Tips to identifying an 'academic ninja'

Do you know what I abhor the most? It's not being called black, brown or any other colour, it's not being labeled a Tamil nationalist, Tamil passivist or an anti-Tamil bootlicker, hell it's not even being derided as an 'hippopotamus playing badminton', but rather, it's being called a 'NERD'. Everyone thinks I am a nerd. Maybe I am, but it doesn't give anyone else the right to be derisory about it. When did a Sri Lankan getting good grades and caring about his/her vocabulary getting picked on become acceptable? No seriously, as a country I thought topping classes was our 'thang'.

All my lab colleagues call me a 'nerd', ask me for spellings of 'not so obscure' words (once a friend asked me for the spelling of 'decision', I almost ended up choking on my food) and my nickname is name-paedia. One of my thesis committee members even thinks that there is nothing I don't know about. Whilst all this can be some kind of an ego boost when I am in dire straits in terms of lack of self confidence, most of the time it's annoying. It's annoying when your junior colleague uses you like Google, asks you research related things which she thinks she is too cool to read up on and such things and tells me that she has a 'life' and I don't.

So for all those like me, I have compiled a list of tips on how to identify an 'academic ninja', from herein known simply as 'AN'.  An AN maybe identified if she possesses one or more characteristics in the following list:

1. Is inclined to read up and do proactive research on matters which matters to her. 

2. Knows the difference between your and you're, its and it's, or knows that the plural of cul-de-sac is culs-de-sac.

3. Never asks another person something which she can look up from wikipedia, or better yet contributes to wikipedia. 

4. Reads books, magazines, journals articles, monogrammes, and watches documentaries and such things; and please no brain numbing material (how Bieber made his music video doesn't constitute a documentary). 

5. Has worked in a lab, or with a simulation tool or has published case studies. 

6. Or any other characteristic which is deemed appropriate by a congregation of two or more ANs.

So if you qualify due to any of the reasons listed above welcome to the coterie of academic ninjas. Who are others to tell us that we are self-sufficient in the gray matter department. We know it already people. As Bill Gates aptly put "Be nice to academic ninjas, chances are you will end up working for one". (No seriously, he said that, it was lost whilst transcribing)