Imagine you get All India Rank 1 in the IIT-JEE. Then you do something even crazier - You turn down Computer Science. Instead, you pick a five-year MSc in Physics at @IITKanpur That was Rajesh Gopakumar, AIR 1 in JEE 1987. He went to @Princeton for his PhD, under a man who'd later win the Nobel. He co-created what physicists now call the Gopakumar-Vafa invariants, a piece of math sitting inside string theory. In 2001, he came home to build a theoretical physics institute in Bengaluru, which he runs today. Man truly lives on his own terms