SPAN: April 1978

NEWSUNIN THE MAKING

Cygnus is a constellation of the northern hemisphere, one of the most interesting regions of the Milky Way for astronomical research. A "disk-star" has been discovered in Cygnus by scientists from the University of Arizona and the Ames Research Center in California. The evolv-

ing star is believed to be a sun in the making; its mass is 30 times that of our sun, and it is surrounded by a glowing disk some 224 million kilometers across. The disk-star (artist's conception above) may provide fresh insights into the formation of the solar system and of earth itself.

SPAN A LEITER FROM THE PUBliSHER After the Carter Visit: Dr. Thomas Thornton and Pran Chopra Discuss Indo-U.S. Relations Thomas P. Thornton is the staff member for South Asia on the National Security Council, one of the U.S. President's executive agencies. As an expert on Indo-U.S. relations, he accompanied his chief, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Zbigniew Brzezinski, to New Delhi as an adviser during President Carter's visit. Dr. Thornton, who at one time early in his career was posted in India for four years, remained a few days after the President's departure. He visited Uttar Pradesh and, on his return from Lucknow, he granted an interview to Pran Chopra, a leading Indianjournalist and political commentator.

SPAN is happy to be able to publish a transcript of that interview (page 2). Coming in the wake of President Carter's visit, it is of particular interest for its appraisal of current relations between India and the United States. Mr. Chopra asked probing questions; Dr. Thornton replied candidly.

They talked frankly abouj such matters as donor-recipient relationships, the possibilities of liberalizing trade and the limitations of trade concessions. What are the chances for increased private investment in India? Of transferring American technological know-how? Naturally, the complex subject of nuclear technology, proliferation and full-scope safeguards arose. The conversation ranged over the globe.

Interviewer and interviewee speculated on whether a Test Ban Treaty will be signed soon. They discussed the iniportance of the development of river water resources in the subcontinent and concluded by reviewing the recent history of cultural exchanges between the United States and India and the outlook in view of the changed climate in the relations between the two countries.

Wide-ranging and forthcoming, the interview has pride of place in this issue and we hope SPAN readers will find it as engrossing as we did.

A concrete example of Indians and Americans working together at a high technological level is described in this issue in an article about how the visit of President Carter was telecast live and in color from New Delhi by satellite to the United States via the ground station at Dehra Dun which was opened in 1976. The author, Ernest Weatherall, is an American reporter long resident in India, with an intimate knowledge of broadcasting techniques. He has personally seen the development of Indian technological know-how, and he describes the achievement in fascinating detail.

Also highlighted in this issue: .

• "The Right to Dissent," an award-winning essay by a 17-year-old American honor student. Asked why he chose this subject, Arthur Evenchik replied, "If we want to make any changes in American society, we have to listen to the opinions of others."

• "World Cinema: No Obituaries, Please" is a lively round up of the recent international film festival at Madras, where 15 American films formed the largest contingent shown from any foreign country. "New Landmarks in Indian Cinema" appraises the 19 Indian films screened at the festival, singling out films by Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, the products of the Film and TV Institute at Pune, and the new cinema in the South. The author, John Warrington, an English critic, concludes that India has a new group of filmmakers of high talent and sensitivity, capable of bringing fresh international prestige to Indian cinema .

• Finally, in "0, Chicago!", a sensitive article, Dr. Chirantan Kulshrestha describes his experience as a graduate student in one of America's great cities.

-J.W.G.

How the Carter Visit Was Telecast Live to America

by Ernest Weatherall

10 14 16 20

22

Economics: How Scientific a Science?

by Robert L. Heilbroner

Learning About Bread and Business Talented Teenagers

26

30 33 36

World Cinema: No Obituaries, Please

by Chidananda Dasgupta

Benjamin Lee Whorl and the Quest for Meaning

by Jacquelin Singh

40 44 49 Front cover: This watercolor painting, inspired by the colors of an American gum machine, is the creation of 15-year-old Ohio schoolgirl Gayle Daluca. It is one of the many paintings displayed recently in New York by talented teenage artists from all over the United States. See story on pages 22-25.

Back cover: One of Chicago's newest landmarks is Water Tower Place, an exciting center for shopping and sightseeing. Picture shows the elevator bank of the building, gleaming with mirror, stainless steel and glass surfaces.

JACOB SLOAN, Editor; JAY W. GILDNER, Publisher.

Managing Editor: Chidananda Dasgupta. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu.

Editorial Staff: Krishan Gabrani, Nirmal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes.

Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Aroon Purie at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Photographs; Inside front cover-NASA. 2-R.N.Khanna.

5-Avinash Pasricha. 6-8-Pramod Pushkarna except 6 bottom by Avinash Pasricha. IO-Joan Sydlow. 14-courtesy Wells Fargo Bank. 21-courtesy Martin Marietta Today. 39-Avinash Pasricha. 4O-Shrimal Studio. 42-43-Howard Sochurek, Life. 49-NASA. Back cover-Otis Elevator Company.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission. write to the Editor. Price of magazine: one year's subscription (12 issues), 18 rupees; single copy, 2 rupees 50 paise. For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Managet, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Mars, New Delhi 110001. (See change of address form on page 48.)

AFTER THE CARTER VISIT DR.THOMAS THORNTON AND PRAN CHOPRA DISCUSS INDO-U.S. RELATIONS

Dr. Thomas Thornton, a senior staff member for South Asia of the U.S. National Security Council, is a key American policy maker on matters relating to India. He took part in the high-level IndoU.S. talks during President Carter's recent visit to India. SPAN presents on these pages a wideranging discussion between Dr. Thornton and Pran Chopra, a leading Indian political commentator, on the import of the Carter visit for Indo-U.S. relations.

CHOPRA: I would like to begin by asking a broad question on the economic relation路 ship between India and the United States.

Over the past few years, food production in India has picked up, and India's need of foreign aid has somewhat receded. Therefore, the two areas in which Indo-U.S. economic relations have been most active in the past-U.S. food. exports and financial aid to India-are going to be less active. To what extent do you feel that other forms of economic cooperationcanfill this gap?

I notice that in Indo-Soviet economic relations, some new areas have developed.

The old economic relationship, which was in the form of Soviet aid for the establishment of heavy industry in India, is being replaced a lot more by trade between India and the Soviet Union, and in more recent years joint collaboration between India and the Soviet路 Union in third countries has become another new dimension in Indo-路 Soviet relations. Do yOf,lsee similar developments taking place in Indo-U.S. economic relations?

THORNTON: Your description of the previous Indo-U.S. economic relationship as one of food aid and bilateral financial assistance is accurate. This was perhaps appropriate~certainly the food aid was very appropriate at times when it was badly needed-and there will be a continu-

ing bilateral aid relationship.

But these are essentially donor-recipient relationships, and I don't think that they are over the long term healthy relationships.

Obviously, in terms of certain immediate requirements, in terms of certain specialized things that we can do, we will continue to be helpful where we can.

But the relationship between two of the world's larger countries and two of the world's ten largest economies should be much broader, and it should not focus on what is an unnatural kind of relationship.

It was always quite clear that ultimately trade, investment, joint ventures and so forth, would have to take over as the main component of the relationship. I think this is what we are seeing now.

Now that does not say it's going to be easy. In many ways it is easier for the American Government to give aid than it is to give trade concessions, because our people are more directly affeCted .by changes in trade patterns. This problem, of course, is not peculiar to U.S. relations with India; we have it with a number of countries that are moving out of the aid relationship and into normal trading relationships.

The present Administration has taken a strong stand on free trade, especially in the multilateral trade negotiations in

Geneva, but there are limits to what we can do. The wage rates in countries such as India are so low that we just can't totally open our market up. But we can liberalize trade to a considerable extent, and we are trying to liberalize it so that a more natural and more mature relationship emerges between the two countries ..

You also mentioned collaboration in third countries. This is something .which is being done already. I was looking at some data recently that showed that in the Persian Gulf and several other places there has been some quite useful cooperation between Indian and American private companies and I think even between some Indian state companies and American private enterprises.

They are mostly small-scale. Two路 of them are restaurants in the United States, but there are something like 23 ventures.

There is scope for more and I think it makes a lot of sense in the areas close to India and maybe even farther away.

It is easy to exaggerate the possibilities of such cooperation, but it can be a useful sort of input to the relationship. There is a substantial difficulty in the sense that the Indian Government acts as a government and we act in terms of our private companies. Were it to be between private Indian companies and private American companies, it would probably be easier.

CHOPRA: It was expected somehow in would welcome your comments on how you India before President Carter came that think they would affect the pattern and oneof theannouncedand visible effects of the quantity of u.s. investments in India.

One is that Indian investment policy is visit would be some liberalization of Indian exports to the United States, particularly generally moving away from foreign equity in recognition of the fact that dollar aid participation. Purchase of technology rather and food aid having fallen into the back- than equity participation for the sake of ground, trade relations would be the more importing technology has become the more dominant theme in Indian investment policy. natural line of development for the future, The second development is that there and bfcause there is an imbalance in trade against India, exports from India would have been three shifts: one in economic be allowed in a bit more. It would seem that emphasis from industry to agriculture, this particular matter hasn't been explored and another within industry a shift toas much as was expected; at any rate not ward small-scale industry, cottage inmuch has emerged. Would you like to dustry; and a third, to indigenous techcomment? nology. All these three shifts-toward THORNTON: I don't think the Indian agriculture, toward small-scale industry, side really ever believed that there would and toward indigenous technology-have be that kind of specific negotiation in the effect of reducing the room for investconnection with this visit. The subject ment in the form of equity. How would of general access to the American market this affect the climate for u.s. investments was certainly raised in the expanded in India, which is the thirdfront of economic meetings between the President and the cooperation between India and the United States?

Prime Minister and some of the Cabinet Ministers, and also in the Indo-U.S. Joint THORNTON: I think it would reduce Commission. Finance Minister H.M. Patel the need for foreign technology, except pointed out the problems of growing in a very broad research sense. The protectionism, which we recognize also. chances of investment would probably be But these are things which would have considerably reduced in some of these to be worked out at a detailed level. You areas, but there are many other areas can't really expect the Prime Minister which are going to continue to grow in the of India and the President of the United Indian economy. There is a very large States to decide the tariff rates on tanned modern sector in India that is going to hides. So, the visit has been geared to continue to develop. Conceivably-and setting a general favorable atmosphere I'm just speculating here-you could have in which that sort of detailed negotiation a situation where the government was so would be carried on. focused on small-scale and agricultural But the U.S. focus is on a general industry that the large-scale industry reduction in tariff barriers through the would turn abroad for investment.

MTN-Multilateral Trade Negotiations.

There is also the Generalized System of CHOPRA: There is another, an historical Preferences from which India profits. aspect of the question that might also A large amount of the Indian trade with interest you. I would welcome your comthe United States is under the GSP head- ment. In the last two decades, when Indian ing, and more will probably be added. industry was developing to its present Ultimately we need a free trading sys- stage-growing from its quite rudimentary tem in which imports and exports flow beginnings to become one of the ten freely both ways-toward the developing leading industrialized countries of the world, countries and toward the developed as you said-during that period two separate countries, because increasingly, as a coun- trends developed, one in Indo-Soviet ecotry like India or Brazil or Taiwan becomes nomic relations, the other in Indo-U.S. more and more proficient and more and economic relations. On the Indo-Soviet more effective in the American market, axis, investment, either financial or technowe might see the trade balance moving logical or in supplies and materials from the in its favor. We've seen this happen in Soviet side, was mostly going into the largescale public sector. U.S. investment was Japan ..

Besides, the United States also has to mostly going into the organized private be able to sell freely in foreign markets sector. Now as part of the shift that seems if we are going to be able to buy there. to have taken place in Indian economic This is not an immediate problem with thinking and planning, the large-scale orIndia, but it is one which I think we have ganized private sector gets squeezed in to keep in view in building toward on the one side by the large-scale organized the future. public sector and on the other side by the new weight to be given to the small-scale CHOPRA: Another area of Indo-U.S. eco- manufacturer. Would this trend tend to nomic relations, which used to be rather restrict the scope for u.s. investment in more prominent in the past than it has been thefuture.? of late, is investments-American equity THORNTON: Well, if the Indian Governinvestments in India. Two things have ment's resources are going in two different happened in India in recent months and I ways and the government wants to see a

more'vital private sector develop, that might open up the possibilities for foreign investment even more. It all depends on the Indian Government policy. But if the decision isn't made to develop the private sector, then you're probably right, there would be less U.S. investment under those circumstances.

Also, to a great extent it is going to depend on the investment climate as perceived by the American investor. This continues to be one major determining factor in how large American investment is in India. The other factor being, of course, the policy of the Indian Government. The two are intimately related.

Generally the American private investor is very chary about investment in India.

Rightly or wrongly, the word is out in American investment circles that India is not receptive to foreign investment.

What is required is an increased awareness on the part of the American investor as to what exactly the climate is-and, of course, a climate in India that is attractive to the investor.

These are things that the President and the Prime Minister talked about. Investment is an almost indispensable element in Indo-U.S. economic relations, if American technology and capital are to flow into India. The technology particularly has to come though the American private sector, since the American public sector does not own very much technology.

CHOPRA: What line of action is likely to emerge from President Carter's visit and the disoussions afterward in this question of removing the impediments to increased American investment?

THORNTON: The methods will be educational, in the sense that there will be high level American business groups in better contact with the Government of India, as well as contacts at a very senior governmental level. There will be an exchange of views and an exchange of visits.

CHOPRA: Has any particular calendar orprogram been set upfor this?

THORNTON: No, not yet. That's now in the process of being worked out.

I believe Secretary Vance is charged WIth the responsibility for seeing to it, together with the Indo-U.S. Business Council, which is loosely affiliated to the Joint Commission. It will be pursued there-through the State Department and then through the Joint Commission and in the Business Council.

CHOPRA: Shall we now go on to what became a touchy subject during the visit.

First of all, I am really quite confused as to what exactly are the areas of disagreement between India and America on this question of nuclear technology. Could you explain, then, what they are?

'India is not a battleground where we or the Soviets are going to win. India is going to win in India.

Or India will lose in India. There is really very little that we or the Soviet Union can do to deflect India from its own course of national interest even if we should want to.'

THORNTON: The problem concerns our supply of light enriched uranium to the Indian nuclear reactor at Tarapur. We have been regularly supplying this uranium to India for a number of years. These shipments, under current practice, are recommended by the President and then authorized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Government of India wants these shipments to continue and we would like to be able to continue them also.

On our side, we are concerned -or let me even broaden it, the international community by and large is concernedthat all countries that are not signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or otherwise do not have their facilities safeguarded, accept full-scope safeguards. This involves inspection by representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a U.N. organization of which India is a founding member.

We have legislation pending which, in fact, will require us to terminate nuclear cooperation with any country that does not have full-scope safeguards on its nuclear program. That legislation has not been passed yet, but it will be very shortly, and these provisions will take effect within 18 months. So, there is a situation emerging in which either a compromise will be found, or we will have to withdraw from the supply of nuclear materials to Tarapur.

Tarapur itself is safeguarded. The Government of India's concern, as I understand it, is that the facilities which they have built and operate indigenously should not be subjected to safeguards.

The Government of India says that there is no need to do so because it is not involved in an explosives, and certainly not in a weapons program. Secondly, since India built its own facilities, why should anybody else have the right to .look at them?

Certainly, inspection is a matter within the sovereign judgment of the Government of India. What we are trying to do though -and again when I say we, it is not just the United States-we are trying to create an international system of safeguards that does not rely necessarily on the good word of one country or another.

I have no doubt that the GoveJ;llment of India is perfectly sincere and honest.

But I might not make the same judgment about all countries, and you can't very well have a situation where you say,

"Yes, I believe India, but I don't believe country X, therefore India doesn't have to have safeguards and country X does."

What we need is a broad international system with the widest possible application that ultimately embraces all countries and all facilities.

CHOPRA: Do you think that there is any substance in the Indian feeling or misgiving that the fulf-scope inspection or other elements of the safeguards would hinder the full development, or the autonomous, indigenous development of nuclear technology by India?

THORNTON: I can understand concerns on this score, but I do not think there is substance to them Mter all countries such as Canada, Germany, Japan have full-scope safeguards, and their nuclear development has not been hindered in any way. They have progressed at least as well as India in the development of nuclear technology, and they have been able to do this under a system of IAEA inspections. I really don't understand why India could not do the same thing.

There are Indian inspectors on the IAEA teams that go to countries such as Canada and Japan. We hope that the Indian Government will make a thorough study of what safeguards do entail, because we believe they would find that the safeguards are not any significant burden.

of the IAEA. Now, I frankly don't know what legal sanction the board of governors has beyond suspending cooperation. I suspect there isn't any.

But it is in the nature of international agreements that they depend on international opinion to support them. We don't have an international army that could then march on the country that is in violation and take over its plant.

CHOPRA: What is the U.S. Government's attitude to the question of peaceful nuclear explosions?

THORNTON: We have never found a good use for peaceful nuclear explosions.

The Soviet Union has been much more interested in them than we are, but it too has not found a good use for them as far as we've been able to tell. Indeed, the Soviet Union has agreed, at least tentatively, to forego them for a period of time under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Our problem is not whether a country wants to dig holes or not, but that you cannot tell the difference between a peaceful nuclear explosion and a military explosion. A country that sets off a series of-peaceful nuclear explosions could equally well be developing nuclear weapons. There is no way to tell. As a matter of general principle, there has to be a line drawn, and we see no way to draw the line except by banning all explosions. This is what we are trying to do under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would also ban all American explosions, those of the Soviet Union and of all other signatories.

I would not exclude forever the possibility that someday under international control and supervision nuclear explosions could be used for something useful, whether it be canal digging or whatever.

But so far our scientists have not found a way that would be cost-effective to use nuclear explosive technology .

CHOPRA: Youusedtheword"inspection" as part of the safeguards. Does inspection mean just that, that is inspection, or does it go on from inspection to prohibition of A, B, C-whatever steps the inspector might discover? Does prohibition of the intended steps follow inspection?

THORNTON: I would say now we are getting into a technical area of how exactly inspections work. I think that problems relating to inspection could be of two kinds. If a country building a certain plant were to build into it processes that CHOPRA: A program of developing the were inherently uninspectable, then the technology of peaceful nuclear explosions, inspectors should report back to IAEA and a series of experiments was begun and say that this will not be an acceptable in the United States and, indeed, in the institution.

