BIOGRAPHY - Father's foibles

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Published on April 17 2010 ,Lounge Page 20

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B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ····························

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Mohandas Gandhi left an enormous paper trail of his thoughts. His collected works run into several vol- umes. Then there is his autobiog- raphy. His close associates Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal wrote extensively about Gandhi. His grandson Rajmohan wrote the comprehensive and objective Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire. The sheer size of the material can be daunting, and biographers could always sift through Gandhi's thoughts (and he had thoughts about almost everything) to build a theory explaining his life. Jad Adams, a British broadcaster and historian whose previous works include an account of the Nehrus and biogra- phies of Rudyard Kipling and Tony Benn (the leading light of “old“ Labour), has read those sources to retell Gandhi's life. There is a buzz about the book because Adams wrote an article in The Independent newspaper a fortnight ago about Gandhi's complex attitude to sex. But that's only part of the book. The article focused on Gandhi's idiosyn- cratic, peculiar, misogynist views about sex. And not only views, but also practices, such as sleeping naked with young women to test his resolve to overcome basic instincts. This, while he was mar- ried to Kasturba. These incidents certainly clash with Gandhi's saintly image, of an ascetic pursuing truth, but then V.S. Naipaul, Ved Mehta, and Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, among others, have written about the incidents in some form. What's surprising is that by focusing on those inci- dents, Adams seems to want to provoke a reaction. Here's the puzzle: The book is primarily meant for readers in the West, who are presumably numbed by the sexual peccadilloes of their leaders. After Bill Clinton and Sil- vio Berlusconi, it seems, every- thing is passé. That, I suppose, is the point: These Western politi- cians have never been regarded as saints, whereas Gandhi has been. There are statues honouring him at Tavistock Square in London, near Dupont Circle in Washing- ton, DC, at Union Square in New York, at Embarcadero in San Francisco, and there are some 250 postage stamps. But those honours are hardly Gandhi's fault: He never asked for those; he said his life was his message. The crucial point is that, and unlike Clinton or Ber- lusconi, he refused to succumb to temptation (if he did, so long as force wasn't involved, it shouldn't concern any of us). If these incidents have a place in the book, it has more to do with Adams' desire to shake the Western view of seeing Gandhi as a holy figure. That problem starts with Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi, which elevated Gandhi, placing him on a pedes- tal; those eight Academy Awards canonized Gandhi among those who learn history through cin- ema. For the more high-brow, there is the opera of Philip Glass, Satyagraha, which sees Gandhi in a continuum, with Bhagvad Gita being chanted, and episodes named after Leo Tolstoy, the Rus- sian novelist (whose religious writings inspired Gandhi), India's own Rabindranath Tagore (with whom Gandhi differed on the nature of nationalism, but both had enormous respect for one another), and Martin Luther King, the American civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1968, and who said he was inspired by Gandhi. Adams challenges the canoni- zation, but not in a polemical way. His aim is not to denigrate Gandhi (although that's how it might seem to many readers in India, since taking offence has become a part of the Indian cul- tural trait); rather, to see him as a human being with human urges and some odd views who none- theless left a deep imprint on world history. There is far more to the book than Gandhi and sex. It is really about Gandhi's emergence from being a shy, hesitant Gujarati law- yer too timid to speak in public, into a self-assured figure of moral authority. In the larger story, what emerges is Gandhi's obstinacy. Gandhi was stubborn, and the world was lucky that his stub- bornness had such a benign end and scrupulous adherence to the right means, unlike his contem- porary, Mao Zedong, in China (whose means and ends were both evil). Once Gandhi was con- vinced something was right, he refused to budge. In the hands of evil leaders--think of Osama bin Laden or Hitler, another contem- porary--this could be cata- strophic. His stubbornness allowed him to see clearly what was right and wrong, and that's the other