SPAN: January/February 2000

isual and information technology have touched all areas of life, from industry to art. Works on the inside front and back covers show some of the ways electronics can become art. Installation art as a genre really came into its own in the '90s-and video is a standard feature of many installations today. The challenge is to use that high-tech "canvas" imaginatively, as done here by Jessica Bronson in her work Lost Horizon, and by Vivan Sundaram, whose installation Carrier appears on the inside back cover.

V

January/February

2000

SPAN Publisher Francis B. Ward

"In the Future, People Like Me Will Go toJail"

By Gwen KinKead

Editor-in -Chief Kiki S. Munshi

American University Fair

By A. Venkata Narayan~

Editor Lea Terhune

Indio Inc.

Associate Editor Arun Bhanot

By Courtney Rubin

Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research Services

Pirates of the Whydah

By Donovan Webster TELEVISION FAST FORWARD

The Businessof Broadcasting

By Dilip Cherian

AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Digifallmmortal 'By RobertWLucky Front cover: A computer-generated illustration by Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar to celebrate the new millennium. "The new century will be brighter and distinctly dominated by digital technology," says Suhas about his vision of the future that inspired his cover art.

The Dawn,o(Videoconferencing

By ArunBhanot

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

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.

Do You Speak Bostonian?

By SaraHannnel

How Big Is Too Big?

By Tom Brown

Think Truck

By EJ. Heresniak

A LETTER

FROM

THE PUBLISHER

nthis first issue of a new millennium,

have

I

SPAN looks ahead to fresh horizons

with a backward glance at the cornerstone developments

changed

since

his grandfather

delivered blocks of ice by horse and wagon.

of the past. We find our-

But our nostalgia about the past should

selves on a threshold like none other in

not blind us to its flaws. "Pirates of the

recorded history. Progress today is driven

Whydah" by Donovan Webster tells the

by information transmission,

and the refinements

of knowledge

storage and development.

Television

story of the first sunken pirate ship to be discovered in North America: the slave ship Whydah that sunk

technology became a household necessity in the last

off the coast of Massachusetts in 1717 and the rebels

century. Now that it has been hitched to the infor-

who manned

mation revolution it is becoming interactive, digitized

article show the evidence of their doings, dredged

and it is quickly evolving into the essential tool for

from the sea.

the new century.

accompanying

the

On the legitimate business front, "In the Future,

Dilip Cherian focuses on the impact of cable television in India in his lead article, "The Business of Broadcasting,"

her. Photographs

supplemented

by "Anchored in the

People Like Me Will Go to Jail," Gwen Kinkead tells of Ray Anderson,

CEO of Interface Ine., who is

revolutionizing his business to save the environment

Future," an interview with well-known CNN news-

-and

man Riz Khan. The genesis of the news business and

Too Big?" by Tom Brown, examines the challenge

how it has been changed by television is treated in

giant corporations

"The Battle for Information,"

by H.DS. Greenway.

still making plenty of money. "How Big Is face in making their organizations

employee-friendly. And some rising stars of America

It is easy to forget that not that long ago stories were

-the

filed by post and telegraph, rather than beamed live

by Courtney Rubin in "India Ine."

or e-mailed in seconds via satellite and fiber optics.

"Digital Immortal,"

Indian-American

entrepreneurs-are

profiled

A. Venkata Narayana reports on a new project to

by Robert W Lucky, recalls the

combat vehicular pollution and on the American uni-

time when the Next Big Thing was the railroad

versities me/a) both held recently in New Delhi. If

and the telegraph and compares it to to day's digital

you are going to college or for other reasons to the

technology. When Morse Code was first tapped out

U.S., "Do You Speak Bostonian?"

it commenced "what was then considered the great-

will forewarn you about regional dialects.

est information

revolution ever." The fact that the

now archaic telegraph today's information

was digital oddly presaged

technology. But where will it

take us?

The year 2000 is a landmark in a special way to SPAN-this

year we will complete 40 years of pub-

lication. But more on that later. For now, myself and the SPAN staff want to wish you, our readers, a very

Arun Bhanot connects to the growing popularity of videoconferences

in India in "The

Dawn

of

Videoconferencing." E.J. Heresniak in "Think Truck" ruminates

by Sara Hammel

about how the vehicles of opportunity

happy new year.

"In the Future, People Like Me Will Go to Jail" astyear, on an October evening as stifling as a greenhouse, CEOs from half a dozen of the world's largest companies gathered at the U.S. Embassy in London. At the lectern before them stood a man of medium build with lean, handsome features and a Georgia drawl: Ray Anderson, the king of carpet tile.

Anderson is founder, chairman and CEO of Interface, the $1-billion-a-year leader in this unglamorous sector of the floor-covering industry; he introduced himself that night as one of the tribe, "a captain of industry, an American hero." But Anderson quickly made it clear that mutual admiration wasn't the main agenda. In a voice fired by evangelical zeal, he described a breakthrough four years earlier when his life-both personal and professional-had utterly changed. "I had a revelation," he told his audience, "about what industry is doing to our planet. I stood convicted as a plunderer of the earth."

The CEOs shifted in their seats as Anderson explained that he now considered the technologies of the Industrial Revolution to be "voracious," a form of collective suicide. "In the future," he declared, "people like me will go to jail."

Then he rolled out his central theme:

Four years ago CEO Ray Anderson converted to environmentalism.

The company will never be the same.

L

Ray Anderson is on a mission to clean up American businesses-starting with his own. Can a Georgia carpet mogul save the planet?

"Interface of Atlanta, my company, is changing course to become sustainableto grow without damaging the earth and manufacture without pollution, waste or fossil fuels. If we get it right, our company and our supply chain will never have to take another drop of oil." Leveling a finger at Chris Fay, then CEO of the British unit of Royal Dutch/Shell, he added, "We

want to put you out of business."

Since 1987, when Norway's then-Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland advised .the United Nations that economic enterprise must be "sustainable"-that it must "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"-environmentalists and left-leaning policymakers have championed the idea. The doctrine of sustainability caught on in progressive corners of agriculture and forestry and has lately become the rage among city planners and architects. It is less popular, as you might expect, among the world's industrialists, many of whom see sustainability as a well-intentioned fantasy that is likely to have very expensive implications.

Part cheerleader, part scold, part dreamer, Ray Anderson wants to be the man to reconcile them all-left and right, ecologist and oil baron. His 1994 conversion turned him into the rarest of hybrids: a born-again green industrialist. The years he has since spent trying to reform Interface got him noticed by Bill Clinton,

who in 1997 named him co-chair of the President's Council on Sustainable Development. Anderson has made the job his bully pulpit. Drawing on his Baptist roots and his engineer's head for facts, he has spread the gospel of sustainability: Unless we as a species stop bickering and do something, he says, the end-our end-is imminent.

Even two years ago, that kind of rhetoric would have been branded, particularly in business circles, as alarmist and shrill. But there has been a tectonic shift over the past year or so. As Anderson puts it, the corporate brain is waking up. He points to the treaty that emerged from the 1997 environmental summit in Kyoto, Japan, as a sign of a growing international consensus that the greenhouse effect and global warming are real and that the burning of oil and natural gas is largely responsible. In signing the treaty, 160 nations agreed that the world's industrialized countries would cut their greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 5 percent by 2012, compared with 1990 levels. The treaty won't bind the U.S. unless the Senate ratifies it. (Some Senators argue that the treaty lets developing countries off too easily; the Clinton Administration has decided not to submit it for ratification until that deficiency is addressed.) But the mere fact that the treaty exists signals a broad recognition of the problem.

Anderson's main job as co-chair of the President's Council on Sustainable Development has been to work with a panel of business leaders, environmentalists, and local and federal government officials to deliver policy recommendations on global warming to the White House.

He has been a vocal advocate on the council for giving incentives to business for cutting emissions, while his co-chair, Jonathan Lash, in his capacity as president of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, helped to persuade General Motors, British Petroleum (now BP Amoco) and Monsanto to support action on climate change. Dozens of other companies are backing a bill before the Senate that would give "early-action credits" to businesses cutting emissions ahead of the schedule set in Kyoto. (The Pew Center

"If there is a national consensus emerging, you want to be at the table shaping it, not at the receiving end."

-NAZLI

CHOUCRI

on Global Climate Change, a publicpolicy nonprofit in Arlington, Virginia, counts another 20 companies pushing for some form of early-action credits.)

Meanwhile, in the wake of the hottest year on record, 1998, some of the largest multinationals have embraced sustainability on their own. Royal Dutch/Shell and BP Amoco, for example, have promised to cut greenhouse-gas emissions an ambitious 10 percent from 1990 levels; Royal Dutch/Shell says that it will do so by 2002, BP by 2010. GM has pledged to cut total energy use by 20 percent vs. 1995 levels by 2002; Toyota has rolled out a hybrid gas/electric car in Japan; German companies have begun work on hydrogenfueled jet engines; Volvo, Deutsche Bank, Electrolux, ICI, Monsanto and Unilever have formed a consortium to assess ways that sustainability could be applied to their businesses; and DaimlerChrysler, Ford and a small Canadian company have formed a joint venture to develop fuel-cell powered systems that could eventually replace the gasoline engine.

The Council on Sustainable Development's charter, however, expired on June 30. Anderson believes a private organization that includes legislators and other government types should take its place.

From Anderson's standpoint, such a coalition would be only the beginning.

Sustainability, as he understands it, implies nothing less than the reinvention of the modern corporation. It places the planet's ecological health on a par with the production of goods and services and the

creation of wealth. That entails retooling on an unprecedented scale.

At Interface, adopting sustainability has meant reconceiving the business from the ground up, from the composition of its products to the way they are produced, distributed and even disposed of.

Anderson takes the project seriously enough to have had the following credo set in bronze in the floor at his newest U.S. factory: "If we are successful, then we will spend the rest of our days harvesting yesteryear's carpet and other petrochemically derived products, recycling them into new materials, converting sunlight into energy-with zero scrap going into the landfill and zero emissions going into the ecosystem. And we'll be doing wellvery well-by doing good."

This last idea, that sustainability will ultimately payoff in dollars, is Anderson's most potent argument in his quest to convert the Royal Dutch/Shells and Dow Chemicals of the world. "Business will get on board not out of altruism but selfinterest," he insists; to expect anything else-a moral mjssion such as his own, for instance-is naive. (For businesses that have trouble locating their self-interest, Anderson favors a tax package that would penalize polluters.) Still, Anderson expects most businesses to understand that when the environment goes down the tubes, the market itself won't be far behind. In the 21 st century, he says, the spoils will go to those with the foresight to invest accordingly. s long as companies are willing to adopt green practices, says political scientist and sustainability specialist Nazli Choucri at MIT, their rationales don't much matter. "Every company applies [sustainability] as they see fit," she says; "If you do it to save money, it still makes you green, even if inadvertently." Choucri cites three reasons companies go for sustainability, aside from real concern about dwindling natural resources: "First, to be one step ahead of the sheriff, so to speak, in terms of liability and the environmental impact of what you do. Second, you might worry about your competitors getting better PR from this.

A

Third, you might be aware that the Administration is trying to bring sustainability into the national agenda. Think of it as a very strong social wave, much like the clean-air movement of the 1970s ....1f there is a national consensus emerging, you want to be at the table shaping it, not at the receiving end."

For the first 60 years of his life, Anderson pursued the green that doesn't grow on trees. Son of a postmaster and teacher, he grew up a smart, athletic kid in West Point, Georgia. He charged through Georgia Tech on a football scholarship, then upset a comfortable career with a leading carpetmaker by quitting to start Interface in 1973. The long hours helped finish his first marriage, but the company took off after Anderson discovered carpet tile. Squares of industrial carpeting that can be laid down and taken up cheaply, carpet tile lacked class in the eyes of most broadloom men-it was the flooring equivalent of the leisure suit. But Anderson pounced on the idea and scored with customers by offering tiles that were prettier (and more expensive) than the British originals. By 1993 he ruled the market, manufacturing in 29 plants around the world. He was secure in a happy second marriage and enviably rich.

Interface in those days was no environmental trailblazer. Carpeting is, in fact, toxic stuff: Pools and pools of petroleum are drained to make the nylon, which is then fastened in fiberglass and PYC, two known carcinogens. Factories flush their dye water-full of heavy metals and other toxins-into wastewater streams, and blow carbon dioxide, the most worrisome greenhouse gas, from their smoke-stacks. Old carpet ends up in landfills-an indestructible, potentially hazardous waste.

In 1994, public awareness caught up with Interface. Customers began asking what the company was doing for the environment; Anderson had little to say in response. "For the first 21 years of the company's existence, I never gave one thought to what we were taking from the earth or doing to it, except to be sure we were in compliance and keeping ourselves 'clean' in a regulatory sense," he says. Then an employee passed him a book, Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce. Hawken had written about the extinction of species at a pace not seen since the dinosaur era, about the earth choking on its own waste, industrial gases threatening the climate, the deGimation of the world's forests, and "the death of birth."

"Think of it, 'the death of birth,''' Anderson says.

"That phrase was a spear in my chest." (It had been coined by Harvard biologist E.G. Wilson, whom Hawken quoted.) Reading the book in bed, Anderson

~

g

! ~ 8

cried. He read passages to his wife. She cried. "It invaded my sou!," he says.

Several days later Anderson addressed a gathering of Interface managers and repented, in a mea culpa that astonished even himself. He had fouled the earth, he told them; now he was challenging himself and Interface to adopt new ways. By the end of the talk, Anderson says, everyone in the room was crying. "It was the most stunning experience," he recalls. "The feeling was, 'We've been doing it wrong all these years.' You can call it guilt."

Nowadays he travels the world, giving a similar speech to several hundred audiences a year. "Every ecosystem on earth is in decline," he typically tells them. "This is a crisis: It is a funeral march to the grave, if someone or something doesn't do something to reverse the deadly decline.

Business and industry-the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most pervasive institutions on earth, and the ones doing the most damage-must take the lead ....Once one understands this crisis, no thinking person can stand idly by and do nothing. When you get past denial, you must do whatever you can. Conscience demands it." here is no mistaking his passion.

The private Ray Anderson is almost entirely gone, associates note, replaced by the itinerant preacher.

He dedicates his quest to his six grandchildren and seems haunted by "my role in the world they will inherit. I am trying as hard as I can to undo my mistakes."

That hasn't been easy. After his epiphany, Anderson's challenges multiplied. Sales at Interface slumped in the mid-1990s, hurt by Anderson's slack management and other problems. Not only did he need to revive the business, but he also felt compelled to do so in a way consistent with his new green ideals.

To set the business straight, he recruited a new president for Interface's carpet-tile division: a tough, down-to-earth carpetindustry veteran named Charles Eitel (now COO and president of Interface). Then he turned to the environmental part of the problem. He brought in advisers-not the usual McKinsey types that bosses call in at stricken companies. Instead Anderson

T

hired green-movement figures, starting with Hawken, who besides being an author is a successful ecoentrepreneur, the founder of Erewhon Trading, a natural-foods company, and Smith & Hawken, a garden-supply outfit. Anderson also hired David Brower, the man who helped put John Muir's Sierra Club on the international map; Bill McDonough, a green-design pioneer; and Amory Lovins, a physicist and consultant on resource efficiency at the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Anderson called the consultants his dream team; it became Eitel's job to make

selves as ecocrusaders as they pitched carpet tile with renewed fervor. "This happens a lot in green companies," Lovins claims. "Freeing up the contradiction between making a living and doing it in a way that your kids can be proud of you causes an implosion of energy."

The turnaround, unorthodox though it was, worked. Interface's stock price has gone up 70 percent, and profits are up 8 I percent since 1994. Annual sales have risen 77 percent. At the same time, Interface has become more efficient and learned to use fewer raw materials. Interface says it's 22 percent of the way toward sustainability; "And it's happened in just over four years," crows Anderson. The scorecard since "Once one understands 1994: Emissions and solid wastes are down this crisis, no thinking 30 percent and 50 percent, respectively, per person can stand revenue dollar. That has translated into $19 idly by and do nothing. million in cumulative extra cash flow, net When you get past of $62 million of R&D and $14 million of denial, you must do capital spent in converting to sustainable whatever you can. technology.

"I told you sustainability Conscience demands it." makes good business sense," Anderson says, flashing his best smile. "We've got a revolution in this company."

In its products and industrial processes, Interface's progress has come through thousands of small steps-such as eliminating a fourth of the nylon in every carpet them part of the turnaround. A boyishtile. Interface is in the first stages of designing compostable or recyclable carpet; looking 49-year-old, Eitel remembers feeling squeezed between two seemingly it's experimenting with hemp, sugar cane irreconcilable imperatives-make Interand corn; it has added a recyclable carpet face money, make Interface green. His first tile to its product line. A division in Maine that makes fabric for office partitions now response, he recalls, was anger: ''I'm just spins the stuff from recycled soda pop bottrying to run a company, and suddenly I'm responsible for changing the world, too? tles and is replacing dangerous chemicals Why can't the next generation do this? .. in its dyes. A $1 million photovoltaic Now I'm proud to do it, but then it seemed grid-one of America's largest units used impossible." in manufacturing-powers Interface looms路 As Eitel grappled with the busiin California.

Despite all this, though, the company is ness, Anderson adopted Lovins as his still making carpet the old way-unsusmentor and set about transforming himtainably. That's because nylon is not yet self from autocrat to father figure. recyclable, Anderson is quick to explain.

Hawken, meanwhile, took charge of reeducating the employees. "When we He tells suppliers that the first among started," Anderson recalls, "my employ- . them to produce a recyclable nylon will get all his orders. "The technology doesn't ees said, Sustainability sounds like perpetual motion. How do you do it? How do exist today. The best recycling attempts you put back more than you take?" But that have been made lose half the nylon.

It's five to 10 years away," Anderson before long, says Lovins, salesmen began notes. Likewise, Interface is waiting for taking Anderson's lead and styling them-

costs to drop before fully converting to renewable energy. Power from photovoltaic cells costs tlu'ee to four times more than electricity from oil. "We'll convert as we grow sales," Anderson promises. For now, Interface plants one tree in the rain forest for each 6,500-kilometer air trip taken by one of its 7,600-plus employees-more than 12,000 trees at last count. But these are admittedly interim measures. "We are decades from taking that last drop from the wellhead that Anderson talks about," says Jim Hartzfeld, senior vice president of Interface Research.

To some observers, sustainability still sounds like perpetual motion-some kind of alchemical sleight-of-hand. Certainly it's a stretch to imagine a day when the world will make cars, skyscrapers, computer chips, plastics, and all the rest without actually using up anything. Anderson concedes that for now, sustainability is more a guiding principle than anything else: "What we're doing is incredibly difficult. My executives may be right-it may be several generations. But I hold out this hope of living to see it." nderson's admirers are a mixed group. Steve Percy, who was CEO of BP Amoco's U.S. subsidiary untillast March, says, "Ray is very passionate about sustainability and leaders always think long-term." Lester Brown, founder and president of World watch Institute, a leading proponent of sustainable development, echoes that sentiment: "Ray's as committed to saving the environment as any environmentalist I know. He's committed to helping his colleagues in the business community understand that the environment isn't just some fringe issue-it isn't just cleaning up some stuff at the end of some pipe-but it is the foundation on which the global economy rests."

At the same time, there is no shortage of people to either side of Anderson who are skeptical. To his left are those who remain unconvinced that Anderson has resolved Lovins' "contradiction between making a living and doing it in a way that your kids can be proud of." After Anderson spoke at a recent Greenpeace business conference in Europe, Peter Knight, a respected

A

English environmental consultant, challenged him: "Besides giving great speeches and making the company more efficient, I can't see what you are doing that's so different." "We aren't doing enough," Anderson replied. Knight certainly seemed to agree, pointing out that Anderson is still draining all that petroleum, still churning out carpet tile that will end up in the world's landfills. Such critics wonder why Anderson doesn't simply stop making money and keep making speeches. "I could go sit in a redwood," counters Anderson. "1 admire the people doing that. But I want to change industry."

To Anderson's right are the folks like Jerry Taylor, a political scientist at the conservative Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., who calls sustainability a "solution in search of a problem." Taylor says the profit motive in capitalism is already leading to technological advances that are cleaning up the environment quite nicely: "We have a better environment than ever before. It's not collapsing." According to this line of reasoning, if resources were running out, commodity prices would be rising. Instead, the world has seen the opposite. Oil prices, for example, were plummeting until very recently, even as grim predictions-and evidence-of global warming multiplied.

"When oil is cheaper than water, there's no incentive not to pollute," says Matt Arnold, founder of the Management Institute for Environment and Business at Lash's World Resources Institute. "Unless you share the environmental concerns, companies may not find sustainability attractive in the short or medium term."

Indeed, finding companies that share those concerns deeply enough to act on them is the crux of Anderson's challenge.

His experience at Interface will doubtless be repeated by companies around the world as they attempt a similar process of reform. Like Interface, they may well find that the first 10 percent or 20 percent reductions are relatively easy to achieveand, as advertised, actually boost profits.

But in the medium term, and very likely the long one, they will rediscover the long-standing dilemma of the environmental movement: Revolution is ex pen-

sive, and not everyone will spend the money without the threat of the lash hanging over them. After all, the clean-air movement was given teeth by the Clean Air Act of 1970. It's hard to imagine the success of the former without the latter.

