Life, as it goes.

My mood to a certain extent depends on what I am reading in the train ride to office every morning. My current book is "Atlas Shrugged" and so my mood is mostly contemplative and sometimes contemptous. Around the same time last month I started to reread Ann Rynd's well known book which has an impression of being a cult classic. This one is the comparitively lesser liked booked from the two very famous novels by the author, the other being "The Fountainhead."

I had read "The Fountainhead" much before, in between CA exams and then read this one just after shifting to Mumbai a few years ago. Both books appealed to me in more ways than one. I decided to reread 'Atlas Shrugged' because in the first read, I had skipped all the unnecessary speeches which in different ways have reiterated the basic philosophy of the author. This time I am reading every word, contemplating on every single verbal and non-verbal interaction between the characters and analysing the various aspects of the philosophy that the author has tried to communicate.

Though I have reread almost all other books as well, the only difference is that other books like Dan Browns, Jeffery Archers, John Grishams etc. are not so forceful in what they communicate mainly because the message of these books is not very relevant to me and my circumstances as such and so they are read with the interest limited to its style of writing and at times even borders just being time-pass reading. For example when I read the Da Vinci Code, I was quite intrigued by the story of Jesus that he had managed to recreate and reinterprete but that was all, it didn't shake me up or push me to think about its impact on the basic premises of Christianity because I am not a Christian so all I was analysing was how he had presented the story interwoven with history, religion and suspense.

Coming back to Atlas Shrugged, there are few remarkable things in the book that have struck me almost as if the were a physical connection. At times a punch in the stomach and others a skip of the heartbeat. I plan to write them down one at a time in various posts. The first thing that always caught my attention and was the name of the book. Ann Rynd must have been really smart to think of this. All through the beginning I was trying to figure out its relevance which is revealed much later when we near the end of the first half. The dialogue goes,

.... his voice solemnly calm, "if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?

"I.... don't know. What ... could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

This was the analogy for what happens in the story. Imagine what would happen if Atlas Shrugged? The world would end and that's what happens, the world the characters lived in ends because their Atlas shrugs.