Seven Advantages of Tsundoku: Acquiring books and reading none

Seven Advantages of Tsundoku: Acquiring books and reading none

 

Tsundoku is a Japanese Word for acquiring books and not reading them but allowing them to pile up unused or unread. As a noun, it refers to the person – accumulator of books. The act itself may include buying or getting them as gift or perhaps stolen from a library or bookstore. Without dwelling into the origin or history of the word, I may say, it can be used satirically to mildly look down upon a person who has a big collection of never-read-books.  However earliest usage of the word was straight use of the word without any implied offence. The man in the photo on the left is not a Tsundoku. Not because he is reading but because it is a statute! Even though you do nothing – not even reading them – after buying the books, there are certain distinct advantages of this special art / act.

 

Let me enumerate a few of them:

 

• 1.      It helps the bookseller and publishers, anyway
• 2.      It helps furniture manufacturers like shelves and cabinets
• 3.      It makes you proud to show off a huge collection of ‘learned’ books
• 4.      It is talking point or a conversation starter with friends who visit you
• 5.      You have some book ready on hand in case you feel bored and want to read
• 6.      It develops a sort of guilt feeling needed for survival
• 7.      You can introduce yourself as a Tsundoku expert.

 

Whatever is said above does not apply to a librarian or a retail book seller though activities are similar but objectives are different. Are you a Tsundoku, capable of adding to the list of advantages?

 

 

      

Grateful THANKS to All those who greeted / blessed me on my 79th birthday on 14th Dec 2020

 

 Grateful THANKS to All those who greeted / blessed me on my 79^th birthday on 14^th Dec 2020

Dr P Vyasamoorthy

 

I wish to record my sincere thanks to all my friends and well-wishers for having conveyed their greetings and blessings to me on my birthday 14^th December 2020, via SMS, WhatsApp, Email, phone call and in person. Many of you have taken pains to reach me by means more than one. Besides thoughtful touching text, pictures, photos, cartoons, poems etc embellished  several messages.  To each and every one, my grateful thanks from the bottom of my heart. To many I could acknowledge then and there but a few I may have missed. I hope this consolidated thank you note amends my lapses. THANKS AGAIN. Padmanabha VYASAMOORTHY, 79!

 

Prof Ramamurti	Mr V Badrinarayanan	Mr Badrinarayan Miriyala
Mr Ramachandran Chennai	Mrs Jayanti Menon	Mr Janardhan IDL
Mr Janardhan IDL	Mr Markandeyulu	Mr Khanapur Krishna Rao
Mr TSK Raman	Mrs Indu	Dr T Thomas
Union Bank	Prif V Seshadri	Mr RV Rao
Mr Kesavan	Wg Cdr Bhushan	Mr K Venkataramani
Mr Kishan Rao IDL	Dr Sajjan Singh	DR SR Prahlad
L&T Mutual Fund	Mr K Kochhaar	SBI
Mr A Suryanarayana	Mrs Suhasini	Mr T Balamukund
Mrs Prema Anand	Dr RK Garg	Mr SL Narayan
Mr VRV Rao & Susheela	Mrs Indira Narayan	Birthhday Alarm
Mr Venkata Shashtry K	Col Annavajla Sarma	Mr Chepuri Shankar Rao
Mr Ramesh Babu	Mr Arvind Chandwaskar	Pune Srinivasan
Syndicate / Canara Bank	Dr T Dak	Mrs Malini
Mr G Ramakrishna	Justice Rangarajan	Shweta Vyas
Mr SV Chalapathy	Mrs Sarojini & VKN	Mr S Sathyamoorthy
Mrs Kamakshi Hatti	Mrs Kalyani	Mr RN Mital
Mr Ramakrishna Savaram	Mr DK Rao	Mr K Gopalakrishnan KGK
Mr SV Ramana	Mr KV Shastry	Mrs Neela Jagannathan
MR Shankar ao	Mr Linga REddy	Mr ASN
Mr Venkatapathi Raju	Mr BN Acharya	Mr Udaya Babu
Mr Ishwar Rao Bagade	MR N Rajendra Rao	Mrs Sima Chakravarti
Mrs Meenakshi P	Mr Sarvesh Gupta	Mr Gandikota Subba Rao
Mrs MN Rajeshwari	Mrs Sunitha	Mr S Ramakrishna
Mr Raghurraman	Dr Vasunder REddy	Dr KR Ganghadharan
Mr Chalasani Prabhakar	Mr G Ramakrishna	Mr R Bhashyam

 

Multiple Email Ids of same person

 

Multiple Email Ids of same person

Many of my contacts have more than one Email Id from service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. When I initiate a message for such persons I am in a dilemma as which one to choose. Gmail suggests all addresses to choose! When the message is important, I mark it to more than one ID to ensure receipt / response.  Replying to an email from multiple IDs is no issue, as REPLY button always helps you.

 Searching email from a person with multiple email ids is cumbersome. You can not guess from which address you got it. Further searching mail is made difficult by users changing the subject line often. But, sticking to same subject line increases the thread length so much that searching within the thread is difficult. Moreover, users do not stick to the discipline of deleting unwanted parts in ‘replied-to’ messages and length of each post keeps increasing like Hanuman’s tail!

 Labels are a good way to manage searching. However, when I looked into my labels, I found I had allotted / created labels indiscriminately, more than half of which I can not now guess what they mean!

 Why do people have multiple Email addresses? What are the different purposes they are put to use? Do they see all incoming mail, though sent to different IDs, in one consolidated inbox? How do they ensure that they are spammed, the messages are not duplicated, their messages go without action required to be taken?

 I too have three or four Email IDs. Two only are used – one primary the other one for ‘recovery’ of forgotten / lost password etc.  While writing this story I discovered a few that I never used after creation and I do not know how to delete those accounts!

 There are many sites that insist on registering yourself with your email id. Usually, such sites land you in furtherance of spam or misuse of your mail id. Hence, I use disposable email Ids. I can conveniently forget about them after exploring the site for whatever is worth.

 What are your suggestions for alleviating these problems?