The Ayn Rand Effect

.. I have been saving this blog and did not publish it when I had written it, I had written it the night I had finished reading Atlas Shrugged some 4 months ago.....


......And is the line between selfness and selfishness really the one which we have made out to be . If it is then my claim is that it is a line we have drawn because we as a species have made a virtue out of making standards of morality not from our own conscious thoughts but from borrowed garbage that some so called intellectuals shoved down our throats. The rest of the mankind just gulped whatever was decreed to them because of a confirmed lack of self respect .

In the course of time that I have been sitting at home waiting to join work a couple of months from now, idle with my own thoughts I have come to see people not as individuals but as specks. I have become disconcerted often with my own low outlook on humanity but I am trying to figure out what on earth would make me respect men and women that I come across everyday as friends, wellwishers, guardians of society, the so called intellectuals that appear on TV shows and editorials gloating about morality and virtuosity. If for most of the time listening and talking to them would have made me any wiser, or had I heard something from them which came from their own independent thought would have rated them as puposeful human beings but sadly I have not met too many of that kind in life so far.

There are very common issues on which the devoidness of human mind is exposed. If one claims to like a movie actress because she is beautiful despite not being a good actor we frown on him, just as we do when someone expreses the desire to marry a beautiful woman. We call him hollow, incapable of being able to look for some mysterious "inner beauty" as if inner beauty was the domain of only ugly looking women. Well I think it is a good idea if we learned to accept that beauty is what appeals and moves the world. Whether that beauty lies in a woman or in the valleys and gardens of the world it is one and the same entity, human nature is given to crave for it. So for all those feminists and intellectuals who want everyone in the world to forget about the "superficial beauty" and dig deeper my question is where will that lead to ? I for my part will not want to waste time digging for roots of a tree and would rather smell the flower it bore. If I am being hollow so be it .

Indulgence is another issue. Pleasure is derided upon. There are certain absolutes which are a no-no even if there is nothing irreversibly wrong with it. Drinking is bad because Mahatma Gandhi also said the same , because one's parents taught the same.Taking a lighted cigarette occasionally between one's lips is the same as being a smoker risking cancer and therefore touching a cigarette itself is bad . The moral standards dont allow it . What if a drink now and then does not make you vulnerable to disease , what if you hold your own when a little high on smoke and alcohol, it is bad. And who ever stops to think why ! Some argue it leads to addiction-- it is their own lack of trust upon themselves in being more disciplined and not be addicted that makes them mistrust someone else too . The weaker person with lesser self control feels completely justified in setting standards of good and bad. Way to go!

The most hilarious is the way people go about religion. I started reading Geeta a few days ago not because I identify myself as some Hindu but because I wanted to read the thought behind the book. The one thing I definitely understood was that if 80 odd percentage of our nation calls itself Hindu, then it is the biggest fraud ever unleashed upon ourselves. Because as far I have heard being Hindu means following the Geeta first and foremost and its some wonderful insights into the "way of life" and not, mind you, standards of morality. And most of us Hindus are so far away from practising the philosophised way of life in the book that the moment some intellectual on a TV show starts opining about the need to be sensitive to religious sentiments and such innuendo I feel the need to put him in a spot and ask them what religion they are trying to be protective about-that which no one even practices but has been given to feel that he practices it because of the hysteria of the mindless masses chanting hyms in temples , sitting and listening to yogis , making an issue out of whether leather belts are offensive to gods in temples, and whether God would be offended if they were to pray to him on a full stomach(or even worse a stomach full of flesh food) -this hysteria so conveniently accepted as a standard good and passed on through generations without question drives us . Where is religion? And if someone puts a goddess in his painting as nude our religion is offended.So what if it is offended ? Why should it be protected when the religion we practice is in most part a socially approved melodrama and not even close to what it was meant to be!

