SPAN Is Village Life Changing?
2
by McKim Marriott
The Unforgettable Victor Paranjoti
12
by Jamila Verghese
Training India's Women Technicians
20
Moon Landing: The Countdown Begins Student Unrest: Two Views
24
32
by George Kennan and Joh~ Fischer
Is Advertising Really Worth It?
38
by Russ Johnston
New Nations and the U.S. Experience by Seymour Martin
Damoo of the Big Top
46
by Mohan S. Bawa
SPAN OF EVENTS exploration of space requires a massive technological effort, the main ingredients of another great adventure of this century were simple courage and endurance. Sixty years ago this year, U.S. Navy Commander Robert E. Peary stood where no man had set foot before-North Latitude 90°, Longitude 0°. His trek to the North Pole in April of 1909 was the culmination of twenty years of exploration in the blinding Arctic ice and snow. His last trip-the one in which he reached his goal-was made at the age of fifty-two. He lost his toes to frostbite, but he won immortality and added to man's knowledge of his planet. The photograph above was taken in March of 1909 shortly before Peary and a handful of helpers set out on the final 416 miles of their overland journey to the North Pole. In contrast to the thousands of scientists and engineers who back up space missions today, Peary had the help only of a handful of men and the rough craftsmanship of wooden sledges. Since Peary's odyssey, man has flown many times over the North Pole and has sailed beneath it in submarines. Among the submarines was the nuclear-powered USS Seadragon which surfaced long enough in August 1960 for some of its crew to walk on an ice floe in the same area where Peary had once stood. The photograph at right was taken through the Seadragon's periscope. WHILE MAN'S
Front cover Man and his landing vehicles are boldly portrayed against a moon backdrop in this fanciful montage that symbolizes the aim of the ApoUo 11 mission. k pictorial preview starts on page 24.
Back cover The memorial to Thomas Jefferson commemorates a leader who helped mould the U.S. The many similarities between the early history of America and that of developing nations are discussed on pp. 42-45.
W.D. Miller, Publisher; L.L. Lefkow, Editor; V.S. Nanda, Mg. Editor. Editorial Staff: Carmen Kagal, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal K. Sharma; Krishan G. Gabrani, P.R. Gupta. Art Staff: B. Roy Choudhdry, Nand K. Katyal, Kanti Roy, Kuldip Singh Jus, Gopi Gajwani. Production Staff: Awtar S. Marwaha, Mammen Philip. Photographic Services: USIS l'hoto Lab. Published ,by the United States Information Service, Ipur ",House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the Americ New Delhi. Printed b)! Arun K. Mehta at VaJdI & 5p Narandas Building"Sprott Road, d8 Bailard Estate, Manuscripts and photographs sent for publication must be accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope for return. SPAN is nottespon-' sible for any loss in transit. Use of SPAN articles in' other publiditi~ns is encouraged except when they are copyrighted. For details, write to the Editor, SPAN. Subscription: One year, rupees five; single copy, fifty paise. For change of address, send old, address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager. AUow six weeks for change of ad.dress to become effective.
out in large groups and sing songs about the election just as they do in an old-fashioned festival. So far as I have seen, these elections are quite peaceful. A large amount is at stake because there is tax money to collect. Of course, part of a politician's staying power is not collecting taxes. But even though probably not all taxes are collected, there does seem to be something positive going on. The main public debates are not whether the taxes should be collected but whether money should be spent for a school, improved roads or lighting for the streets. Thosearethe hot issues which were not even given priority in the old days. I mentioned that there are five new temples. There are also about five new festivals in the village. You might have expected that with secularization and urbanization and technological changes you would lose a lot of the old village culture, but five new festivals have started up and they are quite "village" in style. There are folk tales told about them-women are still telling stories and they have invented a lot of new stories since I was first there. There is more participation and more paintings are being made. Religion is the women's province in this area. They always did paintings on the wall for each festival but now they are doing more elaborate ones. I was looking at some of these paintings and I found that their content has changed. There was one that was about the god Narayan and how he gives food to the earth. It all comes through him. You worshipped him, and then the earth was fruitful. That one has now become a committee of six. I asked whether they are all Narayans. I was told that the other five are the five Pandava brothers. This is very interesting because in this region the Mahabharata, from which the Pandava story comes, was practically unknown. Almost all of the stories in the village were from the Ramayana-stories about Rama. This new element has evidently come out of the schoolbooks. About fifty p~r cent of the village children are now being educated. This may sound poor, but it is a great improvement from five per cent. All the boys and girls of the landed families and some of the lowest
