Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Overabundance of material

 - "We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge"

The world's treasures lay undisturbed in sites like   Project  Gutenberg, Sacred-Texts.com etc.
For e.g , you can get all the Kai Lung stories on Project Gutenberg.

I chanced upon the Internet Archive , made the mistake of digging deep,  and now it  has put  one hundred obligations upon me.

I found cartloads of old villains  - Koestler's The lotus and the Robot  -which covers just past Freedom India and Japan from a westerner's raw unsympathetic point of view ,    a whole bunch of Thomas Cleary books , and I can never get done with all the Taoism and Zen that he translated - that man must've been a prodigy or maniac , some of the portable MBA series, clausewitz, sun tzu,  a lot of - get this - Donald C Laird books . His Technique of Getting Things Done predated GTD by almost a century and thanks to a doting, dutiful father, was on my reading desk in school, the stories seared on to my brain. Unfortunately, they did not help me in college.

I also found Y Perelman books - the lovely Physics for Entertainment and Figures for Fun series..

My Oreilly Safari is loaded with titles in relevant playlists. I see the appeal of  rebirths now - so much to read is there , though in my case I will even consider the option ,if offered , to  come back as a ghost and haunt libraries ...

There is no shortage of blog articles advising against 'self-improvement' and reading material promising 'the way'. And my shelf is full of books I will never read.  There are even printouts of blog articles among the books.

What is this disease of book/knowledge hoarding ? Whither deliverance ?


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