important thread in the book, leading up to Gandhi's atti- tude towards the British, indepen- dence, and his conversations with Mohammed Ali Jinnah. In his early years in South Africa, in fact, Gandhi imposed his obstinacy in an authoritarian manner, literally throwing out his young wife when she refused to clean the chamber pot of a house- guest. Gandhi's aim was presumably noble: No work is demean- ing; but when his wife wasn't con- vinced, he became a tyrant. He also refused to let her keep jewel- lery, and he was far from being a model father. But again, those sto- ries are hardly unknown in India: Gandhi himself writes about this; Shyam Benegal's 1996 film, The Making of the Mahatma, recreates those stories; and Ajit Dalvi's play, Mahatma vs Gandhi, deals with Gandhi as an imperfect father. But between a doting parent who demands less from his family than he does from others, and becomes a petty commissar, and a tyrant at home who leads by moral force in the public sphere, utilitarian logic would indicate that the latter is preferable. We expect our leaders to be consistent; we expect them to lead in every sphere. But the world isn't like that. Brecht comes to mind: Andrea says, unhappy the nation without heroes; and Galileo responds, unhappy the nation in need of heroes. Gandhi's refusal to compromise on certain essentials exasperated his opponents because Gandhi would not use violent force (nor condone it) to get his way. But by going on a hunger strike, by being willing to bear the pain of impris- onment, he shamed the British empire. Think of what Judge Broomfield said when he had no choice but to send Gandhi to jail--he added that if the govern- ment could release him early, “No one will be better pleased than I.“ Gandhi: Naked Ambition, then, is a curious book. It tells the West, jaded by sexual scandals, of Gandhi's behaviour and prac- tices that are meant to shock, but may have the unintended effect of making his politics appear less radical than it was. And it tells India an aspect of Gandhi's life it already knows but doesn't talk about in public, a possible conse- quence of which would be to arouse nationalists to call for a ban on the book (which is always a bad idea), or to dismiss Gandhi's importance, now that a British historian has laid all out in the open. Salil Tripathi writes the fort- nightly column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. Write to lounge@livemint.com Gandhi--Naked Ambition: Quercus, 323 pages, £20, (around Rs1,350). Mohandas Gandhi left an enormous paper trail of his thoughts. His collected works run into several vol- umes. Then there is his autobiog- raphy. His close associates Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal wrote extensively about Gandhi. His grandson Rajmohan wrote the comprehensive and objective Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire. The sheer size of the material can be daunting, and biographers could always sift through Gandhi's thoughts (and he had thoughts about almost everything) to build a theory explaining his life. Jad Adams, a British broadcaster and historian whose previous works include an account of the Nehrus and biogra- phies of Rudyard Kipling and Tony Benn (the leading light of “old“ Labour), has read those sources to retell Gandhi's life. There is a buzz about the book because Adams wrote an article in The Independent newspaper a fortnight ago about Gandhi's complex attitude to sex. But that's only part of the book. The article focused on Gandhi's idiosyn- cratic, peculiar, misogynist views about sex. And not only views, but also practices, such as sleeping naked with young women to test his resolve to overcome basic instincts. This, while he was mar- ried to Kasturba. These incidents certainly clash with Gandhi's saintly image, of an ascetic pursuing truth, but then V.S. Naipaul, Ved Mehta, and Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, among others, have written about the incidents in some form. What's surprising is that by focusing on those inci- dents, Adams seems to want to provoke a reaction. Here's the puzzle: The book is primarily meant for readers in the West, who are presumably numbed by the sexual peccadilloes of their leaders. After Bill Clinton and Sil- vio Berlusconi, it seems, every- thing is passé. That, I suppose, is the point: These Western politi- cians have never been regarded as saints, whereas Gandhi has been. There are statues honouring him at Tavistock Square in London, near Dupont Circle in Washing- ton, DC, at Union Square in New York, at Embarcadero in San Francisco, and there are some 250 postage stamps. But those honours are hardly Gandhi's fault: He never asked for those; he said his life was his