Bringing 15 boxes of friends home – the post that started it all off. This post recounts the voyage of our second batch of friends, henceforth dubbed as Part 2 of the series.

In Dec 2011, my brother-in-law brought the second batch of books — to Chennai. So far so good. Since his parents were going to returning to US with him, I had a time window of two weeks to collect the books. Sathish, an ex-colleague and friend, (who has a home in Chennai) picked up the books. Two months later, he brought them to Bangalore. I finally picked them up in Mar 2012. A grand total of 9 boxes but they are all hardbound so quite heavy. I present the list below along with my commentary. As I accumulated these books over the years, I’ve been pretty religious about annotating when (and sometimes ‘where’) I bought the book.

• Tintin in the new world
• Bought at the Stanford Bookstore on Jul 27, 1998 (this would have to a week after moving to the SF Bay Area from Chicago – heady times!)
• Ambassador’s Journal: John Kenneth Gailbraith
• The paperback cover on Amazon is NOT the one I own. Mine has a green cover and it’s a hardbound. I’m currently reading this humorous and insightful account and transcribing my favorite bits – JK Galbraith has his very own Galbraith category on my blog.
• Primal Leadership
• Bought in Dec 2005. Seems interesting enough but still remains unread. Found a bookmark from The Lenox Hill Bookstore, NY though it doesn’t prove that this book was purchased there. For the longest time, I was incapable of walking out of a bookstore without  purchasing at least one book.
• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits (by Verne Harnish)
• 12 pages of testimonials, ghost writer
• Hard facts, dangerous half-truths & total nonsense (by Stanford U Professors Robert Sutton & Jeffrey Pfeffer)
• Professor Sutton was visiting Yahoo campus (2004/5) for a talk on “The Ambidextrous Organization” — this was a freebie book from the event. It’s a promising read.
• The complete works of O. Henry
• Bought in April ’95 (during my Chicago years) – this is arguably my first/only bibliophile book and warrants a separate post for one other reason – suspense!
• All things bright and beautiful (by James Herriot)
• Bought second-hand (undated).
• The new industrial state (by John Kenneth Galbraith)
• Bought in Mar 2000.
• Bhagavad Gita (in Hindi)
• Bought in Dec 2004 from the Birla Temple, Hyderabad. Went to Sunnyvale, CA – then a few years in a San Jose attic, a year in a Cupertino garage, a few months in Chennai and finally to our Bangalore apartment. Yes – a well-travelled hardbound indeed.

There’s more good news for the rest of our book friends in my sister’s garage. Another ex-colleague and friend (Ajay) is on a business trip to the Bay Area and has agreed to bring back a ‘significant number’ of books. How significant? I won’t answer that lest it jinxes things. Stay tuned… part 3 in this series is not too far away.

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