The lady with
the cigarette holder
When I was
young, Nehru was my hero. He was an enchanting speaker and a great communicator,
and I was quite under his thrall. So I went through school and college without
entertaining any doubts about nationalization and commanding heights.
My first brush
with socialism came while I was a student abroad. I had come to India for a
visit. At that time, exchange control required one to surrender all one’s
foreign exchange when one entered India, which I dutifully did. Exchange
control allowed one to buy £8 at the airport when one left the country, which I
did. I reached London in the morning, and happily spent the day going around
the city. In the evening I went to King’s Cross to take a train to Cambridge,
and found that the last train had left. I no longer had enough money for a
hotel, so I walked for miles looking for a cheap enough place to spend the
night. I finally got a room in the YMCA at Tottenham Court Road. Next morning,
I no longer had enough money to take a train to Cambridge. So I got some
pennies and started ringing up friends. Finally I found a friend’s wife; she
said she was going to get her weekly wage that afternoon, and would lend me
enough if I went to her office at 5 PM. I trudged around the city the whole day.
I walked into her office at the appointed time and took the money. I reached
Cambridge that evening, famished but no longer destitute.
That experience
cured me of my love for socialism. When I returned to India and started doing
economics, I found many more instances of the hardships visited upon people by
socialism. Analysing them gave me a livelihood.
That is how I
began to make a case for liberalism. But I had no ideology; in my own eyes, I
was only applying commonsense. “Well, what do you know about that! These forty
years now, I've been speaking in prose without knowing it! How grateful am I to
you for teaching me that!” said Monsieur Jourdain to his philosophy teacher in
Moliére’s The Bourgeois Gentleman.
Somewhat in the same way, I have been a liberal most of my life without knowing
it. It just happened that I made my living in socialist India, and my economics
enabled me to get much entertainment out of the government’s stupidities. If
that was being liberal, I did not mind.
Then in his
brief liberal phase, Manmohan Singh picked me up to help with decontrol. That
brought me a little fame. Liberalism soon went out of fashion in the
government, so I left the government. But outside, liberalism grew in
popularity, and so did I. That is when I came across other liberals and became
aware of liberalism as an ideology.
I had read Ayn
Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and enjoyed
its broad canvas and epic quality. But it never struck me that it had an
ideological message. I had an impression that she had begun to write in the
1930s, when I was born. That made her ancient; just like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, her fiction
appeared vintage to me. It was only when I met other liberals in the 1990s that
I realized what an icon she was amongst them.
Ayn Rand had
quite an eventful youth. She was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in St
Petersberg in 1905, the year in which Japan inflicted a painful defeat on
Russia. She lived in Russia through World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of
1917, and graduated in philosophy from the University of St Petersburg. In
1926, she escaped to the US. She went to Hollywood and got a job as an extra in
Cecil B DeMille’s King of Kings. Then she hung around doing backroom jobs in studios.
There she met Frank O’Connor – the actor, not the Irish writer – and married
him in 1929. In 1934 they moved to New York.
That is when she
started to write seriously. Although she had been in the US for a decade, her
early years in Soviet Russia weighed on her. She wrote a novel about life in
Russia called We the Living in 1936;
next year she wrote a dystopia – a nightmare of a collectivist future – called Anthem. Neither did well in the States.
Then in 1943, she wrote The Fountainhead
– the story of an architect who defended his integrity against odds and eventually
won. That novel finally struck a chord, and presumably brought some prosperity
to Ayn Rand, for she and her husband moved to Los Angeles in 1943. It was made
into a film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in 1949.
In 1950, she met Nathaniel
Blumenthal (who later renamed himself Branden), coming straight out of college,
who became her principal acolyte. They soon moved to New York, and he became
her lover with the consent of the spouses of both. She set up an office in the
Empire State Building and he his Nathaniel Branden Institute in the basement.
There he would hold forth on the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Leslie Hanscom wrote
in Newsweek in 1961, “After three
hours of heroically rapt attention to Branden’s droning delivery, the fans were
rewarded by the personal apparition of Miss Rand herself – a lady with drilling
black eyes and Russian accent who often wears a brooch in the shape of a dollar
sign as her private icon….”
Murray N Rothbard, a follower of
Ludwig von Mises, wrote a number of deliciously catty pieces about Ayn Rand,
including a play, Mozart Was a Red,
where he describes her thus: “CARSON is a little woman with straight hair
seeping down one side of her face. Her figure can only be described as
protoplasmic, amorphous; her age, too, is indeterminate, but is presumably in
the fifties. She wears a shapeless suit with military shoulders, in the height
of fashion (Moscow, 1925). Her eyes are beady and intent, and when she talks,
she is invariably curled up, ready to strike.” Justin Raymondo writes, “With
her flowing cape, intense eyes, and long cigarette holder, Rand was the very
picture of eccentricity; she sometimes wore a tricornered hat, and at one point
carried a gold-knobbed cane. Her thick Russian accent added to the exoticism.
It is a measure of Rand's powerful personality – and the real key to
understanding the Rand cult – that, after a while, many of her leading
followers began to speak with a noticeable accent, although each and every one
of them had been born in North America.”
It is too late to meet Ayn Rand,
for she died in 1982. But she has quite a following; and as her readers will
testify, her philosophy has considerable appeal. If you want to learn more
about it, Barun Mitra of Liberty Institute has brought out a useful little introduction
(Ayn Rand at 100, ed Tibor Machan, Pragun
Publishers (D K Publishers Distributors), Rs 175), containing essays by her
most prominent followers about her philosophy and influence. It offers a quick
way of getting acquainted with her thought.
