Indecision

This is a devil which has bugged me for the majority of my life. I make a decision and forget about it. Then suddenly, out of the blue, my mind starts thinking about it again. Should I or should I not? What if I do it, what if I don't? The subject isn't important. What is important is that I spend a lot of time, and energy on thinking about it. It leads to a lot of sleepless nights, to grey cells wearing themselves out by the constant friction of hesitation.

A manager is supposed to take quick and firm decisions. Who says I'm a manager? Being a hard-core techie, I believe in the principle of perpetual optimization. Even my blog title (... A never-ending journey) says that. If a few new parameters make a system unstable or less optimal, then you have to reconsider your decision. You have to rearrange your variables, recalculate your formulae, and reiterate your answer. Therefore, in my view a decision can never be considered to be final. There is always the possibility of something added to it (or removed from it), something which tilts the scales to the other side, something which disturbs the equilibrium and stirs up the dust in the mind which has just started to settle down. Then all one is left with is to get back to the drawing board.

What is the latest dilemma over which I'm posting this in the middle of the night (2:14AM to be precise)? It is important to me, very important. To others? I don't know and I shouldn't care. The events in the next few days should present a clear picture, even to myself. For now I have to relax and think (is that any oxymoron?). I have an interesting week in front of me, celebrating a birthday, and meeting up with close friends.

If anything, my indecision has given my something to write about on my blog, which was embarrasingly still after I posted the short story (which has done wonders for me in Google).

Book review: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The first thing I noticed about this book is that it is huge. A monstrous 891 pages long. After I had read The Fountainhead (thanks to my cuz), I had always wanted to read Atlas Shrugged. After finishing all the interviews, I had nothing to do at home. So I started this book. It took me around 15 days to complete it (a side product of this was a nifty little tool I made to track my daily and weekly bookmarks, ultimately displaying a really useful graph which helps me understand my reading habits). I found out that I read the most on Wednesdays. What's the use of this? Who knows It will help someday somehow. Anyways on with the review.

The book starts on a good note and the development of characters is quite crisp. The contrast between the brother-sister duo of James and Dagny Taggart is interesting. But somewhere in the middle, the book veers off on a long journey which sometimes bores me. I really get distracted when authors start on some side-topic and write pages and pages on it, and you're just mindlessly moving your eyes over the lines, and then suddenly you come back to the original storyline and you almost miss it. Michael Crichton is another author who does this often. Somehow it makes me feel that it is being done just to increase the number of pages.

No doubt, if Howard Roark was the eternal struggler in the Fountainhead, so is Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. But the character I liked the most was Hank Rearden. His cold, impersonal but logical talk made him a man to fear and respect. The villain of the story is not a single person as in The Fountainhead (Ellsworth Toohey), but a collection of "moral" industrialists.

The climax of the story is of course John Galt's speech (won't disclose when and where). After a continuous spattering of his hard-hitting words, the story picks up pace and finishes surprisingly as an action novel. A nice read but I prefer the Fountainhead due to its clearer and stronger message about individualism.