Down the memory lane

After endless bickering by Ma, about how books are dangerously encroaching the whole of our modestly sized house, she said it was time to discard them , /pause/, she corrects herself "we have to discard at least some of them". So stood ahead a daunting task of sorting the old books and catergorising them into "Have to keep", "Find rightful heirs" and "Discard".
I love my book room. It has this huge shelf with glass sliding panels and books arranged behind them in neat rows.

So first came the old text books, from 10th grade onwards. The english text books, which were read the day they were bought. The "Merchant of Venice" in old english. I only realised the importance of ICSE english syllabus, when i shifted to CBSE for my 11th and 12th. The former having a distinguished class ( spoken like a true ICSE snob ! ). I missed "Selected short stories" and "Pagent of poems" after i left them behind.

Among the books, i saw a familiar red- black book cover and out came the "Resnick and Halliday". Eagerly opened it and started reading the first chapter. Aaah, how i love those tiny fonts and those diagrams. And all the "Prove that .." questions at the end of each chapter. Then there was Looney with all the Trignometry gyan. I suspect my other text books except english have already been "given". Then there a few books on physics from my dad's time. Indian authors, big fonts, i remember reading them on and off.

Some odd 30 novels. The ones i started buying like mad when i started earning. I even have a james hadley chase for that matter. :P

Then there were the engineering books. Out went the ones which said "Object Oriented Programming" or "Html" or "Java" or "VC++". I somehow absolutely hated "learning" languages. Then there was "Theory of automata and finite languages" by John Martin. Definitely a keeper. I learned the concept of FSM's here. I am still fascinated by them. Then a "Introduction to Prolog", what a teaser that was , i remember ! Until you think in terms of recursions, you can never write a program. But when you do, it was a 3-5 lines of code , brevity and elegance personified. A keeper again. The "Operating systems" by Silberschatz got eaten by termites. Felt bad, but was secretly relieved that it wasnt "Resnick and Halliday". Then was "Compiler design", a keeper. Was torn whether to keep the "Network analysis", but would have to keep "Microprocessors" too, for the sake of fairness, you know. And "Have to keep" pile was growing making it an extremely difficult optimisation problem.

There were a huge pile of brilliant tutorials mock test papers and YG files. Was tempted to keep one of the papers and try to solve the math section. Debated between getting excited and feel good about myself or getting completely humiliated. Whisked it into the "Have to keep" pile.

Found an old notebook, with neatly written notes sbout calculating the final velocity of a projectile under the force of gravity.

I am so glad that some things never change...