Life, as it goes.

Various tones, expressions and octaves were used depending on the reactions by the people who got the news. To some it was shocking, to some suprising, others considered it with envy and yet others who know me better followed it with, "This was to be expected of you."

What am I talking about? Well, it is something with many of you will consider with raised eyebrows. I am going to Singapore. No, thats not it. I am going to Singapore on work. There is more to come, I am going to Singapore on work and R is coming with me. HEE HAA HAA HAA. Pre-marraige honey moon. Cool na.

This idea was not exactly met with approval from my parents but then my mom said, "Jaane do, there are times when you let your child decide. She is now out of our hands." His parents did not give up so easily but then he didn't exactly ask for their permission. His mother did try to talk to me about it, something to the effect of what will people say? I replied something to the effect of who gives a damn.

Finally after a lot of yes/ no/ maybe I am going tonight. Everything is in place. I will be back on December 3. Till then silence shall prevail on this space.

I have been gushing about the book like anything because it seems to me that it deserves all the praise I have given but this does not mean that it is faultless. There are certain negatives in the book which make it such a painful read that many people are not able to complete it.

Firstly, it is long. More than 1000 pages and that too only because the font size is .8. There are times when you would say, "Yeah yeah, get on with it." The reason for this is that the story in itself is not so long, it is stretched by the author with a purpose of propogating and documenting her ideas. If we only take the main turning points and events in the story, it can be summairsed almost by half. I don't know what system of editing was used when Ann Rynd wrote and whether publishers used to put their two bit into the work but this one sure looks like it never passed under an editor's eye or even if it did no real changes were made.

Secondly, it is heavy. Not exactly a page turner where each chapter ends with a sense of suspense and forces you to go on till you finish it in the wee hours of the night. So even if it is a best-seller, it could not have done better than a normal suspense, romance, tragedy or drama novel because of its very heavy message sent across in speeches and monologues which are painfully long and sometimes repetitive. For e.g. D'Anconia's speech about money, Rearden speech at his trial and the mother of all speeches, John Galt's radio speech which is 28 pages long.

Thirdly, the bias. Ann Rynd had talked about India, hardly a few sentences but what she wrote is sickening and definately not true. Her sweeping analysis of certain things is such that one feels like she doesn't know what the hell she is talking about. She has a bias, it could have arisen because of what she went through in her life in Russia but from the book one realises that there is no space for an alternate thought, no doubt for anything else. The fatwa she announces is that, "My way or highway, if not this than nothing." This does not go well with me especially because her potrayal of everything that is against her belief is such that you are compelled to dislike. Its just too damn dictactic and manipulative.

Fourthly, glorification of escapism. John Galt escapes just like a losing warrier would escape from the battlefield, hide on the side, build his own army and return to rule when everyone else has killed each other. The book calls this the right thing to do. I call it escapism. Sure, things are bad, sure situations and circumstances are not supportive to your belief, sure they are out to defeat you, so what? You run away? Nope not in the real world you don't. In the real world you stick it out, stay till the end and die if you have to defeated maybe but not a fugitive at least. To this doubt the book provides justification stating that it is right to escape a world which uses your last drop of energy but would not acknowledge that it can't live without you. Somehow for me it is not a good enough justification.

Lastly, I wouldn't recommend this as a book you should take on a fun vacation. In fact take it only if you want to ruin the vacation because it will make you feel angry, contemptuous and sometimes downright miserable. Its a book I would call, "Read it at your own risk."

A mark of a good story teller according to me is how s/he potrays emotions. How the words describes the feelings and present a vision of the character. In Atlas Shrugged, the author is biased towards her principles. She has a certain belief and she reiterates it in every word. This also reflects in her potrayal of the emotions of her characters. You feel a strong disgust for the looters in the way she describes their faces and a compelling attraction for the industrialists when their faces appear in the story. For example when she introduces James Taggart

" ... He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to his bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralised sloppiness as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat but transformed into the gwakiness of a lout."

The words are so amazingly transparent here. The phrase 'decentralised sloppiness', so apt to describe Taggart's character of an indecisive heir to his industrial inheritance. It sets our dislike for Taggart so easily right from the beginning. What is so significant about her style is that she is unapologetically biased and will not compromise her dislike for the looters by presenting their appearance in neutral fashion or by leaving it to us to decide.

Another example of how she glorifies her industrialists through her words such that one immediately intakes a breath of pride and eyes glow with insipration at reading about such a character. The entry of John Galt is described as

" ... a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheek made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn - yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainity, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgivness or grant it."

The description goes on to speak about his physique, clothes, hair, eyes in such vividness that whenever I read it, I see him and somehow it seems an impossibility that any one can match the man she potrays as if he is meant to remain in the folds of the book as if he is just too good to be true.

This style of depiction is present all through the book. Expressions, grimaces, coutenances, visages, voices, laughter, pain and shock of characters defined to the minutest details with words and phrases like

"She knew - by the way he looked at her, by an instant's drop of his eyelids closing his eyes, by the brief pull of his head striving to lean back and resist, by the faint, half-smiling, half-helpless relaxation of his lips, by the sudden harshness of his arms as her seized her - that it was involuntary, that he had not intended it, and that it was irresistibly right for both of them."

One has to read it, i mean really read it, slowly, deliberately if needed aloud to understand these words and what they convey. Every word read goes to mean something and every word missed is a meaning lost.