Nobody Tells This to Beginners

Fresh or Wilted?

June brings the musty smell of earth as the clouds burst open, pouring their stack on the scorched land. The smell conjures up another pleasant memory: beginning of another academic year.

Textbooks, workbooks, notebooks, rolls of brown paper, and of course, labels. Every book was crisp, fresh from the presses. The whole family sat down to carry out the ritual of neatly covering every book with the brown paper so the books could endure the soggy downpours, chilly winds and dry heat throughout the year.

Taylor at Men with Pens relishes old books.

There’s something about a used book smell. It’s like the opposite of car-buying. For cars, you want the new-car smell. For books, you want that smell that says other people have read these pages before, that they have loved them, and that so will you.

I have slowly built an assorted collection of books over the last decade and care for them dearly. Transparent plastic sleeves garment my novels and non-fiction collection. This has helped them survive a scary termite infestation in my loft bedroom. The collection also has some memorable textbooks on Philosophy and Literature from college.

Like Harry Potter’s Advanced Potion Making textbook which had useful notes scribbled in the margins by the Half Blood Prince, used reference books are a delightful find. Tablets and eReaders cannot replicate the joy of finding nuggets of information, like highlighted sentences, dialogues marked ‘IMP’ and meaning of meandering dialogues (especially Shakespearean) so that just reading the notes was enough to get a gist of the chapter.

I feel most sorry for books which are falling apart. A tattered copy of ‘The Memory of Elephants’ by Boman Desai managed only one cautious read, held together by paper binder clips. Although I loved the book, and even told him so when I met him during a book reading for another author, I couldn’t find another copy of the book.

Two tattered copies of The Human Bondage I picked from Flora Fountain, the treasure-trove of used and antique books in Bombay were carefully stored and read over and over, until I was able to find an unharmed hard bound copy at Blossoms Book House.

The agglomeration is still expanding, but at an inert rate, but I’m not complaining. O’Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi & other stories’ along with Jane Austen’s ‘Pride & Prejudice’, leather-bound volumes printed in 1984. Collector copies.

Your hands are …

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. 100 years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.

by James Altucher

Education just not enough to get a job

Originally written for BizDemy

Our hyper-connected world mandates education standards today are measured on an international scale. Asian parents and students attach high value to educational success. Even so, education in this emerging continent is still passive learning that requires students to sit, listen and provide output in exams is simply unrealistic in today’s digital age. There is no such thing as a homogeneous level of learning and comprehension in a classroom of students. Competing with international counterparts, online business education with simulations provide a multinational opportunity.

Read more

 

Back to school

My favorite subject in school was Algebra. I loved the complicated assumptions and the inferences we had to derive using x, y and some times z. If the problem got too

Algebra Equation (Photo credit: Evelyn Saenz)

crowded, we’d introduce a,b,c and d.

The logical and linear thought process involved deriving the final answer, filling up an entire full-scape page made me gleeful. Opening the brackets, breaking down the sum into smaller units and crossing across 0s to make smaller numbers till each of them came together in the final lines to a final simple number was raptus.

Fast forward 15 years i.e. today I use the same logic and assumptions, but in the reverse. A word or idea is the germ of an explosion of thoughts which hang together by a string of logic, woven together to form the big picture, a blog post, press release and sometimes a sales letter.

Response to https://challenge.meyouhealth.com/2012/8/13/recall-your-favorite-subject-in-high-school-and-list-3-reasons-why-you-liked-it-13#!1344902526.1469793/response/completed/14546/