message. The crucial point is that, and unlike Clinton or Ber- lusconi, he refused to succumb to temptation (if he did, so long as force wasn't involved, it shouldn't concern any of us). If these incidents have a place in the book, it has more to do with Adams' desire to shake the Western view of seeing Gandhi as a holy figure. That problem starts with Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi, which elevated Gandhi, placing him on a pedes- tal; those eight Academy Awards canonized Gandhi among those who learn history through cin- ema. For the more high-brow, there is the opera of Philip Glass, Satyagraha, which sees Gandhi in a continuum, with Bhagvad Gita being chanted, and episodes named after Leo Tolstoy, the Rus- sian novelist (whose religious writings inspired Gandhi), India's own Rabindranath Tagore (with whom Gandhi differed on the nature of nationalism, but both had enormous respect for one another), and Martin Luther King, the American civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1968, and who said he was inspired by Gandhi. Adams challenges the canoni- zation, but not in a polemical way. His aim is not to denigrate Gandhi (although that's how it might seem to many readers in India, since taking offence has become a part of the Indian cul- tural trait); rather, to see him as a human being with human urges and some odd views who none- theless left a deep imprint on world history. There is far more to the book than Gandhi and sex. It is really about Gandhi's emergence from being a shy, hesitant Gujarati law- yer too timid to speak in public, into a self-assured figure of moral authority. In the larger story, what emerges is Gandhi's obstinacy. Gandhi was stubborn, and the world was lucky that his stub- bornness had such a benign end and scrupulous adherence to the right means, unlike his contem- porary, Mao Zedong, in China (whose means and ends were both evil). Once Gandhi was con- vinced something was right, he refused to budge. In the hands of evil leaders--think of Osama bin Laden or Hitler, another contem- porary--this could be cata- strophic. His stubbornness allowed him to see clearly what was right and wrong, and that's the other important thread in the book, leading up to Gandhi's atti- tude towards the British, indepen- dence, and his conversations with Mohammed Ali Jinnah. In his early years in South Africa, in fact, Gandhi imposed his obstinacy in an authoritarian manner, literally throwing out his young wife when she refused to clean the chamber pot of a house- guest. Gandhi's aim was presumably noble: No work is demean- ing; but when his wife wasn't con- vinced, he became a tyrant. He also refused to let her keep jewel- lery, and he was far from being a model father. But again, those sto- ries are hardly unknown in India: Gandhi himself writes about this; Shyam Benegal's 1996 film, The Making of the Mahatma, recreates those stories; and Ajit Dalvi's play, Mahatma vs Gandhi, deals with Gandhi as an imperfect father. But between a doting parent who demands less from his family than he does from others, and becomes a petty commissar, and a tyrant at home who leads by moral force in the public sphere, utilitarian logic would indicate that the latter is preferable. We expect our leaders to be consistent; we expect them to lead in every sphere. But the world isn't like that. Brecht comes to mind: Andrea says, unhappy the nation without heroes; and Galileo responds, unhappy the nation in need of heroes. Gandhi's refusal to compromise on certain essentials exasperated his opponents because Gandhi would not use violent force (nor condone it) to get his way. But by going on a hunger strike, by being willing to bear the pain of impris- onment, he shamed the British empire. Think of what Judge Broomfield said when he had no choice but to send Gandhi to jail--he added that if the govern- ment could release him early, “No one will be better pleased than I.“ Gandhi: Naked Ambition, then, is a curious book. It tells the West, jaded by sexual scandals, of Gandhi's behaviour and prac- tices that are meant to shock, but may have the unintended effect of making his politics appear less radical than it was. And it tells India an aspect of Gandhi's life it already knows but doesn't talk about in public, a possible conse- quence of which would be to arouse nationalists to call for a ban on the book (which is always a bad idea), or to dismiss Gandhi's importance, now that a British historian has laid all out in the open. Salil Tripathi writes the fort- nightly column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. Write to lounge@livemint.com Gandhi--Naked Ambition: Quercus, 323 pages, £20, (around Rs1,350). EMAIL lounge@livemint.com

