SPAN: September 1969

SPAN My Week With Gandhi

10

by Louis Fischer

How They Cracked the Genetic Code

28

by Philip Eisenberg

The Riddle of the Serpent Mound

32

by Paul Underwood

Farewell to Dick and Jane

On arrival at Palam, President Nixon waves a greeting to the enthusiastic crowds which assembled to welcome him. By his side is Mrs. Patricia Nixon.

34

by Arlene and Howard Eiseni}erg

SPAN OF EVENTS THE JET AIRCRAFTemblazoned "United States of America" touched down at Palam Airport precisely on schedule at 12:30 p.m. Out stepped Richard

Busiest Airport in the WorId

44

by K.G. Gabrani

Footprints usually claim attention in detective stories, but never have they caused the same excitement as did these prints of the astronauts on the moon. For more moon photographs, see pages 2-7.

M. Nixon, making his third visit to India and his first as President.

So began 23 hours in India on July 31 for the American President. His message was direct. "I want to say now," he told welcomers, " ... that our goal-and I know the goal of all of the American people-is simply this: we want our generation to be remembered as the one in which man first set foot on the moon, and as the one in which for the first time in the twentieth century we had uninterrupted peace, with justice and freedom for man on earth."

Aboard the carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific, President Nixon welcomes the Apollo-II astronauts back to earth. Inside their quarantine van, frol11 left to right, are Armstrong, Collins and¡ Aldrin.

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 Choudhury, Nand K. Katyal, Kanti Roy, Kuldip Singh Jus, Gopi Gajwani. Production Staff: Awtar S. Marwaha, Mammen Philip. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur.

House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy.

New Delhi. Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Pvt. Ltd. Narandas Building, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-I. Manuscripts and photographs sent for publication must be accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope for return. SPAN is not responsible for any loss in transit. Use of SPAN articles in other publications 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 recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.

The day was warm-and so was the welcome. Thousands lined New Delhi's broad avenues as the two Presidents-America's Mr. Nixon and India's acting President M. Hidayatullah-drove to Rashtrapati Bhavan, where Mrs. Indira Gandhi and the U.S. Chief Executive conducted their extensive discussions.

And as he has done in previous visits, Mr. Nixon journeyed to Rajghat.

He laid a wreath on the Mahatma Gandhi samadhi and paused in silent prayer for the man he described as having "a greatness which transcends. the ordinary meaning of that word."

More discussions followed the next morning, right until Mr. Nixon was scheduled to depart. At the airport, the President alluded to these discussions, saying they had been "most helpful in establishing a new channel of communication, a new attitude with regard to relations between our two countries .... " Thus ended Mr. Nixon's 23 hours, another milestone in Indian-American relations.

Prominent among those who received President and Mrs. Nixon were acting President M. Hidayatullah, left, Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi and Mrs. Hidayatul/ah. On his way to Rajghat where he laid a wreath, right, the President stepped down from his car to shake hands with young admirers, below.

Surrounded by footsteps, the U.S. flag stands out starkly against the moon's dusty surface. Television camera rests atop white pole in background while the Lunar Module's shadow falls in lower corners.

67,,'--749;

Weeanleill :o~~:~~~d~~~~ peace ~~~~~b:~m~~ plaque, underline the philosophy of man's conquest of the moon on July 21, 1969.,The plaque now rests in an airless atmosphere, attached to the leg of the ladder from which Neil A. Armstrong took man's first, hesitant step onto the moon's surface.

Together, Armstrong and his fellow astronaut, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., embedded into the moon's grainy soil the red, white and bludlag of the United States of America. With a precision acquired from their months of training, they set out a series of experiments and, after 2 hours and 21 minutes on the surface, returned to their Lunar Module for the journey back to earth.

There was but a single moment of reflection upon the historic implicatio~s of their journey. It came when Armstrong, after finding the moon's surface solid enough to hold his weight, gave his interpretation of the meaning of the accomplishment. "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," he said. Apart from this, the astronauts had little time to release themselves to their emotions. They carried out their assigned ta;;ks, among them recording on film many of the historic episodes as they took pl,ace. >(; (~~1.- 1,. )6Cj/

?,c7 6

For more photos-and a poem by America's Archibald MacLeish to commemorate the moon journey-please see the following pages.

beyond our light, our lives-perhaps

,Voxa tothe moon

a meaning

to us ...