Soviet Union too-probably more extenOr, the inspectors might find a viola- sively in the Soviet Union. Are those extion-let's say a large amount of pluto- periments continuing or have you come to nium is missing and everybody stands the conclusion that this is not a path worth around with very embarrassed looks on following anymore, one into which more their faces and won't tell the inspectors effort and money needs to be invested? what happened to it. Then the inspectors THORNTON: For our part we've come (Text continued on page 45) would go back to the board of governors

Glimpses of the media in action during President Carter's visit. Facing page, clockwise from top left: News photographers ready their cameras .. technician repairs electronic camera with specialized equipment .. antenna and microwave tower at the Dehra Dun earth station, which went into commercial operation in December 1976, and whence coverage was beamed to the United States via satellite ..American engineers at Overseas Communications Service, Delhi, watch television monitors and edit videotape. This page, top: Television superstar Barbara Walters. Right: Delhi TV provided live coverage of President Carter's arrival at Palam airport and his speeches at the Ramlila Maidan and in the Indian Parliament (below).

networks, ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation), CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), and NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation). The reason for their concern was that although video newstape had been satellited from India's new ground station at Dehra Dun, it had been done only in black and white. Now, the American television networks wanted not only to send their stories in color but also to do live satellites -that is, let American viewers see what was going on in India during the President's visit while the events were actually happening.

This presented a logistical problem for the American TV technicians. Each network had to bring in at least a ton of special equipment, since there were no color telecasting facilities in India. The Indian Government's Posts and Telegraphs division in the Ministry of Communications set an entire floor aside for the American networks and their equipment in the new Overseas Communications Service (OCS) building in New Delhi.

Posts and Telegraphs also set aside eight international lines for telex machines, and 40 for international calls in the press center set up at the Ashoka Hotel.

One circuit called the "White Line" was given to the TV networks. This was open 24 hours a day, so producers and technicians had instant communication with their New York and Washington studios. Fifteen lines were given to the White House, including the classified hot line on which the President keeps in contact with the Pentagon and his Cabinet.

All these lines were connected to satellite circuits which would beam the calls to London, to be relayed by another satellite to the United States.

The American networks had several hundred thousand dollars invested in the Delhi segment of the President's trip. If the TV coverage could not be satellited in color, most of it would not be used, since in the United States black-andwhite segments are only televised by the networks in an emergency. Then there was the question whether there could be live coverage during the President's stay in Delhi.

The liaison man between the American networks and the Indian engineers at OCS and the ground station at Dehra Dun was Raj Bhonsle, chief of audiovisual operations at the U.S. Information Service (USIS) in New Delhi, who worked closely with Prem Gupta, chief engineer, and Sukant Jain, video engineer. "Fortunately, almost all the Indian engineers

we worked with on President 'Carter's visit were the same ones we had worked with nine years ago, when President Nixon had visited Delhi," Gupta explained. "During that visit we had no way to satellite television film. The footage was put on the first plane going to Hong Kong, London or wherever there were satellite facilities. Now with the new ground station in Dehra Dun, India has joined the worldwide satellite circuit.

But first we had to make sure everything was ready to transmit color."

The USIS technicians made several trips to the ground station at Dehra Dun to confer with the engineers there. The Lee Thornton, TV reporter for CBS, records station, which op,ened over a year ago, a story just before Presideni Carter's departure. is connected with OCS in Delhi by a microwave circuit. Until this station While the President was in Delhi, it was went into operation it was impossible NBC's turn to be the "pool coordinator." to satellite TV videotape or film from This meant that NBC, in addition to Delhi, although this could be done from satelliting its own videotape coverage, Bombay, which was connected via micro- also sent the tapes of ABC and CBS. Each network edited its own tape, wave to India's first ground station at and brought the finished product to be Pune.

The problem of color turned out to satellited. Received in New York, it be no problem. It had been feared that was ready to be aired unless the producers because of the difference between Indian there wanted to cut down on the length.

The coolest man in the OCS control and American standards extra equipment and converters would have to be center on New Year's Day, was Al Chamused to make both systems compatible. bers, the producer for the pool, who is the The difference was only slight and it chief Asian producer for NBC. Indian did not give rise to any problems. When engineers had also stayed up all night the first test pattern, which was sent to see how the first satelliting in color from the OCS building in Delhi to the would go, and to be on hand if something ground station in Dehra Dun, was received went wrong. A large number of techniback in Delhi, the color was found to cians from the three networks along with be perfect. The American networks also Indian engineers crowded around waiting made a test with their own patterns and for the first segment to be fed to New York, their eyes on the TV monitor were happy with the results.

Now that the color problem had been showing what was being sent.

Finally Al Chambers said to a technisolved, the question was wheth-er the Indian Posts and Telegraphs facilities and cian, "Roll it!" and the videotape began the Dehra Dun ground station could rolling. Not once during the feed did New take daily feeds for the three American TV York interrupt with the feared "Your networks while the President was in picture is breaking up!" or "Try again, India. Tests proved they could, but things your color isn't registering!" or "We've can always go wrong during the actual got some distortion. Start from the top again!" When the first segment was sent, operations.

Although the three American networks Chambers asked the technicians over the are commercial and thus fiercely compe- phone, "How received?" The answer titive, they usually get together and book came, "Okay, let's have the next one."

The hours and weeks of work by the a block of time on the satellite, because of the great expense involved in doing Indian and American technicians had so individually. These time blocks are paid off. The first pool satellite to New booked, if possible, before the networks' York in color had been such a success evening news shows or morning programs. that afterward it became routine. The Because of the time difference between next challenge was to do a live satellite.

Delhi and the Eastern United States, Unfortunately because of time differences, the President's arrival and his first day the President's address to India's Parliain Delhi were satellited at 3 o'clock in ment was too early for NBC's "Today" the morning to New York, in time for the show and its competitor, ABC's "Good competitive network evening news shows. Morning America." However, NBC de-

cided to let its correspondent Judy Woodruff do a live satellite feed later from the Parliament building telling viewers what President Carter had saia to India's lawmakers.

Judy was able, in the parlance of television, to do a "two way" with the host of the "Today" show, Tom Brokaw.

This is an instant two-way conversation.

It was possible because of a microwave connection between the Parliament building and OCS, which in turn was microwaved to the ground station at Dehra Dun, then from there satellited to London and thence through another satellite to New York. Brokaw's replies were returned over the reverse circuit.

The Carter visit produced another important first: for the first time, cameras of any kind were allowed in India's Parliament-not only cameras of the American networks, but those of India's television network too.

Because Delhi has no facilities at the present time to process 16mm color film, the networks had to use electronic cameras exclusively. The big advantage of electronic cameras is that they use videotape, which, unlike film, needs no processing, and can be viewed immediately. For this reason the tape is easy to edit and can be satellited from mobile units, as was done by the American networks in Delhi.

Almost all TV stations in the United States use video cameras in their news departments. A new name has sprung up as a result, Electronic News Gathering, ENG for short. Video cameras were first used by all the American TV networks overseas, when President Gerald Ford made a tour of Europe a few years ago.

But in case something should go wrong with the electronic cameras, the networks also used film cameras as a backup.

The disadvantages of an electronic camera are that it is delicate, can easily get out of order, and except for a warning light that indicates that the tape is finished or the batteries are low, there is no way of knowing if it is working properly.

CBS had two cameras go inoperative in Delhi, and even the repairman who came along with the team could not fix them. Another camera was flown in from Bonn as a substitute.

One ABC cameraman, having covered Barbara Walters' interview with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, discovered that the tape turned out black and white because the color coder in the camera was not working. A new interview was arranged. This time the camera was plug-

ged into a monitor to make sure it was working.

Electronic cameras are still in the development stage. Until a few years ago they were so bulky that they were only used in TV studios. But they are now small enough to carry around.

This seeming surfeit of electronic equipment fascinated the Indian TV cameramen and technicians. It gave them an idea of what their own television network will have when it eventually goes color. Some Indians were already familiar with the equipment, having worked as trainees in Britain and Germany. One remarked after looking at the CBS monitor: "I look forward to the day when we can show color on television, and then you can see our dancers in their beautiful costumes. India is made for color TV." Indians were also intrigued with American correspondents doing their traditional "stand up to camera." The corresponden ts first record their 40-second spot on a small tape recorder. Then by putting the plug in their ear, hiding the tape recorder behind their back, and turning thei~ head slightly, so that the camera does not reveal the earpiece, they repeat what they have recorded earlier for the camera, looking as though they had memorized it.

While radio lacks the glamor of television, those who work in the media say it is always far ahead of TV even in the era of live satelliting. With the growing number of radio stations broadcasting only news 24 hours a day in the United States, and almost every station having at least five minutes of news on the hour, radio fills an important need. Some TV correspondents double as radio newsmen, but because they are often away on stories with their TV crews, the radio networks usually have their own staffers.

India's Posts and Telegraphs set apart three satellite lines for radio coverage.

They were located in what are sometimes used as translators' booths in the Ashoka Hotel. One line was set aside for the radio network pool, which was run by Dick Rosenbaum of ABC, but also used by CBS and NBC. The two remaining lines were for the other audio services, AP, UPI, Mutual Broadcasting, the BBC and others.

With some help from the White House communications staff, President Carter's remarks, when he was visiting DaulatpurNasirabad village and other places where there were no central communications, were short-waved to the USIS, which taped them, then relayed the segments to the press center at the Ashoka Hotel.

There they could be picked up by corres-

pondents who had not accompanied the President, and in the radio booths where they were used as inserts by broadcasters.

Handling the print-media correspondents was easier. Since President Nixon's visit to India, communications, thanks to satellites, had become more reliable.

American correspondents had clear lines when they telephoned their stories, and they could get in touch with their editors in the United States in a matter of minutes.

Unlike in the past the telex operators no longer had to wait for hours before there was a free line to send a story.

There were times when the army of correspondents covering the visit could not always accompany President Carter.

For example, only a limited number of newsmen could attend the official banquet at Rashtrapati Bhavan. The newsmen selected one reporter to attend and cover the story for all of them. Television also did the same.

Those of us who covered the Nixon visit to India in 1969, could see the changes brought about by the women's liberation movement in the United States which insisted that women be given equal employment rights as men. During the Nixon visit there was only one female correspondent, Nancy Dickerson, who was primarily a radio reporter. On the Carter visit there were four "newspersons" (to use a new but clumsy term): Barbara Walters and Ann Compton of ABC, Judy Woodruff of NBC, and Lee Thornton of CBS. All the women are TV correspondents, and some also do stories for radio.

Americans were reminded that women newscasters have been on Indian TV ever since the first station opened years ago.

In 1969, there were no black correspondents, or cameramen and technicians.

On the Carter trip, one of the top reporters, Ed Bradley, was black: once a combat reporter in the Vietnam war, Bradley now covers the White House for CBS. Lee Thornton is another black correspondent. There were black technicians, cameramen, and equipment repairmen with the television crews.

President Carter's visit will be remembered by the Indian technicians at OCS and at the Dehra Dun ground station as the first big "test of their new satelliting facilities, which they passed with flying colors.

D About the Author: Ernest Weatherall, a veteran American journalist who has worked with such newspapers as The Herald Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor, is presently in India to write a book on the country.

ECONOMICS:

HOW

SCIENTIFIC ASCIENCEiI Unlike the natural sciences, economics can never be wholly free of value judgments.

However, says a noted economist in this article, it must follow the scientific method.

In my more macabre moments, I have sometimes indulged myself in the following fantasy. It is the year 3000 and a team of Polynesian archeologists is exploring the ruins of one of the larger cities of the old world. Poking about in the rubble, one of them discovers a volume whose brittle pages are still legible, and discusses with his colleagues the possible purpose of this journal with whose language he is unfamiliar. Noting the equational arrays (some of the mathematical symbols are still in use) and the geometric representations, he suggests that it might have been a journal of mathematics. Another, calling attention to the disproportionate amounts of prose between the equations, suggests applied physics. A third says engineering. While they are debating, they are joined by a senior member of the expedition who looks at the title page and haltingly spells out: "The Am-er-ican Eco-no-mic Re-view." The junior member is incredulous.

"You mean," he asks, "that these people believed that economic relations could be represented by logic?" "My dear boy," the senior member tells him, "that's not the half of it. They actually thought it was a science!"

Is economics a science? Partly that depends on how we choose to define the word. Does science mean a search for "repeatable patterns of dependence" among variables, the definition suggested by Columbia's Ernest Nagel? This nicely fits the current fashion for functional models in economics but omits large areas of economic scrutiny, including economic history or economic taxonomy (comparative economic systems). Do we mean by science a reliance on the experimental method? This throws into limbo certain central ideas of economics, such

as value or utility, for which no experiments seem to be possible.

Do we mean only the acceptance of a common paradigm, as suggested by Thomas S. Kuhn of Princeton University? This then presents us with the problem of which economic paradigm to choose among a number of competing claimants: neoclassicism, institutionalism, Marxism.

I do not propose to explore here the question of which definition of science best applies to economics. Rather, my concern will be the relevance for economics of an idea that runs through all the ideas of science: the conviction that science must be "value free." By this I mean that all scientists agree that their work should be carried on in a manner quite independent of the biases and hopes, not to mention the willful interference, of the scientist.

In a word, science exists to explain or clarify things that exist independently of the values of the observer. It is the study of what is, not of what ought to be.

We shall have occasion later to glance at the purity with which science keeps its vows. But I think it fair to state that the vow itself constitutes an ideal to which almost all economists gladly and wholeheartedly subscribe. However they may define their tasks, nearly all would include value neutrality as a necessary condition for the performance of those tasks in a scientific manner.

It is this central contention that I wish to challenge here. I will deny that the vital element of economic analysis can ever be wholly devoid of considerations¡ of a normative or judgmental kind. To put it more strongly, I contend that the economic investigator is in a fundamentally different relationship vis-a-vis

his subject from that of the natural scientists, so that advocacy or value-laden interpretation becomes an inescapable, indeed a desirable, part of social inquiry.

That, however, is not all that I wish to argue. For having sought to convince you that economics is not and should not be value free, I will then turn around and insist that it should nonetheless retain as an objective the methods of science.

Let me begin with the simpler part of my task, which is to demonstrate that the work of the economist is laden with value judgments. Perhaps the best way to do so is to observe an economist at work. Let us say that he is collecting certain data-say the size distribution of corporations or the movement of prices.

This is assuredly a procedure as objective and value free as that of the natural scientist collecting data on the sizes of natural objects or the movements of the planets. Our economist may then relate his first set of data to a second set-say the profit rates of corporations ranked by size, or the quantities of goods exchanged at various prices. Here, too, he breaches no rules of value neutrality, assuming of course that he does not winnow his facts or doctor his observations.

Is not such work quite as value free as that of the natural scientist who performs similar observations or correlations on the objects of the physical universe? Indeed it is. Furthermore, these findings of the economist may be of the utmost importance.

But what he has performed up to this point is not yet economic analysis. Thus far he has only performed the task of an economic statistician. If economic analysis stopped at this point, the basic contention of my paper would be false.

But an economist does not stop here. Indeed, his task now begins-the task of ascribing meaning to the data and the relationships that he has so painstakingly acquired. This meaning takes the form of efforts to explain how and why the social organism displays the objective characteristics he has unearthed.

And here is where value judgments inevitably insinuate themselves into his work.

To give substance to the problem, consider a very simple case. In every elementary textbook on economics (including my own), we find a standard example of economic analysis in the discussion of the social result of imposing a price ceiling below the "equilibrium" price for a commodity, say a rent ceiling on apartments. At the below-equilibrium price, we are told, there will be more would-be buyers (renters) in the market than before the ceiling was imposed. The result is the classic instance of a "shortage" -that is, a situation in which the quantity of a commodity demanded at a given price exceeds that which is offered at that price.

Now, is this not also a value-free finding, as removed from the wishes or biases of the economist as the finding of a natural scientist that a compass needle swings when a magnet is placed near it? The question brings us to the critical parting of the ways between value-free natural science and value-laden social science.

But the answer is not as simple as might at first appear, so I shall take some pains to spell it out carefully.

As perhaps you have anticipated, there is one very easy mode of demonstrating the value-laden content of economic analysis as contrasted with that of the natural scientist. It is that economists do not remain content with a simple observation that there coexist a rent ceiling and a large number of disgruntled apartment-seekers. Invariably they go on to prescribe social remedies for this situation, usually remedies that fall back on the workings of the market system. "Thus," writes Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "France had practically no residential construction from 1914 to 1948 because

of rent controls. If new construction had been subject to such controls after World War II, the vigorous boom in French residential building since 1950 would never have taken place .... " He concludes: "To protect the poor from being gouged by landlords, maximal rentals are often fixed by law. These fiats may do short-run good, but they may also do long-run harm."

It is not difficult to spot the value judgments latent in this example of economic analysis. There is a silent acquiescence in the propriety of the market, rather than government allocations or other means, as the mechanism for allocating apartments to would-be renters. There is also the assumption that the "longrun harm" cannot be overcome by nonmarket means, e.g., the provision of additional dwelling space by state construction.

Now, Samuelson may have sound philosophical grounds for preferring the market means of allocation to nonmarket means, and he may be correct in his contention that the market will ultimately provide more housing than will a program of government construction. But it is quite clear that neither his preference nor his policy judgment follow as value-free conclusions from the raw data of ceiling prices and disgruntled apartment-seekers.

Since I have already declared that I do not believe that economists should aim at value-free analysis, it is not my intent to chastise Samuelson for introducing what are clearly valueladen statements into his text. I am concerned about his failure to alert his readers to his value assumptions, but that is another matter, to which I will return. Right now I shall ask you to follow me in a more abstract, but I think more fundamental, argument.

This is the argument that the inherent and inescapable value content of economic analysis lies in the fact that the behavior of objects of social analysis is not like the behavior of the needle of the compass. In the difference between the two meanings of the word "behavior" lie the roots of the value problem for social sCIence.

Of course, we all know that human beings do not behave like so many iron filings or compass needles. Yet, when we inquire into the reason for, or the nature of, the difference, the answer is not immediately apparent. Take the scientist who has observed the effect of a magnet on a compass a hundred times, and the economist who has observed the effects of lower prices on expenditures a h~ndred times. Assume that all the treacherous problems of extraneous influences are eliminated-that ceteris paribus truly prevails. In what way is the economist prevented from describing the behavior of his social universe by laws that are just as 0bjective as those of the natural scientist?

