SPAN: May/June 2011

Spirit of Freedom

resident K.R. Narayanan had a special surprise in store for President Bill Clinton as a souvenir of his India visit: a painting of Mahatma Gandhi done by India's one and only M.P. Husain. Of the painting the artist says he made it "dreamy and misty" to suggest a bygone era) "yet the spirit of peace and freedom forges ahead into the new century." The 3 x 5 ft. painting was done in one day by the octogenarian artist. President Clinton, who referred to Gandhi more than once during his stay here, finished his final speech in Mumbai with a quote from him. "He once said 'It is my conviction that India, numbering one-fifth of the human race, can be a great force of service to the whole of mankind.' If we have the right kind of partnership and the best of India that I have seen in these last few days becomes the guiding force for all of India, then Gandhi's cherished hope will become the accepted reality for your children and America's children in this new century."

P

SPAN

o Superbugs

By Mark D. Uehling

Publisher Francis B. Ward Editor-in-Chief Kiki S. Munshi

President Bill Clinton's Address to the Joint Session of Parliament

Editor Lea Terhlme

Vision Statement-U.S.-India

Associate Editor Arun Bhanot Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana Editorial Assistant K. MuthuJmmar

Relations:

A Vision for the 21 st Century

**.

**~

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Why People Hoard Knowledge

By David StautIer

Making It Work

By Melissa Master

Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar

Next: Global Smog Deputy

Art Director

Hemant

Bhatnagar

ProductiOn/Circulation

Manager

Rakesh Agrawal Research

Services

An Interview with Professor Frank Sherwood Rowland

Poets' Corner A Conversation with William Meredith and Richard Harteis by Arun Bhanat

AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Literary Gold Miner Front cover: President Bill Clinton being received by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, following his arrival on a five-day state visit to India. See story on page 6. Photograph by Pramod Pllshkarna, courtesy India Today magazine.

By Lea Terhune

Writing: The Naked Craft

By U(vashi Blltalia

Kala Raksha-Artisans'

Oasis

By Judy Frater Note: SPA does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

Errata: The credits for photographs on pages 10-12 in the March/April 2000 issue of SPAN should read: 10, above-AP Photo/Greg Gibson; below-Wide World Photos. 11, above-AP Photo, below-AP Photo/Gerome Delay. 12U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Cory Montgomery.

Credits for pages 49-51 should read: 49-50---courtesy Ford Motor Company; 51-courtesy General Motors.

Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor.

Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

The Fight to Clean the Ganga

By Andrew Ward

NGOing

Global

By Sherle R. Schwenninger

Goli ke Hamjoli

By Sum ita Mehta

A LETTER

FROM

uchof this issue of SPA is devoted to U.S. President Clinton's historic visit to India. It has been more than two decades since the last presidential visit. The Indo-American relationship has undergone many changes in those years. This visit celebrated the new and vibrant relatio!,!ship between the two great democracies with extensive media coverage that gave the entire world a chance to experience the hospitality and the diversity of India that greeted Bill Clinton.

Public statements and agreements highlighted the different facets of the bilateral relationship. Contact with Indians of many walks of life in six locales in as many days turned the official visit into a personal pilgrimage for Mr. Clinton. SPAN has tried to capture some of the words and pictures that will be remembered.

Something else to be commemorated in 2000 is the 50th anniversary of USAID in India. Two articles in this issue are the first of a series that survey IndoAmerican cooperation as manifested by USAID working together with Indian government and nongovernment agencies. "Goli ke Hamjoli," by Sumita Mehta discusses the successful program to educate women about and give them access to family planning methods. The other, "The Fight to Clean the Ganga," by Andrew \'Vard,examines ongoing efforts to clean the waters of the Ganges River in Varanasi. For each project USAID has provided technical assistance, funding or both.

Kala Raksha Trust, an organization formed to preserve textile crafts and insure gainful employment for artisans, was started in Kutch in 1993 at the instigation of former Fulbrighter Judy Frater. Now Kala Raksha has opened a textile museum to preserve the crafts heritage and provide a resource base for artisans.

Frater writes about Kala Raksha and the museum in

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Budding craftspersons around the world have probably employed, at one time or another, Crayola crayons. Beth Py-Lieberman recalls the history of the

THE PUBLISHER

venerable Binney & Smith crayons used in countless creative hours by many of us, once upon a time. See "The Colors of Childhood."

Writing is another kind of craft to which many aspire. Author Valerie Miner gives advice to writers in her interview with SPAN, while publisher Urvashi Butalia offers the view from behind the editor's desk in "Writing: The Naked Craft." Two traveling poets, William Meredith and Richard Harteis, met up with Arun Bhanot, who discusses their visit and their work in "Poets' Corner."

Serious challenges facing all citizens of the world are the focus of two articles in this issue. "Superbugs,"

by Mark D. Uehling, informs us about the war being waged in labs internationally against antibiotic-resistant microorganisms. Its strategy center is at the University of Ohio. "Next: Global Smog" has Arun Bhanot engaged in dialogue with obel laureate in Chemistry Frank Sherwood Rowland about global warming and what "todo about it.

Nongovernment organizations are often involved in the kinds of programs that tackle concerns discussed frequently in SPAN. In "NGOing Global" Sherle R. Schwenninger looks at the strengths and. drawbacks of NGOs and the impact these organizations have had on world affairs.

On the business side we have two offerings about knowledge sharing in the workplace, and the increasing need to share knowledge in the information age: "Why People Hoard Knowledge," by David Stauffer and "Making It Work," by Melissa Master.

Our issue is rounded out with photos from anthropologist Stephen Huyler'S ''An American Namaste to India." Happy reading.

SUPERBUGS he complaint: A cough. Doctors in the rural emergency room thought they had matters under contro!'

Their patient, an elderly Iowa man with a 7S-year history of smoking, had developed bronchitis at his nursing home.

He was given antibiotics and sent back home, but the bronchitis persisted. Two days later, the man was brought to the University of Iowa medical complex in Iowa City.

Doctors there could see that the first course of antibiotics had not worked.

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They prescribed stronger drugs, but it was too late. The patient had been infected with bacteria that could not be killed with antibiotics like penicillin or erythromycin.

His bronchitis, it turned out, was caused by a strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria that had flourished instead of dying off. What had begun as a run-of-themill infection of the airways became something much more dangerous: bacterial meningitis, an infection of the brain's lining. After four days in a coma, the patient died. He was 86.

"He got infected with a bug for which there isn't effective therapy," says University of Iowa microbiology professor Gary V. Doern. "Five years ago, that never occurred."

Did you think mankind had conquered bacteria with "miracle drugs"? Not so.

Hour by hour, the bacterial realm replicates, mindlessly trying new tactics to thwart man's finest bug-killing weapons.

Back in the human realm, meanwhile, medical research into new antibiotics moves at glacial rates-the costs are ex or-

bitant even for profitable drug companies.

Doctors admit they have overused many existing antibiotics, giving the bugs a chance to beat the drugs. According to a 1998 Institute of Medicine report, the percentage of antibiotics prescribed inappropriately ranges from 20 to 50. The federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that one-third of all antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary.

H

ealth-conscious consumers may be making matters worse by using antibiotic-impregnated products such as soaps, cutting boards and toys. Why? Microorganisms invariably lurk in out-ofthe-way spots where the concentration of antibiotics isn't high enough to kill them, and these hardy survivors pass their drug resistance along to the next generation.

It is also indisputable that vancomycin, the antibiotic favored when all others fail, is losing its effectiveness as bugs adapt to it. In February last year, microbiologists reported that a quarter of the hospitalized children in one Washington, D.C., study harbored drug-resistant Enterococci bacteria.

None of this is news to the medical profession. It has watched antibiotic resistance for decades. But years after the problem came to wider notice, there is still just one ambitious program to track the most dangerous bacteria in an ongoing way. This solitary effort is funded by a major drug company and led by three trailblazing scientists at the U niversity of Iowa.

The project is called Sentry. A network of 83 hospitals worldwide, Sentry annually gathers 50,000 samples of hundreds of species of bacteria, bugs responsible for 90 percent of the infections in the United States-everything except bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diarrhea and sexually transmitted diseases. "Our mission is a global, comprehensive approach," says Dr. Ronald N. Jones, Sentry's leader and a burly, soft-spoken pathologist.

One regional Sentry center in the Netherlands processes samples from partner hospitals in Europe. Another center in Australia handles samples from Asia. The lab in Iowa collects bugs from the United

States and from the rest of the Western Hemisphere. . By processing bacteria from all over the world, Sentry's researchers can spot new pockets of bacterial resistance to antibiotics as they emerge, and can tell medical colleagues how well the bacteria are doing against particular medicines. Sentry's generals will not end the ageless war between man and bug. But they can gather intelligence that will help win battles.

Sentry researchers track resistance in three important ways: First, they gather data from around the world. Second, they study communities as well as hospitals.

And they use the same procedures for all of their bacterial samples, so that data from California can be compared with data from China. No other surveillance program or government agency can cite even hazy plans to mount a similar effort.

The project is now three years old and known to only a handful of researchers, but those who are familiar with it are impressed. "Sentry's approach is excellent," says Dr. Stuart B. Levy, president of the American Society of Microbiology. The author of a sobering book called The Antibiotic Paradox, he has spent 20 years asking officials to watch resistance more closely. "How can we do anything until we know how big ,the problem is?" asks Levy.

Surprisingly, Sentry is the only international research project studying antibiotic resistance in a methodical way. The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization have no programs comparable to Sentry, which is tracking many more species of bacteria than its peers.

Even within the United States, the gov-

Despite more than a century of medical breakthroughs, bacteria such as streptococcus, staphylococcus and tuberculosis are resurgent. Experts warn: fillish the full course of antibiotic prescriptions and don't take antibiotics unnecessarily, or without doctor's supervision.

ernment tracks antibiotic resistance haphazardly. A report last February from the General Accounting Office, which surveyed all 50 state public health laboratories, found that states differ widely on what bacteria to monitor, and what tests to perform. Almost half of the labs have no access to the advanced molecular technology needed to identify specific strains of bacteria. And even when a lab identifies a resistant strain, the information may not reach other states, in part because the labs' computers can't talk to one another.

The federal Institute of Medicine issued its third report on antibiotic resistance in 1998, with two earlier analyses largely ignored. "No country, including the United States, has a reliable, longitudinal, fullservice antimicrobial resistance surveillance program with comprehensive focus," the report states baldly. "Research and information on the impact of rapidly increasing antimicrobial resistance in the community are lacking."

The stakes in the battle are high. In 1995, Congress' Office of Technology Assessment estimated that resistant bacteria cost the nation $1.5 billion annually.

The number of deaths may be as high as 77 ,000 annually. Even so, the Institute of Medicine estimates that all levels of U.S. Government spend just $55,455 on surveillance of bacterial resistance. Government spends almost 600 times that amount on surveillance of AIDS, which touches a far smaller population.

"The government is just not doing the job that needs to be done," says Sentry's Gary Doern. "If we don't do it, it seems like nobody is going to do it."

Doern, Jones and pathologist Dr. Michael Pfaller originally proposed a federally-funded program. But when their grant proposal was rejected, they applied for and received funding from Bristol Myers Squibb. The Princeton, New Jersey, drug company makes several antibiotics, and has early access to the Sentry data to guide its in-house research. But it has never asked the Iowans to deviate from their original goal: a global bacterial radar screen.

Sentry's leader, Dr. Jones, has memorized the top five bacteria found in dozens

Antibiotics are misused in medicine, agriculture and even household products. But besides human error, the bugs have two other advantages. First, they are the most inventively promiscuous of creatures. For them, the history of life on this planet has been one long Boogie Night. In addition to sexual mating between members of the same species, bacteria can casually swap snippets of resistance-carrying genetic material between vastly different species.

Second, we and the bugs operate on vastly different scales of time and population. For humans, even one death is serious. Yet if untold quadrillions of one line of bacteria

of countries in his far-flung program, and can rattle off their fluctuating MIC numbers (the minimum inhibitory concentration, or minimum amount of a drug, that will prevent bacteria in a lab dish from growing). Jones is a medical professor who glides benevolently in and out of nondescript offices and laboratories in Iowa City. He bears no trace of his staggering workload. Even before more than a dozen Sentry articles started to reach medical journals, he had published 600 papers and 50 book chapters.

It's in a basement lab that the action unfolds. Opening the overnight packages from Canada, Latin America and the United States, Jones' technicians find billions of living, replicating bacteria inside small tubes. They smear the samples on coaster-size discs of nourishing agar in glass dishes, and then wait for them to grow. Then they pit each sample against a grid of at least 25 and as many as 55 antibiotics. (Some compounds are not even on the market yet.)

Once a sample's success against the battery of drugs is recorded, the organism is cooled into a state of suspended animation, making one basement lab a chilly bacteriological zoo. "We keep every isolate we ever get," says lab manager Kari Kugler. "We have freezers full of these organisms."

Sentry has already yielded a number of clues in the war on bugs. For the intestinal critters known as Enterococci, Sentry learned early in 1998 that in just a year

perish, their family still wins big, in evolutionary terms, if the battle produces a random genetic change that ensures the survival of a hardy mutant. With that organism, the quadrillions lost can and will replace themselves.

In essence, then, mankind has in a few decades given bacteria the equivalent of several aeons in a Darwinian Las Vegas. In that evolutionary betting parlor, each bacterium has minuscule but real odds of beating any antibiotic.

Trouble is, these magnificently adaptable adversaries are so numerous, and roll the genetic dice so often, that over time they inevitably come up with winners.

-M.D.V.

and a half, the number of U.S. specimens resistant to vancomycin rose from 15 percent to 18 percent. The percentage of respiratory bacteria resistant to penicillin is 46 percent, a figure that had never been calculated before Sentry.

Other surveillance studies around the world exist, but they are less ambitious.

The best of the lot, England's Alexander Project, monitors resistance in just three species of bacteria that cause lowerrespiratory infections, analyzing 12,000 specimens from 30 nations annually. The World Health Organization's WHONet is beginning to set up surveillance.

MRL Pharmaceutical Services, located in Reston, Virginia, runs the Surveillance Network for drug companies, and logs in voluminous quantities of data. But the information is recorded in any manner its contributors choose-which makes it more difficult to draw accurate conclusions about the global picture.

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he CDC, to be fair, also has several programs that track resistance. But most are designed around a particular medical issue. So various CDC fiefdoms watch resistance in hospitals but not in the community at large, in sexually transmitted conditions but not diseases affecting children, and in tuberculosis but not sinus infections. The agency says its budgetsand state-by-state control of what diseases are monitored-have limited its reach.

"We are making some progress," says Dr. James M. Hughes, director of the CDC's

National Center for Infectious Diseases, "but we have a long way to go."

Gary Doern, Sentry's microbiologist, takes watching the bugs as seriously as CIA spies took monitoring the Russians during the cold war. He recalls a bacterial sample from Akron, Ohio. The source turned out to be a man who had spent years in and out of the hospital for respiratory infections. The patient admitted that he rarely finished his antibiotics, allowing bacteria to use his body the way football players use the weight room.

The Akron man is no Typhoid Marythe risk that he could give someone something greater than a cough, something life-threatening like meningitis, is small.

But his case is still sobering. It's only the second instance on record of Moraxella resistant not only to penicillin but also to two far more advanced antibiotics: ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin.

Doctors in Akron, natUrally, were more concerned with keeping the patient alive than documenting which of his bacteria were resistant to which of their antibiotics.

But thanks to Sentry, the medical community now knows that one colony of Moraxella has survived a powerful antibiotic banage. This time, at least, a bug's victory on the battlefield has been promptly noted, and physicians fighting Moraxella can now start to plan their counterattack.

D About the Author: Mark D. Uehling is a contributing editor of Popular Science.

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6

SPAN MAY/JUNE2000

Government and

P.arliament and

landmark in lndo-U.S. Statement signed

Far left: President Bill Cli11to11 inspects the Presidem's Bodyguards at Rashtrapati Bhavan during welcome ceremonies on the first day of liis visit. Left: The President and First Daughter Clielsea pay respects at Gandhi Samadhi; the President also planted a sapling at Rajghat.

SPAN MAY/JONE 2000

7

JOINT SESSION OF PARLIAMENT

r. Vice President, Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker, members of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, I am privileged to speak to you and, through you, to the people of India. I am honored to be joined today by members of my Cabinet and staff at the White House, and a very large representation of members of our United States Congress from both political parties. We're all honored to be here and we thank you for your warm welcome.

I would also like to thank the people of India for their kindness to my daughter and my mother-in-law and, on their previous trip, to my wife and my daughter.

I have looked forward to this day with great anticipation.

This whole trip has meant a great deal to me, especially to this point, the opportunity I had to visit the Gandhi memorial, to express on behalf of all the people of the United States our gratitude for the life, the work, the thought of Gandhi, without which the great civil rights revolution in the United States would never had succeeded on a peaceful plane.

As Prime Minister Vajpayee has said, India and America are natural allies, two nations conceived in liberty, each finding strength in its diversity, each seeing in the other a reflection of its own aspiration for a more humane and just world.

A poet once said the world's inhabitants can be divided into "those that have seen the Taj Mahal and those that have not."

Well, in a few hours I will have a chance to cross over to the happier side of that divide. But I hope, in a larger sense, that my visit will help the American people to see the new India and to understand you better. And I hope that the visit will help India to understand America better. And that by listening to each other we can build a true partnership of mutual respect and common endeavor.

From a distance, India often appears as a kaleidoscope of competing, perhaps superficial, images. Is it atomic weapons, or ahimsa? A land struggling against poverty and inequality, or the world's largest middle-class society? Is it still simmering with communal tensions, or history's most successful melting pot? Is it Bollywood or Satyajit Ray? Shweta Shetty or Alia Rakha? Is it the handloom or the hyperlink?

The truth is, no single image can possibly do justice to your great nation. But beyond the complexities and the apparent contradictions, I believe India teaches us some very basic lessons.

The first is about democracy. There are still those who deny

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that democracy is a universal aspiration; who say it works only for people of a certain culture, or a certain degree of economic development. India has been proving them wrong for 52 years now. Here is a country where more than 2 million people hold elected office in local government; a country that shows at every election that those who possess the least cherish their vote the most. Far from washing away the uniqueness of your culture, your democracy has brought out the richness of its tapestry, and given you the knot that holds it together.

A second lesson India teaches is about diversity. You have already heard remarks about that this morning. But around the world there is a chorus of voices who say ethnic and religious diversity is a threat; who argue that the only way to keep different people from killing one another is to keep them as far apart as possible. But India has shown us a better way.

For all the troubles you have seen, surely the subcontinent has seen more innocence hurt in the efforts to divide people by ethnicity and faith than by the efforts to bring them together in peace and harmony.

Under trying circumstances, you have shown the world how to live with difference. You have shown that tolerance and mutual respect are in many ways the keys to our common survival. That is something the whole world needs to learn.

A third lesson India teaches is about globalization and what may be the central debate of our time. Many people believe the forces of globalization are inherently divisive; that they can only widen the gap between rich and poor. That is a valid fear, but I believe wrong.

As the distance between producers large and small, and customers near and far becomes less relevant, developing countries will have opportunities not only to succeed, but to lead in lifting more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in human history. In the old economy, location was everything. In the new economy, information, education and motivation are everything-and India is proving it.

You liberated your markets and now you have one of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world. At the rate of growth within your grasp, India's standard of living could rise by 500 percent in just 20 years. You embraced information technology and now, when Americans and other big software companies call for consumer and customer support, they're just as likely to find themselves talking to an

expert in Bangalore as one in Seattle.

You decentralized authority, giving more individuals and communities the freedom to succeed. In that way, you affirmed what every successful country is finding in its own way: globalization does not favor nations with a licensing raj, it does favor nations with a panchayat raj. And the world has been beating a path to your door.

In the new millennium, every great country must answer one overarching question: how shall we define our greatness? Every countryAmerica included-is tempted to cling to yesterday's definition of economic and military might. But true leadership for the United States and India derives more from the power of our example and the potential of our people.

I believe that the greatest of India's many gifts to the world is the example its people have set "from Midnight to Millennium."