Now our hands have touched you in your depth of night.

Three days and three nights lve journeyed, steered by farthest

stars, climbed outward,

crossed the invisible tide-rip where the floating dust falls one way or the other in the void between, followed

that other down, encountered

cold, faced death-unfathomable

emptiness ...

Then, the fourth day evening, we descended, Presence among us,

made fast, set foot at dawn upon your beaches, sifted between our fingers your cold sand.

Wanderer in our skies, dazzle of silver in our leaves and on our waters

We stand here in the dusk, the cold, the

silver,

silence ...

and here, as at the first of time,

we lift our heads. silver evasion in our farthest visiting moon" ... ...

thought-((

the

((the glimpses of the moon"

and we have touched you!

From the first of time,

Over us, more beautiful than the moon, a moon, a wonder to us, unattainable, a longing past the reach of longing, a light beyond our light,¡ our lives-perhaps

before the first of time, before the first men

a meaning to us ...

0, a meaning!

tasted time, we thought of you.

over us on these silent beaches the bright

You were a wonder to us, unattainable, a

earth,

longing past the reach of longing, a light

"... And we have touched you." On the moon's barren, bleak and silent Sea of Tranquillity, Edwin Aldrin stands alone, caught in the camera of Neil Armstrong. Aldrin's helmet visor reflects the world about him-Armstrong, a portion of the Lunar Module, a telerision camera and the U.S. flag.

While returning to earth

from their moon journey, the Apollo-II astronauts paused momentarily from their tasks and shared some of their thoughts with the world below. Overlooked in the excitement of the moon landing, their reflections provide a fresh dimension to their accomplishment.

NEIL ARMSTRONG: Good evening. This is the Commander of Apollo 11. A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the moon. His spaceship, Columbiad, took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the moon. It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet earth in the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow. First, Mike Collins.

MICHAEL COLLINS: Roger. This trip of ours to the moon may have looked to you simple or easy. I'd like to assure you that that has not been the case. The Saturn 5 rocket which put us into orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked flawlessly. This computer up about my head has a 38,OOO-wordvocabulary, each word of which has been very carefully chosen to be of the utmost value to us, t~e crew. This switch which I have in my hand now has over three hundred counterparts in the Command Module alone, this one single switch design. In addition to that, there are myriads of circuitbreakers, levers, rods and other associated controls. The SPS engine, our large rocket engine on the aft end of

Apollo-ll astronaut Edwin Aldrin emerges from the lunar landing vehicle to start his descent to the surface of the moon •

•

Aldrin sets up a solar wind apparatus, top right, . to study particles coming from the ~uit and trapped, in a l~ft. by 4-ft. strip.

Dr. Elbert King, right, examines a moon rock through an infectionproof barrier' at Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston, Texas.

Aldrin, left, steps into lunar wilderness to deploy two experiments yielding new data on moon. our Service Module, must have performed flawlessly or we would have been stranded in lunar orbit. The parachutes, up above my head, must work perfectly tomorrow or we'll plummet into the ocean. We have always had confidence that all this equipment will work and work properly, and we continue to have confidence that it will do so for the remainder of the flight. All this is possible only through the. blood, sweat and tears of a number of p~ople.

This operation is somewhatJike the periscope of a submarine. All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all those I would like to say: thank you, very much.

EDWIN ALDRIN: Good evening.

I'd like to discuss with you a few of the more symbolic aspects of the flight of our mission, Apollo-II. As we've been discussing the events that have taken place in the past two or three days here on board our spacecraft, we've come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the moon.

More still than the efforts of a government and industry team, more even than the efforts of one nation, we feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. Neil's statement the other day, upon first setting foot upon the surface of the moon-this is a small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind-I believe sums up these feelings very

nicely. We accepted the challenge of going to the moon; the acceptance of this challenge was inevitable. The relative ease with which we carried out our mission, I believe, is a tribute to the timeliness of that acceptance.

