Shrikant Rangnekar

Facebook Poll: Who are your Top 5 Heroes of all times? There are over 1700+ answers already led by Ayn Rand, Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle. Please vote for your heroes and add them to the list if they are missing from it. Please discuss your reasons for your choices here on this forum.

Atlas Shrugged Movie and Ayn Rand Polls (Over 350+ answers and counting...) How many stars do you give to the Atlas Shrugged Movie? Vote now! Over 150+ answers already! What is your Most Favorite thing about the Atlas Shrugged Movie? Add your own answer, and see others’ answers. Over 75+ answers already! What is your Least Favorite thing about the Atlas Shrugged Movie? Add your own answer, and see others’ answers. Over 100+ answers already! What is your favorite book by Ayn Rand and Why? Add your own answer, and see others’ answers. Over 50+ answers already! What single idea of Ayn Rand has had the maximum impact on your life?

What is your Most Favorite thing about the Atlas Shrugged Movie? What is your Least Favorite thing about the Atlas Shrugged Movie?

**Mod Note: Merged topic. Originally "Atlas Shrugged Movie Report" -Dante** Atlas Shrugged Movie Report: April 17, 2011 The other number I was watching closely was its performance on Saturday compared to Friday–because I knew that the bulk of Objectivists were seeing it on Friday. It performed almost as strongly on Saturday as it did on Friday–which is a good sign... How was the movie received by Objectivists? I conducted a poll of my Facebook friends asking them to rate the movie as wither Excellent (5 stars), Good (4 stars), Average (3 stars), Poor (2 stars) or Awful (1 star). 100+ people have voted so far and you can see the poll results On my Facebook wall. If you have trouble viewing the poll results or voting in the poll because you are not my Facebook friend, you are welcome to send me a Facebook friend request. You will also be able to see my frequent updates about Atlas Shrugged Movie as they are posted on Facebook. Please add you own vote in the poll...

Atlas Shrugged Movie Report: April 17, 2011 The other number I was watching closely was its performance on Saturday compared to Friday–because I knew that the bulk of Objectivists were seeing it on Friday. It performed almost as strongly on Saturday as it did on Friday–which is a good sign... How was the movie received by Objectivists? I conducted a poll of my Facebook friends asking them to rate the movie as wither Excellent (5 stars), Good (4 stars), Average (3 stars), Poor (2 stars) or Awful (1 star). 28 people voted so far and you can see the poll results on my Facebook wall here. If you have trouble viewing the poll results or voting in the poll because you are not my Facebook friend, you are welcome to send me a Facebook friend request. You will also be able to see my frequent updates about Atlas Shrugged Movie as they are posted on Facebook. Please add you own vote in the poll.

Atlas Shrugged Movie: Help it go Viral

Kindergarten Chats: Part 1 I am about one third of the way through the book. Here are all the posts so far...

Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats: Of Tulips & Men Freedom liberates nothing if it liberates not the mind. I hold it against a man that he prefers not to free his mind; that he chooses the habitual, rather than that self-government, that initiative, which is the perpetuating force of a free people. I know that a few men care to face the truth; not because it is the truth, but because they fear the truth may prove too large. All of which is timid and unlovely. It ill becomes us: we were meant to be large and true. So must we be. So are we in many ways.

Thanks JayR. Ayn Rand researched architecture thoroughly in preparation for writing The Fountainhead. Her notes in "Journals of Ayn Rand" have several references to Louis Sullivan, and shows familiarity with both his career and his ideas. She studied Wright in greater detail, and as Wright is Sullivan's student, she got ideas of Sullivan through Wright as well. All the explicit ideas of Howard Roark about architecture and it's meaning and method are directly from Louis Sullivan--the most famous of which is "Form follows Function."

Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats: A Function Creates Its Own Form In nature and in man’s work, there is the initiating pressure of a living force and a resultant structure or mechanism whereby such invisible force is made manifest and operative. The pressure, we call Function; the resultant, Form. Hence the law of function and form discernible throughout nature. A function creates its own form. Form ever follows function...

Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats: On Thought "But you cannot do this in a day, in a week, in a year. It must be for you a life-work, a long steady, continuous endeavor. The more you think, the more you will delight in thinking; the more you contemplate, the more you will delight in contemplation; the more you act, the more you will delight in action. Bear in mind that you are not to think merely on occasions, as a sort of ceremonial, but daily, hourly, all the time–it must become your fixed and natural habit of mind. So will your thinking steadily grow in power, clearness, flexibility and grace; and you will ever thereafter feel what the spirit of independence and self-control truly means."

All the varied elements of human nature and its surroundings confluence in a special fashion in the individual, and form what we call character. Character is the resultant of all the forces operative in an individual man, and it shapes the amount and the direction of his energy. Like a great river, however winding its course, it discharges and delivers its output into our culture at some definite spot. To explore a river and know it thoroughly, we may begin at the thousands of widely separated well-springs which flow away in rivulets that conjoin to make its branches, and follow these as they conjoin to make its trunk, and this trunk, on to its delta; OR, we may begin at the delta or estuary, and follow up the trunk, the branches, the rivulets, until we shall have sought out the minutest headwaters. Character is a large word, full of significance, no metaphorical river can more than hint at its meaning. Character is not confined to the individual, it defines, also, a group, an institution, a nation; and conversely, it names minutest of actions, quantities and qualities we can ponder. So shall our course lie: upstream, against the current, down-stream with it. We will broadly trace physical appearances to their moral causes, and moral. mental and social impulses to their manifestations in brick and stone. From: Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats: Of Rivers & Characters

Louis Sullivan was a giant. Howard Roark’s ideas about his work in The Fountainhead are Louis Sullivan’s ideas. While he has had a profound influence on my life, many of my friends have found his ideas inaccessible, partly because of his poetic flair, partly because of his unusual terminology and partly because his pre First World War world and sensibility are alien to them. I am going to paraphrase some of his thoughts as I reread his masterpiece “Kindergarten Chats” (originally written in 1901 and edited in 1918), in the hope that it might make his work more accessible to others. This book is about art of expression – about how to grasp the world deeply in a first-hand way, and how to create works based on those insights. Currently, I have no capacity to equal the beauty of his language, or the life transforming power of his work–you will need to read the “Lieber Meister” in original for that. I will simply select and freely reword his formulations as I understand them, chapter by chapter. As I begin, I do not know how productive this endeavor will be, or whether I will be able or willing to carry it through the whole 175 pages of the book. Please do let me know if you find this attempt useful and if so why. And if you are familiar with Sullivan, please do share your thoughts. Here are my first few posts: Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats: Foreword Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats: Pathology of a Building Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats: the University & the world Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats: An Oasis

What will be the impact of the Atlas Shrugged Movie on our culture? I am raising questions about the factors that will shape the magnitude of that impact, and am answering them before the release of the movie in the hope that doing so will get people thinking about this opportunity, and will enable them to devise their own strategies for making the most of it. Atlas Shrugged Movie: Ten Million Dollar Questions

I have posted Three Ayn Rand Movies: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead & We the Living on my blog. How does the new Atlas Shrugged Movie compare to We the Living and The Fountainhead movies? Ayn Rand’s ideas grew in depth, breadth and explicitness across her three novels: We the Living, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Concretizing them in a movie form grows progressively harder with successive novels. We the Living dramatizes the sacredness of one’s own life and the destructive evil of dictatorships. The movie was made during Mussolini’s dictatorship in Italy in 1942, and the story of its making is fascinating in its own right...

Here is my review of the movie: Atlas Shrugged Movie: A Roman Copy of a Greek Original

I just saw the New York showing of the Atlas Shrugged Part I movie. This is a brief review of it. If you would rather watch the movie first before reading a review–which is what I would do and recommend–please do not read any further. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ 1. Firstly, making a movie is a large-scale endeavor, and working over a decade to actually bring the movie to fruition required considerable tenacity, resourcefulness and purposefulness–I must thank especially John Aglialoro, the producer who spearheaded the project, for making that happen. 2. I found that this is a sincere attempt to portray Atlas Shrugged–the production team genuinely liked and respected Atlas Shrugged and it appears they tried their best to portray it to the best of their ability within the constraints they had. 3. My overall impression of the movie can best be described by an analogy... Read the entire review here: Atlas Shrugged Movie: A Roman Copy of a Greek Original by Shrikant Rangnekar