Books Retired 2

This is the second list of retired books! There is some spill-over of authors from the first list: Castaneda and Von Daniken.  Then there is Lobsang Rampa, an Irish plumber who decided that he was actually a Tibetan monk who had been granted this body after the original body had become unusable after Chinese (or was it Japanese) torture and extreme privation.  Over a dozen books he spun a yarn about growing up in Tibet as a child, being inducted as a monk, being initiated into the most abstruse mysteries and meditation in chambers deep below the Potala palace, moving across to China and so on. All I imagine of Tibet is from what I first read in Rampa’s books as a child.  I went on to read authentic accounts by others eg Heinrich Harrer’s “Seven Years in Tibet” andk later, even more prosaic histories. Yet, somehow, the mention of Tibet brings up the images implanted in rich detail by Rampa. This would be tolerable if the same was also not true of Buddhism in general. No other account of Buddha’s life or of the four noble truths, or of the eight-fold path has been able to fully erase the images created by Rampa. Later reading , of other texts, only seems to add detail to those memories. For that, I cannot really forgive the rascal! (Update: I was somewhat dismayed to learn that Rampa wrote more than a dozen books. Evidently I had stopped buying his work after acquiring 12! But I was relieved to learn that many Tibetologist referred to The Third Eye as the book that triggered off their interest in Tibet and  related stuff - presumably including Buddhism   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobsang_Rampa )

While at school I had heard of a book that was the opposite of a dictionary. One went to it to get a word when one already knew the meaning. I never could buy a Thesaurus while in Dehradun and was therefore very happy to buy a copy in the Galgotia book shop branch located inside the IIT Delhi campus (on the ground floor of the main building itself). I went on to buy another copy as well, eventually, but did not much use either. Somehow the discovery that the thesaurus was essentially a listing of synonyms was a great comedown. What was I expecting, I wonder!

There was a period when, egged on by a fond teacher at the IIT, I started toying with the idea of a life in literature. Luckily I shook off that idiocy but could not shake off some of the baggage that I had picked up. Sheer sentimentality! I have retained a copy of Derrida gifted by Rahul and let go the others over time, including, now, the three survivors here (the one with the spine side up is a History of Modern Criticism, no less!).

Finally Sperling and Schindler were my first introduction to psychology made popular: a genre I was to encounter almost countless times in my reading. Both belonged to my father. There is no special reason to hold on to them. They were not classics in that genre but it is amazing how little popular advice has changed in matters of importance to lay people.