Today I feel we're fully capable of accepting an expanded role in the exploration of space. In this respect, we have all been particularly pleased with the call signs that we very laboriously chose for our spacecraftColumbia and Eagle. We've been particularly pleased with the emblem of our flight, depicting the U.S. eagle bringing the universal symbol of peace from the earth, from the planet earth, to the moon, that symbol being the olive branch. It was our overall crew choice to deposit a replica of this symbol on the moon.

Personally, in reflecting the events of the past several days, a verse from psalms comes to mind to me: "When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him?"

END

The practical benefits

...and what's next

on the moon has climaxed the most productive decade in the history of technology. The next ten years should be just as fruitful. The United States will extend its exploration of the moon and the planets, probably including Jupiter and Mercury. By 1980, scientists probably will have answered definitively the question of whether there are life forms on Mars.

Launch vehicles and rocket boosters are not likely to exceed the size of the Saturn-5, now the world's largest and most powerful space rocket. However, new non-chemical propulsive devices and electric propulsion systems should be in use. Significant progress will be made in the use of recoverable boosters to reduce the cost of space travel essentially to the price of fuel. When this has been accomplished entirely new uses of space can be considered.

The most dramatic yield will come from the growing applications of near-earth satellites. The availability of large-scale power sources will make possible the direct broadcast of radio and television programmes from satellites into home receivers. Improvements in satellite telephony techniques could make these systems cheaper than land communications, even for short distances. The effect on a world-wide basis should be profound.

For example, improvements in the forecasting of weather from satellite data are estimated to save as much as Rs. 7,500 crores a year in world food production after 1975. Satellite oceanography technology could save over Rs. 225 crores yearly in ocean shipping, coastal engineering, and water surveillance systems. Earth resources survey satellites will provide benefits of as much as Rs. 60 crores annually for world-wide agriculture and forestry.

New navigation and air, water and land traffic control systems could conserve up to Rs. 37.5 crores annually. In all, the application of satellite technology offers an exciting prospect during the decade of the 1970s, one that will yield immediate benefits.

Permanent manned orbiting space stations and moon bases will be devoted primarily to scientific research. It is conceivable that there will be industrial operations on the moon taking advantage of its vacuum, but not to any extensive degree. Transportation costs to the moon will inhibit shipping of large amounts of goods or products. Lunar laboratories will be manned on a rotating basis, and roving vehicles will travel far afield over the surface of the moon, including its hidden side and its southern highlands.

Manned missions are not likely to be flown to the planets during the next decade, nor will spacecraft venture far outside of the solar system. However, the most spectacular launch opportunity of the 1970 decade will occur in 1977, when the planetary geometry will be such that it will be possible to fly a single spacecraft on a so-called "grand tour" to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

This is a rare opportunity: once every 179 years the planets are so lined up that one spacecraft could fly by all of them closely with only the propulsion needed for a Jupiter flight.

This technique utilizes the gravitational fields of the giant planets to change the energy and direction of a spacecraft's course in such a manner that missions to other targets can be flown without further expenditure of propellants. The 2,800 million-mile trip to Neptune would require nine years with this gravitational-assist MAN'S LANDING

Dr. Pickering, 58, is director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, Calif, which has developed spacecraft for lunar and planetary exploration and operates a world-wide deep space tracking network.

\

Artist's Station

conception of earth orbital space station of the late 1970s. would be 720 feet long, weigh 500 tons, and carry 100 men.

technique, compared with thirty years for a more conventional direct-flight mission.

Following a September 1977 launch, the spacecraft would tra verse the trans-Mars asteroid belts in 1978, approach within 120,000 miles of Jupiter in January 1979, pass near the rings of Saturn in September 1980, fly within 10,000 miles of the surface of Uranus in February..J5l84; and encounter Neptune at a distance of 15,000 miles in November 1986. The possibilities for the gathering of scientific data on this mission are intriguing.

