The Boy Named Crow (Excerpt) 2018

The Boy Named Crow (Excerpt from Kafka on the Shore)

By Haruki Murakami (Japan)

"So you're all set for money, then?" the boy named Crow asks in his typical sluggish voice. The kind of voice like when you've just woken up and your mouth still feels heavy and dull. But he's just pretending. He's totally awake. As always.

I nod.

"How much?"

I review the numbers in my head. "Close to thirty-five hundred in cash, plus some money I can get from an ATM. I know it's not a lot, but it should be enough. For the time being."

"Not bad," the boy named Crow says. "For the time being."

I give him another nod.

"I'm guessing this isn't Christmas money from Santa Claus."

"Yeah, you're right," I reply.

Crow smirks and looks around. "I imagine you've started by rifling drawers, am I right?"

I don't say anything. He knows whose money we're talking about, so there's no need for any long-winded interrogations. He's just giving me a hard time.

"No matter," Crow says. "You really need this money and you're going to get it--

beg, borrow, or steal. It's your father's money, so who cares, right? Get your hands on that much and you should be able to make it. For the time being. But what's the plan after it's all gone? Money isn't like mushrooms in a forest--it doesn't just pop up on its own, you know. You'll need to eat, a place to sleep. One day you're going to run out."

"I'll think about that when the time comes," I say.

"When the time comes," Crow repeats, as if weighing these words in his hand.

I nod.

"Like by getting a job or something?"

"Maybe," I say.

Crow shakes his head. "You know, you've got a lot to learn about the world. Listen--what kind of job could a fifteen-year-old kid get in some far-off place he's never been to before? You haven't even finished junior high. Who do you think's going to hire you?"

I blush a little. It doesn't take much to make me blush.

"Forget it," he says. "You're just getting started and I shouldn't lay all this depressing stuff on you. You've already decided what you're going to do, and all that's left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it's your life. Basically you gotta go with what you think is right."

That's right. When all is said and done, it is my life.

"I'll tell you one thing, though. You're going to have to get a lot tougher if you want to make it."

"I'm trying my best," I say.

"I'm sure you are," Crow says. "These last few years you've gotten a whole lot stronger. I've got to hand it to you."

I nod again.

"But let's face it--you're only fifteen," Crow goes on. "Your life's just begun and there's a ton of things out in the world you've never laid eyes on. Things you never could

imagine."

As always, we're sitting beside each other on the old sofa in my father's study. Crow loves the study and all the little objects scattered around there. Now he's toying with a bee-shaped glass paperweight. If my father was at home, you can bet Crow would never go anywhere near it.

"But I have to get out of here," I tell him. "No two ways around it."

"Yeah, I guess you're right." He places the paperweight back on the table and links his hands behind his head. "Not that running away's going to solve everything. I don't want to rain on your parade or anything, but I wouldn't count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything."

The boy named Crow lets out a sigh, then rests a fingertip on each of his closed eyelids and speaks to me from the darkness within.

"How about we play our game?" he says.

"All right," I say. I close my eyes and quietly take a deep breath.

"Okay, picture a terrible sandstorm," he says. "Get everything else out of your head."

I do what he says, get everything else out of my head. I forget who I am, even. I'm a total blank. Then things start to surface. Things that--as we sit here on the old leather sofa in my father's study--both of us can see.

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions," Crow says.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So, all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And that's exactly what I do. I imagine a white funnel stretching up vertically like a thick rope. My eyes are closed tight, hands cupped over my ears, so those fine grains of sand can't blow inside me. The sandstorm draws steadily closer. I can feel the air pressing on my skin. It really is going to swallow me up.

The boy called Crow softly rests a hand on my shoulder, and with that the storm vanishes.

"From now on--no matter what--you've got to be the world's toughest fifteenyear-

old. That's the only way you're going to survive. And in order to do that, you've got to figure out what it means to be tough. You following me?"

I keep my eyes closed and don't reply. I just want to sink off into sleep like this, his hand on my shoulder. I hear the faint flutter of wings.

"You're going to be the world's toughest fifteen-year-old," Crow whispers as I try

to fall asleep. Like he was carving the words in a deep blue tattoo on my heart.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic

storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

On my fifteenth birthday I'll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library. It'd take a week to go into the whole thing, all the details. So I'll just give the main point. On my fifteenth birthday I'll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library.

It sounds a little like a fairy tale. But it's no fairy tale, believe me. No matter what sort of spin you put on it.                           ………………end of excerpt………………..

