The Cycle Of Crime

A picture is worth a thousand words. And a gesture is worth a thousand warnings. Was taking a stroll when I came across one of the many cycle stands. I saw this.




And this.
 

 
And finally this !!!!




Lol…. Amazing idea, whoever’s it is to get rid of the tires to carry while leaving the cycle frame behind.


I tell you, there are so many things to see and learn in life. Beyond the text books I mean.

Hidden Treasures

A lot has been going on and I’m dying to tell you about it. Ironically, a lot has been going on and hence I do not get the time to blog. Whatever be it, am working on a very interesting post. Just need some time.

I was just clearing up the table. This meant papers needed to be removed, files needed to be put neatly into cardboard boxes and put away someplace where they could be retrieved when needed. It took me longer than I anticipated, and I was covered with dust and grime. Anyway, a few hours of toil and aching muscles later, the files were put away, boxes shoved elsewhere and the place looked more in order. It is then that my eye caught on something. Something extremely mesmerizing that was hidden behind the files by the walls for God knows how long. I hesitated only a bit, wondering if it would be proper on my part to remove this.

I gave myself a look of utter surprise, wondering if this was the right age of be excited about things like this.  And every morning, I look at them mesmerized, wondering how different and yet how enthralling they could look. For many, these would have meant nothing more than few pieces of junk. For me, it was like a treasure hunt.


This is what I am talking about.

Worming Up-II

Nothing is as exciting as taking up new challenges. The most difficult challenge for me was to overcome the fear of letting worms crawl all over your hands, and yet not drop them out of fear and injure them. These are the tobacco worms the department has been breeding for decades now. My challenge was to learn the art of doing it rightly in 5 days’ training, and yet not feel sick every time I entered the smelly breeding room.


No worms as a prize to guess that I went ahead and took up the job. The first day, I just followed the guy who was training me. And I had no freaking clue about what was happening. This is the same guy who says bok of inseks and botton and who has sternly written instructions all over the place in wrong English (eg: please do not removed the machine). I was handed a checklist of some 50 things to do while he went around changing worm boxes, putting older ones into newer boxes, and categorizing them based on certain characteristics. If you happen to be in the biosciences or have a little interest about insects, you will know that most insects mainly have 4 life stages- egg, larva, pupa, and adult. These were the diagrams in the good old biology textbooks. The larval stage could further be divided into 3rd, 4th, and 5th instar stages.

Now….


My trainer has left for “botton” after training me to feed “insek” (he doesn’t pronounce “S”, poor thing).

I start my job at 8 every morning, first categorizing the larvae into different boxes based on the presence or absence of eyes and the shape of the head (let me spare you the details).



Then, I take the adult worms from the previous days which are no longer feeding and put them in dry wooden blocks. You know that they are ready to go without food when they smack the food all around the cups and a thick black line appears on their back. Here see the difference for yourself.






Once put in blocks, they go without food and in a few days, they all reach the pupae stage with the brown covering that makes them look like cockroaches.






After a few days, when the pupae turn black and soft from being brown, they are left in the cages where they emerge into adult moths.




The adult moths live on sugar water, and lay eggs on the underside of the tobacco plant leaf.




These are attracted to light and hence every time you take the plant out of the cage, you need to switch off the lights and have to know your way in the darkness. Once the plants are taken out, eggs are collected by gentle scraping with the hand without damaging the leaves. There are two varieties of worms, the green ones and the black ones. These are the collected eggs.




Three days later, the eggs are made to hatch on a thin strip of food. The food is a special diet made with calculated amounts of vitamins, antibiotics, and other stuffs and smells as horrible as the fermented dosa dough. In the pic, moisture is being wiped off the surface of the food block to be cut into pieces.




When the eggs hatch into thin hairy beings on the strips of food, they look like this.




About 200 of them are put in small cups everyday and allowed to grow.






After a couple of days, they are transferred to a bigger cup, and the cycle is repeated again.







 
Look how the worms get a grip on the food and dig it out with their pointed jaws.




Sometimes, eggs hatch out into weird looking creatures. Naah, this is not Surf Ki Safedi Lalita ji. It is just a whiter worm.




Challenges I faced


First, the sheer number of things intimidated me. There are 3 huge rooms filled with boxes like this and I had to know my way through them.



The second challenge was to put the larva into the dry box. These are extremely soft and the moment you hold them, they start wriggling their heads and butts. Yet you cannot afford to drop them or squish them. This is how they looked. [1] And this is how you put them into the dry blocks with your hands.




And this is how you put them into the dry blocks with your hands.




I remember how the guy asked me to use forceps to do that, and I was touched with his compassion for me. The next moment my high hopes came crashing down when he dutifully informed me that he wants me to use the forceps because he doesn’t want me to injure the worms. When I would put the worms into the boxes, they would wriggle their heads and crawl out. Soon, I figured out a way to grip them softly by the neck and put their head facing downwards so that it was difficult for them to crawl out.






Learning and knowledge gained-


I have learnt how to distinguish between a male and a female pupa looking for a tiny hole somewhere in the male pupa. Imagine the chaos holding a brown pupa which is wriggling itself furiously trying to locate a freaking hole.