caste are in school. Few girls still are being educated, but there are, I think, something like twenty-five boys going beyond the fifth grade now. Quite a few are going to various high schools. There are about seven or eight in intercollege, using the village as a dormitory and coming back every night. There is one who commutes fourteen miles a day to a university. Every land-owning family now has one or two sons in high school. This has become the standard pattern. One son, the eldest, always has to stay on the land because it is so productive. Here we have prosperity working against education, but the brothers are supposed to work together and they do complement each other. There is a perfect willingness on the part of many of these boys to come back and spend time in the village and to use their education on the land. I have seen high school graduates who are extremely bright and doing very well in their studies say they really prefer not to take urban jobs. They prefer life in the village. They think it is much better now that they have a chance of making a prosperous living there. The village has a kind of pull, you might say. Previously people worried about the village a lot. They were hungry in it and they left. Now they think hard before leaving. There is expressive education in every sphere and more literature. There are nine school-teachers living in the village, all local boys, and previously there were none. They are writing songs about sanitation for their classes, and they are also enthusiastically helping me collect village folklore. They realize that there is a difference between standard language and village language. They are interested in the old, unwritten village tales. There are also new dramas and new poems. I find that women are willing to tell me stories. It was very, very difficult to do that eighteen years ago. There is an awareness that there is something important in the village, an awareness of how their customs differ from other peoples, an acceptance of urban standards as different from village standards, and a sense that the two ought to be related and are related. New things are coming in and
there is local creativity. Before I returned there this year, I thought very little would have happened to this village, located where it was, with very conservative and proud people. In fact, a great deal has happened. It has happened not directly, it seems, because of the agencies that were going to promote it, but by the initiative of the villagers themselves. They go to the seed store, they run after the village level worker and ask him what number seed has come in, and whether the fertilizers are available at this place or that. They are constantly knocking at the doors of the block development offices trying to get things for themselves. There is a great deal of confidence about this. People used to come to me and ask me to get things for them. They used to say, "You are our mother and father, you help us;" now they are telling me what to do. They say, "Would you like to get electricity for your house? Well, come along, I know the man who can get it for you." And so they do. He is a man selling bus tickets in the village. He has more power than any gazetted officer because he has given bus tickets to people at the right times. I was officially told, "You won't get an electric connection for three weeks," but he got it for me in six hours. The villagers know how to get things they want. They have learned much about technology. I received a letter from my wife, who bought a little land just outside of Chicago. She was keeping horses on it and wrote that she was cleaning out the barn and burning the horse manure. When I told them this, they said, "Oh, no, that is a great mistake." They all want to know about tractors, and she is sending a catalogue for them. A lot of this seems to have happened on its own power. The old society seems to have stepped up pretty much on the initiative of its own leadership, with a couple of new ideas here and there. It is a demonstration that it can work when people take END over. The village pradhan or elected headman, seen conducting a meeting at top right, is a person of considerable influence. Below, a tractortangible symbol of rural progress-is being parked inside the compound of a farmhouse.
To Cody, "Stone isn't an object .... It's alive; it has warmth. And I put part of me into it."
Whimsically-interpreted owl is typical of Cody's work. Below, he sketches idea for a turtle which will take shape from the chunk at his feet. He once cut for a month on a 400-kg piece; then it broke.
At first one-man show, Cody confided, "When I work on a piece it becomes a friend." However, no remorse attends a sale, because, "It is better than eating cornmeal all the time." Right, boulder-hunting in the mountains.
Vocational training for women is a relatively new concept in India, but its translation into practice is yielding rich dividends. The eighteen women's polytechnics in the country have trained thousands of girls for jobs in offices and factories or for self-employment in such professions as dress-making.
"I WOULDN'T call this a school or a college; it's something in between. There is the discipline of the school-not too much, just sufficient discipline-and it's nicer than a college. Unlike the ordinary college, where there is little contact between lecturers and students, here each lecturer knows each and every student." This is 16-year-old Asha Lakshminarayanan's appraisal of the Government Polytechnic for Women, Madras, where she is a first year student and has taken up a pre-technical course leading to a diploma or a university degree in science or engineering. Asha is one of three hundred girls on the rolls of the polytechnic who are receiving specialized training to equip them for a professional career. Many of them have taken up courses in commercial and secretarial practice or for such established feminine vocations as dress-making and costume designing. But the more venturesome, or those with special aptitudes, are qualifying in draftsmanship, electronics and civil engineering-fields hitherto generally regarded in (continued) India as the special preserve of men.
