Sasy Kumar

Sasy Kumar is Finance Manager at Al Saif Group, Head Office, Saudi Arabia. He has spent 37 years as an Accounts/Finance professional in various private sector corporate organizations; (23 years in India plus 14 years in the Middle East).
 
Intellectual Milestones: During the course of his intellectual voyages, Sasy has been fortunate and proud to have discovered three great thinkers (philosophers in every sense of the term) whose ideas have influenced/changed the course of his life; or to use a current phrase, created paradigm shifts in his life; and he consider them to be the 3 milestones in his life. They are:
 
1. Friedrich Nietzsche (FN): He discovered FN during his college years at Trivandrum, probably following a lead from the preface to one of Bernard Shaw’s plays (Man and Superman?). Started with his magnum opus: Thus Spake Zarathusthra (Walter Kaufmann’s English translation). Sasy has read/studied most of his works in the years to come.
 
Sasy considers FN as the grandmaster of all philosophers. There is probably nothing comparable to the grandeur of his writing style, in the whole domain of literature, in any language; and to the gay abandon with which he wields philosophical concepts, demolishes them, or creates and integrates them. FN foresaw and probably seeded many of the intellectual developments of the 20th century.
 
In fact he was far ahead of his contemporaries and also far beyond his time and society; — in his own words — “some (great men) are born posthumously — only the day after tomorrow belongs to me!” FN was probably looking to the 21st century /3rd millennium, during which he expected the growth and evolution of his “Ubermench” (trans/posthuman), and “heroic” individuals who will really understand, appreciate, and apply his philosophy.
 
2. Ayn Rand: Sasy discovered Rand during 1975 while at Bangalore at the starting phase of his career in accounts/finance. (Incidentally this is the city in India which has become a focus of attention for IT jobs outsourcing by US companies. Bangalore is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India; and almost all major IT companies including Sun and Microsoft have set up bases in this city.) In Sasy’s opinion, AR is the greatest philosopher and novelist (a very unique and rare combination) of the 20th century; and it must be emphasized that such a great thinker could have evolved/flourished only in the US.
 
The academia and the media have chosen to be ignore her values for obvious reasons. Her initial masterpiece The Fountainhead and her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged are artistic-literary creations of epic proportions; And of course her nonfiction works are a class by themselves and complementary to the above referred epic novels. Her outlook on life is best summarized in her own words: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life , with productive achievement as his noblest activity , and reason as his only absolute” (quote from the epilogue of Atlas Shrugged.)
 
3. Max More: Max has successfully brought about a synthesis, a convergence of widely disparate concepts, values and ideas; and in Sasy’s opinion, he is the logical progenitor, the convergence of the ideas and values they (Nietzsche, Rand et al.) bestowed upon us. Sasy would like to describe/title him as a proponent, if not the founder of, “Applied Philosophy”, which, as of now, does not exist, as an academic field of study.
 
Sasy earned his B.Sc. in Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics at the University of Kerala, India in 1973.
 
Visit his Facebook page. Read his LinkedIn profile. Follow his Twitter feed. Visit his Personal Website. Sasy knows English, Malayalam, Hindi, and Tamil.