Ziegler Natta and the Coloured Orbitals

Memories @ IITD textile department... and the people with whom I shared my precious 4yrs of Undergrad life.

I had almost forgotten about this one, but just a few minutes back, while preparing for an undergradute lab that I have to instruct tomorrow morning...I stumbled across this web page which is so intricately connected with the incident.

It was some Textile Fibers class we were doing in our second year (fall 2002) under Prof. Manjeet Jassal. All students were supposed to give a presentation on some topic on speciallity fibers or something, and we were supposed to work in groups of 2, hence sukul and me.

The night before the day we had to give our presentations... we realized that we had done nothing... and decided to get it postponed. The next time, a month or so after, we realized once again that we hadnt really done anything for the presentation the next day, and instead of getting a 'postponement' on it, we decided to devote a 'night-out'. I can't very clearly recall our topic of the talk, but I do remember that Ziegler Natta Catalysts had something to do with it. So I decided to talk on Ziegler Natta Catalysts and Sukul would cover the other aspect of the topic. Google search took me to this beautiful page. I was so awestruck by the entire beauty of the mechanism that I decided to reproduce the beautiful pink-blue-green-red orbitals and their fascianting overlaps on OHP sheets for my part of the presentation the next day; with the kindest intentions to distribute my new found knowledge with my dear classmates. I could already hear them clap...
I should also mention at this point that I had a very hard time trying to procure coloured OHP markers at 1:30 in the night...but animesh jain (kani) came to my rescue.

The next day, Sukul starts off...and clearly Manjeet Jassal is not impressed...wait till my turn comes, I say to myself...and it does...

One by one I show my beautifully coloured slides and begin talking about them...

But within 30 secs I am rudely interrupted by the professor. "We have already done this in class, she yelled...don't you have anything relevant to show us?"

Needless to say that the slides on which I had spent 2 and half hours carefully preparing, juggling 4 different pens with only 2 hands which the 'unkind' almighty has given me, spent only about 30 seconds on the stage. Talk of 'short roles'.

She went on for another couple of minutes in the same tone, and finally lavished us with praise thus, "This is by far the worst presentation I have ever seen in my life".

Me and Sukul were beaming with pride.