Think of it: virtually every challenge humanity knows can be found here in India. And every solution to every challenge can be found here as well: confidence in democracy; tolerance for diversity; a willingness to embrace social change. That is why Americans admire India; why we welcome India's leadership in the region and the world; and why we want to take our partnership to a new level, to advance our common values and interests, and to resolve the differences that still remain.

There were long periods when that would not have been possible. Though our democratic ideals gave us a starting point in common, and our dreams of peace and prosperity gave us a common destination, there was for too long too little common ground between East and West, North and South. ow, thankfully, the old balTiers between nations and people, economies and cultures, are being replaced by vast networks of cooperation and commerce. With our open, entrepreneurial societies, India and America are at the center of those networks. We must expand them, and defeat the forces that threaten them.

To succeed, I believe there are four large challenges India and the United States must meet together---ehallenges that should define our partnership in the years ahead.

The first of these challenges is to get our own (Continued on page 14)

t the dawn of a new century, President Clinton and Prime Minister Vajpayee resolve to create a closer and qualitatively new relationship between the United States and India.

We are two of the world's largest democracies. We are nations forged from many traditions and faiths, proving year after year that diversity is our strength. From vastly different origins and experiences, we have come to the same conclusions: that freedom and democracy are the strongest bases for both peace and prosperity, and that they are universal aspirations, constrained neither by culture nor levels of economic development.

There have been times in the past when our relationship drifted without a steady course.

As we now look toward the future, we are convinced that it is time to chart a new and purposeful direction in our relationship.

Globalization is erasing boundaries and building networks between nations and peoples, economies and cultures. The world is increasingly coming together around the democratic ideals India and the United States have long championed and lived by.

Together, we represent a fifth of the world's people, more than a quarter of the world's economy. We have built creative, entrepreneurial societies. We are leaders in the information age. The currents of commerce and culture that link our societies run strong and deep. In many ways, the character of the 21st century world will depend on the success of our cooperation for peace, prosperity, democracy and freedom.

That presents us with an opportunity, but also a profound responsibility to work together. Our partnership of shared ideals leads us to seek a natural partnership of shared endeavors.

In the new century, India and the United States will be partners in peace, with a common interest in and complementary responsibility for ensuring regional and international security. We will engage in regular consultations on, and work together for, strategic stability in Asia and beyond. We will bolster joint efforts to counter terrorism and meet other challenges to regional peace. We will strengthen the international security system, including in the United Nations, and support the United Nations in its peacekeeping efforts. We acknowledge that tensions in South Asia can only be resolved by the nations of South Asia. India is committed to enhancing cooperation, peace and stability in the region.

India and the United States share a commitment to reducing and ultimately eliminating nuclear weapons, but we have not always agreed on how to reach this common goal. The United States believes India should forgo nuclear weapons. India believes that it needs to maintain a credible minimum nuclear deterrent in keeping with its own assessment of its security needs. Nonetheless, India and the U.S. are prepared to work together to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery. To this end, we will persist with and build upon the productive bilateral dialogue already underway.

We reaffirm our respective voluntary commitments to forgo further nuclear explosive tests. We will work together and with others for an early commencement of negotiations on a treaty to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons. We have both shown strong commitments to export controls, and will continue to strengthen them. We will work together to prevent the spread of dangerous technologies. We are committed to build confidence and reduce the chances of miscalculation. We will pursue our security needs in a restrained and responsible manner, and will not engage in nuclear and missile arms races. We will seek to narrow our differences and increase mutual understanding on nonproliferation and security issues. This will help us to realize the full potential of IndoU.S. relations and contribute significantly to regional and global security.

The true measure of our strength lies in the ability of our people to shape their destiny and to realize their aspirations for a better life. That is why the United States and India are and will be allies in the cause of democracy. We will share our experience in nurturing and strengthening democratic institutions the world over and fighting the challenge to democratic order from forces such as terrorism. We will cooperate with others to launch an international Community of Democracies this year.

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Vision Statement

The United States applauds India's success in opening its economy, its achievements in science and technology, its commitment to a new wave of economic expansion and reform, and its determination to bring the benefits of economic growth to all its people.

Our nations pledge to reduce impediments to bilateral trade and investment and to expand commerce between us, especially in the emerging knowledge-based industries and hightechnology areas.

We will work together to preserve stability and growth in the global economy as well.

And we will join in an unrelenting battle against poverty in the world, so that the promise of a new economy is felt everywhere and no nation is left behind. That is among the fundamental challenges of our time. Opening trade and resisting protectionism are the best means for meeting it. We support an open, equitable and transparent rule-based multilateral trading system, and we will work together to strengthen it. We agree that developed countries should embrace policies that offer developing countries the opportunity to grow, because growth is the key to rising incomes and rising standards. At the same time, we share the conviction that human development also requires empowerment of people and availability of basic freedoms.

As leaders in the forefront of the new high-technology economy, we recognize that countries can achieve robust economic growth while protecting the environment and taking action to combat climate change. We will do our part to meet the global environmental challenges, including climate change and the impacts of air and water pollution on human health.

We also pledge a common effort to battle the infectious diseases that kill people and retard progress in so many countries. India is at the forefront of the global effort that has brought us to the threshold of the eradication of polio. With leadership, joint research and application of modem science, we can and will do the same for the leading killers of our time, including AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

We are proud of the cooperation between Indians and Americans in advancing frontiers of knowledge. But even as we unravel the mysteries of time and space, we must continue to apply our knowledge to older challenges: eradicating human suffering, disease and poverty. In the past, our cooperation helped ease mass hunger in the world. In the future, it will focus as well on the development of clean energy, health and education.

Our partnership is not an end in itself, but a means to all these ends. And it is reinforced by the ties of scholarship, commerce, and increasingly of kinship among our people. The industry, enterprise and cultural contributions of Americans of Indian heritage have enriched and enlivened both our societies.

Today, we pledge to deepen the Indian-American partnership in tangible ways, always seeking to reconcile our differences through dialogue and engagement, always seizing opportunities to advance the countless interests we have in common. As a first step, President Clinton has invited Prime Minister Vajpayee to visit Washington at a mutually convenient opportunity, and the Prime Minister has accepted that invitation. Henceforth, the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of India should meet regularly to institutionalize our dialogue. We have also agreed on and separately outlined an architecture of additional high-level consultations, and of joint working groups, across the broad spectrum of areas in which we are determined to institutionalize our enhanced cooperation. And we will encourage even stronger people-to-people ties.

For India and the United States, this is a day of new beginnings. We have before us for the first time in 50 years the possibility to realize the full potential of our relationship. We will work to seize that chance, for our benefit and all those with whom we share this increasingly interdependent world.

William Jefferson Clinton President of the United States of America Done on March 21, 2000, at New Delhi

Atal Behari Vajpayee Prime Minister of India

President Ciinton shakes hands witl~ members of Parliamentrifter his ~peec/1 on March 22.

At the state banquet ar Rashtrapati Bhavan. facing the President are: Vice President Krishna Kant, President K.R. Narayanan, Prime Minister Atal Beluiri Vajpayee, ChiejJustice A.S. Anand. Leader of Opposition Sonia Gandhi, Secretary of State Madeleifle.Albright, Commerce Mini~erMurasofi Maran. U.S. Ci!rngressmen Gary Ackerman and Jim Greenwood.

711路0 Preside/Ifs greet guests at !he hanquet.President Clinton with Ambassador Richard F. Celeste as .laq11eline Lundquisr meets President K.R. Narayanan.

12

SPAN MAY/JL'NE2000

VISION STATEMENT ADDENDUM Institutional Dialogue Between the United States and India 1. During the visit of President Clinton to Delhi in March 2000, President Clinton and Prime Minister Vajpayee agreed as part of their vision for the future relationship that a regular, wide-ranging dialogue is important for achieving the goal of establishing closer and multifaceted relations between India and the United States and for the two countries to work jointly for promotion of peace and prosperity in the 21st century. The two leaders agreed on a number of steps to intensify and institutionalize the dialogue between India and the United States.

2. The President of the United States and Prime Minister of India will hold regular bilateral "Summits" in alternating capitals or elsewhere, including on the occasions of multilateral meetings, to review bilateral relations and consult on international developments and issues. They will remain in frequent contact by telephone and through letters.

3. The two countries will also hold an Annual Foreign Policy Dialogue at the level of the Secretary of State of the United States and External Affairs Minister of India. This dialogue will be broad-based and touch upon all aspects of U.S.-India relations, including considering the work of other groups as appropriate.

4. The two countries also consider the ongoing Dialogue on Security and Nonproliferation between the Deputy Secretary of State of the United States and External Affairs Minister of India important for improving mutual understanding on bilateral, regional and international security matters. They agreed that this dialogue should continue and take place semi-annually or as often as considered desirable by both sides. The Principals of this dialogue will establish Expert Groups on specific issues as considered desirable and appropriate.

S. Foreign Office Consultations between the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs of the United States and Foreign Secretary of India will continue. The two leaders believe that close cooperation between the two countries is a factor of stability in the politically and culturally diverse and rapidly transforming Asia. A Dialogue on Asian Security will also be conducted as part of the Foreign Office Consultations. The two sides will also stay in close touch and consult on intell1ational democracy initiatives.

6. The two leaders consider combating international terrorism as one of the most important global challenges. They expressed satisfaction at the establishment of the Joint Working Group on Counter-terrorism and its productive first meeting in February 2000. They agree that the Joint Working Group should continue to meet regularly and become an effective mechanism for the two countries to share information and intensify their cooperation in combating terrorism.

7. The two leaders see an enormous potential for enhancement of economic and business relations between the two countries in the Knowledge Age. They decided to institutionalize bilateral economic dialogue. They will keep themselves informed and follow developments in the bilateral economic dialogue closely tlu'ough a high-level coordinating group. The coordinating group will be led on the U.S. side by the White House with the support of the State Department, and on the Indian side by the Prime Minister's Office with the support of the Ministry of External Affairs.

• The Coordinating Group will develop a common economic agenda for and undertake preparations for the Heads of Govell1ment meetings. With broad inter-agency and inter-ministerial representations at senior official levels, it would convene regularly to facilitate close coordination on the various issues raised in the ministerial dialogues and ensure that discussions therein complement and reinforce broad economic and foreign policy objectives, including the deepening of bilat-

eral cooperation on high technology and information technology issues.

• U.S.-India Financial and Economic Forum: The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and the Indian Minister of Finance will host a forum on finance and investment issues, macroeconomic policy and intell1ational economic developments at regular intervals. Their meetings at the ministerial level would be supplemented by sub-Cabinet meetings and involve, as appropriate, the participation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve, Council of Economic Advisers, and other officials of the U.S. Govell1ment and the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Reserve Bank of India, and other officials of the Government of India.

• U.S.-India Commercial Dialogue: The U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Minister of Commerce and Industry of India will lead a dialogue to deepen ties between the Indian and American business communities. The dialogue will encompass regular government-togovernment meetings to be held in conjunction with private sector meetings. Its aim will be to (a) facilitate trade, and (b) maximize investment opportunities across a broad range of economic sectors, including information technology, infrastructure, biotechnology and services.

Participation will include, as appropriate, representatives of other Cabinet agencies and ministries on both sides. Close contact will be maintained with business associations, and activities will be planned with the benefit of such private sector input, including the establishment of subcommittees to pursue specific projects or sectoral issues of mutual interest.

• U.S.-India Working Group on Trade: The United States Trade Representative and the Ministry of Commerce and other concerned Ministries/Departments of the Government of India will engage in regular discussion to enhance cooperation on trade policy. As appropriate, individual trade issues could be examined in greater depth with the participation of other agencies with corresponding responsibilities and through creation of sub-groups. The Group will serve as a locus of consultation on a broad range of trade-related issues, including those pertaining to the World Trade Organization. The Group will receive inputs from the private sector (including trade policy issues identified in the U.S.-India Commercial Dialogue) as appropriate.

8. The two leaders consider cooperation between the two countries in energy and environment an important part of their vision for the future. They have agreed to set up a Joint Consultative Group on Clean Energy and Environment. The Group will hold periodic ministerial! high level meetings as desirable and appropriate and will lay emphasis on collaborative projects, developing and deploying clean energy technologies, public and private sector investment and cooperation, and climate change and other environmental issues. The Co-conveners of the Group will be the Department of State of the United States and the Ministry of Extell1al Affairs of India.

9. The two leaders believe that the strong scientific resources of the two countries provide excellent opportunities for scientific collaboration between them. They agree to set up a U.S.-India Science and Technology Forum. The Forum shall promote research and development, the transfer of technology, the creation of a comprehensive elect{onic reference source for U.S.-India science and technology cooperation, and the electronic exchange and dissemination of information on U.S.-India science and technology cooperation, and other programs consistent with the previous practice of the U.S.-India Foundation.

10. Institutional dialogue in other areas will be considered as mutually agreed.

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to a new wave of economic reform; your determination Qls .•,~~ to bring the fruits of growth to all your people. We are proud to support India's growth as your largest partner in trade and investment. And we want to see more Indians and more Americans benefit from our economic ties, especially in the cutting edge fields of information technology, biotechnology and clean energy.

The private sector will drive this progress, but our job as governments is to create the conditions that will allow them to succeed in doing so, and to reduce the remaining impediments to trade and investment between us.

Our second challenge is to sustain global economic growth in a way that lifts the lives of rich and poor alike, both across and within national borders. Part of the world today lives at the cutting edge of change, while a big part still exists at the bare edge of survival.

Part of the world lives in the infornlation age. Part of the world does not even reach the clean water age. And often the two live side by side. It is unacceptable, it is intolerable; thankfully, it is unnecessary and it is far more than a regional crisis.

Whether around the comer or around the world, abject poverty in this new economy is an affront to our common humanity and a threat to our common prosperity.

The problem is truly immense, as you know far better than 1. But perhaps for the first time in all history, few would dispute that we know the solutions. We know we need to invest in education and literacy, so that children can have soaring dreams and the tools to realize them. We know we need to make a special commitment in developing nations to the education of young girls, as well as young boys. Everything we have learned about development tells us that when women have access to knowledge, to health, to economic opportunity and to civil rights, children thrive, families succeed and countries prosper.

Here again, we see how a problem and its answers can be found side by side in India. For every economist who preaches the virtues of women's empowerment points at first to the achievements of India's state of Kerala.

To promote development, we know we must conquer the diseases that kill people and progress. Last December, India immunized 140 million children against polio, the biggest public health effort in human history. I congratulate you on that.

I have launched an initiative in the United States to speed the development of vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis and AIDSthe biggest infectious killers of our time. This July, when our partners in the G-8 meet in Japan, I will urge them to join us.

But that is not enough, for at best, effective vaccines are years away. Especially for AIDS, we need a commitment

today to prevention, and that means straight talk and an end to stigmatizing. As Prime Minister Vajpayee said, no one should ever speak of AIDS as someone else's problem.

This has long been a big problem for the United States. It is now a big problem for you. I promise you America's partnership in the continued struggle.

To promote development, we know we must also stand with those struggling for human rights and freedom around the world and in the region. For as the economist Amartya Sen has said, no system of government has done a better job in easing human want, in averting human catastrophes, than democracy. I am proud America and India will stand together on the right side of history when we launch the Community of Democracies in Warsaw this summer.

All of these steps are essential to lifting people's lives.

But there is yet another. With greater trade and the growth it brings, we can multiply the gains of education, better health and demOCratic empowelment. That is why I hope we will work together to launch a new global trade round that will promote economic development for all.

One of the benefits of the World Trade Organization [WTOj is that it has given developing countries a bigger voice in global trade policy. Developing countries have used that voice to urge richer nations to open their markets further so that all can have a chance to grow. That is something the opponents of the WTO don't fully appreciate yet.

We need to remind them that when Indians and Brazilians and Indonesians speak up for open trade, they are not speaking for some narrow corporate interest, but for a huge part of humanity that has no interest in being saved from development.

Of course, trade should not be a race to the bottom in environmental and labor standards, but neither should fears about trade keep part of our global community forever at the bottom.

Yet we must also remember that those who are concerned about the impact of globalization in terms of inequality, in environmental degradation do speak for a large part of humanity.

Those who believe that trade should contribute not just to the wealth, but also to the fairness of societies; those who share Nehru's dream of a structure for living that fulfills our material needs, and at the same time sustains our mind and spirit.

We can advance these values without engaging in richcountry protectionism. Indeed, to sustain a consensus for open trade, we must find a way to advance these values as well. That is my motivation, and my only motivation, in seeking a dialogue about the connections between labor, the environment, and trade and development.

I would remind you-and I want to emphasize this-the United States has the most open markets of any wealthy country in the world. We have the largest trade deficit. We also have had a strong economy, because we have welcomed the products and the services from the labor of people throughout

the world. I am for an open global trading system. But we must do it in a way that advances the cause of social justice around the world.

The third challenge we face is to see that the prosperity and growth of the information age require us to abandon some of the outdated truths of the Industrial Age. As the economy grows faster today, for example, when children are kept in school, not put to work. Think about the industries that are driving our growth today in India and in America. Just as oil enriched the nations who had it in the 20th century, clearly knowledge is doing the same for the nations who have it in the 21st century. The difference is, knowledge can be tapped by all people everywhere, and it will never run out.

We must also find ways to achieve robust growth while protecting the environment and reversing climate change. I'm convinced we can do that as well. We will see in the next few years, for example, automobiles that are three, four, perhaps five times as efficient as those being driven today. Soon scientists will make alternative sources of energy more widely available and more affordable. Just for example, before long chemists almost certainly will unlock the block that will allow us to produce eight or nine gallons of fuel from bio-fuels, farm fuels, using only one gallon of gasoline.

Indian scientists are at the forefront of this kind of research -pioneering the use of solar energy to power rural communities; developing electric cars for use in crowded cities; converting agricultural waste into electricity. If we can deepen our cooperation for clean energy, we will strengthen our economies, in1prove our people's health and fight global warming. This should be a vital element of our new partnership.

A fourth challenge we face is to protect the gains of democracy and development from the forces which threaten to undermine them. There is the danger of organized crime and drugs. There is the evil of trafficking in human beings, a modern form of slavery.

And of course, there is the threat of teITorism. Both our nations know it all too well.

Americans understood the pain and agony you went through during the Indian Airlines hijacking. And I saw that pain firsthand when I met with the parents and the widow of the young man who was killed on that airplane. We grieve with you for the Sikhs who were killed in Kashmir, and our heart goes out to their families. We will work with you to build a system of justice, to strengthen our cooperation against telTOr.We must never relax our vigilance or allow the perpetrators to intimidate us into retreating from our democratic ideals.

Another danger we face is the spread of weapons of mass destruction to those who might have no reservations about using them. I still believe this is the greatest potential threat to the security we all face in the 21st century. It is why we must be vigilant in fighting the spread of chemical and biological

weapons. And it is why we must both keep working closely to resolve our remaining differences on nuclear proliferation.

I am aware that I speak to you on behalf of a nation that has possessed nuclear weapons for 55 years and more. But since 1988, the United States has dismantled more than 13,000 nuclear weapons. We have helped Russia to dismantle their nuclear weapons and to safeguard the material that remains.

We have agreed to an outline of a treaty with Russia that will reduce our remaining nuclear arsenal by more than half. We are producing no more fissile material, developing no new land- or submarine-based missiles, engaging in no new nuclear testing.

From South America to South Africa, nations are foreswearing these weapons, realizing that a nuclear future is not a more secure future.

Most of the world is moving toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. That goal is not advanced if any country, in any region, it moves in the other directio'n.

I say this with great respect. Only India can deteJTnine its own interests. Only India. Only India can know if it truly is safer today than before the tests. Only India can determine if it will benefit from expanding its nuclear and missile capabilities, if its neighbors respond by doing the same thing. Only India knows if it can afford a sustained investment in both conventional and nuclear forces while meeting its goals for human development.

These are questions others may ask, but only you can answer.

I can only speak to you as a friend about America's own experience during the Cold War. We were geographically distant from the Soviet Union. We were not engaged in direct armed combat. Through years of direct dialogue with our adversary, we each had a very good idea of the other's capabilities, doctrines and intentions. We each spent billions of dollars on elaborate command and control systems, for nuclear weapons are not cheap.

