SPAN: April 1971

Jessie and Benjy pose for wedding picture, below, at Delhi Zoo. Right: U.S. Ambassador Kenneth B. Keating and Zoo Director c.L. Bhatia smile benevolently on the happy couple.

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SPAN The Beas Dam

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BENJY THE BISON AN ENVOYhas occasion to perform a variety of services in the course of his diplomatic career, but seldom perhaps one as unconventional-or enjoyable-as that' of U.S. Ambassador Kenneth B. Keating in his recent role of matchmaker to two bison.

It is an unusual wedding in more ways than one. The bride, Jessie, is all of nine years old. The age of the bashful bridegroom, Benjy, according to his marriage licence, is a mere ten months. But Jessie, a gift of former U.S. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith to the Delhi Zoo, had been a lonely, childless widow for some years; and Mr. Keating's heart was touched by her plight, for all Americans in India are under his ambassadorial'care-and Jessie, of course, is American.

"I don't normally act as a go-between for prospective mates of non-human species," the Ambassador said. But when a generous American, Ross Fenn, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, offered to donate a male bison, it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.

Many persons and institutions had a hand in the successful conclusion of the matrimonial arrangements, including the U.S. State Department; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; the Great Plains Zoo in Sioux Falls; and the Indian Government.

On the long flight from America, Benjy shared space with 500 pure-bred sheep aboard a cargo-liner specially chartered by the Indian Government to bring them to this country (as part of a ~ U.S.-aided project to help increase India's wool output).

A 600-pounder when he arrived, Benjy at maturity will weigh between 2,000 and 2,500 pounds, stand six feet high at the shoulder, and sport a beard almost a foot long. He will also, presumably, have long been a happily married husband by then.

(Semantic note: When Americans say "water buffalo," they just mean buffalo. When they say "buffalo," they mean bison.) END

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Front cover Workmen are dwarfed by the huge intake shafts that will carry water to the power turbines of the Beas Dam. Dom Moraes' article on this project is published on pages 2-9.

Photograph by Avinash Pasricha.

Back cover Sam Gilliam works on a draped canvas with multi-coloured acrylic. He was one Of eight American artists represented at the Indian Triennale featured on pp. 22-25.

Photograph by Yoichi Okamoto.

Editorial Staff: Carmen Kagal, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal K. Sharma, Krishan G. Gabrani, Austen Nazareth. Art Staff: B.Roy Choudhury, Nand K. Katyal, Kanti Roy, Kuldip Singh Jus, Gopi Gajwani. Production Staff: Awtar S. Marwaha, Mammen Philip. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Limited, Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-!.

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Power to light homes, to turn the wheels of industry; water to quench parched lands and make the desert flower-these are the main benefits that will flow from the Beas Dam, scheduled for completion in 1974.

To meet this goal, men and machines work round the clock.

The bulldozers and rollers at right are engaged in raising the dam to 188 feet of its total height of 435 feet, a task that must be completed before the monsoon.

Below, an engineer checks the dam level, while a dumper brings in fill material excavated from the river bed.

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T'S ONLY a short walk from here," the young engineer said. "That is, only one mile beyond this place." The car had stopped on the mud road behind us. Beyond us, the same road tilted insecurely down, ridged, pitted, leaky, and strewn with large round stones, towards what appeared to be a very distant river. But in the arm of the cloud bank to the east lay a cool pale sun, and the wind from the hills around us made a noise like fire in the crops by the road. "Splendid," I said.

We started to walk. An hour later, the sun now high and hot, we reached the river.

Across it, partially submerged, was a shallow canoe. My engineer friend shouted loudly for some time. Eventually a scrawny man with an irritable air appeared on the farther bank. He fished a bucket from the 'belly of the canoe and started to bail water out. After he had bailed out some twenty bucketsful, I appreciated why he looked so irritable. The canoe, however, now rode perceptibly higher in the water. The man climbed in, paddled over, and fetched us, a bit precariously, across.

The far bank was entirely composed of large round boulders, lodged in mud. It was devoid of any sign of human habitation. "Where," I asked, peering round, "is the village?" My friend laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder. "For that," he informed me, "we must cross another river." We tramped, with considerable difficulty, across the slippery boulders for another half hour. Then we came to the next river. A very smalt boy poled us over in a punt. On the far side were a couple of huts, a number of women washing clothes, and the man we had come to see.

Santokh Singh is a stocky hillman, with handsome, slightly Mongol features, and a dashing moustache.

He was smartly attired in a blue suit and, perhaps not quite appositely, brown tennis shoes. He has a natural courtesy of manner: he welcomed us warmly, and apologized for the distance we had had to cover, though he himself could hardly help it. "Is this your village?"

I inquired, through my engineer friend.

Santokh Singh looked mildly offended.

"There are only two huts here," my friend translated. "He says, in his village there are twelve houses."

"Yes, marvellous," I said rather wanly.

"But where is his village?" Santokh Singh pointed straight up the hill ahead. "There," said my friend. "I see," I said, "but how far is it?" Santokh Singh said it was a mile away. We started up on a precipitous

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Santofh Singh, an unskilled labourer, is one of the 9,000 persons working at the Beas Dam. Right, steel and concrete reinforcement is being placed at the base of the spillway to dissipale the force of water during floods. path covered with the same large round boulders we had encountered all the way.

On the path, however, instead of being lodged in mud as by the river, they were loose in the dust, which caused me to progress at a sort of totter, like a ballet dancer on points. I was somewhat shamed by two women who were walking ahead.

Each had an immense pot of water balanced on her head. They were going at speed.

After half an hour of this, I asked my friend to ask Santokh Singh if his village was very far. "Not very far," said my friend. "He says, a mile away." We continued our climb. Half an hour later, I asked if we could sit down in the shade of a tree for a moment. While we were doing so, I inquired how far the village now was. "He says," my interpreter told me, "about a mile." I asked if there was any water to be had near where we were.

Santokh Singh said there was no water till we reached the village. "In any case," said my friend cheerfully, "that will be raw water." "Raw?" "Yes, unboiled. It is very dangerous for anyone unaccustomed to such water to drink it." I asked if there would be anything else to drink in the village, which was both cold and wet.

"Of course not," my friend said.

We continued. At last, beyond a curve in what could loosely be called the road, we saw a large, thatched, whitewashed house. Santokh Singh pointed to it. This was his house. In the broad front verandah were four chairs and a table, and, proudly displayed, a transistor radio. The floor was covered in a neat fitted carpet of dried cowdung, and there were ornamental designs on the white wall. In front of the verandah sat an old man smoking a hubble-bubble. This was Santokh Singh's father. As I flopped into one of the chairs on the verandah, numerous women started

to appear. Unfortunately, they appeared one by one, so I had to rise each time, which was very hard on my already aching legs.

The last of these women was Santokh Singh's wife. She is about 25, he is 27, and they have four children. The eldest ,had departed for school. This was about a mile away across the hills. India is full of surprises; even so, the idea of a school in the vicinity was paralysing. Santokh Singh, however, had been to the school himself.

"1 was very intelligent," he said, "when I was a student." But he had left at the age of 11. "Sometimes," his mother, squatting on the floor behind me, said, "the teacher came for the fees, and there was no money in the house to pay. We are proud people, and it was a question of honour. So we took him out of the school, and he worked in the fields. I have eight sons, and all worked in the fields."

The family owns 30 acres ofland around their house, but this did not makefor prosperity. They sowed wheat and oilseed, but since the farm was high above the river, they had very limited supplie~ of water for irrigation. "What we grow on the land," Santokh Singh said, "depends on the rain. In one year, when there were heavy rains, we were able to make Rs.I,800 by selling our surplus crops." His wife added, "In most years we don't grow enough on the land to feed ourselves."

So, since his other seven brothers were required on the farm, Santokh Singh started work as an unskilled labourer on the Beas Dam, which spraddles a hillside down the valley. He is paid Rs. 1,500 yearly for this. "We will be able," his wife said, "to educate our sons." Santokh Singh nodded.

They brought us cups of tea, flavoured with cardamom, and rather vivid sweets. [ asked Santokh Singh if he knew what the dam was for, which he was helping to build. Yes, he said, it was taking water to the dry parts of India. "Wah," said his mother, "this is a dry part, but the dam won't help us." Santokh Singh said, "It will help other Indians a long way off.

This much I understand."

He waved his hand plainward to indicate what a long way off meant. He himself had only once been beyond thirty miles from his village.

That was to Hazaribagh, near Calcutta, where for nine years he worked as cook to an Army colonel. "The water in that place did not agree with me," he said, "so I returned here. The place of a man's birth is always dear to him. I was born here, so also my father, so also my grandfather. I continued

In the Beas-Sutlej Link Project near Kulu, the river will flow down 16 miles of tunnels to augment the water and power of Bhakra. will stay here always. But when this dam is completed, I will move to the next dam, even if it is a hundred miles away. This is good work, not only the money. but the effect of the work. But I will come back."

I lurched ruefully up from my chair, thinking of the five- or six-mile walk down the mountain, and also of those two frightful ferries. A thought struck me. "By the way," I inquired, "how does Santokh Singh get to work?" My engineer friend, after a long, complex interrogatiC?n, said, "His shift starts at 8 a.m. He leaves here on foot at 4 a.m., to reach the site in time. It is eight miles on foot to the site. He leaves the site once more at 6-30 p.m., and walks eight miles back. He works six days a week.

So he walks 96 miles a week, to and from work. His actual work on the site is carrying loads from place to place. He must walk about eight miles a day in the course of his work. Therefore," said my friend with an engineer's precision, "he walks twenty-four miles a day, and 144 miles a week. No wonder," he added, "he is looking so fit." I sighed. I looked down at my blistered feet. I said, "Yes." Not everybody who works on the Beas Dam walks 24 miles a day. An unskilled labourer like Santokh Singh is recruited locally, but the skilled labourers, the technicians, and the planners, have mostly come from the nearby Bhakra Dam, and they have been housed in a new township, 7 miles from the dam itself, called Talwara.

It is a neat, red brick town, constructed on the general lines ofChandigarh, and though somewhat devoid of what may be called gaiety, it is not unpleasing to the eye. Eight thousand of the 9,000 people who work on

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the dam live at Talwara. The houses in the colony are graded from T-l to T-8. A labourer would live in a T-l type house, in one room with a communal bathroom and kitchen. Mr. B.R. Palta, the General Manager, however, lives in a T-8 house. It sits tidily at the end of a drive, and behina it is the Beas River. From the back lawn, one looks down the river across the hacked hills to the partially completed dam slung like a hammock across the water.

