Bookkeeping!

I seem to have a great tendency to accumulate things. Or thats what I realised when I opened the carton boxes that contained all my stuff which my dad (not wanting to have anthing to do with it!) conviniently shipped it off from Bangalore to Chennai. All these stuff accumulated over the last 15 to 20 years were tucked away in my house in Bangalore. When I moved to Chennai and bought an apartment dad thought that I would miss all the stuff and had them shipped to me. But accomodating them in an apartment was out of question as space was very limited. So I took the rather painful decision of giving away almost everything except the most precious stuff. So with this in mind I went about opening the boxes one after the other. Among other things I found

• A file containing literature on Shortwave listening, Dxing
• A first edition of "Applied Electronics" by G.K Mithal (My dad's copy when he was in Engineering College, incidentally 24 years later I used a updated edition for my engineering course)
• A lot of newspaper articles on subjects ranging from the English Language (Know Your English, The Hindu), Gardening, Art, Collecting, Movies, Literature, Computing, Tea, Insurance, Treasury, Numismatics, Philately, Personal Finance clipped and filed neatly.
• IPO prospectus of mutual funds
• A lot of catalogues for pens, shoes, audiophile equipment etc
• Clipping of my name in Print (Know Your English, The Hindu)
• Course material for Unix, C, Oracle, and CAT (IIM's!) etc
• A lot of Books mainly Enginnering text books.
• A lot of Business Today, Chip magazines
• All my notes and Journal entries right from the very first job to my most recent

I painfully parted with most of them after having one last look at each. I just retained a few first editions, the Onkyo Catalogues. At about 7 in the evening after about 12 hours when I finally wound up I felt hungry and realised that I forgot to have lunch. My wife who has been a mute spectator all along, said that she was glad that I finally got rid of all the junk. Didnt want to tell her about SPURL and FURL the electronic clipping service! I still have about 4 boxes to go!