05/12/2020
Profiles in Courage (7/8)
His anime watchlist is thicker than my flashcard deck. Rumor has it he reads atlases. For fun. He once came to school wrapped in tinfoil: for school spirit, he said. 9/10 freshmen can’t identify him without his beard. I present to you the man, the myth, the legend: Prithvi Nathan.
When I first met Prithvi I laughed him off. I knew the type - the school Geo Bee champ. I bet he read atlases for fun. It wasn’t until I first sat next to him in Honors Biology 9 that I realized the gravity of my mistake. As I struggled to understand the difference between meiosis and mitosis, Prithvi read silently from his ever present edition of Barron’s: AP Biology. By the time I finally figured out in my sophomore year, Prithvi was skipping Quizbowl tournaments to attend Neuroscience conventions.
When he’s not trouncing his competition in geography or researching the next big genetic breakthrough, Prithvi is what some might call a “man of culture”. Some might ask, how does this help with Quizbowl. Allow me to enlighten you.
Imagine: you’re down by 10, it’s the last tossup. Shoot, its cellular biology. You shouldn’t have slept through those biology lectures back in freshman year; you should have carried around your own edition of Barron’s: AP Biology as Prithvi had. But it’s too late for that now. Then, a buzz - it’s Prithvi.
Gosh darn it Prithvi, you think to yourself, when the question said “this state” it didn’t mean --
Then you hear it: “15!”, says the moderator. You are shocked. You look towards Prithvi questioningly. はたらく細胞 (translation: Cells at Work!), he says in perfect Japanese (as do all men of culture). You can only nod your head in your amazement.
This entry was written by William Wang
