I’ve given up hope on my efforts to blog regularly. My posts are becoming shorter–all right, I concede that the length of a post is in no way proportional to its quality–and more infrequent thanks to some pretty tight schedules at work. So, instead of "original" posts that "come out of my head," I am resorting to "response-like" posts or "inspirational" posts.

Jivha has written some interesting stuff about Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead.

Like him, I too was met with raised eyebrows when I mentioned that I hadn’t read Ayn Rand, back in my college/early post-college days, as if I’d committed some sacrilege. At that time, it didn’t appeal to me. Period. And later when I read it, it was more out of curiosity rather than for any other compelling reason.

Fountainhead is in some ways, a predecessor–in terms of her ideas and philosophy–to her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. My main grouse about Ayn Rand’s books is that the world is divided neatly into black and white. You’re either for or against, there’s no middle path. Her heroes/protoganists are men of hard work, intellect, ability and determination. They’re undaunted in the face of the most gruelling odds and as is expected, triumph in the end. Triumph as in "moral triumph," not necessarily in terms of "making it big" or earning more money or whatever. Like Jivha said, they are extremely predictable.

A curious tendency about her descriptions is that she goes overboard describing both strength and weakness. That’s both her strength and drawback–strength in the sense that she has great talent to use English effectively while she describes both these. Her drawback is in her going overboard, going to any length to get her point across, to make the reader despise the "villains" instead of leaving us to decide. There’s no way you can find any merit in her "weak" characters or demerit in her "strong" characters. This feature is manifest in both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I feel that the hallmark of any good writer is to make the reader draw his/her own conclusions, to let the reader reflect deeper. However, as Shaw has said so well, "The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of "happy endings" to misfit all stories." What applies in the context of "Romance" equally holds good for all other stories. I don’t want to elaborate any further on Fountainhead because (if Jivha reads this post) it’d kill Jivha’s interest in reading the book.

However, apart from these "masterpieces," I like another, but not much publicized book of Ayn Rand–We the Living. It may not be on the scale of Atlas Shrugged or may not "expound" Rand’s philosophy as in Fountainhead, but it’s thought-provoking at a certain level. It’s about a young woman’s struggle for freedom in the Russia of the Revolution. Ayn Rand hated the post-revolution USSR with a passion, which is understandable because once-prosperous, she and her family were reduced to naught, post-revolution. What makes this book a worthy read is that:

• It doesn’t sermonize, like Atlas Shrugged.
• It is a straightforward tale with which every person can identify.
• Paints a realistic picture of the revolution-torn Russia.

Probably it is that way because her "philosophy" hadn’t developed yet!