According to Mr. Palta, it is the twentieth largest dam in the world. It is the second part of a dual purpose scheme fOf the Beas River. The Beas, which has a not undeserved reputation for turbulence, rises noisily from the Rohtang Pass, spills through the Kulu Valley, ripening the apples as it goes, and arrives eventually at Harike, 250 miles southwest of the source, when it has a loud collision with the Sutlej River. This is a natural one. Later, there will be an engineered collision when water

from the Pandoh Reservoir will be shuttled through the Beas-Sutlej Iink into the Bhakra Reservoir near Dehar.

Before the Beas meets the Sutlej, however, and as, green and young, it enters the Punjab, it flows past a place called Pong.

Here, somewhat to its surprise, it is trapped by the new dam. This dam has a central clay core, with earth and gravel shell zones on either side. It has five diversion tunnels, each 30 feet in diameter. Of these tunnels, in which the Beas now bellows like a trapped bull, three will house the power turbines, and two will be purely for irrigation.

At present, the river's average annual run-off 'of 13 million acre-feet is mostly wasted. Eleven million acre feet, in fact, Work on the 30~ft.-diameter tunnels (below) has been started from both ends. A railway operates to carry workers and material in and the rubble out. A 75-ft.-wide by 400-ft.-deep surge tank (right) at the end of the tunnel will regulate water supply to the power demand.

are unused. When, through the projects at Pong and Pandoh, this water is utilized, it is hoped that it will reach, fertilize, and illuminate 2.9 million acres of barren land annually. The total cost of the dam at Pong is estimated at 1,870 million rupees. Of this, 18 million dollars comes from the United States Agency for International Development. Of the remaining money, the Government of Rajasthan pays 60 per cent, and the Haryana and Punjab Governments share the rest of the cost. Sixty per cent of the water from the dam will in fact flow into Rajasthan, and the new Rajasthan canal will flow through the beautiful, ghostly ruins of Jaisalmer and Barmer, lost in the Thar Desert, where it rained last year after nine years.

It is then hoped that the desert will flower. The new canal-which is planned to be 426 miles long-hasn't yet been completed. So far about 204 miles have been finished, at a rate, roughly speaking,

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of a mile and a half a month. The dam is expected to be in full operation by 1974, but the canal wiJJ not be completed for something like 12 years.

Even if the dam is completed long before the canal, however, the water will not be wasted. Considerable quantities of it will flow into the existing length of the canal to fertilize the desert around it. Any excess will be channelled off to the Punjab and Haryana.

The Beas Project will also contribute substantially to the power situation in North India. The dam at Pong initially will produce 240,000 kilowatts of power with an ultimate capacity of 360,000. Upstream, the power generation from the Beas-Sutlej Link project will be much higher. Water diverted by the Pandoh dam after flowing down 24 miles of tunnels and open channels will produce up to 636,000 kilowatts before flowing into the Sutlej.

The construction of such a mammoth

Even the unskilled labourers at Beas have a sense of purpose, an awareness that their work is helping build a better India. project is obviously not without administrative problems-such as acquiring needed tracts of land. Mr. Palta has daily to wrestle with them. But not all the difficulties are administrative.

On a bright, crisp afternoon, we stood with a young engineer on a high earth wall, watching the placid, powder-blue waters of the Beas slide off down the diversion tunnels. Huge yellow bulldozers were roaring like prehistoric monsters in the bed of the river. The raw red flesh of the hills around us had been hacked and carved with mathematical precision. "You would not dream," said the engineer, "that this river can become an absolute torrent during the monsoon. That constitutes our most immediate problem." I invited clarification. "The embankment on one side of the dam," he explained, "has been half completed, but we are only just starting to fill in the centre. If we haven't built it up 188 feet by this June, we're likely to have a flQpd that will swamp the entire Punjab.

The only way to stop it would be to punch a hole in the dam which would, take the Beas back into its old course. Later, of course, we'd have to repair the whole thing, and that would cost a lot."

He looked out over the construction and shook his head. "But we'll complete the work before the monsoon. We have to.

It's our dam, and we are responsible."

The prominent American engineer Harvey Slocum supervised the construction of the dam at Bhakra, but the Beas Dam is unusual in that, though U.S.A.I.D. helps finance it, mainly in terms of imported equipment, and there are two American consultants who pay occasional visits, the staff on the site is entirely Indian. Apart from the regular consultants, A.I.D. people come up to the dam every so often to see how it is doing. A young architect, David Tiedt, had arrived from Delhi during our stay at the site. He occupied himself under a strong sun, with an energy I could not but admire, clambering up ladders and down stairways, inspecting everything he saw with a thoughtful eye. Tiedt later told me that he was much impressed by the quality and speed of the work being done.

There are several different aspects to this dam. It has an earth and gravel shell,

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One of tile superintending engin!ers, Jagman Singh, above, is in charge of the mechanical workshop at Talwara (left). In the background is the Indian-built crane costing Rs. 9 lakhs.

and a clay'core. The concrete necessary for the tunnels and spillway is produced on the site itself. One of the superintending engineers, Mr. Jagman Singh, pointed out the enormous scoops at work on the river bringing out quantities of the round smooth stones which cover the banks of the Beas. These stones are used in the concrete and apparently the concrete produced on the site is of high quality. Mr. Jagman Singh drove me from the riverbed to his workshops, which lie inland near Talwara township. In the main workshop numbers of hunched and gnomelike mechanics were squatting over blowlamps that hissed and scattered showers of acetylene sparks over the floors. Here metal parts are cast for the machines on the site, and orders are also executedfor the governments of various States as well as for the Central Government.

Across the way from the main workshop is a plant which produces and bottles oxygen. This oxygen is also sold to State Governments and local hospitals. As we came out of the oxygen plant Jagman Singh pointed out what was clearly the apple of his eye. It was a very large and angular apple, no less in fact than a gigantic yellow crane. "Do you know," said Jagman Singh, "that we used to import these cranes from the U.S.A. and they cost us 30 lakhs of rupees each. Every time something went wrong with a crane or some other equipment we had to send to the U.S.A. for spare parts, and that meant that lots of machines around the site were lying idle for weeks on end. The crane was particularly difficult to keep in constant operation. So my colleagues and I went to work and were able to design a crane to suit Indian conditions. We built this crane at our workshop out of Indian materials

and spare parts. The crane only cost us 9 lakhs to build. And quite apart from the cost, the advantage is that in the event of a breakdown we have our own spare parts immediately at hand."

Jagman Singh is an affable as well as a highly knowledgeable man. He, like most of the other senior officials, and like some of the equipment, came from Bhakra to the Beas Dam. But there were also large numbers of young engineers on the site whose first assignment this was. What struck me in these young men was the quality of pride they had in the dam, and their full awareness that the work they did was of considerable importance to the country as a whole. This pride and awareness were not blunted by the fact that many of them felt their scale of salary was low. This quality of pride in the work done spread down from the senior officials to the more skilled labourers. I talked to a young man called Ramdas Singh. He is a fitter, and according to him, he wanted from the age of ten to work on a dam site because he understood that this was work that would help safeguard the future ofIndia. "When this dam is finished," he said, "there will be other dams to be built, and I will go wherever there is a dam. I have two children and my ambition is that they should go to college which I never did. If I do work, however minor it is, which will make the country prosperous, I will be making them prosperous, and they will be able to go to college and train to be something better than a fitter."

That seemed to me one of the most moving qualities of the busy antheap of the Beas Dam. The work which was being done was being done by Indians for Indians, and everyone on the site was aware of it. Santokh Singh was only an unskilled labourer. He himself would not benefit from the water of the dam he helped to build. Before the dam, however, he had hardly known a world beyond the walls of his village. But the blue water seething away down the tunnels towards remote parts, to him, of the country, made him aware of the dimensions of India. For him there must be something hopeful in the very sight of this water. He is helping to send it to people he has never seen in areas he will never see. Some day perhaps other people whom he has not seen will be constructing a dam to send water to his village, not because they know him or his needs, but because they, like him, are Indians and END their country is India.

THE PlACE OF FRANKliN D. ROOSEVELT IN IIISTORY

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Roosevelt's greatness stems from effectiveness of action rather than personal eminence.

This is the view of the distinguished historian Allan Nevins who died last month at the age of 80.

As a tribute to him and in commemoration of Roosevelt's death anniversary on April 12, Span reprints his assessment of the President.

Is IT TOO SOON to estimate the place of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the stream of American and world events? It is never too soon for such a task. History is not a remote Olympian bar of judgment, but a controversial arena in which each generation must make its own estimate of the past.

We have this advantage in attempting the task, that a great part of the necessary evidence is already at hand. Seldom in human annals has so huge a volume of reminiscences, autobiographies, impressions, letters, official documents, and other data bearing on one man been issued within 25 years of his death.

In dealing with every commanding figure of history, a fundamental question presents itself: To what extent did greatness inhere in the man, and to what degree was it a product of the situation? Washington had indisputable greatness in himself-he was great in character, great in traits of leadership, great in insight and wisdom. Lincoln had an even more manifest and appealing personal greatness, and his public utterances attest a rare intellectual power.

But with Franklin D. Roosevelt we feel no such assurance of transcendent personal eminence. We feel that he lacked the steadfast elevation of character exhibited by George Washington. We find in him distinctly less intellectual power than in Jefferson, Lincoln, or perhaps Woodrow Wilson.

We conclude, in short, that his tremendous place in history was in lesser degree the product of his special personal endowments, and in larger degree the handiwork of his stormy times, than that occupied by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

About the Author: Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of about 50 books, Allan Nevins is renowned as a biographer, historian and editor.

That Roosevelt had remarkable intellectual gifts is plain; but these gifts fell short of the highest distinction. He possessed a quick, resourceful, and flexible mind. This fact is illustrated on an elevated level by his ability to deal with 50 important issues in a day, making shrewd decisions on each; by his power in wartime of efficiently coordinating departments, industries, and armies, of gaining the teamwork of generals, admirals, and business leaders. He organized the national energies with unique success. His intellectual proficiency is illustrated on a lower plane by almost any of his press conferences; by his deft tact in handling two-score quick-witted newspapermen, evading some questions, dissecting the fatuity of others, using a few to touch a needed chord of public opinion, and responding to many with concise, expert answers. Like his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, he had an insatiable curiosity about books, about men, about events. It was linked with an unquenchable zest for experience; the zest expressed in his famous wartime message to Churchill, "It is fun to bein the same century with you."

He had a t.alent for quick parliamentary hits. He could make his enemies ridiculous by a few pungent words. He had flashes of daring imagination. He had a remarkable gift of rapid improvisation, as he showed in all the recurrent crises of his 12 crowded years in office. In part this consisted of his ability to use other men's thought; "he is the best picker of brains who ever lived," his intimates used to say. His power of application was remarkable even among overworked Presidents.

But of pre-eminent intellectual talent he had little. I recall Walter Lippmann saying "He has in the second administration:

never written a real state paper." In a sense that is true. No paper signed by him equals Washington's Farewell Address, Lincoln's great papers, Theodore Roosevelt's first annual message, or Woodrow Wilson's nobler productions. A capacity for abstract thought was largely omitted from his equipment. Like Theodore Roosevelt, he was primarily a man of action. His mental processes, as many friends have said, were intuitive rather than logical. He reacted rather than reflected.

All that is told us of his reading suggests that it was rather adolescent: either escapist, like the detective stories carried on every long trip; or attached to a hobby, like naval history; or journalistic. His humour lacked the philosophic overtones of Lincoln's, or even the saltiness of Harry Truman's; it too was somewhat adolescent.

In respect to character, he had traits of an admirable kind; but we must add that even in combination, they fell short of a truly Roman weight of virtue. He held sincere religious conviction, and it was no mere gesture that led him to take his Cabinet, on the morn of his first inauguration, to divine service.

one of the unflinching optimists of his time. Having conquered a prostrating illness and horrible physical handicap, he felt an inner faith in man's power to conquer anything. When his aides made estimates of American industrial capacity, he raised them; when the Combined Chiefs of Staff set down dates for the various goals in the invasion of Europe, he revised them forward. Because of his religious

'In time his specific achievements may be blurred, but the qualities of his spirit will be remembered. For years Americans will think of him as one of those spirits who ride in front.'

faith and his ingrained optimism, he possessed an unfailing serenity. In the stormiest of hours his nerve was never shaken.

On his first day in the Presidency in 1933, with the banks of the nation closed down and the country almost prostrate with anxiety, he found his desk at six o'clock in the afternoon quite clear. He pressed a button. Four secretaries appeared at four doors to the room. "Is there anything more, boys?" he inquired. "No, Mr. President," they chorused. And Roosevelt remarked with his happy smile: "This job is a cinch!"

Equally admirable were his idealism, his consciousness of high objectives, and his frequent nobility of spirit. He was willing to sacrifice himself for the public weal.

When in 1928 Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic presidential candidate, asked him to run for governor of New York, he was told by physicians that if he kept out of public life another year or two, he could regain the use of his left leg, while if he did not he would be incurably lame; but he answered the call of duty. His concern for the poor, the friendless, the unfortunate, was deeply humane. "I see one-third of a nation," he said in his Second Inaugural, "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished"-and meant to do something about it. Moderately rich himself, he disliked those who were too rich.

Yet, we must add, Roosevelt's impressive virtues were flawed by certain grievous defects. He had flashes of insincerity which sometimes impaired the confidence even of close friends. Henry L. Stimson mentions in his memoirs the fact that, having found out Roosevelt in a quite needless bit of duplicity, for several years he avoided all contact with him. And Mrs. Roosevelt writes: "While I often felt strongly on various subjects, Franklin frequently refrained from supporting causes in which he believed, because of political realities. There were times when this annoyed me very much."

All in all, we must repeat our conclusion that his character lacked the symmetry, harmony, and weight found in that of Washington and of Lincoln. Yet without the highest inner greatness Roosevelt had an effective greatness of action, in relation to his time, which will cause him to be remembered as happily as any American leader. It is significant that Churchill, intellectually so much superior, always treated him with manifest deference, as a lesser man bowing to a greater. Was this simply because Roosevelt headed the more powerful state? I think not. We must here face

what seems to me a salient fact of history.

A leader who puts second-rate qualities of intellect and character into first-rate application to the needs of his time may be a greater man than the leader who puts first-rate qualities into a second-~ate application. Roosevelt signally illustrates this aphorism.

Roosevelt's effective greatness included an unrivalled power of matching the urgent crisis with the adequate act; a power of timing an impressive measure to meet a desperate need. Take the first days of 1933, after his election. Never in a period of peace had the nation been in such straits.

Between 12 and 15 million men were out of work. Five million families, one-seventh of the population, were supported by public relief or private charity. Since the beginning of the Depression, 4,600 banks had failed. Travellers through the broad industrial belt from Chicago to New York seemed to pass nothing but closed factory gates. Half the automobile plants of Michigan had shut down. Along the Great Lakes, path of the largest marine commerce of !he world, ships had almost ceased to move.

Middle Western farmers gazed bitterly at crops whose market value was less than the cost of harvesting.

W

mst of all was the fe",

which gripped the nerves of the nation. To observers who travelled across the country in trains almost empty, through factory districts with hardly a wisp of smoke, the helpless populations sent up an almost audible cry of anger, bewilderment, and panic. The day before Roosevelt took office the crisis gathered to a climax. By midnight of March 3 the closing of all remaining banks had been or was being ordered in every state. Never before had a change of Presidents taken place against a background so dramatic. The people, awakening on March 4 to read that their financial system was prostrate, gathered at noon by millions about their radios to listen in anguish, in anxiety, but in hope, to the voice of their new national leader.

There ensued four of the most brilliantly successful months in the history of American government. Roosevelt's first words promised energy: "I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people, dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems." He impro-

vised a series of policies, and mobilized an administrative machine, with a vigour that would have done credit to any wartime executive. Within 36hours he had taken absolute control of the currency and banking system, and called Congress in extraordinary session. He forthwith launched an aggressive attack along half a dozen fronts: upon banking problems, industrial prostration, farm distress, unemployment, public works, the burden of public and private debt. One reporter wrote that the change in Washington was like that from oxcart to airplane. Congress laboured for 99 days under the President's all-but-complete sway. Almost his every wish was obeyed by immediate votes.

A

nd ., Roo",velt took the", steps his courage, his resourcefulness, his blithe optimism infected the spirit of the people; he gave Americans new confidence and the elan of a new national unity. When he gaily signed his last bills and departed for a brief sail up the Atlantic coast as skipper of a 13.5-metre sailing boat, the nation realized that it had turned from stagnation to a bright adventure. As the President put it, we were "on our way."

Nor was this an isolated spasm of leadership; for each recurrent crisis found the same resourcefulness called into effective play. When France fell, when the British Commonwealth stood alone <:\.gainstthe deadliest foe that modern civilization had known, Americans gazed at the European scene in fear, in gloom, in perplexity. With a sense of dumb helplessness, tens of millions put their intensest feeling into the hope for Britain's survival. Those tens of millions never forgot the morning of September 3, 1940, when they¡ read the head¡ lines announcing that Roosevelt had told a startled Congress of the transfer of 50 destroyers to embattled Britain; a defiance of Hitler, a defiance of home isolationists, a first long stride towards ranging America against the Fascist despots.

These years 1940-41were, as we see now, among the greatest crises in modern history. They were met with imagination, boldness, and ingenuity. Parochialism, timidity, or fumbling might have been fatal; even a pause for too much reflection might have been fatal. We knew then that Roosevelt was determined to face the exigency with an intrepidity worthy of the r,epublic.

Roosevelt's second quality of effective greatness was his ability to vindicate the American method of pragmatic experiment, of practical ad hoc action, step by step. He was essentially a Jeffersonian. He belonged to the school which, following the historic Anglo-American bent of mind, is attached to facts rather than ideas, to the enlargement of precedents rather than the formulation of dazzling visions. He loved experimental advance, and was wont to say that if he were right 60 per: cent of the time, he would be satisfied. Like Jefferson, he was willing to scrap a theory the moment a brute fact collided with it; he trusted experience, and distrusted flights. into the empyrean. His so-called revolution, though unprecedentedly broad and swift, was like Jefferson's "revolution"; it was simply a combination of numerous practical changes, the main test of which was whether or not they worked.

The Rooseveltian changes did work.'

The New Deal in home affairs was empirical, not ideological. His emergency programme was a stopgap affair put together to tide over a crisis, and as Mrs. Roosevelt once put it, "gave us time to think." It succeeded. Taken as a whole, the New Deal passed through two phases. In the first, 1933-35, the government tried scarcity economics, reducing factory production, farm output, and hours of work, and doing what it could to cut off the American economy from the outside world.

In the second and better phase, 1935-50, it tried full employment, full production, enlarged distribution of goods, and freer international trade. This led directly towards the acceptance of Cordell Hull's ideal of co-operative internationalism. American participation in world affairs after 1938 similarly passed through two phases. In the first, a1l1the nation's energies were devoted to the defeat of the Axis. In tl).e second, Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, and Stettinius moved step by step to construct a new world order, an enduring fabric of the United Nations. In home and foreign affairs alike action was always direct, experimental, and pragmatic.

Innovator and conservator at once, Roosevelt made daTing new additions to the American fabric, but he kept the best of the old structure. While he converted Americans to the new ideal of social security, he strengthened their old faith in individual opportunity. He vindicated the traditional American method of solving problems one at a time by pragmatic trial

and error. As one journalist wrote: "One remembers him as a kind of smiling bus driver, with that cigarette holder pointed upward, listening to the uproar from behind as he took the sharp turns. They used to tell him that he had not loaded his vehide right for all eternity. But he knew that he had stacked it well enough to round the next corner, and he knew when the yells were false, and when they were real, and he loved the passengers."

Roosevelt's third and most important quality of effective greatness lay in his ability to imbue Americans with a new spiritual strength. From the gloom of the Depression years, that numbed consciousness of frustration and failure, Roosevelt lifted Americans on the wings of his great new adventures-the alphabetical adventures of the AAA, the NRA, the TVA, the CCC (Agricultural Adjustment Adminis..1ration; National Recovery Act; Tennessee Valley Authority; Civilian Conservation Corps); above all, on the. wings of the greatest adventure in our history, the effort to rescue democracy from totalitarianism, and to organize the world to safeguard freedom.

E

!feetive g,.atness-that is Roosevelt's title to a high place in the world's history. Intellect and character are not enough; to them must be added personality, energy, and an accurate sense for the proper timing of action ..Roosevelt was not an intellectual giant; but what of the personality that made the Arkansas sharecropper and the Harlem Negro feel they shared all the destinies of the republic? His character did not awe men by its massive strength; but what of the gifts that made him so efficient in harmonizing labour, capital, and agriculture at home, and getting discordant nations to pool their wartime efforts?

In time his specific achievements may be blurred, but the qualities of his spirit will be remembered. For years Americans will think of him as one of those spirits who ride in front; we shall see his jaunty figure, his gaily poised head, still in advance of us.

We shall hear his blithe voice in his words just before his death at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945: "The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith."

END

The Conservation Corps provided opportunities for young people to channelize their energies in socially useful workpreserving the nation's natural resources.

The CCC enrollees fought soil erosion, above, saved wildlife and waterfowl from extinction. At right they gather seed of aquatic plant for restoring a food supply for migratory waterfowl. They fought disease by eliminating swampy areas, far right, breedingplaces of mosquitoes.

Created by President Franklin Roosevelt, the CCC provided jobs for the drifting youth of the Depression and helped save the nation's land and forests.

T

he Great Depression had come to the United States: millions of people were out of work, thousands of banks had failed, the national morale was at a low point. This was the state of the country when Franklin D. Roosevelt became President. He lost no time in dealing with the crisis. One of the measures was the establishment on April 5, 1933 of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)probably the least controversial and the most successful experiment of the New Deal. In a famous message to Congress, President Roosevelt said: "I propose to create a Civilian Conservation Corps, to be used in simple work, not interfering with normal employment, but confining itself to forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control and similar projects." The project would give unemployed youth work and give posterity important dividends by protecting and improving public lands.

In its nine years of existence-the programme ended formally six months after Pearl Harbor-more than two-anda-half million youths had worked in the CCC camps. Not only did they contribute heavily to the preservation of natural resources, but they came out healthier than they had ever been and with a deeper appreciation of their own country. They planted trees; helped control insect pests; built forest-fire protection systems, roads and trails, dams and terraces. They 'helped check erosion and demonstrated proper land use. They developed parks for recreation ; crea,ted lakes and ponds, stocked them 'with fish, and pianted refuges for the fast-diminishing wildlife of the country. When it was all over the boys had planted nearly three billion trees, built a million miles of road, constructed 85,000 miles of telephone lines, erected 4,000 fire towers, and improved more ~han four million acres of forest land.

Although the Civilian Conservation Corps was established as a U.S. Federal agency, it had the co-operation of other Government departments. State welfare agencies selected the junior enrollees, the Veterans' Administration selected

veterans, the Department of the Army handled the enrolling of the volunteers, provided the housing, transportation, food and clothing, and the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture planned the conservation programme and provided technical supervision.

To be eligible for the CCC a young man had to be a citizen of the United States, unemployed, of good character, 17 to 23! years of age, unmarried, out of school, and able to do vigorous work.

He agreed to stay at least six months.

At the camps, of which there were about 1,500, he lived with 199 other boys, usually about 40 to a barracks dormitory.

In addition to food and clothing he received a cash allowance of $30 a month, half of which he had to send home.

While the work was hard, it was only a five-day week, so that he had the weekend for recreation and educational opportunities. Every camp had facilities for voca,tional training and'the boys were encouraged to prepare themselves for skilled jobs upon leaving camp.' No skills were demanded upon enlistment and many of these young men had never been out of the city. But they were willing to work.

In a history of this federal agency, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942; A New Deal Case Study, John A. Salmond describes the background of its creation: I IN THE CHAOS of depression America, almost two million men and women had abandoned all pretence to a settled existence and had simply taken to the road, travelling in freight cars or on foot, sleeping in caves or in shanty towns, aimlessly drifting in search of vanished security.

Among them were about 250,000 young people, "the teen-age tramps of America" as they were sometimes called, wandering the land looking for a future. The need to rescue them was crucial.

Moreover, these juvenile drifters were but a tiny fraction of the total of jobless youth. Most of these unemployed youngsters, indeed, never left their home environment. Figures of unemployment among young people during the Depression decade are incomplete, but it has been calculated that in 1932, of the labour market, perhaps one in four was totally unemployed. A further 29 per cent worked part-time only.

This was an American crisis. These young people, endlessly tramping city streets or stagnating in country towns, were in a Text continued on page 17

Inforest nurseries, above. the CCC workers grew millions of tiny trees which were transplanted and shipped to other places for reforestation programmes. More than three billion trees were planted by the Corps.

Photos, below and right, show a farm in 1934 with sand drifts up to six feet deep in front of buildings and in 1936 after control measures were taken. The Corps planted the farm with Sudan grass which yielded between"eight and ten tons an acre.

situation not of their own making. Bewildered, sometimes angry, but more often hopeless and apathetic, they were a generation already deeply scarred. The government could no longer afford to ignore their plight.

The federal government had also to cope with scars of a very different kind, the disfiguring marks which three generations of waste and ill-usage had left on the American landscape. Forests had once covered 800,000,000 acres of the continental United States, but by 1933 there were a mere 100,000,000 acres of virgin timber left. Much of the nation's timber resources had thus been brutally squandered. Moreover, wanton forest destruction had compounded the crucial problem of soil erosion. Each year water washed three billion tons of the best soil away from American fields and pastures, and wind accounted for a like amount. Indeed, by 1934, more than 300,000,000 acres-a sixth of the continent-had gone, or was going. Deserts of dust were replacing the grasslands of the Great Plains, the once verdant Texas hills had become st4.lnted tufts, as erosion galloped through the land.

The Civilian Conservation Corps was thus, in one sense, a catalyst. Through it, a new and vital President, Fninklin D. Roosevelt, brought together two wasted resources, the young men and the land, in an attempt to save both.

The idea of putting young men to work in the woods was scarcely new. Many men in many places had played with the notion at some time or another. Nevertheless, a number of people have tried to trace the CCC to a single source, the great Harvard philosopher, William James. In 1912 James had published an essay entitled "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he had advocated "the conscription of the whole youthful population to form, for a certain number of years," a part of a great army "enlisted against nature." This force, he contended, would bring countless benefits both to the youth and to the land.

Many people simply interpreted the CCC as being the application of James's suggestion to despression America. Roosevelt, however, could not remember having read the essay and certainly denied ever consciously connecting it with the Corps.

"But," he admitted, "it is a very interesting thought." ...

Though one can indeed find. a wide

variety of possible sources for the idea of the CCC, it nevertheless remains true that more than any other New Deal agency it bore the personal stamp of President Roosevelt. Without him, relief work in the woods may have remained only an idea.

Roosevelt's love of the land was both passionate and total. His own Hudson Valley estate, at Hyde Park, was a constant source of the profoundest delight to him, and driving his specially appointed automobile he would spend hours exploring its giant forests, its gentle hills, its streams and glades. The new President was a strict Jeffersonian in his belief that a rural existence was the best of all possible worlds.

In his view, nothing benefited soul, mind, and body more than a life lived close to nature. It is in this context that his longterm interest in relief schemes involving the moving of urban dwellers back to the land must be understood. This passionate belief, too, can be seen in the concept of work in the forest for young men.

Roosevelt's feeling for the land did not stop at Hyde Park, but rather embraced the whole continent. No feature of American life disturbed him more than the callousness with which the national heritage was being destroyed. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has written, "he felt the scars and exhaustion of the earth almost as personal injuries." Roosevelt had been a fighter for conservation for most of his adult life.

He knew what must be done and was acutely aware that action had to be taken immediately.

Roosevelt's experiences at Hyde Park pointed the way, in his view, to a national solution. When he took over the estate in 1910 the once fertile soil was virtually exhausted.

Where corn had formerly grown, he pl~nted great trees and loved them both for their majesty and the hope of renewal they gave the earth in which they stood. Reforestation, he believed, could save the nation's natural resources as it had saved Hyde Park.

From the time he first entered public life in 1910, Roosevelt fought for conservation measures. As chairman of the New York State Senate's Fish and Game Committee, he tried to develop a comprehensive reforestation scheme, and he even made conservation an issue in his unsuccessful campaign for the vice-presidency in 1920.

He retained-indeed, he strengthened-his conviction during his long period of

convalescence from polio.

When he triumphantly returned to public life as governor of New York in 1928, Roosevelt seized every opportunity to translate his ideas into action on a statewide basis. The most important of these efforts was his successful sponsorship of an amendment in 1931 to the constitution of New York State. This amendment gave the state government authority to purchase marginal land and reforest it, the money to be provided by a bond issue. It was a policy directly in line with Roosevelt's deepest convictions, and his open support of it won him national recognition among conservationists.

As governor, Roosevelt lost no time in using these new powers, and, at his direction, the New York conservation commissioner, Henry J. Morgenthau, Jr., introduced a broad reforestation scheme. In 1932 Roosevelt was able to develop it as a part of New York's unemployment relief programme. The men required for treeplanting were all taken from relief rolls, and 10,000 people were thus given temporary employment.

Morgenthau later alleged that the CCC was simply an extension of the New York development.

Of course, this was not so. The New York plan was but one of a number of streams contributing to the eventual creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and it is impossible to single out anyone source as being of prime importance. What can be said, however, is that Roosevelt breathed life into a scattered collection of ideas. Of all the New Deal agencies, it was his personal creation.

It was during his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, on July 2, 1932, that Governor Roosevelt first hinted at the outlines of his national plans for conservation. He called for "a definite land policy" to fight "a future of soil erosion and timber famine." "In so doing," he said, "employment can be given to a million men. That is the kind of public work that is self-sustaining .... Yes, I have a very definite programme for providing employment by that means." Here, in generalized form, was the idea of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

END

Editor's Note: John A. Salmond is Senior Lecturer in History, Latrobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He was a Commonwealth Fellow in History at Duke University, 1961-63.

~: I;::I)I~ '}J 0--

25

Eco-Architect

II II Lawrence Halprin is a new type of architect concerned with total environment-"ecology," to use today's vogue-word-whose plans will increasingly come to influence people's life, work, and play. "A man in love with water," his latest creation is the imaginative "fountainscape" (below) in Portland, Oregon.

LAWRENCEHALPRIN is a landscape archivehicles in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis is more tect who has been described as "a man in like a little park than a city street. The love with water." Fountains, pools and streams are featured in most of Halprin's young gather here, rock bands perform, art work, but what really delights is the way in is exhibited, festivals held. On the treewhich he uses water-to make a shimmershaded benches, office workers eat their ing lake between apartment blocks; to flow lunch-and do a bit of girl-watching. The evenly, gently, uniformly down a shallow Mall also features a self-service post-office, modern walk-in sculpture, and a great flight of steps; or to move languidly across a huge stone slab and fall off the sides in four-sided clock with exposed works.