The Madras polytechnic offers girls the choice of several courses in vocational training. Below, a group prepares patterns for dressmaking. At left, another girl is engrossed in geometrical drawing.
Kennan deplores ...
illusory and subjective. What strikes me first about the angry militancy is the extraordinary degree of certainty by which it is inspired: certainty of one's own rectitude, certainty of the correctness of one's own answers, certainty as to the iniquity of those who disagree. Such convictions seem particularly out of place at just this time. Never has there been an era when the problems of public policy even approached in their complexity those by which our society is confronted today. The understanding of these problems is something to which one could well give years of disciplined study, years of the scholar's readiness to reserve judgment while evidence is being accumulated. And this being so, one is struck to see such massive certainties already present in the minds of people who not only have not studied very much but presumably are not studying a great deal, because. it is hard to imagine that the activities of this aroused portion of our student population are compatible with successful study. Destructive Compromises? I am not saying that students should not be concerned, should not have views, should not voice their questions about national policy. Some of us who are older share many of their misgivings, many of their impulses. Some of us are no happier than they are about a: great many things that are now going on. But we also recognize not only the possibility that we might be wrong but the virtual certainty that on some occasions we are bound to be. The fact that this is so does not absolve us from the duty of having views and putting them forward. But it does make us unable to lose ourselves iil."transports of moral indignation against those who are of differing opinion. I am aware that inhibitions of this sort on the part of us older people would be attributed by many members of the student left to a sweeping corruption of our moral integrity. Life, they would hold, has impelled us to' the making of compromises; and these compromises have destroyed our usefulness. We are no longer capable of looking steadily into the strong clear light of truth. In this, as in most of the reproaches with whichour children shower us, there is of course an element of justification. There is a point somewhere along the way in most of our adult lives, admittedly, when enthusiasms flag, when idealism becomes tempered, when responsibility to others, and even affection for others, compel greater attention to the mundane demands of private life. There is a point when we are even impelled to place the needs of children ahead of the dictates of a defiant idealism, and to devote ourselves to the support and rearing of these same children-in order that at some future date they may have the privilege of turning upon us and despising us for the materialistic faintheartedness that made their maturity possible. But I cannot shower myself or others with reproaches. I have seen more harm done in this world
by those who tried to storm' the bastions of society in the name of utopian beliefs, who were determined to achieve the elimination of all evil and the realization of the millennium within their own time, than by all the humble efforts of those who have tried to create a little order and civility and affection within their own intimate entourage. The success of a society may be said, like charity, to begin at home. The Golden Chain. So much, then, for the angry ones. Now, a word about the quiescent ones: the hippies and the flower people. My feeling for these people is one of pity. I see them as the victims of certain great and destructive philosophic errors. One of these errors-affecting particularly those who take drugs-is the belief that the human being has marvellous resources within himself that can be released and made available to him merely by the passive submission to certain sorts of stimuli: by letting aesthetic impressions of one sort or another roll over him or by letting his psychic equilibrium be disoriented by chemical agencies that give him the sensation of experiencing tremendous things. But it is only through effort, through doing, through action-never through passivity-that man grows creatively. It is only by volition and effort that he • becomes fully aware of what he has in him of creativity and becomes capable of communicating it to others. There is no pose more fraudulent-and students would do well to remember this when they look at each other-than that of the individual who pre/tends to have been exalted and rendered more impressive by his communion with some sort of inner voice whose revelations he is unable to describe or to enact. Particularly is this pose fraudulent when the means he has chosen to render himself susceptible to this alleged revelation is the deliberate disorientation of his own psychic system. It may be said with surety that any artificial intervention into the infinitely delicate balance that nature created in man's psychic make-up proceeds at the cost of the true creative faculties and weakens rather than 'Strengthens. The second error I see in the outlook of these people is the belief in a total personal permissiveness. They are misjudging, here, the innermost nature of man's estate. There is not, and cannot be, such a thing as total freedom. The normal needs and frailties of the body, not to mention the elementary demands of the soul itself, would rule that out if nothing else did. Freedom begins only with the humble acceptance of membership in a natural order of things, and it grows only with struggle, self-discipline and faith. There is in the hippies' cultivation of an absolute freedom, and above all in the very self-destructiveness with which it often expresses itself, a selfishness, a hardheartedness, a callousness, an irresponsibility, an indifference to the feelings of others, that is its own condemnation. No one ever destroys just himself alone. Such is the network of intimacy in which every continued on page 36