The answer is obvious, but its implications may not be. The difference is that the objects observed by the social scientist all possess an attribute that is lacking in the objects of the natural universe. This is the attribute of consciousness-of cognition, of calculation, of volition. Individuals and social organizations often behave in ways that are as regular as those of the objects of physics and chemistry-if they did not, society would have long ago disintegrated. Yet, even' in the most routine human actions there resides an element of latent willfulness that is lacking from even the most spectacular processes of nature. Indeed, one of the decisive attributes that distinguishes the social world from the physical is that social events are not merely interactions of forces, but contests of wills.

Thus behavior has both a purposiveness and a capriciousness that make prediction infinitely more difficult for the economist than for the natural scientist. Therefore, our efforts to predict economic behavior-however accurate in the "normal" casesuddenly become inaccurate when behavior changes its purposes or displays its caprices. The record of prediction with regard

'The natural scientist does not care about how his needle feels about magnetism, but the social scientist has to know how his buyers and sellers feel about the attraction of prices .... ' to stock market fluctuations, foreign exchange rates, price levels or even the growth rate of vast aggregates like Gross National Product (GNP) is all evidence of this unreliability of behavioral regularity.

But what is the relevance of this unreliabilify to the problem of the value judgments concealed in economic analysis? The relevance lies in the central role played by behavior in the progress from value-free facts to value-laden conclusions. Without assumptions about behavior, no conclusions whatsoever can be drawn from any set of social facts. The problem, then, becomes one of discovering the value component which is intrinsically part of our behavioral assumptions.

But why "intrinsically"? The answer is a curious one. If the economist hews to a strictly empirical description of behavior, given its latent unpredictability, he retains his value neutrality, but at the cost of any usable theory. To put it differently, if the economist wishes to move from economic statistics to economic analysis, he must go beyond observations into assumptions with regard to behavior, and it is at this juncture that value judgment enters the picture. For when we examine the analytical work of economists, we do not find that their behavioral propositions are carefully framed to reflect the fundamental uncertainty that beclouds all behavioral laws. Instead, we discover that economic behavior is almost universally described in precisely the magnetic fashion of the needle and the compass. The ruling "law" of behavior which is assumed to apply to consumers, workers and businessmen alike is that they seek to maximize-consumers maximizing their utilities, workers their incomes, businessmen their profits.

Do they? The question is embarrassing on at least two counts.

The first is that we have a great deal of difficulty in specifying exactly what kind of behavior we mean by "maximizing."

For example, how shall we specify the behavior of a corporation which seeks to maximize its profits, presumably for a very long period-of time, with respect to its price policies, its labor policies, its governmental relations, etc. ?

Second, there is the awkward probability that whatever behavior presumably maximizes utility or profits in one period is not likely to be that which maximizes in another. Lowered rents will not attract renters, as a magnet attracts a needle, if the renters expect the rent ceilings to be still lower in the future.

So, too, we must take into account changes in the state of mind of the economic actors over history. However consumers may have behaved in the days of the Industrial Revolution when they sought to maximize their utilities, it is surely not the way they behave in the days of the Advertising Age; nor do the entrepreneurs of the New Industrial State, wrestling with the difficulties of maximization of which I just spoke, resemble the entrepreneurs of Dickensian England, counting up each day's receipts.

Thus the claim to a knowledge of economic laws requires a degree of insight wholly different from that required to enunciate natural laws. The natural scientist does not care about how his needle feels about magnetism, but the social scientist has to know how his buyers and sellers feel about the attraction of prices if his analysis is to be grounded on anything other than guesswork or blind faith.

This crucial aspect in the meaning of social behavior infuses economic analysis with value in two ways. The first has to do with the fact that economists arbitrarily apply to economic reasoning

"laws" that they know to be at best partial descriptions of reality and at worst outright misdescriptions of it. This is surely an attitude at variance with the willingness of the scientist to abandon a hypothesis when it no longer conforms with observations.

Why do economists persist in an approach they know to be inadequate? The answer is, I believe, embarrassingly simple.

It is that economists must have some kind of behavioral assumptions to make their theories work. Lacking any better generalization, economists have retained the convenient assumption of maximization because it serves this purpose-even if the resulting theory often works very badly as a predictive instrument.

A second reason for the retention of the assumption of maximization introduces the problem of value judgment from a different perspective. It is that maximization, for all its vagueness and error, generally accords with the prevailing orientation of most economists that "more is better." The idea.of maximization thereby gives a certain scientific authority to textbook statements that an economy with a high growth rate is better off than one with a lower rate. In a word, maximization becomes a prescription for conduct. Since we are all now acutely aware that more is not necessarily better, I will not belabor the value implications of this belief other than to equate it with a latter-day version of Benthamism, in which pushpins, poetry and pollution are all the same as long as they get counted in the GNP. But all this is, in a sense, preamble to the more difficult task that I set myself at the outset. This is to question the legitimacy of the idea of "value neutrality" as an ideal for economics, and at the same time to defend the idea of "science" as an appropriate ideal for economics. The task sounds like a contradiction in terms, so I shall proceed with care, trying to specify with precision what I believe are the elements at stake.

The first problem with value freedom concerns the psychological or sociological relationship between the observer and the thing observed. Presumably the scientist approaches his research object in a frame of mind that is without conscious prejudicefearlessly open to an acceptance of results, however unexpected or unwelcome these may be.

This attribute of scientific inquiry has come under sharp attack in the natural sciences. The work of both Kuhn and the British philosopher Michael Polanyi has made it abundantly clear that scientists do not in fact behave with indifference to their observed results, but struggle desperately to fit anomalies into preconceived patterns or paradigms. If this is the case with the natural sciences, it is far more so with the social sciences.

As in my previous discussion involving Samuelson's unwitting use of value criteria, my purpose is not to scold economists for their lack of objectivity. It is rather to point to the cause for this universally observed state of affairs. This cause lies in the fact that the process of social investigation inescapably embroils the investigator in his subject in a way that is different from that of the natural scientist. For the latter, the discovery of an anomaly may constitute a blow to his intellectual security, perhaps even to his psychological integrity. But it does not threaten his moral position as a member of a social order.

On the contrary, the discovery -of unexpected results in the social universe almost invariably threatens or confirms the legitimacy of the social system of which the social investigator is unavoidably a part. Indeed, at the risk of making an assertion that verges on a confession, I would venture the statement that

every social scientist approaches his task with a wish, conscious or unconscious, to demonstrate the workability or unworkability of the social order he is investigating.

Moreover, this extreme vulnerability to value judgment is not a sign of a certain deficiency in the social investigator. On the contrary, he belongs to a certain order, has a place in it, benefits or loses from it and sees his future bound up with its success or failure. In the face of this inescapable existential fact, an attitude of total impartiality to the universe of social events is psychologically unnatural and, more likely than riot, leads to a position of moral hypocrisy. It is not one of their flaws but one of their claims to greatness as economists that Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Marshall and Keynes were explicit in their use of facts and theories as instruments of advocacy. Smith's great model of the economic system was written not merely to analyze late 18th century England, but to plead for a policy of "perfect liberty" and to assail the policies of mercantilism. Marx espoused social revolution, based on his economic model of the "immanent" tendencies of capitalism. Keynes sought social control over investment for reasons that the General Theory made clear.

These "policy" prescriptions were not afterthoughts. On the contrary, they were an inextricable part of the great contributions of these economists to social understanding. Yet in every case, they rested on value-laden assumptions.

And indeed, insofar as economic analysis is concerned with social change, in which the fortunes of men (including the analyst) must be affected, how could it be otherwise?

But this leads me to my final contention-that despite its immersion in values, norms and advocacy, economics should nonetheless attempt to embrace scientific canons of procedure.

How is it possible to reconcile such seemingly contradictory positions?

The reconciliation involves as its first step a return to our earlier dichotomy between economic statistics and economic analysis. So far as the former is concerned, there is little to trouble us. Precisely the same standards and precisely the same pitfalls confront the economic statistician as the biologist or the physi-

"fm afraid 1 must concur with Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Movin.

The cause of death was taxes."

cist. Both must struggle agajnst the inhibitions imposed by the reigning paradigm, first in their choice of research objects, and second in their treatment of research results. Both confront, albeit in somewhat different ways, the problem of the interaction of the observer with the things he observes. It is not here that the problem lies.

The question, rather, is how the economic analyst, whose analysis must include normative elements, can aspire to the position of the scientist? Here, at this critical last juncture, I must first state with all the force at my command that I do not believe that the economist has the right, in the name of value advocacy, to tamper with data, to promote or promulgate policy recommendations without supporting evidence, or to pass off his value-laden conclusions as possessing scientific validity.

Indeed, one of my objections to much of contemporary economics is that it lends a gloss of such "objective" validity to conclusions that in fact follow only from arbitrary and value-laden assumptions-I refer, for example, to the use of neoclassical economics to "disprove" the usefulness of minimum wage laws.

Of course, minimum wage laws may bring consequences other than those desired by their sponsors. But I hope that my labors in analyzing the dubious nature of the usual assumptions about economic behavior now make it possible for me to state that no economic predictions or prescriptions that rest on these assumptions can lay claim to any scientific validity.

How then can the economist possibly aspire to the standards of a social scientist? The answer does not lie in efforts to produce behavioral laws that will be the counterpart of the laws of nature -that is a chimerical task. The answer lies rather in his efforts to duplicate the methods, not the models, of the natural sciences.

What are these methods? They are to be found, above all, in the openness of the procedures by which science goes about its task, exposing itself to informed criticism at every stage of its inquiry, engaging in painful self-scrutiny with regard to its premises, experiments, reasoning, conclusions. Revelation, unstated premises, missing links in the chain of deduction may all be found in scientific analysis, but they are by common consent its weaknesses to which criticism is rightly directed.

This element of science can be transposed in its entirety to economic analysis. Like the natural scientist, the economist is expected to keep his journal, recording as best he can his starting points, his successive steps, his final conclusions. He records, with all the honesty and fidelity of which he is capable, not only his data and his processes of reasoning but his initial commitments, hopes and disappointments. Since the economist performs few experiments that can be rerun in a laboratory, his results cannot be so easily proved or disproved as those of the natural scientist, but they can be equally subject to scrutiny and criticism in the forum of expert opinion.

Thus when I urge the abandonment of the idea of a "value free" economics, I do not thereby seek to abandon the idea of an economics committed to scientific standards. Rather, I want economics to make a virtue of necessity, exposing to all the world the indispensable and fructifying value grounds from which it begins its inquiries, so that these inquiries may be fully exposed to, and not falsely shielded from, the public examination that is the true strength of science.

D About the Author: Robert L. Heilbroner is one of America's most distinguished economists. He has authored or coauthored more than a dozen books whose combined sales of over three million copies, says Business Week, "may make him the top-selling economics author of all times." Among his books are Between Capitalism and Socialism, Business Civilization in Decline, Future as History and The Great Ascent.

THE Rim This award-winning essay by a 17-year-old high school honor student from Lorain, Ohio, won first place and $10,000 in the young people's category of a nationwide essay competition' which was organized on the occasion of the Bicentennial celebrations of the United States.

Sponsored jointly by the Wells Fargo Bank of San Francisco and the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C., the contest attracted 2,314 essays by people under 18 years of age.

Arthur Evenchik (left) wrote his prize-winning essay just the night before the contest deadline. He chose "the right to dissent" as his subject because he believes it is so important.

"If we want to make any changes in American society," he says, "we have to listen to the opinions of others."

Now a high school senior, Arthur is an outstanding student who has been active on his school newspaper. He is an avid reader, likes to bowl and play the piano, and teaches fourth-grade Sunday school at his Jewish temple.

He is a great fan of the comic strip "Peanuts" and was delighted to discover that its creator, cartoonist Charles Scholz, was one.of the essay contest judges. Although he has not decided where he will go to college, he plans to study journalism. He is saving his prize money for college. His first literary recognition came when he was nine with the publication of a poem entitled "The Wise Robin Said." Arthur, his parents and two sisters, aged 21 and 18, live in a small, three-bedroom house near Lake Erie. His father runs a family auto-supply business, where Arthur works summers mixing paint. His mother is a substitute teacher for deaf children in the Lorain public schools.

HT TO DISSENT If the history of the United States has demonstrated nothing else in the course of 200 years, it has certainly shown that being an American is not easy. To be perfectly honest about it, the whole business can be a terrible burden at times.

We, the American people, are the heirs to a philosophy that is so challenging and all-encompassing that living up to it is an extraordinary responsibility.

An American forfeits the right to claim superiority over others, for he (or, of course, she) is the product of a heritage of equality. He is forbidden by the spirit of the law (if not always by the law itself) to act on the basis of unjust prejudices. He has no right to scoff at the opinions of others without first considering them seriously, for he lives in a society which was meant to thrive upon freedom of expression. He must not be blind to the need for social change, for it is the recognition of that need which has inspired the greatest achievements of . Americans throughout their history.

The true patriot can only be the individual who recognizes his burden and accepts it with a mixture of daring and awe; not the hopelessly average, flagwaving, "love it or leave it" symbol of machismo we have revered for too long.

That latter image has caused irreparable harm to this country by distorting that aspect of liberty which is the most precious part of individual freedom-the right to dissent.

Unfortunately, dissent is not very popular these days. Its reputation has been soiled by those who regard any form of it as a crime akin to treason.

Its image has been tarnished by those who have acted irresponsibly in its name.

But the right to dissent must never completely lose its significance. Our history has no meaning, the words of the.

Founding Fathers no relevance, if we cease to use it wisely and bravely in our own lives.

It is certainly true that not every act of dissent is constructive. We have been subjected to countless senseless diatribes and ravings in the last few years, and the specter of "ideological" violence still haunts our collective consciousness. How-

ever, even as we condemn and reject those dissidents whose means are useless or dangerous, we are not free to ignore their message. If indeed there is no justification for their grievances, we will find that out after examination, and we may well write them off as fools.

In some cases, though, a different realization may develop. Even the most despicable of terrorists is a product of our society, and it behooves us to learn how to defuse the horrible anger he represents, before it erupts again in new acts of rage.

There are injustices in this country which have been ignored for too long; and even while we deplore mindless rhetoric and violence, our obligation to correct these wrongs will never diminish.

It is regrettable that meaningless protest garners so much publicity, for it is far more important that we understand legitimate forms of dissent. No matter how many people console themselves with illusions of a "melting pot," there is no such thing as universal identity or agreement. This is what makes democracy such a sloppy operation at times, but our system is still well worth the trouble.

The most important quality of dissent is its fundamental role in the American philosophy. It is the cornerstone of individual freedom, guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and every responsible law and verdict since. The right to disagree grants every citizen a unique identity based upon individual judgment. It is implicit in the freedoms of speech and press, and safe. guards them from manipulation.

This does not mean that dissent can' be meaningful only to the individual.

Indeed, its implications extend far beyond that primary role. Dissent is the key to social change and human betterment.

This can be seen most clearly in the area of institutional reform.

Most societies have a tendency to become dependent upon their institutions.

The vision of the people contracts and falters until they are unable to conceive of any kind of social organization besides that which is familiar. Man-made conventions assume an aura of permanence.

This is a dangerous attitude, one that can lead only to stagnation and ultimate

failure. We are saved from that fate by those with the courage to dissent. They are the ones who observe the faults and shortcomings of our institutions, and work for reform. They encoljirage new efforts to make our institutions more effective in every realm of society. The dissenter must be conscious of the present while preparing for the future. Institutions must be continuously adapted, and alternatives must be constructed, in order to fulfill the requirements of a changing world.

This does not mean that there is no value in supporting social institutions.

Many equally well-intentioned citizens may seek to preserve that which the dissenters oppose. This can only benefit a free society. We shall still depend upon the dissenters to raise the questions of debate, no matter how they may eventually be settled.

It would be ideal if dissent would fail only after reasonable discussion and exploration. That is not always the case.

Dissent can fail when old prejudices are not overcome. It can fail when insecure citizens are afraid to view their established institutions critically.

The destiny of American society will depend largely upon its flexibility, upon the ability of its people to understand and utilize dissent. The very nature of dissent and democracy makes social change advance slowly, but they are still the only reasonable means we have to effect reform. They shall enable us to create exciting innovations in society.

In the broad spectrum of things, a span of 200 years in a nation's life is not very significant. In the very short lives of human beings, it is awesome. As we enter our third century, we can do no better than to remember and hallow the principles upon which our society is firmly grounded. Constructive dissent will be our most valuable tool in building a nation that fulfills the ideals of its. creators. We can be the beneficiaries of a splendid paradox: by safeguarding the most significant dimension of individual freedom, we shall possess the resources to forge a society dedicated to the welfare 0 of all.

I

HIGH SCIENCE EVERY SATURDAY TEXT BY RICHARD K. REIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIM HANSEN

Each year, hundreds of America's most talented high school students forgo their weekend leisure to participate in a unique and-successful science and technology program.

F

Yet nearly all students are there every Saturday morning.

The explanation for this educational phenomenon is simple.

The students are participating in the Science Honors Program, which attracts the brightest young science students from high schools in New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area. The academic abilities of these students have led them beyond the most advanced courses offered at their high schools.

At Columbia they learn from college professors, who 'expose them to courses and laboratory experiences they might never hear about in an ordinary high school, and frequently would not encounter even in college.

The program is sponsored jointly by Columbia University, several major corporations, and the National Science Foundation, an agency of the U.S. Government that encourages the development of teachers and researchers in the sciences. It is open to all students, regardless of background or nationality, but competition for the limited number of spaces is keen. The program ordinarily enrolls 300 students, who usually are admitted to the program as sophomores and remain for three years until they complete high school. Each year the program has about of them among the 100 openings-and 700 applicants-all

or most American students, Saturday morning is a time to catch up on sleep after a long week of late nights and early classes. Every Saturday morning at Columbia University in New York City, however, about 300 energetic students show up bright and early and eager to learn. They are not college students but rather high school students who have.traveled as far as 80 kilometers and have got up as early as 6 a.m. to get to their Saturday morning classes on time.

When these students get to Columbia they immediately immerse themselves in courses on such esoteric subjects as "Elementary Particles and Relativity," and "Metabolic Basis of Human Disease." After a two-and-a-half-hour morning class, they often remain on the campus for an afternoon lecture on such topics as "Picosecond Pulses From Lasers" or "Magic Number Effects in Organic Molecules." Even the annual class picnic, a tradition among American high school students, has a scientific bent: The students travel to Dobbs Ferry, north of New York City, for their outing, after which they tour the cyclotron facility there.

These students receive no academic credit for their work, they have no examinations, and no teacher takes attendance.

Left: Michael Dinnerstein, 15, in astrophysics class. Above: Gavin Grover prepares a cancer research experiment under the tutelage of Professor Ray Sweet of New York's Institutefor Cancer Research. Below: Louis Doctor, 17, experiments with a computer that he assembledfrom an electronics kit.

brightest students in their schools.

