"Oh my love, what happened to your light?"
PRATYASHA
In that sense, the mice helped me find my light and now I am a kid again, looking to take my love for science and art into a journey that'll be all my own."
"
PRATYASHA
About the Self-Portrait
The text in this piece is a lyric from the song Kid Again by Jon Bellion. I have been listening to it on a loop. It has Jon's (AI-generated) younger voice asking him "Oh, my love, what happened to your light?" which is a reference to how his experiences in the music industry and an exploitative contract affected his passion for creating music. He recently got free from that clause and is now operating independently. The song is not pessimistic at all! His older, present-day voice replies "I am a kid again, I can do anything," signifying that his passion for creating music never died and that now he is back with a bang from his tough situation. This resonated with me because I really, really love science but may not have always had the best experiences.
For the longest time I have spent my days at the lab doing chores no one else wants to do simply because I am a junior and also because with coursework I could give only a part of my time to the lab, so I was not trusted with experiments. I was able to overcome that stage but at a great cost to my interest for a long-term commitment to benchwork. I even thought that maybe I didn't even like science so much. But after interacting with the mice (and experiments) I realized that I actually do love science, maybe just not in the context of a usual PhD-Postdoc experience. In that sense, the mice helped me find my light and now I am a kid again, looking to take my love for science and art into a journey that'll be all my own.
How I came up with the Lab Self-Portrait
I draw self-portraits very frequently but I have never thought of one in the context of the work I do in the lab. The photos I take sneakily in between breaks came in handy. Purple nitrile gloves feature prominently because on the very first day at the lab they caused me to sneeze wildly until I just had to get used to it having no other choice. I also went over my lab notes and saw how I could integrate them into this self-portrait.
About Pratyasha
Pratyasha is a visual artist and a final year student of Biotechnology at IIT Kharagpur. She combines her love for the life sciences and storytelling to create fanciful comics and paintings exploring the relationship of humans with nature.
Related Posts
To Paying Attention
ZAKHIYA
"When you are curious is when you pay attention, and when you pay attention you get more curious, it's the one inexhaustible cycle that can wheel your journey. Life is long, life is tedious, the system will keep forcing you to determine but the world is ever changing and the only way to make sense of it all is to be curious and to pay attention, to what is around and to what is within."
Just Go with the Flow
BHAVNEET
"I am telling you this because I want you to understand, that you don’t have to know what you want to do in science. It’s not an intersection of roads, rather you are in a boat called Life floating in the ocean of scientific pursuits, and you can pick any direction you want. And guess what? You can always edit your course as you go along."
Share this page: