literarydiscussions.myfreeforum.org

Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

I have used the TBF search engine to find this Ayn Rand thread, so that I
may post an interesting observation regarding her popularity in India. I
have been spending quite a bit of time at myspace.com using their search
engines to find people who might possibly share my interests. I am able
to target my search to a particular country, a religion and an age range.
It is also possible to specify level of education.

I specified Religion = Hindu, Education =Grad/Post-Grad, Age = 30-40.
Part of the reasoning behind the age range is to narrow the search so as
not to deal with over 100 profiles at a time. I will at some point search
other age ranges.

I examined the profiles of approximately one hundred people in India,
and notice an unusual number of them list Ayn Rand in their BOOKS
profile. When I do searches in other countries, I do not often see Rand
listed. I am wondering if some conclusion might be drawn regarding a
relationship between Rand's philosophy and India's intellectual climate.

Since I mention myspace.com and the BOOKS section of profiles in this
post, I will remark how saddened I am to find so many profiles various
countries where it is obvious that the person has either no interest in
books, or actually detests the idea of reading a book. There are also
provisions in the profile for listing Movies and Music. I can envision some
future time where a BOOKS section might disappear entirely and be
replaced by some more generic, catch-all OTHER INTERESTS category. If
this is in fact an increasing trend, then it is a sad trend indeed, and one
that perhaps spells a lot of trouble for human society in the coming
centuries. Jefferson was initially thought odd by many peers for his stress
on free education for all as a prerequisite for success of any government
"by the people."

As I post this now, I feel the inspiration to use the myspace.com search
engine by country, by religion, searching on Ayn Rand, to see if some
significant pattern might be revealed.

In my blogging and networking there, I often recommend the TBF site. It
will be interesting if we see someone join and mention myspace.com as
their reason for visiting.

I have been doing this for less than a week, and already I have over 100
contacts in my Friends list. Every time I hit the refresh button on my
profile, I see the total membership jump by several new members per
minute, for a current membership of 71 million. I do, however notice, as
I visit profiles, that some members have not logged in 3 or even six
months. So the total membership does not reflect the highly active
membership.

My 22 year old step son sighed when I showed him my profile and
exclaimed "I must be the only one who isn't on myspace.com." For some
reason he has no interest, even though he has been very active with chat
and other Internet activities since Junior High.

<a href=http://www.thebookforum.com/forums/showthread.php?goto=lastpost&t=8443>Click here to view post at The Book Forum</a>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

Ayn Rand's mother taught her French and subscribed to a magazine
featuring stories for boys, where Rand found her first childhood hero:
Cyrus Paltons, an Indian army officer in a Rudyard Kipling-style story by
Maurice Champagne, called "The Mysterious Valley". Throughout her
youth, she read the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas and
other Romantic writers, and expressed a passionate enthusiasm toward
the Romantic movement as a whole. She discovered Victor Hugo at the
age of thirteen, and fell deeply in love with his novels. Later, she cited him
as her favorite novelist and the greatest novelist of world literature.

Legacy
Quote:
Rand's novels continue to be widely sold and read. Following her death,
continued conflict within the Objectivist movement led to a proliferation of
independent organizations, a few of which claim to be her exclusive
intellectual heirs. Rand and Objectivism are less well known outside North
America, although there are pockets of interest in Europe. Her novels are
reported to be popular in India and to be gaining an increasingly wider
audience in Africa. Generally, her work has had little effect on academic
philosophy; her followers are largely drawn from the non-academic world.

http://www.yazadjal.com/2005/02/02/t...-rand-century/
Quote:

Today is the 100th birthday of Ayn Rand. I enjoyed all her books, fiction
and non-fiction; was a founding member of the New Delhi Ayn Rand club;
and well, owe a lot of my learnings in libertarianism to her. I grew up with
browsing through her books in my parents library. When my father once
saw me thumbing through An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology with
glazed eyes, he pulled out Altas Shrugged, turned to Galt’s speech and
insisted I read that first!

There are a lot of tributes on her today, and here are a few excerpts from
the best. These pieces are well written, click on the links and read it all.

........

Just playing devil’s advocate here:

Wasn’t much of the skyline of Bombay built in the era of License Raj?

Also — on New York — that skyline is a metaphor for capitalism, to be
sure. But it is also almost entirely built with unionized labor.

Great to see all these quotes, but I want to hear more about what you
think about why libertarianism is so great, and what it might mean in
India.

Liberalization has been great, but the state is still utterly essential when it
comes to protecting various minority groups, pushing the reform of
backwards social values (things like outlawing dowry and child marriage),
regulating business, and about a thousand other things.

Personally, I am in favor of constitutional liberal democracy w/ free
markets, along the lines of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom. I’m
not a big fan of Rand (though I respect her), and I find the more critical
take on her centenary in the New York Times to be compelling.

This isn’t a flame — I find your blog quite interesting to read. I guess I’m
just looking to hear you explain more about how you envision this working
in India.

...

This is a tough thing to argue about, since we’ve never seen a
government that acts the way Ayn Rand wants it to act in the quote you
give.

I interpret her as saying something to the effect of “all creative force,
including especially the idea of government-sponsored social reform,
should be put into the private sphere.”

This can work, it seems to me, when the shape of a society is somewhat
stable. In India’s case in its early years, the shape of the country itself
was a question. How to handle language and ethnic differences? How to
handle backwards social values?

The government needed to think creatively in order to reform society in
certain ways so that the new country had a chance of staying together.
This wasn’t just about enforcing laws in the constitution; this kind of
thinking (call it “reformism”) was built into the process of composing the
constitution itself.

The Hindu Code Act of 1950 is also an important example of this kind of
thinking. It was intrusive of Hindu customs; most Hindu men at the time
would have opposed it. (The government was too weak at the time to
make the reforms apply to Muslims as well). But the reforms produced
what I think were a net good. In liberal (or even libertarian terms), one
can say that they helped to ensure the ‘individual rights’ of women.

I often think that the principles of libertarianism (even if it allows the
encroachment of a nominal, ‘robot state’ to enforce criminal justice) only
have potential to work in societies where people have thrown off the
bonds of religion and family.

In India, both are hugely important. And both pull against individual
freedoms.

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