To narrow the field, the Science Honors Program administers an entrance examination consisting of75 science and 50 mathematics questions, all considered highly difficult for high school students. Applicants also must write an essay in which they describe their interests and aspirations in science. Students also submit recommendations from their high school teachers or counselors. Some especially gifted students make perfect scores on the examination, and are admitted on that basis. Those who miss more than four or five questions are usually eliminated.

A large number of students generally miss several questions and must be accepted or rejected on the basis of their essays and recommendations. Those students who successfully hurdle the admissions obstacles are necessarily a highly motivated lot.

They are not likely to sleep late on Saturday mornings. or all the talent that is assembled in the Sdence Honors Program, the heart of the organization is nothing more than a desk and a telephone in a modest office in a science building at Columbia. The program's secretary works part time and can be expected in the office only on Saturday mornings. The only

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unusual things about this office, says the secretary, William Grange, are the students who walk into it.

"It's a foregone conclusion that they all will go on to college," says Grange. "Some go from this program right into graduate school-that's how smart they are. Others write articles for professional journals while they are still in high school. Some travel to Europe to compete in math contests. But a few go into theater or become English teachers. You learn not to be surprised by any of these kids."

One visitor to the office this particular Saturday morning is a diminutive 15-year-old wearing blue jeans, matching denim jacket, and wire-frame eyeglasses-typical high school student dress these days. He is Michael Dinnerstein, a sophomore at New York City's Stuyvesant High School and anything but a typical student. Dinnerstein asks Grange for information about the summer science programs, also sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and designed to provide advanced training to students during the summer between their junior and senior years in high school. Although he is only a sophomore, Dinnerstein has been accepted for two such programs. He is trying to decide which one is better.

In the Science Honors Program, Dinnerstein takes a course in astrophysics, one of a dozen courses offered this semester.

He ~xplains that his scientific interest is in an area called galactic evolution. "I've proposed a new theory on how the galaxies evolved," he says matter of factly. "The course here has helped me tremendously. For one thing, it enabled me to read a doctoral dissertation that I wasn't able to understand before."

What does Dinnerstein mean by "new" theory? "Well, it's a slightly bizarre, wacky theory," he says. "This year when I reproposed the theory, I devised the most accurate computer model of how galaxies evolved."

Most accurate compared to what? Dinnerstein does not hesitate: "A similar model was described in an article in the Astrophysical Journal. My model has 15 advantages over that one.

Mine will do everything that one does, plus some other things that one won't do."

Dinnerstein is asked about the significance of his project.

He responds: "My model contributes greatly to the field. It's a big step. It could be applied to any simulation in which you want to find the combined effects of many factors. You can realistically observe what happens as different factors are adjusted. The city could use it to help solve its fiscal problems."

He says that his project has won several awards in science fairs, including prizes from the U.S. Navy and the Society of Nuclear Medicine, both of which were impressed with the applications possible from Michael's computer model.

Later, his teacher at Columbia, astronomy professor Lloyd Motz, is asked about Michael's work in galactic evolution.

Motz has not heard about it. He is told that the student has constructed a computer model that ....

"Oh, all the students are fantastically interested in computer programing," says Motz, who has taught in the program since the early 1960s and has learned not to be surprised by anything.

"The computer is a practical application that appeals to them.

It's a game. The computer gives them tremendous leeway and freedom with their ideas. They can develop any program they want, and they are very clever at it."

Dinnerstein's program simulates the evolution of the galaxies.

"Sure," says Motz, not the least surprised. "You take a few hundred thousand mass points, write down the basic equations for them, and plug it all into the computer and it begins to construct a model. It's a fascinating game."

Motz is told that Dinnerstein thinks his model surpasses that described by two scientists in the Astrophysical Journal. "Michael said his was better? Really? That's remarkable, because these guys really are very sophisticated in their approach. If Michael

The program's primary object is to bring the students in contact with research scientists. says that, I have every reason to believe he's done it. He's a very quiet youngster, but you can tell by looking at him how deeply he understands something. It does indeed make sense."

Motz is then informed that his student's model uses threedimensional coordinates. "My gosh! That's really amazing because most of these models are two-dimensional. That's remarkable. I am very impressed." Motz sounds as if he has learned again not to be surprised by these students.

1960s. Elam took every physics or physics-related course he could get in the program. He lost interest in physics shortly after enrolling at Harvard University, dropped out, became interested in languages, and eventually worked for five years as a translator at the United Nations.

"The Science Honors Program probably spoiled me for college," Elam says now. "The professors in that program seemed much more interested in the students than my college professors were." He has returned to college to complete a master's degree in computer science from the City University of New York. "I think the Science Honors Program plants some kind of seed in everyone. You never forget what you started there. " Another alumnus, from the late 1960s,Jon Victor, remembers his years in the Science Honors Program as a "very, very, very good experience-especially if you know you like science."

Victor was another student who probably surprised a few people in the program. He was in sixth grade when his father noticed a newspaper article about the program and encouraged the boy to apply, and Jon was accepted. "I'm very indebted:" says Jon, who remained in the program five years. He is now a graduate student at New York's Rockefeller University, working in a laboratory with a scientist who teaches in the Science Honors Program at Columbia on Saturdays.

"The program got me off to a very good start in math. I also learned computer programing there," says Jon Victor.

"All the courses were very current. I had the impression we were getting things hot off the press. And the teachers were completely in control of their subjects.

he Science Honors Program was launched in 1958, one of many educational efforts in the United States that were inspired by the orbiting of the Russian space satellite Sputnik. The program, originally supported by a grant from the Hebrew Technical Institute of New York, has since 1961received funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of that organization's program to encourage talented high school students to consider careers in science and technology. The NSF spends almost $2 million a year to support 125 programs in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Seven programs, including the one at Columbia, are held during the school year.

Most of the programs are given during the summer months, and students spend 1to 12weeks in intensive courses in biological, physical, or social sciences, or mathematics or technology.

In all the programs, students are expected to pay their own ietor's experience corresponds with what Professor Sachs expenses. In some cases students are also asked to pay all or part of the tuition, though limited funds are available to support has said about the goals of the program. "We are not as worried about the exact material we teach as we are about students unable to tneet the costs of instruction.

Also contributing to the program are several' American the general overview of science," says Sachs. "Our foremost goal corporations, including IBM, AT&T, Bell Laboratories, Union is enrichment rather than acceleration. There are many collegeCarbide, Allied Chemical and Texaco. These corporations all oriented programs where the main goal is acceleration, so that are involved in advanced scientific technologies, and most of by the time the student has gone to college he has done collegethem have Science Honors Program alumni on their payrolls. level work. Since we don't give credit, don't have grades or Columbia University, which donates classroom space and the examinations, that's definitely not one of our goals."

The goal, Professor Sachs says, "is to put the students in use of its computers and laboratories, also benefits indirectly from its affiliation with the program. Many Science Honors contact with research scientists. Although many high schools students enter Columbia for undergraduate or graduate work. offer these students adequate training in elementary science, "Every year when I look at our graduate admissions list, I see most of the high schools don't provide any contact with genuine two or three people who started off in this program," says Allan scientific research. Our primary goal in choosing the teachers and Sachs, professor of physics at Columbia and since 1969 the . in organizing the courses is to get personal contact between research scientists and these bright kids." director of the Science Honors Program.

The program offers a modest stipend of $1,200 to teachers for achs points out that the program keeps no systematic one semester's work-not always enough to lure some faculty records of the accomplishments of the students who have into the classroom on a Saturday. But there are other attractions. participated in it. But a survey taken several years ago of "Because of the very high selectivity of the program, and the students in the program in the early 1960s confirmed the general high talent of the kids, it's not hard to find some of the best impression that these students have been extremely capable and scientists around Columbia to work with them," says Sachs.

The final goal of the Science Honors Program is simply to highly motivated. Of the 305 alumni who responded to the survey, 282 had been graduated from college. Nearly three-fourths of put the students in contact with each other. Explains Sachs: "You take these students from an environment where they are them had studied in scientific fields. Perhaps the most astonishing finding was that 90 per cent had gone on to graduate school very likely not to have any contact with students of the same talents or interests, and you bring them into contact with similarly after college. Ten years later, 41 per cent had received doctoral talented and interested students. You make them realize they degrees and 43 per cent had published papers in professional are not as unusual as they seem to be in their individual high journals. "It's really amazing," Professor Sachs says.

Alumni of the program include men and women in a wide schools-that there are other people like them."

The Science Honors Program has been criticized for not variety of professions and careers-research scientists, medical doctors, at least one veterinarian, and several housewives. providing enough laboratory experience to complement the classroom instruction. "The techniques you learn in a laboratory Many of them praise the Science Honors Program.

"I enjoyed it more than anything else I've done. That pro- are very valuable," says student Gavin Grover, "because then gram and my high school courses were probably the richest you can start to do things on your own." Program director time of my life," says Harry Elam, an alumnus from the early Allan Sachs agrees with the criticism. "More lab work would be

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Journal, that costs $120 a year. How does he keep up with the bills? Partly by'cash awards he wins at science fairs, and partly by babysitting for neighbors.

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one of the strongest improvements I could offer," he says. "But it's financially and organizationally difficult to do." Like money, lab time is a precious commodity at American universities.

Another criticism of the program is that it is t-oo intensive, encouraging scientific growth at the expense of social development. The concern was raised publicly after the New York Times Magazine profiled Francis Barany, a Science Honors Program student who, at the age of 16, scored a scientific breakthrough by isolating the enzyme that the Venus Fly Trap plant uses to digest the insects it swallows. Francis, the article pointed out, is also an outstanding young mathematician, and his older brother, George, is a researcher at Rockefeller University. Both of their parents are research scientists who previously taught at Budapest University.

So much brainpower in one family bothered some readers of the New York Times Magazine. "Francis Barany is a pawn in his parents' game of life," wrote one reader in a letter to the editor. "Francis and George come across as programed geniuses whose development was predetermined and totally implemented by parents whose greatest value lay in developing their intellect.

What are Francis' and George's human values? How do they see themselves as individuals? What values (if any) do they place on feelings and emotions?"

Professor Sachs and others in the Science Honors Program were not receptive to this criticism. "If a youngster is not well adjusted socially, and is very precocious in science, some people might feel that a program like ours is not good," he says. But he feels the criticism was totally unjustified in Barany's case. The article also described the teen-ager as a proficient swimmer and a certified lifeguard who spent some of his free time sailing radiocontrolled model boats on the lake in Central Park. "He really is a well-rounded, interesting young man," says Sachs.

In fact, considerable interaction 'with the rest of society is vital for many of these young students who must hold part-time jobs just to pay for the materials needed for their scientific endeavors. Michael Dinnerstein, for example, subscribes to about a dozen scientific periodicals, including the Astrophysical

typical classroom scene in the Science Honors Program: The Electronics Laboratory. Sam Palmer, a radio astronomer at the Institute for Space Studies in New York, a division of the Goddard Space Flight Center, spends the first hour of the class lecturing on circuits in digital computers and on the techniques of manufacturing transistorized circuits. "If you are clever you can make just about anything," Palmer tells the seven students in the class. "The most common circuit you will run into is in the 7400 series," he says, referring to a specific computer model.

Then Palmer corrects himself: "Not the most common ever, but the most common you will see this year."

Palmer concludes his lecture and the students adjourn to a laboratory where they begin constructing their own circuits.

"A lot of them begin with no background whatsoever in electronics," Palmer says. "But the course is self-contained. You don't have to know a damn thing in the beginning. But you have to be able to learn fast. I give them a fairly broad introduction so they can teach themselves if they want to go further. But I pay attention to the fundamentals you normally ignore when you teach yourself."

One of the students approaches Palmer and announces that he has a "big problem." Palmer listens and suggests a quick solution. The student thinks out loud, scribbles something on the blackboard, and discovers that Palmer is right.

The student, a husky redhead named Louis Doctor, is one of those who has taught himself but has ignored the fundamentals along the way. "That's why I'm in the course," says Louis, a 17-year-old high school senior from Port Washington, New York. "I used to be gung-ho about photography. Then last summer I suddenly got interested in electronics. I started putting all my time and money into it. The first thing I did was to build my own computer.

Computer? "Sure, I made it from a kit. It's a mini-computer with a video display terminal, sort of like a television. I designed and built it without really knowing what I was doing. Now I'm going back over it, trying to find out what I did."

Several other students in the program are having difficulty with their circuitry and ask Louis for advice. He offers a few suggestions and then returns. "What we're working with are called 'chips.' They're miniaturized, integrated circuits that are the building blocks of a computer. Each one of these chips can make a simple decision in a matter of a few nanoseconds."

Louis explains that what most people think of as "instantaneous" is actually a time interval of several thousandths of a second. A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. That almost incomprehensible speed is what makes the computer such a strong tool.

The class ends, and Louis Doctor heads for the subway for the beginning of a 90-minute trip back home. He has to hurry because he has a job in a camera store, where he works almost every day from noon to 6 p.m. Louis serves customers, repairs cameras, and occasionally takes pictures at weddings and confirmation ceremonies. He invests virtually all his earnings in his electronics interest.

Louis is asked if all his outside work interferes with his schoolwork. "No," he says. "To tell you the truth, I don't put in much time at all on schoolwork." For this student and for many of the other participants, the Science Honors Program obviously is not the regular kind of schoolwork.

D About the Author: Richard K. Rein is afree-/ancejournalist often appear in American magazines.

whose articles

LIIIIIII¡ I_UIBIIID liD BU811188 "I'm enjoying it. It's refreshing to deal with youngsters who have wide-open minds and an eagerness and enthusiasm to learn. And I think they're enjoying it, too. Most important, it's a very worthwhile effort for the future of our country and our economic system."

Edmund E. Seyfried, Jr., president of the northern division of Martin Marietta Cement, was talking about a new program that has turned close to a thousand business executives across the United States into part-time junior high school teachers during the past school year. Drawing on their own experience and background in the "real world," each one has been teaching a class on business and economic subjects one day a week to eighth and ninth graders-a total of 29,924 students in 45 cities from coast to coast.

Called Project Business, the program is a new initiative of Junior Achievement (JA), Inc., long established in the field of economic education at the high school level in the U.S. Under the regular JA program, high school students learn about the business world by forming their own companies to manufacture and market products. Designed in part as a preface to these high school activities, the new program covers a broad range of subject matter, ranging from banking to being an effective consumer, from choosing a career to reading corporate annual reports.

"For businessmen taking part," says Seyfried, who has been teaching one morning a week at Williams Junior High School in Davenport, Iowa, "this program is like coaching baseball in the Little League. We are doing our coaching in the classroom on a subject that concerns many of us a great deal-the future of our economy.

"One of the potential problems I see around us today is the movement away from free or private enterprise because many people simply don't understand it.

But our economic system has served us well, better than any other system has done anywhere else in the world.

"By working with young peeplein the classroom, we achieve two purposes. We

help the kids develop their own knowledge and capabilities for the future. At the same time, we are strengthening the foundation of understanding on which the economy and its widespread benefits are built."

Bread-large loaves of fresh white bread-was the center of attention on a recent morning at Williams Junior High.

Seyfried and the class' regular teacher, Mrs. George Ann Ingram, divided the 27 boys and girls into three groups of buyers (two families and a restaurant) and three groups of sellers (Lancaster Stores, J.J. and R.c., Inc., and Consolidated). This was the second class session on the market system. The first, a week previous, was a lecture covering such factors as supply and demand, production, pricing, distribution, operating costs, profit.

Now the class got down to business.

Armed with hypothetical cost figures (including production, rent, distribution, utilities, wages) provided by Seyfried, the youthful partners in the three companies quietly determined how much to charge for each of their loaves in competition with the rival companies.

The buyer groups, each equipped with an envelope containing $5.50 provided by Seyfried, put their heads together to assess their own situation: family size, budget, other needs, estimated requirements of a restaurant.

"Weigh all of these factors carefully," Seyfried said. "When we tell you to go, do some preliminary shopping first for comparison's sake, and then try to get the best deals you can. Any money a family saves goes toward recreation. Anything the businesses earn is profit. Now go ahead and see how well you can do."

Have you ever seen a film of a hectic day for soybean traders in the pit of the Chicago stock exchange? Frenetic, noisy, incomprehensible to the viewer, yet apparently getting the job done. Except for the noise levei, which remained appropriate to a schoolroom, that's what happened at Williams once bread trading got going.

Afterward, each group reported on how

things turned out from its assigned standpoint. The experiences ran from super (putting $4.45 of the $5.50 total into the family recreation fund), to financial disaster, to some domestic belt tightening.

Mike Lancaster of Lancaster Stores, for example, said his company took its 32cent-a-Ioaf cost of production, added various expenses plus desired profit, arrived at a selling price of 45 cents, and subsequently found "nobody bought our bread." Dropping the price to compete, they sold at a loss.

Beth Grib, on the other hand, reported that her family could not get as many loaves as it needed. There weren't any left at any price-which led to a discussion of such topics as shortages of goods, finding substitute products, conservation, rationing, and the apparent potential for another bread distributor in this market.

The bell rang and 27 business people, householders, and restaurateurs scurried to their next class after hearing Mrs. Ingram's parting admonition: "Don't forget. Test tomorrow on the Continental Congress." Theatrical moans and groans rent the air. On days when Seyfried and Project Business are not on hand, Mrs. Ingram and the class devote their attention to the regular American Studies curriculum.

"Today's session was an especially good one," she told a visitor while the next class filed into the room. "It's a fine program, providing material in a form we couldn't get anywhere else. The schools really welcome it."

"We're getting something started," Seyfried says. "Project Business touched almost 30,000 young people nationwide this year. On the basis of this experience, the plan is to expand the program substantially so that it is available to something like 100,000 students by the end of this decade. I hope it becomes a regular part of the educational system everywhere in the country."

0 Facing page: Company executive Edmund Seyfried, Jr., reviews results with students at Williams Junior High School in Davenport, Iowa.

How can high school students best learn the intricacies of a country's economic system? Perhaps by playing the role of businessmen or breadwinners for a day. An Iowa school is one of many in the United States which teaches students in this fashion; they have great fun even as they imbibe difficult economic lessons.

TILIITID TBIIIOBIS A private art awards program discovers artistic talent in American teenagers every year and helps promote an appreciation of various art forms.

A nationwide program designed to advance interest in the arts among young Americans celebrated its golden anniversary late last year. The vast project, involving 52 regional art contests for students in the country's junior high and senior high schools, was sponsored by Scholastic Magazines, Inc., and supported by dozens of private businesses.

