Colors of Animals

Read my new flash fiction in issue XX of the delinquent 
http://www.thedelinquent.co.uk/index.html

You are a science grad student if

1.  you read singlesnet. as sHinglesnet.
2. detergent makes you think of triton-X 100.
3. you start to criticize humans for being humans and ask reasons for why are they pissed off?
4. you make your food with timer stolen from lab.
5. you start to eat in micro and milli quantities but drink in liters.
6. you check your account after every happy hour.
7. the development disbelief in yourself is directly proportional to the amount of years you spend in grad school.
8. you feel cocky when your experiments work and depressed when don't: in sum, you have so much depression that if you want you can open a retail shop to sell depression candies or cookies.
9. things in your life moves in a circle: viscous or wishful.
10. you think only apocalypse can save you from grad school.

A Story of a Mutant

Link of my experimental fiction published on Fictitious Magazine

http://fictitiousmagazine.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-story-of-mutant-by-anand-prakash.html

A walk across the Zombieland

Here is the link of my new story published in the online magazine Sprout
http://sproutm.yolasite.com/a-walk-across-the-zombieland-vi.php

Or read here

                                            A walk across the Zombieland

      By Anand Prakash

            As usual, he woke up late.

How would he cross the Zombieland? A thought surfaced in his mind.

Alone.

            Still he has to go.

He hastily went over his routine things. After taking couple of bites of a denatured chicken egg sandwiched, he gulped a full glass of strawberry colored liquid. He packed up seasoned turkey legs and rice for his lunch before stepping out of his apartment. It supposed to be snowing out but thanks to global warming the Sun almost made him sweat in early January. He didn’t mind as long as the Sun disperses menacing grey clouds for one thing he didn’t like forced gloominess.

            Somewhere an engine squealed when force-started while another one fluttered when accelerated. Still, there was no sign of a vehicle on the main road.  He knew where he would find the vehicles, so he didn’t care. As he paced on the sidewalk with alternating red and white concrete blocks, he saw a lonely red car parked in front of a recently closed bank branch. In the car, he noticed a female body with eyes closed and strapped with seat belt in sunbathing posture. Did somebody strap her here? Or she stayed on her free will? When nothing supported either of his hypotheses, he moved on the sidewalk.

            On either side of the sidewalk, only apartment complexes stayed. People, drinks, books, cell phones, and everything from the porch of these apartments had disappeared long ago. Even the windows which let out inappropriate human cries during afternoons remained barren and silent. Once again and almost addictively, he studiously relished the power of the pop culture in the names of the apartment complexes: Puss(y) in the Boot, The Liquor Dozzen, The Crocodile Undie, Confessions of an Alcoholic, etc. A solid and soulful humor never dies, he smiled as he thought. Or was he biased of their memories? He debated over it many times on these longs walks.

            An offensive smell broke his chain of thoughts once again. He circumvented the dumpster. Still in front of him, lay the half opened blue colored cookie box, yellowed wrappers of some cheese, brown broken glass with a name synonymous with beer, and a squished can with few micro-liters of brown water. The scene brought the memories of a developed and littering civilization returned and almost bald cross-roads with sketches of tires supported his observation of such a civilization. After habitually waiting for the pedestrian sign, he crossed the road.

An advertising board in front of an administrative building announced the timing and ticket price of some moustache-less comedian with a serious face. Many red buildings followed. These buildings stood like a group of spooky creatures which had scared and belittled him many a times. He ran past these buildings and reached to the corner of a red building where three broken bicycles were tethered to the bicycle stand. There he turned right and walked upward on a slope. Because of the slant, the lit windows of library gave him a monstrous look as if demanding the reason for his long absence. As he passed the closed library, he promised to come here more often in future.

At the corner of the library, he took a left turn. There was more than one reason for taking this turn. First, he had no interest in meeting caffeine zombies coming from a chain coffee shop which had chained the population since time immemorial. Also by taking this route, he would miss the food shops with similar sign and symbol across the states or borders. These food shops promised to serve the same quality of food across the county. Is that possible? He had always asked.

            Straying away from a route comes with a cost. Though chances were rare in this season but he could still have a chance encounter with some liquor vampires. The liquor places had invited students on the first day of school, last day of school, and days in between by giving one reason (this is your first day of school, come and celebrate with us) or others (this is your last day of school, come and celebrate with us, etc.). During those days, he didn’t know whether he celebrated but he remembered eating canned food and bagels. “Eat bagel here.” He read the sign next to the town’s official tattoo shop. The sign became meaningful only when he located a Bagel shop next to the tattoo shop.

Couple more shops later, his eyes landed on the church timings. Is the church still open even in absence of majority of students? He wondered. Once again he questioned the meaning of a religion and a mess and once again his mind considered him intellectually incapable of understanding of such high concepts. But the rules and regulations of Oyster city sheriff department were easy on his mind. The black and white cars parked there to save the remaining public, may be from encroaching madness or confusing loneliness or both.

Satisfied, he crushed a twig on the sidewalk. An engine made a clicky-clacky sound as if it had some starting problem. He waited for the car which didn’t appear. The yellow grass on the left of the sidewalk reminded him of his childhood jaundice. To avoid that, he eyed on the flyers hanging on the silver colored electric poles. All of these colorful flyers wished something good – good like have a good year, have a good winter, and have a good …whatever… Even before he gets out of this wishful yet highly improbable ‘promise’ trap, the dried trees stood like black bony ghosts in his proximity. He hurried past figment of his horrific imagination.

