Oscar Luckett and Rohan Mehta

By Sona Wink

Illustration by Oonagh Mockler

Oscar Luckett, CC ’25, and Rohan Mehta, CC ’25, had a platonic meet-cute freshman year. Sitting at side-by-side tables at Hungarian on two seperate friend-dates, they ended up talking to each other the entire time. They clicked immediately. As their roomate of two years, I have had the distinct pleasure of spending quite a lot of time with them—more often than not, at odd hours of the day, in partial states of undress, with toothbrushes sticking out of our mouths. 

Rohan and Oscar have a lot in common. They are both native New Yorkers—the former from the Upper East Side and the latter from Brooklyn. Rohan is the Senior Class President of Columbia College, Oscar is a University Senator for the College. They share an acute interest in the goings-on of Columbia’s campus, which they often debrief in our living space (they are my primary source of campus news). They have ridden a combined total of over 3,000 miles via Citi Bike. They both delight in the craft of humor; they put thought into telling jokes. 

I asked them to discuss their differences. They commented: 

Oscar: “I think I like to read a little bit more than you.”

Rohan: “He’s definitely a little more intellectual, that’s for sure. He’s a reader. You should see how many books he read for his thesis. He carries them around sometimes.”

O: [silly voice] “I’m becoming a D1 schlepper!”

R: [amused] “I still don’t believe that he read them, but he claims that he read them.”

A crucial difference between the two lies in the types of jokes they tell. Rohan enjoys pushing the boundaries of acceptable humor; he is acerbic and wry. Oscar, on the other hand, delights in esoteric puns, goofy dance moves, and 30 Rock quotes. It is a rarity to hear him curse. Their two approaches balance one another: They have a delightful, if sometimes inexplicable, back-and-forth banter. For example: 

R: “You have shockingly high energy when you wake up. You’re waking up, you’re ready.” 

O: “Sometimes I wake up like I’m getting off the bench at a basketball game, like COME ON! Let’s get in there!” 

R: “I mean, I’m not like [silly voice] ‘Whoa! Where’s the Kool-Aid guy coming from?’ that’s not—” 

O: “The Kool-Aid man?”

R: “The Kool-Aid man walks into a room and makes himself known.” 

O: “It’s true.” 

Oscar is six-foot two, unfailingly kind, and seems to move through the world with ease. Our apartment building is populated primarily with elderly ladies who have lived here for decades. They immediately adored Oscar, and I understood why: He is kind and cordial in an old-fashioned way; he has excellent posture; he made the effort to give them all his phone number when we first moved in. He is unceasingly chipper, even first thing in the morning, when I am at my grumpiest. Whenever I encounter Oscar in the apartment, I almost always end up hunched over laughing.

Rohan, on the other hand, is energetic, charming, and light on his feet. He tells stories with clever punchlines. He, more than anyone else I know, is prepared to face the adult world: He can effortlessly roast a slab of lamb, host a classy dinner party, do his taxes, and negotiate rent with our landlord. He oozes competence. He is meticulously clean. His calendar is booked weeks, if not months, in advance. Josh Kazali, CC ’25, once noted: “Rohan is a master of making lunch plans. He will plan lunch with you and you won’t even realize it.”

It goes without saying that Rohan and Oscar are both extremely busy; they spend the vast majority of their time outside of the apartment. I see them most often late at night in our shared hallway, where they toggle rapidly between debating campus news and riffing in silly voices. These moments have become precious to me as our time together draws to a close.

Rohan once told me that the formula for crafting a good joke relies upon finding commonality between vastly different ideas, akin to finding the intersection point between two lines in 3D space. “You have these two lines of thought, and you find the spot where they are in the same z,” he explained. “You’re making this unexpected connection between totally different things.” Indeed, the image is apt for describing how the three of us connect: We live vastly different, busy lives, occupying different nooks of campus, but collide, in the wee hours of the night, in the few square feet that connect our bedrooms. 

Oscar replied, “And is that us? Or is that wordplay? I’m not following the metaphor.” 

Rohan didn’t pick up the metaphor, either. “That’s what makes something funny,” he said.

Oscar switched to a silly voice. “Let me bust out my algebraic calculator!”

“The square root of Z is the punchline!” Now Rohan is doing a silly voice, too.“You do the math.”