The annual Scholastic Art Awards Program was the brainchild of Maurice R. Robinson, founder and still chairman of the company that has conducted the contest for half a century.

In the 1920s, as he visited hundreds of U.S. schools, Robinson was disappointed by the relative lack of recognition for the creative and intellectual achievements of students compared with the honors heaped upon athletes. He decided to try to remedy this imbalance.

Robinson started in 1923 by announcing in The Scholastic magazine a prize story contest. In 1925 he devoted an entire issue to student writing-and art tiptoed into the competition with an award offered for the best design and illustration for the cover. Entries swamped the tiny office, then in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This overwhelming interest, and what the judges described as unexpected talent, led two years later to the first Scholastic Awards for Art. The 1977contest attracted 150,000 entries, submitted to regional sponsors, and the best from each area were shipped to Scholastic Magazines' New York offices.

From this collection, 442 works were selected for exhibit at the Union Carbide Exhibition Hall in New York.

In addition to national recognition, 78 young artists received scholarships offered by art schools and colleges to senior applicants on the basis of portfolios and academic records. Another 52 contestants, one from each region, received $100 cash awards.

Left: Among the more imaginative works was Bryan Forsberg's painted box, divided into sections, with clay figures in front of a background of pebbles. Bryan, 18, chose ceramics "because it gives you a chance to do something nobody else does."

Above: "Fancy Hat," a watercolor by 16-year-oldDonna Meeks, was one of the 442 entries selected for display in New York.

Hundreds of winners over the years have gone on to achieve distinction in the fields of fine and applied arts and design. Others are teaching, directing galleries, illustrating books, serving as art directors for magazines.

And, according to Scholastic Magazines, a surprisingly large number have produced works that have won prominent places in exhibitions and in museum collections.

However, the man who started the whole thing views this as secondary. "This discovery. and encouragement . of talented young people through scholarships and other awards is merely a by-product of our Scholastic' Awards," Robinson asserts. "Our prime purpose is to promote appreciation of the arts, and we learn to appreciate best by actual participation." .

Fifteen- year-old Amanda Bray (seen painting a flute above) went to Washington, D.C.,from Kansasfor the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations and re-created the scene (above left) from her memory. Her watercolor painting was done with cotton swabs.

Left: Explaining how she thought up this collage, Rhonda Lewis, 13, of Illinois said, ~'The teacher set up an old wheel and stuff in class, and I made a tricycle of it."

Opposite page: The eye-catching sculpture (bottom) of tiny musicians cavorting about a bugle was the product of17-year-oldMark Yeary's imagination. Top left: This untitled watercolor made Jeff Archibald, 12, from New York, one of the youngest winners of the '77 awards. "Epicenter" (top right), an intricate ink drawing, was the inventive creation of 16-year-old Tony Vera from Ohio.

SEEDS OF SUCCESS TEXT BY SETHURAM SESHADRI PHOTOGRAPHS BY AVINASH PASRICHA

Indo-American Hybrid Seeds, whose lush farms sprawl over 40 acres near Bangalore, represents an unusual success story.

Seeds produced here result in outstanding varieties of flowers and vegetables, and are exported in a big way to the U.S.

Brightly colored petunias in flower beds in Chicago. Warm-hued begonias in decorative pots in San Diego. Towering antirrhinums in a lush garden in Atlanta. These and other lovely creations of nature are common enough sights in flower-conscious America.

Looking at them, one would perhaps think of the enrichment they bring to people's lives. The discriminating observer would know that the flowers spring from hybrid seeds. The profusion, the variety and the blooming period would indicate that. However, many would be surprised to learn that the hybrid seeds have been imported from India.

Indo-American Hybrid Seeds, a pioneering firm in Bangalore, has emerged as a major exporter of flower seeds to the United States. Exports of this firm reached a value

Crimson petunias in splendid bloom (above) and Karnataka tomatoes (above left) oxemplify the excellence of hybrid varieties. Left: Partners Bhat and Attavar examine hybrid geraniums in one of their many greenhouses.

of Rs. 1.2 million in 1977, 10 years after the first shipment worth Rs. 60,000 left India. Total foreign exchange earnings so far amount to Rs. 5.5 million.

This enterprising firm owes its success to Manmohan Attavar, 45, who has always felt a strong attraction to flowers and cultivated the art and technique of growing them.

Mter obtaining his master's degree in horticulture from the College of Agriculture at Dharwar, he proceeded to the United States for higher studies in plant breeding and genetics at the Montana State University

in 1961. Erhard R. Hehn, professor and the head of the department of plant sciences, noticed Attavar's interest in the practical aspects of floriculture. He encouraged Attavar to study ornamental horticulture and flower breeding with the Ball Seed Company of West Chicago, one of the world's largest enterprises of its kind. During the one-year training course, Attavar gained expertise in greenhouse management, plant propagation and seed production. Concurrently, he studied at the Du Page Horticultural School run by the Ball Seed Company. He was exposed to the highly refined techniques of selective plant breeding for hybrid seed production at the Pan American Seed Company at Paonia, Colorado, where much pioneering work in hybridization has been done.

H America has developed hybridization into a fine art, India .may be the ideal 'soil' for its practicehybridization demands painstaking skilled labor in the tradition of Indian horticulture.

Hybridization was a technique developed placed in me," he says. "In the U.S., an in the United States in the early part of this enterprising man who wants to do somecentury to produce better varieties of food thing on his own does not suffer from lack crops. The advantages lie in increased yield, of help." Dr. Hehn and Miss Hazel Thompresistance to plant diseases, and uniformity son, also of the Montana State University, in growth. The "Green Revolution" in stood guarantee for the loan. Supporting India was mainly brought about by hybrid Attavar's efforts, Dr. Hehn said: "Too many return home to be pure wheat production. Now hybridization tech- students niques are widely used in growing vegetables academicians, which I don't think India at the present stage of economic development and flowers.

The technique consists of selecting male is in dire need of. ... I have always appreciatand female lines of a particular plant species, ed your desire to dedicate yourself to the each line having qualities superior to the improvement of the lot of your countrymen." usual varieties. Through hybridization, the . Attavar returned to India in 1965 with advantages of both lines are combined, a the loan he had obtained. He also brought phenomenon uncommon in nature. In the with him seeds of special varieties of petunias case of flowers, for instance, the buds of and other flowers, besides scientific apparathe female line are emasculated by the tus and chemicals for carrying out investigaremoval of the stamen, the male part. The tions in floriculture. More than anything pollen is collected from the male line by else, he brought with him the expertise he vacuum suction and stored under refrigera- had gained by study and observation. He tion at - 10° F in a dry environment. At the had the confidence to successfully apply right time, the pollen is applied manually to his knowledge into practice. He had also obtained the assurance that he could export the female line. Using the right combination, it is possible to get seeds which grow into hybrid seeds from India.

After analyzing the climatological data of plants superior to either parent line. However, the seeds of the hybrid plants once again various locations in India for setting up a share the qualities of only one or the other seed farm, Attavar chose Bangalore, which original parent. Therefore, hybrid seeds are is blessed with mild weather almost throughfor one-time use only and have to be con- out the year. The soil is conducive to the growth of a wide variety of plant species, stantly produced. bringing to Bangalore the reputation of As hybridization involves much manual work, hybrid seeds are relatively expensive being the "garden city of India." Situated in labor-short America. Attavar got an at an altitude of 3,000 feet above sea level, idea: produce hybrid seeds in India, with rainfall and humidity at an optimum where labor is plentiful, and then export them level, the Bangalore area has a good growing to the United States. Once having made up season for about nine months in a year.

The State Director of Horticulture, Dr. his mind, he set about collecting funds for starting a seed farm in India. But he soon M.H. Mari Gowda, helped Attavar to realized that raising capital for his project carry out initial investigations on the selecwas not as easy as he had thought. People tion of matching plant lines, establishing he went to for help, in fact, laughed at his the pollination time for hybrid seed production and the correct season for plant growth. idea.

He was allowed the use of the laboratory Finally, Attavar approached the board and greenhouse facilities at the well-known of directors of the Ball Seed Company for Lalbagh gardens in the city. "This assistance help. They sanctioned him a loan of $14,000, proved to be invaluable," Attavar recalls. to supplement his own savings. "I am still SOOQ.A ttavar built his own greenhouse amazed by the confidence and trust they on the outskirts of the city. N. Krishna Bhat, Extreme care is taken at every stage of a horticulturist, joined him as a partner hybridization in the controlled greenhouses. in the budding venture. With the financial Seedlings are grown in specially sterilized soil. assistance extended by a leading bank, the Left top: Pollen being collected from the male line two partners expanded the greenhouse faciliof a petunia by vacuum suction. The pollen is then ties on a second location just beyond the city. stored under refrigeration and, at the right time, Today, the farms of Indo-American applied manually to the female line. Bottom: Hybrid Seeds sprawl over 40 acres, green"Seljing" a geranium with a brush. This is done to houses accounting for two acres. About maintain the original line with all its qualities.

200 to 300 employees, the number varying Hybrid seeds are for one-time .use only and according to the season, have been trained so new seeds have to be constantly produced.

in the specialized tasks involved in hybrid seed production. "Coming as they do from the poor villages in the area, they are very happy to have regular employment with us," Attavar says. He is pleased that, with collective effort, he has been able to convert what was a barren land into a lush farm, using terrace cultivation and lift irrigation methods.

In hybrid seed production, quality control at every stage is vitally important. "Emasculation of the buds, collection of pollen and pollination involve much manual work.

The utmost care is therefore essential," Attavar says. All the media, including the soil used in hybrid seed production, are steam-sterilized.

The hybrid seeds produced in the farm are tested before shipment. Random samples are planted and the growth is monitored. The flowers thus grown are sent to Bombay and Delhi for display in five-star hotels and on special occasions. They bear eloquent testimony to the excellence brought about by hybridization and advanced methods of floriculture.

Research is fundamental to the development of new varieties of plants, disease prevention, and increase in productivity.

Indo-American Seeds has therefore established a research division, staffed by highly qualified experts. Dr. R.K. Bhandary, technical director, and Dr. K.P. Vasantha Shetty, director for vegetable crops, have helped the firm to diversify into new lines. Ornamental plant breeding as well as hybrid vegetable and fruit seed production hav~ now become successful operations. In fact, Indo-American Seeds has made good progress in exporting the plants and seeds to the Middle East.

Attavar and his colleagues are now deeply involved in promoting the use of hybrid seeds in India. "Vegetable and fruit production can be increased greatly. The cost of hybrid seeds is recovered many times over and the benefits are immense," Dr. Shetty comments. Farmers who visit the farm are impressed by what they see and get trained in the use of hybrid seeds.

The first love of Attavar still being flowers, he is passionately devoted to the idea of making India beautiful with hybrid seeds.

His initial dream having burgeoned into an efficient enterprise, he has sown the seeds of further success.

0 About the Author: Sethuram Seshadri, formerly a writer with the Illustrated Weekly of India, is now <

a publicity

executive in Bangalore.

woaLDCIII.': 10 An annual international film festival is India's window on world cinema. Held in Madras earlier this year, Filmotsav '78's collection included 15 American films.

International cinema, the writer of this article concludes, is as full of creative ferment as ever.

"Taxi Driver Takes Madras for a Ride," said the headline in a Madras daily, commenting on the rush for tickets for this film by Martin Scorsese, one of some 15 U.S. entries (the largest from anyone country) at Filmotsav '78, an international film festival held in Madras earlier this year.

There were other films from the United States and many other countries, which vied for the attention of the film enthusiast-both the one who wants to be entertained and the one who is prepared to be engaged with what a film says. The Italians made a strong impression with Padre Padrone (Father Master), a film about an illiterate Sardinian shepherd that I did not see but heard everyone talking about, I Cannibali (The Cannibals) by Liliana Cavani, its haunting images bringing to life a modern version of the Antigone theme, Cadaveri Eccelenti (Illustrious Corpses), by Francesco Rosi, who packs a great deal of meaning into the format of a detective story, almost turning the whole thing into an essay on Eurocommunism.

Brazilian comedies delighted all audiences with their verve: the sexual extravaganza of Xica da Silva by Carlos Diegues, always exhilarating but never outrageous (the film is not without some significance in its colonial context), Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, simpler but still very enjoyable. The two Polish films I saw were Zanussi's Camouflage and Wojciech Has' The Sandglass-one goes deeply into academia with a fine liveliness Left: Travis Bickle, played by Robert de Niro, trains himself for his one-man crusade against big city evils in the Americanfilm Taxi Driver.

OBIIUARIIS, PLIASB

of mind and style and erupts into unexpected violence against a luminous night sky, bringing two professors down to earth with a thud; the second convolutes through a maze of symbolism and allegory of which only some haunting images linger ~in the mind. Hungary's Budapest Tales (Istvan Szabo) packs political allegory into a brilliant but somewhat scanty imagery to the bursting point. Britain's Black Joy (Anthony Simmons) brings to lifeall the seediness and the exploitation of innocence in the ghetto of the West Indian immigrant so intensely that at the end of the film you are glad to be in Madras, taking a walk outside the Abirami theater, gulping mouthfuls of fresh air to brace yourself for the next film which begins in 10 minutes. Five films a day for 14 days, plus press conferences, official receptions and late-nigh~ shows of Indian films and films outside the festival brought by delegates from Venezuela or Sri Lanka, Algeria or Tunisia.

Despite the blandishments of the topless Brazilian comedies and the elegant striptease of films like Bolognini's The Inheritance, Taxi Driver carried its flag high.

It was easily the most sought-after film of the festival, with people of every description, including some VIPs, thronging the

shows meant for the press. Many of the redoubtable members of the Fourth Estate could be seen standing at the start of the show. And then the hush descended.

People seem to have had the mistaken notion that the film was full of explicit sex scenes. It turned out to have none.

So both those who could not get tickets and those who could were equally disappointed; the former before, and the latter after the event. In between there was the minority of genuine film buffs, most of whom found the film strangely satisfying.

As the Filmotsav bus started back downtown from the Abirami theater with its load of festival hunters, I found myself engaged in a vigorous inner dialogue with the well-known critics whose conflicting reviews of Taxi Driver I had read in foreign magazines. Travis Bickle, played with conviction by Robert de Niro, is a war veteran back from Vietnam, who, unable to sleep (horrors of war?), prefers to work at night and takes on the job of a taxi driver. The set of his jaw, his sense of alienation from the people he works with, mark him out from the start as something of a psychotic character. Prow ling at night through the streets of New York gives him a picture of the seamy

Ahove: Lilia Skala and David Thomas as the elderly couple awaiting the results of the peabody dance competition in James Ivory's Roseland.' Top: In Fun With Dick and Jane, George Segal and Jane Fonda play the title characters who enjoy living beyond their income.

Top left: An illiterate Sardinian youth, destined to,hecome a professor of linguistics, takes a beatingfrom his father in Padre Padrone.

side of big city life and draws him to the image of purity-in-white of Betsy, who works in the campaign office of a presidential candidate.

But out on his first date with her, he takes the girl to the only kind of movie he knows-a porno. Shocked, she walks out of his life, refusing to see him or answer his calls. His nightly kaleidoscope of New York continues to unfold and to convince him further that even Betsy is a part of the conspiracy against goodness.

A chance encounter with the presidential candidate she works for confirms his impression that nothing is going to be done to clean up the evils of the big city. He resolves therefore to take the matter into his own hands. Remorselessly, he trains his body and his mind for it. First he tries to kill the presidential candidate, unsuccessfully; then the focus of his sick mind shifts to a 12-year-old prostitute he has seen earlier. He resolves to rescue her and does so in a gory shoot-out with her pimp and two of her protectors, restoring the girl to her parents. The story is out in the papers, the parents are grateful and the angelic Betsy who had turned him down is now full of admiration. But Travis casually lets her out of his taxi and goes on, satisfied that he has done his bit to clean up an evil world. A faint smug smile hangs on the lips of the intense face of the psychopathic driver as he goes coasting along the night streets of New York, the steam still hissing out of the manholes.

The film is a fable of the big city, loaded with sin and the inexorability of it.

Many critics, Stanley Kauffmann included, have picked holes in it on account of its narrative logic; why should the taxi driver be so naIve as to take a clean girl to a dirty movie? Why should she react as though she had never heard of a porno movie and remain unrelenting in spite of his obviously sincere distress? And why should the film end with all this praise of Travis in the press which should, in fact, have led to his arrest for murder?

To me all that the film says, as it swirls along through the enchanted nightmare world of New York streets at night making an abstract kaleidoscope of colored lights and blue darkness, is this: the world we live in is so caught up in its own web that only a madman dares do anything about it. And what he does is no more than a symbolic act, which changes little of the realities that will continue. It is the old Cervantes/Dostoevski problem; the world is corrupt and he who seeks

to clean it up is either a clown or an idiot.

Scorsese's film is fascinating while you watch it, deeply disturbing after it has ended. Its conflicting resonances go on ringing in one's ears, changing a little, but perhaps forever, one's simplistic responses to the world.

Nothing could be further from this obsessive perception of evil than James Ivory's bitter-sweet nostalgia of Roseland, named after, and shot in, a dance hall in New York. Ruth Jhabavala, without the gall that she increasingly reserved for the Indian characters of her AngloIndian stories for Ivory, assays gentle cameos of love, youth and age in three tales which glide from one to another, getting better and better in the process.

Each is built round a dance competition:

The American cinema today is remarkable for its diversity.

The frightening cool of 'Taxi Driver' lies as far from the caressing lights of 'Roseland,' as the elaborate wit of 'Love and Death' lies from the documentary realism of 'Harlan County, USA.' the first the waltz, then the hustle, finally the peabody, in which Lilia Skala poignantly portrays the old woman, once beautiful, urging on her aged and inept partner to win the competition, just once.

The film has, especially in the second and third episodes, a gentle, autumnal charm.

The Merchant-Ivory-Jhabavala team has an indefinable Indian tinge to it, perhaps out of tune with the American mainstream; but this gives a certain slow pace and a gentle humanity to its first non-Indian venture.

For one hour and forty-three minutes, Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A. relentlessly records a 13-month strike by coal miners; interviews with miners and their families struggling for days, weeks and then many months, fruitless negotiation, moments of despair, the resurgence of determination against state troopers clearing the picket lines across the road for nonstrikers, against union bosses who try to let down the workers but are finally removed. The employer's case is also shown in interviews and the long-drawn, repetitive negotiations are

all there in a grueling encounter with reality, literally down-to-earth. The sense of documentary truth is never lost, even if the sound varies a good deal and sometimes you cannot make out what is being said. The film won the Oscar for the Best Documentary Film of 1976; but needless to say, it played to a half-empty theater. Perhaps it is true that "humankind cannot bear very much reality."

And perhaps that is why good-fun comedies like Oh God by Carl Reiner and Ted Kotcheff's Fun With Dick and Jane remain the stock-in-trade of Hollywood comedy even after independent filmmaking has come into its own and the old Hollywood with the studio stamp obliterating all but the most redoubtable individuals is practically dead and gone.

In the first film, the spirit of God descends, not in the shape of a dove, but of George Burns wearing a fishing cap and a windbreaker. This is remnant Hollywood, hopefully floated by Warner Brothers who think there might still be some takers for this sort of stuff-and there might. There might be more, however, for Fun With Dick and Jane, because there is a shade more of fun and a shade less of trying to do some good while having fun. Both George Segal and Jane Fonda make lovable characters living blithely beyond their income and determined to stay within the upper crust, come what may.

The audience roared with delight when Fonda, in the midst of animated conjugal conversation in the bathroom, hitches up her skirt (not too high), sits down on the toilet seat, wipes her (unseen) behind with tissue, gets up, washes and wipes her hands, talking incessantly all the way through, as only a female Fonda can when the occasion demands it. An inconsequential film, but diverting and unobjectionable.

Woody Allen is nothing if not objectionable every time he opens his mouth; except that in Love and Death he is great even when he keeps it shut. Plunging grandiosely into 18th-century Russia, he creates sumptuous visuals of the past which make his modern-to-the-minute cracks more piquant by contrast. The only original comedian in the cinema today, he makes full use of the rich legacy from Chaplin to Groucho, although much of his wit is verbal. His relentless spoofing extends from Dostoevski to Einstein and Bergman-the most hilarious of these a reversal of the three lions of Potemkin.

Certainly the best Allen yet, perhaps the beginning of still better ones to come, now

that he has got a tight grip on structure and on cinema and is quipping faster than ever.

Instead of ending on this note, the festival decided to end with the Joseph E. Levine production of One Bridge Too Far, directed by Richard Attenborough.

Made to tell us once more how futile war is, the film gets so involved with its first-class re-enactment of war action using so many overfamiliar star faces that it takes a long time to produce a little feeling in us-too little to justify the monumental effort.

Even so, faces were grim as we climbed the festival bus-especially of the British delegates, most of whom were old enough to remember the daily shower of bombs on London and the lives lost in the weary advance to victory.

Much remained unseen in the seven days (out of fourteen) I was there. In the contingent of 15 American films (the largest ever in any Indian festival, not counting films made by American directors in other countries, such as Peckinpah's Cross of Iron in the U.K., and Orson Welles' F for Fake in France, Iran and West Germany), Joseph Zito's Abduction was reported to be the most sex-ridden (yet apparently the tradition of American conservatism continues, for unlike many European films, there is no display of genitalia even in the rape scenes, I am assured). Emile de Antonio's three highly political films and press statements seemed to have caused a curiously mild flutter. Altogether, the American cinema, as seen and heard of in Madras, seemed remarkable more for its diversity than for any unifying trend.

My own abiding memory is of lightssome of them from the backgrounds of Roseland, soft as a caressing hand, but mostly from Taxi Driver, a parade of white and green and yellow blobs, now well defined, now amorphous, framed by the taxi's window, with de Niro's face etched before it with a frighteningly cool inwardness.

Despite television and the moans of many critics, each international film festival confirms that world cinema needs no obituaries yet. Neither does sex or violence dominate it nearly as much as the noise they make in the press. A well-organized noncompetitive festival like Madras' helps most to bring this out, because the quality of entries, although not representing absolutely the very best available, is still high enough to give India a fine glimpse of world cinema.

0

IBW LAIDMABIS IIIIDIAI CIIBMA A unique feature of the film festival at Madras was the 'Indian Panorama' which featured a number of outstanding Indian films of recent years. One of the many well-known foreign critics who attended the festival was BBC's John Warrington who comments in this article on some of the leading new directors and their films. Taken together, they represent a remarkable body of new Indian cinema.

The Madras festival proved many things for India: that it can efficiently organize an international festival; that there is a remarkable group¡ of new young filmmakers-particularly from South India; that the Bombay commercial cinema is now seriously alarmed by the thrust of this comparatively new talent; that Bengal, where the parallel cinema movement started, has lost its early vigor: after Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak (whose retrospective was a unique feature of the festival), there are no towering talents any more.

The creative film directors are now finding how to bridge the muddy waters between art films, original realistic films, the sensitive mythological films, and the flamboyant, commercial extravaganzas so popular with mass audiences.

A creative film director who has bridged the gap is Shyam Benegal. Benegal learnt his film technique the hard way by making hundreds of commercials, so he might have been expected to go directly into the large feature industry. He didn't, because film to Benegal is communication, pleading a cause, arguing for change; he cannot accept the Indian star system (one day's work, then gone for weeks)-he prefers a group working together.

In a male world he pleads for women's rights, the rights of the individual. A humanist, he does not argue for revolution but quiet change (Girish Karnad, playing the man organizing the dairy cooperative in Manthan, seems almost to be playing Benegal).

In Ankur and Nishant Benegal dealt with rural problems of ownership and violence, not just the land but also ownership of people. In Bhumika (The Role) screened at the festival, he moves from the villages into the town and the film world. It is based on the life of a well-known actress who, it is said, was an alcoholic and a nymphomaniac-the popular concept, not the medical definition. Censorship prevented Benegal from presenting such a character; so with Smita Patil (one of the finest, most sensitive actresses in India, she also gave a delicately observed true study of a young village wife in Manthan) he has created a woman seeking personal liberation, yet also seeking security; a woman seeking the freedom that man has in his personal relationships, yet failing because men lack the courage to accept personal responsibility.

Benegal surrounds the central story of Bhumika with a cynical look at the history of India's commercial films: if the film has a fault it is that of self-indulgence in too many flashbacks. His second film at the festival-he has an unbounded creative energy-Kondura (The Sage From the Sea) returns to the village setting. Superstition balances with religion, parables, mythology. It is his first film which Western audiences might not comprehend: the symbols are too exclusively Indian.

Whilst Benegal is not political, Mrinal Sen, the Bengali director, is uncompromisingly so. He claims to be a Marxist, yet he is so much the emotional, uncompromising individualist, sensitive not just to equality but also to the individual, that Das Kapital seems to be a dusty bible.

Sen has changed from his earlier wayward, brilliant fireworks and symbols to a simple narrative, an attempt to clarify his political message to ordinary people. Mrigaya (The Royal Hunt) creates a relationship between personalities so opposed that they might never meet except that they are both hunters: one, the old British administrator; the other, a young hunter froni a primitive tribe.

The usurer landlord steals the young hunter's wife, who then hunts him down as he would a tiger who has killed a child.

He is captured and tried. The British administrator is deeply concerned and disturbed by laws which have always seemed correct and just, but no longer appear so. The symbols roll across the film, some being much too obvious, and the young hunter much too goodlooking.

In Oka Oorie Katha (The Story of a Village), Sen refines his narrative even further. A father and son live a strange, almost dream-state life outside village society. The father refuses to work for the rich. Somehow he manages to live, aided by some judicious stealing from the village landlords. Sen's philosophic concern bubbles and spits at us. Simple? Homespun socialism? Basic Marxism? Maybe, but Sen weaves a strange beauty and anger; an appeal for his people. He leaves us unsure whether he accepts the old man or really despises him. An example is his relationship with his daughter-in-law, whom he has ignored, exploited and abused in turn. When she dies in childbirth, he squanders the money given to bury her on getting drunk. Yet sitting under a banyan tree he cries: "Give us two sacks of rice; give us whole clothes for these ragged loin-

cloths. Give us a new house' for this old one. Give life to the dead girl of ours. " One cannot escape the fact that Sen is' deliberately using the word "give" against such people, using it to illustrate his own ambivalence to a cure for the social ills about which he feels so deeply and can speak so movingly.

Sen is Bengali but he has moved his work to the South-using, incidentally, one of the world's finest character actors, Vasudeva Rao, as the father in this film.

Sen's move to the South is significant because it is there thatthe main creative movement in Indian cinema is now centered.

Although the movement has been developing for some years, it was the Madras festival which highlighted the new cinema in the South.

The film cooperative movement, in which filmmakers with limited funds pool their resources, is also making steady progress in the South. The Chitralekha Film Cooperative, formed in 1965 by a group of students from the Pune Institute, produced Kodiyettom (Malayalam), written and directed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Simply told, it concerns a man unable to face reality; faced with an errand, he will pause to play with children, drink and talk with his friends. He has a vague, almost Chaplinesque, timidity. It is a social document about dreams, poverty and reality. John Abraham's Tamil film Agraharathil Kazhuthai (A Donkey in a Brahmin Village) again has obvious symbols. A donkey is orphaned when its mother is stoned to death and is then adopted by a professor. Parts of the film are quite beautiful, often distressing: throughout there is a feeling of loss, of failure. But this talented director seems to lose his concentration at times.

Many films made in the South deal with prejudice, caste, exploitation of peasants by landlords. But there is also a move away from this. Go-Dhuli (The Cow-Dust Hour), directed by Girish Karnad and B.V. Karanth, though set within a village, dramatizes a philosophical conflict. It begins when a young Indian returns home with an American wife. There is the genuine confusion of the priest, beautifully played

by Lakshmi Krishna Murthy, who appears in many of the socially relevant films, over the American woman's attempt to understand the taboos, language and people. The film's second half burns with an intensity which overwhelms the earlier languid establishing sections.

The festival succeeded in selling the conceptual Indian film overseas. (Apart

from sales, the National Theatre in London is having a special season on regional Indian films; a season is projected for New York. The Yukt Film Cooperative's film Ghasiram Kotwal has been selected for Berlin this year. This is a Marathi film which has given a new incentive to the young Bombay group whose guru is Mani Kaul.)

Nearly all these new directors and technicians are from the Pune Institute which has become an outstanding source of talent. The best of their actors are from the theater, although Smita Patil came from the Pune Institute.

The three-day seminar "Strategies in Film Marketing" spread itself laconically over many subjects, providing a forum for questions but few answers, although these may come during the reflective analysis of the debates.

The 1978 festival showed that India has a new group of high talent and sensitivity, which, with the encouragement and aid given by their states and the energetic Film Finance Corporation, may well bring fresh international prestige to Indian cinema and close cooperation in the communication of ideas and beliefs so necessary in the world today. From Madras, India cannot now look back.

D

Top: Smita Patil and Anant Nag, playing film stars, act out a scene from a film-in Shyam Benegaf s Bhumika (Hindi). Above: Supriya Devi as the tormented Nita in Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara (BenJ;ali). Left: Narayan Rao and Mamata Shankar (dance maestro Uday Shankar's daughter) as the poor village couple in Mrinal Sen's Oka Oorie Katha (Telugu).

RECONSIDERATIONS:

LEEWHORF THE QUESTFORM ING

Seldom has an amateur made such a fundamental contribution to scholarship as the chemical engineer who turned out revolutionary theories in linguistics.

I

maginea legal expert lecturing on quasars to a group of astrophysicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or a banker writing scholarly papers for the Journal of the American Medical Association. Scarcely less spectacular a feat was performed by an almost completely self-trained scholar, Benjamin Lee Whorf, who set the whole scene of linguistic anthropology on its head during the late 1930s and 1940swith what became known as the Whorf hypothesis. Whorf argued that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language; at the same time the structure of our own native tongue shapes the way we perceive our environment.

Perhaps Whorf appeals to us more than other linguistic luminaries of the time precisely because of his amateur standing.

After all, most of us have solid notions about what language is composed of, what its relation to thought is, and what it takes to learn languages. The problem is, we can rarely get linguists to listen to us, except on occasions when they use us as informants. And then they take down descriptions of our speech patterns with the detachment of a Henry Higgins. When someone like Whorf commands their attention, we sit up and cheer.

It would be a naIve mistake, however, to carry the comparison any further, because unlike most of us, he was trained, if mainly by himself, and possessed what has been acknowledged, even by some of his most zealous detractors, to have been one of the keenest minds ever brought to bear on the problems of human communication. Even his mistakes are felt to be more interesting than the correct but safe findings of more cautious writers.

Whorf had the initial advantage of being born into a family of bright, offbeat individuals amongst whom creativity was encouraged and the pursuit of knowledge an engaging pastime.

His father was a designer; one of his younger brothers, John, became a wellknown artist, and the other, Richard, a successful movie star of the 1940s.

Whorf himself graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1918 as a chemical engineer and went to work for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company in Hartford, Connecticut, where he remained as a junior executive till his death.

But apparently the office regimen was

not enough to fuel the furnace of his mind. With the energy of two men, he successfully pursued his professional career for eight hours every working day; after work hours he produced enough scholarly work to achieve renown-and to generate lively controversy.

He first got interested in languages through his fundamentalist religious beliefs. Discrepancies between the Old Testament and modern scientific evidence might be more apparent than real, he felt. These might be due more to faulty translation than to a genuine conflict of ideas.

He wanted to find out for himself, so he went to work studying the Old Testament language, Hebrew. He seems never to have looked back.

Several years later, Whorf took to stopping on his way home from office at a small library in Hartford that had a rich collection of books on Central and South American cultures. Thus, he literally browsed his way into his first language studies to attract an audience of specialists. By 1930 he had won enough recognition for his work on Aztec and the Mayan writing system to obtain a small grant to study Nahuatl, a language very like ancient Aztec, still spoken at that time by a few people living near Mexico City.

When Edward Sapir, the eminent linguist and authority on American Indian languages, joined the faculty at Yale University in 1931, Whorf enrolled as his student. At that time the whole linguistic anthropology discipline was focused on Amerind, as these languages are called.

In the first place, they had been found to be amazingly numerous and therefore offered a rich field for investigation: about eight million people are believed to have spoken the 2,000-odd varieties of Amerind at the time of America's discovery by Columbus. Further, the exotic structures of their grammars, as they yielded themselves up to intensive scrutiny, revealed ways of thought that had a heady effect on scholars, liberated for the first time from the constraints of IndoEuropean language study.

Sapir suggested that Whorf study the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona.

Even more important, he provided the germ of the idea that was to be expanded and explained by his student: that the world is to a large extent "unconsciously built up on the language habits of the

group," and that our orientation in the world is in the "tyrannical hold" of linguistic form.

Whorfs interest in language and his work at the insurance company were not as unrelated as it might seem. In the course of investigating causes of fires, he found time and again that some assumptions people were making about word meanings were costing his company money in claims. For example, workmen in a tannery verbalized as a "pool of water" what was in reality a vat in which decomposing waste matter was becoming gas. A wooden lid partially covered the potentially explosive process that was going on underneath. When someone threw a lighted match into the "water" the whole thing went up with a bang, much to everyone's surprise. And not many know it was Whorf who advised that the word iriflammable be changed to flammable in labeling combustible material, a practice adhered to in the United States. This is because the prefix in-, with its usual meaning not, could in this case be disastrously misleading. (Inin the case of inflammable-means of course exactly the opposite of not.)

Whorf went on with his studies of the Hopi language, spending more than eight years in preparation before publishing a series of elegantly expressed findings.

Although he lectured for a term at Yale, he never worked for a Ph.D. nor made himself available for the academic jobs that came his way, saying he felt his interests would be circumscribed. He wanted to be free to satisfy his own need to know.

That need took him further and further into the realm of language. He was one of the first and most vocal to plead for a general taxonomy or classification of the world's languages as a first step in their scientific investigation. But his name is best remembered for the hypothesis that he expressed in these words: Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thought are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious.

These patterns are the unperceived intricate systemizations of his own language .... And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationships and phenomena, channels his reason¡ ing, and builds the house of his consciousness.

Are linguistic habits related t<;>other habits?

Do people with different linguistic habits differ in behavior?

Can linguistic habits determine others?

The answer is a partial yes. Wide disagreement rages.

Whorf used his data on Hopi to explain what he meant. Factors like plurality, the expression of quantity, verb tenses, and duration and intensity are rendered very differently in Hopi from the way they are rendered in what Whorf calls "Standard Average European" (SAE).

For instance, English has nouns referring to individual items with definite outlines (like tree, ball, house), and also mass nouns that lack sharp boundaries (like water, wood, meat). The mass nouns give us some uneasiness, so we drop the and a before them, or feel the need to limit them somehow by putting in front of them names of the things that contain them (like a plate of meat, a mug of milk, a cup of tea). This exercise doesn't actually solve the problem, but simply shifts our attention from the tea to the cup, or from the mass noun to the individual noun of definite outline. Hopi gets out of this complication by having no mass nouns; such concepts are expressed through verbal forms.

For English speakers, time is a commodity that one can buy, sell, spend and waste. For the Hopi, time is not measurable, and his verbs have no tense in the Indo- European understanding of the word. Instead, Hopi verbs articulate happenings in a dynamic state, yet not in a state of motion. Whorf claimed that this fact made the language give body to such matters as inception, evolution, acceleration, increases in intensity, and the like, that SAE expresses only in technical language and the formulae of physics and mathematics.

The two language types also differ with regard to space. Five thousand words (or about 20 per cent of those in an English dictionary) have spatial connotations. We're either grasping the thread of a story, straying wide of the mark in an argument, orfollowing a line of thought.

In other words, Whorf pointed out, we continually spatialize in our imaginations qualities that our senses tell us are not spatial. , Hopi has no such metaphors of imaginary space. The fact that we do and rely so heavily on them is just one more piece of Whorfs evidence that all of us arc

prisoners of our tongue.

On the other hand, he tells us that Many Amerind and African languages abound in finely wrought, beautifully logical discriminations about causation, action, result, dynamic or energic quality, directness of experience, etc., all matters of the function of thinking, indeed the quintessence of the rational. In this respect they far outdistance the European languages.

All of this is not to say that the idea of linguistic relativity (which is another way of referring to the hypothesis) was original with Sapir or Whorf. Seen in historical perspective, they were participants on the same side of an ongoing debate about the nature of language.

Whorf brought renewed interest to the issue and gave it shape and direction.

Two radically opposed points of view can be and are put forth: (l) that the underlying structure of language is universal and common to all human beings, and (2) that universal deep structures cannot be fathomed by logical and psychological probing or are of a nature so abstract as to be trivial. The first universalist conviction goes back at least as far as the Greeks. But the second view, sometimes labeled "monadist," has been traced to the 17th century German philosopher Leibnitz. Leibnitz said that languages are monads that are "perpetual living mirrors of the universe," each one reflecting experience according to its own individual habits of cognition.

