Is Fountainhead being replayed in Mumbai?

Ayn Rand's Fountainhead seems to be converted into real life drama in Mumbai. The following extract is from Suketu Mehta's incisive piece of journalistic triumph, Maximum City.

Rahul Mehrotra, whose architectural projects - particularly the combination of low- and high-tech material in his buildings - are praised by critics, is in his tenth year of working in Bombay. More than half of his work, the unpaid part, is in an urban planning institute in Bombay. He talks to anyone who'll listen - governments, journalists, Rotarians - about what needs to be done in Bombay. ... Rahul traces the deterioration of Bombay to the late 1960s. In 1964, a commission headed by the architect Charles Correa - Rahul's father-in-law - proposed New Bombay, a 'magnet city' for Bombay, a pressure valve. It would be located right across the bay, just to the east of the island city.

...

But in the late 1960s, the state government backed out of a commitment to move its offices from the Nariman Point Reclamation, on the southern tip of the island to New Bombay. Private businesses followed suit. ... Rahul identifies the five builders who, along with the V.P. Naik government ruined Bombay: the Makers, the Rahejas, the Dalamals, the Mittals, and the Tulsianis.

...

Bombay grew along a north-south axis; people live in the north and commute, in inhumanly packed trains, to the south. Its future depends on the axis being reoriented in an east-west direction.

...

The reason the builders took over Nariman Point instead of New Bombay was simple: "The greater you skew demand and supply, the higher the prices rise. The five boys must have met and had tea and decided to corner it all in a smaller plan.'

Will Howard Roark triumph this time?
Do you live in Mumbai? Can you confirm the above extract?
The book was written in 2004. So perhaps things have changed in the last 5 years. Or so one hopes.

Books - Paper or Audio?

A few posts ago, in The Return of the Story Teller, I had wondered why audio books have not blown away paper books.

Having almost finished the 29 hour audio book, Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, I know why.

Audio book does not let you think. When I read a book, I stop, think, reread and then proceed. Audio books do not give you the time to think. It is a constant supply of data that goes directly to the brain through the ears for post processing.

I think I will stick to books, of the paper kind, for some more time.

What do you prefer? Paper Books or Audio Books?

Integrity and perfection

I was all of 19 when I first read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead.

And I had thought I had understood it all -- the philosophy of selfishness as the greatest virtue, the fight of the individual striving for perfection against the whole world steeped in mediocrity, the genius versus the average.

Those were the heady, youthful days of idealism. That was the way to go -- perfection for the sake of perfection.
Now as I look back at my two decades, I cannot help but wonder when pragmatism replaced my quest for perfection. I do not think I understood Fountainhead completely.

At one point, a character who gives Howard Roark a break says, "And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea."

I think I missed out on that small bit in my first reading all those years ago.

Return of the storyteller

The tradition is storytelling has always been oral. The best stories are told and heard on grand pa's or grand ma's laps or around a bonfire on cold nights.

Then came books. Books are essentially containers that preserve stories. Books let the storyteller conquer space (people across the globe can read the story) and time (they can read it whenever they want - even after the story-teller is dead). So books are good.

But books are not a patch on the oral tradition. Books take away the emotion that storyteller brings to storytelling. So one has to imagine emotions as one reads. But then we can't have J K Rowling visiting every house to tell her story. That would be fun but not practical.

I am listening to Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. Yes, that is not a typo. I am indeed listening. It is an audio-book. And I am thrilled. This is a first for me (I am old and I have inertia. It takes me a while to try out something new). And I am wondering, why hasn't the audio-books blown away the book industry? Audio-books are the nearest thing to a traditional storytelling! Audio-books are the best of both worlds. It is oral, and the digitally preserved sound conquers space and time. Audio-books cannot replace text books (I cannot imagine a audio-book on a medical tome) but they can replace fiction books completely.

Audio-books can be far more profitable than paper books. With Internet and iPods production and delivery costs come down drastically. Why then have the audio-books not caught on as it should? By now, we should have seen a shrinking paper book industry.

Here's a free valuable innovation for the Apple Inc. (or Amazon, Kindle can be used typo read and listen). How about a digital bookmarking feature? As I listen to an audio-book, I should be able to go click-click-click, placing a digital bookmark on passages that I enjoy. I can then easily locate and revisit these passages after I finish listening once.