Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Books - My second love

My love for books is surpassed only by my love for Mathematics.The sight of books fills me with joy undescribable. I have always nurtured this dream(supposed to be a secret) of setting up a library because I know how difficult it is to get access to great/good books in India and I wanted to do my bit to make things slightly better.

The credit for developing the reading habit in me goes to my mom who made sure that never missed a single book fair when I was in school despite not being a voracious reader herself. I shall always remain grateful to her for this.

My love for books in mathematics was kindled during my IIT coaching days and the credit for this goes to one Mr.Koteshwara Rao, one of the best mathematics teachers I have met.Even after nine long years, I can still recollect with great fondness, the enthusiasm, passion and energy he exuded while teaching.It was he who introduced us to Bernard and Child's Algebra, Dorofeev's Elementary Mathematics, Tom Apostol's Calculus, Shklarsky's Problems in USSR mathematical olympiads, some of the best books of high school mathematics ever.The sheer joy of solving problems or reading these books is inexplicable.

Though initially I was only interested in collecting good books on mathematics, it was IIT, Kharagpur's library (one of the biggest technical libraries in Asia) which exposed me to great books in a lot of other domains(though mostly scientific like physics, computer science, aerospace etc) and it was then that I started collecting non-mathematical books.

My love for books only kept growing and my intersts have only widened. While I was working for a software development firm in Hyderabad, I used to buy a lot of books about Computer Science and Engineering and software development.Bjarne Stroustrup, Gang of Four, Sipser, Ullman, Brooks, Kernighan and Ritchie, Pressman - all great authors.Thanks to the increase in disposable income, I also bought books like GEB, Selfish Gene and other non-fiction books once in while. During the 3 years I was in Hyderabad, my book collection swelled to around 800 books.

CAT coaching had a big big impact on my reading habits. The preparation for the RC section in CAT(considered one of the toughest sections mainly because of our reading habit which is almost nonexistent)consisted of reading passages from very varied domains including philosophy,politics, business, literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology and science. I started buying books like Arundhati Roy's the Algebra of Infinite Justice, Bertrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy, Jack Welch's Straight from the Gut etc.My reading speed no doubt improved but more importantly my perspective broadened.From here on a lot of books on philosophy, economics, business etc found a way to my library.

My stay at IIM, Calcutta reinforced this trend further.IIMC's library is one of the biggest Management Libraries in Asia,it was here that I got to read some absolutely fantastic books on economics, finance, mathematics(surprisingly!) and gerneral management.I also started buying a lot books thanks to the guy who came to our Hostel with the latest business best sellers.

I can proudly say that I am now an owner of more than 1000 absolutely wonderful books in a wide variety of subjects like mathematics, physics, computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, economics, business, genetics, biology and history.

Some of the books I have read recently:
My rating scale - very bad, bad, ok, good, excellent

Fooled by Randomness - Excellent
The Long Tail - Excellent
ROI selling - Good
Valuation - Excellent
Interpreter of Maladies - Good
The Google Story - Ok
Understanding Arbitrage - Good
It's Not About The Bike - Excellent
The McKinsey Way - Good
The monk who sold his ferrari - Ok


Currently I am reading "Blue Ocean Strategy".

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

well well well.....
Never knew u needed to read all these to get thru CAT verbal section !!!!!!

shit man vamshi,,when i went for ngineering i was not sure what exactly calculus meant !!....and dont even think i know it now :P

10:29 PM  

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