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Satish wrote:Dialectical materialism is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought with materialism as the crux...hmm...think abt Rand and Marx now!!
a typical communist ideologist u r....big words learnt by heart from a book and spoken without knowing what they mean! 
Satish wrote:]Dialectical materialism is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought with materialism as the crux...hmm...think abt Rand and Marx now!!
satish wrote:Or is it that I'm the only odd man out here?
Good to see a Paulo Cohelo's admirer here.Stingrae wrote:after careful perusal of all d pages...
i say dis..
HUH??!
it all started bout a book i actually liked...n now ppls wit their personal pics in their profile(wich is sooo weird) are BLUSHIN about man bein an animal..
Prince wrote:Seriouly, this was a matrimonial ad in the Eco Times in 1991-92.
WANTED BRIDES
Wanted life partner etc...for a .... The applicant should write what she thinks of Fountainhead (or Atlas Shrugged, I don't quite remember) in three pages....
That was the only criteria. Somebody had cut this out and put it up in our college notice board
Satish wrote:'To each according to his abilities and needs'---who said Marxism is abt equality..get ur basics right.read more
Aishwarya wrote:"I think therefore I am", said the great French philosopher Rene Descartes. About two hundred years later, a middle-aged lady wrote a book which gave a name to Descartes' philosophy - objectivism. We are whatever we are because of the way we think. Individuality, they said, is the essence of mankind. This book won worldwide interest and acclaim and was regarded as philosophically the most challenging book of its time. The author Ayn Rand, the book - The Fountainhead. <br><br>Talking about this book is very difficult. It is very easy to review a book with a story and very easy to review an idea, but it is extremely difficult to review a school of thought because there is so much scope to it in so many directions from a single source that catching hold of one track and explaining it would not only mean limiting the scope of the book but also belittling the greatness of the author.<br><br>
Fountainhead is the story of an intransigent young architect, Roark, who's fighting against the conventional styles of architecture. Nothing bothers him except his work. He has the quiet complete calm of a man who has realized that he doesn’t belong to the world of the second-handed. The world hates him, branding him as an egotist, a selfless cold-blooded emotionless creature. But Howard is at complete peace with himself. He gets rusticated from his college because he doesn’t even oblige his principal over the design of a small arch. He feels the building should be like an honest man, plain and simple which is exactly the opposite of the norms being followed then.
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Howard has a friend, a fellow architect called Peter Keating. Now he's just like any of us, wants to be successful by depending on others, by living for others. Peter is a mob man at heart with tremendous vanity, who’s willing to be a parasite for something as short living as a brilliant career. His triumph is his disaster. He has no self and therefore cannot have any ethics. When there is a competition for the design of the building, he approaches Howard for help. Howard draws sketches and helps Peter win the contract for the design of the building. Howard doesn’t have any animosity, as it is not success that he is after, he wants to be himself at any cost.
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The third character is Dominique Francon, the rich, extremely beautiful girl. She too, like Howard Roark, feels that she doesn’t belong to this world. When she meets him, she vows to destroy him, because she feels that Howard is insulting his own greatness by surviving in this hypocritical, parasitic world.
<br><br> Ayn Rand has excellently depicted the chemistry between Roark and Dominique. The moment they meet, sparks fly. Even something as voyeuristic as sexual union between them has been described so spiritually that instead of getting titillated or disgusted, one begins to respect the whole act.
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Then there is the fourth and the most dangerous character of all, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey Ellsworth - evangelist, philosopher and intellectual par excellence. Apart from Dominique Francon, he is the only other person who has been able to understand Roark. He believes in collectivism and he has got the lust for his superiority, and this can be expressed only through others by dominating them. He is the genius of modern democracy in its worst meaning and is also considered to be a walking encyclopedia. This is natural since he is no creative mind and only repeats and apes - he is like a sponge and not a fresh spring. He wants to destroy individuals like Roark. His manipulation is well brought out by this incident. An industrialist, Erwin Stoddard wanted an architect to design an idol for the temple he wanted to build. Toohey, knowing Roark, very well recommends his name to Stoddard. Roark obliges, and when he finally completes the idol in the temple, everybody is shocked. In a place of worship, the idol was that of a nude woman in a state of exaltation. For Roark, religion meant being free from inhibitions, free from bondage and an eternal state of bliss attained only by being oneself. But Toohey condemns it as a sacrilege, the antic of an insane egotist idiot - the very Toohey who recommended Roark’s name for this assignment.<br><br>
The climax of “Fountainhead” is one the most dramatic endings I have ever come across. Roark is given an assignment to build a home for the aged. The only fee Roark charges is that the building should be designed exactly the way he wants it to. But the builders, in order to create more room for the building, do some slight alterations. Realizing this, he goes one night and blows up the building with a dynamite. He is arrested and summoned at the court. He acts as his own defense counsel and the speech he gives in the end to defend himself is simply mind-boggling. He says “creators, thinkers and artists have stood alone against men of their time, their every new thought was denounced. But these people were not selfless, they were selfish, self-motivated. On the other hand we have the parasites, the second-handed people who choose to depend on others. That building was mine - I created it and I destroyed it”. He gets acquitted.
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Characterization is slow. The style is a metaphor for smoothness. Every word makes you think. But let me warn you, it is a very dangerous philosophy for those who get inspired by Roark after reading this book - not understanding ego and selfishness in their truest sense would end up in their being branded as mental wrecks.
<br><br> You don’t have to believe and take for granted whatever is written in the book, you don’t even have to contradict or refute what’s being said. You weigh and consider it. Every time you read “Fountainhead” you get a new meaning of it, because as I mentioned it earlier it is not a book, it is a school of thought.
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