And yet, in spite of all of this-and as I sometimes say jokingly, in spite of the fact that both sides had very good spies, and that was a good thing-in spite of all of this, we came far too close to nuclear war. We learned that deterrence alone cannot be relied on to prevent accident or miscalculation. And in a nuclear standoff, there is nothing more dangerous than believing there is no danger.

I can also repeat what I said at the outset. India is a leader, a great nation, which by virtue of its size, its achievements and its example, has the ability to shape the character of our time. For any of us, to claim that mantle and assert that status is to accept first and foremost that our actions have consequences for others beyond our borders. Great nations with broad horizons must consider whether actions advance or hinder what Nehru called the larger cause of humanity.

So India's nuclear policies, inevitably, have consequences beyond your borders: eroding the barriers against the spread of

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sen to foreswear these weapons, encouraging others to ;, !7 keep their options open. But if India's nuclear test ?t'l.ys ~ ~s~f} shook the world, India's leadership for nonproliferation can certainly move the world.

India and the United States have reaffirmed our commitment to forego nuclear testing. And for that I thank the Prime Minister, the government and the people of India. But in our own self-interest-and I say this again-in our own self-interest we can do more. I believe both nations should join the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; work to launch negotiations on a treaty to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons; strengthen export controls. And India can pursue defense policies in keeping with its commitment not to seek a nuclear or missile arms race, which the Prime Minister has forcefully reaffirmed just in these last couple of days.

Again, I do not presume to speak for you or to tell you what to decide.

It is not my place. You are a great nation and you must decide. But I ask you to continue our dialogue on these issues. And let us turn our dialogue into a genuine partnership against proliferation. If we make progress in narrowing our differences, we will be both more secure, and our relationship can reach its full potential.

I hope progress can also be made in overcoming a source of tension in this region, including the tensions between India and Pakistan. I share many of your government's concerns about the course Pakistan is taking; your disappointment that past overtures have not always met with success; your outrage over recent violence. I know it is difficult to be a democracy bordered by nations whose governments reject democracy.

But I also believe-I also believe India has a special opportunity, as a democracy, to show its neighbors that democracy is about dialogue. It does not have to be about friendship, but it is about building working relationships among people who differ.

One of the wisest things anyone ever said to me is that you don't make peace with your friends. That is what the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told me before he signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, with whom he had been fighting for decades. It is well to remember-I remind myself of it all the time, even when I have arguments with members of the other party in my Congress-you don't make peace with your friends.

Engagement with adversaries is not the same thing as endorsement. It does not require setting aside legitimate grievances. Indeed, I strongly believe that what has happened since your Prime Minister made his courageous journey to Lahore only reinforces the need for dialogue.

I can think of no enduring solution to this problem that can be achieved in any other way. In the end, for the sake of the innocents who always suffer the most, someone must end the

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contest of inflicting and absorbing pain.

Let me also make clear, as I have repeatedly, I have certainly not come to South Asia to mediate the dispute over Kashmir. Only India and Pakistan can work out the problems between them. And I will say the same thing to General Musharraf in Islamabad. But if outsiders cannot resolve this problem, I hope you will create the opportunity to do it yourselves, calling on the support of others who can help where possible, as American diplomacy did in urging the Pakistanis to go back behind the line of control in the Kargil crisis.

In the meantime, I will continue to stress that this should be a time for restraint, for respect for the line of control, for renewed lines of communication.

Addressing this challenge and all the others I mentioned will require us to be closer partners and better friends, and to remember that good friends, out of respect, are honest with one another. And even when they do not agree, they always try to find common ground.

I have read that one of the unique qualities of Indian classical music is its elasticity. The composer lays down a foundation, a structure of melodic and rhythmic arrangements, but the player has to improvise within that structure to bring the raga to life.

The key is to genuinely and respectfully listen to each other. If we do, Americans will better understand the scope of India's achievements, and the dangers India stiJi faces in this troubled part of the world. We will understand that India will not choose a particular course simply because others wish it to do so. It will choose only what it believes its interests clearly demand and what its people .democratically embrace.

If we listen to each other, I also believe Indians will understand better that America very much wants you to succeed.

Time and again, time and again in my time as President, America has found that it is the weakness of great nations, not their strength, that threatens our vision for tomorrow.

So we want India to be strong; to be secure; to be united; to be a force for a safer, more prosperous, more democratic world. Whatever we ask of you, we ask in that spirit alone.

After too long a period of estrangement, India and the United States have learned that being natural allies is a wonderful thing, but it is not enough. Our task is to turn a common vision into common achievements so that partners in spirit can be partners in fact.

We have already come a long way to this day of new beginnings, but we still have promises to keep, challenges to meet and hopes to redeem.

So let us seize this moment with humility in the fragile and fleeting nature qf this life, but absolute confidence in the power of the human spirit. Let us seize it for India, for America, for all those with whom we share this small planet, and for all the children that together we can give such bright tomOlTOws. Thank you very much.

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Ahore: President Clinton and Chelsea at the Taj Mahal in Agra. It was Chelsea's second visit. Left (from left to right): Governor Suraj Bhan, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh. well-known environmental activist Veer Bhadra Mishra and President Clinton at the signing of the em路ironmental protection agreement at Taj Khema.

The enthusiasm was mutual: President Clinton meets the women from Dairy Cooperative Union at Nayla village near Jaipur, Rajasthan.

Elephants dressed in holiday best welcome the President to Jaipur, although he had to decline a ride for security reasons. Rajasthan Tourism Minister Bina Kak talks with the President after receiving him with garlands.

The perfect tourists. President Clinton and Chelsea visit Amber Fort and get in a little shopping.

Sculptor Aljun Prajapati displays his excellent likeness of the President.

he presidential shikar. Led by expert Fateh Singh Rathore, the presidential party hunted for a glimpse of tigers. They were lucky, sighting two in a few hours. The tiger relaxing in the grass (bottom) remains unmoved by his visitors.

President Clinton, on several occasions, expressed his hope that efforts to save these exquisite animals from extinction will succeed. During his visit a U.S. Government contribution totaling $250,000 was announced-with matching funds from India, contributions will come to more than $450,000. The funds go to various tiger and Asian elephant conservation projects.

The "Greening the Globe" initiative announced earlier this year will nearly double US. funding for tropical forest and biodiversity conservation to a total of $150 million in 2001. The initiative also includes $3 million, a 50 percent increase, to help Asian and African countries protect endangered elephants, tigers and rhinos, and provide for training and technical assistance.

Back to business. President Clinton is greeted in Hyderabad by_ Andhra Pradesh Chief Kmister N. Chandrababu Naidu. The President

Presiiknt Clinton talks to big business at the Bmnbay Stock Exchange.

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oard KnollWledge To get them to share you've got to overcome a lot of history.

f your employees are hoarding their knowledge to the detriment of the company, try getting them in touch with their prehistoric side. A corporate structure based on a model developed 15,000 or more years ago, when our ancestors were in their longstanding hunter-gatherer mode, would be less likely to impede knowledge sharing among all of those brainy techies, professionals and managers whose unfettered collaboration could take your firm on a rocket ride to unprecedented success.

Alas, your firm-along with almost every other modern organization-bases its structure on a model that arose in our more recent agricultural and machine eras.

That means knowledge sharing is probably stifled by at least the vestiges of a command-and-control system that presumedaccurately, until recently-that all knowledge of any value to the organization resided in the company's procedures manuals and top managers' minds.

Anyway, that's about the way Charles Ehin sees it. The former e-systems organizational development manager, currently a management professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, notes that when our ancestors ended their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and settled down to an agricultural existence, it kept them in one place long enough to build civilization, found mercantilism, spark the Industrial Revolution

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and invent suburbs. But despite these obviously positive developments, Ehin contends, there was one drawback: We lost an element of the hunter-gatherer culture that is as relevant to the information age as it was to the stone age. Hunter-gatherers naturally and unthinkingly formed close-knit, egalitarian bands of 30 to 50 individuals, in which each member shared every bit of knowledge that could contribute to the improved welfare of the clan. "Members of t~ese kinship groups lived by a strong ethic of sharing. Consequently, the hunter-gatherers were extraordinarily egalitarian, conducting their affairs quite successfully without the need for powerful chiefs," Ehin explains. The point of this social structure, we're told today by evolutionary psychologists, was for clan members to survive and pass along their genes to the next generation.

That was no less the point when we went from what Ehin calls a "shared-access" mode as hunter-gatherers to a "controlledaccess" mode as agriculturalists, but the means of survival changed. He explains: "In the agricultural and machine ages, society was well-served by controlled access to explicit knowledge-facts, rules, instructions and procedures-by the few.

But our information age calls for shared access to tacit knowledge--expertise, reasoning, judgment and insight-by all.

Organizations that once stood or fell on the

basis of tool and muscle power now succeed or fail on the basis of cumulative brainpower-the extent to which they encourage their people to make tacit knowledge explicit by selflessly sharing knowledge." In other words, our authoritarian, square-peg organizational structure doesn't fit what we need in this egalitarian, round-hole knowledge age.

Hoarding it Over Everyone Gone for good, observes Thomas O. Davenport, a principal in the San Francisco office of Towers Perrin, is the sort of managerial hegemony under which "scientific management" originator Frederick W. Taylor could gain renown with guidance such as this: "The'work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions ...as well as the

means to be used in doing the work."

Shifting to egalitarianism is a particularly wrenching change for the very generation of B-school grads who are at this moment in their prime as senior managers, says Davenport, author of Human Capital: What It Is and Why People Invest It (Jossey-Bass). "We were taught to act like engineers and to believe that you can engineer your way out of most business problems. All you need to do it is the right tools and all of the available information. You close yourself in a conference room with your similarly schooled fellow senior managers, analyze the problem at hand, and emerge with a pronouncement that tells everyone else in the company what to do."

Little wonder, Davenport adds, that managers thus educated would see the career benefits of hoarding rather than sharing knowledge. But those managers make a critical mistake if they don't recognize that knowledge is very different from the other inputs an organization needs in order to provide valuable outputs. The difference was described this way by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in a 1997 Harvard Business Review article: "Unlike the traditional factors of production, land, labor and capital, knowledge is a resource locked in the human mind. Creating and sharing knowledge are intangible activ.:ities that can neither be supervised nor forced out of people. They happen only when people cooperate voluntarily." As the Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek has argued, "Practically every individuaL.possesses unique information" that can be put to use only with "his active cooperation." Getting that active cooperation may well turn out to be one of the key managerial issues of the next few decades.

If it is, managers will have to recognize that any career advantages of hoarding knowledge in the machine age have been obliterated in the information explosion.

"In the machine-centered world, the advantages of 'I know more than you' were real," says professor Mark Addleson, director of the Program on Social and Organizational Learning at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. "Hierar-路 chy was based, in effect, on little more than span of control. I'm at the bottom

when I know how to keep one machine running, move up when I know how to keep a group of machines running, and move steadily higher as I progressively know how to run a department, a division and a company. In this machine-dominated environment, I could truly 'possess' knowledge, because all I needed to know were facts-the facts of financing machines, so I could acquire them, and the facts of engineering machines, so I could make them run."

Things are far different in today's worker-centered world, Addleson says.

"The work is in what people-not machines-do, and in what people do together. There is often no pre-defined production task to which every worker is attached. The creativity of the organization is not reflected in the output of its machines, but in the interaction of its people.

Knowledge sharing isn't just desirable, but essential." But the sharing imperative is thwarted, Addleson says, "because the stilldominant way of structuring the organization is based on the logic of the machine."

Dominant, yes; exclusive, no, as proved by the famed knowledge-sharing corporate cultures at a few mostly young, mostly high-tech companies such as Microsoft. In his latest book, Business @ the Speed of Thought (Warner), Bill Gates argues that a company's survival today is determined more than anything by its ability to circulate information through improved collaboration. "The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competitors," he writes, "is to do an outstanding job with information."

Doing What Comes Naturally But critics have noted that Gates, at least in the pages of his book, seems to see technology alone-not people-as facilitating the company's now-essential information sharing. "Information, alone, isn't enough," wrote consultant Paul Carroll in a Wall Street Journal review of Gates's new volume. Charles Ehin goes further, arguing that everything an organization does, including what it does to encourage or discourage knowledge sharing, occurs within the historically ignored context of human nature. When we observe organizations

The Shock of Knowledge Sharing ro golf phenom Tiger Woods and PGA Tour veteran Mark O'Meara formed what O'Meara telmed "a unique friendship" in the year after Woods, then 22, joined the pro golf tour in 1997. The two Orlando, Florida, neighbors played and talked golf regularly while they weren't on tour, and often while they were. The then-41-year-old O'Meara, widely labeled the best pro never to win a major golf toumament, shared everything he knew about golf with newcomer Woods. The presumed journeyman veteran passed along to his upstart rival the only element of the game in which Woods could be said to be lacking: the expertise or tacit knowledge gained from year after grinding year on the pro circuit. O'Meara seemed to have given up dreams of golf superstardom, content to possibly be remembered as the selfless graybeard who gave Woods the final, essential boost to a career whose success could surpass that of Nicklaus or Palmer.

Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, things began to go incredibly right for O'Meara, who had finished no better than third in 56 major tournaments over 17 years. In 1998, he wrested from Woods himself the championship of the Masters

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with due regard for human nature, Ehin holds, we can see that their controlled-access-mode structure triggers the "self-centered" human drives. These are concerned with such issues as rank, status, control, territory and possessions. But that's not what managers should seek in our shared-access-mode information age, which calls for "other-centered" drives, aimed at qualities such as attachment, affiliation, altruism and care-giving and receiving.

The relatively sudden emergence of the knowledge-sharing imperative was spurred, according to Towers Perrin's Davenport, by two principal drivers: "First, the business world is moving much faster today than ever before. So it's unrealistic to suppose that any group of managers, no matter how smart and experienced they might be, can come up with timely solutions to today's complex problems without tapping the spectrum of human capital the company has within it.

Second, the people in today's organizations have a whole different set of expectations than ever before. They know they have valuable input on organizational issues, and expect to be able to provide it."

Tournament-O'Meara's first-ever major. Only a few months later, proving his newfound ranking among golf's elite was no fluke, O'Meara won another major, the British Open. In press reports of his double win, O'Meara credited his instruction of Woods as a factor in his remarkable achievement, saying, "For me to go out and play with such a young, talented player. ..has been an enOlmous boost."

Before O'Meara's big wins, anyone familiar with the unwritten rules of sports or corporate culture might have thought that the veteran's offering wisdom to Woods amounted to career suicide. You don't willingly share with any potential rival-least of all a brash, young one unrelated to you and not even a teammate or protege-the inside knowledge you've gained only by dint of your very own hardscrabble efforts. You don't, that is, unless you accept, as O'Meara at least implicitly accepted, a thought expressed by renowned psychologist and workplace observer Abraham Maslow more than 30 years before anyone wrote about managing knowledge: He wrote that "when I try to be altruistic and philanthropic, I cannot help benefiting myself or advancing my own self-interest."

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Another factor is offered by David L. Bradford, a senior lecturer at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, whose research has focused on the personal and organizational effects of internal collaboration vs. competitiveness. "We're experiencing an interdependency explosion," he contends. "As organizations get flatter, employees increasingly need to get information from peers, people at their own level." The information explosion also fosters interdependency, he adds. "It's difficult even for people who are brilliant or who have been with the organization for many years to know all they need to know to maintain top-level performance."

George Mason's Addleson describes the same development in a different way: "We're gradually giving up our collective belief in the expert-the notion that some people have the answers and others don't.

We're slowly adopting the more egalitarian view that many people know pieces of answers and no one knows it all." The organization's challenge, then, is to create a setting that allows its people to fit their individual pieces together to collectively "know it all."

Employees as Shareholders Managers must literally and figuratively reshape their organizations, so that they foster rather than impede knowledge sharing. "Shared access to information, \;Vhere all participate in an egalitarian management of resources for each other, must be given its essential place in organizational life," Ehin says. "Without it, tacit knowledge remains tacit, and all the organization can do is rehash explicit knowledge." Until it disappears.

For an organization to be capable of operating in a shared-access mode, Ehin argues, it must develop "basic competencies" that he dubs "the four tenets for fostering human nature." They are: • common purpose, characterized by shared values, self-reference and vision; • line-of-sight relationships, consisting of activities, interactions and sentiments; • visualizing wholes, adopting a broad organizational view and adopting system thinking; and • a sense of community, characterized by compassion, empathy and trust.

In his forthcoming book Unleashing Intellectual Capital (Butterworth-

Heinemann), Ehin observes that these tenets overlap and reinforce each other, such that "the system cannot function properly if one of the tenets is missing or has not been fully developed." Absence of common purpose, he contends, leaves the organization with no sense of direction. Without line-of-sight relationships, workers are blind to the ways their contributions mesh with those of everyone else. The visualization of wholes is required for taking in "the big picture."

And without a sense of community, the organization "has little hope for fully activating the altruistic human drives so vital for highly committed, cooperative activities."

If you're thinking at this point that it's tough enough to wrest your company from the effects of its authoritarian past, there's more: It's devilishly easy to do too much to encourage a sharing environment. Davenport expresses wider expert opinion in saying, "There's a certain fragility in an organization's efforts to elicit the tacit knowledge of its employees. A growing body of research shows that informal means are better than formal ones in getting knowledge from any one to the many." He notes that the informal, loosely formed "communities of practice" extolled by some management thinkers as an organization's best vehicle for making tacit knowledge explicit are "a special kind of team that coalesces organically, without official designation or even recognition by management.

Community members confer, collaborate, share information and teach one another, but not because the boss says they have to or the organization chart puts them in the same box. They do it because they need each other to get the job done."

Because the most essential ingredient in the formation and perpetuation of communities of practice is their informality, Davenport explains in Human Capital, senior managers must above all refrain from making them official. Learn to recognize them, he advises, "if for no other reason than to avoid disrupting their progress."

Yes, give them a few resources, such as the use of a conference room and a bul-

letin board on the Intranet, but don't fund them too much, force them to develop a charter, or compel them to produce something management defines unilaterally.

And by all means, "avoid the temptation to declare them an organizational unit and give them a box on the chart. Communities of practice are too evanescent to be engineered."

Daniel 1.S. Moorhead, who heads organizational learning at BT (British Telecom) Group, supports that theory.

"The fact that you might prove that knowledge sharing is essential today doesn't logically imply that you need a formal, structured system to achieve it.

Oxygen is essential for me to live, but that doesn't mean I need to put oxygen on my action agenda or develop an oxygenacquisition program."

Informality may also minimize what Moorhead views as a reluctance in some of us to go on record as "receivers" of knowledge contributed to a common pool by others. "When I borrow another's knowledge, I have to assume the one-down position in several respects," he asserts. "First, I must admit to myself that I need help. Second, I have to expose my weakness to those who learn that I went idea shopping. Third, I may have to incorporate a credit line in my report ,or project-and even share any reward when I'm officially recognized. All this in a culture that rewards decisiveness, individualism, self-sufficiency, perseverance and other John Wayne virtues."

Optimal size of these informal knowledge-sharing units is a critical consideration. It's no coincidence, research across the spectrum of social sciences shows, that our ancestral proclivity to form clans of 30 to 50 is repeated in workplace communities of practice and other informal groups of about the same size. It was and is the ideal size for a group to collectively gain the most from the cumulative knowledge of all its members. Thus, Ehin goes so far as to say, "Large companies should be broken up into relatively autonomous units of no more than 150 to 200 people linked together by an organic network. These smaller units give individuals the necessary line-of-sight

relationships with each other and their customers."

As an example, he cites Asea Brown Boveri, which employees 200,000 people but is broken down into approximately 5,000 independent operating units around the world, each composed of an average of 50 individuals.

The organization can also encourage knowledge sharing by hiring knowledge sharers. "Learning and teaching are competencies that can be screened for by employers," Davenport advises. Similarly, Ehin notes, "Organizations need to be very selective in deciding whom to invite to join them." People must fit the sharedaccess identity of the firm and be willing to commit themselves to greater levels of responsibility and accountability for knowledge -transfer. Management must also do more to keep these people, Ehin observes, "given that knowledge people use their minds, which means they own their means of production. When they leave, they take this means of production with them." To minimize such departures, Ehin claims, employees "need to be considered more as partners or volunteers than as employees, since they cannot be forced to engage their brains."

