100000 Pa of Pressure

I don’t know why the term used is pressure head, but as of now, the pressure on my head is extreme. Just after completing the weirdest set of internal examinations, our great mentors drop us down another bottomless pit. The same afternoon (3^rd Feb), we were in for shock after shock. First thing the so-called Final Project’s so-called Seminar was supposed to be held on 4^th. My group took a whole week just to get clearance from the security at DRDO and before even discussing the details about any project, we were asked to submit an abstract along with a presentation of our ‘progress’. We took a whole half hour to recover and against our will, went and begged our lecturer to extend the date by a few days. After some letter writing and being on the receiving end of some ‘lessons’ we managed to get the date extended. Just when we were about to heave a sigh of relief, another blow took all the breath out of us. He gave us some kind of a weird option to save ourselves from losing marks.

 

An option that seems something like when you’re hanging off a cliff and a single rope is holding you, you are given a Knife to save yourself !!

 

We were forced to give our mini-project presentation on 4^th in order to avoid losing of marks, and with that, our date for the final project would be extended. It looked like death either way, so we chose to take a risk by cutting off the rope and hoping that the fall would be broken by something soft. We chose to give the mini-project presentation with hardly 5-6 hours of preparation time in our hands. Within minutes, Chakradhar and I decided it was time for some serious hard-work. We rushed to my home as soon as we could and started off on the presentation. My weird hatred towards Microsoft’s Powerpoint and extreme liking towards Flash bugged him a lot, but he had to yield. Thankfully, we quickly found all our back up files and images and rushed forward to finish in time. We had about 5 hours in hand. We used all of them with an extra hour (6 hours total) and managed to get to the end of it. I couldn’t actually believe that we managed to finish it in time. It’s really true that when one is determined to do something or make something happen, it does happen. But that was only half of the ‘save-our-selves’ plan. We hadn’t prepared about what we would talk and because of the high amount of time spent in designing the presentation, we had to forego the speaking rehearsal. We decided to take a direct shot at it once and for all. I was extremely nervous about this because the closest I came to speaking in front of an audience was almost exactly an year ago, in Goa. Chaky had no such experience whatsoever. We both knew our flaws and the only strategy was to avoid them.

 

The day came and we watched a few presentations that weren’t so impressive. When our turn came, I was shaking from head to toe. I was to give the introduction to the project and he would continue from there. I stepped forward and noticed that only 3 people were listening. One was Raj and the others were lecturers. I gathered up all I could and started speaking. I started off awkwardly, not knowing where to breathe in and out. Sometimes words got cut coming out because I was trying to gulp or breathe. I missed many points that I planned for and in no time, it was Chaky’s turn to speak. He stepped forward and nearly saved the day for us. He gave a nice throw to his voice and spoke confidently, all this being a first-timer. Sometimes he screwed up ending up confusing the lecturers and himself, but overall, our presentation was much too better compared to the others given that we had only 5-6 hours to do the whole thing. The response from the 3 people looked positive, and so I was satisfied, though the amount of marks we could get for that is still a mystery. Moreover we were later told that this presentation was only to see how people were talking. The real presentation is yet to come. Another Blow ??

 

Yeah, considering the fact that we now have about 5 days remaining before we can present the first draft of the final project and here I am typing away like I have the time of my life without even having the basic requirement of an abstract for the presentation, the pressure on us can go only one way, up, and directed downwards, on our heads.