My favorite story of Kavi happened in Mrs. Antilla’s English class. We were told to consider the ethical paradox described in the classic thought experiment called “The Trolley Problem.”

The story is you happen upon a train track to which five people have been tied down to. A train is coming and will certainly kill all five people. There is no time to attempt to untie them. However, you are standing by a switch – a switch that will change the path of the train onto another track avoiding the five people who would otherwise die. The catch is that on the other track there is one person who is tied down.

Mrs. Antilla gravely looked around the room and asked, “So… is the correct decision to pull the switch, killing the one person who otherwise would have lived were it not for your intervention? Or should you leave yourself out of the equation entirely, allowing the tragedy to unfold as it would have had you not been around at all, ending with the death of five innocent people?”

“Kavi, what do you think?”

Kavi, nonplussed by the moral gravity of this tragic scenario leaned back on his chair, shrugged his shoulders and curtly responded, “Eh. Depends if they’re white.”

When we first met in 2004, one of the first things he told me was that I liked really bad movies. While truthful, it was hard to hear, man, and I’ve been working on that ever since. But of all the movies we watched together, it’s a *really* bad movie that is one of my favorite memories. We were the only two people in the movie theater when we went to see The Spirit. Even the actors forgot to show up. And yet we had a marvelous time laughing, yelling, running up and down the aisle, and making the theater our own. We were freaking kings.

Although we ended up going to different schools, we grew closer in college. Freshman year, we started the blog Brown Paper, White Paper together, a reference to a song from one of our favorite TV shows, and, also, a reference to our skin colors. Guess which one was Kavi?

In his first post for BPWP, he stated that the best quote from any movie of 2008 was: “There’s nothing I like better than kicking your ass. Except maybe eggs.” The quote was by The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) in, you guessed it, The Spirit, arguably the worst film of 2008. But it was his favorite line because it made him giggle every damn time he said it. The man loved to giggle, and he loved to be entertained, and he loved to share that entertainment with others. It was an honor to start a mediocre blog with him because the fun we had writing it was anything but.

See you in another life, brotha.