To Andhra Pradesh with love

David Shulman, professor of humanistic studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an expert on South Indian languages and cultures has written Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Journey (University of Chicago Press, $25/Special Indian price, Rs 1,004) which is not just a travelogue but a long meditation on Telegu literature with reflections on Andhra history. As a journey across space and time, it is rather like a genre without rules, free from precept or precedent: part travel writing, part literary appreciation but above all, a philosophy expressed in images. Shulman is also a scholar in Sanskrit and classical Hindustani music, plus much else besides, and brings to bear his formidable learning to this book, which he admits to “a restlessness that rules me, so the landscapes shift like the languages and the texts”. All of which makes it difficult to write about it in this limited space! As you might expect, the diary is lyrical, sensual but more than anything else, it is introspective. Just about everything becomes a part of the huge canvas Shulman builds his story on. There are reflections on daily happenings and the life around: “Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs, Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree.” Simple observations of the daily lives of ordinary people of Rajahmundry, on the banks of the river Godavari which like all rivers in India are sacred and determine the life styles of millions around. Shulman has been bitten by the metaphysical bug: “How did I happen to find myself in Rajamundhry in the early spring of 2006? The answer would be the river called me. She — the Godavari — is imperious, also infinitely seductive. Rajamundhry is her town. When I saw her, she extracted a promise that I would return:….” And long before he first saw India, he had a calling within, “as if India was the magnet, and I the iron filing, unconscious, unmelted…. If words mean anything — but why should they mean? —it is only when the underlying echo, the music that motivates all real language, fades into silence”.

It is classical Hindustani music which Shulman had studied in depth that had drawn him to India, along with the music of the Dravidian languages, which fascinated because he says, “Linguistics had shown that South Indians utter, on average, more syllables per second than any other attested speakers of known human languages — and sometimes give the impression of a bubbling or cascading stream.” Telugu, he adds, is in fact “the main language of classical South Indian musical compositions”. Shulman goes into history to explain “the strangely hypnotic, contrapuntal complexity of tremendous aural power — a musical experience unlike any other, perhaps transcending meaning in any of the usual senses of the word”.

Shulman uses the metaphors of music to describe early mornings in Rajahmundry. “The rooftops, white, gray, streaked with grime, partly hidden by thick green clusters of palm, seem to be humming a barely audible morning raga. Birdcalls, the bells on the bicycles, the constant backdrop of horns from the cars and rickshaws, the cries of fruit vendors, the distant ring of a radio broadcasting a Sanskrit prayer to the waking god, mothers shouting at their children: all this is the raga as it breaks through the surface to audibility.” For the non-Telugu speaker or for those unfamiliar with classical Hindustani music, we have simply to go along, overawed by the depth and range of Shulman’s scholarship, and the meanings he gives to the everyday happenings around him.

It is Shulman’s principle not only to read poetry in the original language “but also to absorb it in the setting where it was written” because language does not exist independent of the environment in which it is rooted.

Shulman plunges deep into Telugu poetry and in the process into the beliefs, philosophies, the myths and legends of the land. So, “Godavri is not somewhere outside us but deeply alive within.” Like the Hindu way, he is inclined to see divinity in the earth itself, in rocks, in trees, in stone sculptures, in mountains, in rivers but specially in the Godavri in spate: …marvelling at the dramatic swelling and acceleration of their goddess, this necklace hanging over the breast of the Andhra Earth-goddess….” Shulman does not lose his critical eye and sees the muck behind the façade of modernity and the pollution of the river “smothered in the stench of the Andhra Pradesh Paper Mills upstream”.

This book isn’t an easy read and has to be taken in small doses by the noncognoscenti. But it is fascinating the extent to which some foreign scholars go in understanding us. How many of our own do so?