It was a challenge to come to the lab every morning (even on weekends) and not faint out of the smell and the trauma of dealing with these creepy crawly things. The initial few days were so bad that everything I ate smelt of them. I would step onto something and jerk off involuntarily to see if I had stamped on an insect. I would be rummaging through my bag for a pen and then back off immediately wondering if some of those insects have crawled up into my bags. I killed so many insects by dropping them abruptly because they wriggled so much and I was too scared to touch them.



But eventually, things got fine. Eventually, I stopped using the forceps and started to hold them with my hands instead. The way they crawl and cling to the skin gives you a very uncomfortable feeling. But at least they do not bite. I mean these are merely spineless insects. Things could have been worse. I could be working in a lab full of white rats or sting rays, getting bitten by them every now and then. I could be working in a lab full of snakes. I could be working with the chimps, the monkeys, crocodiles or whatever. These are just tiny harmless insects.


Like I said, this job isn’t at all related to what I study. But one of the best things about this is the scope of a well rounded education. Even when you are a student from a different department, you could do so many things. You could work in the library, feed worms, take poetry classes, learn graphics designing, learn or teach languages, and so on. The opportunities are endless and diverse. This way you acquire newer skills, make new contacts, and get to do something different, even if that means dealing with wriggling, crawling green creatures.

I am so glad I didn’t chicken out the day I went to see what the training was like. And if you get my point, go take a break off your hectic work life and learn something totally new and unrelated. Not only does it teach you a lot, but it also acquaints you with things you could never think of.

And let me know the next time you learnt something which was totally unrelated to what you are specialized in doing.

Worming Up- I

This summer, I decided to broaden the periphery of my learning, and do something unusual. I was skimming through the students’ board for campus job opportunities in one of group's colleges when something interesting caught my eyes.


Needed someone to feed insects.

Now this was not exactly something I’d jump at, as if it was something mouthwatering like spending a day with John Abraham in Goa sans Bipasha Basu. However, I emailed the prof. and he agreed to meet me. He informed me that no graduate student had done anything like this before, and he also made it clear that the pay would be hourly and kinda okayish. Moreover, I’d be expected to work on the weekends. But this being the time when the course load is low, I decided to give it a shot instead of whiling my time in shopping malls. We decided on a week’s training before I took charge.

Day 1-
He took me around to show me things and introduce me to the guy who’d train me. It seemed that he was leaving town for a while and the department needed a temporary replacement. The first thing that caught my nose is the stench so very characteristic of any animal lab. While he introduced me to the guy and left, I could almost feel my stomach churning and crying to puke. My trainer was a Vietnamese guy, a short heighted fellow reaching almost till my shoulders with hair standing out like a porcupine. And here read his English.

Trainer- There are many bokk of insek here. I go to Botton so you take care and feed insekk.

I could laugh and laugh the way he funnily skipped the S alphabet and replaced it by a K. What more, I went home and tried to peak like him. I mean speak like him.

I was taken to a lab full of these worms at different stages of their life. Anybody with a basic idea of entomology would know that most insects go through four main life stages of egg, larva, pupa, and adult. My job was to keep the cycle going, which consisted of about 25-30 steps daily. Mornings would take me some 4 hours while evenings would take me another one hour.

The first time I saw the insects, I wanted to flee as far from the department as I could. Let it suffice to say that I am an extremely touch-sensitive person who has never even let a cat close till date in fear that the cat’s fur would brush on my skin. My nightmares consist of being in a room with insects let out, crawling all over me. It seemed that my nightmares we coming true after all.

My trainer told me to use forceps initially. I was pleased that he was aware of my discomfort. The next moment, all my high hopes came crashing down. He meant that I should be gentle with the insects and not injure them and squish them in nervousness or fear, so it is better that I start with the forceps initially.

Now here take a look at the worms. They come in two types, the wild type (green ones) and the black type.

   
 
By the time I had watched him doing stuffs on day 1, I had decided that I was not taking up the job. I could sell newspapers, work as a waiter, or do anything else. But it was a torture to spend five hours a day in such stench, letting hundreds of worms wriggle all over your hands. Come on, I was not really one of those shorts clad guys from the Discovery channel who got their kicks out of jutting their hands into snake pits.


Later that night, he came into my room to have a talk with me. He as in my alter ego, my second half that resides in me and talks to me during confusion and apprehension. And he told me this-

Look, someone has to do it. And you are helping someone in their research. If all this while you sold apple pies, now you are helping grow the apples. It might not be something as hot as learning to fly planes, but it is a job after all. If your dentist could make a living out of peeping and poring into people’s mouths (or worse still, think of your gynecologist), if masseuses could make a living out of oiling huge blobs of fat of strangers, if your local Govinda hair salon (pronounced as Gobindo heyar seloon) could make business chopping lice infested hair with dandruff, what was wrong in helping the department breed worms? For all the research you did with rat fetus, did you ever realize that someone actually does the job of extracting the rat fetus out of the mother’s body?

Will I decide to go out of the way and take up the job that needed me to be in stinking places with worms all around me? Will I help the department and also gain some very unusual experience in the process? The experience might not make me a stellar resume, but it is an art learnt and a skill acquired nevertheless. Will my altered ego convince me that no experience in life whatsoever goes waste? Will I mentally prepare myself to deal with the occupational hazards of the job where I would have to touch the wriggling insects, clean insect exuvia (the dead remains of the insects or the skin they shed during molting), and work on weird timings like 7 AM on a weekend? Or will I chicken out, spend the summer comfortably hanging out in shopping malls and hogging on pizzas and burritos?

Let time answer that.