We the Living - Ayn Rand

Whether it was nandigram...the communists apathy to voilence or the general goings on in this country....for some reason...i picked up this book which describes the days after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

My heart bled to read how the individuals suffer during any such socia-political upheavels. This the story of this girl who was 18 and stood witness to the change of Russian socialism. It clearly opened my eyes to the fact that at the education or policy level one doesnt wait even a minute to think how these changes could affect people at the individual level. An economist by education, i have been trained to think statistics and econometrics is everything to come up with a policy. While it is but true...that sometimes not everybody can be pleased..i am more drawn today than ever to the welfare economics approach and the pareto theorems which explicitly states that policies are paratian optimal solutions if and only if they dont make anybody worse off while making some one better off than at the beginning.

Coming back to the book and Ayn Rand.....who is not really a favourite of mine since she really writes big fat book and heavy philosophical stuff....but i like this book ...because it is more an autobiographical and the background brings out the situation in Russia in 1919 when the revolution had just taken place and all the so called capitalists were in doldrums. It sends a chill down my spine when i read about the train packed with people moving slowly in the russian winter and people fighting over food.