Managers must also remember to make knowledge sharing part of their personal management style, notes Stanford's David L. Bradford, coauthor of Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership (Wiley). For example, he explains, a manager can be more effective by continually seeking information from subordinates who almost always have relevant specialized knowledge or experience. "It's easy to say, 'This is the way we'll do things.' What's harder is to say, 'I want your opinion, I'm willing to be influenced, we'll have some give and take.' The idea is to combine what you know with what others know. The result will be a solution that's better than any you would have arrived at alone."

0 About the Author: David Stauffer heads Stauffer Bury Inc., a Red Lodge-based firm that provides management informationfor corporate investors, customers, employees and opinion leaders.

Making

It Work

How companies tap into the knowledge storehouse.

T

he necessity of knowledge sharing has been emphasized so often that it's on the verge of becoming a cliche. The question of how to convince your employees to share their knowledge, however, remains under debate. Because knowledge-sharing programs face a number of challenges, both cultural and procedural, it's unlikely that there is a single answer.

Indeed, most knowledge-management (KM) professionals agree that trying to find one cut-and-dried solution that will work for everyone is not only impossible-it's undesirable.

Some companies may benefit from a formal knowledge-management initiative, announced and implemented with all due hoopla. C. Douglass Izard, director of tax knowledge management for KPMG Peat Marwick, explains, "It is a big cultural change for a professional-services firm to share, because people in the past were rewarded for not sharing knowledge. You built an expertise in a certain area, and that's how you made a lot of money: by performing that for clients, not by sharing it across the firm." In this case, the implementation of knowledge sharing was clearly stated as a new policy, which required determined executive mandate and accompanying incentive programs.

Other companies, however, may find their employees more re-

ceptive to an informal, grass-roots movement encouraging them to share what they know. "I've found a lot of companies that look at knowledge sharing as something separate-a program, an event-and that's just opposite from the way we think of it," says Heather MacPherson, manager of workplace learning at the Royal Bank Financial Group, one of Canada's largest financialservices companies. "For us, this initiative has been in existence since time began." Because the company has a history of sharing, there was never a need for an abrupt change in policy.

But regardless of how a knowledge-sharing program begins or what structure it takes, the most successful programs are those that are inextricably tied to the business and its strategic objectives. David O. Ulrich, professor at the University of Michigan's School of Business Administration, asserts that an essential step in sharing knowledge is to generate it-through experimentation, benchmarking, bringing new talent into ~he organization and creating mechanisms for continuous improvement. How does this differ from what the rest of us have previously known as work?

The distinction lies in perspective. If we view everyday business activities as knowledge generation, it is easier to regard the results as quantifiable knowledge to be shared.

The next step, Ulrich says, "is to generalize that knowledge, to share it across boundaries. One way to do that is to create a culture where you're not punished for sharing. Another way is to move people from unit to unit, so that the knowledge embedded in the people moves. A third is to build an incentive system, so that there's a bonus or reward when you share knowledge. A fourth way to do that is governance: cross-functional teams and cross-unit teams, where you bring people together for decisions across an organization's boundaries. A fifth way is through communications forums, where you bring best-practice studies together as case studies that then get disseminated to other people."

Technology Is Just the Beginning Ulrich's first point-on the importance of creating a culture that doesn't penalize sharers-states, in a nutshell, the most important facet of knowledge management. Although probably few companies believe that they have a culture that punishes employees for sharing, think of the sales department that rewards only its top salesperson: The process turns her co-workers into her rivals.

For her to share her selling secrets with them would not only risk her bonus, which she would certainly consider punishment, but also require time that she could otherwise spend making sales.

Revamping the system to reward the department as a whole for overall increased sales is more conducive to a sharing culture.

Beyond that, though, companies must create cultures in which knowledge sharing is actually encouraged. Culture is one of KM's biggest buzzwords, but as art critics and sociologists alike can attest, culture is an insidious thing-difficult even to categorize, much less create. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that a knowledge-sharing culture runs counter to the values that

our society instills in individuals from our earliest years.

"Think about your experiences in school," says Chris Bogan, CEO of Best Practices LLC, a research advisory consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "As soon as you're in first grade, you're starting to take quizzes where you sign your paper and don't let your eyes rove. We have deep cultural traditions that tend to discourage sharing, so when we get into the workplace, encouraging people to do it is not what they expect. You have to manage that."

How, then, can a company overcome an individual's psychological hurdles to sharing what he knows?

The first step is to recognize that these hurdles exist. Many companies initiate their programs by pouring money into the creation of an Intranet or a database program, seemingly inspired by Kevin Costner's theory in the movie Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come." Unfortunately, they won't. "Too many so-called KM systems are Information Technology projects in disguise," writes Jim Botkin in his book Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company (Free Press). "As such, they are technical successes undern1ined by cultural shortcomings."

Bogan agrees: "I think there are still a lot of bold promises about what KM is going to do, but the actual performance on systems is far short of the proclamations and promises from vendors selling their wares and people lobbying for it internally. The truth of it is, I've looked at a lot of broad-based corporate KM systems, and as total systems, all of them are underwhelming."

This is not to underemphasize the importance of technology: In fact, it is technology that makes the difference between telling one colleague a good idea over coffee, or telling 15,000 colleagues by placing the infonnation in a worldwide database that is searchable by keyword. But if your company culture does not encourage sharing, your employees are not going to do so in any medium. "Clearly, it's a cultural change, not a software change," says Kimra Hawley, president and CEO of San Jose, Californiabased Input Software. "The software that you implement to help do this has to be easy enough to use that it doesn't present an obstacle in and of itself, but people can always find reasons why it's a pain to enter all this information."

The Nuts and Bolts of Sharing So how do you create this land of knowledge-sharing Canaan, where information flows like milk and honey? "The establishment of a knowledge-sharing system requires that senior management lead a vocal and highly visible effort to ensure that all employees understand the benefit of sharing experience and expertise," says Mark G. Mazzie, chief knowledge officer of the Knowledge Management Group for Barnett International, a research organization providing management solutions in drug development. Certainly, leadership is important and managerial mandate goes further at some companies than others. Botkin relates how KPMG initiated its Tax Knowledge Sharing system with an announcement from the chairman that the company's new policy would be for employees to submit valuable informa-

tion that they learned in the course of their work.

Despite the cultural roadblocks in the consulting industry that Izard described earlier, this announcement had a significant impact: Because tax professionals often receive new policiesfrom the Internal Revenue Service, for example-in this format, it was appropriate to the culture to initiate knowledge sharing in the same way. Botkin says, "You've created a situation where, because of the chairman's announcement, everybody is anxious to share. In the first year, employees submitted 6,000 pieces of knowledge to share, and they had an editorial board that took it down to 600."

An editorial board like the one Botkin mentions is important in instances where knowledge is being solicited from so many employees, in order to ensure that the information being disseminated is truly valuable. "If even 10 percent of the information is wrong or out of date," he says, "employees won't come back."

At KPMG, tax knowledge is shared through a three-part process. First, individuals submit information electronically to the tax-knowledge management group. In the second phase, Izard says, "We look at the quality of the submission, we judge whether it is unique, new and exciting, and if it is we put it into the sharing database. We also sanitize the document, removing the client name and that sort of thing. The third phase is the actual distribution of the information, which we do in a Web-based Intranet environment."

Clearly, the payoff for such a significant investment of money and time needs to be sizable. Although the return on investment for knowledge-management systems is not yet being widely measured, Izard has no doubt that the system has been of enormous benefit. "If someone in another office has a particular tax situation, they can go to the database and find out if we've already an~wered that one or a similar situation, and it saves a tremendous amount of time in serving the client. We've also taken our internal documents and linked them to the underlying authorities external to the firm-the statutes, the court cases, the regulations. So if an employee is reading advice that someone gave in the Des Moines office, and there's a reference to a court case, that's hyperlinked, and he doesn't have to go out to the library and research it." In other words, the system saves time by keeping employees from reinventing the wheel for every new client.

However, knowledge sharing does not have to be mandatory to be successful. Toyota Motor Company has created a powerful knowledge-sharing structure with its suggestion system, in which managers screen employee suggestions and take an active role in coaching them about the feasibility of their suggestions, the possible implications, and-if the manager feels an idea is applicable-effective methods of presenting that idea to the Creative Idea Committee. The committee consists of senior executives, directors and general managers who review individual suggestions according to a rigorous scoring system and implement the most valuable ideas. Because managers convey to employees that the senior management team is eager to hear their ideas, the company has an atmosphere of openness and

communication, which has led to an employee participation rate of over 90 percent and the generation of more than 20 million ideas.

Sharing: Not Optional The process of convincing employees that knowledge sharing is in their best interest, as well as the company's, is an essential step in establishing a knowledge-sharing culture. The simplest way, of course, is to offer employees no choice. Bogan explains, "Many companies, Ernst & Young being an example, have developed increasingly formal performance-management systems that say you're expected to capture valuable knowledge, you're expected to archive it, you're expected to share it, and you're expected to use others' knowledge when you become aware of it yourself. They've actually moved that into their performancereview systems."

Ernst & Young isn't alone. Barnett International has also added a section on knowledge sharing to its performance review.

Direct supervisors are expected to observe and comment on employees' abilities in a number of areas, including: â&#x20AC;˘ "Takes the initiative to share experiences and expertise"; â&#x20AC;˘ "Acts as a mentor to other, less experienced employees"; and â&#x20AC;˘ "Seeks advice from more experienced employees."

The Royal Bank Financial Group considers a number of activities to be indicative of knowledge-sharing capabilities, such as: contributing to team meetings, discussion databases and newsletters; making internal and external presentations; participating in cross-functional teams, communities of practice, mentoring programs and benchmarking studies; and offering project debriefs. Explains MacPherson: "The supervisor would know if an employee is participating in these activities. Essentially, it's a partnership between the individual, his manager and the organization. The organization does its best to create opportunities, and then the individual and the manager come up with the right opportunities for that person to participate within the context of the work they need to get done."

Are there recalcitrant employees who, like an uncooperative kindergartner, just won't share? Certainly-but they don't last long. Employees who feel that, as Input Software's Hawley put it, ''I'm not going to share my information because that's my power base," are destined to fail in a sharing organization.

Hawley says, "I had to get rid of a couple of cowboy sales guys who just couldn't do it. I had to tell them, 'No, you don't understand. The way you're going to be successful here is to use the system, and if you don't, you can't work here anymore.'"

They shouldn't look for a job at KPMG, either, Izard says.

"We might not fire them immediately, but if people are hoarding information, not sharing it, that would not bode well. We're not checking on employees to make sure that everything they do is submitted-but it's fairly close to that, because we are measuring submissions by office and by individual. But a professional practice partner would know if someone in a particular office just was not sharing, and they would have to deal with it at the local level.

It's the expectation of the firm to share information now."

A Spoonful of Sugar Many companies, however, choose to sweeten the deal by providing other forms of motivation. "Employees can be incentivized in a number of ways," says Mazzie of Barnett International. "We have found some companies that compensate monetarily-with cash, bonuses, options, trips-and others which simply use senior management recognition as the primary motivator. In reviewing these different approaches, we have not found that one works better than the other, as long as both are fairly administered, highly publicized and supported by senior management."

Some companies rely solely on recognition as an incentive, feeling that monetary rewards are inappropriate incentives for knowledge sharing. "One of our values is partnering," says Bob Forrester, a "learning architect" at the Mutual Group, a Canadian financial-services company. "Paying employees for their knowledge would run counter to this, and feel a bit mercenary. Instead, there is an emphasis on giving to get back. Knowledge from a particular area will get attributed to that area a~ a form of recognition."

Milliken & Co., a textile and chemical firm based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, has chosen an unusual method to reward the associates who contribute the most in the company's quarterly "sharing rallies": the company provides limousines to transport the winners to a local auditorium, where they receive an Academy Awards-style reception, complete with TV cameras and cheering crowds.

But many companies, including the Royal Bank Financial Group, use a combination of recognition and financial incentives, rather than choosing one or the other. MacPherson explains, "Employees submit ideas and best practices to our Staff Suggestion Program. Those whose ideas are implemented receive financial rewards, which vary according to the magnitude of the benefit accruing to the organization. The rewards can be as high as $25,000 for a single suggestion." For example, one employee recently hit the jackpot with a way to eliminate the need for some of the administrative work involved when one Visa account requires duplicate cards. Cost savings to the company: over $1 million.

Met Life has a similar program, in which employees can win Best Practice Awards worth $1,000 for processes that result in a high level of customer satisfaction. Programs such as these, which reward employees financially as well as holding them up as examples to their peers, can be doubly effective.

Whatever form they take, the principle behind incentive programs is simple: to offer employees additional motivation to share their knowledge with their peers. As part of a larger initiative, they reinforce the positive aspects of knowledge sharing as a whole. "Employees who share get promotion opportunities, opportunities to do exciting work, the respect of their peers, and more flexibility in their work," Ulrich says. "They get paid both economically and psychically."

D About the Author: Melissa Master is an assistant editor of Across the Board magazine.

NEXT: GLOBAL SMOG Professor Frank Sherwood Rowland won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work elucidating how the Earth's protective ozone layer forms and decomposes.

His ongoing research continues to shape the views of environmentalists, scientists and governments around the world as they tackle major threats to mankind's future: global warming and atmospheric pollution. In 1974, Mario 1. Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rowland, who teaches at the University of California, Irvine, postulated that human-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs'rwidely used in aerosol cans, reji'igerators and air conditioners~'ould, in the stratosphere, transform into ozonedepleting agents. Within a decade, scientists worldwide acknowledged the impact of certain industrial gases on the upper atmosphere, prompting nations to ban production ?f the most environmentally noxious agents. Says Rowland, "We were trying to figure out how the world works, without thinking specifically about how to use the results. There are distinct advantages to letting people try to understand things, and in doing so pursue questions that might later lead to applications."

Rowland visited New Delhi recently to talk about atmospheric pollution and the challenges it poses in the 21st century at a conference organized as part of a series marking the silver jubilee of TERI, a prominent NGO. The following are excerpts from an interview with SPAN.

What are the major areas of concern regarding atmospheric pollution?

The major areas of concern for atmospheric pollution are three: the first is stratospheric ozone depletion, the second is global warming, and the third is, what I call, global smog.

Stratospheric ozone depletion is the problem dating back 25 years, and for which we now have the Montreal Protocol. The Montreal Protocol called for a ban on the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons in the industrial world, with the ban taking effect January 1996, So we are already four years into it. And what one sees is that the amount of CFCs going into the atmosphere is very much less than it was in the 1980s. The Montreal Protocol doesn't say there should be no release, It basically states there should be no new use. And so you have automobile air-conditioning and refrigerators that can be slowly leaking.

Scientists are seeing that the amount of fluorocarbon 12 has not quite leveled off. What this means is that there was a certain amount of fluorocarbon 12 out there that hadn't leaked yet, and the protocol didn't try to recover that but rather aimed to prevent more production of fluorocarbon 12. And fluorocarbon 11 went through a maximum several years ago. This says that the Montreal Protocol, on a global average, is working very well. And it's an indication that it is possible for

countries to act, i~ they get their will together.

As far as global warming is concerned, the Kyoto Protocol really doesn't call for anything as drastic in its total effect as the Montreal Protocol, which says ban it completely. The Kyoto Protocol says don't increase it. Now that's a very different circumstance. But on a global basis, it's probable that the amount of carbon dioxide is going up, but it's close to a balance. We haven't really seen many cutbacks, certainly. Actually very little has been put into place since the Kyoto Protocol was first agreed to and which represents a response to the Kyoto Protocol saying, nQw that we got the protocol, we should do the following things.

Isn)t the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)) which has evolvedfrom the I~oto Protocol) one such idea?

All of those things were what people were saying well before the Kyoto Protocol. That there are many places in which we do not use energy efficiently; those things have been there all along and are economically valuable. It's the steps that would greatly change things that have not happened.

My third concern is the global smog. For my purposes, smog has two components: the particulates and the gases that .make ozone, Our own work is almost entirely in connection with the gases that make ozone.

What have your researchesshown?

Let me put it this way. In the 1950s, Los Angeles had smog.

And the conclusion was that there were four things that were required: one was unburned hydrocarbons, the second was nitrogen oxides, third was sunlight, and the fourth was the rim of mountains around Los Angeles. Now we've experimented a lot in hundreds of cities and we find out that we do need the first three, but we don't have to have the mountains!

Los Angeles is not a special geographical case. Maybe it's a little worse in Los Angeles and Mexico City because of the mountains. But you get smog in Albuquerque, you get in it Denver, you get it any place where you put a lot of automobiles together. My own experimental work is measuring the gases that essentially contribute to all of these.

We do three kinds of air sample collections. One is in remote locations in the Pacific Ocean. We started this 22 years ago in 1978. Every three months we collect air samples from Alaska to New Zealand, and in places where we think we are away from sources. I mean the ideal place is a beach looking into the wind just coming in from the ocean. Now, if you had a big source in the ocean, then that will not be a good place. But the things that we are looking at are primarily not produced in the ocean in any appreciable quantity.

We've done this for a long period, following gases such as methane. In the 1980s methane was growing very steadily and then started to slow down, and in the mid-1990s people were beginning to say methane would level off. That's not our view when we looked at our data at the end of the 20th century. It's still going up. There was a slow down in the mid-1990s but now it seems to be going up. Not as fast as in the 1980s, but there is no real indication of leveling off soon. People were starting to dismiss methane as a greenhouse gas, as being no longer important. That's not what our ct:rrent data shows.

And then there is this question of global smog, which means going into various cities and just seeing what is present. And in Santiago, Chile, for instance, you see substantial quantities of small alkanes-propanes, butanes-which aren't used, they aren't part of natural gas. They are also not part of gasoline. But they are a part of the heating and cooking that are used in many cities. Mexico City has the same problem.

What methods do you employfor a study that encompasses practically the whole of the world?

We go into a city, collect enough samples to get a general picture, and it tells us what's going on there. For instance, we

detected a very large amount of methane in Karachi. We don'\ know why, but that's probably from the rotting vegetation.

Maybe the garbage is not collected.

But it just tells you that somethinh is going on in the city that looks different from what you see in most other cities.

In the Asian context, one has to realize that there isn't a single solution. It is not the industry, it is not just the people. It's both.

~ usually associate smog with areas with a latlJe urban concentration. Now this problem would be there in smaller places as well. WOuld it be wrong to say that?

Since what we do is to measure the total concentratioIO in a given location, it responds to the population density and to how many adjacent areas there are. So the bigger the city, the more likely that you will have such concentrations of these gases. If you have a small city producing methane, the wind comes in with a low concentration, it builds up and it goes out.

But in large cities, it comes in, builds up and then it goes to the next one, builds up again and goes out again. It tends to accumulate in a way that small cities won't show.

If it's global smog, 'there is another major contributor to the problem that we found very interesting and which illustrates another part of the problem: biomass burning. In September 1996, we were part of a larger group of experimenters onboard a NASA airplane in the Central Western Pacific region, trying to trace ozone patterns~ Onboard that airplane was a laser-induced LIDAR detector.

What this detector does is it shoots a pulsed beam out of the laser and if that beam runs into ozone, then there is a certain chance that it will scatter some of that radiation. If it scatters the radiation, there is a certain chance that it will come back to the airplane. And so you send out a pulse and you watch for the return.

If there isn't much ozone, you get very little return. Also, the beam shoots straight down and so there is no delay if it is scattered. And if you get a signal, you know it was ozone at that distance. We were shooting from 10 kilometers and between three and five kilometers there was a lot of ozone.

We flew on this path for 800 kilometers and kept seeing a zone of ozone down below. Then we flew down through it. And when you fly down through it, then you see it's got high concentrations of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. Of course, it doesn't have high concentrations of all the hydrocarbons, but it (Continued on page 47)

Poets) Corner A Conversation with

William Meredith and Richard Harteis

A contemporary

of John Berryman,

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert

Lowell, William Meredith was born in New York City in 1919 and graduatedfrom Princeton University in 1940. He served during World War 11 and the Korean War. Meredith's first book of poems, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, was chosen by Archibald MacLeish for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1944, when Meredith was still serving with the U.S. Navy in the Aleutian Islands. His other works include The Open Sea and Other Poems (1958), The Wreck of the Thresher

and Other Poems (1964), Earth Walk: New and Selected

Poems (1970), Hazard, the Painter (1975), The Cheer (1980) and Partial Accounts:

New and Selected Poems (1987), which won the

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Meredith was awarded the 1997 National Book Awardfor Poetry for Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems, the title referring to the poet's long struggle with the effects of a stroke he suffered in 1983, which has confined him to a wheelchair, besides affecting his speech.