BOOKMARK

VV

Man, machine and music SAMANTH S

On what constitutes good music, opinions may vary, and often fractiously, but there is a far wider consensus on the importance of music itself.
Incredibly, all the age-weary plati- tudes still sound true: The ability to make music separates us from the animals; it expresses our humanity; it is the cornerstone of culture. But that consensus has now been severely tested by the work of David Cope, whom I read about recently in the online maga- zine Miller-McCune. In a superb profile titled Triumph of the Cyborg Composer, journalist Ryan Blitstein describes how Cope is questioning the very philosophy of music, and how he may be, in a strange way, one of the most influential com- posers of our age.

Cope embraced composition, he tells Blitstein, because he wanted to create one work as great and moving as Pyotr Tchaiko- vsky's Romeo and Juliet. But in 1980, when he was commissioned to write an opera, he was laid low with an acute bout of composer's block. In desperation, he turned to his other passion--computer pro- gramming--hoping that he could write software to produce music in the David Cope style.

He went one better. Experi- ments in Musical Intelligence (EMI or, more lovingly, Emmy) could produce music in anybody's style, as long as she had been fed with enough samples of the com- poser's canon. One day, when Cope started up Emmy and stepped away for a sandwich, Blit- stein writes, “she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would've taken him sev- eral lifetimes to produce“. When Cope performed Emmy's compo- sitions as well as authentic Bach to an audience of classical music afi- cionados, few were able to differ- entiate between the two.

The reaction to Emmy, and to her more advanced successor Emily Howell, has included some genuine marvel but has consisted largely of debate and anger.
Record companies refused to give Emmy a contract, and musicians refused to play her music. And unlike in a certain Stanislaw Lem short story, in which poets kill themselves after a machine begins to write verse, this reaction to Emmy doesn't appear motivated by insecurity. Instead, it emerges because Emmy has put in doubt that sacred consensus about the creation of music, and thereby put in doubt our very notions of what makes us human.

Technically, all music is born by arranging and rearranging seven notes, an exercise in per- mutation that a computer is primed to execute. No music, therefore, can be utterly sui generis. “Nobody's original,“ Cope says, devastatingly. “Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.“ If you borrow and tweak a phrase from another work, it's a knowing trib- ute; if you smuggle away a section wholesale, it's Anu Malik at his most “inspired“. But the process, Cope points out, is precisely the same, and although he doesn't say it, the implication is clear: If all music is made up of temporary loans from all other music, why not let a computer do that job?

This rubs uncomfortably against the grain of our concepts of both music and musical genius.
Music, we like to believe, is a product of the human soul and, further, a channel between com- poser and audience, carrying a sentiment too frail to be commu- nicated in words. Musical genius discovers not the most efficient or time-tested way but the most sub- lime way of parsing that senti- ment. And yet logic tells us that Cope is right: Music really is just mathematics, just seven notes marvellously combined. Bach may have arrived at his combina- tions instinctively, and Emmy may have patiently crunched a million prior possibilities, but the chorale sounds the same.

The purists, though, needn't yet slit their wrists in despair; in fact, I think there is still cause to cele- brate man's bond with music.
Tellingly, neither Emmy nor Emily Howell has helped Cope compose his one truly great work, a slender hint that there may be more to this art than intelligent note-juggling (although even that might be false comfort: Emmy- Cope's masterpiece may be lan- guishing in his vault of computer- generated compositions, unap- preciated and unperformed).
Then too, the software can only mimic a style, not create one.
Emmy can give us more Bach, but she cannot give us a brand-new genius, simply because she needs us to tell her what we consider “beautiful music“.

With time, and with newer com- puter technologies, these too will change. What will not change, however, is that our ideals of aes- thetics will still be shaping the music we listen to. We will still find a cello solo intensely stirring where a flourish of woodwinds would have passed with a bare murmur of approval; in that sense, we are still “making music“, bend- ing sound to our unique sensibili- ties. We aren't human because we can compose music. We're human because we can respond to it.
Write to Samanth Subramanian at raagtime@livemint.com