In their styles, the two views are analogous to the familiar classical-romantic dichotomy that divides art, music, and literature. It is no accident that the monadists came into their own with the writings of the German philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt in the early 19th century, a time when romanticism was in its heyday. From von Humboldt the line is a direct one to Franz Boas, who put American Indian studies on the map of scholarship in the early years of this century, then to Sapir and to Whorf.

For those of us uninvolved in the controversy it is hard to imagine the passions aroused in those who are. We can only watch while extremists from either side verbally flail away at one another.

Whorf, after his initial recognition in the 1940s, came in for his share of abuse. His hypothesis generated considerable polemics in his lifetime; and these became more and heated as time went on. This is easy to understand. For one thing, Whorfs hypothesis questioned our human objectivity and the rationality of our everyday decisions. It also questions the patent on "truth" which, since ancient times, scholars have taken out in the name of the Indo-European "greats": Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin.

Philosopher Max Black of Cornell University writing in the early 1960s dismissed Whorfs metaphysics with the backhanded compliment that "in all its amateurish crudity it is no worse than some philosophical systems that have had a considerable vogue." He went on to dismantle, piece by piece, the carefully constructed house of Whorfs intuitive insights into language. Another critic called Whorfs hypothesis "one of the great self-deceptions of our age," and suggested that Whorf had neither the temperament nor the intellect to understand his mentor, Sapir.

Other, more considered, views have worried over the tautological nature of Whorfs main premise: to say that the speaker of another language perceives experience differently from us because he talks about it differently, and then to infer differences of cognition or knowledge from those of speech is fallacious, they maintain. Furthermore, Whorfs findings on Hopi have been thought to be less than reliable. But by far the commonest argument against Whorfs (or anybody else's) monadist view is the fact that translation from one language to another is possiblea condition that would not be so if languages were mutually exclusive.

By the time we reach the late 1960s, the fire in the rhetoric burns less brightly. One commentator suggests that Whorf may not have been such an extreme Whorfian as he is sometimes made out to be. This is another way of saying, perhaps, that some of his enthusiastic followers made greater claims for his theory than he did himself.

Contemporary writers like George

Steiner and Dell Hymes are willing to grant Whorf importance. Steiner thinks of Whorf as an outsider, sensitive to language's poetic and metaphysical implications, who brought a sense of larger issues to the narrow world of linguistic scholarship; Hymes regards Whorf as the almost sole representative of his time of some of anthropology's linguistic objectives: a general classification and description of the world's languages in terms of semantics, or meaning.

The present status of the Whorfian hypothesis has been summed up in three questions: (1) Are linguistic habits related to other habits of behavior? (2) Do people with different linguistic habits differ also in other related habits and behavior? and (3) Can the linguistic habits be taken as determining the other ones? The answer is yes to all three. But only to some extent.

Wide disagreement rages about what that extent is and what constitutes acceptable evidence for it.

Meanwhile, other matters have preoccupied linguists ever since 1957 when Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology erupted onto the scene with transformational grammar, a variation on the old universalist theme with 20th -century embellishments The foundation of Chomsky's theory is the belief that the human mind is "programed" at birth to learn "naturallanguage," and that this programing factor is universal. It is what enables the child at an early age to manipulate with ease linguistic patterns that would boggle the mind, were we all to look as sharply at them as the transformationalists do.

But Chomsky and his followers are themselves now under fire after 20 years of pre-eminence. The many differences between languages have not "gone away" in spite of their efforts at finding the abstract universals. And so the war goes on.

Whorf died of lung cancer in 1941when he was 44 years old. The last two years of his life were consumed at the same restless pace as the earlier ones. It was as if he felt all the data he had collected on language was meaningless unless it led to some larger dimension of truth, some greater human use. In the end he turned

more and more to the philosophy and metaphysics of India. In a two-part article, "Language, Mind, and Reality," published in the January and April 1942 issues of The Theosophist of Madras, Whorf sums up his credo.

"Speech," he says, "is the best show man puts on. But we suspect the watching Gods perceive that the order in which this amazing set of tricks builds up to a great climax has been stolen-from the Universe."

As the mind (or Manas) itself exists on two levels, the one, lower faculty concerned with form (Rupa) and the other, higher one, with formlessness (Arupa), so language exists on the level of naming or lexation (Nama-Rupa) on the one hand and precise patterns at a deeper level (Arupa) on the other. These precise patterns do not operate like the meanings of individual words, but function more like the way meaning appears in sentences. The "patternment" aspect of language, then, is akin .to the higher mind, Ariipa, that always overrides and controls the name-giving aspect (Nama). For Whorf, sentences, not words, are the essence of speech.

All flights of philosophy aside, what engages us most when we read Whorfs writings, collected in the volume Language, Mind, and Reality and edited by John B. Carroll, is his insistence on taking theory out of the rarified atmosphere of scholarship and setting it down where it will hopefully do some good: in the real world. He saw in his pursuit of the truth about language a means to human understanding in the full sense of the word.

In The Theosophist article he says,

of meaning, and that the evolution of human language was complete and had spread its "proud completeness up and down the earth, in a time far anterior to the oldest ruin that molders in the soil today."

Over the din of battle waged by the contending forces in linguistic theory it may be that, for the layman, a voice like Whorfs comes through as one of the more coherent sounds. Whether man is indeed a prisoner in the Tower of Babel or shares with every other human being the condition of being "programed" to learn languages in the same way; whether, in short, languages are inherently dissimilar or alike, are questions that do not much concern us as we go about our daily business.

But Benjamin Whorfs persuasive voice does command our attention when he reminds us that, .... the human spirit is inconceivably old; that the few thousand years of history covered by our written records are no more than the thickness of a pencil mark on the scale that measures our part of experience on this planet; that the events of these recent millenniums spell nothing in any evolutionary wise, that the race has taken no sudden spurt, achieved no commanding synthesis during recent millenniums, but has only played a little with a few of the linguistic formulations and views of nature bequeathed from an inexpressibly longer past.

Yet neither this feeling nor the sense of precarious dependence of all we know upon linguistic tools which themselves are largely unknown, need be discouraging to science, but should, rather, foster that humility which accompanies the true scientific spirit and thus forbid that arrogance of the mind which hinders real scientific curiosity and detach0 ment.

Jacquelin Singh is a free-lance The scientific understanding of very diverse languages-not necessarily to speak them, but to analyze their structure-is a lesson in brotherhood which is brotherhood in the universal human principle-the brotherhood of the "Sons of Manas."

It causes us to transcend the boundaries of local cultures, nationalities, physical peculiarities dubbed "race" and to find that in their linguistic systems, though these systems differ widely, yet in the order, . harmony, beauty of the systems, and in their respective SUbtleties and penetrating analysis of reality, all men are equal.

Again and again Whorf proclaimed that linguistics is essentially the quest

writer living in Delhi. Though she writes on a broad range of subjects, her specialty is linguistics which she studied at the University of California at Berkeley. Her articles have often appeared in The Illus-

trated Weekly of India, Eve's Weekly and Femina. She has also written and edited a number of. children's books.

--

by CHIRANl'AN

KULSHRESTHA

C

The author, who was in Chicago as a graduate student a few years ago, offers a nostalgic glimpse of the city. Chicago gave him anonymity and warmth; it helped him resolve his personal dilemmas.

hicago was the supreme fact of the fiction I wove around myself the year I spent in the United States. Life in that city seemed to impose certain primary conditions of introspection. When you walked through the ghetto beyond the East 60th Street early in the morning, avoiding the cool glances of young . blacks standing against the walls, or heard the splash of the lake water while reading newspaper accounts of the state of poorhouses in Illinois, or walked the streets downtown with the throng-each man to himself, but each the center of a unique private worldyou felt as if you were in a vast spiritual crucible and had to find your way by feeling its sides. Sometimes I would wonder if I was being subjected to a fundamental process of social, cultural, and anthropological experience which historians and social scientists had learned to describe as characteristically American -the problem of finding a new life in a land with unaccustomed sights, smells, and sounds, and the overwhelming need to reconsider the nature of one's affinity with society.

To be an American was not a simple matter. The problem, as I saw it, was not of being the citizen of a particular nation: it was of ceaselessly endeavoring to approximate oneself to an idealistic concept of man. To be an American, in this sense, was to be ineluctably conscious of one's humanity, to retain an attitude of clairvoyance to the future, and to affirm and extend, through personal example, the notions of freedom, equality, and altruism.

My passage to America made it imperative for me to experience the full gamut of emotions one necessarily feels when one approaches the verge of a stirring self-exploration. I had not gone to the United States to corroborate my understanding of the squalor, perversity, and emptiness that permeates human life. I was on a different, a more private mission-a project that the early settlers in the New World might have sympathized with. I had journeyed to Chicago to seek a release from the trap that had got built around myself. For that's exactly what it was-a trap: people acting predictably, following a predictable course, and, as a consequence, ending predictably. I was, of course, cloยงer to the end than my friends imagined or appreciated -the kind' of end that comes not from death, but from mental void, from the blank terror of living through insomnia and migraines, wet pillows, and maddening intellectual uncertainties.

Often I likened myself to a predatory animal visiting the familiar sights of his life. My American experience made me perceive that my torments were an aspect of my inadequate understanding of the nature of human life and behavior. Something in me struggled to break free from the lethargies of my insulated estheticism and sought meaning in the complicated web of relationships in the outside world. I would closely watch out for changes in my consciousness and record my state of mind as they reacted against external stimuli. These cluttered impressions I set out to gather in a notebook on whose cover I had impulsively scrawled the title- "0, Chicago!"

* * *

To be a part of a vast, anonymous city is in some ways consoling. The tension is there, but then you kind of merge into the background, unobserved. Of course, once in a while, as the cars zoom past the streets, headlights beam in full glare on your face and you feel exposed, pinned to the wall with a sense of guilty recognition. You've been discovered, you feel, though there is nothing very concrete to which you may ascribe your guilt.

"The world process has gone awry and you can't do nothing about it. You're not the one who matters, who runs things, who's gonna be asked. You worry about yourself, Mister, and everything will take care of itself. All you can do is to act passive and let the world do its doing. You don't have to bother about it, not a fig. And you'll feel you are free, released. You see-that's the thing."

This was Tiny, my pedagogue at the International House.

He was short and stocky, intense looking, and always wore blue jeans and a black sweatshirt. No one knew anything about his background, no one had ever seen him go to work. He kept to himself, occasionally amusing himself with his guitar or with small tricks managed with a handkerchief. Sometimes he performed somersaults or headstands to kill boredom. He was our foyer clown and philosopher and often counseled youngsters with his own special brand of cynicism.

Many residents of the International House were inclined to accept Tiny's rhetoric. I myself found him absolutely persuasive in actual conversation; later, I would develop doubts and construct a series of mental objections which were never really advanced.

My own opposition to the beliefs of a man like Tiny was not merely theoretical.

Whenever I saw him in the foyer early in the morning, staring vacantly out of the window with a coffee cup clasped in both hands, I thought of another much older man living just around the corner who would at that time be getting down to work on his typewriter and would keep typing till, as he said, his eyes bulged out. Saul Bellow, whose fiction and manuscripts I had come to study at the University of Chicago, believed that the most important problem for any man was to find a measure of significance before death took its toll. Obeying the code of duty in one's sphere of work was, for Bellow, akin to meeting the terms of one's contract on earth. These terms, he felt, were known to all men intuitively, and could not be defied except through the modalities of an evasive and irregular metaphysics.

In his own life, Bellow has sought to fulfill the terms of his assignmentwith untiring work and continuous self-discipline. When I once mentioned to hiin the possibility that the Nobel Prize might one day come his way, he almost blushed and said that hewould have to work harder, write a great deal more and better, to win that coveted accolade. Thinking about this remark later, I thought that there was a spiritual dimension to Bellow's esthetic priorities-as if behind his determination to write more and better fiction there was a muted voice that kept praying: I should not shirk work. I should not cease in my efforts. When the day ofjudgment comes, I should not befound wanting.

Wherever I turned in the University of Chicago, I found a similar commitment to the morality of intellectual labor. A story was current in the social science building that Edward Shils, the eminent sociologist, had once pushed a soliciting student out of the elevator, saying: "Young man, grow your mind, not your . beard." My teacher Wayne C. Booth, the noted fiction critic, used to say, quoting Socrates, that human degradation resulted from a hatred of the logos, of the word of truth. Loss of faith in reason and its grounds in human community was, to Booth, a fate worse than death. "I may, of course, use impressive logic in pursuing my unreasonable purposes," he would say, "but I have forfeited my claims to ..rationality. And I no longer exist, reallyas a man, even if! survive my animal battles."

I was enormously fascinated by Henry Moore's three dimensional four-meter-high sculpture (above) commemorating the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction achieved under the supervision of Enrico Fermi. I would visit the statue in the west stands of Stagg Field in the University of Chicago, watch it from all angles, sometimes sit in its arched cavity and domed interior, and muse upon its possible architectural intention. Gradually I could interpret the bronzed artwork as a symbol of multiple significances. The solid skull-like exterior with eye sockets seemed to convey the driving energy of the human mind as well as the fact of death, the two meanings being implicit in the particular use to which atomic reactions can be put. The inner sanctum of the statue appeared strangely tranquil and peacely, like the garbhagriha of a traditional Indian temple. How appropriate for a university to erect on its grounds a monument that would celebrate the prowess of the human intellect and yet caution against its destructive potential!

Even the jokes at the University of Chicago seemed to assume a bizarre, metaphysical coloration. Some bored technicians at the computer center-so went an anecdote-decided to have fun with two computers that had gone out of order and gave erratic results. One of them-nicknamed The Maniac-was fed with a problem: Where is God? The instrument worked feverishly for an hour and, confessing its inability to cope with the problem on its own, sought outside help. The request was granted, and The Maniac was electronically coupled with The Schizophrenic.

The two operated together with great verve and finally transmitted the message that the solution would be ready in a few minutes. Promptly after 10 minutes came the solution: God is missing!

I didn't know there was a Paris in Illinois till the International Fellowship Committee, which arranges for foreign visitors to stay with American families, started me on to it. Paris, I discovered, was 400 kilometers and four hours away by bus from Chicago, a compact, well-knit town proud of its own newspaper and market place. My hosts- Mrs. Silverman and her son Larrywere the only Jewish family in that community and gave me a fair idea of the gradual assimilation of immigrant populations in the mainstream of American life. Larry Silverman, who man-

aged the family's gasoline filling station, was 28, irreverent, and shrewd, with a face that from certain angles resembled the pictures of Saul Bellow in youth. The evening I arrived, he invited me to a driving spree that took us to a bar in the neighboring town of Italy: as we perched on high stools drinking beer, Larry chatted with several of his acquaintances in the joint, joking, bantering, sometimes querying and sympathizing, but always bringing the conversation back to an assessment of the local market. An alert businessman, he used all the conversational openings to find out which way the trade winds blew. Talking to me later that evening about the Rajasthan desert, he quickly came up with a list ¡of agricultural products that I could profitably market, if I so cared. In fact I'm sure he felt disappointed with my lack of enterprise in making a quick dollar with the tips he was so freely offering.

I had intended to spend the entire next day writing a travelogue and, after breakfast, worked without interruption till two in the afternoon when in came Larry with the suggestion that we fly to St. Louis in his plane to pick up a friend returning from Vietnam.

Larry had a small four-seater Mooney aircraft, which he flew with unaffected ease and confidence. Approaching St. Louis, we were caught in a storm, and all of a sudden darkness seemed to press down upon us like a heavy woollen cap. Larry handled the plane with great unconcern and often swung it from side to side to escape the storm. I could see and hear faintly the patter of raindrops on the window. Soon we were at the St. Louis airport and headed back home immediately after picking up Larry's friend.

We landed close to Larry's shed on the Paris airstrip around 60' clock. It was dark, and chill had set in. As I was getting out of the plane, I could hear the excited pitch of several voices. Larry's friend was surrounded by his family the moment he stepped out.

There were sounds of kisses and sobbing. Being a son and a brother away from home, I was deeply moved by the reunion.

This, I remember thinking, was real life, which did not have to pretend (unlike some hardboiled varieties of contemporary fiction) that all affections, sentiments, and filial relationships had lost their warmth in modern life. There was an undercurrent of love and sympathy in all human relationships that seemed to survive all exigencies and circumstances-war, adversity, differences of nationality and culture, and the so-called pressures of a mass society. By responding to this. love and sympathy, we affirmed our allegiance to the kingdom of the heart, and consecrated, in effect, the ideal of human brotherhood.

I was not sure if there was a God who supervised the quaint mechanism of our lives, but I was sure there were certain states of mind that came alive in interpersonal relationships and could perhaps be called godly. Such mental states, I thought, could be the legitimate business of any young man.

* * *

It was on a cold, misty morning in December that I met Mabel Dodsworth. "Meeting," though, is hardly the right word to describe what actually happened. I was returning from the bank and, trying to take a shortcut to the Woodward Avenue, found someone huddled on the ground, two crutches thrown on either side of the body, a heavily plastered ankle jutting out of the left leg of the trousers. It was a girl fallen unconscious. I sat by her side and fanned her face with my handkerchief, not knowing what else to do.

Soon, however, Mabel came to. It turned out that she was

Chicago at twilight. " ... Youfelt as if you were in a vast spiritual crucible and had to find your way by feeling its sides .... "

new to Chicago and lived several blocks away on 51st Street.

Just after her arrival, she had slipped in the bathroom and dislocated her left ankle. That day she had gone to the Billings Hospital for a checkup and, while returning, had lost consciousness through exhaustion and weakness.

It began to drizzle. Soon there would be snow. I hailed a taxi and escorted her to her apartment. She looked pale and fragile and had to be supported in the elevator and at each faltering step in the corridor. I opened the door and she lay down in bed, sick and tired. Finding no groceries in the kitchen, I went to the store below and brought some eggs, bread, butter, and cheese. Imagine me, serving an omelet with coffee to a girl in bed!

Late in the afternoon I resolved to leave. Mabel was still in bed, breathing heavily with closed eyes, but it appeared as if she would pull through. Besides, the portly manageress of the building could be¡ trusted to attend to emergencies. I gave her my

phone number and left. endurance. Trying to rush under a tree for shelter I slipped and But the moment I came out of the building I realized that I fell near an incomplete snowman abandoned by children . had made a mistake. Upstairs I had not realized the velocity of . Unhurt, I stayed on the thick carpet of powdery snow for a while, the wind and the rate of snowfall. Now, the swirling flakes of my mind blank and my senses numbed. snow bit into my face and the wind made my steps unsteady.

