The Man who could have been...

We are all ‘Gail Wynand’s...

Now you might be wondering who the hell he is... Well, he is a fictional character from the epic novel ‘The fountainhead’ written by Ayn Rand. If you have not read it, just grab a copy today, finish it off in a week and then go and buy ‘ATLAS SHRUGGED’... After reading these 2 books I stopped reading fiction for one year as a tribute to Ayn Rand. It was like I had reached the pinnacle of modern English fiction, nothing else stands. More about Ayn Rand and her books in another post, perhaps. This one is about a specific character from ‘The Fountainhead’.

Just who is this Gail Wynand? Well...

He is you. He is me. He is almost 90% of the human population.

In the novel, he is a powerful newspaper tycoon, who rose from the rags to rule the newspaper industry. He is characterised as a highly “successful” industrialist. He shares a lot of the positive ideals present in Howard Roark, the main protagonist of the novel... But unfortunately the more time he spends in this world the more Wynand gives in and gives up on his ideals one by one, in order to be “successful”... He had the potential to be idealistic, but gave it up under the guise of being realistic.

How does that make you and me to be like him?

Just remember how you felt the day you finished school, the day you scored a double hundred in Math, the day you got admitted in the vocation of your choice (or parent’s choice or society’s choice:)), the day you finished college, the day you got your first job. Head held high, floating in ideals, a spring in your step... As the cliché goes, “the world was your oyster”... "Ye ‘Also-rans’, ye ‘average men’, ye ‘boring bosses’, here cometh I....", you muttered in your breath. You had ideals, big bold ones, determined to make a difference, determined to be the difference, determined to be different...

Few years on... Have you lived up to those ideals? Do you still do things only if you believe in them? Are you the ‘Prime Mover’? The answer my dear friends would be a mighty ‘NO’.... If it had been ‘yes’, that would have given you an outside chance of claiming to be a ‘Howard Roark’ - the perfectionist, the purushottaman(tamil)... But alas the answer is ‘NO’ and that has made you and me and many many many of us just ‘Gail Wynands’... We would like to believe we are all ‘Howard Roarks’, but the harsh, hard-hitting reality is that we are all Gail Wynands, nothing more, nothing less.

Gail Wynand – The Man who could have been...


Note: Those who are familiar with Rand’s works will appreciate this post a lot more. Others please go and read her books and then read this post... “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” are two exhilarating experiences that are not to be missed, two epics that are absolutely relevant to today’s world.