The beauty of selfishness JENNIFER BURNS B Y M ONIKA H ALAN

That it has taken till 2010 for the biography of a person who has influenced the intellectual agenda of capitalism to come out, is in itself proof of the challenge any biographer of Ayn Rand would face. To docu- ment a controversial life that has a cult following at one level and is dismissed as bad writing on the other, and a life of stark public and personal dichotomy, is no easy task. While one may bow to Rand intellectually, her personal life, caught in the rigid grid of her own philosophy, makes her irra- tionally human. In her biography Goddess of the Market--Ayn Rand and the Amer- ican Right, Jennifer Burns man- ages to do the unthinkable: She keeps her opinion out of the book so that the reader has the liberty to react to facts, to the contradic- tions and the duality. Burns brings out Rand's grandeur of thought but poverty of emotion, without overpowering the narra- tive with her own voice. Rand came into the world as Alisa Rosenbaum, the eldest child from a wealthy household in tsarist Russia that would transform into a Communist nation in a few years. As a child with a precocious intellect, she was socially isolated; she was “serious and stern, uncomfort- able with gossip, games, or the intrigues of popularity“. High marks ensured respect, but not affection from her peers--she was “abrasive and argumentative“. She would force conversations and had a “violent intensity to her beliefs“. The magnificent intellect turned this social isolation into a belief system that made her see herself as a victim, being pun- ished by mediocrity. If introspec- tion gave her the beginnings of a thought system, her early journey from extreme wealth to fighting over a dry pea to keep off hunger in Communist Russia gave that belief system a direction. The transformation of Alisa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand began when she became a junior Holly- wood scriptwriter who struggled to survive as an immigrant who had escaped from Communist Russia. That she would one day be traced back as the root of the global crises of capitalism, influ- encing the former US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan into believing that unfettered lais- sez-faire capitalism works, would have been unthinkable to those who knew her as a “crackpot“, after she wrote unpub- lished romantic short stories such as The Husband I Bought, Good Copy and Escort. But what began as the Night of Janu- ary 16th in 1933 and We the Living a year later would carry the seeds of what would become a powerful but rigid ideology variously called libertarian- ism, conservatism and objectivism. It w a s a n a b s o l u t e philosophical sys- tem that insisted on primacy of reason and the exis- tence of knowable and objective reality implicit with the belief that the moral purpose of man is his pursuit of individual happiness or rational self-interest. Extended into an economic system, it is a textbook of free markets with minimal government control. Rand's iron-clad thought sys- tem would suffer not the slightest questioning. Members of The Collective, a small group of thought insiders who clustered around Rand, ran the risk of vio- lent expulsion, accompanied by unprovoked rage, if they so much as watched a movie that was not approved of by Rand. The person and the philosophy were at odds, where a tight ratio- nal system had in its core an emotionally unstable person who could suffer no doubt. The years between her unpub- lished romantic short stories to achieving a cult status after Atlas Shrugged were a struggle. But if the heroic popularity among stu- dents in transition between a post-depression America--that was perilously close to discarding capitalism for communism-- gave her a band of followers, Rand never got what she deeply wanted: intellectual acceptance from academics. Dismissed as a novelist by the peer group, her own abrasive and combative stance did little to ease the way. The intellectual giant had a flaw--she was human. As is the rest of the world. That makes dry logic, rationality and the tauto- logic fixation of proving that “A is A“ for all human thought and action, unequal to the task of explaining the emotion-driven, tumultuous, untidy human world that would keep escaping from the neat orderliness of Ran- dian thought. As I finished reading Burns' book, US President Barack Obama had signed the healthcare Bill that will cost America $940 billion (around Rs42.4 trillion) over 10 years and cover 32 mil- lion uninsured Americans. In 2010, Rand would be out of place in the country she adopted and wanted to trans- form into a working example of the success of her intellectual belief that had no place for altruism, social welfare and ser- vice to others. Pure Randian thought now seems based on a premise that was flawed. IN SIX WORDS An unbiased examination of Ayn Rand Goddess of the Market-- Ayn Rand and the American Right: Oxford University Press, 369 