The end of the lane where it met East 59th Street was not far.

But going back was out of question: I had to complete a paper I made an effort and got up. As I took the next few steps, I and my friends at the International House would be worrying. became conscious of the stillness growing around me. Snow was I trudged on, taking shelter under the porches of apartment everywhere, with innumerable prints made by straggling feet. buildings every now and then to regain my balance and to blow Suddenly I felt very relieved and easy, as if a heavy, unholy some warmth into my hands. The wind by now had turned into burden had evaporated from my body and soul. What was it? a minor storm, snow fell intermittently, streets were almost Why was it so? I couldn't tell, yet it appeared to me that I was deserted, and no taxis were in sight. In the shopping arcade a survivor in some mysterious and inexplicable but positive around the 53rd Street, a truck had got stuck in the sludge and sense. But that was no time to answer riddles. I turned the <:orner several workmen were trying to push it into action. Machine in:to the 59th Street and walked home.

0 oil and grease had sullied the snow around the truck.

From 53rd Street I turned into the long treelined lane which About the Author: Chirantan Kulshresth4 is a .Reader in English at the ledto the International House. Automobiles, covered with snow, University of Hyderabad. His literary articles have often appeared in such were parked on both sides of the road. My ears were frozen, journals as the American Review, Chicago. Review, Indian Journal of stiff as crackers and burning. I felt very tired-weary beyond American Studies, Quest and Indian Literature.

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'India cannot be treated as just one more nation of the global south, or just one more developing country. It has to be treated very much on its own. This we understand, and this we will be doing.' to the conclusion that at the present state of knowledge and technology it isn~t worth pursuing. With the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, we will of course abandon it. Now I would imagine and I would rather hope that scientists in all countries would be rethinking the problem on a theoretical level, and seeing whether someday this is a force that could be put to use.

Speaking personally, if someday it is found that you could dig a new canal somewhere and nuclear explosives would be useful, if it would be clean and costeffective, maybe that's the sort of thing that IAEA could undertake-become the only agency in the world that is entitled to set off a nuclear explosion.

This would be one way of handling it.

But, as I said, right now the technology does not seem relevant and is not being pursueq by us, certainly not through tests.

CHOPRA: In that case, what were the aims and what was the need for the agreement signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1976 on the Regulation of Peaceful Nuclear Explosions? rm not sure of the title of the treaty, but it was a 1976 treaty on the regulation of peaceful nuclear explosions between the United States and the Soviet Union. ; . THORNTON: It was an interim step reducing the permissible level of explosions for monitoring purposes. I believe it's going to be superseded by a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

CHOPRA: Do J take it to mean that, first of all, a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is fairly soon likely to be signed between the United States and the Soviet Union, and two, that under the treaty peaceful explosions would also not be undertaken by the Soviet Union as well.

THORNTON: We pertainly hope that there will be a treaty signed. As to the latter, that would necessarily be a part of it from our point of view.

CHOPRA: What is China's position on this question of partial or total bans?

And what is the present state of American efforts vis-a-vis China? .

THORNTON: China has stood completely outside the arms control picture, and I think quite unfortunately. We would like to see them come in, but at this point there has not been any Chinese interest. Their view is that this is the business of the two superpowers. We have

started to pursue this matter with them and we will continue to pursue it, seeking to draw them into international arms control negotiations. Although the Chinese nuclear capability is certainly not on the scale of that of the United States or die Soviet Union, nonetheless it is a potentially disturbing international. factor. You could never have what we are looking toward, the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, unless China and all other real and potential nuclear powers are firmly involved. But for the time being the Chinese have not shown interest in participating.

CHOPRA: Now to the question of Indou.s. relationship in the context of the U.S. view of South Asia as a whole. I had an impression that until very recently, over a period of a few years, there had been an American decline of interest-partly in this r~gion as a whole, and partly in India-a kind of a disenchantment, a kind of afeeling that nothing much can be done anyhow.

Accompanying that, there was a somewhat contrary thinking, an interest which one would regard as not entirely benign: a thinking that India is not a country that needs to be written off, but that it needs to be somehow counterbalanced. Would you say that this phase of disenchantment, or of disinterest on the one hand and counterbalancing on the other hand, is something we have now come out of? Are these phases behind us ?

THORNTON: Let me start sort of at the middle of your question-the theory that the United States somehow or other was trying to counterbalance India. Some academic writings, I know, have asserted that the United States was trying to prevent India from rising to a position of world power and so forth. I've been quite intimately associated with Indo-U.S. relations over the last 20 years and I have never heard an American official consider that as a course of action.

There was never any attempt to minimize the position of India or keep India from being a great power or a middle power or an emerging power, or whatever.

In many ways that would have shown a greater interest in the subcontinent than actually existed. It just never arose as a question in American policy considerations.

I think it rather flows back to the first part of your question: Did we pay much attention to India? Did we take it very seriously? Despite periods of intense and

sympathetic concern with India that are associated with the names Bowles and Kennedy, the predominant answer quite frankly is that often we did not. In several of the past Administrations, there was a general feeling that our interests were not heavily engaged in South Asia one way or the other. And, speaking candidly, some past Indian governments did not make it easy for the United States to find a viable basis of cooperation.

If you go back to a period as early as the mid-1950s, when we first became deeply involved in South Asia, we tended to view our relations with the whole region and with India in terms of the requirements of our policies toward the Soviet Union or China, because we considered our intrinsic interests here to tie low, when measured in political and military terms.

Sometimes this view would be more strongly or less strongly represented.

In the previous Administration, under President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger, it was held very strongly. The main issue in the world was seen to be between the United States and the Soviet Union, and therefore regional considerations were of secondary concern. That is a criticism of past American policy I accept as valid and I have expressed myself in print to that effect. The idea that we were trying to keep India down, however, is just not relevant; this was just simply not a consideration.

Now coming to where we are now, which is the import of your question, I think the situation has changed, and it's not because Lillian Carter worked in the Peace Corps in a village near Bombay.

It's a change in the view of the world that the Carter Administration holds.

We have become much more interested in what are called the North-South issues.

We have come to take much more seriously the role of the Third World, or developing, or nonaligned countries-especially, of course, the larger ones such as India, or Nigeria, or Brazil. These countries were on the President's itinerary and will be either visited on this current trip or the trip scheduled for this spring.

We are interested in these countries for their own sake, because of their economic position, and because of our bilateral relations with them, but also because we are concerned with the problems of the Tlllrd World, generally. Of course our relationship with the Soviet Union still is central and has an important impact on

The relationship between two of the world's ten largest economies should be a broad one and should not focus on donor-recipient ties, which are unhealthy over the long term. how we deal with the rest of the world.

But the view of this Administration is that countries such as India are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves visa-vis the Soviet Union, as long as they are not under direct military threat.

India is not a battleground where we or the Soviets are going to win. India is going to win in India. Or India will lose in India. And there is really very little that we or the Soviet Union can do to deflect India from its own course of national interest, even if we should want to.

This is the approach of the Carter Administration, which deals with India not as a function of some global political problem, but primarily as an important nation with which we share bilateral interests.

If we see India less in its own terms than in global terms, it would be only to the extent that it is involved in a class of problems which are North-South problems-trade, investment, aid. But even there India is a special case, because of its size, because of its position, because of the way its economy is organized.

India cannot be treated as just one more nation of the global south, or just one more developing country. It has to be treated very much on its own.

This we understand, and this we will be doing.

CHOPRA: One recent theme that has emerged, and it was very prominent in President Carter's address to Parliament, very encouragingly so, is a kind of a joint effort between the countries of this region for the development of river water resources, especially between India, Nepal and Bangladesh, with U.S. assistance as far as may be possible, the international community's assistance as far as it may be needed.

To my mind it would seem that this is a new thing that has emerged within the subcontinent. Twenty years ago when the Indus water treaties used to be discussed, the discussion was always about sharing of the waters by two claimants upon those waters. The emphasis was much less upon joint development between India and Pakistan, maybe because of the state of relations between India and Pakistan.

Lately, however, this theme of joint efforts has emerged both within and without the subcontinent. President Zia of Bangladesh when he toured India and Nepal mentioned this. When Mr. Morarji Desai went to Nepal he mentioned this and the Nepalese Foreign Minister men46

SPAN APRIL 1978

tioned this on coming to India. And now President Carter's address brings it to a higher level of consideration. Do you see that such a theme can now occur in diplomacy as a reflection of the changed view of the subcontinent, that the subcontinent is not an area of warring countries only but it is an area of possible cooperation between these countries?

THORNTON: Oh, yes, clearly. I'm sure an American President wouldn't even have made such a suggestion a few years ago. We have been very impressed by the way that India and Bangladesh have been able to come to an agreement over the Farraka question, and by their willingness to include Nepal in these copsiderations. After all, many of the tributaries of the Ganges rise in Nepal.

There are at present in the eastern part of the subcontinent, perhaps for the first time, the preconditions for cooperative development of what should be one of the world's great, fruitful agricultural areas. We welcome that .warmly. We have no preconditions about how this should be organized or what should be done, whether rivers are to be moved, whether groundwater is to be pumped up for irrigation, or reservoirs are to be built. There are many ways, obviously, and there are many other factors involved in development, but water management seems to be the key.

What the President suggested in his speech was that we would support an initiative on the part of the regional'states -after all, it must come from them, this is their countryside-for a study of how the international community can best address this problem. It is a problem of the international community in the sense that if there is a large food deficit area in eastern India or Bangladesh, this impacts on the availability of food worldwide, resulting, for instance, in increased bread prices for the American consumer.

It means less grain that we could sell to the Soviet Union or that Australia could sell to somebody else.

Increasingly we will have to look at these problems as global problems. What we are doing in the Sahel could be taken as a model to some extent. The inter-' national community is addressing an international problem. Cooperation on Eastern waters development should not be in the sense of giving aid. It's not aid to India or aid to Bangladesh though it will obviously help both of these countries and Nepal-but it is a problem of the

international community banding together to see whether there are useful things it can do to improve the global food balance that all of us participate in.

CHOPRA: Let me invite you to speculate on this question a bit. Out of these rivers that we are talking about, the largest flows for a very long distance through China; it's the Brahmaputra. And several of them flow into Pakistan and then to the Arabian Sea. Do you think that it is a practicable idea, if not of today, of tomorrow or the day after, that these two countries would also be within this vision of a joint river development of this region?

THORNTON: Over time, it would be very useful if China were to associate itself in some degree with the program, and to the extent that Pakistan is concerned, certainly Pakistan also.

CHOPRA: Do you see a time of such possibilities?

THORNTON: Well, you know we're talking of a program which is going to last well into the next century. The development of eastern India and Bangladesh is not something that can be done, let's say, in five or ten or fifteen years.

I imagine that my grandchildren will still see the development of this region as a very active undertaking, because some of the projects which may have to be undertaken are huge. It will probably take several years simply to have a thorough study of the problem. I hope that relations among the countries of the region will have progressed by that time to the point where cooperation is possible.

CHOPRA: You mentioned earlier the North-South dialogue and the U.S. interest in India on that axis also. There has been a feeling that India has been something of a moderate in the southern group.

As against that the United States has been one of the three hardliners in the northern group, along with Japan and West Germany, as distinct from some of the European countries, especially Sweden, Belgium and, to some extent, France. There was an expectation here, in Delhi certainly, that President Carter, in recognition of the particular position India has on the NorthSouth axis, would be making some fairly important observations, a major pronouncement on North-South relations in Delhi. That, it would seem to me, hasn't come through.

THORNTON: This was a visit to India.

We spoke earlier about the idea that somehow or other the United States had frequently dealt with India in the light of some global consideration and not on its own terms. The possibility was considered of making a major speech on North-South affairs in New Delhi, but that would be rather like 20 years ago having come here and made a major speech on the evils of communism.

India is indeed a moderate in NorthSouth issues. A good way to phrase it would be that India is a country with a wide range of interests in North-South affairs, which gives it, as the President said, almost the function of a bridge between the two sides. North-South matters were therefore usefully discussed between the Prime Minister and the President. But it would not have been appropriate to use New Delhi as a venue for talking over the heads of people of India to other countries.

CHOPRA: The two aspects of Indo-U.S. bilateral relations, economic relations on the one hand, and the North-South relations on the other hand, do overlap to some extent, because one party is a member of one group and the other party is a member of the other group. Would you say that hitherto the irifluence of the North-South axis has been a benign one or a malign one on the bilateral axis of relations? How do you foresee this problem of the interaction bel-ween the two? Would improvement on one axis lead to an improvement on

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material, more tangible relationships on the economic side and diplomatic side and soforth, do you see also a livening up of the cultural interchange between the two countries? Judging by past experience, what in your view are the more useful aspects which ought to be built up?

THORNTON: You are certainly correct in saying that in the previous years there was a great shriveling up of this kind of contact. Although I've been implicitly critical of past attitudes of my own government in some of the things I said earlier, in this case it was not the fault of the U.S. Government. Rather the climate in India became such that it was very difficult for American scholars and individuals to come here and work freely.

This climate, I think, was the greatest inhibition to the exchange of persons and exchange of ideas. There was a cutback in resources on our side because they couldn't be used all that effectively.

But there are now plans for an increase in cultunll and academic exchanges.

The President mentioned it in his speech, for he is personally concerned. There are, CHOPRA: Let me in conclusion refer to of course, limits to the number of people another kind of interaction which one has who can usefully go back and forth one noticed in the past. With a kind of dis- way or the other under governmentenchantment or lack of interest in India approved programs. that manifested itself in the Indo-U.S. The value of exchanges is that people relationship, there was also a shriveling get to know each other, whatever they up of cultural contacts, of exchange of visits, are doing. I was an exchange student a drying up of the whole interface between in Germany myself when I was young, the two countries. Now, assuming, and I and it really was a great formative exthink the assumption is correct, that perience of my life. I think this is true President Carter's visit revives the more of so maqy people who go¡ abroad,

the other, or are they two entirely different, autonomous processes?

THORNTON: That is a very interesting question. The two are very definitely interrelated and may almost be locked together in a sense. A lack of interest in North-South issues in general, which was characteristic of some previous Administrations, manifested itself also in a lack of interest in India. To the extent that we were unyielding, or uninterested in NorthSouth issues, it was more difficult for us to deal with India. This naturally raised feelings in India that we were not concerned with the problems of India, many of which are North-South problems.

As we become more interested in these problems and as we try to develop positions that would be helpful to the NorthSouth dialogue, I would see us working increasingly closely with India. Conversely, if India were to change its position and become a strident advocate of confrontation in North-South issues, this would inevitably have an impact on the U.S. bilateral relationship.

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encounter a new culture, and establish friendships and contacts that persist. The problems that grew up in Indo-American relations might have never happened had there been among the leadership on both sides the kind of personal knowledge that comes through the experience of going back and forth.

Where can this exchange most usefully take place? Certainly in the areas where cooperation is most important. That is, in things like agricultural development or energy development-and these fall under existing exchange programs.

American scientists should come here and work on projects in these areas where we have much to learn from what is going on in India. But there should also be a continuing exchange of specialists in the area of our respective cultures and histories: Americans coming to tell India about American history and Indians coming to tell Americans about Indian history, widening the circle of awareness and knowledge of the other country.

Artistic exchange, yes, of course also.

Student exchange is already very extensive. There are many Indian students in the United States, and that probably is something which we don't have to encourage. There are a number of American students who come to India at the advanced levels as well. But we, and I think the Government of India, would want to focus on areas which have concrete application, in addition to the general building of goodwill and mutual learning that goes on.

CHOPRA: I understand from a number of friends in the U.S. academia, that funds for India studies became extremely difficult to put together over recent years. I am talking of American studies in American universities by Americans relating to India.

Formerly, funds used to be very readily forthcoming from the kind of private funding that occurs in American universities, but lately it hasjust disappeared.

In fact one of the most distinguished American scholars about India, when he wanted to come to India had to come under a mental health scheme "because you know crowding leads to mental health and I want to go to India to see what happens to mental health in a crowded situation"because he couldn't say, "I want to go to study this aspect or that aspect of India itself."

THORNTON: That's very true, but it's not peculiar to India. If you were in the Philippines or in Central Africa, you'd find much the same thing. Availability of money from private sources for foreign area research in the United States has dropped off drastically, mainly because many of the large private funding organizations-Ford, Carnegie and so forthare focusing much more on domestic American problems. Also, in many cases, because of economic difficulties in the United States, the foundations don't have the kind of resources they used to. One of the large endowments has had to curtail its operations very drastically simply because it lost a lot of money in the stock market and does not have the

same capital to work with.

Now, that is certainly part of the problem, but the other part is that India, as I said earlier, suffered more than some other countries in recent years because the research climate was unfavorable.

There was not much point in sending people to India in many of the disciplines, so universities didn't devote scarce resources to it. This I trust will change.

The amount of money available from private sources is not going to increase greatly, nor is the amount of money available from government sources going to increase by whole orders of magnitude. We just don't have that kind of money.

The whole cultural exchange program of the United States runs on a budget of substantially less than $100 million. That has to cover the whole world. We will try to emphasize India more within that program and we will try to enlarge the program generally.

But what we're talking about is a few million dollars. Also, there are limits of how much of this you want to do. We do not want to recreate the 1950s and 1960s in which there was an American researcher standing behind virtually every Indian. This again represented a period of Indo-U.S. relations that was probably not a healthy or a realistic one.

CHOPRA: With that, I would heartily agree. Perhaps on that note of agreement we can conclude this conversation. Thank you very much.

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LANDSAT DISCOVERS NEW RESOURCES

"If I had to pick one space-age development to save the world, I would pick the earth resources satellites," Dr. James C. Fletcher, former administrator of the u.s. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), said recently.

The most important of the earth resources satellites is the Landsat, three of which are at present circling the globe, relaying images which can be processed into photographs or computer-enhanced maps (like those shown on this page). Using this data, scientists can predict crop yields, locate mineral and petroleum deposits, identify cultivable land, monitor the development of forests; map geothermal and volcanic regions. Developing countries can leapfrog a whole era in exploring, identifying and using resources by means of the Landsat satellites. A remote-sensing satellite earth station now being set up near Secunderabad will enable India to receive Landsat data directly from the satellite, giving her a valuable new tool for resource development.

Picture below: A portrait of the United States, a mosaic of 505 photographs taken by the Earth Resources Satellite (ERTS I), assembled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for use in landmapping, hydrology, farming and forestry studies. Left: A picture of Nepal assembled from Landsat images.

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