"Many of the desires of students have merit, and many institutions change too slowly. Nevertheless, the right answer lies not in threat and counterthreat, violenc~ and counterforce; it lies in mutual search for commonly accepted answers." -Buell G. Gallagher, former president of City College of New York
"I see admirable qualities of idealism, spunk and concern in the students. Now with the backlash from general society andsomewhat-from faculty, these qualities are turning into sour despair. And this has helped create a more immobile society." -David Riesman, Harvard sociologist
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they want is understanding, and they hope to pick up at least a smattering of it by talking to wise, mature men; by reading under these men's guidance; and by observing how such men 'conduct their own lives. In sum, they are after what used to be called a "liberal education." As recently as twenty years ago, they might have found it in most good American universities. Today their chances are close to zero. For, as Irving Kristol pointed out in Fortune, "In the overwhelming majority of universities, liberal education is extinct." It was destroyed by the academic revolution. Many professors and administrators do not yet seem to realize that it is gone. In their official oratory, at least, they imply that their institutions still provide it in copious, life-enhancing draughts. The freshman who is drawn to the university because he takes this rhetoric seriously quickly discovers that it simply is not true. Hence his accusations of hypocrisy, his disillusionment, and his impulse to throw bricks through classroom windows. He feels that he has been sold a bill of goods. What killed liberal education? The best account is
, set forth by Christopher Jencks and David Riesman in their recent book, The Academic Revolution. (Riesman is professor of social sciences at Harvard; Jencks is a resident fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.) The revolution that they describe originated, roughly, at the end of World War II, when the demilnd for higher education began to grow with explosive speed. The only people who could meet this demand-the university teachers-suddenly found themselves in a l1ighlystrategic position. Only recently they had been humble pedagogues; now they were the sole purveyors of a scarce and precious commodity. Like all monopolists, they used this new-found power to enhance their own wealth, prestige and authority. Today, $50,000 incomes-from salary, government and foundation grants, outside lectures, and consulting fees-are not uncommon in academic circles. The professoriat also used its new strength to seize a big share of power from university trustees and presidents. On most campuses today it is the faculty that decides who shall be hired and fired, what shall be taught, and to whom. A Visible Relationship. With such leverage, the professoriat soon began to reshape the university to suit its own desires, rather than those of the students or their parents. For one thing, teachers today are doing less and. less teaching. Jencks and Riesman note that "until World War II even senior scholars did a good deal of 'scut' work: teaching small groups of lower. level students, reading papers and examinations, and the like. Today, however, few well-known scholars. teach more than six hour~ a week. The routine problems of mass higher education have fallen by default to graduate students." Moreover, what little teaching the professors do often is "dull and ineffective." They have no incentive to get any professional training in the art of teaching, because good teaching is "no help in getting a salary increase, moving to a more prestigious campus, or winning their colleagues' admiration." It may even be a handicap, because "the able teacher finds students beating a path to his door and leaving him little time for research"-which is what pays off in money and reputation. Indeed, the typical professor could not care less about the interests of undergraduates. The questions they are apt to ask~What is the good life?The nature of justice? What are the remedies for the evils of society?-he considers a bore and an embarrassment. Few professors today claim to have answers to such large questions; each professes instead his own narrow speciality--econometrics, say, or minor British poets of the eighteenth century. Thus, the students who expect "a visible relationship between knowledge and action, between the questions asked in the classroom and the lives they live outside it," get instead "pedantry and alienated erudition." (Jencks and Riesman again.) Is it any wonder that they are "completely turned off" and concontinuedon page 36
Honda shapes the world of wheels
You've got to hand it to Honda. New designs. New colors. Altogether 20 models to put a glint in your eye. That famous four-stroke engine takes everything in stride. Won five out of five '66 Grand Prix Championships, 50cc,to 500cc. A world's record. With Honda, performance counts as well as style. And that tells it like it is. Any questions? See your local Honda dealer for a safety demonstration ride.
HONDA