Meredith has won three of Poetry's annual prizes, fellowships from Guggenheim

and Ford Foundations

and the Loines Award from the

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1978 Meredith was appointed consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a position he held through 1980. He has taught at Princeton, the University of Hawaii,

among

others,

but has primarily

been associated

with

Connecticut College since 1955.

Despite his old age and physical disability, the poet visited India last March on a lecture-cum-poetry

reading tour that took him to Chennai,

Calcutta, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and New Delhi.

Meredith speaks very slowly, with great effort, and needs frequent pauses. On tiring, he turns to fellow poet and companion of 25 years, Richard Harteis, to complete his views. Harteis is a sophisticated and knowledgeable

speaker, who because of his long association

with

Meredith, effectively "interprets" for his mentor when the latter loses his train of thought. During this interview, Meredith directed many of the questions to Harteis to answer.

Your beginnings first. How did you initially start writing poetry?

MEREDITH: I started writing during World War II ...

HARTEIS: William was a pilot both in World War II and in Korea. When William was 24 years old, he published his first volume of poetry, Love Letter from an Impossible Land. He was serving out in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska at that time on submarine patrol. Word came that he had been selected by Archibald MacLeish, who was the Librarian of Congress at one point, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. This is a very famous series in America where a major artist chooses a young artist to give the mantle to, and to say, "This is a poet I think you should look at." So Archibald MacLeish chose William. But William started writing poetry a little earlier.

MEREDITH: I was 10 years old actually when I started writing poetry.

HARTEIS: But when he first began writing seriously, it was at Princeton University.

When you were 10 years old, what kind of poetry did you write?

MEREDITH: Serious, very serious poetry. A frog in a cesspool

bow 1.... Very elegant. [Laughs] Which poets would you say influenced your writing the most?

MEREDITH: Robert Frost, of course. He was 42 years older

than me. But definitely Frost. Also John Berryman, Lowell, Auden. Also Robert Penn Warren.

Robert

Since you were amidst what seems like a galaxy of great poets, can you describe your experiences and memories with them?

MEREDITH (nodding to Harteis): You answer that.

HARTEIS: They were very good friends. And these poets were coming out of the New Criticism. They were developing out of this formal, sort of distant, elitist poetry and were doing more personal poetry. They neither shared the bohemian excesses of the Beats nor the exhibitionist excesses of the "confessional" poets, at least not William. From the beginning of his career, William has been known as a poet whose unadorned, formal verse marked him as a singular voice: from his deeply personal poems of the early days to the later, less formal poems.

It was all very revolutionary and they only had each other to depend upon. We must also mention Muriel Rukeyser. She was William's great mentor. William was a kind of eminence grise, because he really acted as a critic and editor for people like Robert Warren, Lowell, Berryman. We've been giving lectures along our tour here and one of them was to talk about this friendship between this group of poets.

William mentioned Robert Frost. This is an interesting anecdote. William and Frost were very, very good friends. Frost and he were traveling to California and they drove back and stopped

with Stewart Udall, who had just been named Secretary of the Interior by President-elect John Kennedy. Both of them convinced Robert Frost to read at John Kennedy's inauguration. That has since become an icon in American lives.

How do you think that these poets you mention, including yourself, shaped American poetry?

(Meredith asks Harteis to talk.)

HARTEIS: Frost's reading at Kennedy's inauguration was a landmark because since then, poetry has taken on a more formal or public role. And I would say that William's kind of responsible for that. For example, they used to always eschew the notion of a poet laureate in America. It didn't seem to be a very democratic kind of thing to good poets like William, who held the unofficial poet laureateship at the Library of Congress as the poetry consultant. They were against the idea of a poet laureate as in England and some other countries. There was this worry that you wind up writing poems for the king's dog or something like that. But in fact there were too many Southern senators, who just insisted that we have a poet laureate, because there is a certain Anglophile strain in American culture. And, in fact, it has worked out very well. The current poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, who William brought to the Library of Congress first to read, has done a great job. He often comes on television to read a poem. It's been a great thing because Pinsky is able to reach millions of people with poetry.

So I'm saying that this more public use of poetry, the poet laureateship and so forth, really had a kind of seed in the fact that William first talked Frost into reading at Kennedy's inauguration.

You talk about a wider audience for poetry in America today.

But in terms of the American poetic fraternity, where do you think your influence and the contribution of poets like John Berryman or Robert Lowell lie ?

MEREDITH: Well, I've always seen myself as a teacher, first and foremost.

HARTEIS: William was a famous teacher. There's a chair in his name at Connecticut College. There were many young poets who came through, like Michael Collier, who is now directing the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which is the most important writers' conference in America. So teaching was one thing.

MEREDITH: I liked the poorer students. Easy students are easy to teach. The poorer students need you more. And they are more grateful when they make a breakthrough. So that has been my philosophy of teaching. I guess I would have taught them even if I had to pay them, because I love teaching.

HARTEIS: Also when you mention influence, I think that Berryman and Lowell, certainly these people brought the personal voice, the lyric voice, back into American poetry.

(Continued on page 48)

Literary Gold Miner Sacrifices come before the rewards in a writer's life, and rewards are more often intangible than material. But it can work and work well with planning and dedication. Valerie Miner does it. ost aspiring writers would settle for what Valerie Miner has achieved: a respectable string of novels; an impressive list of miscellaneous writings, including essays, stories, articles and co-authored books; and appointments to distinguished colleges and universities, among them the University of California at Berkeley, Arizona State University, and her current professorship at the department of English, University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Though her name may not figure in bestseller lists, her books have nevertheless done well. From the start her focus has been on women's issues. Her fiction explores the relationships that women have with each other and with the worldand how their internal worlds interface with the external world. She began charting her course in the 1960s, as a politically active literature student at UC Berkeley during the days of the Free Speech Movement and Anti -Vietnam War protests. In 1970 she left the United States for Canada because of the war in Southeast Asia, as many men did who objected to the Vietnam War. "More women went to Canada than men did," says Miner, as she recall~ those days, sitting in her temporary home, the guest quarters at Triveni Kala Sangam in Ne\\ Delhi. Petite and engaging, she seems comfortable in India. She comes from a working class

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background, she says, as she settles down with a cup of tea. "My mother did not go past grade 8. She's an immigrant from Scotland. She worked at an all-night coffee shop until she was 77, in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. And my father was a merchant seaman, so books were not around the house. There was no high drama except at the Sunday dinner table, and the idea of my going to college was very foreign." Her move across the San Francisco Bay to ,Berkeley was a big deal. "I was the first person in my family to go through college." But literature departments in the 1960s were limited. "The work I read was by white, male British writers. Even when I studied Victorian literature I never read the Brontes. I did my senior thesis on Walt Whitman because he was the closest I could come to a woman in terms of the writers I had studied."

Broader horizons opened up for Miner in Canada. Having worked for the UC Berkeley student newspaper and with a graduate degree in journalism-"It was very safe in a certain sense to write about people and what they were doing, to get both sides of the story"-it was natural to turn to journalism for a livelihood. She worked in Canada for four years doing magazine feature work. "I was very lucky.

I got assignments. I also got some teaching positions at the University of Toronto Centennial College, so I did both teaching

and writing." It was also in Canada she began to write about women's issues: "I began to realize there are stories that weren't told, and that I wanted to tell some of those stories in a different way and it was also the time, the early 1970s, when a lot of women's literature was becoming available to me for various reasons."

Miner started reading writers like Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Toni Morrison and Doris Lessing. From Canada she went to Britain, where she was instrumental in forming a writers' group with Zoe Fairbairns, Sara Maitland, Michele Roberts and Michelene Wandor. They produced a cooperative book, Tales J Tell My Mother. "I'm passionate about writers' groups," she says.

The book was refused by 19 publishers, but did well when it finally came out.

She eventually made her way back to California in the late 1970s. By then she was gravitating toward fiction. "As a journalist I was always looking outward, somehow. Always looking to other people to ask them questions. Usually men.

And I would try to find out the two sides of the story. It was kind of a traditional role for the women to be a cipher for the traditional men's points of view." She says making the switch was "a big move," but "I found that fiction was much more meaningful to me, and I felt I could go deeper in my fiction. And I don't mean

that fiction is deeper than nonfiction. I think all good writing has a really strong set of commonalities, but to me, as an individual, I could go deeper psychologicalJy, sensually and descriptively than I could in journalism."

Ten books later, she is traveling again, this time in India, on a Fulbright grant.

While here she has taught creative writing classes at Miranda House in Delhi, and in Calcutta she lectured and pursued her research. When asked about the state of English letters in India, she replies unhesitatingly: "One of the things I hope to do with my Fulbright felJowship is some research on Indian writers who live in India, as opposed to Indian writers who are expatriates." She does "a lot of reviewing and cultural repOiting" and says Indian authors written up in the West are the expatriate writers. "We write about Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai but we don't write about writers who live most of their lives in India and stilJ do. So that's what I'm hoping to learn more about. Some of the writers I just mentioned-all of them are excellent writers-are well known in the States, but writers like Shashi Deshpande and Manju Kapur and others are just not known, even though they write in English. And certainly the writers who write in Malayalanl or Bengali or other languages who are translated often don't make it across the seas, either."

She wants to give Americans a more complete view, she says. "I'd say that Americans are becoming more conscious of India through literature as opposed to other sources of information. I, frankly, think literature is the best way for people to become aware of a country." She praises Rohinton Mistry as "someone I'd be very proud to have representing my culture. He, of course, lives in Canada, but a lot of Americans read and admire his work." Through writers and filmmakers Amelicans are becoming "more and more aware of this country largely because of cultural media, and I'd like them to become more aware through the cultural media that's actually produced in this country."

She has been overwhelmed by the response of the young women at Miranda House. Originally she was told she would

have five students in her class, but after she gave a reading, 57 students signed up.

"It's whittled down a bit as students realize that creative writing means they have to write, they can't just either read or sit in the classroom." But she ended up with two good-sized classes. Students come from all disciplines, not just the English department, and, she says, they are very well read. "The class is a mixture of discussion, lecture-I do a craft tutorial each time-reading aloud of mini-fictionshort, short pieces, because of the time frame. We discuss these. Then we break into small groups and we talk about their work." Philosophical questions are also discussed, "like the life of the writer and how you create a writing life and what that means, the sacrifices involved, the rewards and the difficulties." The participants are very enthusiastic. Miner feels their interest in creative writing is elicited by the enormous amount of reading that they've already done. ne of the things that sets Valerie Miner's work apart from other writers is her willingness to address alJ kinds of women's relationships, lesbian relationships included. She writes sensitively and honestly about the depth of woman-to-woman ties, be it mother to daughter, friend to friend, sister to sister, or lover to lover-nothing is ruled out in her fiction. She exposes strengths and vulnerabilities candidly and delicately.

She observes, "I would say my writing is characterized by an interest in women's lives. I don't see how I could write about women's lives without writing about lesbians, without writing about heterosexual women, without writing about mothers, without writing about old women, without writing about girls. And some of these things, like writing about old women and writing about girls, are almost as taboo as writing about lesbians."

Her novel Winter's Edge is about two old friends, one who works as a waitress in a cafe and the other a clerk in a magazine shop. They are working class women in their sixties and seventies. Miner enlarges upon the story behind the story, "My agents, really trying to help me said, 'You don't

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want to write this about old people. Nobody reads about old people. Even old people don't read about old people. They are great characters. Make them 40!' I wasn't going to do that. And so the book came out with an independent literary house, not a major motion picture house, and it has done very well." Though she concedes her agent may be right in the commercial sense, and adds, "I am sure that the lesbian content in my books has held them back from financial success in some ways."

Valerie Miner is more concerned with honest, effective writing than with controversies about her themes. "The experience I have had from smart, attuned readers are that people are curious about people's lives. And if you write deeply and honestly, and we hope, beautifully, they will respond very enthusiastically. I certainly have experienced a lot of discrimination as a writer because I am a lesbian." She has had job offers withdrawn and once, at a lecture at a Connecticut college, she was badgered by hostile questions that had been circulated among students-who hadn't read her work-by a teacher who felt threatened by Miner's openness about sexual orientation. Her novels have more to do with the things that interest all women most intensely, their relationships with others and their own emotional processes. Her novels are also somewhat autobiographical in the distinctions between social classes that her characters often exemplify.

Though Miner's fiction most often reflects women's personal journeys, Murder in the English Department is a mystery novel. It is the only mystery Miner has written, so she hedged a bit when asked why women make such excellent mystery writers, from Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, P.D. James to Patricia Cornwell, to name just a few. After qualifying that she is not really a mystery writer, she hazards, "I think on some level that women are socialized-I'm not an essentialist, I don't think it's biological-but I think that we are socialized to be more attuned to psychological nuance, to things that are in the future. I think there is almost a sixth sense that good writers of both sexes have." She adds, "Women writers are often a little more

Writing: The Naked Craft s publishers we get to see any number of manuscripts. For the most part, we look at these carefully and get back to the authors with comments, criticism, feedback, and often, suggestions for changes, revisions, improvements. The hardest part is getting authors to accept these. They usually respond with a SOlt of obduracy: "No, I don't want to change a single line," or, the less common "I never rewrite a word." I've often wondered at this. Several of the people we are dealing with are first-time writers. They're experimenting with form and genre, they don't yet know what it is they are most comfortable with, or what they have a greater talent for-but they're somehow reluctant to learn. It's almost as if they believe that the skill of writing is something that comes ready-made. This is more the case with creative writers than with writers of nonfiction. It seems to be a widely held assumption that creative writing somehow inhabits a "higher" plane and is therefore less of a skill and more like something that comes naturally-something that writers just intuit themselves into.

And yet, as almost every successful writer will tell you, writing, like evelything else, has to be learned. Or at least, it benefits from being learned-just as singing or dancing or acting does. This is not to say that there is no such thing as a natural talent for writing-there is. No one would deny that. But it's also something that can benefit from a little learning, or a little willingness to learn. 1 remember working closely with two

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savvy about character. It seems to me the real pleasure in a good mystery is in the evolution of character and in the engagement of the reader as a character-that use of Virginia Woolf's notion that the reader is a companion as opposed to someone being taught. ot everything is thrown out before you. You use your brain. And I think that women are always good at puzzles and knots, it's our lot. But I'm really talking off the top of my head."

An issue that confronts every writer who wants to write fiction is how to take care of life's obligations and make space for writing at the same time. Says Miner: "The most important element of creativity involved in being a writer is creating a life where you have the time and space for it, the quiet to do the work, and go deeply into the work. At first I found it really frustrating. And 1 made many false starts."

authors on their manuscripts-this is what editors do. In the first instance, a large, sprawling novel which seemed to be going every which way, we worked together to "discover" something that was already there, and then to refine it. This was an underlying logic and structure to what seemed like a rather rambling nanative---{)nce she and I became aware, together, of this, we worked to tease it out. At the end of the exercise, she felt her novel had been "revealed" to her. The second instance relates to a brilliant, tightly-knit and shocking story. But somehowbecause it was trying to tread a fine balance between politics and art-the ending did not quite work. Once again, several rounds of collective work, and several discussions about possible other endings, helped the author to rework and turn the story into something clever and brilliant. .

And I remember-although I am not, and would not imagine myself to be a creative writer-a time when my tutor forced me to rewrite something 10 times (this was during my master's degree) before she was willing to accept it. At the end of this rather painful exercise, she told me: "Remember this lesson.

Never try to use big words just to impress. Write how you feel, write what you feel, say what you want to say, simply and clearly." I don't think I've ever forgotten this lesson.

Part of the business of learning involves that very precious thing: feedback. Writing, as any writer will tell you, is a lonely business. And to send what you have written out into the

Fortunately, the teaching jobs she landed did not eat up all of her time. "Coming from a blue collar family all 1 could see was, 'I have 3 courses off. I'd better get some writing done!' Coming from that background really gave me a sense of seeing the glass as half empty in the good sense, because I could fill it with writing time." Miner interpolates, "I've learned so much from my students. The chance to work directly with really good writers who are graduate students-they've gone through and they've studied literature, and they kind of know what they want to do but they are at an early stage so they are flexible, and they ask really good questions and they argue with you, and you are reading their work very closely week after week. You know, when you have said to them five times, 'You can't do that,' when it comes to reading your manuscript and

you start doing that, you say, 'you can't do that.' " Becoming a teacher wasn't a goal of hers, "It just became part of my life." eradvice to aspiring writers is simple. "I think that the most important thing is create that life that works for you." Time and place are critical, but she adds, "1 wrote four books literally in a closet, and that was fine, it was a big closet.

And I thought I was lucky." You have to use ingenuity and your imagination, she says. "You have to create a world where you have a job to support yourself, and you promise yourself regular time during the week, whether that's two days a week, or every single day for one hour, it doesn't really matter as long as you keep your hands on the book on a regular basis. I think it's really crucial that people find a place where they work well. That doesn't have to be

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world is to make yourself deeply vulnerable. The slightest criticism hurts. But if you've had the good fortune to have discussed your work with like-minded people, and perhaps even to work in the suggestions you like, the vulnerability can be reduced, and you know that you are not alone. In some places people set up writing groups where they meet and talk about their work and their ideas, and from where they take away feedback and other ideas to incorporate or work with.

Despite this, people often scoff at writers who have studied writing, or at those who teach it. But several of the newer "Indian" writers, and especially those living in the United States, have studied or taught creative writing. Names that inunediately come to mind (and inevitably, since I'm a feminist publisher, the writers are women) are: Anjana Appachana, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sbauna Singh Baldwin, Chitra Divakumi Banerjee. I can't see that their work has lost anything by their being trained in the art of writing. Nor does it seem in any way "similar" in style and method (for people often fear that going to a writing "school" or course will immediately tum each writer into a clone of the other!).

Unfortunately, we have no creative writing courses in Indiaor perhaps it would be more con-ect to say that I am not aware of any such courses (except perhaps one, a distance-learning course run by the Indira Gandhi National Open University). We don't even have any forum where prospective writers can meet with successful writers and talk about writing. This kind of gathering helps, in many ways, to shatter the mystique that surrounds writing and writers. Both of these things would be useful, especially in the cun-ent atmosphere where the success of a few Indian writers--especially in the Western world-has

elaborate. It can be the library." She laughs about some friends she just visited in Sri Lanka. The man of the couple has two studies, one for his CUlTentproject and one for others. His female partner uses a space at the crossroads of three rooms, without so much as a door. "She's in her sixties and I said, 'Ranjini, why don't you have a study like Dana Nath's, or take one of his?' And she said, 'Well, I've always worked well in the middle of things.' And she has. She has produced a number of books, and that's what works for her. WeII, it would drive me crazy."

Face the facts, she urges, "You are probably not going to earn a living as a writer, if you are a serious literary writer, so you need a job. And you need a job that is flexible enough to give you some time, and you need discipline, and you need to apply yourself every day, and you need a

spawned a whole anay of hopefuls. Everyone wants to make good. Everyone has a novel, or a collection of short stories or....But no one, or almost no one, is open to talking about their work. They continue to write, in isolation, or with the support of a few people close to them, and then produce something which can't really be published. And when it's rejected, they are, quite naturally, hurt and upset.

Publishers can also be quite cavalier in their attitude to new writers-it's no use pretending we're the good guys and gals.

We're not-at least not all the time. But it is true that in the last few years, publishers who do fiction titles, have begun to be deluged with manuscripts. Most of these get sent back to authors: sometimes the problem is that the plot does not hold enough, at others there isn't a plot at all and the work is made up of a sort of stream-of-consciousness reflection. And then, there can be problems with style, or with language. As a publisher who's at the receiving end of many of these, I often wish writers would try to leam their craft-not ilecessarily in a formal "school" but even through reading, writing, discussing, changing. It's not easy to rethink. something that you're used to seeing as a "gift" or something that comes "naturally," and to see it as something that can be leamed, a craft, a skill.

