Rand on my shelf Ayn Rand is a writer who enchanted millions of young people in the second half of the 20 th century. I was one of those millions. My first encounter with Rand was utterly casual. I was travelling back to Shillong from Kerala after the winter vacation. A friend who was on the train was reading The Fountainhead . When he went to sleep after lunch, I picked up the book and read a few pages. I was enchanted. Howard Roark, the hero of that novel, was my kind of the ideal man in those days. He would have had similar effect on a lot of young people in those days, I’m sure. Roark is a genius who is condemned to be an outsider by the society’s ineluctable mediocrity. Roark remains outside the social conventions. He refuses to be moulded by the normal social forces. He makes his own choices which determine his life. He is his own man. And a defiant one too. I loved him. I was in my 20s. I continued to read the novel whenever my friend was not reading it. By the time the t
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