§Individual Assignment

Writing a Letter

> Pretend that you are the protagonist.

> What letter would you write to the father?

> Write this and present it in the class.

> Again, you will be judged according to the letter’s use of critical thinking and creativity.

Critical Reading Strategies

1.Previewing: Learning about a text before reading it.

2.Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts.

3.Questioning to understand and remember: Asking questions about the content.

4. Reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values: Examining your responses.

5.Outlining and summarizing: Identifying the main ideas and restating them.

6.Evaluating an argument: Testing the logic of a text, its credibility and emotional impact.

7.Comparing and contrasting related readings: Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to understand them better. 

THE FOLDED EARTH

      THE FOLDED EARTH

BY: Anuradha Roy

Late in this quietly mesmerizing novel, set in a Himalayan hill town in the north of India, Anuradha Roy describes the crystalline beauty of the peaks in winter, viewed long after the haze of the summer months and the fog of the monsoon, held in secret for those who choose to brave the cold: “After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth.” In the mountains, one of Roy’s characters observes, “love must be tested by adversity.”

It’s the inherent conflict in human attraction — the inescapable fact that all people remain at heart unknown, even to those closest to them — that forms the spine of the novel. In marrying a Christian, the narrator, Maya, has become estranged from her wealthy family in Hyderabad. But after six happy years together, her husband has died in a mountaineering accident. Rather than return to her parents, she seeks refuge in Ranikhet, a town that looks toward the mountains that so entranced her husband. Overcome with grief, she stows away his backpack, recovered from the scene of the accident, and refuses to inspect its contents. She can’t bear to know the details surrounding his death.

In Ranikhet, Maya settles into a routine: teaching at a Christian school; spending time with her landlord, Diwan Sahib; and observing the sometimes comic rhythms of the village and its army garrison. Roy manages to capture both the absurd and the sinister in even minor characters, like a corrupt local official who embarks on a beautification plan that includes posting exhortatory signs around town. (One, meant to welcome trekkers, is vandalized to read “Streaking route.”) His crusade, inspired by the Sing­aporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who embraced caning as a punishment, also includes the persecution of a simple-­minded but harmless herder.

Of course, a sedate world exists only to be shaken, and soon enough the town is disturbed from all sides. An election brings issues of religion to the fore, threatening to stir sectarian violence. Curious military maneuvers prompt rumors of Chinese spies and fears of a border conflict with Pakistan. Diwan Sahib’s nephew, Veer, a mountaineering guide, moves into the elderly man’s villa, and Maya finds herself drawn to him, despite the bad habits he encourages in his uncle and, more alarmingly, his tendency to disappear without warning.

While there are scenes of tension and intrigue — a political goon attacks a young girl, Veer’s work in the mountains starts to appear suspicious — the novel’s mood remains elegiac rather than fraught, expressed through small tragedies like the burning of a valuable manuscript or the death of a beloved deer. Roy is particularly adept at mining the emotional intricacies of the relationship between Maya and Diwan Sahib, which also serves to symbolize India’s uneasy passage from tradition to modernity.

The novel’s one weakness is its culminating revelation (and its consequences), which feels strangely insignificant, as if Roy couldn’t bring herself to commit to the more outrageous implications she has set in motion. “If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow peaks where that sky is,” a character notes of a day when the Himalayas are shrouded in clouds, “would he believe you? . . . But you and I know the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don’t know and can’t understand.” Perhaps Roy prefers to keep the heights of her story, like those mountaintops, shrouded in mystery.

Background of an author:

 Anuradha Roy- Since publishing her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Anuradha Roy has developed into one of the most exciting new voices of South Asian literature. Published to critical acclaim, her first novel was published in thirteen different languages. Her second novel, The Folded Earth won the Economist Crossword Book Award 2011 and achieved similar success to her debut. Her latest novel, Sleeping on Jupiter was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was crowned the winner of the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. As well as being an author, Roy runs an academic publishing company in India with her husband called Permanent Black, which they started together in 2000.

Appreciation of the story:

            In this story they prove if how they love each other although their families disapprove their relationship but still they are still together but how sad for Maya that Micheal die for an incident. It’s hard to accept that your love one is not coming back to you.

            I can’t relate this story to my life although I experience already that having a love life but at the end , our relationship to each other won’t take too long because there are a lot of things that happen, but it hurts so much to see your love one having another girl then they are sweet to each other. Actually I’d having my love life that my parents won’t know that’s why I’m scared to say to them that I have already a love life but months have pass I decided to stop and we break up. I surrender my feelings to him although it’s hard for me to do it but I need.