But it's important to do so. It helps, and makes a difference to the people who matter most: your readers, your publisher and, of course, yourself!

0 About the Author: Urvashi BUlalia, author of The Other Side of Silence, is the executive trustee of Kali for Women, a leading publishing house. She is an activist involved with women's and civil liberties groups in Delhi. She has written and published widely.

place you can write." She also advises travel. "Get out of the country." But, she temporizes, "Here students have much less money, and much less mobility and many more obligations in a lot of senses, so I don't feel I can say that. But the ones who do have the opportunity to travel, I really encourage it."

The exposure to new authors that she has as a writer of reviews vitalizes her own work, she says. "Although I do go back and read the classics, I read new books. I try to see what's happening in them. I see new directions. There's a wonderful writer I'm passionate about named Randall Keenan, who is an African American writer from North Carolina. He does so much writing about people of different ethnicities, which I think is very difficult. Although he's black he writes about Asians and whites and he writes

about women." She names others: Thea Astly, Edna O'Brien, Dorothy West, Elizabeth Huggins, Bemard McLafferty.

"One of the things these writers have done is educate me and in some ways encourage me in ways that perhaps the classical writers I go back to read don't necessarily do because they are not contemporaries."

Most of all, Valerie Miner believes in luck. The word frequently pops up in her conversation. As her character Adele muses in Range of Light, "From the outside, from the point of view of many people, I had an enviable life. Look at this story about an Ozarks woman with nine kids who was mayor of her town and also held down a job as a telephone operator. I was very lucky-I had worked hard and used my advantages as best I could, but I had those advantages, and compared to this woman in Arkansas, my life was vanilla pudding." 0

Kala Raksha began as a resource base for artisans and a grass-roots promoter of income generation for those skilled in endangered textile arts. Now there is a museum to preserve these traditions.

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long ago, professionals gathered in Mumbai to question the relevance of museums in India today. During ~ the event the National Gallery of Modern Art held an exhibition of turn-of-the-century photographs. Sepia images of "The Natives in Their Dress," "The Parsis" "The Bhatias" and "Some Tribals" disturbingly recalled "The Partridge," "The Bustard," "The Tailorbird." In the same month, in Delhi, a lecture on "Justice for the Voiceless" was delivered by a wellknown activist.

Are these issues related? Kala Raksha Trust, a small grass-roots NGO in a village in Kutch thinks so. And as the trust opens the doors of its community museum it hopes to address them with a simple but revolutionary concept: involve people in presenting their own cultures.

Every museum or collection has a story. This one begins and ends with traditional crafts. India's living craft traditions, showcased in museums throughout the country, and its voiceless craftspersons, are precariously balanced on the edge of survival.

Excellent examples of crafts have been removed from artisan communities, sold to collectors, tourists, or even museums.

When artisans do not have access to their own heritage, the link that ensured tradition is broken. At the same time, today craft is rarely produced only for local consumption, so the functional

basis that drove innovation is disturbed. Crafts are disengaged from their role as intimate expressions of the cultures that engendered them. And even when artisans can earn a living by producing contemporary versions, most do not wish their children to be artisans if there is an alternative, because the status of the artisan remains low in the social hierarchy.

This situation was brought to my attention by artisans themselves while I was studying embroideries in Kutch on a Fulbright grant in 1990. "Why are you studying us?" a group of sufembroiderers in Sumras.ar village asked me. "Why don't you help us?" I realized that there were ways more relevant than study to preserve living crafts. If traditional crafts are to survive, they must be' both economically and culturally viable. I thought, why not combine income generation with research?

My idea was nurtured by Aid to Artisans (ATA), a Connecticut-based nonprofit organization. In 1991 ATA procured a grant on my behalf from the Pacific Asia Travel Association to collect traditional textiles as a resource base. In the same year, with an introduction from Aid to Artisans, Dastkar, a Delhi-based society for crafts and craftspeople, and I received a Ford.

Foundation grant to set up a project in Kutch. The project focused on three communities, including the suf embroiderers of Sumrasar. Dastkar was to organize income generation through crafts. I would coordinate building the collection of traditional textiles to be used by the artisans ("Threads of Culture," SPAN, July 1992).

Kala Raksha grew out of this project. The suf embroiderers wanted to be more involved. "Couldn't we do something on our own?" they asked, In fact, to preserve arts in a meaningful way, one must involve the artisan. This was the founding principle of Kala Raksha.

When Kala Raksha was registered as a society and trust in 1993, its original intention was to maintain the resource base of

Above: Design committee with designer. Researchers and designers have enjoyed the opportunity to work with both artisans and collections--and vice-versa. The process stimulates new awareness and self-appreciation.

Left: Author Judy Frater and Kala Raksha Chief Executive Prakash Bhanani examine the catalog cards and documents produced by the trust in the Resource Center. Catalog cards contain storage information, so that objects can be quickly located. All objects are stored in inert, metal cabinets. Flat textiles are rolled. Stitched pieces placed in narrow drawers eliminate stress on objects and facilitate finding them. A marble table is used to examine collections.

traditional textiles,. and to assist artisans in their own comprehensive development. To insure grass-roots operation and the education and empowerment of women, we included artisan members as trustees. We would need income for our work. And, as income is the primary concern of artisans, we concentrated fIrst on income generation.

Kala Raksha's strategy was to address the problems of endangered crafts to make them more economically viable. We developed a line of products based on the artisans' tTaditions, thus reinforcing the weakened link.

We had artisans participate in selling their products in bazaars outside Kutch. Exposure was not only an education; introducing artisans to their consumers helped establish a new functional basis that would enable artisans to innovate.

The assurance of regular income succeeded in empowering artisans. Women began to speak up in meetings. For the first time since migrating as refugees from Sindh in 1972, sui artisans celebrated Janmashtami, the birth of Lord Krishna.

The day afterward, artisan trustee Miraben greeted me with a voice hoarse from singing. They had been dancing into the night, she explained. But women from their community never dance in public.

"We have been to Delhi and Mumbai!" she exclaimed. "Can't we dance?"

One day Babriben, another artisan trustee, called me into the workshop. She had laid out three cushion covers. "Are these all the same?" she asked. They were the same design, but the quality varied. ''Then why are they all receiving the same rate?" she wanted to know. That was the impetus for establishing an artisan-based pricing committee to ensure fair wages.

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hen women had been earning steadily for four years, Kala Raksha encouraged them to establish self-help savings groups.

For almost a year, two groups of 20 women each accumulated earnings in the local bank. Then Miraben asked for a loan to finish her house. Her wheat would be harvested in four months, she said. She would repay the loan then. Men of the village took me aside. She'll never return the money, they warned. But the group held a

meeting and decided to lend the money, and determined that the interest should be that which the savings would have earned.

Miraben repaid the loan a month early.

"My heart was pounding," she confided. "I knew that whatever else, 1 had to return that loan." So far, in two years, not a single woman has defaulted on a loan.

By 1997, with the assistance of the development commissioner (handicrafts) Kala Raksha had built a community center. We had added a second cooperative of Rabari artisans. Our products were making a name for the trust, and artisans were assured in their primary concern: craft was economically viable. Only then could we turn our attention to the original task: maintaining the textile collections. We received a grant from the Sir Ratan Tata Trust to complete our Resource Center and Museum.

The intent of a museum, including audience and function, shapes its content, scope and design. Kala Raksha's museum was intended to serve artisans, to provide

Above: Women doing mud relief work.

Building the center was a cooperative effort. Husbands ofSumrasar artisans did the construction. The outside walls were decorated by Kala Raksha's Rabm'i artisans in traditional mud reli4 work.

Right, above: The architectural design for Kala Raksha Center was based on the bhunga, traditional round mud huts of Kutch, such as are still found in the village Bhopa ni Vandh where Kala Raksha Rabari artisans live. Right: Woman with book. The process of using collections to innovate in contemporary production did not have to be explained.

Artisan trustee Hariyaben had made a new suf design based on a picture of an American Amish quilt before the book could even be added to the library.

them access to their heritage of traditional embroideries and restore the link of tradition. Traditions evolved by a simple process: artisans knew excellent work, and copied it. Techniques, pattems and motifs became codified. Innovations driven by newly available materials, contact with other work, and changing tastes

insured that traditional work remained vital. Our museum would make the collection of traditional pieces available for study, and enable artisans to maintain their traditions through a contemporary, conscious process. Thus, the museum would focus on traditional embroideries from the communities with which Kala Raksha works, and it would be located at the Community Center in the village.

The museum building, part of Kala Raksha Resource Center, was designed by Ahmedabad architect R.I. Vasavada. His design, following Kala Raksha philosophy, was based on the traditional round bhungas, but at the same time presents a contemporary look. Scale was an important factor. We wanted a premises that was familiar, comfortable and inviting to those who would use it. So Vasavada designed the center in units of 15 feet by 15 feet, the traditional structure of artisans' villages.

Two bhungas were allocated to the museum, one for storage and research, the other for display.

The collections, which included a library of books on related topics as well as the textiles, had already been used successfully before they were housed.

Designers had studied our trunks of

embroideries to develop our initial line of products. For artisans, the process did not need to be explained. One day a distinctly unusual shawl tumed up at the pricing committee. "My idea," affirmed artisan trustee Hariyaben. "I liked a picture in one of those books lying in the office and thought, that could be done in sl1/ with a little adjustment." It was a book on Amish quilts. Hariyaben was made head of the design committee, and last year created a suf collection based on Bhutanese weavings.

However, the process of documenting the collections, designing and installing the permanent exhibition-making the collections into a museum-tumed out to be as important as the collections themselves. In the creating of our museum, we realized mutual benefits for the museum and the community. And we realized the tremendous value of a community museum in long-term preservation of traditions. The process of building our community museum addressed the final issue of endangered craft: that of social status of the artisan. And with that, the problems of the museum as archaic storehouse of outsider visions were also addressed.

A museum is an educational institution.

Its collections assume their full value

A Vagadia Rabari oshikun pillow cover conveys to the viewer the subtle but identifying differences in styles ot' subgroups of Rabaris of Kutch. Beside it is a temple motif Viewers are encouraged to explore pieces on display for motifs that express artisans' lives.

when they are documented, and are accessible. As we created a catalog card with photograph for each object in the collections, we called on Kala Raksha artisans to provide essential information, both ascriptive and descriptive, and some cultural analysis. For further synthesis of information, we produced a document on each of the styles with which the collection is concerned. The artisans knew the objects with an intimacy that no researcher could ever gain. The resource base of our artisans ensured in depth accuracy of information, a luxury unknown by most museums.

or the artisans, assisting in documentation initiated a process of education, increasing self-awareness and self-respect. The very act of viewing one's own culture from an outside perspective began reflection, a process essential to education.

Finally with collections documented and accessible, we could create what the public sees first: the museum's permanent exhibition. We had just one bhunga for display.

But an extremely limited venue does not mean that ideas should be small. The challenge was to present concepts clearly, concisely and appropriately. Again we worked

'F

closely with community members. We chose to examine two traditions with which Kala Raksha works from multiple perspectives: cultural context, cultural impact, and technique and aesthetics. Curatorial input began with this concept, from which we developed a script outline and object list.

As long-term display of rare pieces from the collections is harmful, Kala Raksha engaged the design committee to produce replicas. This not only involved the artisans in the creation of the museum, but also resulted in the revival of old techniques for production.

The display, conceptualized by Pradip and Mala Sinha of Vadodara and worked out by our exhibition team, employed appropriate technology and aesthetics.

Our Rabari coordinator made a camel from simple local materials to display camel trappings. For garments, artisans made mannequins themselves, using the traditional cloth doll technique. Photographs were enlarged and laminated to provide a context.

Community members installed the embroideries to insure accuracy. Assessing the accompanying photographs, one artisan noted that display is not new to them; it is an instinctive and integral part of their life. Pointing out a display of dowry items, she said, "This is the origin of the concept of the museum!"

Most enjoyable of all was dressing the mannequins. As the ceremony began,. word flashed through the hamlet and all of the artisans rushed to the exhibition hall.

The mannequins became bride and groom; the scene was exactly that of a wedding. Attending the bride with excruciating detail and plenty of advice, the women found that some of the ornaments and props provided were not correct.

In each case someone immediately exclaimed, "I have one at home!" and ran to get it. Days later, groups would appear giggling at the door, come in and lift the

Above: Mannequins made by Kala Raksha artisans depict a traditional Maru Meghval wedding scene. The artisans also dressed the mannequins for the occasion, making sure that all details were authentic. Right: Here embroideries traditionally exchanged during engagement are displayed. The photographs accompanying textiles give cultural context and illustrate contemporary adaptations.

bride's veil, just as they would after a wedding in the village.

The exhibition script was also developed with artisan input. But as I am the one with the anthropological background and museum training, I did the final writing. The text begins with the context of embroideries throughout the subcontinent, and the concept of traditional style. It then examines the traditional roles of embroidery in the Maru Meghval community as a medium of exchange and celebration for wedding. In the Rabari community the social function of producing embroidery is explored.

Presenting embroideries exchanged by Rabaris, and those used in a wedding, we encomage comparison of the two cultures.

Here, the text adds the element of expression of identity through embroidery style.

This leads into an examination of style.

Again, the panels encourage interaction by

suggesting that the viewer search for motifs. Two stands of jewelry introduce the concept of cohesive aesthetic in a community style. Outside, two displays enable the viewer to try some traditional stitches. In this small space we thus present an introduction to traditional embroidery and a link between the collections and the artisans.

Of course, I wrote in English, but for this local museum the text panels and labels are to be in Gujarati. As staff, artisans and I met to review the translation for content and style, I suddenly became aware that the room was filled with tension. Everyone was looking at me, waiting to see, "How is she going to present us?" I was tense too.

My academic reputation seemed on the line. How accmate was I? The discussion that ensued was invaluable. Staff and artisans now reflected on their own cultures from an outside perspective. We achieved greater accuracy and, more important, a sense of mutual authorship.

As rural societies rapidly change, Kala Raksha's concept of a community museum developed by involving the community can be a model for revitalizing both traditions and museums. Accessible to artisans, our museum helps restore the link of tradition to a contemporary context. Our

design committees utilize the collections to develop fresh innovations for their new urban market.

Building and presenting collections that are focused and connected to local life, the museum enables a conscious, indigenous view of cultures in a relevant context.

Finally, strengthening the cultural viability of craft, the community museum raises the self-esteem of artisans. This museum belongs to Kala Raksha artisans.

When people come from other sections of Sumrasar, neighboring villages, Bhuj or beyond to see the exhibition, artisans take them on a walk through tour, proudly using the opportunity to articulate their own culture. The critical issue is that they are presenting themselves.

If Kala Raksha gave artisans a voice, the development of the museum has enabled them to talk as equals. Their culture has been given authority, as if being published.

"We didn't know how to talk before," Hariyaben recently reflected. "It didn't mean we had nothing to say. Now, we know how to talk." This was presented as a simple fact. For her, there is no going back. 0 About the Author: .Judy Frater,former associate curator at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., is the project coordinator of the Bhuj-based Kala Raksha Trust in Cujaral.

The Fight to Clean the Ganga

Dr. Veer Bhadra Mishra, hydraulic engineel; mahant of the Sankat Mochan temple, caretaker ofTulsi Ghat and proponent of India's rich artistic heritage, is also a principal activist in the movement to clean the Ganga.

The ancient and sacred Ganges River is burdened in modern times with severe pollution.

Activists and the government have tried to return it to its pristine state, but the going is slow.

wo men, both alike in dignity and purpose, are immersing themselves in the purifying waters of the holy Ganges.

Daily Dr. Veer Bhadra Mishra takes a dip at Tulsi Ghat in the southern part of the city. From time to time N.C. Gupta bathes there also. Both men are devout Hindus, both men offer prayers at the same ghat, and both are dedicated to the same goal: the cleaning of the Ganges. Yet, for some reason, fate has placed these two men at odds with one another, as they do not agree on the method which should be employed to do it.

Dr. Mishra is a man of many hats. He is a professor of hydraulic engineering at Banaras Hindu University as well as the mahant of arguably the city's most attended temple, Sankat Mochan. When he is not performing the duties of those two occupations, he also takes on the role of activist by serving as the president of the Sankat Mochan Foundation (SMF). It is a nonprofit, nonpolitical, nongovernmental organization founded in June 1982 and committed to the objective of sustaining a clean and healthy Ganga.

When then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi launched Ganga Action Plan (GAP) Phase I in 1985, the Uttar Pradesh Jal Nigam was given Rs. 380 million to cany out its 13-scheme cleanup plan. The execution of this plan was heavily criticized by the mahant and his organization, as after almost eight years of work, the Ganga remained dirty. "They ate [the money] up," the mahant says, "their plans were inefficient and did not take into account such things as regular power outages." Anyone who has spent more than a day in Varanasi will readily acknowledge these as daily and extended occunences. "Jal Nigam's plan failed because it was energy-intensive. They depended on electricity to pump the sewage to the treatment centers, but when the electricity cut off, the raw sewage went straight back into the Ganga."

T

N.C. Gupta, director of the Uttar Pradesh Jal Nigam at Varanasi, also aims to clean the Ganga. But his department and Dr. Mishra's Sankat Mochan Foundation do not always see eye TO eye.

Pressure from SMF and various politicians who had had enough finally brought about the cessation of GAP Phase I in April 1993.

In 1996 N.C. Gupta was instated as the director of Uttar Pradesh Jal Nigam at Varanasi. He and his team of engineers drafted a proposal for GAP Phase II involving the use of pipes and plants already constructed during the previous phase. "Dr. Mishra is always criticizing," Gupta said, "but what does he want? Phase I was meant to lessen the pollution, not to totally clean it. In our plan for Phase II we will finish the job." And it is upon this point that the fate of the Ganges now depends.

After its harsh and continual criticism of Jal Nigam during Phase I, all eyes went to SMF as if to say, "You guys got a better idea?" They certainly thought so. Friends of the Ganges (FOG), a San Francisco-based environmental organization, linked the mahant up with professor emeritus Bill Oswald from the University of California at Berkeley. Oswald had been working for decades on his Advanced Integrated Wastewater Oxidation Pond System (AIWPS) which utilized algae and required little electricity. In his system, wastewater moves through a series of ponds undergoing natural chemical reactions and eventually resulting in the outflow of phenomenally pure water. It seemed to be just the thing SMF was looking for. swald and Mishra and other engineers, now working in collaboration, came up with a solution to Varanasi's problem. The plan was to lay enormous interceptor sewers along the Ganges and Varuna rivers to catch all the raw sewage from 28 major ducts that have previously been dumping straight into the bathing areas. The sewage would then flow with the force of gravity north of the city to a channel called Sota between a sandbar and the western bank. This is where AIWPS would be situated and where the raw sewage would move from pond to pond getting treated. Exhaustive studies in and around the city were conducted to see what the possibilities of employing Oswald's system in Varanasi were. Many factors such as projected increases in population, seepage from the pond bottoms and the higher water levels during the monsoon, were examined and investigated. Experts from USAID in New Delhi were called in also. American diplomats, engineers and even politicians like Senator Richard Shelby who visited the foundation's headquarters in 1998 worked alongside Indian priests and environmentalists. One of the results was a detailed report on the "Feasibility of the Interceptor Sewers and AIWPS Technology for the Prevention of Pollution of the Ganga at Varanasi" prepared jointly by SMF, Oswald-Green LLC and USAID. It was submitted to and accepted by the municipal corporation for GAP Phase II in May 1997.

The happiness and excitement experienced in the SMF was not shared in Gupta's camp at Jal Nigam, however. Their prospects were not looking too bright. If their proposal was not going to be used, then they would be out of a job. And worse, "All that we did in Phase I would be wasted: Rs. 380 million. And they are starting again," Gupta says, looking sincerely distraught. But there is perseverance on both sides of this issue. Looking for help, Jal Nigam showed the Allahabad High Court that the SMF

O

proposal was impractical. In January 1998, the ruling came as such. Gupta points out that, "It says in our Constitution that education and water issues are under the jurisdiction of the state government. And they ruled that the plan was impractical. So, we will do ours."

But it isn't going to be that easy. According to the 74th Amendment to the Constitution, water issues now fall under the auspices of the locality, that means the municipal corporation.

