Report of the 3rd Atlas Meet in Delhi

The third edition of the Atlas meet in Delhi, held last Saturday, drew a bigger crowd than expected. Confirmations had come in from only four people, probably owing to the festival season, but we ended up with exactly double the number! Vikram, a young professional working in Delhi, attended for the first time, while the rest were all people who had turned up before.

The evening began with a rather enlightening presentation from Kumar Anand about the American financial crisis. Thankfully, he steered clear off economic jargon as far as possible, while giving us a thorough account of what exactly had happened. He drew some economic lessons from Atlas Shrugged, and demonstrated how interventionist policies in interest rates and the property sector had led to this collapse. A robust discussion followed, during which Barun made some astute observations about the crisis. After this, we were left with only a small window to view part 2 of John Galt’s speech. However, it was only 5 minutes long. We discussed the concepts of sacrifice and selfishness briefly, before moving on to the snacks break.

The second part of the meeting was attended by six, as Sunil Khetan and Kumar Anand took their leave. We began this with a brief presentation by me on our progress over the last couple of months. I also discussed the experiences of Argentina and Slovakia, two other countries that had received the Atlas grant. The conversation quickly moved to ways of spreading Ayn Rand’s ideas amongst school students. Broadly, we discussed the possibility of making an introductory presentation on Ayn Rand to students of classes 11 and 12, in the form of an interesting talk & audio/visual session. We decided that once we made our own content, all we would need to do is get permission from school authorities to spend a couple of hours on any one day with the students. This way, we would be able to make students aware of Rand, and, hopefully, interested enough to pick up the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. Getting permission from even five schools would mean a potential audience of 500 students. Poonam and Arun Virmani both responded very positively during this session, and agreed to participate actively in this initiative. As a first step, they both decided to ‘test the waters’ by seeing how some of their acquaintances in the education line responded to this idea.

We hope for an equally engaging session next month, with an even better participation. If you are interested in any of the ideas we discussed, and have some suggestions that you would like to share, please leave your comments.