This seems to be what Anderson is getting at when he says that the promise of profits and good PR isn't always enough to induce business to transform itself. The market is a "dishonest broker," he maintains, because it places no value on the environment: "The last front of sustainability is the redesign of accepted notions of commerce. We need a tax shift to raise the price of oil to reflect the externalities ignored by the market, such as the cost of the cleanup after climate change, and the cost of oUl:military presence in the Middle East. I really do believe the earth cries out for a carbon tax to make renewabIes more competitive." The day oil's price reflects its cost-$100 to $200 per barrel, in Anderson's view-will be the day businesses like Interface will shift to 100 percent sustainability and "kick ass in the marketplace."

The near-term environmental outlook isn't good, Anderson warns. The Kyoto accord does nothing about the greenhouse gases that already double-glaze the globe. ~'Nothing we can do will prevent the world from getting warmer and more turbulent, with coastal flooding and new diseases," he says. "Get ready to live with it. We'll be taking steps like Kyoto all through the 21 st century."

Asked what he would tell business leaders who doubt that time's running out, Anderson pauses to think. It makes for an incongruous image: the carpet king in his corporate suite, conjuring a formula to save the world. Finally, as sunlight glints off a sculpture at his elbow-a tower of animals representing biodiversity-he leans forward and admonishes his hypothetical colleagues: "Only you collectively can make a big enough difference to save the species from itself. To save the species from you."

0 About the Author: Gwen Kinkead, a New York City-based Fee/ance journalist, is a frequent contributor to Fortune and New Yorker magazines.

•

erlcan The November 1999 University Fair organized

by USEFI was a unique opportunity for Indian students wanting to study in the U.S. to interact with visiting representatives of leading American universities.

llyou wanted to know about studying in the U.S., but did not know where to go or whom to ask," goes the U.S. ducationa1 Foundation in India (USEFI) poster displayed at several colleges of the Delhi University and the campus of lawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

To disseminate information about the educational opportunities and more, representatives of 23 U.S. universities gathered in New Delhi last November at the American University Fair 1999 organized by USEFI. The fair was the largest ever in terms of the number of universities represented since the activity began in 1994. The purpose of the fair is to provide admission-seekers an opportunity to obtain authentic and up-to-date information regarding the choice of courses they want to pursue, costs of education and availability of scholarships in various universities and colleges in the United States. The large tumout of students at the one-day fair at Delhi-which subsequently toured other metro cities, Mumbai and Calcutta--clearly indicated that America is the top destination of choice for Indian students wishing to pursue higher education.

The majority of admission-seekers are fresh college and uni-

Ai

versity students who wish to explore the possibility of studying abroad. "Many students who aspire for higher education in the best American universities are often ignorant and confused about selecting the right college, desired study program, admission procedure, application process and, more important, financial assistance. Even in the age of Intemet and World Wide Web, which can be used for accessing latest information instantly about any university by the push of a button, the Indian students rather preferred to avail this rare opportunity to visit the fair and interact with the universities representatives directly," said Dr. Vijaya Rao, educational adviser of USEFI and the coordinator of the fairs in India. "The added attraction this time was the participation of prestigious Ameri/can universities in the fair in larger number as compared to the earlier fairs. Needless to add, courses offered are far more charming and attractive this time compared to our earlier fairs," she elaborated.

Among the well-known universities that participated in the fair were the New York State University at Buffalo; Marquette University at Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Syracuse University, New York; Michigan State University at Ann Arbor; University of

Missouri at Kansas City; Oberlin College, Ohio; Temple University at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New Hampshire College at Manchester; University of Miami at Coral Gables, Florida; and Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia. The universities offer courses ranging from computer sciences to engineering, journalism, business administration, nursing, interior design, law and psychology. Unlike in the previous years, in the 1999 fair a large number of students sought information about the courses relating to information technology (IT) and computer sciences-both in software and hardware-rather than the traditionally popular ones like engineering and business administration. For Amul Sethi, 18, a first year commerce student from Khalsa College, Delhi University, this was his first experience of an education fair. He was delighted to interact with the university representatives directly, but disappointed that the fair was just for one day. "The organizers should have ideally held the fair for at least three days so that a discerning student could have a better opportunity to get basic counseling required to pursue higher education in the United States. Due to paucity of time and the huge turnout of admission-seekers, the university representatives were providing standard answers to the students' queries: 'For other details, contact the university dotcom,' " complains Sethi.

Last year more than 13,000 Indian students went to the United States to pursue their desired courses. "The number is mindboggling indeed, and USEFI, apart from organizing university fairs of this nature, throughout the year counsels its student members and facilitates their search for proper courses and guides them through the procedure," says Rao. "Unlike his American counterpart, the Indian student needs family support in admission matters. The situation, of course, is changing fast in India as well. If we analyze the students' turnout at the fair we feel that most of them are independent and can take their own decisions without the help of parents, even though they are wholly dependent on parents for funding," adds Rao. Higher and professional education in America is indeed expensiv~. The average cost per student for one academic year, including tuition and living expenses, is about $18,000. To help meet the high costs, students are allowed to work 20 hours a week, and those who complete the nine-month course can take up off-campus summer jobs. For Kajleen Kaur, 22, economic honors student from Delhi University's Guru Gobind Singh College of Commerce, and who aspires to join a business administration course in a prestigious American university, the cost of the study is beyond her means.

"Education in America is expensive. But if you compare the costs with those in United Kingdom or Australia, it is far less expensive in American educational institutions," says Rao.

Some colleges, for example the New Hampshire College at Manchester, insist that at the time of admission the student provides documentary evidence of the means to meet his or her tuition and living expenses. The requirement can be fulfilled through a letter from the sponsor's bank indicating that sufficient funds are available with the admission-seekers or their sponsors.

In case of students who have sponsors in the United States, the sponsor is required to submit Form 1-134, which may be obtained at U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service offices in the U.S., or any U.S. Embassy or consulate office.

Vipul Sarna, commerce student from Delhi University's school of correspondence, came to the fair with a hope that admission to some business administration school will be given on the spot. Educational adviser Rao responded to the point saying that "in America admissions are not made by individuals but by a group of people selected for the purpose. Outside the U.S., spot admissions are not given. As a matter of fact, the representatives at the fair have visited a half-dozen countries before coming to India. They are here to open a window of the American university for the benefit of Indian students, and admission is offered after processing the application and screening the other data provided in the application form."

Sarna was also a bit disappointed as the American universities do not recognize the degree obtained through a school of correspondence.

The representatives of American educational institutions were quite pleased at the tremendous turnout of students at the 1999 fair. Abraham Verghese, representative from University of Miami, ran out of information literature as he did not anticipate the huge crowds thronging the fair. Darnell Tutchton, who represented the Savannah College of Art and Design and was on his first visit to India, saw a huge potential for Indian students seekin'g admission in American universities. "There are only 25-30 Indian students in our campus in Georgia, just a small number when you look at the size of India. Indian students have lot of talent which we hope to tap in the next few years. If such talented students join our institution, it will be a rewarding experience to both of us," said Tutchton.

Those who traveled to the fair from distant universities in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan felt that a fair of this nature must tour every state capital, if not the headquarters of every university. "This will provide students enough opportunity to decide about their future course in the educational career and curriculum," says A.R.K. Murthy who came to the fair from Hyderabad.

The American University Fair was sponsored by multinational companies such as AT&T, American Express and Coca-Cola in Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta.

0

• Indians make up a tiny fraction of the population of Washington, D.C., but they run many of the area's top high-tech companies.

fter a 30-hour flight from Washington to Bombay, Lloyd Griffiths, dean of George Mason University's (GMU) School of Informqtion Technology and Engineering, still had hours to go. It was just a 10-mile drive to the Bombay campus of the Indian Institute of Technology (lIT), high in the hills behind the city, but his driver had to stop every few feet on the congested roads, where Mercedes sedans waited behind cameldrawn carts. Griffiths had traveled a lot, but he'd never seen anything like this: Beggars everywhere, and wedding parades of about 500 people in brilliant costumes and animals dripping with gold.

The trip took four hours. Finally, the car pulled up to lIT, where a wire fence surrounded a campus that seemed spacious and green compared to the city below.

Griffiths could hardly believe the world's most prestigious technical collegewhose graduates he wanted so badly he planned to offer them $50,000 eachcould be in a place such as this, where the

smell of sewage assaulted him the moment the plane landed at Bombay-Sahar International Airport.

In a small auditorium, 60 students were waiting for Griffiths and Sudhaker Shenoy, a 52-year-old lIT alum who's the founder and CEO of Fairfax-based Information Management Consultants (IMC), a systems integrator and softwaredevelopment company. The pair made their pitch for two hours, showing filIP clips of the GMU campus and a video hyping Northern Virginia's Internet economy.

"We build companies," Griffiths said of GMU's Global Co-op Assistantship Program, many of whose students work in the area IT industry. "We want you to build companies."

But the real lure was the $50,000 scholarship-it covers a two-year master's degree and a paid internship at a sponsoring company, such as Shenoy's IMC. Griffiths was familiar with lIT-Bombay because the school-part of a six-campus system founded in 1951-has an excellent reputation. A Business Week article had anointed it a "star factory." It accepts

When Reggie Aggarwal and Sanju Bansal formed the Indian CEO High Tech Council, they thought they'd maybe have a dozen members.

Now they have more than 200. Standing (left to right) are Paresh Shah of the Fortes Group, Rahul Prakash of Telecom Ventures, Reggie Aggarwal, Sanju Bansal, Piyush Sodha of Nextlink and Nitin Malhotra of Tech Hounds. com. Seated (left to right) are NDC Group's Babi Das, Satish Kumar of Microtech-Tel, and Sudhaker Shenoy of Information Management Consultants.

fewer than 3 percent of applicants (Harvard accepts 16 percent)-fitting for a school whose original mission was to make India self-reliant. lIT's job was to create elite scientists capable of building the power plants and dams t.he country needed after winning independence from England.

"In many ways, the lIT grad is the hottest export India has ever produced."

Business Week said, listing 17 alums who were founders and CEOs of American companies, including Sun Microsystems.

Forget the old stereotype of India as the

land of snake charmers and sitar players, a destination for the flower children. Today, it's a breeding ground for a disproportionate chunk of Washington's high-tech entrepreneurs-disproportionate because Indians make up less than 2 percent of the area's population.

No one keeps Washington statistics, but AnnaLee Saxenian, an associate professor at the University of California-Berkeley, did a study of Silicon Valley's new immigrant entrepreneurs.

Of an estimated 2,000 startups in Silicon Valley, she found that 40 percent are run by Indians, and of

those, half by lIT grads. From free-e-mail guru Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail to the four Indian founders of Junglee, an Internet browser acquired by Amazon.com for $180 million, the list of Silicon Valley Indians-and lIT grads-is a who's who of the Internet.

Lloyd Griffiths' thinking was simple: If you see a good business model, copy it.

The University of Maryland was already in on the act: Amitabha Ghosh, director of lIT -Kharagpur, recalls Mary land deans asking him to send his entire graduating class to Maryland, promising each student

financial assistance.

Says Shenoy: "If they graduate from a local university, 10 years down the road they'll set up companies here."

They already are. There's Hemant Kanakia, who in May 1999 sold his Silver Spring-based Torrent Networking Technologies to telecommunications giant Ericsson for $450 million, and K. Paul Singh, founder and CEO of McLeanbased Primus Telecommunications, a company he says will be worth nearly a billion dollars this year. Then there's Pradman Kaul, president and chief operating officer of Hughes Network Systems, a billion-dollar telecommunications company in Germantown.

The list goes on: Roger Mody of Fairfax's Signal Corp., Rahul Prakash of Alexandria's Telecom Ventures, and Nat Kannan of McLean's UOL Publishing.

And Sanju Bansal, the 33-year-o.ld chief operating officer of MicroStrategy; the rocketing Vienna database mining company. Bansal laughingly recalls the days after college when his MIT fraternity brother Michael Saylor, now MicroStrategy's CEO, would visit the Bansals' Burke home because he loved Bansal's mother's Indian cooking.

There are so many Indian CEOs herenot to mention chief information officers and chief financial officers-that Bansal and Reggie Aggarwal, a 29-year-old hightech lawyer, last year started the Indian CEO High Tech Council. The group, composed of about 300 executives of Indian descent, claims that its members' businesses generate close to $4 billion for the local economy. The group is such a powerhouse that it attracts more non-Indian than Indian CEOs, among them Jonathan Ledecky, who took time out from negotiations on the Capitals-Wizards deal to attend a May dinner.

Then there are the dozens of smaller companies that some of the area's 60,000 Indian professionals are getting off the ground. Arthur Marks of New En~erprise Associates says about a third of the portfolios the venture-capital firm receives have Indian founders.

Another company, Indian-owned Technolbgy Ventures in Gaithersburg, was

orget the old stereotype of India as the land of snake charmers and sitar players. Today it is a breeding ground for hightech entrepreneurs.

launched to recruit personnel from India and place the immigrants at local companies.

Indians are pouring in: Between 1990 and 1996, the National Science Foundation says, the number of doctorates in science and engineering granted annually by U.S. universities to immigrants from India nearly doubled, accounting for 5 percent of all doctorates awarded.

Local companies can't get enough of them, Forbes reporter Chandrani Ghosh moved to Washington from India three years ago and shared a house with a software developer. She constantly fielded calls from headhunters. "They'd be so excited to hear another Indian accent and they'd say, 'Oh, are you in software too?'" When she told them she was ajournalist, they'd persist: "But do you have any interest in software?" _ America's Taiwanese immigrants are another highly educated group-they have increasingly returned home to start businesses or work in established companies. But most Indians stay here. Professor Saxenian says that's partly because of the difference in standards of living-two Indian homes per thousand have computers, compared to one out of two homes in the United States-and partly because of the frustrations of doing business in India.

After India won independence in 1947, the Congress Party subjected the new country to one socialist experiment after. another, including nationalization.

The so-called "licensing Raj" made setting up any kind of business a nightmare, says Satish "Sam" Kumar of McLean, who started his first company-selling electronic process-control equipment-as a 21-year-old in India. He arrived in America in 1983 to get a master's degree

in electrical engineering at Arizona State University, and in 1988 started Denverbased Microtech-Tel, a telecommunications company with revenues of $16 million in 1998.

"In India, it's tough to get telecom and transportation," he says. "Here United Airlines has 10 flights to Denver a day."

Sudhaker Shenoy picked up a master's in engineering and an MBA at the University of Connecticut in 1973 and then tried to go home. He told his brother to sell the furniture and the car if he didn't come back after two months, and moved to India to look for a job.

He was back in America in a monthIndia didn't have the kind of infrastructure needed to get the job he wanted.

"In India, jf they don't feel like running the train, it's not running," says Paresh Shah, of the Fortes Group, who had to cope while visiting relatives in 1997. "No amount of calls on your cell phone is going to make it go, so you'd better plan to stay where you are for the night."

India's political elite recently has begun to open up the economy, and a World Bank survey of U.S. software companies identified India as the number-one choice for development, since top-notch engineers can be had there for one-fifth of what they make here. The desire of American companies for Indian professionals is so strong that it has led to thousands-called technobraceros, a coinage based on the name for laborers brought in to work on American farms in the World War II era--entering under a controversial visa program that allows them to work here temporarily.

The Hindu caste system, also helped spur India's brain drain, some say. The British author V.S. Naipaul, an Indian born in Trinidad, has noted that Indian scientists who win Nobel Prizes for work done abroad go home and produce little of value ever again; the rigid caste system prevents their achievements from doing anything to improve their social standing.

Few Indians will talk about the subject.

"I don't discuss castes," says Babi Das, CEO of telecommunications consultants NDC Group. Even fewer Indians will acknowledge friction between. castes in the

local Indian-American community.

Once upon a time, Indians were prohibited from immigrating to the United States because they were part of the Pacific Barred Zone. Congress's turn-of-thecentury attempt to prevent immigrant Asians-a group in which Indians are often still included-from taking mining and railroad jobs that labor leaders cried should go to American citizens.

But with the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, enacted partly to deal with American labor shortages in technical fields, Congress opened the floodgates for Indian physicians and engineers. The country churns out 60,000 electronics engineers a year, twice as many as does the United States.

According to INS figures, more than 27,000 Indians immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, and another 164,000 came in the 1970s. Mostly they headed to the East Coast-New Jersey, home of the storied Bell Laboratories, now Lucent Technologies, still has the nation's highest concentration of Indians. Washington's big draw was companies such as Lockheed or Martin-Marietta and the nation's rapidly expanding space program.

The arrivals were extraordinarily well educated: According to the 1990 census, 58 percent of Indians in America have earned at least a bachelor's degree. Only 20 percent of the U.S. population as a whole has. One-third of Indians in America have at least a graduate degree; 7 percent of all Americans have one.

Indians have had a reverence for math and science, a tradition that goes back to the fifth century, when Indian thinkers were developing the concept of mathematical zero along with the related system of numerals that is called Arabic but was, in fact, invented in India.

As the Indian community grew, its members could take advantage of the family reunification provisions of the immigration acts. That started a second wave from the subcontinent. These immigrants of the 1980s were often less educated and less proficient in English than their predecessors, but they were hardly the nation's poor, huddled masses. Almost all Indian immigrants to the United States come

from the English-speaking middle classes, since the rural poor of India-the kind you see in documentaries-can't afford the bus to Bombay, much less a plane ticket to America. The very wealthy also tend not to emigrate.

Engineers and physicians were the pioneers, while the second wave brought a stronger Indian flavor. Many owned or worked at restaurants, hotels, gas stations and 7-Elevens. This wave led to stereotypes such as those mocked in the portrayal of bumbling Apu and Sanjay Nahasapeemapetilon, who run the Kwik-EMart on TV's The Simpsons.

"If you want to bring over family and they don't speak English, they can work in the shop," says Aneesh Chopra, a 27-yearold Advisory Board consultant who wrote about the Indian-American community while at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Many Americans still associate Indians with these businesses because the second wave asserted its culture more openly.

"At the time my parents immigrated"in 1970-"the Indian community was much smaller, and there was this fear of standing out," says Nitin Malhotra, the 29-year-old founder and CEO of TechHound.com, an Internet job site he started last year after his first venture, a technology consulting firm, was acquired.

Indians could assimilate especially easily because English wasn't a problem: It's widely spoken among educated classes because of the country's British colonial past. Which left food-many Indians are strict vegetarians-as the major cultural barrier. Proper ingredients were so scarce

he average IndianAmerican household income is $59,77725 percent higher than the national average, and the highest of any ethnic group in the United States.

that new arrivals would rely on lentils from Spanish grocery stores and test all the flours in the Safeway to find the best one for chapati, the most common bread in Northern Indian homes.

When the first immigrants came, "it was more of a caveman instinct. They were just interested in surviving. Now they're trying to find a place," says Harriet Vidyasagar, who wears a sari every day. From her Bethesda home, she's starting Out of India magazine, whose motto is "Staying connected with things Indian."

The community prospered. The average Indian-American household income is $59,777-25 percent higher than the national average, and the highest of any ethnic group in the United States. In Washington, Indians moved to Potomac and McLean. Their success drew little note, partly because "the general cultural ethic is to keep your head down, work really hard, and let your deeds speak for themselves," says Sanju Bansal.

And after years of penny pinchingmany doctors, for example, lived in hospitals to save money to bring their families over-most successful Indians still live modestly, which helps them keep a low profile. . So ingrained is the scrimping that when Paresh Shah was working in Cambridge in 1993 after earning his MBA at Harvard, his pediatrician father "would actually ship me lemons because they were cheaper here than they were in Cambridge. And if my parents saw me shop at Bread & Circus, they'd die.

They'd be like, 'No, we'll get it for you.

We'll go to the Price Club,''' Shah says, mimicking their accents.

With the high-tech explosion of the 1980s, the Indian engineers saw opportunity. Paul Singh, an electrical engineer by training, started Overseas Telecommunications International in 1985, when the quasi-government satellite company Comsat had lost its monopoly on providing the international portion of satellite phone service. In 1991, he sold on to MC!, then left in 1994 to form Primus Telecommunications, this year ranked 43 among the Washington

Post's Top 200 companies.

The Indians were uniquely positioned to capitalize on market changes for several reasons, not least of which was the Section 8a provision of the Small Business Act of 1953, the federal government's oldest affirmative-action program.

Section 8a steers contracts worth $4.3 billion a year to "minority enterprises"-and a 1990 audit showed that one-third of such recipients were in the Washington area.

It also helped that Indians think seriously about education very early.

"I understood what computers could do for people when I was 14. If you look at guys my age, they didn't get into computers until college, when they were in their twenties. By that time, I was already thinking about how I could apply them to my business," says Babi Das, who started his first company in 1992, at age 26. After selling it to a competitor in 1998, he became the CEO of NDC Group, a telecommunications and IT consulting firm which went public last year.

Jitendra Vyas first came to the United States at 19, to visit cousins in Cleveland, and ended up staying because his uncle suggested he take computer classes. ''I'd never even seen a computer before I came, but the families in India are very opinionated," says Vyas. "They look to the future rather than now. My uncle-he is an engineer for Ford-said, 'You know, computers are going to grow.' " Today the 32-year-old already has sold one business, a medical-data transcription company, and recently launched his second, the IT consulting firm Technology Ventures, which also does software development and recruiting. It already has clients like Fannie Mae and revenues of more than $2 million.

Besides valuing education, the culture respects entrepreneurship. "In India, it's considered noble to be an industrialist," says MicroStrategy's Sanju Bansal.

The culture also breeds competition, both for goods and for survival. "In India you have to haggle for everything, so these Indian guys know how to get the best deal," says Reggie Aggarwal, the Shaw Pittman lawyer who cofounded the CEO High Tech Council.

"There's a lot of people in India, and you have to do really, really well to be outstanding. That makes us strive harder," says Dev Ganesan, 39, who came to Washington in 1987 to work at Deloitte & Touche. He took Advance Communication Systems public in 1997 and is now the CFO of the $250-million company. "And because there's so many people in India and the competition is so intense, you don't get a second chance.

You either make it or you don't."

Indians are adaptable, says Pavan Arora, a twentysomething Internet startup vice president who as an undergraduate won a grant from Johns Hopkins to study why Indians are so successful. "India has 26 states. Each state has 104 different dialects," he says. "When you have that much diversity, you have to be able to deal with anything."

Finally, they had little fear of failure, because they realized their skills would always be in demand. Says Microtech- Tel's Sam Kumar, who in 1988 left his engineering job at Siemens to strike out on his own: "I knew I could always go back."

Some ideas for companies grew out of the Indian immigrant experience. In 1989, Ram Mukunda, now 40, started Bethesda long-distance carrier Startec Global Communications after a childhood spent listening to his parents argue about prices for long-distance calls to India ($2.49 a minute).

Mukunda, an electrical engineer by training, knew the international long-distance business through his work as an ad-

ome ideas for companies grew out of the Indian immigrant experience. Ram Mukunda started Startec Global Communications after a childhood spent listening to his parents argue about prices of phone calls to India.

viser to Intelsat's strategic-planning division. So he sold his house, borrowed from relatives, paged through the phone book for Indian last names, and began handing out fliers advertising $1.49 calls at Indian community events. Last year Startec, which has since begun to target more than a dozen ethnic minorities, rang up $160 million in sales.

Ashok Saxena, who was born in New Delhi, started his first companyInformatics, a $2-million satellite research and development shop-after three vice presidents lobbied for his services at Fairchild Space, then a Fortune 500 company. Informatics was purely good business sense.

His second company, IAOL-Indians Abroad On路 Line-is a little more personal: A near-fatal car accident forced Saxena to do some soul searching. "I tried so hard to homogenize, but you get older and you get nostalgic," says the 47-yearold Saxena, who'd married an American.

He realized his favorite part of the week was his volunteer work producing, until 1997, an Indian-American TV news program for the Potomac community.

Saxena knew Indians were wiredIndians in America are twice as likely to own a computer and be online as are Americans as a whole, says a survey from the Indian-American magazine Little India. Counting on expats also to be a little homesick, in 1997 he gathered nine other Indians, printed up business cards declaring himself "chief visionary," and launched IAOL, an Internet provider and web site that's a portal for all things Indian, from curry recipes to cricket scores. The site-run out of a handful of rooms decorated with photographs of India at the Maryland Technology Development Center-is in English, although stories can be translated into Tamil or Punjabi.

Rockville-based IAOL is being funded partly by other Indians, notably Mukanda of Startec. And their consultant is another Indian: 34-year-old Paresh Shah, a mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur who started business-strategy consultants the Fortes Group. He's also got an Internet venture in the works.

The Indian community was succeeding so quietly that even the community itself didn't realize what had happened. Two years ago, when Reggie Aggarwal and Sanju Bansal decided to form the Indian CEO group, "we thought we'd find 10 or a dozen guys," says Bansal. "About a hundred folks came out of the woodwork."

Indian physicians, engineers, even journalists had their own organizations, but the CEOs didn't, partly because "If I do have time, I want to spend it with my family," says Primus's Paul Singh. "The same for my other CEO friends."

Besides, many of the CEOs are so mainstream American-"practically antiIndian," says Aggarwal-that Aggarwal and Bansal worried that the idea of an Indian group would put them off. So Aggarwal, a tireless promoter, gathered small groups of Indian CEOs, most of whom are men, together by trumpeting the attendance of one or two especially powerful guests whose names-if not their Indian descent-wei'e instantly recognizable.

Sudhaker Shenoy, a member of Congressional Country Club, got the club to open its doors for the formal launching of the council, which the Indian-American press proudly noted was the "firstever Asian-American function on its premises." Some 160 Indian high-tech executives came to network over a salmon dinner-no Indian food, because the caterers wouldn't cook it.

The Indian CEOs have warmed up to the invitation-only group, partly, Aggarwal says, because so many nonIndians are clamoring to join. He says he turned away 150 people from the group's May dinner.

"You don't want a group that gets together and just talks about how great Indians are," Aggarwal says, laughing.

"These Indian guys are businessmen."

Shenoy compares the group to the first time he tried ice cream. "You don't know what you've missed until you try it," he says.

Says Kumar, who hands out "Sam Kumar" business cards to American contacts and "Satish" to Indian ones: "I met the CFO of PSINet and the guys from

hen Aggarwal and Bansal decided to form the Indian CEO group, "we thought we'd find 10 or a dozen guys," says Bansal.

"About a hundred folks came out of the woodwork."

Friedman Billings Ramsey. On my own, it would have taken me longer to get an introduction."

In the beginning, some of the Indian CEOs were annoyed by Aggarwal's constant calling and e-mailing. But there was one thing they appreciated: that he was a young Indian who wouldn't quit until he got what he wanted. After all, some of the first generation had privately wondered if members of the second generation, with their comfortable childhoods in Potomac and McLean, would lack drive.

Says Shenoy: "They don't have that fear for survival we had."

Instead, the second generation-the oldest of whom are now turning 30-have a fear of not living up to their parents' skyhigh expectations.

"None of this 'C's are average,'" says Paresh Shah, 34, who's already started a handful of companies. "My parents' expectation was that we would get A's." His parents didn't check homework, just report cards. "It was assumed we would obey their wishes," he says.

"In junior high I was taking classes at Montgomery College at night," says NDC Group's Babi Das, whose father had him on a schedule to finish calculus by his sophomore year at Wheaton High.

"Senior year I only had one class and was at college the rest of the day. I wanted to

spend senior year with my friends, but my father was a man; you did what he told you."

India's educational system reveres math and science, and so do Indian immigrants.

Pavan Arora, who gives his age only as "twentysomething," loves to talk about the "Indian table" in his high-school cafeteria. "It doubled as the math team," he quips. Little wonder, then, that in 1997 the children of Indian immigrants won four of the 10 prestigious national Westinghouse prizes for high-school scientis.ts.

Then there's college: In a 1992 survey of 961 Asian-American high-school seniors across the country, all the Indian students told the Princeton-based Educational Testing Service that their parents expected them to路 earn at least a college degree. And in most cases, not just any college degree. "If you blew up the 30 best universities in America, you'd decimate the Indian population," brags Aneesh Chopra.

Most universities fold Indians into the Asians category, so it's hard to get statistics. But Indians, who account for less than half a percent of the U.S. population, make up about 5 percent of Harvard students, says the Harvard-Radcliffe South Asian Association. And the list of competitors at the annual Bhangra Blowout, a popular intercollegiate Indian folkdance competition hosted by George Washington University, reads like the U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Colleges" list: MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Penn, Johns Hopkins and Duke.

And that MIT student dancing this year to the song boasting of farmers' hiding bottles of alcohol in their turbans? He was an engineering major, as are disproportionate numbers of young Indians-only that or premed will do. Sangam, the Indian Student Association at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, has to cancel its meetings when there's a scheduling conflict with the premed society.

Respect for engineers is so much a part of the Indian culture that when Nitin Malhotra chose to major in computer science at the University of Virginia in the late I980s, "my parents really viewed it as a step down from electrical engineering."

art of our philosophy is being able to leverage all these relationships for helping to fund companies," says Roger Sawhney of the Indian CEO network.

Malhotra's father, an electrical engineer who came to Washington to get an education and later went on to help design Metro's power circuits, reminded his son that "the engineers are at the top of the hierarchy in tenns of prestige."

For the second generation, who graduated from college just as Internet pioneers were beginning to strike it rich, the urge to pursue idealism and stock options is perhaps even stronger than it was for their parents' generation. Three years ago, DC's chapter of the national Network of South Asian Professionals (NetSAP) hosted its first entrepreneur conference and had to turn away participants. Last year, attendance hit 300.

"There were dozens of young kids, all with badges that said CEO," says Kumar.

And unlike their parents' generation, who Kumar says were "like orphans," the young Indian-Americans are tapping into Indian networks frequently. Given the strength of the connections-"The separation is like half a degree," says litendra Vyas-it's hard to imagine that for a while, most of the younger generation dissociated from Indian culture as much as possible.

Paresh Shah says he was the ultimate rebel. He had "zero Indian friends," skipped temple and community picnics, and, after a seventh-grade visit, refused to go back to India. "I was spoiled," he says.

"It was hot. There was no TV. And the poverty was depressing."

In 10th grade, by dating-and worse, dating an Irish-American girl-Shah spUlTeda family crisis. "The whole family ganged up on me-my parents, my sister, even my younger brother. They were like, 'You can't do this,'" says Shah, who eventually married the Irish-American woman.

Dating is a f1ashpoint in many Indian households because the traditional Indian way is to make an arranged marriage, where you love the person you marry instead of marrying the person you love.

Comparing the elaborate lies they told to sneak out to the movies is a good bonding point for many young Indians. So is the identity crisis, almost a rite of passage for Indian-American high-schoolers. It has inspired countless stories in the IndianAmerican press, with headlines such as WHO ARE WE ANYWAY, plus an argot: "ABCDs," American-born confused desis, or the edgier "coconuts" (brown on the outside, white on the inside).

But it wasn't until college that members of the second generation began turning back to their roots and seeking out Indian friends. South Asian societies began forming at colleges in 1990, as the second generation hit the campuses.

"I ate Indian food, saw Indian artifacts, heard my grandparents speak Hindi, did the rituals for Diwali, but I had mostly white friends. But when I got to Hopkins, 10 percent of my classmates were Indian," says Chopra, who graduated in 1994.

Shah says he began to realize the advantages of Indian culture in college.

Today his discussion of his career history is peppered with "What kind of values does the company have?" .

Reggie Aggarwal is ticking off his closest friends on his fingers, and they're all Indian-and members of NetSAP. He's not the only one to make the organization, begun in 1993 (the DC chapter started in 1995), the point around which his social life pivots. (NetSAP's members are under 35; few have reached the level of success required for an invitation to join the CEO High Tech Council.)

NetSAP has dinners and parties at least four nights a week, and members of the tightly knit 450-member DC chapter can show up at Coco Loco, Divas or Eleventh Hour nightclub almost any night of the week and "you'll always find somebody that you know," says litendra Vyas.

"Every day you get these mass e-mails saying, 'Everyone's meeting at the Hotel Washington tonight.' Last week I booked a table for six at City Lights, and by the

time I got there, we were 16," says Chandrani Ghosh, the Forbes reporter.

Together, young Indians are also rediscovering their heritage. Nitin Malhotra and his wife Ann, who's also IndianAmerican, are taking a class to understand their religion and language. They try to cook Indian food once a week. "It's a lot more work," sighs Malhotra.

It helps that things Indian are chic these days. Madonna wears bindi on her forehead. Vogue featured Indian-inspired fashion, and mehndi is so hip that Urban Outfitters sells do-it-yourself kits.

"I've been drinking chai with masala forever," says Pavan Arora. "It cracks me up that people will pay four bucks for it."

For proof of the second generation's ambitions, look no further than a local Indian venture-capital fund formed in February last year. The 13 partners are all Indian men under 35, more than half of whom have Ivy-League degrees: half (not necessarily the same half) have businesses they're hatching, and all are plugged in to the Indian titans of technology, both in Washington and in Silicon Valley.

"Part of our philosophy is being able to leverage all these relationships for helping to fund companies," says Roger Sawhney, 29, a Harvard-trained doctor who's a Bethesda-based consultant for Boston Consulting Group. The group plans to do three to five deals a year, including funding the ventures of their members.

Their first investment: $100,000 in Ashok Saxena's IAOL, an investment they thought was a particularly good fit because IAOL needs to tap into the young demographic.

"It's all come full circle," Aneesh Chopra says proudly. "Here we are, the second generation investing in the first."

The pride-both in where they have come from and in where they are goingspilled over into the naming of the fund.

It's called Avatar, a term that comes from Hindu mythology. It means incarnation of a Hindu deity in human form.

0 About the Author: Courtney Rubin is a staff' writer for Washingtonian.

The

a eJor In ormaion Correspondents have gone to war since stories were filed by slow boat. Though the media have changed in ways that have influenced reportage dramatically, the struggle to get stories told-sometimes under tough restrictionshas continued for more than ten decades.

"The happy days when [war correspondents] were guests of the army, when news was served to them by the men who made the news ...have passed. Now, with every army the correspondent is as popular as afloating mine .... " -RICHARD

HARDING DAVIS,

1914

rmed forces and reporters have always had an ambivalent relationship. The reporter's job is to gather information and disseminate it, and in wartime there is a hell of a story to tel!. For military people charged with conducting a war, fulfilling journalists' needs can be a nuisance-even a threat. As a World War II military censor put it, "I wouldn't tell the people anything until the war is over and then I'd tell them who won."

Basically, the military authorities have three concerns. They don't want journalists reporting information that could alert the enemy and get soldiers killed. They don't want the home front demoralized. And, as in any bureaucracy, they don't want their own mistakes and incompetence exposed. War correspondents usually accept and respect the first concern and utterly reject the last. It is the question of what constitutes demoralizing the home

A

front, as opposed to giving the public what it needs to know, that has caused most of the problems between the news trade and the warriors. "Public opinion wins wars," General Eisenhower told newspaper editors during World War II. He considered reporters attached to his headquarters as "quasi-staff officers," and for the most part they acted that way.

Winston Churchill criticized pessimistic reporting from the Anzio beachhead in 1944. "Such words as 'desperate' ought not to be used about the position in a battle of this kind when they are false," he declared. "Still less should they be used if they were true."

In America's undeclared wars-in which the reasons why we fought were less clear-disagreements festered on how much the American people should know and not know. The AP's Tom Lambert and the UP's Peter Kalischer were banned from Korea in 1950 for writing stories about the panic, lack of equipment and disarray of American forces caught in the North Korean attack.

They had disclosed information that would have a "bad moral and psychological effect," the army said. General MacArthur lifted the ban, but told the two reporters they had a "responsibility in the matter of psychological warfare." When David McConnell of the New York Herald Tribune reported that an

American bomber had strafed the truce talk zone, he was told by the military not to "forget which side you're on." Years later, in Vietnam, Admiral Harry Felt repeated this admonition to Malcolm Browne of the AP: "Why don't you get on the team?"

And so it has been for most of this century, as one side fights for information and the other fights either to deny or control it.

Last April the New York Times said of the Kosovo War: "When democracies send their military forces into combat, citizens need to know as much about the battles as sensible security precautions permit. In the case of Kosovo ...NATO and the Pentagon must provide a detailed account of the effectiveness of the air war. It is a responsibility they have so far largely failed to meet."

Be it Flanders in 1914, or Brussels in 1999, the policy at military

artist in Florida tells the story. "Everything is quiet....There will be no war ...! wish to return," Frederic Remington cabled. Hearst replied: "Please remain. You furnish pictures. I will furnish war."

When the war came censorship came with it. But this did not stop publication of wild, misleading and just plain untrue stories in what came to be called the yellow press. Battles that never took place were reported, not so much by correspondents in the field, but by Washington bureaus, and in the fevered imaginations of editors back home. Perhaps never before or since did American journalism better prove the old dictum attributed to Senator Hiram Johnson: The first casualty of war is truth.

Censorship wasn't foolproof. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous American war correspondent of his time, got into trouble

For most of the past century, as one side fights for information, the other fights either to deny or control it.

The dashing Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) was the most famous combat correspondent of his time.

briefings has been: emphasize enemy atrocities, but keep allied operations under wraps.

The American century began in 1898 with the capture of the Spanish empire, when newspapers were at their most irrepressible best and irresponsible worst. The famous alleged telegraph exchange between William Randolph Hearst and his combat

for describing how worn out American troops were, "hanging to the crest of the San Juan hills by their teeth and fingernails." The story was printed in the New York Herald on July 7, 1898, and recabled to the Paris Herald, where the Spanish Embassy forwarded it to Madrid. Spain alerted their besieged Santiago garrison, allegedly giving them increased hope, and encouraging them to hold out longer. The Santiago garrison soon surrendered, so Davis was off the hook. But the danger of modern communication, and how news might be flashed around the world and used by an enemy, had been established. No longer did news travel by slow boat.

There is a direct link between Davis's story and CNN's realization in the Gulf War that news about where the missiles were landing in Tel Aviv might be useful to Saddam Hussein rocketeers.

Relations between reporters and the military authorities became even more strained during World War I. Correspondents had to swear to "convey the truth to the people of the United States," but refrain from disclosing news that might help the enemy. Newspapers had to pay $1,000 to the army to cover each correspondent's equipment and maintenance, and post a $10,000 bond-an immense sum in those days-to be forfeited if a reporter didn't follow the military rules.

Frederick Palmer, who had been the only American war correspondent accredited to the British Army, became the American army's chief press overlord and censor-a poacher turned gamekeeper. Later, Palmer would speak of his "double life" during the war, in which he served as a "public liar to keep up the spirit of the armies and the peoples of our side."

When Westbrook Pegler in the winter of 1917-18 broke censorship to expose how ill the army was housed and equipped, the army said he was too young and inexperienced and tried to get the United Press to recall him-much the same as the White

United Press correspondent Ernie Pyle was a World War Jl legend and achieved the distinction of being loved by the reading public and military brass alike. Here he is on a transport taking Marines to the 1945 invasion of Okinawa. It was his last assignment.

He was killed by a Japanese bullet three weeks after this photo was taken.

Below: Martha Gellhorn was among the first women war correspondents, writing for Collier's Weekly during the Spanish Civil War and throughout World War 11. Here she is seated on the deck of the S. Rex on her way back from a 1940 assignment in Finland.

Gellhorn was gutsy. When denied access to the D-Day landings at Normandy by military officials, she sneaked ashore as a stretcher-bearer.

She wrote and traveled indefatigably into her eighties and died in 1998 at the age of 89.

House tried to have David Halberstam recalled from Vietnam more than 40 years later, only in Pegler's case the army succeeded. "Censorship is developing more in the news interests of the military than in that of the American reader," Pegler wrote.

Henrietta Eleanor Hull became the first accredited American woman war correspondent in a day when women didn't even have the vote. Her articles, bylined "Peggy," in the Chicago Tribune, were Ernie Pyle-style stories about the daily lives of ordinary soldiers. Hull was "a victim of male rivals," Phillip Knightley wrote in The First Casualty, his celebrated book on war correspondents. She was never allowed to witness combat, forbidden to visit training camps and hospitals, and was forced to wait out the war in Paris.

When America entered World War II, Washington quickly set up an Office of Censorship and an Office of War Information to handle the flow of news. Knightley quotes an American censor: "Newspapers ...and broadcasting stations must be as actively behind the war effort as merchants or manufacturers." Total war would require journalists' total compliance, and for the most part that's what the military got in what would be America's last truly patriotic war.

One reporter loved equally by the troops, the public and the brass was Ernie Pyle, who wasn't interested in second-guessing strategy, or exposing incompetence.

"Our soldiers always seemed to fight a little better when Ernie was around," said General Omar Bradley. His reporting reached 300 daily papers and 10,000 weeklies. Pyle reached a stage where he could no longer bear to see another dead body or ruined town, so he returned to the U.S. "The old romanticism about getting itchy feet

to get back to the front is a myth as far as I am concerned," he said. But he was persuaded to ship out again to the Pacific, where he was killed by a Japanese bullet close to the war's end.

Women war conespondents came into their own during World War II, finally prevailing against prejudices. At first they were relegated to behind-the-lines reporting, like Hull. But women such as Helen Kirkpatrick of the Chicago Daily News, Martha Gellhorn writing for Collier's, and photographer Margaret Bourke-White of Life managed to join the fray and gradually won acceptance.

The incident of General George Patton slapping a soldier in Sicily is indicative of how World War II reporters stayed on the team. Visiting a field hospital, Patton had slapped a shell-shocked soldier he thought was shirking his duty. Reporters witnessed the slapping. Edward Kennedy of AP tried to persuade Eisenhower that, since the news was bound to leak out, it ought to come from conespondents who were on the scene.

Ike said that he personally felt such a disclosure would be of great value to the enemy as propaganda, and made a personal request to the reporters to sit on it.

And they did. Drew Pearson finally broke the story in Washington three months later.

In the first desperate days of the Korean conflict, there was no military censorship, and reporters freely wrote about despair and disorganization as U.S. forces suffered battlefield setbacks.

Marguerite Higgins and Homer Bigart, both of the New York Herald Tribune (they loathed each other), won Pulitzer Prizes in Korea in a bitter rivalry.

Censorship became total after the front settled down for the long negotiation along the cease-fire line. Conespondents were not allowed to talk to negotiators.

Information was confined to a daily briefing by the United Nations command. But for all the difficulties, most reporters signed on to the notion that the press and the military were on the same side. "The correspondents in Korea were still awash in the patriotic fever of World War II," wrote James Greenfield of the New York

Margaret Bourke-White-here shown with her gear infronl of a military plane in 1943-was the first woman photojournalist to be hired as such. She began as an associate editor at Fortune in 1929. Six years later she joined the new Life magazine, where some of her most famous photos were published. She worked in combat zones during World War JJ and was among the first photographers to enter and document the Nazi death camps.

One of her best-known photographs was taken in India-of Mahatma Gandhi at his spinning wheel. She died in 1971.

Reston of the New York Times. "In the long history of the war," he wrote, "the reporters have been more honest with the American people than the officials." But the U.S. military would never again allow such access to its operations as it did in Vietnam.

Not so in Vietnam. At first correspondents there were inclined to support the American effort, even if they weren't "on the In 1983 the United States invaded the Caribbean island of team." Later they questioned the war itself. Toward the end, radiGrenada in an effort to prevent what the U.S. Government percalized by the 1960s, some saw the American military as oppresceived as a Marxist threat to the hemisphere. Unlike the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, reporters were excluded ensors and imperialists-an attitude the military never forgave. tirely from the invasion force. (Some reporters-notably Bernard Early on, young reporters such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan of the New York Times, and Malcolm Browne of AP, Dietrich of Time-managed to get onto the embattled island by hiring boats. Dietrich was able to hear military communiques on battled military officials who, at first, hoped to conceal the extent of the growing AmeriCan involvement, and then wanted the press radio describing events he knew had not happened.) After a to minimize the mounting number of South Vietnamese defeats. firestorm of complaints, the Pentagon adopted a pool system to be activated the next time U.S. Tet, the countrywide attack in 1968 during a Vietnamese holitroops went into action. Its first day, was the war's turning point test was the so-called tanker Television became the main source of and remains mired in controversy. war in the 1980s when selected information for most Americans, and it Did the press over-react spreading reporters were allowed aboard changed war reporting forever. doom and gloom? Was Tet only a Navy ships escorting oil tankers through the Persian Gulf. 'That temporary setback for the war effort, or did it expose the official pool system was preferable to the American optimism as a fraud? The Viet Cong were deciniqted, alteniative," says the AP's Richard Pyle, which would have meant news-bycPentagon-briefing with no reporters on site. but Tet showed that the light at the end of the tunnel was an illuThe pool arrangement for the invasion of Panama in 1989 sion. Americans began to question whether the war was winnable at any cost the country was willing to pay. After Tet, America be- was a disaster. When troops were sent in to arrest President Manuel Noriega, the press pool "arrived in Panama City after gan trying to disengage rather than win.

Television by now was the main source of information for the main U.S. strikes were over and then were kept locked in most Americans, and the images on the screen-at first in black briefing rooms for hours," says Steven Komarow, who was and white-changed war reporting forever. Morley Safer's ex- there for the AP. "Only when things had quieted down to spopose of American soldiers burning a village had a huge impact on radic gunfire and some looting were we exposed to daylight." viewers at home, and added to the military's mistrust of reAdding injury to insult, Komarow recalls, the military then porters. But there was never any official censorship. In Vietnam used the presence of the pool as justification for barring other correspondents were made honorary majors-World War II re- reporters from the scene. porters had the momentary rank of captain-and could travel The Somalia operation of 1992-93 was a television-driven anywhere on military transport if space were available. The only event from beginning to end. TV news images of starving condition: that they not betray troop movements, a request that Somalis drove the Bush Administration to intervene, and televiwas respected. The press battles were over misleading briefings sion's coverage of a dead American pilot being dragged through in Saigon and Washington, which ran contrary to what the rethe streets brought the intervention to a close under President porters could see for themselves in the field.

Clinton. The enduring image of the initial landing was American In Cambodia, Sidney Schanberg reporting for the New York assault troops crawling up the beaches at night with TV crews Times caught the eventual decline and fall of the American-sponcrawling backward ahead of them, filming every move. sored republic as did no other. He was one of the few eyewitIn Haiti, 1994-95, the American intervention was marked by far the most cordial and workable press-army nesses to the fall of Phnom Penh and the beginning of the cooperation-"by unparalleled horror visited upon Cambodia. In both Laos and relationship I have been involved in," says Douglas Farah of the Washington Post.

Cambodia, a censorship-at-source was imposed by the American But Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti were small embassies trying to keep reporters ignorant of what was going sideshows compared to the dramatic, pyrotechnic air war by U.S. on. Sylvana Foa of UPI broke the story that the American and allied forces over Iraq, followed by four days of intense Embassy in Phnom Penh was directing airstrikes over fighting known as the Gulf War. It was the biggest U.S. military Cambodia-a level of involvement the embassy had denied-by operation since Vietnam, but in terms of press restrictions, it was buying a cheap radio that could pick up the frequencies the pilots the worst. The ground rules: no reporting of troop movements, and the embassy were using.

To this day, some military men glumly insist that television and no access to battle zones except in organized groups of pool and the press lost the war in Vietnam by demoralizing the home reporters and cameramen. Unauthorized visits to combat units front. The case for the correspondents was best made by James could result in a lifting of press credentials. Dispatches and film Times 40 years after the war. Few reporters "expendep ,any ink debating whether the U.S. should be waging a war, in Korea at all.. .."

Defense Department calls them), will have only four hours to get would be censored, but only-the Pentagon promised-for milito Andrews Air Force base when a military operation is about to tary security, not to avoid criticism or embarrassment.

But the 1,600 U.S. reporters in the war zone at the height of the occur. They will not be told where they are going. fighting were so curtailed that not even interviews with nurses In the years since the press reported on Teddy Roosevelt at San and doctors in rear areas were permitted without military escorts.

Juan Hill, war coverage has experienced breathtaking changes.

First radio, and then television arrived to take away the ascenThe American public was dependent for its news on military briefings far from the scene, which the military conducted with dancy of print, and now the Internet is emerging as a reporting tool. Reporters today are freed from the need to find a telegraph great skill. During the lead-up to the shooting war, some reoffice or even a telephone line to get their stories out. Words and porters got around the restrictions simply by ignoring them, or atfilm can be transmitted by satellite; and the equipment needed to taching themselves to foreign armies. For example, Michael perform this technological wizardry is getting smaller and Kelly, stringing for the New Republic and the Boston Globe, joined Egyptian forces. The most respected newsman in the cheaper. No longer will reporters spend more time finding a way to file than reporting the news. country, Walter Cronkite, rose out of retirement to complain beGender discrimination is no longer tenable. Imagine fore Congress that the unprecedented press restrictions "trampled on the public's right to know," while the Pentagon insisted that a Christiane Amanpour putting up with behind-the-lines assignments that were forced on Peggy Hull in 1918. modern, fast-moving war could not possibly accommodate unOn the negative side, few reporters today have any background limited numbers of reporters in battle.

Once the shooting began, however, restrictions fell away. Tony in military matters. Since the end of conscription, a generation of Clifton of Newsweek rode into Desert Storm combat with the Americans has grown up without having served in the military, and this contributes to the widening American tanks, a feat that no regulf between reporters and soldiers. porter achieved in the desert war But for all the technology, reporting against General Erwin Rommel in First radio, and then television World War II. Clifton described an and photographing, war still means arrived to take away the ascendancy living dangerously and occasionally Iraqi tank that "disintegrated into dying young. In all, more than 50 enormous fragments; the turret, of print, and now the Internet is U.S. newspeople have been killed in weighing several tons, flew 20 feet emerging as a reporting tool. the U.S. combat actions since the into the air like the lid of a giant end of World War II. garbage can. The tracers set off black The tension between the military and the press will never and scarlet fireballs and brilliant white showers as gas-storage tanks and munitions went up. A strong wind was blowing from be- cease, because both need each other, but cannot grant the other what it really wants. Absolute freedom to print or film everyhind us, so we rushed ahead wreathed in the black and white smoke from our burning quarry." But mostly, in those final 100 thing is not possible in wartime, nor is it possible in a democracy to turn the media into organs of state propaganda. hours, the Gulf War was a nightmare of censorship, limited access In the century's final year the U.S. military was at war again, and bungled pools. The pendulum that allowed unfettered freedom this time in the Balkans, and the press protested yet again that the to report the news in Vietnam had swung sharply back toward conflow of information was too rigidly controlled. In April, news extrolling the news. George Esper, who led the Associated Press's war coverage from Saudi Arabia, says that the military followed "a ecutives from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, AP, CNN and the Wall Street Journal wrote pattern obviously designed to hide the horrors of war, especially Secretary of Defense William Cohen complaining that the flow American casualties." of news from the Balkan campaign was being even more tightly But this time, the press was just not going to take it anymore. held than in the Gulf War. "We of course recognize your need to After heavy pressure from news organizations, the Pentagon withhold information that would jeopardize ongoing military opagreed to new guidelines-no pools unless there is no other feaerations ...," the editors wrote. "But, at a minimum we believe sible way of accommodating the press; journalists to be provided that the department should make public its information on what access to military units; public affairs officers to act as liaisons targets in Yugoslavia have been hit...." but not to inteliere with reporting; field commands to permit Richard Harding Davis made the same point in 1914. journalists to ride on military vehicles and aircraft whenever feaSpeaking for all the century's combat correspondents, he wrote: sible. Said the AP's president Louis Boccardi: "The guidelines In war "the world has a right to know, not what is going to offer the promise of the kind of coverage the citizens of a demochappen next, but at least what has happened." Some things racy are entitled to have, while they also recognize the need for never change. [] security ground rules in combat zones."

In place now is a Department of Defense National Media Pool, About the Author: H.D.S. Greenway covered conflict in Indochina, representing television, newspapers, magazines, radio and wire Pakistan and the Middle East for Time, the Washington Post and services. Its 44 members are rotated on a regular basis. It is by the Boston Globe. He is currently the editorial page editor of the Boston Globe. necessity Washington-based, as the "deploy abIes" (as the

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE PROGRESS

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In April 1717, a storm off Cape Cod capsized the treasure-filled pirate ship Whydah Galley. She remained lost under the sea for centuries, until treasure hunter Barry Clifford found her in 1984.

Since then he has retrieved a colorful collection of artifacts from the former slave ship.

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ithin sight of the pale, bluff-lined beach of Cape Cod, at a spot a quarter mile from shore, a flood of bubbles bursts across the surface of a glassy sea. Emerging from the center of the explosion, clad head to toe in a blue neoprene dry suit, pops 53-year-old professional treasure hunter Barry Clifford. Decked out with an aluminum scuba tank and a full-face diver's mask, Clifford is flutter-kicking his swim fms for all he's worth, slicing through the iridescent foam and lugging an unwieldy, four-foot black cylinder to the smface.

Gently, almost gingerly, Clifford sets the object on an aluminum platform hung from the rail of the 65-foot work boat Vast Explorer 11.

"That's a swivel gun!" he says, breathing hard and patting the small cannon with a gloved hand. "It would have been mounted on a pivot near the ship's stem. Swivel gun! Guaranteed. The stem almost has to be nearby."

After 15 years of searching the ocean floor off the town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Clifford believes he's finally zeroing in on what's left of the hull and loot from the fIrst pirate ship ever discovered in North America. Called the Whydah Galley, it was said to be heavy with treasure stolen from at least 53 ships when it sank in a storm on April 26, 1717.

The swivel gun-the latest find in an artifact trail that includes more than 100,000 pieces-has Clifford so jazzed he launches himself onto the platform behind it. The cannon drips with weeds and is encrusted with shards of scallop shells. In the July sun, it exudes a dank odor of seawater mixed with spoiled eggs. As we gently hoist it across the Vast's rail, Clifford grins.

"There's more," he says.

He pulls a mesh sack from his belt and removes a plastic bag filled with sand that's flecked with gold dust.

"Nice," says Cathrine Harker, an underwater archaeologist from Scotland.

"There's a river of gold dust down there," Clifford says. "Really fme dust. Oh, yeah ...."

He peels back the wrist on his left dive glove and extracts two Spanish pieces of eight, silver pieces blackened like small, charred pancakes. He smiles, turning the centuries-old coins in his gloved fingers.

"Look at these," he says, the grin of treasure fever now spreading across his nineperson crew. "The last time a human touched them, they were either being handled by a pirate-Dr being used to buy human lives."

The Whydah's story begins in London in 1715 when the hundred-foot three-master was launched as a slave ship under the command of Lawrence Prince. Named for the West African port of Ouidah (pronounced Wrn-dah) in what is today Benin, the 300-ton vessel was destined for the infamous "triangular trade" connecting England, Africa and the West Indies. Carrying cloth, liquor, hand tools and small arms from England, the

Relics like this bronze ship's bell (above), evoke the life and times of pirates. Locating booty is a challenge.

"It's like working blind," says team diver Chris Macort (below) of searching in the churning, murky water. A lamp and a metal detector guide him to small items such as gold jewelry from West Africa and Spanish coins received as currency in exchange for the Whydah's human cargo.

Whydah's crew would buy and barter for up to 700 slaves in West Africa, then set out with them on three to four weeks of hellish transport to the Caribbean. Once there, the slaves were traded for gold, silver, sugar, indigo and cinchona, the last being a source of quinine, all of which went back to England.

The Whydah was fast-she was capable of 13 knots-but in February of 1717, on only her second voyage, she was chased down by two pirate vessels, the Sultana and Mary Anne, near the Bahamas. Led by Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy, a ravenhaired former English sailor thought to be in his late twenties, the pirates quickly overpowered the Whydah's crew. Bellamy claimed her as his flagship, seized a dozen men from Prince, then let the vanquished captain and his remaining crew take the Sultana.

By early April the pirates were headed north along the east coast, robbing vessels as they went. Their destination was Richmond Island, off the coast of Maine, but they diverted to Cape Cod, where legend says Bellamy wanted to visit his mistress, Maria Hallett, in the town of Eastham near the cape's tip. Others blame the course change on several casks of Madeira wine seized off Nantucket. Whatever the reason, on April 26, 1717, the freebooter navy sailed square into a howling nor'easter.

According to eyewitness accounts, gusts topped 110 kilometers an hour and the seas rose to 30 feet. Bellamy signaled his fleet to deeper water, but it was too late for the treasure-laden Whydah. Trapped in the surf zone within sight of the beach, the boat slammed stem first into a sandbar and began to break apart. When a giant wave rolled her, her cannon fell from their mounts, smashing through overturned decks along with cannonballs and barrels of iron and nails. Finally, as the ship's back broke, she split into bow and stern, and her contents spilled across the ocean floor.

The following morning, as farmers and other locals arrived at the wreck site, more than a hundred mutilated corpses lay at the wrack line with the ship's timbers. To hall' looting, colonial governor Samuel Shute sent Cyprian Southack, a caltographer and sea captain, to recover what might be salvaged for the crown. When Southack ar-

rived, he reported "at least 200 men from several places at 30 kilometers distance plundering the Pirate Wreck of what came ashore [when] she turned bottom up."

Of the Whydah's crew of 146, only two men survived: John Julian, a half-blood Indian who soon vanished, and Thomas Davis, a Welshman who was captured and put on trial in Boston. There he testified that the amount and variety of stolen booty on the Whydah were dizzying, including 180 bags of gold and silver that had been divided equally among the crew and stored in chests between the ship's decks.

After Southack issued public demands for the return of items salvaged from the wreck, the cape's locals handed back some wooden beams, guns and a few gem-studded rings cut from the fingers of dead pirates. But Southack recovered little of the Whydah's legendary booty. He did, however, note the location of the shipwreck on one of his maps. This map, along with Southack's journals and letters, became Barry Clifford's most valuable tool in his search for the lost treasure.

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ou'd better get down here," Clifford calls out to Bob Cembrola, a maline historian and longtime associate who is waiting on the deck of the Vast Explorer II. Clifford is down on the sea bottom, talking through a two-way speaker in his diver's mask. "We got a great big section of hull, with all the timbers showing. Wow!" It is afternoon on day three of Clifford's treasure-collecting expedition in July 1998.

During his years of seal'ching, Clifford has found plenty of artifacts from the Whydah (including the ship's bell, inscribed "The Whydah Gally-1716"), but he's never found any of the hull, which he believes may contain the missing treasure.

Cembrola dives to join Clifford 30 feet below in a green murk of weeds and algae.

When he returns to the surface, he's carrying a chunk of blackened, rough-hewn timber, pinned by a long, hand-forged screw.

"Of course, I'd like more conclusive proof," he says, his black wet suit dripping with seawater. "The dimensions are right, and it's the right shape. The wood looks old enough. It's in the right location, and the ar-

tifacts in and around it are consistent with the other artifacts that have been collected.

I could be wrong, but for the moment I'd say that's a section of the Whydah's hull."

As bits and pieces of the pirates' weapons, clothing, gear and other possessions have been plucked from the wreck, researchers have logged the locations where they were found, then gently stowed them in water-filled vats to prevent drying.

The artifacts have revealed a picture of the pirates quite unlike their popular image as thuggish white men with sabers.

The abundance of metal buttons, cuff links, collar stays, rings, neck chains and square belt buckles scattered on the seafloor shows that the pirates were far more sophisticated-even dandyish-in their dress than was previously thought. In an age of austere Puritanism and rigid class hierarchy, as Clifford's team points out, this too was an act of defiance-similar in spirit, perhaps, to today's rock stal'S. The most common items found in the wreck haven't been eye patches and rum bottles but bits of bird shot and musket balls, designed to clear decks of defenders but not to damage ships. The pirates, it seems, preferred close-quarters fighting to destructive cannon battles.

Among the custom-made weapons recovered have been dozens of homemade hand grenades: hollow, baseball-size iron spheres, which were filled with gunpowder and plugged shut. A gunpowder fuse was run through the plug's center, to be lit moments before the grenade was tossed onto the deck of a victim ship. Pirates didn't want to sink a ship; they wanted to capture and rob it.

Finally, among the coins and weapons there remains one truly impressive find: a leg bone with a small black leather shoe, complete with its silk stocking, Along with salvaged clothing, the bone strongly suggests that the average pirate was about five feet four inches tall-not the giant of Hollywood movies.

Tall and thin, with a shock of unruly black hair and sideburns, Kenneth J, Kinkor resembles Abe Lincoln gone piratologist. As research director of the Whydah Project, Kinkor's job for the past

Recovery "I don't think we'll get everything out in my lifetime," says Barry Clifford, whose team on Vast Explorer II has salvaged more than 100,000 artifacts. Resting getitly on a bed of cobblestones, a pewter syringe was most likely last used by the Whydah's surgeon, James Ferguson, to administer a compound of mercury to treat syphilis. Archaeologist Catherine Harker (right) examines a grooved grindstone, probably used for sharpening knives.

decade has been to open a window on the golden age of piracy from 1680 to 1725. Removing a padlocked chain, Kinkor raises the lid of a deep freezer in the small conservation laboratory at the ~ expedition's museum on MacMillan Wharf in ~ Provincetown, Massachusetts. Reaching inside, g he pulls out a bundle of white fabric wrapping a .g foot-long black pistol stock and hands it over. ~ "The owner of this pistol belonged to no na;g tion," Kinkor says. "These men gave up such loyalties when they became pirates. They were African slaves, displaced English seamen, Native Americans, and a scattering of social outcasts from Europe and elsewhere. They had no common language, no shared religion. They were truly a deviant subculture held together by a common spirit of revolt."

In his 1724 book, A Genera! History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, the novelist and journalist Daniel Defoe quotes Bellamy through a secondary source, a Captain Beer who did battle with the Whydah from his sloop. "I am a free Prince," Bellamy is said to have speechified, "and 1 have as much Authority to make War on the whole World as he who has a hundred Sail of Ships at Sea and an Army of 100,000 Men in the Field; and this my Conscience tells me."

Unlike their reputation as tyrants, many pirate captains were elected by their crews in a rough version of democracy. "'Pirate' was literaIly their nationality, their social structure,': Kinkor says. "They were thrown together outside the law and designed their own laws to govern community behavior. Black, white, English, French, whatever. They were as free as men could be at that time."

Thanks to court testimony of captured pirates and the depositions of tnerchant captains who had fallen prey to Bellamy, Kinkor believes that 30 to 50 men on Bellamy's crew were black.

"Most of them were former slaves," he says.

"The pirates would raid slave ships and offer male slaves their choice: Join the pirate ranks or continue to the New World in slavery. Which would you take?"

Once aboard a pirate ship, it didn't matter if a man happened to be an English refugee from Monmouth's Rebellion of 1685, when Protestant forces attempted to seize the crown from James II, who was Roman Catholic. Nor did anyone care if he was one of the thousands of out-ofwork sailors decommissioned after Queen Anne's War in 1713. All any loot-minded indi-

8

A Swift Seizure Claiming their prize, Bellamy and his crew capture the Whydah without incident, scratch out an inventory, and divide the loot. Bellamy rewarded her captain's cooperation by sparing his life. A show of weapons-including grenades (above) and pistols loaded with shot from leather pouches (below)-often persuaded foes to surrender without a fight. "There was little bloodshed," says expedition historian Kenneth ]. Kinkor. "Sailors didn't get paid enough to risk their lives against pirates."

~ ~ ~ ~ OJ ~ CD

Tracking "Black Sam" Prowling the Caribbean Sea and western Atlantic, Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy plundered more than 50 vessels during his year-long pirate career. In February 1717 he chased down and commandeered the English slave trader Whydah, a Jast, three-masted merchant galley. Plotting the course Jor Richmond Island off Maine, Bellamy continued raiding along North America's East Coast. On April 26 what may have been a diversion to visit his mistress on Cape Cod became a date with doom; Bellamy, with all but two oj the 146 men on board, perished in the storm.

Emblazoned with brass dragons on its side plates and handle, this Scottish-made flint-lock pistol was recovered from the wreck site still loaded with lead shot, wadding, and part of a cartridge. In keeping with the rough democracy practiced on pirate ships, such treasures were auctioned to the highest bidder among the crew.

An early example of the Freemasons' symbol was crudely engraved on a dinner plate, perhaps by a pirate member of the fraternal society. "Lust for gold defined this period," says Clifford (right), "but the stories the artifacts tell are the real treasures."

Discoveries of a Season "This is not like the Titanic," says Kenneth Kinkor. "The storm broke this ship apart, scattering its pieces." In the summer of 1998 diversfound lead-lined sections of what may be the gunpowder room (jar left and below left). Fighting the cape's currents, Clifford (left) clings to his air and communication lines and heads to the surface with a heavily encrusted swivel gun, one of many small cannon that Bellamy's pirates mounted on the Whydah.

vidual needed to do was take a small step from being a legal privateer seizing goods at sea by royal authority to going "on account" as an outlaw. And between 1680 and 1725 as many as 10,000 men-and even a few women-plowed the seas as pirates, their allegiance to navy and king thrown overboard.

A crowd of tourists has gathered on MacMillan Wharf in Provincetown to gape at the treasure hunters as they trundle vats of artifacts from the workboat to the project's small museum. Before long, news of Clifford's find has spread across the wharves, and several local fishermen are coming in to congratulate him and his crew. For Clifford this is the beginning of a frenetic period of phone calls and visits.

Within the week, as the story makes the front section of the New York Times, old friends and former investors will telephone, and offers will come in to build a larger museum.

"It's like being queen of the prom," Clifford says of the instant attention.

"Everybody wants to be at my side."

In his book, Expedition Whydah, Clifford characterizes Black Sam Bellamy as equal parts hero, freedom fighter and likable scoundrel. But Clifford, with his rugged good looks and natural salesman's charisma, might as well have been describing himself, considering his longtime skirmish with certain members of the historic preservation community over the project.

From the start Clifford's claim to the

Whydah has rankled preservationists, who argue that historic resources on public land should remain in public hands. Much to their dismay, Massachusetts' highest state court ruled in 1988 that under the federal "law of finds"-neatly summed up by the expression "finders keepers"the pirate ship was Clifford's to do with as he saw fit.

Two years before his court victory Clifford had made a deal with a group of 300 or so investors pieced together by a brokerage film. The group raised six million dollars to fund the salvors for three years, with an eye toward auctioning the pirate loot. But at the end of three productive dive seasons the backers decided that auctioning the artifacts would net too little profit, and so the idea was scrapped.

"Most treasure hunters don't make money by selling treasure," says Paul F. Johnston, curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian Institution and one of Clifford's most outspoken critics. "Instead they make money selling shares to investors. They're selling dreams."

Clifford shrugs off such criticisms. "I just have to factor them into the job, like rough seas, broken boat parts and the weather," he says with a gleam in his eye. "Some of those academic guys are jealous. I took the chance. I spent nine years looking for the Whydah, and I'm the one who found her."

Clifford points out that he has met all the conditions of his salvor's permit, hiring people to record finds, keeping arti-

The bronze bell (left), raised in 1985, established the Whydah as the first pirate ship found in North America. Worked by 282 years of currents, a sealing wax stamp (above) has found an anchorage between two stones. "We can't know if the pirates brought this piece aboard," says Harker, "or if it was part of the Whydah's original cargo or if it came from a sailor's personal effects."

facts together, and conserving them in a lab. But preservationists still mistrust him, .suspecting that, sooner or later, he will sell off the treasure.

Right now, though, Clifford decides it's time for a celebration, inviting his team into an amber-lit fishelman's bar. For the next hour, as they gobble pizza and drink beer, there are invocations of "180 bags of pirate treasure" yet to be found. Exhausted and grinning, Clifford shakes his head at all the speculation.

He knows that a proper excavation of the Whydah's stern, if that is what the newly discovered wood on the bottom proves to be, must wait for the next dive season, when the weather and resources will allow it. Only then will he know whether the wreck will yield its legendary gold or whether its greatest treasure will be what it has taught us about the true lives of pirates.

0 About

the Author:

frequent magazine.

contributor

Donovan

Wehster is a

to National Geographic

cry. But matters fortunately died down as time healed an unintended wound to a fragile psyche that had anxieties about a foreign invasion.

It was CNN and its correspondent Peter Arnet who gave Indian viewers a taste of full-blooded international broadcasting during the Gulf War. Operation Desert Storm was brought right into Indian living rooms. Used, as Indians were, to be monopolized by the state broadcaster Doordarshan, the war coverage by CNN was a different experience altogether. Since then broadcasting in India has come a long way.

Having developed a fondness for the more polished and professionally packaged programming viewers soon found it difficult to settle for anything less. A new public had been created and there was a market waiting to happen. Says H.K. Dua, information adviser to the Prime Minister and also an expert on television, "Today we can wonder how we did without it before.

Television is a very India-friendly medium.

We've always been an audiovisual society and I see us excelling in the program production area in the coming years."

It was at this juncture that satellite channels such as Zee and Star made a reticent debut. Once private channels entered the scene the face of Indian broadcasting was to be changed forever. Today companies in the entertainment sector, led by Zee Telefilms, are creating havoc at the bourses, reaching stellar positions in terms of market capitalization up from their being in the irrelevant ranks only two years ago.

The market cap of the broadcast boys has already increased from Rs. 2,030 million to Rs. 52,380 million in this very short span.

Hoping to cash in on this popularity, a slew of media companies and production houses are now busy planning their initial public offerings. Ronnie Screwala, head of UTV, which represents a Rupert Murdoch investment and is one of the big software players, says, "There is no doubt that the markets are looking carefully at the winners of tomorrow. TV software is an industry that's come of age. The markets are a little behind on a phenomenon that's there on the ground already."

After software-where the story is still evolving-it is now the turn of cable com-

panies to bask in the limelight. Many are realizing that it is the cable companies which may soon decide the fate of the telecom industry in the future. With the rising popularity of the Internet in the Indian subcontinent, cable companies are now making a foray into data mode of communication. Due to technological innovations data communication is cheaper than voice telephony. The focus is rapidly shifting from telephone companies to cable companies.

Subhash Chandra, who recently paid $296 million to acquire Rupert Murdoch's 50 percent stake in Asia Today, smiles at those who think he paid for assets that only comprise the three channels: Zee TV, Zee Cinema and Zee News. He mentions proudly that this also includes his 50 percent share in Siti Cable. Analysts feel that Chandra actually paid the huge sum happily because he was getting back his 50 percent share in Siti Cable. So the trend set by AT&T in its acquisition of TCI and Media One is already catching up in India. merican entertainment companies are today looking at India with renewed interest. It is estimated that the U.S. entertainment and media sector is worth over $450 billion. The next big leap in markets is going to happen as previously untapped markets begin to get tapped. Now potential U.S. partners are waking up to the fact that there is much to gain by aligning. India has traditionally been more Eurocentric where collaborations are concerned.

Already CNBC has formed a joint venture company with its old program content partner TV 18 and it is to be called CNBC Asia. Raghav Behl, head of TV 18, says, "We have distinct cost advantages to produce specialist programming in India.

There are both cost advantages and time zone benefits which we can harness effectively. The CNBC Asia platform will also tap into the growing global interest in Indian markets and scrips. As India becomes a global investment destination, there is need for live reportage on what happens in this region. Credibility and conformity to local standards are what audiences require. Our CNBC parentage en-

A

sures both these."

CNN, too, is scouting quite seriously for Indian partners to produce India-specific software. If the 1999 general elec~ tions are any indication, then popularity of India as an important subject and newsworthy place can no longer be doubted. If BBC was there to cover the elections, so was CNN. In a new development for this market CNN flew in a IS-member team along with star anchor Riz Khan just to cover the elections. Over the next two years company sources suggest that CNN plans to spend over $10 million on localizing its programming in both Asia and Europe. Those in the know believe that when this begins to happen new Indian program-makers will get exciting new assignments. Says Anuradha Prasad of BAG Films, a leading Indian software player, "Each new buyer pushes us to meet new quality standards. We sometimes push the bar on content, sometimes we need to look at editing technique or hardware. It's an evolving marketplace and new demands make new winners." Anuradha and her anchor-husband Rajiv are the new breed of Indian software players who have a deep understanding of the local markets.

They and those of their ilk are waiting for the next nudge that expands the envelopes they work within.

Elections may be India's best known festival of democracy but it is not just election coverage which is attracting American television channels today. Keen on cashing in on India's well known movie mania, Turner International Ltd., part of the Time Warner group, is all set to launch Home Box Office, the world's premium movie channel in India. Given urban India's long-standing love affair with Hollywood this entry could well be a winner. TNT, the "other" movie channel that's already on air, has its own faithful viewership. Quality, taste and attention to family sensibilities make the TNT channel a favorite with those who worry about what television channels seem to delight inpushing lots of sex and violence onto the dhurrie potato in the Indian home. Just off the block is the $11.2 billion Viacom which has launched its primary brandthe children's entertainment channel

Nickelodeon. Zee TV, which is itching to get out of the Murdoch clutch, has already Subhash tied up with Nickelodeon to Chandra, who distribute that popular chanrecently paid nel on Siti Cable. It's visible $296 million but audiences are yet to reach significant numbers. to acquire But that's not all. U.S. 50 percent media giants are eagerly stake in Asia sought-out partners beyond Today, has the boundaries of English plenty to smile television. That's where the big new growth is going to about. take place in the future.

Savvy regional language players are already flexing their muscles to see how they can mix and match global content Hollywood movies in the country has inwith local taste. Others are in the process creased multifold as their dubbed verof looking for ways where new partnersions have found a bigger market. ships will yield dollar revenues in the Channels like Discovery and National long run. A wonderful example of this is Geographic devote prime time to programs dubbed in Hindi. It's an acknowlprovided by the savvy Ramoji Rao whose regional winner Eenadu TV has tied up edgment of what Discovery has already achieved that its local boss Kiran Karnik with Scientific Atlanta of the U.S. to install India's first private sector earth sta- has been selected by the new Information tion for satellite television broadcasting and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley to help government get its own homeat Film City, near Hyderabad. The earth station as currently structured will be spun broadcaster Doordarshan into better used to launch three new channels in ad- shape for the future. What Discovery has dition to the existing Telugu channel done is uncover the Indian hunger for inETY. But the future may hold other de- fotainment. An underrecognised market, it is already being targeted by some playvelopments such as local software being ers hungry for the numbers which make beamed out for use globally. the ratings respectable. Also, given the It is not just in television broadcasting evolving legislative environment in that India is attracting foreign investors. which invaders-from-the-skies are likely Gradually India is becoming an imporinfotainment has tant entertainment hub. The popularity of to find themselves, none of the baggage that news and the government have to worry about.

From dubbing it is now on Information and to animation for which Broadcasting India is emerging as an imMinister Arun portant center. The jury's J aitley wants to still out on whether it's goget Doordarshan ing to be a success, but India is already the hub of in better shape several Hollywood animafor the future. tion movies. The movies may still be in the works but there's no doubt that a trend has been set for the future.

ll this frenzied activity by foreign media companies does not in any way imply that the smaller Indian companies have been playing the role of mute spectators. Desi satellite and cable channels have also been flexing their muscles and it is not just broadcasting they have shown their preference for.

Clearly the importance of the Internet has filtered through to broadcast players. Siti Cable has earmarked Rs. 5,000 million to fund the first phase of its initiative to offer Internet services through their cable network in major metros within the next three months. Truly the global trend of convergence is becoming on-the-ground reality in India, even as you read this.

Leading this convergence brigade are two industry 'segments--cable and mobile telephony. But it's the cable TV industry in India that is now poised for a graceful leap fragging-if that's possible. Since it first became tentatively corporatized in 1995, the cable industry in India has not looked back. In spite of gawky political and bureaucratic efforts at muzzling it, the sector has grown totally unchecked. It violates laws with impunity, it adapts technology haphazardly and its owners still behave like a confident posse of outlaws. The corporatization has begun to make some dent in what is an anarchy that passes for an industry. Today though big investors with deep pockets are in play, the future direction looks a bit hazy. A.P. Hinduja, youngest of the Hinduja brothers, whose fame and fortune make them likely candidates to straddle the business, is clear about where he is headed. "We are only at the starting phase of real growth. Carrying broadcast signals into homes is part of the bigger offer we can make to our customers. We cover the last mile like nobody else except government monopolies have been able to do.

What we do with it, only technology and entrepreneurship will decide." If this sounds a bit like a buccaneering tycoonyou've got the core of the message about where the industry is headed.

What's still unclear is when all this will really settle down into an industry that big investors can afford to get excited about. Today cable already reaches

A

(Continued on page 43)

"Golden Spike" was driven home, connecting the Union Pacific Railway with the Central Pacific Railway to complete the last link of the transcontinental railroad system. If television had existed then, perhaps this event would have been covered with the same justified excitement that surrounded Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon. But, of course, there was no television, and instead the news was relayed to the waiting nation via the communications network of that day: the telegraph.

The ceremonial spike and hammer had been wired such that, when the hammer struck the spike, the "sound" would be immediately conveyed over the telegraph, which had completed its own transcontinental wiring years earlier. However, both Governor Leland Stanford of California and Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific missed the spike when they swung the hammer. Nonetheless, the telegraph operator dutifully entered the message by hand, keying in three dots that signaled the single word "done."

Twenty-five years earlier Samuel Morse had sent his famous message, "What hath God wrought?" from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to Mount Clare depot in Baltimore, Maryland, thus commencing what was then considered the greatest information revolution ever.

By the time the railways were joined, Western Union already had more than 80,000 kilometers of cable and poles and was, by the standards of that time, an economic giant. The electrification of the nation was just beginning. It would be another 10 years before the electrical light would be invented, and still another year before the first New York City street would be illuminated. In seven years, the telephone would be invented. The three great infrastructures-electrical power, communications and transportationwere in their infancy then, but they were fertile with promise.

The railroad of that day had a transformative effect on industry that was similar to the effect we now ascribe to information technology. Commerce, which had been oriented north-south because of rivers and canals, rotated to run east-west.

Chicago, which had only 30,000 residents in 1850, became the railway capital of the nation and tripled its population in both that decade and the next. The radius of economic viability for wheat-the point at which the cost of transportation equaled the value of the wheat-expanded from 500 kilometers to 5,000 kilometers. If the concept of the "global village" had existed in that day, people would have said globalization was happening because of the railways.

Today the transformative power of the railways is a thing of the distant past.

Promontory Point no longer seems as if it were ever a crucial place. The Golden

Iexpandable,

viction held by almost everyone in the field is that we're on to something that will change the world paradigm-not just for now but for a long time into the future, and in ways that none of us is able to forecast.

So what is different? Most importantly, information technology seems almost infinitely expandable, since it is not bound by the physical laws of the universe that have constrained previous technologies. The problem with those railways was the intrinsic limitation of the technology. I imagine going back in time to Promontory Point in 1869 to talk to people about the future of the railroad. People would tell me how wonderful and long-lasting the

nformation technology seems

I

since it is not bound

by the physical laws of the universe that have constrained

Spike itself was "undriven" as part of the war effort in 1942. Transcontinental railways have diminished in importance, and many have ceased operation. The telegraph has disappeared, too, and today it's all about information technology-the force that will rewrite the rules of commerce, collapse the worlds of time and space, reinvent governments and iITevocably change the sociology of the peoples of Earth. That, of course, is what we say now. The question is whether this importance is transient or whether information technology is so fundamentally different from what ~as come before it that its power will last into the next millennium.

I asked a number of influential friends in the information technology business whether they thought that the cUITenttechnology was fundamentally different from the transforming technologies of previous centuries. Everyone said that of course it was, and some implied that it was sacrilegious even to raise the question. The con-

power of the railroad would be. Yes, I would agree, the railways would reshape the nation. It would be the dominant economic force for many years to come. But, I would say, look at that train. A century from now, it would be pretty much the same. A hundred years of progress would perhaps triple the speed of the fastest trains. The strongest engines would be able to pull more cars, and there would be anywhere from ten to a hundred times as much track mileage, but that's it. What路 you see is basically what you get. There isn't anything else.

I would also think to myself that, in a few decades, Ford would start building little compartments that propelled themselves without the need for tracks. Before long the Wright brothers would start testing contraptions that flew through the air.

The flying things wouldn't be called winged trains, because they would seem different enough from the railway to deserve their own name. The nation would

become webbed with highways and clogged with traffic, and the skies would be filled with giant flying compartments.

All these inventions would constitute a steady improvement in the speed, convenience and cost-effectiveness of transportation. Still, transportation wouldn't have improved all that much. Even today, looking at a lumbering Boeing 747 lifting its huge bulk into the welcoming sky, I wonder: How much better can transportation get? What comes after the airplane?

On the other hand, if the people of 1869 asked me about the future of the telegraph, I would shake my head in perplexity. A good idea, I would say, but far, far ahead of its proper time. The telegraph was digital, and the quality of being digital would be one of the three synergistic concepts that would constitute information technology. By itself, however, the telegraph could not be self-sustaining. What would be needed, and would not be available for another century, would be the other two concepts-the supporting technology of microelectronics and the overriding metaphysical idea of an information economy.

The telegraph, of course, was undone by the telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell only seven years after the Golden Spike was driven. His invention was basically the idea of analog-that is, the transmitted voltage should be proportional to the air pressure from speech. In that era, this was the right principle to follow. After all, the world we experience appears to be analog. Things such as time and distance and quantities such as voltages and sound pressures seem to be continuous in value, whereas the idea of bits-ones and zeros, or dots and dashes-is an artificial creation, seemingly unrepresentative ofreality.

For more than a century thereafter, the wires that marched across the nation would be connected to telephones, and the transmission of the spoken information would be analog. Not until the late' 50s would communication engineers begin to understand the intrinsic power of digital.

An analog wave experiences and accumulates imperfections from the distortions

and noise it encounters on its journey, and the wave is like Humpty-Dumpty-all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put it back together again. The notion of perfection does not exist.

Bits, in contrast, have an inherent model of perfection-they can only be ones and zeros. Because of this constraint, they can be restored or regenerated whenever they deviate from these singular values. Bits are perfect and forever, whereas analog is messy and transient. The audio compact disc is a good example. You can playa disc for years and years, and every time it is played it will sound exactly the same. You can even draw a knife across it without hearing a single resultant hiccup in the sound-in most cases, all of the bits corrupted by the cut will be restored by digital error-colTecting codes. By contrast, the old vinyl long-playing records sounded wonderful when they were first played, but they deteriorated continuously thereafter. And don't try that trick with the knife!

The underlying notion of the perfection of digital makes much of information technology possible. Pictures can be altered, sound can be processed and information can be manipulated endlessly without fear of corrupting it. Nature sets the perfect example in life itself-the instructions for replication are transmitted in the four-letter digital code of DNA. At this fundamental level we find the indestructibility of digits, without which life could not be propagated and sustained.

Is digital here to stay? Or could a budding young Alexander Graham Bell came up with some invention that convinces us to go back to analog? While there are compelling reasons why digital is a foundation of the information age, it is also true that digital implementation perfectly complements the microelectronics technology that is the building block of choice today. This is a stretch, but I suppose I could imagine microelectronics being replaced in the future by quantum devices or biological computers that were intrinsically analog. People might say, "Remember when computers only gave you a single answer, as if everything were crystal clear, and they didn't realize that life is fuzzy and full of uncertainty?" I

suppose it's possible, but I don't think so.

I think digital is here to stay.

The digital revolution started before microelectronics had been developed, but it is hard to imagine that it would have gotten very far without the integrated circuit. The first digital computer, ENIAC, was built from vacuum tubes in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, nearly at the same time that the transistor was being invented at Bell Labs. But digital computers were unwieldy monsters, and during the 1950s it was analog computers that achieved popularity among scientists and engineers. Then in 1958 a young engineer named Jack Kilby joined Texas Instruments in Dallas. Being new to the company, he was not entitled to the vacation that everyone else took during the company shutdown that year. Working alone in the laboratory, he fabricated the first integrated circuit, combining several transistors on a single substrate, and thus began a remarkable march of progress in microelectronics that today reaches astronomical proportions.

The integrated circuit is now such an everyday miracle that we take it for granted. I can remember when portable radios used to proclaim, "Seven Transistors!" in big letters, as if this made them much better than their mere sixtransistor imitators. Today you would never see an ad stating that a computer featured a microprocessor with, say, 10 million transistors. Nobody cares. But I watch that number grow like the number of hamburgers McDonald's sells, because it is the fuel of the digital revolution. If it were to stop growing, ominous things would happen.

In 1965 Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel Corporation, made the observation that the feature sizes (the width of the wires and sizes of the device structures) in microelectronics circuitry were shrinking at an exponential rate. In other words, we were learning how to make transistors smaller and smaller at a rate akin to that of compound interest. Integrated circuits were doubling their cost-effectiveness every 18 months. Every year and a half, for the same cost, we could produce chips that had twice as many transistors. This

came to be known as Moore's Law, and for nearly 35 years it has remained almost exactly correct.

Moore's Law is the furnace in the basement of the information revolution. It burns hotter and hotter, churning out digital processing power at an ever-increasing rate. Computers get more powerful, they continue to increase in complexity, and time scales get shorter-all consequences of this irresistible march of technology.

Railroad technology had nothing similar.

Perhaps no equivalent technology force has ever existed previously.

That the power of digital electronics can increase exponentially is difficult for most people to comprehend. We all tend to think in linear terms-everything becomes a straight line. The idea of doubling upon doubling upon doubling is fundamental to what has happened in electronics, but it is intuitive neither to engineers and scientists nor to decision-makers in boardrooms. To envision it, think of the old story about the king, the peasant and the chessboard. In this fable the peasant has done a favor for the king and is asked what he would like for a reward. The peasant says that he wishes simply to be given a single grain of rice on the first square of his chessboard, and then twice as many grains on each succeeding square. Since this sounds simple, the king agrees.

How much rice does this require? I discovered that one university bases a physics experiment on this fable to help students gain an intuitive understanding of exponentiation. The students are given rice and a chessboard to see for themselves how quickly exponentials can increase. They discover that, for the first few squares, very little rice is required.

The first 18 to 20 squares of the board can be handled easily using the amount of rice contained in a small wastebasket. The next couple of squares need a large wastebasket of rice. Squares 23 through 27 require an area of rice about the size of a large lecture table. Squares 28 through 37 take up about a room's worth of rice.

Filling the last square-the 64th-requires a number of grains represented by the number one followed by 19 zerosvariously estimated at requiring the entire

area of the earth to produce, weighing 100 billion tons, and filling one million large ships or one billion swimming pools.

This is the way exponentials work. At first they may be small, but later they grow overwhelmingly large. Moore's Law states that there wi 11 be exponential progress in microelectronics and that doublings will occur every year and a half.

Since the invention of the transistor there have been about 34 of the 18-month doublings of the technology as predicted by Moore-the first half of the chessboard. If this law continues, what overwhelming implications await us now, as we begin the second half of the board? Or, as was suggested by a recent story in the New York Times, based on an article by an Intel researcher in the journal Science, will we soon reach the physical upper limit on such growth?

Moore's Law is an incredible phenomenon. Why has it worked so well? After all, it is not a true natural law in the sense that the laws of physics are, nor is it a logical axiom that has been derived mathematically from basic principles. It is merely an observation of progress-an observation, however, that has been an accurate predictor for nearly 35 years. [n spite of the fact that this law is the most important technological and economic phenomenon of om time, there is no accepted explanation for its validity.

Gordon Moore himself has suggested that his law is simply a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since every competing company in the industry "knows" how much progress is required to keep pace, they each pour all necessary resources into the pursuit of the growth Moore's Law mandates. This has required an ever-increasing investment, as the cost of fabrication plants necessary to produce smaller and smaller circuitry has escalated continuously to more than a billion dollars per facility. Whatever the reason behind Moore's Law, it is more likely to lie in the domains of economics or sociology than in provable mathematics or physics.

Aside from the enigma of why Moore's Law exists at all, there is the puzzling question of why the period of doubling is J 8 months. This rate of progress seems to

be critically balanced on the knife-edge of just the amount of technological disruption our society can tolerate. I sometimes think that Moore's 18 months is akin to the Hubble constant for the expansion of the universe. Just as astronomers worry about the ultimate fate of the universewhether it will collapse or expand indefinitely-so should engineers and economists worry about the fate of Moore's expansion constant. Suppose, for example, that Moore's Law ran much faster, so that doublings occurred every six months. Or suppose it were much slower. What would happen if the phenomenon described by Moore's Law suddenly stopped, as that Times article so unsettlingly suggested it is about to do?

We've gr{)wn so accustomed to the steady progression of cheaper, faster and better electronics that this rate of development has become standard. We know that, when we buy a computer, it will be obsolete in about two years. We know this computer will be worthless and that even charities won't accept it. We know that new software may not run on our old machine, whose memory capacity will be insufficient for most new purposes.

We know that new accessories and addon cards that can't be used with our old machine will be created. We know this, but we accept it as a consequence of the accelerati ng pace of information technology.

One very good reason why the J 8-month doubling period has not been disruptive is a principle of economics that helps counterbalance the chaos implied by the Moore's Law upheavals-it is the principle of increasing returns, or the idea of demand-side economies of scale. In other words, the. more people who share an application, the greater its value to each user. If you have your own individual word processor that produces files incompatible with anyone else's system, it has very little value. If the operating system you use is owned by few other people, you will have difficulty buying software for it. For this reason, the information technology market often has the characteristic of "locking in" celtain popular products, such as Microsoft Word or the PC platform.

The good news is that the economic imperative of increasing returns forces standards and common platforms that survive the turmoil of Moore's Law. The bad news is that it is often hard to develop new products and services that lie outside the current framework. For example, the Internet today has been charactetized as a collection of old protocols that survive essentiaJJy unchanged from their original design (created about 30 years ago) and are now running on new machines that Moore's Law has made continuously

terms of style, color and brand. Maybe you would be able to buy a mahogany computer to match your living-room decor. Used computers would retain their value, and programs would remain constant over the years. Intel, Microsoft and other bastions of the technology market sector would have to find new business models.

Could it happen? Could computers stop getting better? As you ponder that recent report in the Times, remember that many other scientific papers have been written

lective strength. The beat must go on, somehow, some way. Material systems other than silicon that promise smaller circuit sizes are being explored. Some researchers are betting on quantum or biological computing. Meanwhile, research on the algorithms that process information continues unabated on its own Moore's Law curve. In a number of important areas, such as image compression, more progress has been made through mathematical ingenuity than through the brute-force application of faster computIng.

Moore's

Law isan

incredible

phenomenon.

Why has it

worked so well What would happen if it suddenly stopped?

more powerful. We can't change the protocols because the cost and disruption to the Internet's hundred miJJion users would be enormous. ow imagine a world in which Moore's Law speeds up. The computer you bought would be obsolete before you got it hooked up. No PC or Apple standard platform would exist, because the industry would be in constant turmoil. Every piece of commercial software would be specific to an indi vidual processor, and people would search at t1ea markets for software suitable for the computers they had bought only a few months earlier. Chaos would abound.

But suppose instead that Moore's Law simply runs out of gas. Suppose we reach the limits of microelectronics, where quantum effects limit the ability to make circuits any smaJJer. What would the world of information technology look like? Perhaps computers would be like toasters, keeping the same functionality over decades. Competition between computer manufacturers would be mainly in

over the past two decades predicting the end of Moore's Law because of the constraints imposed by various physical laws.

So far they have all been wrong. Every time the technology has approached a physical limit, a way around that limit has been devised. However, the latest such papers do seem more and more credible as the size of circuits descends into the world of quantum mechanics and atomic distances. While there is somewhat of a consensus that Moore's Law could continue for another decade, that consensus wavers as further doublings become more and more problematic. Remember the fable about the rice and the chessboard and the awesome consequences of unlimited exponential growth. Surely there is a limit, and it may not be very far away. The likelihood is not so much that Moore's Law would stop completely but that it would begin to slow down.

Even as we approach possible physical limits on the technology, however, there is a huge industry that wiJJ resist the slowing of technological growth with aJJ of its col-

Going forward, however, the greatest potential for continuing improvement lies in networking and distributed computing.

Today two parallel developments are taking shape: the eyolution toward higherspeed networks and the invasion of a myriad of embedded, invisible and connected computers. In networking we know that it is possible to increase the capacity of optical fibers a thousandfold, which will result in a veritable sea of capacity at the heart of the Internet.

Technical obstacles to high-speed access to this sea are starting to be overcome, driven by a plethora of competing alternatives that include cable, telephone, wireless and satellite. Within a few years, megabit access will be conunon, foJJowed shortly by access to tens of megabits at each home. In the sea beyond, a kind of distributed intelligence may take shape.

At the periphery of the network, tiny, inexpensive devices with wireless Internet connectivity are likely to cover the earth.

It is possible that every appliance, every light switch, every thermostat, every automobile will be networked. Everything will be connected to everything else.

Networked cameras and sensors wiJJ be everywhere. The military wiJJ develop intelligent cockroach-like devices that crawl under doors to watch and listen. The likelihood exists that everything will be seen and known. We may well approach what author David Brin has called the transparent society.

Because of these trends, it is probable that, a couple of decades from now, the computer as we know it today-an isolated, complex steel box requiring hour

upon hour of frustrating maintenance on the part of its user-will be a collector's item. Instead we will all be embedded in a grid of seamless computing. We may even be unaware of its existence. People will look at computers in museums or in old movies and remark how quaint such times must have been. Unlike the railway, which, centuries later, still retains the form and function of the original model, computers will have undergone a metamorphosis into a contiguous invisible util-

ing mostly machines to be our caretakers in the land of atoms.

The image of the Golden Spike being struck, enabling heavy, fire-breathing engines to clatter over iron tracks, seems to epitomize the old world of atoms.

Recently I waited on a railroad platform in a small Japanese city. I saw in the distance an express bullet train approaching the station. The speck quietly grew larger until suddenly, with a sound almost like a sonic boom, it burst through the small sta-

ity. They will have moved into a new existence entirely. Hopefully, they will take us with them.

After digital and the infrastructure of microelectronics, the third aspect of the current evolution is the idea of an information economy. Personally, I never cease to be amazed by how this new economy functions. When I was a youth the only adults I saw working were carpenters building new houses on my suburban street and farm workers in the nearby fields. I came to believe that was what adults did-they made things and they grew things. One day, as an adult myself, I came to the sudden realization that I did not know a single person who made or grew anything. Everyone I knew had a rather mysterious job in which he or she moved information or money around.

Some had grown very wealthy doing these nebulous things. Sometimes I am wryly amused by this information economy. I myself am so far removed from any physical contribution to society that I have a sense of unreality about what I do for a living. How do we get away with it? We have all moved into the land of bits, leav-

tion. The earth shook beneath my feet, and the vacuum and shock when the train passed left me breathless. What awesome, visceral power! But this is the world of atoms, and it is bound by the limits of the physical world-by energy and mass, by the strength of materials, and by the depletion of natural resources. The world of bits, in contrast, seems to glide by in ethereal serenity.

Information in itself weighs nothing, occupies no space and abides by no physical law other than-possibly-the speed of light. Unlike physical goods, information can be given away yet simultaneously retained. It can also be copied perfectly at nearly zero cost. It can be created from nothing, it consumes no natural resources, and, once created, it is virtually indestructible. We are still trying to cope with the ways these properties clash with our traditionallaws and business models in industries such as publishing and music.

In Augustine s Laws, the clever book by Norman Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin Corporation, the author observed that new airplanes increased in cost by a factor oUour every 10 years and

that the fraction of each airplane's weight allocated to electronics was also increasing rapidly. He pointed out that, if this trend continued, the engineers would need to find a new substance to add to airplanes that was enormously expensive yet weightless. Fortunately, such a substance was found: it was called software.

Thereafter, the cost of planes could increase indefinitely without regard to their lift capacity.

Having escaped the bounds of physical laws, information technology can continue to expand in unforeseen directions. The World Wide Web came as a surprise to nearly everyone in the business, even though it appears obvious in retrospect. It was a great social invention based on old, available tec;hnology. In fact, nearly all the progress made today in the Internet world is based upon new business models and sociological change rather than on technology. I often hear the expression, 'Technology isn't the problem." According to some people, we have enough already to last for a long time to come.

What comes after the information age?

I have no idea. But, as I walk the halls of industry, passing by cubicle after cubicle containing roboticized humans staring at CRT screens, I think that this can't last.

This strange amalgam of human, screen, keyboard and mouse must surely be a passing phenomenon. Perhaps in three or four decades one of my grandchildren will be able to say, "I don't know a single person who deals with information."

Maybe then people will deal only with meta-information, or policy. Maybe we will rise above the land of bits into the land of ideas and dreams. Whatever there is, it will surely be different. But, because information technology has escaped the bounds of physical limitations, because it is supported by microelectronics that have been powered by the compound interest of Moore's Law, and because of the lasting beauty of digital, I'm betting that it will endure in some form through the next century.

D About the Author: Robert W Lucky is vice president of Telcordia Technologies, which produces software and consults j(Jr telecommunications companies.

30 percent of those who receive any broadcast signals. They also happen to be the same segment that marketers are excited about. When big bucks will make the leap of faith and when laws will amend the sins of the past still remains a question mark. What's certain though is that it's a market that's waiting to turn legit and then it will be in orbit.

Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said with certainty about the one player who has been left behind in all this: Doordarshan. The private channels are forging ahead of DD in terms of advertising revenues, a very basic parameter of commercial success and longevity.

In spite of the fact that TV advertisement revenues in the Indian market grew by"76 percent in 1996-99 (till March), DD's ad revenues reflected a woeful tale of negative growth. DD may still enjoy the maximum viewership but it has not been able to leverage that into substantial revenues for the state broadcaster.

As private sector channels increase their onslaught in the regional sector, DD has every reason to feel threatened.

It may only be a matter of time before a conglomeration of channels busts DD's myth of invulnerability.

Just one example should suffice. The aggressive Zee TV has announced that its regional ventures are likely to break even in the next two to three years. In the near future the network also has-as yet unrevealed-plans to launch two English channels. This is a part of a band of 30 channels which will be offered to operators as part of its direct-to-operator platform. The network has also launched a new company called Zee Interactive Learning Systems Limited which will "integrate television, multimedia, Internet and print." Subhash Chandra, the maverick tycoon whose satellite telephony venture is also near take-off stage, will soon make Zee the full opportunity broadcaster everyone will have to fear. As for his own

plans Chandra believes "the next phase of the broadcast cycle will see players who are full spectrum specialists pitted against each other. This is a business where only the fully-equipped can survive. That's our corporate plan at the moment-to be among those who can be counted on to play that battlefield." et no account of Indian broadcasting can be complete without a bit of crystal gazing on where Doordarshan is headed. Despite the fact that DD is currently accessible to over 250 million viewers it is steadily losing its advertising revenues. On being asked about this trend, Arun Jaitley says, "I don't see Doordarshan being commercially viable in the near future. Since its role is likely to become more and more that of a public

Y

A.R Hinduja says, "We are only at the starting phase of real growth. What we do with it, only technology and entrepreneurship will decide."

service broadcaster, we will need to look closely at what the best formula is. The new committee we have constituted will give us-in the next 90 days-a plan on how we can market ourselves better."

But everybody knows that no committee however talented can work wonders on its own. Basic restructuring is the only answer and somebody will soon have to bite that bullet.

By virtue of being the sole terrestrial broadcaster in the country DD still has a delightful monopoly. With diminishing advertising revenues and an escalating cost of maintaining 750 transmitters, Doordarshan will have to look at brandnew ideas. One idea that is being floated currently will do two things-if it works.

It could revolutionize broadcasting itself and it may turn DD profitable. The idea is

to spin off the vast majority of DD staff and hardware into a separate company that will provide broadcast services to all buyers. A moribund infrastructure properly revamped could be the platform for the future throng of specialist broadcasters. Their own demands will make people respond or be pushed out. This is a model that has worked in France and hopefully will be implemented better in India now that some global lessons are available.

Amidst all the chaos, the jostling for mind space and new plans that may never see the light of day, the broadcast industry is currently in higher spirits. After all, they have reason to believe that with a new government firmly in place they can finally expect the Information and Broadcasting Ministry to clear several long delayed actions. Today it even looks likely that the government will allow direct-to-home (DTH) television broadcasting in the country with some conditions attached of course. While earlier the government had planned to give only DD the go-ahead to launch DTH services in the country this time round even private players are likely to be included. News is already out that Murdoch has truncated his plan on DTH, sacked his top people and may work out a new bargaining position for himself. . For those watching this scene it is worth retelling a tale. In 1997 when Star TV seemed set to launch DTH, hectic lobbying by rival channels ensured that the plan did not get government approval. Meanwhile Zee TV is today working on a plan to launch direct-tooperator service, a small cul-de-sac that others have refused to explore. Of course, it will be converted to DTH once the government gives the go ahead. That is how the cookie crumbles in India and those who can make sense of the bits will be rewarded with bites of a market that is poised to grow at a blazing 25 percent every year for the next 10 years. Now that should make those left out eat their hearts out!

D About the Author: Dilip Cherian,former editor of Business India and Observer, is a Delhihased columnist and husiness analyst. He is a consulting partner at Pelfeet Relations, one of the premier image management firms.

Riz Khan has been a familiar face since the cable TV revolution hit India.

Satellite television is only the beginning, he says.

s we open our eyes upon the new millennium, we may be forgiven if we feel like Dorothy snatched from her Kansas farm and dropped into the Land of Oz. Acceleration toward change increases with each nanosecond, as does the convergence of media that once were discrete entities.

The old newspaper will never be quite the same now that you can log in to the web sites of far-flung dailies for the latest headlines. One thing that has remained more or less static, at least on the outside, is that glassy, rectangular screen. And it can no longer be dismissed as merely "the boob tube." Television and cyberspace now intersect-the blending of the two is incipient.

If the recent past is any gauge, new and unimaginable things lie ahead. Science fiction of today will likely realize its own selffulfillment in coming months and years.

With both feet firmly on the ground in the news business, CNN International anchor Riz Khan seems elated about this turn

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of events. He has seen the medium of television evolve in the course of his energetic professional career with the BBC and CNN. Now his eyes are on the potential. Ordinary television is fine, but we are going other places now, he says. "The impact of global TV is still there because pictures are pictures, but I think it's really in the shade compared with what's happening with the Internet, because the Internet is also a source for television. As computers become more powerful there's a possibility to get video onstream. Q&A, the show that Ido, is also on video stream now, which is amazing. People can be on the computer, watching. Click on the box and the show is there for them. So I think this word 'convergence' that everyone uses, how pictures, words, sound and everything else are coming together, it's a big thing. I think people are realizing that the Internet, the computer, the box-one single box-holds the power to bring everything together. So global TV, especially in the less developed areas, is

of huge impact. They are seeing pictures from outside their environment, outside their world. People, as they start to get more computer-savvy, as they get access to the Internet, will make the Internet's growth phenomenal."

Riz Khan, who takes pride in his Punjabi roots, visits India periodically, and he sees it moving ahead where TV is concerned. "Television is a great source of not only news but also entertainment, and I noticed the huge swell in entertainment channels. That seems to be the fastest growth area. It's not that news is growing everywhere suddenly, because news happens all the time and it's just a case of covering it. But there seems to be a huge swell in cartoons, music ...music especially-especially in Asia-music videos, soap operas and so on. And each country's own television system is becoming that much more sophisticated. Television in India-in the time I have been traveling here with both BBC and CNN specifically for work in the past eight or nine years, I've seen an incredible change. Even in the past three years since I was here for the 1996 election, television has really changed. It's becoming far more sophisticated. The news networks locally are becoming far savvier in how they present the news. It's not just someone sitting there reading words." He adds with a grin, "I went in to do some filming in one of the slums to show that there is positive work being done by people there. Tucked away in a corner is a television with the Smurfs on it."

The global news business is transforming itself by necessity.

Khan says, "News companies have realized covering the globe is very expensive, in the first place. Having people everywhere all the time is almost not feasible. So what happens now is that television channels are doing more linking up with local broadcasters, finding out if they can have reliable people locally, the same way the BBC did for years with radio, having stringers around the world. I think there are more connections made with local broadcasters around the world, and that gives an opportunity to get a window into the country on a regular basis."

Indians are often perplexed about domestic news coverage in the United States. A few years ago when then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao's visit to America received poor coverage there, newspapers here complained of a news blackout, when actually it was a more general lack of interest by the American domestic media. Says Khan, 'The USA is so introspective generally with its news service, I think there is not a huge understanding of what's out there. That's not just of India, that's also about places like China and most of Africa. I think it's just that

Americans never really had that much interest in what's going on outside the USA. The USA is so big itself; they feel they get enough there." But the perception of India in the United States is changing, partly because ofIndia's increased participation on the global stage, and partly because of the many successful Indian Americans. Indians who moved to America a generation or so ago and who succeeded there are also seeing India differently, as Riz Khan observes. "They are now looking at going back into India as the more protectionist measures here open up. Access to India's potentially huge and growing market is opening up. So it's quite funny, Indians abroad tended to think of India as a place they came from, but now they are thinking of doing business here." ne area where India is scoring high in America is in the music world. "The music scene is a huge thing, and that's coming through. Bhangra is bigger in Britain than America as far as the white American people. In Britain it's being embraced by the non-Asian British culture as well. But in the USA there is the influence of more modern pop-type bands like Kula Shaker and Comer Shop and people like that." The movies are another place Indians are getting noticed in the U.S. "Hollywood is starting to bring into the limelight figures like the director of The Sixth Sense, an Indian director. Films like Fire, Deepa Mehta's film, which created a controversy. And now Earth, which again is doing pretty well.

There is a little bit of subculture there, but Indian people are starting to rise in terms of profile, within the arts and music and culture of the USA. And I think that opens eyes."

Even on the more serious news side, there is increasing awareness, says Khan. "The nuclear testing obviously raised a few eyebrows. That created a big awareness that there's a nuclear power out there. I'm sure there was debate in circles that would not have normally thought about India. And of course that brought more prominence to the conflict in Kashmir. The fact that it is tied to nuclear issues made it that much more prominent. There is more awareness, though I would hate to think that it was an awareness just on conflict and nuclear and so on." India is an exotic place in the mind of the average American, Khan says, "still too exotic a place for the average American, those who don't really see much outside of their own world, to really understand and embrace."

American companies, however, haven't been shy about

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THE

DAWN

OF

UIDEOCONFERENCING

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he day begins early for Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu. By the time he reaches his office at 6 a.m., Naidu has already been up for three hours having exercised on the treadmill installed at his home, read the newspapers and breakfasted. In office, the first thing he does is switch on his laptop computer. It will accompany him for the rest of the day. The next half hour or so, the chief minister checks reports from various agencies on the power and water situation in the state. For a state -'" whose economy is still predomi- ~ nantly agriculture-based, a con- ~ stant review of power generation ~ and the existing water levels in the ~ z state reservoirs is a priority task. ~ Then it is time for Naidu's daily teleconference with district officials.

The chief minister's videoconferences, to which the media is allowed free access, seem to have revitalized the moribund bure.aucratic machinery. It's time for Naidu to get more feedback to his queries from officials about the progress of the various development programs run by the state

Years after the technology first surfaced abroad, videoconferencing . . .

IS now emerging as a malor communication tool for governance and business in India.

government. He confers with district collectors on the reports they have filed earlier on the power situation. He also discusses the state's environment program, farmers' bazaars, price monitoring and implementation of road works, sanitation and public health schemes. The bureaucrats who participate in the confer-

ence too have gotten up early to prepare their reports. Many of them may have stayed up all night for the presentation.

Their facts had better be right, because the chief minister is known to admonish slackers openly. Not only officials, the videoconferencing facility also enables Naidu to consult with hjs Cabinet ministers on various issues. All 23 district headquarters in Andhra Pradesh have been linked with the state secretariat for this purpose. The state government has also provided all key officials with wireless sets. The statewide computerization drive, under aidu's directive, has made movement of files easier and also. helped keep track of them and fix responsibility. Not surprisingly, therefore, Naidu's corporate-style functioning and cyber-savvy image has earned him the title, CEO of Andhra Pradesh Inc. Naidu's example is all set to be followed by his counterpart, S.M. Krishna, in neighboring Karnataka. On November 30 last year, Krishna kept his schedule announced earlier on the state's founding day of introducing videoconferencing in the state

administration within 30 days, and launched this facility in nine districts of the state. He intends to hold videoconferences with district administrators at least once a week.

The use of teleconferencing for governance is only one example of this format coming of age in India, although the technology is several decades old. When the idea first surfaced in the United States in the mid-1970s, it sounded like a sure-shot winner. Instead of flying to faraway meetings, busy corporate executives and convention-goers could save time and money by meeting electronically: people in one city would gather in one room and have televised meetings with people in other cities-even other countries. However, such teleconferences did not catch on then. High costs and traditional business habits prevented the technology from becoming the revolutionary communications tool early enthusiasts had predicted.

Until a few years ago, prototype videophone and some low-end videoconferencing systems could either show images as flickering, halting black-and-white affairs or even more halting color images. Voices also tended not to be in synch with the images of the people who were speaking. The image quality problem had a lot to do with the lack of high-definition small screens that could be fitted inside personal videophones. The main culprit was the speed of transmission. If that could be fixed, all the other problems would fade away. Most low-end systems in recent years, particularly those that operated over telephone lines, were able to show between 10 and 20 image frames per second, when all experts agreed that the ideal speed should be around 30 frames per second.

Things began to change only when the telecommunication industry moved to install integrated service digital networks (ISDN) so that the information sent out over the phone line would be digital, which can be handled by computers and CD players. Now things are getting even better with the advent of new videoconferencing and videophone systems based around the PC technology, which do not require expensive setups or dedicated locations. Desktop videoconferencing, in-

troduced in the United States about three years ago, allows multiple people to share images of each other on ordinary computers using telephone or network connections. A typical setup, with software, video card, and a tiny camera, can cost as little as $200 per computer, although many systems are more expensive.

Desktop videoconferencing is increasing in popularity, and that could reduce costs in many organizations by cutting back on travel, messengers and other expenses.

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ccording to one survey in the United States, the desktop videoconferencing market reached $600 million in 1998, up by more than 66 percent from the previous year. It is now believed that the market for videoconferencing systems and services will grow about 40 percent overall between now and 2003. "If these analysts are right, videoconferencing could be one of the fastest growing electronic industry segments at the millennium," says a recent report by the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association.

Even in American homes, parents are having to gear up for a new way of communicating with their children away in college: videoconferencing.

Well-wired students are plugging cameras and mikes into their desktop computers, turning their PCs into videophones. High-speed modems have made it more economical to transmit audio and video over the Internet. So in between term papers and parties, students will be able to send live pictures of themselves as they talk to friends on the campus or to families in different states.

Companies like 3Com, Intel and Logitech are making cheap and easy-to-use video cameras that add teleconferencing capability to standard PCs. In India, however, videoconferencing is still at the take-off stage, although Picture Tel Corporation, the global leader in visual collaboration, sees tremendous growth possibilities for the medium in India. The company provided the equipment to the Andhra Pradesh Government that allows videoconferencing and voice and data transmission. The company is expecting more orders for videoconferenc-

ing equipment from other states as well. In an interview to the Economic Times, T.N. Sundar, country director of Picture Tel (India), said that the company has installed over 350 videoconferencing units in the country, most of them in the highend range, for large workgroups, conferences and boardrooms. By year-end it has projected a turnover at the end-user price of Rs. 250 million of over Rs. 100 million.

Sundar expects that by 2001, the market would be worth Rs. 1,000 million at the end-user price.

Outlining the usefulness of videoconferencing, Sundar said that although driven by individual requirements, this format "allows the use of the entire spectrum of visual collaboration equipment. This has opened up new. possibilities." Further, Sundar added, "it facilitates mass, interactive and immediate communication and is ideal for use in large virtual networks or large Intranets. But the real growth will come when public call offices (PC Os) be- . come video booths." In his view "all that would happen would be that a videoconference call would cost twice the amount of a telephone call since two lines, a leased and the phone line, would be used." Even a small number of users would give significant returns. Vinoo Goyal, director (devel.opment) of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL), New Delhi, agrees. "Since the entire package for visual collaboration is application-driven, it is ideal for personal, multiple, workgroup, conference and boardroom use."

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SNLis the leading public sector videoconferencing service provider in the country having introduced this service in August 1993 in the four major metros-Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta. Subsequently, Bangalore was added in April 1997. All these five centers have multi-point t:onferencing facilities-studios, transmission equipment, including satellite, optical fiber or microwave linkups depending on the speed of the channel. They can be linked up with each other as also to more than 450 public videoconference centers in cities throughout North America, Europe, the Far East and Australia. In addition, the VSNL

studios can provide hookups to the thousands of companies around the world who have their own in-house videoconferencing facilities. Goyal asserts that though twoway links are the norm, VSNL is fully equipped to simultaneously link into three other centers within India and the overseas public and private studios.

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espite pioneering public videoconferencing in India and controlling the only service gateway in the country, so far VSNL has not sold this format aggressively enough to make it a viable commercial option for business groups or institutions. However, the entry of MNC equipment providers is bound to change the situation, as seen in the case of Andhra Pradesh. Besides, Indian public sector companies like ITI, MTNL and NIC too have entered the field. VSNL has taken note of these developments, says Goyal.

"In India the commercial use of videoconferencing is mostly by the corporate sector.

Many Indian companies who have their principals or joint venture partners abroad use our facilities." Goyal however admits that VSNL clocks only about 15-20 hours of videoconferencing per month, whereas in the developed nations this figure is at least three times more.

Changing fixed mind sets about how to conduct business is a major hurdle to overcome, feels Goyal. Whereas in the West, governments and other institutions, notably universities and medical institutions, use videoconferencing extensively for their operations, there is very little of that happening in India, at least on a commercial basis. "Videoconferencing is still not a part of government work culture, although we in VSNL sometimes do conduct our board meetings through this medium," says Goyal. ''I'm told that there is a clause in the Indian Company Lawwhere it is not specifically stated that videoconferencing is an efficient and cost-effective tool for such purposes. But I believe it is just a question of accepting good technology .... The mindset has to change. Here people still believe that unless there is a physical meeting, it does not count. They would rather spend time in costly travel than conduct business

through a videoconference."

It makes sense, says Goyal, since the most obvious benefit of this facility is cost. He explains: "Bringing in three colleagues from Chicago for a meeting in India could easily add up to about four to five lakh rupees, considering the expense on travel and accommodation. Also, all that time lost in travel and resultant fatigue. In contrast, hiring a VSNL videoconferencing facility and linking up to Chicago would cost about Rs. 60,000 a hour for both-end charges."

Even while VSNL makes efforts to popularize videoconferencing at the Indian corporate and institutional level, it is already gaining popularity among such institutions as the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). India's premier distance-education university is trying to introduce tele-education in India.

Distance education and training is one of the prime application areas of videoconferencing. In place of traditional learning methods, where people have to assemble at one place, interactive videoconferencing offers a classroom-like environment to learn through remote teaching. IGNOU is setting up a VSAT satellite-based network to reach its many students and teaching centers across the country.

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he importance of videoconferencing has also been realized by another important sector-medicine.

Doctors at leading medical institutions in the country including the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, and the Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, often discuss medical diagnosis and prescriptions with other experts in India and abroad. Recently a leading eye surgeon in Bangalore conducted an operation to show a new technique through videoconferencing.

The influx of foreign multinationals after liberalization and the numerous foreign based agencies has also helped to spread the culture. Most of the MNCs routinely hold video conferences as do several embassies and international agencies. The Foreign Commercial Service section of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi held six inter-

national videoconferences last year as part of its mission to promote bilateral trade and promote export potential of US. goods and services. The first videoconference effort was launched on July 29, 1999, linking New Delhi with two of three Export Assistance Centers (USEACs) in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Newport Beach, California. The third site, Providence, Rhode Island, hosted an audio-only conference. A dozen US. companies participated in the conference. According to Brooks Robinson, commercial officer at the US. Embassy, videoconferencing will carry the Indo-U.S. commercial relationship to a new level. "It is a convenient, dynamic medium for exploring new export and joint opportunities in India," he says. Another videoconference saw the US. Ambassador Richard F. Celeste interact with Michael Clark, executive director of the U.S.-India Business Council based in Washington, D.C. The 45-minute event was moderated

by Swadesh Chatterjee, president of the Indo-American Foundation for Political Education.

Says Robinson: "It is an especially cost-effective method of breaking the ice for small to medium companies in both countries. More important, this medium is an effective challenge to U.S. exporters' perceptions ofIndia."

Changing perceptions is the key point in the acceptance of videoconferencing technology in India, agrees VSNL's Goyal. "In the changing business environment of today, technology even.as old as that of videoconferencing holds the key to success. And now with the PC emerging as the focus of the merger of infonnation technologies, the future of this medium is really bright. We are certainly making efforts to take in all the emerging tools that are constantly reshaping the way work is conducted. If it is happening somewhere in the world, it should happen in India as well." Although it is difficult to view how the future will unfold on the Indian technology front, the groundwork being done by the likes of Chandrababu Naidu and others would no doubt playa large role in determining how and to what extent the Indian mindset adapts to the changing realities of today.

0

Checking Pollution Corporate houses and auto manufacturers join hands to control pollution in Delhi. elhi is one of the most polluted metropolitan cities in the world. The city has approximately 1 percent oflndia's population, but has 10 percent ofthe automobiles. A large number of private motor vehicles are being added to the traffic every day, partly due to the lack of a dependable and efficient public transport system. A mass rapid transport system intended to reduce pollution and congestion is in the initial stages and, according to government estimates, is likely to be ready in another five years.

Until then, buses, cars, scooters and auto-rickshaws will be on the roads in great numbers-and motor vehicles are the main source of air pollution in the capital. Two- and three-wheelers alone contribute 70 percent of the total vehicular pollution.

To meet the pollution challenge head on, the central and state governments, local bodies and NGGs have drawn up plans to make Delhi "the pride of those who live here and the envy of those who don't," in the words of Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

To complement the efforts of these organizations, the Association of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, under the banner of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), initiated a three-week-Iong program of inspection and maintenance of the high-polluting two- and three-wheelers. Automobile manufacturing giants such as Bajaj Auto, LML Ltd., Hero Honda, etc., are partners in the concerted drive to control air pollution in the capital. The Delhi Transport Authority, U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID) and ICICI have also been supporting the initiative.

While launching the country's largest inspection and maintenance initiative, Dikshit called upon manufacturers of two- and three-wheelers to effect improvement in vehicles to reduce emission levels. "Steps to reduce air pollution were not only the manufacturers' responsibility, but also a social commitment," she said. "Due to excess pollution the young generation is suffering from various hazardous diseases such as asthma, bronchitis and lung problems." Dikshit added that the health of our future generations depends upon keeping vehicle emissions within the safe range. She requested SIAM to extend the campaign for at least one year so that positive results could be achieved.

U.S. Ambassador Richard F. Celeste recounted the efforts made in the West, especially in the United States. "Timely maintenance of vehicles and efficient fuel quality are important for mitigating carbon emissions," Celeste said. "Major pollutants like carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, suspended particulate matter, sulphur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen are hazardous to human life and both the automotive industry and the society must take proactive measures to reduce, if not eliminate, the pollution levels," he added.

D

IlISIAM~ I

,I

Top: Ambassador Richard F. Celeste speaking Indian Automobile Manufacturers' inspection drive initiated in Delhi. Chief Minister Sheila launched the initiative last November. Above: checked at a pollution control center.

at the Society of and maintenance Dikshit (left) Two-wheelers being

Dilip Biswas, chairman of the Central Pollution Control Board, requested the automobile industry to improve the vehicle efficiency, keeping in view of new pollution norms that come into effect in April, and the petroleum industry to improve the fuel quality. Transport Minister Pervez Hashmi announced Delhi Government's plans to establish three more inspection and maintenance centers for heavy motor vehicles.

SIAM President Venu Srinivasan promised that his organization will be a catalyst in the endeavor to check air pollution and it will continue to support the industry's role as a responsible corporate citizen of the country in the 21 st century.

There is a long way to go to achieve the desired results, but the organizers hope such unified efforts of the automotive industry, corporate sector and charity organizations will ultimately clear the air in Delhi.

-A.V.N.

Do You Speak Bostonian?

American English has a rich diversity of dialect, from New Englanders to Southerners and on across the States, as far as the Hawaiian Islands, where a distinctive pidgin is spoken. Even different cities have their own lingo.

llyn Partin, is standing in front of a roomful of hushed linguists, playing an audio recording of a Southern California man: "I took a trip recently to go to Atlanta ..." the man says, and that's enough for Partin to make her point, which is that the word go in this instance sounds more like "ga-ow": a mix of the sounds of "cow" and "toe."

"It's the kind [of 0] you'd hear from a Valley Girl in totally," Partin explained to the group later.

That inflection, used by many Southern Californians, shows that the local dialect is alive and well, Partin said at an American Dialect Society annual meeting in Los Angeles, where she pre- , sented new research on that area.

But Southern California is one of several regions where regional accents are thriving. Local dialects are stronger than ever in some parts of America, according to new findings from a nationwide canvassing of English speakers. Despite theories that an increasingly transient population, immigration from other countries, and the pervasive mass media are chipping away at dialects and accents, University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov and his colleagues have found that regional accents are growing even stronger in many urban areas.

"In almost every city there is active change in pronunciation going on," says Labov, "so the dialects of Chicago, New York,

A

Birmingham and St. Louis are much more different from each other than they ever were."

That's a comforting sign to those who bemoan the homogenization of the American vocal landscape. Regional accents ensure "cultural variety within our larger civilization," says Alan Jabbour, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. "If we're all doing the same thing, where does the innovation come from?"

Labov has now begun studying smaller cities and plans to publish all his findings next year in a phonological atlas. The first of its kind, the atlas-targeted to both professional and lay readers-will chart accents in cities across the United States and in Canada.

There will also be a CD-ROM with audio clips and accompanying data. Already, preliminary results are available on the Internet at www.ling.upenn.edu/phono-atlas/home.html.

One of the important potential uses of the research: helping companies develop voice-recognition technology for, say, home computers, that can discern different North American accents.

To cover the entire country, Labov's team-relying on grant money from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Nortel Networks, an Ontariobased telecommunications company-spent three years calling residents of different cities to hear how people were talking. Using census data and local phone books, they located the dominant ethnic groups in each locale and interviewed and recorded those who said they were native to the area-the people who are speaking with the strongest accents are often those who stayed where they were born, keeping their ties to the community and therefore keeping the identity of the local dialects and traditions.

Where they say it. Using a software program that analyzes vowel usage and illustrates speech patterns on-screen, Labov's group found that in the cities of the Great Lakes region-like Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo and Rochester, New York-Philadelphia and most of the South, accents are getting stronger (see box). The Boston accent, characterized in part by the dropping of 1" s from the middle of some words and the addition of 1" s at the end of others (as in "pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd" or "Santa Monicker, California"), also remains healthy.

In fact, accents similar to Boston's-found in New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts-are growing more distinctive and different from one another, according to Naomi Nagy, a University of New Hampshire linguist. She found that in Massachusetts, fewer than 33 percent of those surveyed said that the second letter in/ather and bother sound the same. Just over the border, in southern New Hampshire, 34 to 67 percent said the words rhymed-that there was no distinction between the a in/ather and the a in bother.

The fact that more people in Massachusetts considered the sounds separate, Nagy says, shows a desire for individuality and reflects a guarded animosity between the two states.

"The people in southern New Hampshire have more contact with Boston, so for them it's more important to be different," she says.

"It's a way of expressing identity. As long as people don't see themselves as one big happy family, they will continue to be different."

Difference is not the whole story, however. In Dallas and Atlanta,

The way we talk now A team of linguists is compiling Among theirfindings:

an atlas of American

dialects.

Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo. A shift in the pronunciation of the vowel e in Ked (as in the sneaker) makes the word sound more like cud. The word pat now sounds like piat; the 0 in pot now sounds like the a used to sound in pat.

Birmingham, Alabama; Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Though each Southern state has unique versions of twang, most hold tight to a distinctly Dixie pronunciation: A change in the letter e means Ked sounds more like kid or key-ed.

Philadelphia. The letter 1 is disappearing from the middle of words like cellar and dollar. So if you walk into a Philadelphia sneaker store and ask for "New Bounce," you will be shown a pair of New Balance shoes.

Labov has found that the migration of Northerners into these cities has had a significant effect on accents: Young people in Dallas and Atlanta say I, not theAh that is traditional Southern speech.

In general, the more transient segment of the population-especially those who have had some higher education---often uses TVnews-anchor English, which sprang from the old speaking style of the Midwest but no longer has a regional identity.

Labov didn't focus on rural areas or small towns, where other researchers have found that some accents are fading. Linguist Walt Wolfram, for example, has been recording the Ocracoke, North Carolina, dialect because he believes infiltration of tourists may have endangered it.

And there are some scholars who don't believe they are seeing a regionalist renaissance. The data-gathering process of charting an accent trend can take years, so it's hard to form a picture of an entire country before speech patterns begin to change again-and that makes for disagreements. William Stewart, for one, is a linguist at the Graduate School of the City University of New York who belieyes the language is moving toward homogeneity. "I don't like it, but I see that is clearly the trend," he says, pointing to Charleston, South Carolina, as one example of a place where young people aren't speaking in the strong brogue that some oldtimers do. Data supporting the homogeneity theory are scarce, but Stewart says that's because linguists look for differences. "I detect a nostalgia in people," he says. ''There's something romantic about it. People want [accents] to be there."

But University of Texas linguist Guy Bailey, who also has researched accent trends, agrees that regional differences are flourishing. "Labov has a national survey. I have a national survey," he says. "When you talk to people ...you can tell" that they have accents. "The notion that they are disappearing is overblown." The reason, says Texas A&M University linguist Lisa Ann Lane, is simple: "As long as identity is important, then we're not going to see homogenization."

D About the Author: Report.

Sara Hammel is a reporter of

u.s. News

& World

IS Are corporations growing so large that they are becoming unmanageable? How can the needs of management and,employees be satisfied by corporate giants?

hen Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged in mid-1998, the combined company of 232,000 employees was expected to have a lift-off thrust of over $56 billion in revenue. This isn't just a far cry from the small-shopkeeper mentality of mercantile England in the 18th century; it's also a far cry from the international corporation of the late 20th century.

As we enter the millennial zone, many

management thinkers are asking tough questions about how companies should be managed in the new century. It's an accomplished fact that two or more megacompanies can be merged into one mega-mega-company-but the real question is: Can the net result be managed?

An analogy may be helpful. Take a healthy, robust, average-sized man who has exercised his way into a lithe frame that allows him to handle the stress of life with poise and agility. Whether it be work, home or personal strain, the result is the

same: The man deals with the problems that come his way and prevails with his health intact.

Now, seat that same man at a table and bring on the pasta, bread, Caesar salad, whipped potatoes and carved beef. For dessert, give him chocolate souffles and eclairs covered with fresh whipped cream.

The man eats. When the meal is done, he starts over, interrupting his gorge only to clean his palate with the appropriate wines. Allow him minimal rest and absolutely no exercise, and it won't be long

before our healthy male is an ideal cover model for Obesity Journal.

It wouldn't just be his bulging shirt buttons that would betray his condition. His muscles would begin to atrophy, his arterial walls would start to clog and his lungs would be forced into a permanent hyperpump state. Meanwhile, his heart would labor to handle a vascular system that worked fine when the man weighed 80 kilograms but doesn't know how to deal with this 160-kilogram monster.

When we look at the newly formed mega-banks, mega-airlines, mega-car companies and mega-restaurant chains, the questions become increasingly more cogent: What hath we wrought? How big is too big? Is there an optimum size for an organization?

Upping the Human Scale Kirkpatrick Sale may not have been the first to warn of the dangers of size, but he certainly was and is one of the most forceful and eloquent. Although his landmark 1980 book Human Scale is now out of print, his ideas are by no means out of vogue.

In Human Scale, Sale argues that "big government, big business, big everything ... [is] the inevitable result of gigantism grown out of control." He hints that some sort of government intervention might be necessary, but is ultimately not prescriptive: "If there is to be any realization of the [human scale] goal, it will come not as someone dictates a path but as people work out for themselves a great variety of ways of taking control over their lives, varying as times and peoples and necessities and settings differ. I do not, as a matter of fact, imagine that it is all that difficult to accomplish, should the need be perceived and the will exist."

That sentiment, however, was drafted in the late '70s. Talk to Sale today, and it's immediately clear that his campaign to keep things small has been swamped by the economic extravagances of the '90s. "Look," he says from his home in upstate New

mented in a recent Forbes article that the ideal size for a community of humans is only about 150.

"One hundred and fifty Some analysts is about the number of and thinkers say people every person that "manic" knows well; it doesn't matter if you live in global enterprises Namibia or Manhattan." have destroyed Wilson pointed out that 150 is also "about the size any sense of of a company in military individual identity organizations." and taken away Gen. Dennis Reimer, the recently retired Army jaie de vivre. chief of staff, disagrees: "I would argue on the basis of span and control that you could go a little higher than 100 to 150 people. My favorite command is battalion level. At that point, you're responYork, "some $4 trillion moves around the sible for about 400 to 500 people. With world every day. This is only possible be- that number, I was able to know people individually but also have enough authority cause of the computer. But the computer revolution has enabled the worst trends and to be able to influence their lives. At the characteristics of organizational life to be- company command level of 100 to 150, you certainly know each of yom soldiers come immensely magnified."

Sale argues that the motivation for all individually, but you don't have enough authority." the mergers has been "much more finanHaving worked in organizations the cial" than for any other reason. And he remains adamant that anything else defies size of the U.S. Army and Motorola, logic.

University of West Florida professor Ken "When two large companies become Murrell is used to large-scale management challenges. "Whenever I have the chance one, things can seem to make sense, especially when all the details come together to suggest an optimal organizational size, to inflate the value of the combined that number for me is 200 people," he stock," Sale says. "Beneath all that, they says. "Research and a ton of experience make no sense at all." When the merger of suggest it is just not possible to have hufinancial giants Travelers and Citibank is man relationships with much more com路 mentioned, Sale is expectedly pessimistic. plexity than what 200 seems to represent.

"I'm absolutely sure the new company If you are working with more than 200 will collapse one way or another," he says. people, you can never really know them as individuals."

Murrell, who has written extensively on this subject, nonetheless recognizes the drift toward corporate hugeness. "One of my greatest concerns is the nearly total disconnect in these ultra-large systems between the leaders and the workforce.

Sale is by no means a lone voice.

People at the top, at best, can only manage Harvard research scientist and social managers or lead other leaders." philosopher Edward O. Wilson com-

A Chorus in the Wilderness

On the other hand, San Francisco-based organizational psychologist and consultant Mitchell Marks, who has spent the last IS years studying mergers and acquisitions and has been close to 60 of them, says that there is no optimal size for organizational units today. "While you have to applaud a company like 3M for organizing around small units, the reality is that~ depending on the industry~large companies are structured in every possible combination of sizes."

Yet Marks, who co-authored Joining Forces: Making One Plus One Equal Three in Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances (Jossey-Bass), is the first to note that bigness often doesn't add up. "While there are certainly different ways to measure post-merger success, overall I would say that only one mega-corporation in four tums out to perform anywhere near what was expected."

Jerry Flint, the Forbes automobile columnist, would undoubtedly agree. He recently wrote an open letter to Jurgen Schrempp, co-chairman of DaimlerChrysler, saying in essence that the combined company has simply grown too big to function efficiently. Let Chrysler be Chrysler and Mercedes be Mercedes; otherwise, he writes, Daimler will become like General Motors, where "[d]ecisions take forever to make, and it's hard to find anyone responsible for anything. And you know how well GM is doing."

Writers like William Greider assert that the reason corporations of today's size and scope fail is that they are made up of people who don't know who owns the company they work for, don't know where the company is trying to go, and don't know their newly merged corporate brothers and sisters, some of whom may work a halfworld away.

In One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (Touchstone), Greider lashes out at the forced anonymity of people who have been swallowed up by a mega-corporation: "The deepest social meaning of the

global industrial revolution is that people no longer have free choice in this matter of identity." "Manic" global enterprises, he says, have destroyed any sense of individual identity.

Carl Frankel, author of In Earth's Company: Business, Environment and the Challenge of Sustainability (New Society), is both a writer and speaker on scale, but his own treatment of the subject goes beyond span and control.

Frankel believes that, as companies grow to gigantic proportions, their ability to manage the "triple bottom line"~ economic, environmental and social perfonnance~becomes more and more difficult. Furthermore, bigness obliterates any sense of obligation to develop or be a part of a responsible community. Bigness is also "a recipe for killingjoie de vivre," which, for Frankel, is the first ring of the corporate death knell. "We are obsessed by quantity," he adds. "Unfortunately, this cultural and corporate emphasis on quantity is in many ways directly antithetical to the theory and practice of sustainable development."

The most recent thinker to chime in on the subject of scale is David Korten, who has degrees from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and has taught at Harvard Business School. Now board chair of the Positive Futures Network and president of the PeopleCentered Development Forum, Korten has just published his 10th book, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism (Berrett-Koehler), which begins: "In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy and the market economy. For those of us who grew up believing that capitalism is the foundation of democracy and market freedom, it has been a rude awakening to realize that under capitalism, democracy is for sale to the highest bidder and the market is centrally planned by global megacorporations larger than most states."

In person, Korten's message is equally stark. He explains that scale is inextricably linked with two other forces~aloof ownership and lack of accountability~all working against the best interests of not

only the people working for mega-corporations but also the societies in which the corporations operate. Konen asserts that those who have amassed large-scale companies may, ultimately, realize only shortterm financial victories at best.

Even those victories may be hollow.

New York Times writer Gretchen Morgenson, citing the research of The Synergy Trap author Mark L. Sirower, recently noted that often investors have reason to lament corporate combinations that tip the scales only in terms of size, not performance or profitability: "The fact is, most mergers are bad news for shareholders, because the merged company's stock usually underperfonns its peers long afterward."

Morgenson's Times essay insinuates that the only guaranteed beneficiaries of the corporate trend toward "mega-dom" are those who earn commissions by integrating companies~or those corporate executives who cash out when the newly merged company finds that it has more managers than management positions.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If there is one roll-up question that captures the challenge of managing the huge enterprises now formed or forming, it would be this: How do we manage a 21 st-century corporation so that we derive the power that comes with size without losing the focus and harmony of being small? It's a question that can keep executives up aJ] night~and has. Yet it's a question that is stimulating a lot of discussion and perhaps even some useful answers.

In trying to make large companies effective, Ken Murrell focuses on four elements: "You've got to create high levels of commitment, crystal-clear clarity of vision (or purpose), an empowering environment and a competence to lead in an increasingly ambiguous world."

As much as empowerment has been abused in recent years, Murrell argues, the only big organizations in which he has seen large-size clout and small-size

agility have also been companies in which leadership was widely disseminated.

"Executives desperately need to share the leadership role and make others throughout the company take on the full responsibility of adulthood rather than have thousands of people waiting for some 'hero on a white horse' to solve their organizational problems."

In The Membership Organization (Davies-Black), Jane Seiling advances the simple idea that people in an organization of any size will not form an effective operating unit unless they feel they belong to it as fully engaged and fully vested members. Having worked in companies as

large as Ford and as small as a 244-employee natural-gas utility, Seiling, too, would opt for an ideal organizational size of 250. "Beyond that size, it immediately raises the possibility of people not knowing if their personal contribution matters."

Yet, regardless of size, Seiling's membership principle demands that "everyone fully understands his role and that there is open sharing of information so members always know what is happening and why-no matter where they work in the company." Thus, as companies grow enormous, Seiling has seen success when there is an intentional "blurring" of boundaries, especially around status, ti-

tIes and department borders. She writes, "In larger organizations, people like to have their own 'villages within the city.'

This makes it possible to locate pockets of knowledge when you need them-and to feel a stronger sense of significance, belonging and commitment."

But the one essential ingredient, Seiling feels, is leadership that both advocates and models an openness rarely seen today. "There's probably no 'maximum size' to an effective organization as long as leaders reach out to members of the company-wherever they are on the organization chart," she says in an interview.

Starve the Beast

E

rik Sprotte and TeITYRecht are a unique couple. They are married and live in the Chicago area, and are both senior HR executives in major corporations.

Recht works for Baxter Healthcare; Sprotte works for Sears. Both have worked in corporate divisions large and small, and they share the point of view that size does matter.

"I worked in one start-up venture within Baxter that, in its earliest days, bubbled with energy as everyone pulled together to make a new business happen," says Recht. "As the unit grew from dozens of people to just a few hundred, it was amazing how people all of a sudden world start making comments about not knowing everyone else on the team, about how some were entrepreneurial and some were not." She notes that it seems fundamental to management that, as organizations grow in size, issues like rules, fairness, process and policies become important. Yet too often, as these issues grow in significance, the importance of individuals gets lost.

Humans, in essence, become just another "resource" to be managed.

"The corporate world is increasingly bigger and, as such, is much more matrixed," says Sprotte. It seems that "Job No. I" each day is to "feed the beast." "The 'beast' is the

enormous structure that needs to be fed with information and decisions," Sprotte says.

"What I mean by that is that too often as a business grows in size, the people at the top feel that they don't have the time to work with individuals on personal issues, that they must be concerned with what large-scale precedents they are setting by this or that decision, and that just to keep all the parts of the organization moving transforms time management into a pressure-cooker environment. It is a constant struggle for senior managers to balance large-scale strategic decisions with tactical matters-such as how to deal with your own direct reports."

Sprotte and Recht are convinced that a particular leadership skill is increasingly necessary for top executives of large companies: the ability to raise the esprit de corps of the organization. Recht, who believes that many executives today do not see that ability as part of their job description, insists, "We are seeing the need for leaders who are uncommonly good at rallying people around a central goal."

The question of how to reach out and connect thousands of people all working together inside a mega-corporation can be intimidating to many, but not to Peter Cohan, who uses technology to knit largescale enterprises into companies that "feel" small.

What seems to be emerging, he says, is a whole new mental model of how to think about an organization. "I've dubbed this mental model 'The Four Sources of Advantage.' These are simply different ways to manage people, technology, product development and resource allocation," he says. "It involves creating a corporate climate where entrepreneurs can get market-beating products to market fast. This means a minimum of politics, stock options for everybody and bonuses based on improvements in objectively measured customer satisfaction."

Cohan argues that companies that leverage technology to maximum advantage do so with a unifying focus on customers. For example, they continually mix people on different cross-functional teams, depending on whom the potential customer is and what the potential product is: "These teams build prototypes and respond quickly to customer feedback before too much time and money has been spent. They use technical service records and customer wish lists as input to future versions of their products. And they develop product-supply systems that enable them to scale their companies to meet exploding demand."

"Size is irrelevant," says Cohan, whose new book, Net Profit (Jossey-Bass), explores the emerging world of e-commerce.

He believes that only 20 or 30 corporations know how to use technology to unify not only employees but even subcontractors so that the entire organization has a feeling of closeness and smallness.

"Cisco Systems is an $8 billion company with some 15,000 employees," Cohan says, including in that figure all of the manufacturing companies and other alliances the company has formed to deliver its networking products to customers. "How Cisco manages is more

To make large companies effective, says Ken Murrell, "You've got to create high levels of commitment, crystal-clear clarity of vision (or purpose), an empowering environment and a competence to lead in an increasingly ambiguous world." important right now than its size. There are few companies like Cisco where even the top officers in the company are directly responsible for specific customer accounts. These top executives must be in constant touch with people throughout the organization-and they do it through constant voice mails and e-mails, as well as face-to-face meetings, that unify everyone with a single focus." Cohan adds, "It's the daily demonstration that top executives care about things like quality and customer satisfaction-and their willingness to constantly communicate that throughout the organization-that sets a Cisco apart from thousands of other corporations that are not using technology effectively, even though they have access to the very same basic tools and equipment."

Marks also has witnessed the creation of many mega-corporations from a frontrow seat; he says that there are at least four critical to-do's-which can be used in tandem with the technological solution-for managers at any level who are trying to bring hugeness down to size: • Sell people throughout the organization on the business case for the size of the organization. "Make people understandor at least get them discussing-how being a large organization makes sense in today's competitive marketplace. Engage them and involve them in the importance of operating as a large structure."

• As soon as possible, link where the corporation is heading to where each division is heading to where each individual is heading. "Priorities must be clear," Marks says, "for everyone."

• Define and explain as clearly as you can what each individual inside the company can do-right now-to help the corporation succeed. "Go ahead and tell people how they can win, personally and individually, in the new organization." . • Communicate. "It's a lot of work for people to go out and talk to others, and it needs to be done at every level," Marks says. "Typically, however, it is just not done. Managers rely on newsletters or memos. The truth is, people want to communicate directly to their immediate supervisor, or others higher up, to get a sense of what's happening inside the company. And when I say communicate, I mean that managers need to listen as much as they talk."

But it's all too seldom that the leaders of mega-corporations consider these issues, much less follow Marks' advice.

The good news is that more and more 21 st -century management thinkers are tackling the issue of corporate bloat. The bad news is that one cannot delve into the subject of scale and find many corporate stories with happy endings.

D About the Author: Tom Brown is a contributing editor oj"Across the Board magazine.

Think Truck It's hard to switch your mindsetmore so when transitions to new ideas require faster adjustment than ever before.

My grandfather was an ice man. He delivered blocks of ice to homes in his neighborhood in a time when people used real ice boxes and antique dealers sold other things as conversation pieces. I have his ice tongs-big black iron tweezers that he used to pick up and carry 12-inch cubes from his wagon to somebody's house. For a number of years, he used a wagon, pulled by a horse. Later he bought a truck.

One day, when the truck's emergency brake let loose and the truck went rolling down a hill, my grandfather ran after it, reportedly shouting, "Whoa there, whoa, girl!" My grandfather reacted instinctively to what he knew: his horse. To him, the truck was just another way to do the job the horse and wagon had done.

Translating from what he knew took conscious thought-and time.

Somebody who grew up with a truck would never have shouted "Whoa!" and probably would have reacted quickly in a way that worked better for trucks than for horses-to his lasting advantage. But if you grow up with horses and learn to depend on them, it's hard to switch your mindset, even if trucks become the replacement. You may be aware that some of the earliest traffic laws for motor vehicles were based on horse-and-carriage practices. Thinking in truck and not in horse took a while.

Transitions in my grandfather's day were more gradual than they are today.

New ideas get into the mainstream very quickly now. Genetic engineering, cell phones, even "You've got mail."

Unfortunately, this means it's even harder to stay attuned to the mainstream and pick the right set of underlying assumptions about the world. Things change so quickly.

Think about how much the price has dropped for a reasonably powerful .PC (a 300 MHz Pentium is now less than $500). If you are in the forecasting business, running around figuring out household penetration for PCs, just figure everybody will have one and be done with it. It's going to be like a telephone or a television. Five hundred bucks and dropping. Forget about it.

And soon, I predict, no one will even be using the traditional, boxy monitors anymore. I hadn't realized, quite frankly, how fast prices had dropped for large flatpanel displays (now under $500 for a screen the size of an average computer screen). Traditional monitors are too big and clumsy; the minute the price gets even close to that of traditional monitors, people will flock to flat panels, and volume will drop the price even further, obliterating traditional monitors entirely-even for televisions. Good riddance.

The numbers for Internet shopping look

pretty amazing, too. The popularity of shopping with a PC on the Net-rather than in malls, where you can't find your car-took off this past Christmas season.

Who needs the aggravation of going out there and finding that either the stuff you want is out of stock, it won't fit in your trunk, or your arms break after carrying it all afternoon? And the combination of online buying and FedEx pushed the shopping deadline almost to Christmas Eve. Any suspicion that commerce couldn't, shouldn't, or wouldn't be conducted over the Net ought to be history now, so we can move on with the assumption fixed in our minds that this is the way things are going to be.

But I wonder if knowing this would even make a difference for some of us.

Suppose we stipulated that everybody in the world with any disposable income whatsoever has a PC, uses the Internet, and has e-mail and constant mobile communication to anywhere-all for cheap.

Suppose FedEx (or an equivalent) can reach them all, and these people only buy the best quality at the lowest price and in the easiest way. And suppose customers like that, by definition, have no geographic limitations for sourcing goods and services. Suppose the Internet has nearly instantaneous performance, and transaction security as good as an in-person cred-

it card or check. Now suppose that the environment described above is the preferred way to transact'business rather than simply an alternative.

If all that were true, what would your business do? I think many businesses would respond by conducting studies and business cases to prove it isn't happening.

They'd build arguments to justify the way they do things today, and to explain why any response to the world I've described will be merely an adjunct to their business and not central to it. Few would turn their business on its head like Microsoft did a year or so ago, when Bill Gates "got it" and decided the Internet was indeed the future. But companies like Amazon.com wouldn't respond conservatively because they've built a business with exactly the set of assumptions described. Amazon.com was designed by individuals without a traditional mindset.

They've never used a horse, so they've always "thought truck."

Gi ven the rate of change in how we use technology to do impossible things, people unburdened by knowing what is impossible have an advantage over those of us making translations. Chances are you still think horse. Go hire people who think truck and listen to them. You can ignore their music.

All over the place, people-particularly people for whom Social Security looks like a distant mirage-are building their worlds on assumptions that, while novel

to some, are for them just a part of normal, everyday life. Consider Kiko Wu, the contemporary equivalent of Gypsy Rose Lee, the burlesque performer. Wu works at one of the gentlemen's clubs in New York where the women operate as independent contractors, entertaining businessmen for a substantial amount of money. These young women have on-site hairdressers, dressing rooms and lockers in quite pleasant surroundings. Many will have college degrees, without the burden of student loans to repay.

Often they are more entrepreneurial and Internet-savvy than the men they entertain.

Wu is a smart businesswoman who built her own website with a program called Page Mill, featuring Java applets, animation, links to friends, e-mail-the whole shootin' match. She has advertisers paying for it, promotes herself and her place of work on it, and writes an advice column for other young women who want to make lots of money providing the same views that are free on most European beaches. Wu is 23. The Internet, instant e-mail all over the world, and easy, do-it-yourself tools have allowed her-with only a very modest investment-to do things that some might have considered "impossible."

Kendra Williams is a Navy fighter pilot, a logical descendent of Amelia Earhart with better navigation and instant communication. According to USA Today, she's 26 years old, flies F/A-18 airplanes, and has dropped bombs on Iraq. Just

before Christmas, after finishing work for the day, she settled into her berth on the U.S.S. Enterprise and e-mailed her family about how she spent her day. Think about that. Williams has probably never heard of V-mail, the tissue-thin paper letters of World War II, wouldn't know a "wire" if she saw one, and probably thinks Western Union is something that led to the euro.

Instant, worldwide communication is perfectly normal for her. It's not novel or mysterious or even particularly exciting.

That's just the way it is.

Kiko Wu and Lt. Williams made very different career choices, but they have one thing in common: They can't help but think in terms of contemporary technology and exploit it without even realizing how different things were just a few years ago. For them, personal computers, electronic mail, laptops, cell phones and 200channel television are givens. And remember, this stuff is in its infancy and growing fast. For these folks, this technology is the way, not a way.

What if their reality-one in which they not only accept technology but assume it-represents what will be happening in the world over the next decade?

Well, it does. Make that your assumption and build on it. . And don't bother shouting "Whoa!" at 0 this point-it's too late.

About the Author: E.J. Heresniak is a man路 agement consultant.

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embracing India. Foreign cable channels the BBC which was geared toward the "I think everyone have persevered in spite of mixed signals Indian community in Britain. There is starting to see from a succession of govemments. Riz were shows that were talking about Khan is not surprised. "I think everyone is Indian issues in Britain and everything the potential starting to see the potential of broadcastelse and they actually had the reof broadcasting ing from India. I think the more compasources there to put out." Everything nies that come here and see there is a huge, from India." was in place for international coverage literate, English-speaking middle cJassof India when the BBC World Service whjch is actually far superior to most pruts was launched. "[ was the first anchor of the world, I have to say-they st3lted to on that, the first of the dirty dozen so say to themselves, 'Hang on a minute, there's something to speak," he says. "We had programs we could put out here.''' Khan is confident that economic refOlms will work about which people in India would say, 'Wow, this is in favor of the cable television channels, and that is what great, this is something about us, something about our they are waiting for. "If you have something to sell, you have commLll1ity.' And of course with CNN it wasn't like that to let people know you have it there to sell. Otherwise it's initially, because they launched with U.S. domestic propointless trying to sell it." India has an audience that can't be gramming which has always been U.S.-based, which is ignored. "It's kind of silly that we have in India a resource in not so focused on Asian issues." As time went on CNN tenns of televisual people and it's not being used. And 1 realized there was a big gap in their programming and don't know why." He adds, "I've had quite a hard time get- they had do something about it. Khan continues, "I don't ting leading Indian politicians onto Q&A, but largely I think put myself in any position as far as commenting on either it's because they don't feel it's something that's that relevant the BBC or CNN in a way that compares them, largely to their goals. There is a pride in India, 1 guess, that says because [ come from both, in one way or another, and I 'Why do we have to prove ourselves to the rest of the can see the similarities more than I can see the differworld?' But of course, if you are going to do business with ences. CNN has now started to realize it can do more out the rest of the world, there has to be some opening up. And I of India, it wants to do more out of India. There are more think they will slowly start to open up."

Indian people working within CNN itself." CNN has CNN has had a presence in India ever since the cable started to square off against the BBC, taking South Asia television revolution began here, coinciding with CNN's increasingly seriously. "I think that the BBC focused on coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. But CNN's relationIndia in the first place, it has always concentrated on that, ship with India has been a learning process. People have it has put a lot of its resources here. CNN is becoming complained in the past about CNN's relative lack of intermore and more aware of the fact that it's a big world and est in South Asia. Riz Khan points out that historically there's a lot to cover out there and India is one country Britain has much stronger ties with the region. "By and that cannot be ignored. So people like myself and others, we push that a little bit more."

D large there was a lot of domestic British programming on

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