* A Thousand Splendid Suns *

      A Thousand Splendid Suns

By Khaled Hosseini

Summary:

Mariam lives in the small village of Gul Daman with her mother. She is the illegitimate daughter of Jalil, a wealthy businessman who lives in the nearby city of Herat. After her mother's suicide, she is sent to live with Jalil. Jalil and his wives quickly marry Mariam off to a shoemaker named Rasheed, and the newlyweds move to Kabul, where Mariam becomes pregnant. Sadly, Mariam miscarries. Rasheed is furious and becomes abusive.

Across Kabul (and in a galaxy far, far away…) a girl named Laila is born on the same night that the Soviets take control of Afghanistan. Her best friend (and love interest) is Tariq, a neighborhood boy who lost a leg when he was a child. With the war worsening, Tariq's family decides to leave for Pakistan, and he and Laila consummate their relationship the night before he leaves. Laila's family decides to leave soon after, but her parents are killed by a stray rocket as they're packing up the car.

Rasheed and Mariam care for Laila as she recovers. A man comes by and tells Laila that he saw Tariq die in a hospital. Rasheed, being the dirt ball that he is, uses this as an opportunity to ask Laila to marry him. Surprisingly, she says yes. It turns out that she's pregnant with Tariq's child. Her plan is to convince Rasheed that the child is his, and then escape to Pakistan after she's saved enough money.

Mariam resents Laila at first, but she eventually becomes close to Laila and her new daughter, Aziza. Laila tells Mariam about her plan to escape, and Mariam decides to join them. They eventually go through with the plan, but they're arrested before they can leave and are sent home with Rasheed. He is so furious that he almost kills them.

Laila and Rasheed have a son named Zalmai. After Rasheed's shop burns to the ground and the family goes broke, he forces Laila to send Aziza to a nearby orphanage. One day, after visiting Aziza, Laila returns home to find a very surprising guest: it's Tariq. It turns out the man who had come by all those years ago was hired by Rasheed to trick Laila. Laila tells Tariq about Aziza, and he promises that he will meet her the following day.

Rasheed starts to beat Laila that night when he finds out about Tariq. Mariam ends up killing Rasheed to protect Laila. Mariam remains in Kabul to take the blame and is executed by the Taliban. Laila, Tariq, and the kids move to Tariq's home in Murree, where life is comfortable. After the U.S. invasion, however, Laila decides to return to Kabul.

Before returning home, Laila stops in Herat, Mariam's hometown. She visits Mariam's childhood home, and receives a box for the local Mullah's son that was meant for Mariam. It's from her father Jalil. It contains a long letter, as well as her share of his inheritance. Laila uses the money to renovate the orphanage in Kabul, and we learn at the close of the book that she is pregnant with a new child.

 Background of an author:

 Khaled Hosseini.

- was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. In 1970 Hosseini and his family moved to Iran where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan in Tehran. In 1973 Hosseini's family returned to Kabul, and Hosseini's youngest brother was born in July of that year.

In 1976, when Hosseini was 11 years old, Hosseini's father obtained a job in Paris, France, and moved the family there. They were unable to return to Afghanistan because of the Saur Revolution in which the PDPA communist party seized power through a bloody coup in April 1978. Instead, a year after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California.

Appreciation of the story:

           

            Don't be so ignorant on the people that surrounds you. You should know how to make fun with others because it is important that you have many friends so that you can ask them for a help whenever you need them.

CORALINE

CORALINE

BY: Neil Gaiman

Our story starts out when a young lady named Coraline Jones moves into an apartment in an old house with her parents. Her neighbors include two elderly retired actresses and a strange man who lives upstairs and trains mice for a circus act. Despite this weirdness, Coraline is very bored. Her parents work a lot and they tend to just ignore her.

One day, Coraline discovers a door with a brick wall behind it. Seems kind of strange, right? But get this: when she opens the door later, there's a hallway back there. Now that's strange. When Coraline goes through the door, she ends up in an entirely different world: it's kind of like her own, but something's a little off. In the other world, Coraline has an other mother (the beldam), an other father, and other neighbors. And bonus, cats can talk.

Coraline decides this other world is weird (we agree) and so she heads back home. But when she arrives, her parents are missing: the beldam has kidnapped them, and Coraline will have to go back into the creepy other world to rescue them. Fast forward a bit: and, spoiler alert, she succeeds! She gets her parents back and, in the meantime, also rescues the trapped souls of three kidnapped children who have been stuck in the other world for a long time. Coraline beats the evil beldam, saves the day, and returns home.

But wait: it's not quite over. It turns out the other mother's hand has followed Coraline home (it's like Thing on the Addams Family!). Coraline plays one last trick to trap the other mother's hand in a deep well. Phew, finally the scariness is over. After all this excitement, Coraline is ready to start the school year; and boy, is school going to seem really tame by comparison.

Background of an author:

            Neil Gaiman was born in Hampshire, UK, and now lives in the United States near Minneapolis. As a child he discovered his love of books, reading, and stories, devouring the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Branch Cabell, Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, and G.K. Chesterton. A self-described "feral child who was raised in libraries," Gaiman credits librarians with fostering a life-long love of reading: "I wouldn't be who I am without libraries. I was the sort of kid who devoured books, and my happiest times as a boy were when I persuaded my parents to drop me off in the local library on their way to work, and I spent the day there. I discovered that librarians actually want to help you: they taught me about interlibrary loans."

Appreciation of the story:

            This story show’s for being not contented of what you are in your life and curiosity , but we won’t blame the main character because ever since she won’t experience those things in her life, but we try to be contented of what we have because not all that we want is we can get sometimes try to think better, because being contented in life is a good, the advantage of being contented in life is you won’t be insecure to others because you are already contented of what you have, and the disadvantage of being contented is you won’t progress in your life because your contented of what you have, you won’t strive hard for you to learn more but our curiosity can kill us very easy. We put on trouble because of our curiosity.

THE BOY NAMED CROW

The boy named crow

By Haruki Murakami

Summary

Kafka on the Shore is structured around the alternating stories of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy who runs away from home to escape an awful oedipal prophecy, and Nakata, an aging and illiterate simpleton who has never completely recovered from a wartime affliction. Kafka’s journey brings him to a small private library in the provincial town of Takamatsu and to a mountain hideaway where the ordinary laws of time no longer apply. But, like Oedipus, the more Kafka tries to avoid his fate, the closer he comes to fulfilling it. Nakata also sets forth on a quest for an enigmatic entrance stone, the significance of which he does not understand. These narratives push relentlessly forward like trains running on parallel tracks. We know the tracks will converge at some point, but not knowing when, or where, or how creates the suspense that makes the novel so compelling and drives it to its astonishing conclusion. Along the way Kafka on the Shore investigates and sometimes challenges our conceptions of time, fate, chance, love, and the very nature of human reality. The novel offers up a rich array of extraordinary characters and outrageous happenings: fish falling from the sky, conversations between man and cat, a supernatural Colonel Sanders’s ghostly but deeply sensual lovers, a philosophical prostitute, World War II soldiers untouched by time, and much else both strange and wonderful. But more than metaphysical fun is at stake in Kafka on the Shore. There is a vicious murder to be solved, complex and possibly incestuous relationships to be untangled, and the very nature of reality itself hangs in the balance.

Intellectually ambitious, emotionally intense, and beautifully written, Kafka on the Shore bristles with Murakami’s unique brand of imaginative brio. Readers will find themselves simultaneously wanting to turn the pages faster and faster to find out what happens and to slow down to savor the depth and beauty of Murakami’s prose.

Background of an author:

            Haruki Murakami is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described as 'easily accessible, yet profoundly complex'

Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers by his Western influences.

Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko. His first job was at a record store, which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, works. Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened the coffeehouse 'Peter Cat' which was a jazz bar in the evening in Kokubunji, Tokyo with his wife.

Many of his novels have themes and titles that invoke classical music, such as the three books making up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie (after Rossini's opera), Bird as Prophet (after a piano piece by Robert Schumann usually known in English as The Prophet Bird), and The Bird-Catcher (a character in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute). Some of his novels take their titles from songs: Dance, Dance, Dance (after The Dells' song, although it is widely thought it was titled after the Beach Boys tune), Norwegian Wood (after The Beatles' song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).

Appreciation of the story:

            In our life especially if you are a teenager friendships are very important, no matter what happen and problems has come to you. Your friends are always on your side to heal you. The important of friends to our life is they are the one who make us happy when we are in pain and they make us strong when we are weak. The advantage of having friends is when your friends can protect and help you every time you need and the disadvantage of having friends is sometimes friends are bad influence because they are the one who influence you to do something like engage with smoke , drinking alcohol and take prohibited drugs.

