I am sure that each one of you in your lives have had atleast one of those days when nothing seems to go right. Its the day when you envy the luck of the dead chicken in your plate, or when you are almost ready to bang your head on the sidewalk for things could not go any worse than they already have. I had one of those days today on the occasion of the annual UCSD graduate student research expo and poster presentation.
As pointless as the act of presenting your research to unsuspecting victims in a 10 minute seminar is, it only gets worse and more difficult when you have to do it on a 36/48 inch poster. So when an email regarding an announcement to the effect happened to wander into my mail address, I did what any self-respecting sane graduate student would do: prompt deletion with another addition to my spam addresses list. Just when I was smiling smugly to myself at having done another task with aplomb and satisfaction, my mailbox showed another mail from my advisor asking me:
"Would I want to put up a poster."
Did you notice something in the last sentence ? It has no question mark. I am not a stickler at formalities but I know when a question is supposed to have an answer and when it is brimming with overwhelming rhetoricism. With extreme inertia, I agreed to make a poster. Then came another mail from my advisor where he asked:
"Would I want to volunteer for the expo." (Notice the absence of '?')
Almost on the verge of strangling myself, I consented to his wish. I would have silently suffered in the misery, had I not recieved another mail from the volunteer committee in which an overenthusiastic official chirped enthusiastically: "Thanks for volunteering. You get to wear a red shirt embossed with a UCSD logo on the day". Can you believe that ? A RED SHIRT for god's sake. They could as well have painted it fluoroscent lime and written "Stupid inside" and attracted less attention.
So well, the day I had been dreading for so long finally came today. Dressed in my immaculate red, I stood besides my poster, surrounded by a host of other posters. I noticed something very peculiar. There was an unusually high density of humanity surrounding each and every poster which surrounded mine. Mankind, due to some reason or another, found it extremely inhospitable to reside anywhere in the vicinity of my poster. Being the eternal optimist I am, I found a perfectly rational explanation for this phenomenon:
"According to the law of conservation of homo sapiens in a closed environment like a poster exhibition, the number of people will remain constant through time. Now when a lot of them are clustered at a few points in space, there are bound to be some spatial coordinates where their density is less. And today those coordinates happened to be those which supported me and my poster. Simple, eh ?".
Seriously speaking, I would like to believe that the human density function today was less a reflection of the hideousness of my poster and my obvious academic ineptitude but more a reflection (well, literally) of the eye scorching piece of crap I was wearing in place of a shirt.
As pointless as the act of presenting your research to unsuspecting victims in a 10 minute seminar is, it only gets worse and more difficult when you have to do it on a 36/48 inch poster. So when an email regarding an announcement to the effect happened to wander into my mail address, I did what any self-respecting sane graduate student would do: prompt deletion with another addition to my spam addresses list. Just when I was smiling smugly to myself at having done another task with aplomb and satisfaction, my mailbox showed another mail from my advisor asking me:
"Would I want to put up a poster."
Did you notice something in the last sentence ? It has no question mark. I am not a stickler at formalities but I know when a question is supposed to have an answer and when it is brimming with overwhelming rhetoricism. With extreme inertia, I agreed to make a poster. Then came another mail from my advisor where he asked:
"Would I want to volunteer for the expo." (Notice the absence of '?')
Almost on the verge of strangling myself, I consented to his wish. I would have silently suffered in the misery, had I not recieved another mail from the volunteer committee in which an overenthusiastic official chirped enthusiastically: "Thanks for volunteering. You get to wear a red shirt embossed with a UCSD logo on the day". Can you believe that ? A RED SHIRT for god's sake. They could as well have painted it fluoroscent lime and written "Stupid inside" and attracted less attention.
So well, the day I had been dreading for so long finally came today. Dressed in my immaculate red, I stood besides my poster, surrounded by a host of other posters. I noticed something very peculiar. There was an unusually high density of humanity surrounding each and every poster which surrounded mine. Mankind, due to some reason or another, found it extremely inhospitable to reside anywhere in the vicinity of my poster. Being the eternal optimist I am, I found a perfectly rational explanation for this phenomenon:
"According to the law of conservation of homo sapiens in a closed environment like a poster exhibition, the number of people will remain constant through time. Now when a lot of them are clustered at a few points in space, there are bound to be some spatial coordinates where their density is less. And today those coordinates happened to be those which supported me and my poster. Simple, eh ?".
Seriously speaking, I would like to believe that the human density function today was less a reflection of the hideousness of my poster and my obvious academic ineptitude but more a reflection (well, literally) of the eye scorching piece of crap I was wearing in place of a shirt.
6 comments:
I would rather say it was the case of the innate grotesque physical attribute heightened to intolerable levels by the piece of clothes tat were covering ur modest self. To top it all the sacrilegous poster ! Credit humanity for not boycotted them altogether.
Imagine otherwise the only viewer for your coup de grace would have been you !!!
PS: Could we have a picture to verify the outburst ? ;)
well... you paint a grim picture... Grim but true nevertheless... as for a picture, atleast one was taken in all my sanguine glory. in all the other pictures, I had zipped my jacket to the top... but this one evidence remains... ONE EVIDENCE... taken by someone I used to consider a friend :-)... don't worry, I am sure the world will be provided with that moment of grotesqueness running amok in due course of time when the relevant party happens to read it :)
Here is our Man in the shirt of the millenium:
http://ngupta.com/stuff/BeautyUnleashed.jpg
Sorry for the low resolution, but no camera can handle the red radiance, against which everything seems so dull, even the glorious face of our Man.
Ah !!
Reminds me of d classic "Lady in Red" ( forgive the gender inequality). I think Christan De Burg would have re-written the song for thee !
Wat a visison in Red !!
ha ha ha... there is one more pic. and by the standards set by the present one, that is an atom bomb!!! I have to dispose of that person now :)
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