Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian (unconventional lifestyle) novelist and short-story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature for his realistic writing.

One Kafka’s short and sweet story is doing rounds on whatsapp and Facebook these days; the story portrays some profound facets of life. It’s a real story revolving around a very young girl and Franz Kafka. It reflects about relationships to the world and each other. never married and had no children, he was 40, walking through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her most loved and dear doll. Kafka helped her search her doll, but the effort was futile. Kafka told her to meet him in the same place the next day and they would come back to search out the doll.

The next day they met, but they didn’t find the doll. The girl was sad, and she kept on crying. This is when Kafka gave the girl a letter to her saying that the doll had written the letter for the girl. The letter said “please don’t cry. I have taken took a trip to see the world. I promise you to write to you about my adventures.”

This is how a story began which continued until the end of Kafka’s life.
During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll which were written by Kafka very interestingly, full of adventures and conversations of the doll with the variety of people, their personality characters. The girl found the letters adorable. Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.

“It doesn’t look like my doll at all,” said the girl. Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: “my travels have changed me.” the little girl hugged the new doll and took her home happily. A year later Kafka died.

Many years later, when the girl grew adult, she found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written: “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.”

The story describes how Kafka calmed the girl by bringing letters supposedly written by the doll, describing her exciting adventures around the world. Eventually, the story goes, Kafka brought her a different doll, passing it off as the original one. Kafka dies.

About Kafka’s work

Kafka has written few other novels and they are famous even today. Writing was an important part of Kafka’s life. For him writing was a ‘form of prayer’, and nothing would stand in the way of his worship. His personality is described as (INFP) Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Prospecting personality traits. These rare personality types tend to be quiet, open-minded, and imaginative, and they apply a caring and creative approach to everything they do. Kafka experimented with his writing; he wrote funny, eerie, emotional novels.  People found him mentally unsteady and physically ugly. However, many of those who met him invariably found him to possess obvious intelligence and a sense of humour; they also found him handsome because of his intellectual work, although often found in shabby appearance. 

Kafka joined an insurance company where he didn’t enjoy his job. The long hours left him little time to write, and so he resigned from his position after only a year. Instead, Kafka found employment at the state insurance institute, where he finished work at 2 pm, giving him the whole afternoon to focus on writing. It may also have given him some inspiration for some of his more eerie and wicked narratives: his role was to investigate injuries suffered by industrial workers, who met with accidents in factories they worked, many had lost fingers, fractured limbs, and had bruised faces.

Conclusion

What I liked in the lost doll story is that Kafka says change can be happy and exciting as well as chaotic and complicated. But change cannot be avoided. Life is all about transformation – change is constant. Nothing stays forever with us. From birth till death man goes on changing in body, experience, learning, unlearning and in behaviour.  We all experience happiness, grief, love and success or failure. Our life makes us learn and unlearn. But genuine love remains deep in our heart.

Love is a most beautiful feeling which always keeps changing. It grows with experiences and time. It changes in its form. Although many times we feel love is sceptical, everything we love eventually fades away. And it’s impossible to go back in time, therefore, we cannot experience the love we once had; we cannot have a straightforward connection with the feeling of love as time passes. Life is all about adapting to change, finding happiness, and experiencing love in different forms such as friendship, in children, in neighbourhood, romance, in hobbies, in creativity, in job, in life partner or any other form.  

The octogenarian Aabid Surti says “If I can, you can.” This great man walks around apartment buildings in Mumbai every Sunday, plumber in tow, fixing leaky taps and pipes by saving every drop of water he can. Abid has written seven plays besides over 80 books, he has hosted 16 exhibitions of his paintings, and created much adored comic characters like Dabbuji, Bahadur and many more. In 1993, this resourceful artist also received a National Award for his short story collection, Teesri Aankh.

Aabid cannot bear wastage of water; he lived his childhood on the pavements in Mumbai. As a child, he saw his mother queuing up at 4 am for a bucket of water. He has seen fights for every drop of water on streets. People on pavements fought for every bucket, and that legacy stayed with him forever. Once, when he went to a friend’s place, he saw one of the taps leaking, and it hurt him a lot. Since then, leaking faucet bothered him so much so that Aabid started his fight to save water and that has not stopped till date. In the first year of the Foundation’s existence, in 2007, he had visited 1666 houses on Mira Road, fixed 414 leaking taps free of charge, and saved about 4.14 lakh litres of water! Thus, with a volunteer and a plumber, Aabid is seen saving water in different places around Mumbai every Sunday.

In 2013, his son wrote a blog about his work, “Saving the Planet one drop at a time”, it was selected to be a part of children’s textbooks for 2014 by Pearson Education. Aabid is humble and does not boast or talk too much about his achievements. He says “basically I am an author and painter, so when I get an idea for a story, I just simply sit down and start writing. When the Drop Dead idea came, it was just an idea for me, not a great idea or this and that which people are talking about. For me it was just an idea. So I called the plumber and I started moving around my neighbourhood.”