pages, $27.95 (around Rs1,260). That it has taken till 2010 for the biography of a person who has influenced the intellectual agenda of capitalism to come out, is in itself proof of the challenge any biographer of Ayn Rand would face. To docu- ment a controversial life that has a cult following at one level and is dismissed as bad writing on the other, and a life of stark public and personal dichotomy, is no easy task. While one may bow to Rand intellectually, her personal life, caught in the rigid grid of her own philosophy, makes her irra- tionally human. In her biography Goddess of the Market--Ayn Rand and the Amer- ican Right, Jennifer Burns man- ages to do the unthinkable: She keeps her opinion out of the book so that the reader has the liberty to react to facts, to the contradic- tions and the duality. Burns brings out Rand's grandeur of thought but poverty of emotion, without overpowering the narra- tive with her own voice. Rand came into the world as Alisa Rosenbaum, the eldest child from a wealthy household in tsarist Russia that would transform into a Communist nation in a few years. As a child with a precocious intellect, she was socially isolated; she was “serious and stern, uncomfort- able with gossip, games, or the intrigues of popularity“. High marks ensured respect, but not affection from her peers--she was “abrasive and argumentative“. She would force conversations and had a “violent intensity to her beliefs“. The magnificent intellect turned this social isolation into a belief system that made her see herself as a victim, being pun- ished by mediocrity. If introspec- tion gave her the beginnings of a thought system, her early journey from extreme wealth to fighting over a dry pea to keep off hunger in Communist Russia gave that belief system a direction. The transformation of Alisa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand began when she became a junior Holly- wood scriptwriter who struggled to survive as an immigrant who had escaped from Communist Russia. That she would one day be traced back as the root of the global crises of capitalism, influ- encing the former US Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan into believing that unfettered lais- sez-faire capitalism works, would have been unthinkable to those who knew her as a “crackpot“, after she wrote unpub- lished romantic short stories such as The Husband I Bought, Good Copy and Escort. But what began as the Night of Janu- ary 16th in 1933 and We the Living a year later would carry the seeds of what would become a powerful but rigid ideology variously called libertarian- ism, conservatism and objectivism. It w a s a n a b s o l u t e philosophical sys- tem that insisted on primacy of reason and the exis- tence of knowable and objective reality implicit with the belief that the moral purpose of man is his pursuit of individual happiness or rational self-interest. Extended into an economic system, it is a textbook of free markets with minimal government control. Rand's iron-clad thought sys- tem would suffer not the slightest questioning. Members of The Collective, a small group of thought insiders who clustered around Rand, ran the risk of vio- lent expulsion, accompanied by unprovoked rage, if they so much as watched a movie that was not approved of by Rand. The person and the philosophy were at odds, where a tight ratio- nal system had in its core an emotionally unstable person who could suffer no doubt. The years between her unpub- lished romantic short stories to achieving a cult status after Atlas Shrugged were a struggle. But if the heroic popularity among stu- dents in transition between a post-depression America--that was perilously close to discarding capitalism for communism-- gave her a band of followers, Rand never got what she deeply wanted: intellectual acceptance from academics. Dismissed as a novelist by the peer group, her own abrasive and combative stance did little to ease the way. The intellectual giant had a flaw--she was human. As is the rest of the world. That makes dry logic, rationality and the tauto- logic fixation of proving that “A is A“ for all human thought and action, unequal to the task of explaining the emotion-driven, tumultuous, untidy human world that would keep escaping from the neat orderliness of Ran- dian thought. As I finished reading Burns' book, US President Barack Obama had signed the healthcare Bill that will cost America $940 billion (around Rs42.4 trillion) over 10 years and cover 32 mil- lion uninsured Americans. In 2010, Rand would be out of place in the country she adopted and wanted to trans- form into a working example of the success of her intellectual belief that had no place for altruism, social welfare and ser- vice to others. Pure Randian thought now seems based on a premise that was flawed. IN SIX WORDS An unbiased examination of Ayn Rand Goddess of the Market-- Ayn Rand and the American Right: Oxford University Press, 369 pages, $27.95 (around Rs1,260).