Here's another one. And this one I guess is one of the most unchallenged of all times. Prostitutes and their job is perhaps the most looked down in any corner of the wise world. Why? because sex is is a sin. It is another matter that our species exists because of it but it is a sacrilege and a tabboo ...and these women who make a living out of sex are certainly the most corrupt human beings because they are so neck deep in it. If they are looking for respect from their fellow humans they might as well take a trip to another planet.How could they perform an act as ugly as sex , make money out of it and be shamless about it! Do they not realise how vulnerable they make strong willed men to fall prey to temptation? And as human beings is it not completely out of bounds for us to fall prey to temptations to flesh...what if those temptations were ingrained in us by nature itself..so indelibly that even a five year old boy would be moved by representations of the same . We are not here to think , we are here to judge . We shall not be convinced that sex is not a sin but a beautiful revelry of human existence ..we will shy away from talking about it or joking about it because again our parents have told us to. Between a woman who experiments wearing a bikini and a woman who would rather always wear a salwar our respect shall be awarded to the latter of course because she is the one who stayed away from the sin of being sensuous. So to accord the same respect to a prostitute as this latter woman who perhaps was shy of even seeing herself naked is totally unconcievable -right?
Virginity in a woman is a cherished virtue. Marriage is the defining point where loss of virginity is no longer sinful . A priest would read some lines in a ceremony and the gullible lot standing witness to the occasion says "mating between these two can now be officially done" and the whole thing is now morally right! There is nothing such as love before marriage which can justify with this brainless mob a woman's (and for that matter a man's) indulgence with lust because this mob does not function on reason..it functions on a common ground of frenzy and ideological weariness that cannot be expected to be done away with. So even if a man and a woman have been together and committed for ten years they don't have the right to practice the most fundamental and pleasurable instincts of life. The interesting part is some of these very people announce so proudly to the world that they "didn't do it", implying of course that they followed what was commonly held as the right thing to do- their sense of right and wrong emanated more from what the myth of generation had held than their own mutual love ...for them abstinence made their love pure and immediately after marriage they would consider giving up that purity. They would not even stop to ponder that sex was the driving force behind a man and woman getting together in the first place..if it was not for it men and women could have lived happily alone and the burden of bearing new life could have been carried with an equally leashed but less controversial mode of conception-that marriage is a concept that came at least billions of years after the concept of sex and that putting the former as a benchmark for justfying love making means labelling all those who lived before the age of matrimony as sinners!?! What could we do but smile in contempt at such notions and hope that our own sense of reason does not get carried away to discriminate between a "whore" and a "lady" when we meet one or the other in the future.

This is the last diatribe of this post and it relates to my opening narrative.I t is about the way we lose our sanity over patriotism. When that man in the gym asked me whether I intended to return home and serve my country I wanted to ask him a few questions but refrained because I could sense that any endeavour to drive home a point in this mind of stone would be farcical. Those questions I am putting here. Why should I label myself as an Indian first, then an invidual and then a world citizen? This random assigning of levels of priority one should place when deciding his loyalties baffles me. Why should I be made to accept that because I was born at a particular location in this wide world,I should consider myself an entity that owed more to a haphazard zig zagging geographical boundary that was drawn by self serving interests of kings and rulers through generations and had no other relation to the soil I took my first steps on? Why should I choose to be biased towards those who speak the same language as I do , dress in the same manner as mine, relish the same food and live in houses of familiar architecture to those who are different only by an accident of nature? And if I chose to be so unpatriotic to think that all the earth under the sky and entire universe was my domain as much as this political prison reverently termed a nation am I needlessly being a rebel ? My place as I feel it to be is the city I grew in and whose streets I remember trodding, or the city where I took my little brother around on my motorbike as he clung to me from behind, or the city where I went to spend my vacations during my childhood. And now it shall be the city which will give me livelihood and the means to attain the other material pleasures of the earth. That is it . Apologies for not being sentimental about the whole of India from north to south and east to west.

In the end all I am asking for from my fellow human beings is to be a little less uptight about ideas and notions that are not their own but of someone else in some other era gone by. At least if we have the weakness to be not able to practice this philosophy in entirety let us be more forgiving to those who have stronger will and vision than us to not judge them. That alone will make us more respectable not to anyone else but to ourselves.