Save every drop or drop dead. That is all Aabid Surti has to say to each one of us. The octogenarian author and artist works passionately to save water. His work gives him immense satisfaction; he does not expect anything in return.

Aabid believes that when one honestly sets out to do good work, the entire universe conspires to help him achieve his goal.  God helps in raising funds. Just days after Aabid Surti decided to set up the foundation, he received news that he had won a Hindi literature award which came with the prize money of Rs 1 lakh. Aabid adds that his costs are low. He pays the plumber and the volunteer Rs 500 each. He spends some money on getting publicity material, so the initial one lakh of amount lasted a couple of years for him to carry on his mission. His sincerity is supported by some likeminded people, whenever he falls short of funds; he gets funds from someone voluntarily.  It seems, these days, the plumber and the volunteer refuse to take any money from him because they see his sincere effort and feel for the cause. Aabid is building a splendid human chain that is inspired by him. There are people taking up his example and beginning to help save water in their own cities. All you need is an accompanying plumber to fix the leaking taps in your area.

If we don’t conserve water today, our future generation will have to face the water crisis. Small gestures can make a big difference. Kudos to Aabid Surti!!

Her novel Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 includes elements of science, fiction, mystery and romance which contain Ayn Rand’s most far-reaching statement of Objectivism. The book depicts a dystopian (everything degraded) United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly oppressive laws and regulations. Ayn Rand astonishingly defends business and capitalism. She does not regard capitalism as an amoral. Rand held that money, as such, is a good thing for society, because it enables us to trade with one-another peacefully, by mutual consent to mutual benefit. In this sense, everyone ought to value and appreciate money.

The hero of her most popular novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” John Galt is a ruthless head of industry who struggles against domineering government regulations that stand in the way of commerce and profit. In a revolt, he and other captains of industry each close down production of their factories, bringing the world economy to its knees. “You need us more than we need you” is their message.

Nevertheless, she didn’t mean that one needs to have great desire for money. She didn’t mean that everyone should seek to grow rich by valuing income over all else. She went on to say that it’s important to love your work than to do the work that pays the most.

The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel, her first major literary success. The novel’s protagonist, Howard Roark, is an individualistic young architect who designs modernist buildings and refuses to compromise with an architectural establishment unwilling to accept innovation. Roark exemplifies what Rand believed to be the ideal man, and his struggle reflects Rand’s belief that individualism is superior to collectivism. She propagated in this book the role of art in human life is to transform humans’ metaphysical (nature of mind) ideas by selective imitation of reality into a physical form. Each artist’s work of art is known by his ideas and to which one can respond emotionally or apathetically.

In both novels, Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead Rand talks about Objectivism which is a philosophical system that is not subject to change. Objectivism’s central beliefs are that reality exists independently of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through their own sense and perception; a person attains objective knowledge from perception through the process of forming his/her own concepts and own logic. The essentials of objectivism are: reality, reason, self-interest, and capitalism.  And, capitalism is the only political system that leaves the dissatisfied free to organize their own communities and associations, and to build their own subculture

Rand emphasizes that individual rights are regarded in only social system consistent with morality which follows laissez-faire capitalism. Rand’s theories regarding reason link with the intellect. She believed that intelligence is the ability to deal with a broad range of ideas. Objectivism requires people to “activate” their minds, understand all the facts of the current situation, and perform the required. The modern economic theory is based on exactly these principles. A rational agent is defined as an individual who is self-interested. A market is a collection of such rational agents, each of whom is also self-interested. Fairness does not enter into it. Cannibalization is regarded as cleverness in business.

Many of Rand’s rich and famous readers have identified at some point in their lives as followers of Rand’s philosophy of objectivism. They feel that her philosophy of supreme self-reliance is based on the pursuit of supreme self-interest; this appears to be romanticized version of American ideals. Americans want freedom from autocracy, hard work and individualism.

In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Ayn Rand’s principles. Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. What happened is that the divisions turned against each other. Sears and Kmart, the two big umbrella brands suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, painted a picture of a business that’s devastated by infighting in its divisions battling over fewer resources. Cooperation and collaboration got completely lost in the warring among strategic business units (SBU).

No divisions were willing to lose revenues, to help other unit product to push, which would drive traffic into the store, thereby helping all divisions. For example: the appliance division found it could make more profit from selling Samsung appliances than from selling Sears’ Kenmore brand, so they gave more and better floor space to Samsung. The mother brand was reduced to ground level.

On a serious note, some economists who have conducted some experimental study on objectivism, feel good that majority in the society do not follow the doctrine of objectivism. We are far more cooperative and willing to trust, and we retaliate strongly when others behave uncaringly. In fact, we are willing to pay a penalty for an opportunity to punish people who appear to be breaking implicit rules of fairness in economic transactions. How many of you look upon Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism?