New Delhi, July 13 -- "We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality."

Russian-American writer Ayn Rand did not write this line as a gentle reminder. She wrote it as a philosopher who believed that reality is non-negotiable and that the human tendency to look away from it is one of the most destructive forces in individual and public life.

The sentence has a precise, almost mechanical structure. It gives with one hand and takes back with the other. And that structure is exactly the point. You can choose not to see. You cannot choose not to be affected by what you refused to see.

The quote identifies a specific and very human error. People do not typically choose suffering directly. They choose the more c...