In limiting traffic on Nicollet Mall to sheets of glassy smoothness.

Perhaps Halprin's most spectacular taxis and buses, Halprin reveals another of his basic attitudes. He says: "In order to "waterworks" so far is the Auditorium Forecourt in Portland, Oregon. Made of make possible a gracious, unhysterical kind cast concrete layers, it is a terraced water of life on a city street, it has become clear garden whose cascading falls and placid pools are a natural invitation to sit, clamber, wade and splash one's feet. This, wrote a New York Times critic, "may be one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance."

Halprin represents a new type of architect and planner who is concerned with total environment. He believes that, when man builds, he must take both nature and society into account. Designing not simply gardens and parks but entire areas of city and countryside, Halprin and his work will incre~singly influence where and how people live, travel and work.

"Designing part of a city is more complex than putting a man on the moon," _ says Halprin. "On a moon shot, the goal is set. But there is little agreement as to what is the best type of city."

Urban planning, the architect points out, must consider human values. "Take, for example," he says, "the question of whether to put a rapid transit system above or below ground. If above, it may destroy housing, ruin neighbourhoods, put walls between the residential areas of racial or ethnic groups. If it is underground, it may decrease passenger pleasure, deter people from using it and so further overburden highways."

In everything that he does, Halprin's primary concern is with people. The purpose of his art, the principle for which he strains, Model at right is a tri-dimensional is designing for people-real, moving peomovement scorefora San Francisco ple, not the people who figure in abstract redevelopment project .. Halprin designers' blueprints. here "choreographs" motion of Three-fourths of Halprin's work today pedestrians, lifls, traffic. Sea Ranch (above). a Ca/(fornia is in big projects that affect many people.

He recently completed a master plan for a oceanfront community of resort homes, is an experiment in "new town" in California to accommodate "dynamic conservation." The a population of 100,000. Other schemes Halprin-designed Nicollet Mall in have included a 178-hectare downtown Minneapolis-moresmallpark than development in Akron, Ohio, and an eightstreet-features four-sided clock with exposed works (far right). block mall and transit-way clo,sed to private

that the automobile must take second place . .-.. '.

When the architect started his San Francisco firm in 1949, his first job was to design a flower garden. Today he bas a 40-man staff which includes engineers and architects, but also a full-time geographer and an expert on the dynamics of population growth.

Halprin's first project of any size was also the first to win him significant national attention-the "Old Orchard" shopping centre near Chicago. Built in the early 1950s, it faces around a central landscaped mall, a somewhat revolutionary design in

the United States at that time. Today the shopping centre is found in every suburban community and many of them are patterned on the lines of Old Orchard.

Among Halprin's most widely-acclaimed work is Sea Ranch, a 2,000-hectare development of vacation homes on the Pacific Coast. His first action on receiving this commission was to sleep on the beach several nights to get the "feel" of the place.

He pored over histories of the region and made hundreds of sketches and photographs. The location's biggest disadvantage was the strong coastal wind that kept even sunny days chilly. With his geogra-

pher, Halprin charted a "wind shadow" map that identified sites where existing cypress hedgerows reduced wind speeds by as much as 50 per cent. The houses were laid out to take advantage of these shadows.

Their roof lines tend to parallel wind flows, and their rust-coloured chimneys match the colour of a local lichen.

Sea Ranch is regarded as Halprin's first example of "ecological thinking"-a careful consideration of man's relation to the land and the plants and the animals surrounding him. Long before the current preoccupation with ecology, he was one of a group of West Coast intellectuals who

advocated "dynamic conservation," insisting that conservation means more than simply preserving parkland. Of the interest in ecology now, he says: "It's the first fad I've approved of since the miniskirt."

With many other modern architects, Halprin has a deep respect for nature. "I am concerned with every mark made upon the land by man," he says. One of his apartment projects was built in an abandoned rock quarry strewn with hundreds of boulders. He drew up a boulder placement plan, numbering every boulder and determining exactly where the bulldozer should place it.

The boulders became sculptures.

Nature can also provide an antidote to the constriction and artificiality of modern life, Halprin believes. "If one can step for a moment into an outdoor space, no matter how small, and get a glimpse of sky and the smell of earth, trees and flowers, then the overwhelming scale and density of urban life can be largely overcome."

But if man must live in harmony with nature, it is even more important that he be in harmony with his fellow man. In San Francisco, Halprin's St. Francis's Square co-operative apartments won him the State of California's "exceptional distinction" award in social improvement. Conceived as a racially integrated scheme, its key feature was the arrangement of apartments so that they face onto common gardens and play areas. "People tend to make friends more quickly if the housing units open on a joint commons that the tenants really utilize," he says.

While this project was designed to foster communal living, in others Halprin exhibits a deep concern for human privacy. His Capitol Towers in Sacramento, for instance, has an ingenious scheme whereby some apartments look out on private gardens, others away from them. The Capitol Towers site was crowded with large, beautiful trees. "We saved everyone of them against overwhelming odds," he proudly reports. In some cases this meant standing in front of a tree with outstretched arms to prevent it from being knocked over.

All Halprin's work is permeated with his idealism, his imagination, his consideration of all the values that affect the quality of urban life. And providing a clue to the attitudes that shape his total view is an ancient Oriental proverb that hangs on his office wall. It says: No Shade Tree Blame Not the Sun But Yourself.

INDIA Almost as interesting as the exhibits were the reacti ons they provoked. As people walked into the American section at the Second Indian Triennale just ended in Delhi, some stared, others gaped, and a few turned away in embarrassment. On the other hand, many artists and critics found the . show "fascinating" and "stimulating." The girls at left study the fibreglass containers of Eva Hesse's Repetition 19, IV, while the one below is bemused by Alan Saret's bamboo and wood ramp. The controversial exhibit was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York with the aid of the Ben and Abby Grey Foundation.

WHAT DOES one make of an art with no ti~s to representation, an art that sets forth the flat declarativeness of matter with an ostentatious lack of interest in the results? As Carl Andre says: "There is no symbolic content to my work."

If meaning must be found, perhaps it is to be sought not in the works of these artists but in what they are trying to do. And this, according to Waldo Rasmussen of the Museum of Modern Art, is "to extend the notion of what a work of art may be."

Sol LeWitt, another young avant-garde artist, explains: "This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman."

Usually, but not always. While the eight American artists represented at the Triennale share the same basic approach to art, there are differences. Thus for Carl Andre, the idea is paramount; execution matters little. With Eva Hesse, on the other hand, "there is a definite concern about presentation."

Miss Hesse also provides an insight into the element of irony in some of the works. She said, "There isn't a thing in my life that has happened that hasn't been extreme ... and absurdity is the keyword .... It has to do with contradictions and oppositions . . . . I was always aware of their absurdity ... and it was always more interesting than making something average, normal, right size, right proportion .... " Talking to Carl Andre during his extended stay in Delhi, one understands some of the other ideas that impel these artists. There is, for instance, his conviction that works of art should not travel around the world, but that artists should create their works on the site under the conditions that determine that particular site.

Three of the American artrsts, Andre points out, came to Delhi to execute their works. "Keith Sonnier," he explains, "was formerly in the audio-visual field, TV and so on. He travelled a great deal in the South and discovered that sound is a pervasive factor in Indian life." So Sonnier created a work in sound-a pair of speakers that emit a throbbing, amplified microphone feedback.

Alan Saret's sculpture also reflects his reactions to the surroundings. An architect by training, he was fascinated by the bamboo scaffolding he saw everywhere. This resulted in the bamboo ramp at the entrance to the gallery.

"In my own case," Andre continues, "I didn't have much idea of what I was going to do. I started out with potter's clay, though I can't think of anything objective that would cause me to use it.

That work disappeared, however, and I arrived eventually at plasticine. There must be something here which made me choose a standard world-wide matter. If in my piece the Indian connection is less obvious than in the case of Sonnier and Saret, perhaps it is because I tend to look at things in a pure art context."

Of profound importance in Andre's work is his concept of place. He defines sculpture, in fact, as "Form=Structure=Place."

"When I work," he says, "I have this urge to want to make a place. And my idea of a place is stillness, the opposite of action.

I don't think of it in terms of physical place, or in terms of its social interactions. It's not that people are not important to my work. It's just that I regard place as an isolation-an observatory for matter.

"I think the closest I ever came to finding my kind of place was in the gardens of Japan. And here in Delhi the Jantar Mantar

7/ -

o3~---

is also a magnificent place. You have these strong forms, beautifully designed-and of course their power is understandable because they reflect the principles of the universe. They are true to matter, as every great work of art must be."

With Andre, perhaps poverty first suggested that anything might be the material for art. From his job as yard brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad, he began bringing home bits of scrap iron, hooks, springs, wooden beams. And when he left India he took back an interesting assortment of stones, pieces of earthenware, pottery, broken-off surai tops. "I'm something of a scavenger," he confesses.

Like the other young artists in the Triennale, there is in Andre a complete absence of dogma, of certainty that his art is the wave of the future. Eva Hesse, who died last year at the age of 34, spoke for them all when she said: "All I wanted was to find my own scene, my own world-inner peace or inner turmoil-but I wanted it to be mine."

Above: In the foreground, Alan Saret's True Jungle. Canopy Forest, a 1968 work in green wire, recreated in India. On back wall, Robert Rohm's untitled work, half-inch manila rope stained brown, 48 inches by 240 inches. On the floor at left, Carl Andre's strip of multi-co loured plasticine.

At left: Richard Serra's untitled new creation for the Triennale, made of concrete. Serra directed construction of the work from New York by means of photographs.

OR A YEAR the cheerful, efficient little secretary to a woman's magazine editor led a double life. By day, at The Ladies' Home Journal in New York City, 20-year old Marion Holmes typed letters, answered the phone, packed and unpacked cartons of clothes from manufacturers seeking publicitymeanwhile making personal notes on trade contacts and resources.

Several nights a week and all day Saturday she slipped into her second role as a hard-working co-owner of a dress designing firm with no employees. Marion's "life plan," devised at 15, was to produce her own collection, be in business for herself. She would equip herself so thoroughly and methodically that she could not fail.

In February 1970 she made the gamble, threw over her job and became a designer full time. "I loved the Journal," she says.

"I met so many interesting people. But nothing would have held me back. There's no limit, no lack of satisfaction, when you're on your own."

After high school, Marion had won scholarships to the Fashion Institute of Technology. N~xt she had learned patternmaking in a job creating doll's clothes.

During the Journal phase, Ben Compton appeared. He was a young theatfical costumer who had begun to make dresses for a few boutiques, needed an assistant and offered Marion $30 weekly for her spare time. Within a month she asked to be his partner. Ben was relieved; it saved $30 a week he did not have, anyway. They learned their business through trial and error, equal shareholders in nothing.

Many buyers could not understand Ben and Marion's unconventional vision. Their designs express a current high style for ethnic costume: colourful fantasies inspired by The Arabian Nights, American Indians, Asians, Africans, peasants, U.S. rural patchwork. One rich source of unusual materials is the vast fabric wealth of India.

Holmes and Compton call their firm "The Best of Three Worlds"-the old, the new and today's third world, countries where a national dress is worn. Two chic shops did foresee the salability of their offerings. So "Three Worlds" rented new space, took on a few helpers. It was then that Marion packed the merchandising lore gained at the Journal and bid goodbye to her colleagues.

"Even if this whole thing shou1d fold up," says Marion, "I'll be glad I made the effort and had this success."

In the new workroolll (above). these gorgeolls professional models wear Holmes-ColI/pron designs. At le.lt. partners Ben and Marion make a delivery ro a fashionable shop.

PS-iIIO

An Eden from everywhere With its infinite variety of flowers and plants and a herbarium of three million specimens, the New York Botanical Garden is a haven for city folk from the hubbub of daily life and a Mecca for scientists doing research in botany. ~D

NOT FAR FROM ranked buildings and hard gray pavements, the New York Botanical Garden appears like an oasis of green -with trees, shrubs and flowers from all over the world.

The 92-hectare retreat in the Bronx section of New York City is a showplace for exotic plants-Brazilian orchids, Corsican Baby's Tears, Malayan palms and rare conifers. Among the 12,000 species found Visitors take a quick tour of the Garden in its colourful mini train, above. In the background is the G.arden's main conservatory. Left, greenhouse, one of the Garden's eleven, is kept hot, dry, desert-like for cacti and other slfcculents.

in its enormous Conservatory and stately gardens are cfesert cacti, tropical blooms and Arctic lichens. The Garden is at its best in spring, when flowers make bright splashes of colour against the green of foliage. In some areas the air is heavy with the scent of magnolias, and 400 different varieties perfume the Rose Garden. There is a display of homely herbs-lavender, sage and thyme-and even a 17-hectare forest of hemlock. This is virgin forestit has never been cut or cleared since the earliest settlers.

Nature-starved New Yorkers who visit the Garden know that it takes a full day to see it thoroughly, so many of them board

the Floral Flyer, a colourfullittle train with open sides that chugs along the Garden's winding paths. On a normal day the Flyer's passengers might include: a matron seeking ideas for her backyard, a physician curious to see medicinal plants, an officeworker planning to do some bird-watching, or a housewife just wanting to rest her feet.

Most visitors find their way to the fourstorey Museum building which houses exhibits on the major economic plants-tea, coffee, cocoa, jute. Here they find one of the finest botanical and horticultural Iibraries in the world, with 65,000 volumes and 1,000 periodicals in many languages.

The Museum also contains a Herbarium, continued

used by students and professional people, that contains three million specimens of dried plants.

This is also the headquarters for the Garden's educational programme. A typical week will feature a children's workshop on plants, a nature walk, a movie on orchid culture, a lecture on flower photography or the art of bonsai-the Japanese method of growing dwarf trees. People come to the Garden to learn how to prune, how to combat pests and disease, how to judge flowers. In the "out;patient" clinic, worried owners get advice on how to treat their ailing plants.

But serving the public is only one aspect of the Garden's existence. On the cornerstone of the Museum building is this inscription: "Erected for the New York Botanical Garden by the City of New York for the Advancement of Botanical Knowledge-1897-1899."

And part of the Garden's world-famous reputation rests on its scientific programme.

It is headed by Dr. William Steere, Director, who is also a leading bryologist.

(Bryology is the study of mosses and liverwort.) Almost every year he spends some time in a polar region, muffled in fur parka and boots, scraping lichen from rocks. He and his wife are usually flown to a campsite, and left there with a gasoline stove and supplies.

Income from endowment, special gifts, and grants from federal agencies support a wide spectrum of botanical research. Most projects, of course, are completely mystifying to the layman. Eugene Jablonski, for instance, has completed a definitive study of the Euphorbiaceae of the Guayana Highland; Tetsuo Koyama is working on a monograph of tropical American sedges; and Alma Barksdale is investigating sexual reproduction in the water mould.

Research activity entails frequent comings and goings, as scientists inspect other collections or-with tons of equipmentset off to gather samples of their own. Thus Caroline Allen has travelled extensively in tropical America to see several genera of laurels in their native environment. Head curator Bassett Maguire has made or arranged more than 100 expeditions to the great flat-topped mountains of northeastern South America.

Once, coming out of the Venezuelan jungle, Maguire's party found that their food cache had all been stolen."We divided an ear of corn, grain by grain," he recalls.

On another occasion the sole protein ingredient of the group's evening stew was a giant earthworm. Such incidents are taken in stride, for all the researchers love their life. As one observer remarked: "Under those laboratory coats beat the venturesome hearts of men whose boyhood dreams of exploration are coming true."

For all its involvement abroad, the New York Botanical Garden is very much a part of the city's life. And one of its most successful programmes is the Children's Gardencraft Classes, attended by more than 250 youngsters. A recent New Yorker story described the graduation ceremony at which a brochure was distributed carrying

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the names of the crafters (Anthony Adornetto to Lawrence Zollino) and listing items in the bumper harvests: 347 kilograms of broccoli, 787 of tomatoes, 275 of carrots, 731 of beans, and more radishes than their families may have cared for: 17,995.

The ceremony ended, says the New Yorker, when a young gardener equipped with a ukelele sang several of her own compositions. One of them ran: "Inside of my garden, all covered with weeds, I grew all the spinach that anyone needs.

I planted it early in more than one row, And you should have seen how that spinach did grow.

And when it was ready, I took it all home, And then I ate all of the spinach I'd grown."

At the Garden's "clinic," free advice is given on ailing plants. An expert, above, examines a bedraggled Cineraria, hears the case history from its worried owner. Left, while little girl hills beans, boy behind tends lettuce. In the Children's Gardencraft Programme, youngsters earn honours for diligent h~eing and weeding.

An important activity of the Garden is its exploration programme. While on an expedition to a Venezuelan mountain, Dr. Koyama; top, relaxes in a hammock at base camp. Dr. Cronquest, above, hoists a slimy kelp from the bottom of a firth in Scotland. In tropic wilderness, Dr. Maguire, above right, stares at emergency fare: a giant earthworm, protein basis of his group's evening meal.

END

An easy credit system helps farmers and fishermen in the Mekong Delta to buy new equipment, raise productivity and better their living standards.

IN KIEN GIANG, a coastal province in the Mekong Delta, fishing has long been the traditional way of life. Each morning, like generations before them, the fishermen put out to sea in wooden boats; they cast their nets, and return to shore laden with the catch. But while the living pattern in Kien Giang has remained unchanged, its tempo has quickened perceptibly.

Some fishermen, for example, have had their boats fitted with marine engines, which take them further out to richer fishing waters. Others have built warehouses to guard against their product's high perishability.

Still others have bought new boats, repaired old ones, or invested in stronger nylon fish0- 50{5g; i ing nets.

Above: Nguyen Thanh Tung, branch manager of the All this has been done with loans Agricultural Development Bank, hands over loans Development to fishermen. Left: Using equipment bought with an from the Agricultural ADB credit, Thai Van Chi (in the foreground) super- Bank (AD B), through which the South vises netting of anchovy catch into hold of his boat. Vietnamese Government assists small He uses fish to make nuoc-mam, Vietnamese-style fish sauce. Below: Nguyen Phu Quoi and the ADB farmers and fishermen. With 43 branch branch manager look at his tractor, purchased with offices, ADB has steadily increased its a bank loan. The tractor enables Mr. Quoi to farm volume of loans-from 70,000 in 1968 not only his own tract, but also a neighbour's land.

continued

to more than 100,000 in year's loans totalled 6,800 astres (Rs. 425 million), and expected to grow by another in 1971.

1970. Last million pithis figure is 55 per cent

Nine out of ten ADB customers are small farmers or fishermen whose loans average 36,000 piastres (Rs. 2,250). And two-thirds of these loans are granted without collateral. They are used to buy tractors, fertilizer or insecticide, to improve livestock, or for short-term expenses.

Those who till the soil or harvest the seas have always been prey to uncertainty: capital is often not there when they need it. One answer to this problem has been the co-operative. Another is such government assistance programmes as Agricultural Development Bank.

Right: Lam Van Ban, here rubbing the back of a prize Duroc.pig, has borrowed three times from ADB to improve his stock and buildfirst-rate pig pens. Below:' Phu Ngoc Luc (with dipper) gives a sample taste ofnuoc-mam to ADB officials touring his plant. Recently Mr. Luc received a loan to build a new warehouse. Far right: Fisherman and wife show drying sharks' fins-highly prized gourmet delicacy-to the ADB branch manager.

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by AUSTEN NAZARETH

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An Escorts-Ford joint venture helps to put agriculture on wheels.

FOR CENTURIES, on this vast subcontinent, men farmed in the same custom-encrusted way. Their output remained as unchanging as their methods. Now, in the past few years, a ferment has begun in Indian agriculture, and the old, placid pattern of life is changing decisively. The farm revolution is on.

It is a revolution on several fronts. There is the increased planting of new, high-yielding varieties of food-grains. There is the expansion in the use of chemical fertilizers, and in their manufacture within the country. There is the widened spraying of fields with plant-protecting pesticides. There are the promotion of multiple cropping; the development of more efficient irrigation; the growing programmes of soil and water conservation.

And there is mechanized agriculture-the spreading use of tractors and other farm machinery.

The tractor has a lot to offer the Indian farmer. It pulls a plough that bites far deeper into the soil than one drawn by the traditional bullocks-and that is only the beginning of its virtues. Tractor power makes short work of a multitude of farm jobs: mechanical threshing, well-pumping, fertilizer and pesticide spraying. By stepping up the pace of farm operations, the tractor can enable three or four crops to be grown in the span of a single year.

Tn short, tractors constitute an important sector of the Indian farm revolution. And from this year onward, a key contribution to that sector is being made by a joint venture of an established Indian manufacturer, Escorts Ltd., and an American firm with a magic name that is almost synonymous with mass-production in the United States-Ford.

Early this year India's first Ford tractors started rolling off the assembly line. The joint venture is named Escorts Tractors Ltd. Escorts-manufacturer of tractors, motor-scooters, machinery -has its plant in Faridabad, some thirty kilometres out of New Delhi. The location is appropriate: Faridabad, a bustling Haryana township teeming with factories, is a very symbol of the new, rapidly industrializing India.

In his bright, modern office, Escorts Tractors' managing director Rajan Nanda talked of how Escorts Ltd. started in the farmmachinery business-in 1955, with the North India agency for Ferguson tractors. "Those initial years were an extremely difficult time to sell a tractor. Mechanization was unknown; the farmer still believed in his traditional ploughing methods; he was not prosperous and did not have the kind of income which could make possible the necessary investment. We had to make a very great effort to convince the farmers that mechanization was their future. But convince,them we did."

By persistence, hard work, and an accumulated understanding The Faridabad tractor (left) is built to the same exacting standards as its sister Fords in other countries. "It takes a hundred thousand men to make an Escorts tractor" -but only 3,000 of them are Escorts employees. continued

of rural realities, Escorts gradually set up a vast field organization, a key feature of which was extensive demonstrations to farmers of the advantages of the tractor and its implements. "We made it explicitly known that the tractor is only a prime mover; it's the cultivation you put behind it, by way of implements, that helps you penetrate the soil. The heat of India has made the soil so hard and crusty that unless you reach the moisture-point you cannot get good germination."

Escorts was able to expand the market successfully by introducing mechanization, particularly in the prosperous area where water was freely available-essentially Punjab, Haryana, and wes:~rn Uttar Pradesh.

With its carefully-built field organization for a solid base, the company went on from distributorship to production. In 1965, a tractor ("the first conception of which was developed in our Faridabad plant") with the Escorts name-plate was introduced.

Despite the handicap of putting "a totally unknown name, unknown brand" into competition with internationally established

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Managing director Nanda (right) confers with Fordmen W.R. Phillips (left) and E.E.S. Malmberg in Faridabad factory of Escorts Tractors.

makes, said Nanda, "we continued our efforts with zeal, determination, and initiative."

The collaboration with Ford, for one thing, has. put on the market an Escorts-built tractor with an internationally famous brand-name. To its own models of 27 and 37 horsepower-now 51 per cent of the country's total production-has been added the Ford 3000, a 48-hp machine.

The trim blue 3000schugging out of the Faridabad plant are built to the same exacting standards as their sister products of Ford factories in England, Belgium, the United States. The Escorts-Ford partnership in Escorts Tractors Ltd. is on a 60-40 per cent basis.

A pioneering effort in the field of tractor production, Nanda recalled, "was made by the famous Henry Ford I, together with his son, when England needed farm tractors after World War I. A product of the joint effort of father and son, it was called the Fordson tractor. It was manufactured and supplied to England in large numbers ranging from 150,000 to 200,000.

"Ford has, over the years, developed a very well-engineered

product. The Fordson has since been replaced by the Ford series of tractors, which start from about 42-hp and run up to as high as I50-hp."

"We see great possibilities with Ford," Nanda went on to say.

"There are three positive points to keep in mind. One is the constant updating of our products, and not continuing to produce old models. We must keep renovating, and introducing newer and better models like those available abroad, so that the Indian farmer is left at no disadvantage in relation to the foreign farmer.

"Second-and a very definite advantage-is the fact of Ford's worldwide experience. Despite Escorts' having the largest amount of field experience in agriculture among all firms in India, we derive great benefit from our association with Ford.

"Last but not least, through the Ford organization we not only inherit a good administration, but what we learn from them helps us keep our existing 37-hp model up to date (even though they cannot give us direct technical help on this, as it is not a Ford tractor)."

What are the advantages of a 48-hp machine? "We cannot predict whether the trend in India will be to small or to larger holdings in the future; but if to larger, there will obviously be growing demand for the bigger tractor," Nanda said. "If progressive farming and the mechanization revolution continue, we'can foresee increasing popularity for 48-hp tractors-particularly among farmers already involved in a three-crop cycle, as well as among those who farm black cotton soil, in which 37-hp tractors are relatively ineffective."

From the start, the company is committed to a progressive Indianization of the Ford tractor. This first year, the ratio of indigenous to imported content is 50-50. The second year, the percentage of Indian components will be 75; the third year, "91-or as close as possible to 100 per cent. The whole project is conceived around this rapid Indianization; we're planning our equipment, our plant and production conditions accordingly."

"Indianization" does not necessarily signify all-or even an overwhelming proportion of-the Indian-made parts being produced in the Escorts plant itself. Nanda cited advertisements his firm has run in the national dailies, to the effect that "It takes a hundred thousand men to make an Escorts tractor. Escorts employs only three thousand." This means a lot of business for Indian "vendor industries," mainly of small or medium size150 to 200 in all-and a lot of employment opportunities for Indian workers.

There is a small but steady two-way flow of Escorts engineers to the Ford organization abroad, and Ford engineers to Faridabad. "As you know, Ford is a vast institution," Nanda explained, "with a great number of specialists; a common saying is that Ford even has a specialist for the left front wheel of a tractornot that we want to avail ourselves of their specialities to this fine degree! But they have given us a lot of assistance, and we've found it very compatible working together."

It is a partnership which, with the years, can be expected to spread its benefits all round-to Escorts, to Ford, and particularly to the Indian farmer.

END Sliding smoothly down the assembly line, bright new Fords take shape (right) under the skilled hands of Indian workmen at Escorts Tractors Ltd.

Jon HiggiDS As a boy he became proficient on the piano and soon added the drum, flute, clarinet and trumpet to his repertoire. On Sunday afternoons the family quartet formed with Jon's mother at the piano, his father at the 'cello and Jon and his brother Haydnnow a jazz pianist appearing under the name Eddie Higgins-chiming in on whatever instruments were needed.

At Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, Jon continued his musical AT FIRSTthe young American seems inconodyssey.

He sang in the college choir and gruous as the featured soloist in a concert chamber music group, formed his own of South Indian music. His sandy hair and vocal jazz ensemble and' starred in an opera. blue eyes clash with his dhofi and kurfa His studies in a small seminar under the as he enters the hall and sits cross-legged revolutionary modern composer John Cage on a straw mat. But when Jon Higgins sent him in quest of new horizons. "I felt begins to sing, he blends into an age-old myself torn between the traditional Westtradition. At that m'oment he is Indian. ern music and the avant-garde," he exJon Higgins is one of the foremost plains. "When I was introduced to Indian Western exponents of Carnatic music tomusic, I fell into it like a duck into a pond." day with dozens of concerts all over India His plunge began in 1962 when the and America and three popular records to his credit. He has demonstrated and lec- famous Bharata Natyam dancer T. Balasaraswati appeared at Jacob's Pillow, a tured on South Indian music at numerous colleges and universities in the United dance centre in Massachusetts.

Higgins States andbas published articles in leading had already heard recordings of North Indian music. Now backstage he met the musical journals. Admirers have given him woman who was later to become "my the title Bhagavafar-maestro. mother away from home." In a brief conDescribing a Higgins concert in Delhi, one Indian newspaper critic wrote, "Scepversation, he asked her how he could learn ticism yielded place to wonder and warm more about Carnatic music and the artist appreciation.

He earned the unqualified recommended useful books and records. admiration of all."

Fortunately at this time Higgins' Alma "The saint Thyagarajahimself must have Mater was rapidly becoming an American centre for the study of Indian music. He blessed him," said another reviewer, inenrolled in a course on Carnatic music and voking the name of the great South Indian composer. ."Sheer perseverance and a recalls, "I really got involved. Even for a trained musician, the very beginning exersense of dedication to the muse of Carnatic music could be the only reason for his cises are musically stimulating. They are personal achievement." rhythmically interesting and melodically Still another critic had a more philo- . sophisticated."

Balasaraswati's brother T.Ranganathan sophical explanation of the Higgins phenomenon. "Jon is a genius," he said. "In his soon went to Wesleyan to teach the mridangam, the South Indian drum. Higgins, previous life he must have been an Indian."

Whatever his experience in prior lives, by this time a graduate student, studied Higgins owes the musical accomplishments under Ranganathan for two years and of his present existence to his own hard wrote a thesis on South Indian drumming for his master's degree in ethnomusicology. work and careful nurturing by two families Seeking the source of this music, Hig10,000 miles apart: his parents in New England and the Dhanammal family of gins in 1964 obtained a U.S. Fulbright grant to study in India. T. Vishwanathan, musicians in South India.

Music was always in the air at the Higthe brother of Balasaraswati and Rangagins home in Andover, Massachusetts, nathan and the third member of the Dhanammal family's current artistic genwhere young Jon's parents, both accomeration, agreed to teach him in Madras. plished musicians, surrounded him with the best of the Western classical tradition.

Despite his musical sophistication, Hig-

The unusual story of an American's musical odyssey that began with a Western classical education but has led to his being acclaimed as a singer of South Indian music.

gins' initial reaction in the capital of Carnatic music was like that of many novice listeners. On hearing his first concert, he recalls, "I could tell the musician was good, but I didn't like it at all. I couldn't feel any aesthetic pleasure in what he was doing."

Higgins spent almost every waking moment at Vishwanathan's home, studying under his patient but demanding teacher. He found that although his training as a Western musician helped him learn Carnatic techniques, he had to develop a newaesthetic sensitivity because, he explains, "I hadn't been here all those years when I could have been listening. I had absorbed a whole complex of assumptions regarding what was beautiful and what was not that are

characteristic of my own musical culture.

I had to adjust these assumptions to Indian music. In the beginning I would sing and not know if I were good or not. The only thingIknewwasthatI had to keep singing."

Higgins stayed in India for three years, first listening and studying and later performing. His concert career began in January 1965 before the demanding audience of the Thyagaraja Aradhana Festival in Tiruvayyaru, Tanjore District. "I was scared to death," he remem bel's. "There were ten to fifteen thousand people out there. At least they didn't boo me off the platform."

Instead he was invited to give performances in Madras, Calcutta, Delhi, Hyderabad, Trivandrum and other cities. Today, he is

Higgins in Bombay's Shanmukhananda Hall.

"Flawless concert," the press headlined his performance, hailing the American's "mastery over the variegated aspects of Camatic music."

quick to praise the "graciousness of the Indian people who were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to an American trying to learn their music."

The young artist returned to the United States in 1967 and found audiences eager to hear Indian music, which had been introduced by Ravi Shankar. Flower children, lured by the exotic appeal of the East, flocked to his concerts. "They were very responsive," Higgins comments, "yet I had the feeling I could be singing scales

and they would be just as appreciative."

As the fad died away, however, an enthnsiastic and seriously interested audience remained, and Higgins was kept busy giving concerts and lecture demonstrations.

Predictably not every audience was immediately capable of appreciating this music so different from anything they had heard before. Higgins found he could counter the occasional reactions of bewilderment or boredom by introducing the less formal atmosphere of a concert in India. He would invite some listeners to sit near him on the stage and explain that, as in India, spectators should relax and feel free to take a stroll and return if they found (continued) their seats getting too hard.

A U.S. performance by famed Bharata Natyam dancer Balasaraswati (left) first sparked Jon Higgins's interest in Carnatic music. Since his return to Madras in 1969, Higgins (below) has immersed himself even more deeply in the study of his adopted musical tradition.

Young 20th-century American composers looking for new ways of expressing themselves, says Higgins, are beneficially influenced by the music of India.

"It's very helpful if there are Indians in the audience," Higgins says. "They clap in the right places and shout approval in the middle if they particularly like something. The Americans are used to clapping only at the end of a piece, but if the Indians provide an example, they start to loosen up and they listen in a different way."

On one occasion Higgins even experimented with a public version of the old family concerts. He joined his brother, Eddie Higgins, in a friendly musical debate, alternating Carnatic music with American jazz before a delighted audience.

Higgins recognizes his debt to his teacher. "Vishwanathan is my guru," he says. "I owe all that I am in this music to him." The guru-student relationship entered a new phase when Vishwanathan went to Wesleyan in 1967. As fellow students working on their Ph.D. degrees, they

were inseparable. "We did everything together, studied together, went to the movies together, helped each other out," Higgins recalls. "Vishwanathan is my best friend. I feel that he is my brother."

Since his return to Madras in 1969, Higgins has immersed himself in the study of new music. At the suggestion of Vishwanathan, now a visiting teacher at the California Institute of the Arts, he has worked with the famed Carnatic singer, Ramnad Krishnan, to expand his concert repertoire.

With Balasaraswati he has learned dance compositions for his Ph.D. thesis, an analysis of the music of Bharata Natyam.

Higgins hopes to explain the basic elements of the dance music and to show its role in creating the total aesthetic impact of a performance. Balasaraswati's help has been invaluable, and Higgins says, "She is my inspiration and the core of my thesis."

No artist could ask for more inspiring instruction than the lessons Higgins attends at the homes of Ramnad Krishnan and Balasaraswati. Student and instructor -Higgins calls only Vishwanathan his teacher-sit facing each other on a mat and trade ancient lines of music, preserved in the memories and tattered notebooks of the artists. Neighbours, family members and other musicians sit quietly in corners or adjacent rooms listening.

With Ramnad Krishnan, Higgins learns by singing. Krishnan sings a line. Then Higgins tries. Then he listens to Krishnan again, then tries again, then listens again.

Finally they seem to agree and with a shared smile go on to another line or another composition.

The sessions with Balasaraswati' are more animated, for the dancer explains the music to him not only by singing but also with abhinaya, the gestures of Bharata Natyam. When Higgins sings the phrase "lotus-eyed" too abruptly, her hands show

him a lotus opening slowly and gracefully.

In a slightly ribald piece a courtesan demands a large sack of money from her lover, and Balasaraswati holds out her arms as if she were carrying a big bag and says, "You must sing this way because it is so heavy!"

The artist's love of Carnatic music permeates the atmosphere in both homes. Higgins carries this feeling back with him to the United States where he looks forward to a career as a musical schizophrenic. He does not believe that the pursuit of both Indian and Western music is impossible and maintains his development as a Carnatic singer has made him a better Western classical musician.

Higgins absolutely refuses to judge the comparative worth of Indian and Western music, finding each tradition rich in its own way. Nor does he plan to write an Indian symphony, since he questions the value of "artificial mergers" of the two musical cultures. "Trying to merge the two from anything less than an enormously sophisticated experience with both will result in something less than either," he says. Higgins does believe Indian music will influence the West in a more subtle sense.

"Young Americans are looking for hew ways to express themselves as twentiethcentury composers," he explains. "They can be, and in fact are, beneficially influenced by Indian music, by its spiritual and introspective qualities, by its expanded sense of time and by the great opportunity it offers for individual creativity.

"In Western music a singer re-creates what is written," he continues. "In Indian music we do that too, but we also have a chance to improvise. You have a chance to shape something personal, but you also run the risk of failing. It's a real gamble."

The gamble is one Jon Higgins is taking -and winning.

END

Spooks are the stars of Disneyland's newest attraction.

GRACEFUL, almost demure, its finger-like porch columns clutching a New Orleansstyle lacework of wrought iron, the house is the sort of place wealthy plantation owners in America's Deep South used to build for their wives. There is nothing whatever about its outward appearance that would seem to justify the claim that it is a haven for ghosts and other creatures of the spirit world. But step inside, walk through the family art gallery and visit the two-tiered ballroom, and you come face to face with more eerie apparitions than ever jousted for attention in a night of troubled sleep.

Happily, however, there is not a mean bone in their see-through bodies. They're not really interested in frightening you -only in causing astonished laughter.

After all, these are Disneyland ghoststhe residents of a fascinating new attraction called "The Haunted Mansion." And who ever heard of anyone being frightened in Disneyland?

Indeed, of all the attractions to be found in this world of make-believe which the

continued Disneyland's stately "Haunted Mansion" (below) contains many rooms peopled by eerie characters-such as the hall at right, which is filled with haunting melodies as a resident ghost strikes up a chilling tune.

Left: a scene in the Mansion's "graveyard."

late Walt Disney created in Anaheim, California, the "Haunted Mansion" is probably the most laugh-provoking.

Even the "gravediggers" in the basement cemetery draw guffaws.

But a word of warning: If you are technically inclined, and like to know how things work, the "Haunted Mansion" will prove disturbing when you visit it. You'll spend hours afterwards trying to figure out how marble statues can break into sly grins as you watch, how innocent portraits can change abruptly into grotesque gargoyles, how a vaporous, high-hatted musician can wrench tunes from an organ, how furniture can float through the air, how "ghastly ghouls" can chat amiably wi¡th visitors, how the cavernous ballroom can suddenly be filled with wispy dancers who emerge from nowhere, how ...

And even when you think you have the answers, you'll probably be only partially right. Ask a Disneyland technician for explanations and all you will get is a knowing smile and an unenlightening, "We use our own 'Audio-Animatronics' system, along with some illusion-creating techniques we perfected a few years ago."

It took considerable probing. but we finally did learn how the Disneyland "imagineers" and "illusioneers;" as the technicians call themselves, are able to make ghosts materialize and dematerialize at will and cause objects and artificial animals to float through the air wi thout visi ble support.

We had to promise not to tell, however.

It is no secret, though, how the more substantial figures in Disneyland, such as

the marble statues in the "Haunted Mansion," are made to move, change expressions and emit sounds. The "Audio-Animatronics" system has been in use at Disneyland for years. It permits dinosaurs to snap at one another, grumbling bears to paw the air, jungle birds to sing in unison, and "Abraham Lincoln" to deliver a ten-minute address on liberty in a theatre in Disneyland's Town Square-speaking and gesturing in an incredibly lifelike manner, and capable of 275,000 different combinations of movements.

Such animated, three-dimensional creations, synchronized with taped recordings, are conceived and fashioned in a huge workshop manned by 125 "imagineers" and "illusioneers." The outsides of the various figures are of flexible plastic; the insides are unbelievably intricate, with electronically operated parts that make movement in any direction possible once a model has been "programmed" for a given part.

Watching the technicians breathe life into their mechanical brainchildren, you get the uneasy feeling that somehow you have been transported into a factory of the future, where robots are being assembled for some Orwellian purpose.

As with most of the attractions in Disneyland, exploring the "Haunted Mansion" is simplicity itself, once the long wait in line is over. You pass through huge oak doors into a hallway and then into what you assume to be a parlour. The doors close, the lights dim, and, as you stare at a series of staid portraits, you sense movement. Then you notice that the paintings

are changing, stretching, turning into hilarious caricatures. It dawns on you that you and the others are in a huge elevator.

But are you going up or down?

Down it is, into the crypt-like chill of a long, dark corridor. Lightning flashes ominously through a series of tall windows, illuminating an artificial garden outside and more portraits inside. Then you are in a corridor of doors ... doors that develop faces which grimace and groan.

You ride the rest of the way in a twopassenger "carriage" on a continuously moving, Disney-developed "Omnimover" system ... into still cooler rooms, past a variety of ingenious scenes in which ghosts, fluttering bats, talking ravens, and baying hounds abound. Finally, the ride is over, and as you step out into the sunlight you hear your son cry, "Let's go again, Dad!" Later, you learn that the unique "Omnimover"' system consists of 131 carriages, each capable of l80-degree turns to both left and right and each programme.d to shift you automatically to a new scene or sound. The system can carry as many as 2,616 persons through the mansion every hour of operation.

You learn, too, that the mansion is Disneyland's fifty-third major "adventure."

It was conceived by Disney himself more than ten years ago, and it took almost that long for the planning, research, development and outfitting to be completed.

"Disneyland," its founder once said, "will never be completed. It will continue to grow, to add new things as long as there is imagination left in the world." The men and women who were his colleagues say that the ideas, dreams and detailed plans which Walt Disney left behind when he died in 1966 will provide the basis for many more "adventures" to be created in the years to come.

But, one "imagineer" added, "if you think Disneyland is something, wait until you see Walt Disney World!" That monument to Disney's creativity is now being built on 2,500 acres near Orlando, Florida.

It is scheduled to open this Octoberwith 24,900 more acres set aside for later expansion.

It should indeed be "something." Especially if it has a "Haunted Mansion" of its own.

END All right. A Matterhorn, too.

A Disneyland technician in animated conversation with a "resident" of the Haunted Mansion (right). Every "body" loves a waltz in the Mansion's ballroom (left).