The silence of snow

The silence of snow

by Orhan Pamuk

Snow by Orhan Pamuk is a love story set in the volatility of today's Turkey with its clashes between tradition and change and religion and modern atheists—all set in the beautiful, but sometimes treacherous beauty of a border city in the midst of a winter snowstorm.

Ka is an exiled poet, who has returned to Turkey upon the death of his mother. After attending her funeral in Istanbul, Ka travels to the northern city of Kars to visit someone he knew in college and admired from afar, learning that she is recently divorced from her husband. Ka uses the excuse of being a journalist sent to the city to write about the recent suicides of young girls and the upcoming mayoral election.

When Ka sees Ipek again, he is overcome by her beauty, which is far greater than he had remembered. Ka is overwhelmed with his feelings that Ipek is the answer to his dreams, and so Ka pursues her relentlessly during his brief stay in Kars. Staying at the same hotel that is owned by Ipek's father and where they reside, makes it easy for Ka to see her often. He is invited nightly for dinner with the family and so gets to love her the more he sees her.

Ka is immediately caught up in the events of the town as he interviews people for his ostensible story: the mayoral candidate, who is Ipek's ex-husband Muhtar and sometime acquaintance of Ka's; the families of the suicide victims; the assistant police chief; even the leader of the theatrical troupe, Sunay Zaim, who Ka knew slightly from years ago and is in town for a performance at the National Theater.

Ka also meets some of the religious high school students, who are interested in him because he is talking to the girls who didn't want to bare their heads. Ka is introduced to some of their leaders, Necip and Fazil, who happen to be ardent admirers of Ipek's sister Radife, who is madly in love with and the mistress of a renowned Islamic terrorist named Blue.

During his brief stay in Kars, Ka manages to fall in love with Ipek and have his love reciprocated, both verbally and physically, resulting in the most happiness that he has ever known. His happiness is overshadowed by doubts that assail him every step of the way. A profound effect of this happiness is his ability to write the best poetry he has ever written - nineteen poems in a few short days that seem to come from another being.

Another manifestation of his stay is his struggle with his belief in God. He has at times thought of himself as an atheist, but during his stay, he visits the local sheik and declares his love for God. The local Islamists question the validity of his claims and tell him he is a poseur just trying to ingratiate himself.

Finally, there is a coup led by Sunay Zaim with help from a man, who was colonel during his military days. Against bloodshed, religious fanatics, theatrical farces and love triangles and betrayals, a blizzard keeps all the participants in the city watching the events unfolding to a surprising end. A friend of Ka's, Orhan Bey, is a recorder of these events after the death of Ka. In the end, Ka turns out not to be the person that Orhan or anyone else thought he was, except Blue.

Background of an author:

                Ferit Orhan Pamuk (generally known simply as Orhan Pamuk; born 7 June 1952) is aTurkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages making him the country's best-selling writer.

Pamuk is the author of novels including The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red, Snow and The Museum of Innocence. He is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature.

Born in Istanbul,  Pamuk is the first Turkish Nobel laureate. He is also the recipient of numerous other literary awards. My Name Is Red won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour and 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

The European Writers' Parliament came about as a result of a joint proposal by Pamuk and José Saramago. In 2005, the ultra-nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz sued Pamuk over his statement regarding the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. His intention, according to Pamuk himself, had been to highlight issues relating to freedom of speech in the country of his birth. The court initially rejected to hear the case, but in 2011 Pamuk was ordered to pay 6,000 liras in total compensation for having insulted the plaintiffs' honor.

Appreciation of the story:

            In our life being ambitious one is not a bad thing in fact it is good to us if we can control our self, although you are the richest man in the world if your personality or attitude are not good you are consider as in a low degree although you are in a higher position, and the worse thing is when you suddenly became a rich man, then you can buy everything and do what you want. You don’t need to look down others although you are higher from them, always remember that being a good one no one will harm you

SHORT POEMS BY DIBYENDRA

This Life
This life is all about rising and falling,
running through the terrains
of surreal moments, and clinging
on hopes and fears to face
the vicissitudes that leaves traces,
like the scars, that creeps,
screams, revisit one's dreams,
and sometimes mesmerize and gesticulate
toward the labyrinth of freakish dreams.

Waves of nostalgia
The waves of nostalgia
trample on the past,
deepening the bleeding wounds
that will never heal.