That would mean SMF already has the green light and an independent contractor can begin constructing the ponds and laying the sewers at any time, but that is not the case. Money is needed for such a massive project, lots of it. The central government has allotted Rs. 600 million for GAP Phase II regardless of which plan is used. On January 13 a committee of four headed by K.J. Nath reviewed Jal Nigam's proposal in Delhi and the SMF's proposal on February 4 in Varanasi.

On the following day, Uttar Pradesh Jal Nigam presented again, this time before around 20 minority party municipal councillors. SMF did not attend, and neither did Varanasi Mayor Saroj Singh, but G.D. Agarwal, her one-man committee did. Agarwal is a respected senior environmental scientist who quit work in Delhi several years ago on account of his suspicions of high level corruption. He is now based in Chitrakut, but was asked by. the mayor to observe the proposals. Singh and Agarwal were keen supporters of the SMF, as they had helped get its proposal approved by the municipal corporation in May 1997.

At the beginning of the presentation N.C. Gupta asked all nonmunicipal councillors to leave. Agrawal took this personally and said, "It appears I am the or.ly one who is not a municipal councillor. I'm leaving." Great commotion ensued in the room and eventually the committee persuaded him to stay. He found the presentation so di tasteful and unprofessional that he announced afterward he would submit his own independent evaluation of both proposals.

And so it goes. Each side is determined to instate their own plan. The municipal corporation has already said that it will not accept Jal Nigam's proposal. The state and the central governments are now head to head with the city government and a handful of activists under the banner of the Sankat Mochan Foundation. There could be endless months of bureaucratic trench warfare before this is over, and the Ganga hangs in the balance like a child in a heated custody battle. In the coming' months both sides will be tirelessly pressuring the government into expediting the paperwork process. Funds must change hands, contractors lined up and detailed project reports. produced. "Don't think we will stop! We will continue to push," says the enthusiastic mahant with a John Paul Jonesian flair.

For now and the unknown months to come before anything is securely finalized, the condition of the river will continue to worsen as the citizens of Varanasi turn their prayers to Delhi as well as the altars of the gods.

D About

the Author:

in Varanasi.

Andrew

Ward is a freelance

writer

living

NEXT: GLOBAL SMOG

cOl1linued lim/7 page 31

has those which tend to last longer in the atmosphere.

After this, we went through the records from commercial aviation. When they want to know what path the airplane is in and what the wind directions are, they send up radio signals that measure the direction of the wind and they use that in commercial aviation. And these are recorded. So you can go back like we did for that day in September 1996 and see what the wind's direction was when we were at 5,000 meters altitude. You average it out and just follow that path. In this case, when you go down, you follow it back from where you started and the winds curl back ouf into the Pacific. Then you come to the plume area and then you come down below it. The winds curl back, but not in the same way. One curls back toward the Equator and the other will curl back not toward the Equator but still stay over the Pacific.

The one in the middle with the ozone presence went straight back over Australia.

Because we didn't see the short-lived hydrocarbons and we were back over Australia in two days, the things which should last a few hours were gone and the things that last a few days were still there. The ozone had gone up. We followed it on back and over Southern Africa where they do a lot of biomass burning. We followed it for another two or three days, it was now over South America. It's not absolutely clear whether this was from fires in Africa or South America. It clearly wasn't from Australia. This means that when you make ozone, it can go a long way. At least it went all the way across the Indian Ocean, across Australia and across parts of Africa.

Now you look at what happens when you study smog from a city. If you follow it, you can go from South America to Fuji, and then from China to North America or North America to Europe or Europe to China. And if you start at looking at individual sources, there are so many of them and they sort of get together.

The cities of the East Asian mainland will be putting out enough small ingredients that the air that arrives in Los Angeles will be, a hundred years from now, already be in violation of the EPA rules, even before Los Angeles has contributed anything! Not only Los Angeles, but the whole West Coast in the United States will be in violation all the time. And, of course, what we are doing in the United States would be affecting Western Europe and that is why it is called global smog. It's not a single source but rather an average of many.

Are the governments really feeling alarmed about this problem?

Well, the competition for the most polluted city in the world is very intense. And Los Angeles is not unhappy if it's not the worst! In fact, Los Angeles is not even the worst. Houston is now in violation more than Los Angeles. That is because Houston is not doing much and Los Angeles is trying to control it. Mexico City is much worse. They have improved until the number of days not in violation went from about 10 per year in the beginning of the 1990s to about 60 per year now.

That means that you're still in violation for at least 300 days.

So, they're still not doing very well but they're doing better

than before. The political will has to be there and part of the political will is simply saying it's too big a problem and we can't do anything about it.

Is that an attitude found in the developed nations as well?

It's probably less now. This attitude was very much there in Los Angeles in the 1950s and '60s. And the answer was going step by step. There wasn't a single solution to the problem. But just being careful at every step made it a lot better. The amount the traffic in Los Angeles has increased enormously in the last 25 years, but the smog level has not. This means that efforts people are making there for counteracting the problem are working.

In the Asian context, one has to realize that there isn't a single solution. It is not the industry, it is not just the people, it's both. And you don't solve the problem, except incrementally for the most part. You tighten up here, you tighten up there and improve the technology of automobiles. By definition, if the average car is 10 years old then it has outdated technology, because it includes some cars that are brand-new and some that are 20 years old. And the 20-year-old ones are likely not only to have outdated technology but be wearing out also. You need to work at a whole set of things. That includes whatever has been put out from homes, put out from industry, put out by automobiles, whatever else is contributing.

You start with knowing what's there. And that means you have to make measurements that are comprehensive and accurate enough to allow you to say: we have this component and we think it comes from such and such resource.

Can you give some examples where communities have tackled the problem of atmospheric pollution successfully?

Well, Los Angeles, by and large, is a success story. By that I mean that the composition of air has actually improved. It is due to regulations, which wouldn't have come through if there weren't a certain amount of public demand for it. These regulations are local. Say, if you live in Southern California, then the Southern California air quality district says you will have to meet such and such requirements if you drive in the area.

In Southern California, for example, paint has been reformulated to use water base rather than organic base because the organic base evaporates and that puts more small ingredients in the atmosphere while water doesn't do it. The paint industry said you can't get the same quality of paint. But after the regulation, they studied the problem and they came up with good quality paint. There is a built-in tendency to'Tesist any change and usually once the change is mandated, you find out it is easier than you thought.

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Poets' Corner

cOlllinlled from page 33

Especially the "confessional" school, Sylvia Plath for example, where they dealt with themes like the body and illness and death that really meant facing up to your own psychology and perhaps your own hatred of your father or the difficulty of family life.

Some of these things were not reall y discussed before in the nice, clean 1950s, you know. After all it was just after the [Second World] War and everything was prosperous. A kind of wasteland had occurred. And I think this generation of poets brought this kind of vitality and personal vision. And it has continued. And now there is a kind of return to the original formalism. William is somewhat of a formal poet, although his poetry developed more into free verse and more experimental verse.

Let's discuss a bit about the craft of writing. How do you usually start a poem? Do you begin with an image or maybe a phrase or a rhyme?

HARTEIS: I'll read out an extract from an interview that William gave some years ago to Paris Review, in which he was asked the same thing. It goes [reads from book]: "It stars with an insight which gets a few words close to the ground and then the words begin make specific the insight. Once they start growing the words are seminal-I suppose it's like the bacteria of a growth. I can hardly remember a poem in which the words are not particular words, often very bleak, simple words. Once they are put down, they are able to focus an idea. I have, I think, only once written a poem-and it's not a very good poem-which came to me literally as a dream that was decodable. It's about an eight- or ten-line poem and all I could say was, 'That's what it said.' " That was the answer he gave. But it certainly starts with some words, some phrase that runs through your mind. Probably an image too, or a mystery. There is some mystery one may be thinking about. Or a question.

Do you think that writing a poem is a specific engagement with mystery?

MEREDITH: I would say so. It is the engagement of a mystery which has forced itself to the point where you are bound to see it with your vision. Not to solve it, but to see it.

HARTEIS: When William had his stroke we found a folderthe mother lode folder-in which there were many poems that had as many as 17 different versions. He was a really very crafted poet. The point is that he really did revise, and I think most teachers will tell you that it is in the rewriting that the writing occurs. The initial inspiration is fine, but you have to remember, you are competing against Shakespeare. And when something is in print, you can't sort of say, "Oh, I wrote that kind of quickly." You have no excuse. When you put something out for the wide world, it goes to Mars, and it keeps going for eternity. So what you agreed to put into form, when you give form to words, they're gone.

In William's case, we had all these wonderful revisions. And

I think that there was very often a mystery, some question that he had on his mind, and it was sort of turning that question over, over a period of years perhaps, when a poem would then finally be answered by reworking it. So language, yes. Maybe an image, yes. But I also think sometimes an abstract question is the beginning of a poem for William. And then there are love poems too. William is a love poet. There are moments when they are simply lyric expressions of love or gratitude for the beloved.

Frost has had an enormous impact on your life and on your work. What would you say learnedfrom him?

MEREDITH: Well, his language fascinates me because he lived within the means of his language, like an old man. There's never a single word that seems wanting, not a single word that seems to call attention to itself in a pretentious way.

What are the main concerns or themes in your poems? Are you politically inclined? I'm aware of at least two poems where you take a "poet as concerned citizen" stance ("Politics" and "A Mild-Spoken Citizen Finally Writes to the White House").

MEREDITH: Well, I've written only four or five political poems in 45 years. So I wouldn't say that politics is a particularly important concern. But I have strong convictions. Then I also lecture. God or something happens to me and light shines.

I try to explain and I can't explain it either. But something happens to me.

HARTEIS: These are political poems. But I would put it that William is a poet who can take a public stance because of his authority. William's early poetry dealt with the war. The first two books dealt with war and how a young person responds to being a warrior. I think there is a kind of odd detachment and a kind of aesthetic look at this. He describes the death of his comrades in a moving way. But also he takes a stoic approach. Even in war there is a kind of aesthetic: he looks at planes that are plummeting down, etc. He went through World War II and eschewed the sort of elevated diction, the ivory tower kind of notion of art for art's sake.

And then there is nature. William loves nature. He has a 30acre farm on which he grows trees. Also students. I mean, .

William never married and so his students were his sUlTogate children. He really was a great teacher because he had the time to listen to them and could become a surrogate parent for them. So they were always hanging around his office and I think he was unlike some of his peers, who were ivory tower poets, who just lived only for poetry. I think William really felt that poetry, students and farming were three aspects of his life that he pretty much gave equal time to.

MEREDITH: I believe that poetry should be useful, reach a large audience. Not for the sake of an ego, but for the people to enjoy poetry.

0

,

Winter Verse for His Sister A poem by William Meredith Moonlight washes the west side of the house As clean as bone, it carpets like a lawn The stubbled field tilting eastward Where there is no sign yet of dawn.

The moon is an angel with a bright light sent To ur ise me once before I die With,th~ real aspect of things.

It hold the1ight steady and makes no comment. :Pract~cingfor death I have lately gone To that other house Where our parents did most of their dying, Embracing and not embracing their conditions.

Our father bu.iltbookcases and little by little stopped reading, Our mother cooked proud meals for common mouths.

Kind~y,they raised two children. We raked their leaves And cut their grass, we ate and drank with them.

Reconciliation was our long work, not all of it joyful.

Now outside m~ 'own house at a cold hour I watch the noncony:nittal angel lower.

The steady lant~rn that's .worn these clapbo~rds thin In a was of moonlight, while men slept wit~in, Accepting and non accepting their conditions, .

And the fingers of trees plied a deep carpet of decay On the gravel web underneath the field, And the field.tilting always toward day. .

An Atnerican

amaste India to

tephen Huyler is passionate about India. He has spent, on the average, four months a year for nearly 30 years here, and has fashioned his life so he could do so. Traveling far and路 wide researching Indian folk art and crafts landed him in out-~f-the-way places, posh and humble alike. "My introduction to India was truly through the home and the heart rather than the hotel and commerce. It was through thoughtful hospitality, so I didn't have any negative responses to India."

Huyler's interest in "cultural anthropology" led him to photography. His book, Painted Prayers, published in 1994, was his first significant photographic tribute to India. Meeting God: Elements of Devotion in India is his most recent. The photos, based on a permanent exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.-"Puja, Expressions of Hindu Devotion"-form a traveling exhibition now on tour in India. His work has been received enthusiastically by American audiences. His goal is, he says, "to convey to people outside of India that India is growing into a major world power, that it is a contemporary, forward-looking, innovative, relevant culture. It's not hidebound in its tradition. The traditions are constantly changing, they always have. Traditions are adapting all the time."

India reminds Huyler of the important things in life. "Being in India and immersing myself in this culture only enhances my recognition of those aspects of my own heritage that are valuable, some of which are or have been in danger of being lost, and which I can re-focus on." Huyler comes from a large, extended Midwestern family, and has encountered similar solid values in India, "We can each learn from one another, Indians and Americans."

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S

Indiaphile and anthropologist Stephen Huyler has created another richlyillustrated paean to the country he loves. And the photos are currently on tour in India.

In a ritual conducted only upon rare occasions, afire is built upon a temporary sacred tree diagram in front of the sacred tree that represents the community Goddess, Gelubai, in a village in Orissa. A priest feeds the fire with ghee while intoning verses to the Supreme Goddess Chandi (a form of Parvati), requesting her divine presence in the village to solve a crisis.

Padmapoda,

Puri district, Orissa.

In a village high up in the foothills of the Himalayas, the ancient stone images of the God and Goddess, viewed as local forms of Shiva and Parvati, have never been moved from the temple since they were installed long before the first records were made. Each year for many cel1luries, the spiritual energy of these deities has been ceremonially transferred into these brass masks to be carried in their place for special festivals. The joint resources of the few families living in a small Himalayan hamlet means that they are unable to afford an elaborate palanquin for their Gods. Instead this simply adorned basket suffices as a means for transporting their processional images.

Mandi, Himachal Pradesh.

Toward the end of their lives many elderly individuals or couples go on pilgrimage either by themselves or with groups of other devotees. They visit sacred sites throughout the country: temples, shrines, holy rivers or mountains, and the ashrams of revered gurus. Living in close proximity to, and having regular darshan with, a particular holy image or saint is considered to be meritorious, bringing with it a pervading sense of peace and an influx of good karma.

Baroda, Gujarat.

C)

c

o C!J :z (an civil society on an international scale compensate for the

anarchy of world affairs?

N (fJ

ne organization has a snazzy, instantly recognizable logoa lone burning candle imprisoned in barbed wire. The other summons to mind no image whatsoever, save that of its parent, the United Nations-an association some consider a mixed blessing. Amnesty International and the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), both of which report on and catalog human-rights abuses, are similar in many ways, but different in one huge way-and the little matter of the logo says it all.

For the UNCHR is an international-more precisely, intergovernmental-organization, born of droning diplomatic conclaves and legalistic wrangling between nations; Amnesty (as the hip cognoscenti call it for short) is a nongovenunental organization (NGO)-what used to be called a citizens group-and a pet cause of right-thinking rock stars and earnest college students alike. These are boom times for Amnesty and a myriad of other NGOs. They're doing so well, in fact, that in recent years

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GOs have delivered more development assistance worldwide than the UN has, not counting the initiatives (none of them charitable, per se) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. .

Just thumb through the beneficiary lists of the largest foundations in America today, and you will find the names of a growing number of increasingly powerful NGOs-humanrights organizations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the World Resources Institute, and humanitarian relief operations such as the International Rescue Committee and Save the Children. Together, these and a thousand other GOs constitute what their philanthropic supporters believe are the makings of civil society on a global scale.

To Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the growing size and influence of NGOs represents a "power shift" in world affairs as profound as the rise of the nation-state.

o a: o

Part of the power of the idea of civil z 0; society is that it finds support among f'!? conservatives and liberals alike. }; Programs that seek to build civil soci-

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eties and deliver international assis- ~ ~ tance through NGOs are among the most popular (and today virtually the only) foreign-aid programs on Capitol Hill. This approach not only resonates with some of the more flattering features of Tocqueville's portrait of America, it also draws on our deep populist and missionary instincts: "China: Free your people, or we will deny you the American market."

"Nike: Clean up your act, or your: name will be mud among America's sneaker-wearing youth."

And over the past decade, NGOs have indeed begun to leave their mark on global affairs. To one degree or another, they can claim credit for bringing about the global climate treaty, the international ban on land mines, and the agreement that led to the establishment of an international criminal COUlt. They have helped put debt relief for the world's poorest countries back on the international political agenda;

brought to heel some of the most powerful multinational corporations; and imposed new accountability and functional transparency on the IMF and the World Bank.

More than 800 NGOs descended on the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle late last year, helping to derail a new round of global trade talks and blunting what many see as the destructive effects of unchecked globalization on labor lights and the environment.

It would be difficult, indeed, to deny the growing and, in many cases, positive influence of NGOs in world affairs. But it does not follow, as some enthusiastic advocates of global civil society claim, that NGOs represent an epochal solution to the problem of how to build a more civilized world order. A review of the OIigins of the current NGO ascendancy suggests why not. Its main causes are well known: the weakening of state power by the infOllDationrevolution and the globalization of trade and fmance; the explosion of new wealth in the bull market of the 1990s, which has financed NGO expansion; the wave of democratization that has followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc; and the evident disdain for multilateral ism in Washington, D.C. Yet it is these very same forces that ultimately stymie an NGO-based global civil society as a practical alternative to multilateralism among states.

The great weakness of the vision of global civil society is that it represents a category error. The most important function of voluntary organizations within states, the theory goes, is to countervail excessive governmental or corporate power.

But what's needed within states is altogether different from what's needed among them. For the central problem of world order today is not that there's too much of it but rather too little; not that power is concentrated, but that it is increasingly diffused in the marketplace, to the point of near-anarchy. Indeed, today's crucial global challenge is that of governancefrom building regu latory structures that will make the world market economy work for more people to controlling the various criminal and terrorist elements that have escaped state boundaries.

If governance in the face of disorder is the challenge, then NGOs and global civil society are at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive, for the simple reason

that they cannot fulfill the key functions that government must perform to ensure a civilized world. They can provide soft governance-moral suasion and the mobilization of public opinion and consumer power.

They can help ameliorate human suffering, as the best humanitarian relief organizations do. But they cannot adequately regulate markets, provide liquidity to the financial system, or correct the market when it fails (as it does quite frequently), let alone provide the public goods--education, health care and research funding, among other things-that lay the foundation for development and wealth creation.

Unable to tax or collect revenues, except for voluntary dues, they lack the wherewithal, at least on the scale needed, to provide for these essential public functions.

In celebrating the virtues of a global civil society, in fact, the most zealous advocates may only further weaken the states and international organizations that have some competency in global affairs, thereby paradoxically reducing the effectiveness of any nascent civil society.

Enthusiasts argue, for example, that NGOs can deliver development assistance more efficiently than govemments can. But it is no coincidence that such assistance, both official and unofficial, has declined overall in the '90s even as NGOs have flourished. Like the current vogue for "faith-based" social services, the sight of NGOs hard at work may salve our conscience and give us a sense that something is being done, but in fact they do little to solve the staggering problems of world poverty and underdevelopment.

Faced with the negative consequences of an unregulated world market economy, the world's citizenry will eventually demand more government and less volunteerism. In fact, they are already beginning to do so.

Among the cacophony of NGO voices in Seattle, some were calling for the WTO's destruction, but others, in seeking greater environmental protection and labor rights, were in effect demanding its strengthening.

Sooner or later, the gatekeepers of social change in the philanthropic world will need to follow suit.

The need for real govemance will be further clarified when the stock boom endsand eventually it will. Then, the flagships of civil society will be forced to restructure

and downsize, just as many inflated industries, including govemment, have been forced to do over the last decade. Some NGOs have developed enough grass-roots support to survive intact, but most are highly dependent on the accumulated wealth of the richest I percent of Americans and the foundations created and fueled by their philanthropy. From this angle, global civil society looks more like the product of an emerging plutocratic order than an answer to the question of world order.

Dependence upon the rich not only limits just how far NGOs can go in pushing certain kinds of ref 01IDS, but it probably also means that global civil society will grow only as long as inequality in America does.

