Books, books and books-III

After leaving the School, I had a brief stint at Loyala College Chennai, for about four months before I joined the NDA. The college library was good but it did not have an open access system. You had to consult the catalog , fill out a slip giving your choice of books and at the end of the day, the books were issued, if available. You could also reserve a book if it was under issue. Well, it was difficult to pick up a book by just the title and the author, unless you had seen the book before. Moreover, one missed the pleasure of physical browsing of books. Its like ordering a pizza on telephone as compared to placing an order after leisurely taking in the sights and sounds and aroma in a restaurant.

And it was like a blind date. Once, I filled out a slip “Basic Theories by Freud” and after the classes, I was greeted by a real monster of a book, a hard bound edition , over 1000 pages weighing over a kilo. I had to lug it home , browse through for a few days before lugging it back.

It was a too short a stay at Loyola to settle down to any focused reading.

At NDA, again, there was a very good library, though it was hardly used by the cadets. Firstly cadets had little free time and more importantly, library was simply not considered a ‘hip’ place to be in. In fact during our time it was part of the punishments to spend the Sundays at Library. Defaulters (you did not have to do much to be labeled a defaulter; a button of slightly different shade, or a twisted lace in your boots can fetch you 7 or even 14 restrictions). Each day of ‘restriction’ included a run in the evening and 3-4 reportings and on Sundays , it included a library session. It goes without saying, I had my share of ‘restrictions’

It is at NDA that I read all the volumes of complete works of Swami Vivekananda, Biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda by Nikilananda and Romain Rolland , Atmabodh and Kindle Life by Swami Chinmayananda. It is natural that philosophy and psychology are grouped together by librarians,. So my next stop was Psychology. I was particularly interested in Jung; a book I intend revisiting is “modern man in search of a soul”.

No Tamil books here and only fiction I read was ‘historical fiction’. I remember reading everything written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn including some prose poem; Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Love-Girl and the Innocent, August 1914, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. To sum up, for whatever reason, it was all serious reading and just no fun reading. May be I equated serious stuff with English and it was much later that I read books like PG Wodehouse.