{"id":137,"date":"2011-01-24T10:48:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-24T10:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sibha.online\/wprandom\/2011\/01\/24\/books-books-and-books-iii\/"},"modified":"2011-01-24T10:48:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T10:48:00","slug":"books-books-and-books-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/2011\/01\/24\/books-books-and-books-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Books, books and books-III"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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<\/span> leisurely taking in the sights and sounds and aroma in a restaurant. <\/div>\n
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And it was like a blind date. Once, I filled out a slip \u201cBasic Theories by Freud\u201d 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.<\/div>\n
It was a too short a stay at Loyola to settle down to any focused reading.<\/div>\n
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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 \u2018hip\u2019 place to be in.<\/span> 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 \u2018restriction\u2019 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 \u2018restrictions\u2019<\/div>\n
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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 \u201cmodern man in search of a soul”. <\/div>\n
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No Tamil books here and only fiction<\/span> I read was \u2018historical fiction\u2019. I remember reading everything written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn including some prose poem<\/span>; Gulag Archipelago, \ufeffThe First Circle,\ufeff Cancer Ward,<\/span> \ufeffThe Love-Girl and the Innocent, <\/span>\ufeffAugust 1914, <\/span> \ufeffOne 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.<\/span><\/div>\n

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http:\/\/mi59.blogspot.com\/2010\/09\/books-books-and-books.html<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

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http:\/\/mi59.blogspot.com\/2011\/01\/books-books-and-books-ii.html<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

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http:\/\/mi59.blogspot.com\/2011\/05\/books-books-and-books-iv-regimental.html
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http:\/\/mi59.blogspot.com\/2011\/05\/fifth-and-last-part-of-books-books-and.html<\/span><\/div>\n

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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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sibha.in\/wpbooksblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}