Then there is the issue of democratic accountability. The appeal of civil society rests on the assumption that NGOs expand democracy. To a large degree, NGOs have bome this out, championing environmental, labor and human-welfare concerns that often get short shrift in Washington and other capitals, not to mention in international bodies like the IMF. But as NGOs have grown more powerful, their own democratic character has been drawn into question. Mike Moore, the head of the WTO, has responded to NGO allegations that the WTO is undemocratic by flinging the issue of accountability back at the NGOs, who, he says, have never had to get a vote. In Moore's view, according to the Financial Times, the WTO is at least "bound by rules made by representatives of member governments, which in turn were chosen by their peoples."

As Jessica T. Mathews admits, "For all their strengths, NGOs are special interests, albeit not motivated by personal profit."

This fact threatens to undercut what has been a great source of their appeal to idealistic supporters. Until NGOs find an effective answer to Moore's rejoinders, and until they broaden their base of financial support, civil society will remain a poor substitute for democratically accountable governance and, at best, a useful adjunct to state-to-state cooperation through international organizations.

D About the Author: Sherle R. Schwenninger is a seniorfellow at the World Policy Institute of New School University and a consultant to the Project on Development, Trade and International Finance aI the Council on Foreign Refalions.

Crayola crayons have become universal symbols of childhood. Their look, scent and feel on paper take us all back to carefree days of colorful scribbling.

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closely guarded secret. But some basics are clear. other, no pen. Deep at the bottom of my purse, I snag a purple crayon. Hey, I'm a mom, and I scrawl big waxy letters on the Pigments, produced from natural sources-slate yields gray; metals, such as iron, yield reds; various types of earth yield yelback of an envelope. Thank heaven for the ubiquitous crayon.

The object at hand is one of only a few known to exist. It is an lows and browns-start off as powders that are pounded, ground, sieved, then refined and heated. The temperature determines the original box of 64 Crayola crayons from 1958. It's the rare baby boomer who doesn't remember one like it-the first box with the shade of color. Since 1903, more than 600 shades of Crayola built-in sharpener. It was given to the National Museum of crayons have been produced.

American History (NMAH) in 1998 at a celebration in In June 1990 Binney & Smith decided to retire eight of its old Manhattan's Rainbow Room to honor the 40th anniversary of the colors to make some of the more modem, brighter colors that package. Bob Keeshan-Captain Kangaroo-was there, and press children seemed to be searching for in their artistic palettes. Not accounts appeared for days. Reporters waxed nostalgic over the so fast, said a few of Crayola's veteran fans. One morning, a few box with its classic green and yellow chevrons. weeks later, Binney & Smith executives arrived at their head"Can a brand-new crayon color, Boomer Gray, be far behind?" asked a New York Times headline. We boomers: like everything else, we think we own the crayon. But the truth is, nearly everybody alive today probably made their first colorful squiggles with a Binney & Smith Crayola.

It was 1903 when the crayon made its debut.

Before that a child's crayon was just a stick of colored clay or chalk. It looked nice but when put to paper, nothing much happened-not a pretty picture.

Binney & Smith was a small, 21-year-old firm, owned by Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith. They were already in the business of making color. They owned the rights to a line of red oxides of iron for the red paint used by most farmers on their barns. And they were also sellers of lamp black and white chalk.

They had been among the first to solve the centuries-old problem of how to manufacture a really black black. The answer was expensive carbon black. Binney & Smith likes to credit itself for figuring out how to make it inexpensively:At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the company won a gold medal for its carbon black display.

In 1902, they cleared the dust from America's classrooms with the invention of the then-famous Above: A Binney & Smith worker pours hot wax into moLds to demonstrate how An-Du-Septic Dustless Blackboard Chalk. The new some crayons are made the oLd}ashioned way, by hand. chalk won Binney & Smith another gold medal, at Far Left: At the Binney & Smith factory, crayon-filled sLeeves will he packed into the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

48-, 64-, or 96-crayon versions of the classic yeLLow-and-green CrayoLa hoxes.

By this time, they were doing a brisk business selling their products in America's classrooms. Besides chalk, quarters to find picketers protesting the decision. The RUMPs, or they made slate pencils. But schools couldn't afford artist's Raw Umber and Maise Preservation Society, and the CRAYONs, crayons. The Easton, Pennsylvania, plant was already making an or Committee to Reestablish All Your Old Norms, had quickly inexpensive industrial marking crayon out of carbon black and a mobilized their constituents. When the old colors were rereleased later that year in a special holiday commemorative coldurable paraffin.

Well, the rest is history. Color came to the classroom. It was lection, the groups were mollified. Not too long ago, "indian red" Alice Binney, a former schoolteacher, who came up with the name became the third Crayola color ever to be renamed, when Binney & Smith decided that even though the name referred to the pigCrayola. She combined the French word craie, meaning "chalk" with "ola," derived from "oleaginous," or "oily." ment from India, sensitivity required a new name. The new name, "chestnut," selected by Crayola customers, seems rather One of the first customers was the United States Government, which began shipping crayons to schools on Indian reservations. dull when you compare it with the names that came in as close brown" and "the crayon formerly Today the formulation of the nontoxic pigments and the wax, as . seconds-"baseball-mitt well as how they give the crayons their distinctive smell, is a known as indian red." In 1958 "Prussian blue" was renamed

B

"midnight blue," since most children had never heard of Prussia.

And in 1962, "flesh" was renamed "peach."

Back at the National Museum of American History, a large storage-room drawer reveals the museum's extensive crayon collection, ranging from the very old to some of the more recent, even including fruit-scented versions. There's a box, dated 1912, with a picture of Peter Paul Rubens. "Unequaled for outdoor sketching," it says on the side, reflecting Impressionism's emerging popularity. Binney & Smith first marketed in two directions: to artists and to schoolchildren. Here's the school-room version: "Good in any climate, certified non-toxic." Here is a beautiful round wooden container that looks like a toothpick holder, full of crayons. And here is a beautifully crafted wooden box, its dovetail construction giving it the look of a treasure chest. The curator says that it is a treasure. It's filled with the 1941-57 factory standards-the master crayons, if you will. And there next to the standards is a box of today's "Multicultural My World Colors Crayons." The smell of paraffin bombards me. The olfactory system engages. The hypothalamus clicks on. Look out! Here they come-childhood memories!

That familiar smell-a Yale University study on scent recognition once ranked crayons as number 18 of the 20 most recognizable scents to American adults. When I visit Binney & Smith's three-hectare plant in Fork's Township, near Easton, that smell is making me feel like I'm 8 years old again. The plant is running full tilt to produce for the back-to-school season. Three billion crayons are made here each year. Wooden pallets, each piled with cases of crayons waiting to be packaged, line the walls. Outside the factory is a row of two-story storage tanks holding liquid paraffin, which will be pumped into vats and mixed with colored powdery pigment.

C

rayon molder Michael Hunt, from Bangor, Pennsylvania, is showing me how it's been done since the very early days. Besides the paraffin and the pigment, Hunt tells me, the crayon also contains talc. "It's like the flour in a cake mix, gives it texture." His leather workman's boots are mottled with orange wax. Both of us are wearing protective goggles because the wax that he is pumping from his vat into a 40-pound pail is at 120 degrees Celsius. "Sometimes a little of it splashes onto my face," he tells me. "Stings a little, but it cools off pretty quickly."

He deftly lifts the bucket out from under the vat and spills the wax out across the cooling table, a gentle wave rolling across the top as the wax settles into the molds-74 rows of eight. We're making the giant "My First Crayons" that fit easily into the hands of preschoolers.

We wait the 7Yz minutes for the wax to cool. When a timer chimes, Hunt announces the crayons are ready. He runs a cutting device over the top of the molding table and shaves away the extra wax. Then he lays the collecting tray carefully over the top, lining up the holes. He touches a button, activating a press from below, and the crayons gently rise up into the collecting tray.

With ease, Hunt hoists the 3Y2-foot-Iong tray of crayons around to the sorting table behind him and dumps the crayons there. On

inspection, he pulls a couple of pointless runts from the rows and, with a wooden paddle, starts moving crayons from the table to a wrapping device. The whole old-fashioned process takes about 15 minutes.

Not too far away, a more modem, continuous-production operation is under way as a rotary molding table does all of Hunt's handwork mechanically. The machine is making the standardsize crayons. Materials go in one end, and operator Elizabeth Kimminour receives dozens of the thin, paper-wrapped products at the other end. She lays them neatly into cartons to be sent to the packaging plant.

And that's where I get a glimpse of the celebrated box of 64 being produced. Clicking and whirring, factory machines are endlessly fascinating for those of us who rarely see them in action.

Grabbers mysteriously turn flat sheets of printed cardboard into boxes while plastic sharpeners, lined up like soldiers on parade, drop precisely onto a wheel that injects them into passing boxes, which somehow along the way end up with crayons in them.

Binney & Smith is owned today by Hallmark Cards. And that company closely guards the Crayola trademark. (Ms. Crayola Walker of Bellow Falls, Vermont, and Ms. Crayola Collins of Pulaski County, Virginia, however, were graciously allowed to "borrow" the name.) Many companies, particularly foreign ones, would like to capitalize on the Crayola fame, and copycatters try to steal all the time. In the NMAH collection, there's an example of one such attempt-a party bag made to look very Crayola, but it isn't. Licensing of the trademark is common, however, with products ranging from software videos, sheets and bedding, to backpacks, wallpaper and wall paints, and even shoes that look like a box of crayons.

Back home again with my kids and a neighbor's child, I announce that w.e are going to color. I pull three boxes of 64 from a bag and hand one to each child. In no time at all, their industrious minds-their entire bodies-are completely engrossed in their work.

I remember reading in the Binney & Smith literature a claim that as a youngster, Grant Wood, who later painted the iconic American Gothic, entered a Crayola coloring contest in the early 1900s and won. The sunlight pours in through the window, translating color to vision. Claire is making a rainbow. She picks up a crayon. "This is 'thistle.' It's what Eeyore eats." Next she chooses "dandelion," "forest green," "sky blue wisteria" and "tickle me pink." Patsy is drawing a portrait of Jessie, and Jessie is drawing the flower vase on the teacart. I try to imagine the inner workings of their creativity. Optical images register on the tiny retinas at the backs of their eyes, electronic signals travel the optic nerves to their brains, the signals are interpreted and messages sent back. Suddenly I snap out of my reverie as Jessie, pondering the red crayon in her hand, says, "I wonder who decided red should be 'red,' anyway?" And then she thinks a minute and says, "Do you think it was George Washington?"

D About the Author: Beth Smithsonian magazine.

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ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

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Drawing by KAL. Reprinted by permission Canoonists

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Goli ke Hamjoli

By SUMITA MEHTA

raveling through Rajasthan while working on a project on women and the environment, freelance journalist Aditi Kapoor noted that women cited two basic problems: the lack of metaled roads and contraceptives. "If you can do something to help get us these tablets, we would be ever so grateful," they pleaded.

Going by this, it would seem that the oral contraceptive pill is high on the popularity list ofIndian women. In actual fact, it isn't.

Just 1.2 percent ofIndian women opt for them, compared to 15-25 percent in other developing countries. Why so? Partly it is lack of access, but more importantly, it is due to negative perceptions.

When the pill first made its way to India in the early 1960s, it was of the "high-dose" (high levels of estrogen and progestin) variety with some unpleasant side effects. Fears of it being a health hazard further deterred users. Doctors, too, were reluctant to prescribe the pill, instead preferring to promote the IUD or condom as temporary methods of contraception. Because of this lackluster consumer response, international pharmaceutical companies lured to this country by the size of the market, fled quickly. Of the 10 consumers that set up base initially, now there are just three.

Thirty years down the line, the pill has practically reinvented itself. The newer, low-dose versions have drastically reduced hormone levels and side effects have all but disappeared. The pill is the second most highly researched drug, the first is aspirin, and research has shown that the pill has many pluses-it helps prevent certain cancers, retards osteoporosis (thinning of bones-a common complaint of menopausal women) and helps prevent anemia.

Unfortunately, awareness of the pill's positive aspects is minimal, and it still retains its Cinderella status. This becomes relevant in the context ofIndia's population explosion-it is now crossing the billion mark-with its attendant economic and environmental repercussions. Less well known but equally important is the im-

T

pact on the status of women and children's health.

India has the world's highest level of maternal mortalityevery five minutes, one woman dies from a pregnancy-related cause. Fifty percent of maternal deaths of girls in the 15-19 age group are due to unsafe abortions. Experts acknowledge that the most effective way to counteract instances of unwanted pregnancies is by promoting the use of temporary methods such as the pill, condom and IUD. The ~UD has to be inserted by a trained medic but the first two are freely available over the counter in many brands and prices.

Increasing the time between births also increases the survival rate and nutritional status of children. Spacing, therefore, has benefits for both mother and child. Yet, most couples-60 percent-opt for sterilization as a means of fertility control. And this surprises Dr. Rohit Bhatt, former president of the Federation of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Societies of India, "It makes more sense to go for temporary methods, sterilization usually takes place after several children are born, so it really doesn't make much of a difference to numbers or health.

Most couples would ideally prefer delaying the first pregnancy and opting for a spacing method-the condom and the pill fit the bill." .

Interestingly, 80 percent of users of condoms and pills access these products from the market. If the total number of users is to go up, then aggressive marketing is the key. Though awareness of the pill is high and its effectiveness as a contraceptive is accepted, negative perceptions abound and it is difficult to convince people that the pill is safe. Just how bad the situation was till recently is illustrated by what a program manager from a social marketing agency had to say: "We had to complete our sales target. Freebies and promotional aids don't help when selling the pill because it's a decision that affects the body. We found we were getting nowhere. So, instead of pushing it as a contraceptive to consumers, we would persuade doctors to buy the pill from us, so we could achieve our target sales and they in turn would prescribe it for gynecological problems. The Hindu Navaratas was another time when sales went up-the pill was prescribed to delay menstruation as Hindu women cannot perform a puja while menstruating. A very small portion of the sales was related to contraception."

This unenviable situation was what the Goli ke Hamjoli (Friends of the Pill) program had to contend with. A joint venture between the development bank ICICI under its PACT-CRH

A program o.fficer conducts an awareness session on the pill as tea is served. Workshops are designed to dispel myths about the pill, which has transformed since it hit the market three decades ago.

(Program for Advancement in Commercial Technologies Child and Reproductive Health) program and the Commercial Marketing Strategies (CMS)-the most recent in a series of USAIDfunded projects that involve the commercial sector in family planning-this is one ofthe biggest private sector initiatives to promote the use of the pill in India. According to USAID, programs like CMS and PACT-CRH address the challenge to meet the growing demand for health products and services without increasing the burden on public health systems or on poor households. At the launch in November 1998, N. vaghul, chairman of ICICI, commented, "Economic and industrial growth is meaningless if social infrastmcture is not good. We have a high infant mortality rate, a

galloping population and a high illiteracy rate. Since independence, political leadership has claimed to be pro-poor, but nothing much has been achieved. ICICI will help mobilize the private sector and NGOs to work toward social good."

The Goli ke Hamjoli program focuses on urban areas and is spread over Delhi and the four states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, which account for 44 percent of India's population. The CMS team, headed by Dr. Rita Leavell, country manager, set to work studying the consumer-their fears and concerns-and looking at ways to address them. At the same time, the team evolved a strategy to motivate those in a position to persuade the consumer-doctors and chemiststo promote the pill.

Availability of the pill was not a problem, aggressive promotion was the key to success. CMS, therefore, also persuaded commercial firms like Wyeth Lederle to promote their brands to doctors and chemists more aggressively. Simultaneously, ICICI commissioned Ogilvy and Mather Advertising and Public Relations to mount a series of TV ads, with well-known personalities endorsing the project and these were beamed all across India. Tracking studies done later showed that this resulted in 80 percent awareness among the target group aged 19-29 years.

"Initially, the understanding was much more generic," says the project's market research adviser Anand Sinha. "Later," he says, "interest and knowledge focused on specific aspects-the side effects and the safety factor."

Research showed that consumers usually went for advice to

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their local chemist or general physician, who in many instances is a non-allopathic doctor. Orientation workshops are held with both chemists and doctors-and information on the pill-how it works, how to address minor side effects, etc., are dealt with in depth. Follow-up visits are also part of the strategy. "Most women don't have any problems about starting the pill, which is why it is available over the counter," says Delhi-based gynecologist, Dr. Alka Dhal. "However, women who are heavy smokers or who already have a health problem like severe diabetes, a liver condition, very high blood pressure or heart disease, should obviously be screened first. There are only a few conditions which may prevent woman from taking the pill-for instance, if a woman is fully breastfeeding a baby until it is six months old," she says.

Briefing sessions are held for professional bodies like the Indian Medical Association and local civic groups like Lions, Rotary and AIWC (All India Women's Conference) in 12 major cities in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.

Health camps have been organized to inform and educate young couples. Periodic program information and scientific updates are mailed to over 23,000 doctors and 20,000 chemists.

Over 16,000 chemists and 6,200 doctors have been trained to respond to the needs of potential clients. Though onground presence is restricted to these states, the media campaign is at a national level, therefore the reach is much wider. "What is particularly striking is the way diverse elements worked in synergy to increase pill sales, which went up by 15-20 percent in just one year. Commercial sectors have reported sales up by 40 percent," says Sinha.

Chemists attached to the program shy away from talking about sales. "We are fulfilling a social need," says the owner of Pioneer Medical Store in Kanauj in Uttar Pradesh. "People are reluctant to come for advice on family planning but when they see the board [Goli ke Hamjoli] they feel more relaxed." A bit

grudgingly, he does acknowledge that sales have increased, but adds quickly, "we are helping society."

In Kanpur Dr. Umesh Tandon feels there is no problem in simultaneously following the homeopathic and allopathic systems of medicine-he's qualified in both. He has an unusual way of reminding women to take the piJl-"How can you forget to take the pill? Suppose the sun forgets to come out one day?"

But the litmus test is user's reactions. Smita Gupta from Meerut says: "I have tried many methods. At times, my husband was unhappy, at times my mother-in-law did not approve. As a result, I had three abortions and this affected both my physical and emotional well-being. Since I took to the pill-it was a joint decision with my husband-my life has changed. I'm free from tensions and our sex life is more enjoyable. We're both happy." Shaheen, a laborer also from Meerut, is also happy at being on the pill. "I no longer run away from my husband each time he wants to have sex [for fear of getting pregnant]. As a result he's less irritable and there's no tension between us, like there was before. This, I feel, is the major plus point."

The sense of empowerment that many women feel endorses what First Lady Usha Narayanan said when the program began: "It is important that women should be made aware that they can limit the size of their families with the help of oral contraception.

Myths and fears about such methods need to be dispelled. Women need to take their own decisions which primarily concern them and the welfare of their families as well as society at large."

0 About the Author: Sumita Mehta, a former assistant Times of India, is a freelance journalist and consultant.

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resident Clinton chose Agra as the place to highlight environmental cooperation. The Taj Mahal, he said, is a symbol of the importance of environmental vigilance. At Taj Khema, India and the U.S. signed a Joint Statement on Cooperation on Energy and the Environment. "In India the earth has been celebritted for more than 30 centuries. This, after all, is a nation named for a river, a place where the earth and its waters are worshipped as divine," the President said. "With good reason, the people of India have spent centuries worrying far less about what we might do to nature and far more about what nature can do to us-through floods, hurricanes, droughts and other calamities. But as the experience of the beautiful Taj Mahal proved, and as the struggle to save the Ganges proves, we can no longer ignore man's impact on the environment."

Climate change and pollution are problems also being faced in the U.S., he said, emphasizing, "We don't have to choose between economic opportunity and environmental protection. But we do have to choose between a future of sustainable development for all of our children-with clean water and sanitary conditions and energy efficiency and clean air-and a future in which we give it up simply because we refuse to take the necessary decisions to preserve them." The U.S. Government has earmarked $45 million to promote more efficient energy production and use in India, and $50 million throughout South Asia, among other programs. The President observed, "The environmental problems of the United States or India or any other nation are not just national problems. They are global ones. More than any time in history, the environmental challenges we face go beyond national borders. And so must our solutions. We must work together to protect the environment."

President Bill Clinton, Taj Khema, Agra.

March 22.2000.

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