Text Book Nostalgia

I am suddenly nostalgic about text books. Not certain I read all of them, though.

Resnick and Halliday was a Physics text.

BL Theraja wrote several books that became our Bibles for Electrical Engineering.

Tuli's book on Chemistry I still remember the title of.

Pindyck and Rubenfeld was one for Macroeconomics, and Paul Samuelson, for Microeconomics.

Don't remember the book for Advertising, only the fancy ads shown by guest faculty at IIMB.

There was also a thick Operations Research book, that terrified me by its sheer size.

But I was impressed by some non-text books about various management disciplines. Ogilvy on Advertising, Positioning, Maverick, The Goal, for instance.

I did not exactly like them, but some books that I referred to in Marketing Research included those by Green and Tull, Luck and Rubin, and Churchill. They inspired me to write my own.

Favourite Phrases of Teachers

We forget the courses, but still remember catch-phrases used by the teachers who taught us, as far back as high school. Why, I don't really know, you know- incidentally, 'you know' is also one.

We had a Hindi teacher in school who always began a discussion of some verses from poems with "Bahut sundar kaha hai kavi ne" (the poet has beautifully described....)

Another English teacher was famous for his unique way of presenting Keats' Ode to a Nightingale with the "littul birdae" and the important passages from Julius Caesar, not to mention the poem Ulysses which exhorted us to 'drink life to the lees'.

The Chemistry teacher in school was very strict and what we mostly remembered was his threats-       "I'll cut your tail, I say" being a constant one.

The Maths teacher was generally recognised by her pronunciation of 'which' as 'huch' ( luckily not hooch), and that was a great distraction when the theorems went over our heads. Incidentally, a mathematical romance of many dimensions called "Flatland" is highly recommended for readers who are into that sort of thing. Amazon has it, I think.

A Marketing prof. in IIMB was famous for a dramatic pause following a serious discussion of something, and then the inevitable question, " Is that the only kaas (cause)?"

Another OM (we called this POM for a very good reason that I shall explain another time) prof. had this habit of mumbling, and rocking the chair he held on to, standing behind it and holding on most of the time.

Memorable stuff all.