Let this frosty night cover
the mind in its blanket of serenity,
and be the guardian of the night
to chase the dragon from the dreams...

Broken
The reflection seems so fragile
on the broken mirror, that even if I touch
even with a gentle stroke, I might shatter
myself into a myriad shards, silently.

A desperate silence
Leave me alone in the desperate silence
to shriek and yell to the sky for answers,
as the anguish of lonesomeness starts
to collide with the miasma of gloominess.

But I am the dead, wearing a dreary face,
whose unheeded voice drifts in the wilderness
just to fade away into the bleakness of emptiness.

Estranged
To the estranged friend...

This is not what you thought you'll ever hear,
nor I ever intended these feelings to reveal.
Now, I wish this iffy entanglement to be free.
That would be good for you, and good for me.

Today, I felt like I should flush
the smouldered resentment,
or I should break away
from the estrangement,
for whatever the consequence.

I always tried to pull you close,
despite that you always repelled.
I desire not clipping your wings,
nor your pretentious affinity.
It's neither good for you,
nor good for me.

This withered relationship,
either needs a cure, or a kill,
or separate ways to start off
a new beginning.

Blind
In the state of blindness, my quivering steps
were entangled by the labyrinth of confusions,
and tumbled into the quagmire of wretchedness,
which besmirched the pristine thoughts ruthlessly,
and alienated my life in the wilderness of insanity.

Maybe the karma of my life is pallid and murky,
hurled with vicissitudes, and fenced with melancholies,
or I am just a blind, failing to espy the fragile beauty,
delicate as an exquisite rose, that a life showers

SCIENTIFIC/ LAB REPORT

A Scientific Report is a technical document that describes the process, progress, and or results of technical or scientific research or experiment or the state of a technical or scientific research problem. It might also include recommendations and conclusion of the research. Lab Report in science class.

PURPOSE:

1.Persuade others -to accept or reject hypotheses by presenting data and interpretations.

2.Detail data, procedures, and outcomes- for future researchers.

3.Become part of the accepted body of scientific knowledge- when published unless later disproved.

4.Provide an archival record- for reference and document a current situation for future comparison.

PARTS:

1. TITLE

•Reflect the factual content with less than ten words in a straightforward manner.

•Use keywords researchers and search engines on the Internet will recognize.

2. ABSTRACT

      •Summarize in a concise paragraph the purpose of the report, data presented, and major conclusions in about 100 TO 200 words.

3. INTRODUCTION

     •Define the subject of the report: "Why was this study performed?"

     •Provide background information and relevant studies: "What knowledge already exists about this subject?"

     •Outline scientific purpose(s) and/or objective(s): "What are the specific hypotheses and the experimental design for investigation?“

     •End by stating your research question, your study purpose/goal, and/or any hypotheses/predictions.

4. MATERIALS AND METHODS 

•List materials used, how were they used, and where and when was the work done (esp. important in field studies)

•Describe special pieces of equipment and the general theory of the analyses or essays used.

•Provide enough detail for the reader to understand the experiment without overwhelming him/her. When procedures from a lab book or another report are followed exactly, simply cite the work and note that details can be found there.

5. RESULTS

     •Concentrate on general trends and differences and not on trivial details.

     •Summarize the data from the experiments without discussing their implications.

     •Organize data into tables, figures, graphs, photographs, etc. Data in a table should not be duplicated in a graph or figure.

•Title all figures and tables; include a legend explaining symbols, abbreviations, or special methods.

•Number figures and tables separately
and refer to them in the text by their number, i.e.

•Figure 1 shows that the activity....

•The activity decreases after five minutes (fig. 1)

6. DISCUSSION

    •Interpret the data; do not restate the results.

    •Relate results to existing theory and knowledge.

    •Explain the logic that allows you to accept or reject your original hypotheses

    •Speculate as necessary but identify it as such

    •Include suggestions for improving your techniques or design, or clarify areas of doubt for further research.

7. CONCLUSION

   •A summary of findings.

   •State the significance or implications of the experimental findings.

   •State the areas of future research.

8. REFERENCES

   •Cite only references in your paper and not a general bibliography on the topic

   •Alphabetize by last name of the author

   •Follow the recommended format for citations

9. APPENDICES

   •Examples of information that could be included in an appendix are figures/tables/charts/graphs of results, statistics, pictures, maps, drawings, or, if applicable, transcripts of interviews.