 What really made him smile were the flags. The flailing university, town, and state flags, one above another, hung on a longest silver pipe he had seen. It seemed that the loneliness had suck up all the enthusiastic wind from this area.  The red and white concrete blocks of the sidewalk culminated in the spiral shape of a DNA double helix, hereditary material of living organisms. Standing at the one strand of the DNA helix, he checked for vehicles in the parking lot on the far right. The cars and trucks of different colors, not necessarily the red color, were immobilized there. Still standing there, he admired the red colored bricks of the three storied building in front of him. By the time he will come out of this building, everything would be dark and ominous. The students called this building as Department of Biology.

Obediently, he followed the spiral strand of the DNA helix as if it was one of the duty of a biology graduate student. Next to the gate, he swiped the card, pulled the doors, and walked on a dull red rug. The clean air filled up his lungs and he coughed. He was well aware what he would find here: people talking about research. Strange though it seems but here all the talks start with research and ends with research. The research talks had seeped everywhere: in conference rooms, labs, and even restrooms. Some people even claimed that research is life and life is research but he couldn’t find all the answers in research. For him, life has become series of painfully monotonous emotions.

 And he was ready to face new emotions. He was ready to face new faces which do other things he had almost forgotten to do: talk about games and ships (relationships, friendships, ownerships, etc.), sobering up only to get high again, filling up the library during Sundays and exams, talking to their gadgets, running all around the campus irrespective of day and night, crying for marks, and freaking out on presentations, and faces in general which spans all the possible human emotions.

He had to wait. He knew that.

This place turns into a Zombieland twice a year, at least, one during summer and one during winter.

And till then, he had to walk across the Zombieland.

Daily.

Alone.

Grad School Chronicles- Research is 'pretty much' life and vice-versa- IV

15. There is big difference between Wisdom and Knowledge. It is like saying don't do it because you know you messed it up rather than don't do it because you read it somewhere else.

16. The world would have been a better place if we have gotten 50% results after working with 50% commitment.

17. Nobody is perfect, even the DNA polymerase makes mistake.

18. Nothing is free, even the Oxygen generate oxygen free radicals to kill or mutate the cells.

Grad School Chronicles- Research is 'pretty much' life and vice-versa- III

10. Always remember what things you are good at (even pouring wine or water counts), especially during bad days.

11. Tortoise (slow and steady wins the race) principle applies: Research and life, both, are marathons.

12. Control the bidirectional(lab life to life)seepage of stress which is another way of saying keep both life separate. Nothing seeps better than the stress.

13. Pain is the tuition fee you pay to life teacher in order to learn. More you will avoid it,more it will come to haunt you. Do you still want to learn?

14. Never lose trust in your samples. They are as great as you are.

15. Take credit for your messed up experiments because then only you will be better messed up.

A Eulogy for a Grad Student

Here is the link of my new story published in the online magazine Crack the Spine

http://www.crackthespine.com/2012/02/crack-spine-issue-twelve.html

or read here


A Eulogy for a Grad Student
By Anand Prakash

How can we forget him who has spent all of his life working, working and working on his experiments? But one can always ask: Isn’t a graduate student supposed to work like that? Even though I’ve not seen anybody dying from research work but if one person who will die working, I was pretty confident, he should be the one. But how can I predict the future: I am no God.
He walked from his apartment to department. Every single day. He had a superstition that he needed the brownish hot water to streamline his research thoughts at the start of the day. He stopped to drink some amount of brownish hot water at a local shop to kill of his slumber. Every single day. He waited for the pedestrian signals to cross the road as he walked to his department. He couldn’t afford carelessness else his research would suffer. When he put his white skin on, nothing except experiments crossed his mind.
The experiments were his only obsession. “A graduate student must have perseverance and patience to win over any type of experiments,” he had told me during one of our evening brownish hot water sessions. Smile lit his face bright with a recent win. So far he was never failed in a single experiment.
But not all experiments are the same. A failed experiment brought wavy tension lines to his otherwise shiny forehead. “There is something wrong with my commitment to my experiments,” he expressed his guilt before he continued again, “but tomorrow, I will work on the experiment with more patience and perseverance. It will work, for sure.” Day passed but his answer stayed the same and so were the wavy tension lines on his forehead. I was fed up with his optimistic attitude. One day while sipping the brownish hot water, I said, “But you are working on this for over a semester.” “So what? Some experiment tests your limits before they even show a little appreciation in terms of results,” he answered a little agitated. “But some experiment can take your life,” I advised, “and this one experiment you are working this long could be one of this kind.” He gave me a wry smile as if I don’t know anything about the research.
A week before he died working on this suicidal experiment, I suggested him to change his focus to some other experiment. “There are so many reasons for an experiment to not work. Sometimes, it is so hard to speculate upon,” I rationalized. “Why can’t we understand that?” he admonished. “No offense but it’s possible your research plan could be defective…” Unconvinced, he stared at me. I continued, sipping the brownish hot water, “Your sample size of volume may be improper for analysis or may be your technique is flawed or…God knows what?” “God don’t know anything…and there is not God in grad school.” This digressing remark suggested his wounded ego. Thus, I reverted to the standard, uplifting, ego-boosting reply, “You need to wait for the technology to catch up to your imagination.” Unimpressed, he said, “You don’t need technology; all you need imagination to win over this experiment.”
Look where his imagination took him.
But no amount of imagination can bring him back.
So, today, as we mourn in his memory and rejoice in his stubbornness, let’s consider the contribution of such a research worker to our department apart from his research work. “To know our limits” I would say otherwise one of us would fall prey to such an experiment. There are certain things, he used to say, that one should learn from other’s examples. But sadly for him, he was the example for this lesson.
Amen.