A good deal of the original glamour will have disappeared from the type of space missions of the 1960s that have yielded most of the new knowledge of the solar system. The world public is not again likely to thrill to the orbiting of a thirty-pound Explorer as it did in the late 1950s, or the soft-landing of a spacecraft on the lunar surface as occurred in the 1960s, much less experience the excitement of the July landing on the moon by the two American astronauts. Everything will seem anti-climactic to the July feat.

In the 1970s there will probably not be a single dominant project such as the U.S. Apollo manned moon mission in the 1960s.

The principal theme will be the exploration of the solar system.

But near-earth missions which use space technology for practical applications will also be emphasized. Automated, instrumented missions will take advantage of man's sophisticated capabilities in guidance and control and improvements in reliability.

For the next decade, the emphasis is likely to be focused on the gleaning of more immediate benefits from the expenditure of ,pace efforts. In this sense, the U.S. National Space Council estimates that the annual return from space will exceed expenditures ten years from now and to a rather marked degree.

By then, space research will be twenty years old~just about the time usually required for new technologies to mature. Historically, new scientific developments have required about a quarter of a century before they yield measurable benefits to the economÂĽ.

For example, atomic energy is just now approaching a state of wide commercial application, twenty-six years after the first manmade nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.

Ten years ago, sp-aGeexperts were able to predict the space events of the coming decade with much more certainty than they can today for the next decade. Yet, it is certain that, once having seen the stars from beyond the atmosphere and measured the physical characteristics of planets that were mere legend just a few years ago, man is not likely to remain content on earth without investigating at close range what lies beyond the galactic horizon.

END

MYWEEKWITH From the pages of Louis Fischer's biography The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, there emerges a warm, flesh-and-blood portrait of Gandhi the man-his charm, his humour, honesty and compassion. In tribute to the Mahatma during this Gandhi Centenary Year, Span presents abridgements of two chapters from the ,book. Fischer describes a week spent with Gandhi at the Sevagram Ashram in May 1942, and a meeting with the Indian leader four years later-when the conversation at right took place.

His account throws into sharp focus the personality of one of the greatest and most appealing human beings of all time.

NEHRU WAS going down to Sevagram to consult the Mahatma about the contemplated civil disobedience action. I asked him to arrange an interview for me. Soon I received a telegram reading: "Welcome.

Mahadev Desai."

I got out of the train at the small town of Wardha, was met by an emissary from Gandhi and slept on the roof of a hostel.

Early in the morning, I took a tonga with Gandhi's dentist for Sevagram. I tried to make him talk about Gandhi's teeth. He talked about British politics.

The tonga stopped where the dirt road met the village. There stood Gandhi. He said, "Mr. Fischer," and we hook hands.

He greeted the dentist and turned round and I followed him to a bench. He sat down, put his palm on the bench and said, "Sit down." The way he sat down first and the way he touched the bench with his hand was like saying, "This is my house, come in." I felt at home immediately.

Each day I had an hour's interview with Gandhi; there was also an opportunity for conversation at meals; in addition, I walked with him once or twice a day. I usually arrived for the morning constitutional while he was still sitting on his bed in the open air eating mango pulp. Between spoonfuls he plunged into serious discussion. Breakfast finished, he accepted a towel and a long, rectangular, narrow-necked, corked bottle of water from his wife Kasturba and washed his hands before starting on the stroll across nearby fields.

Kasturba, with sunken face, straight mouth and square jaw, seemed to listen attentively, but I did not hear or see her say a single word to her husband during the entire week, nor he to her. At meals and prayers she sat slightly behind his left shoulder fanning him solicitously. She always looked at him; he rarely looked at her, yet he wanted her nearest to him and there appeared to be perfect understanding between them.

During walks, Gandhi kept his arms on the shoulders of two young girls or boys Reprinted with special permission from The Life ofMahatmaGandhi. Copyright Š 1950by Louis Fischer.Published by Harper &Bros.,New York.

but moved forward with long quick strides and kept up a rapid conversation without losing breath or, apparently, tiring. The walk lasted not less than half an hour.

When he returned I was ready for rest and leaned against a post while he continued to speak.

Gandhi was well built, with fine muscular bulging chest, thin waist, and long thin firm legs, bare from sandals to short, tight loincloth. His' knees were pronounced bulges and his bones wide and strong; his hands were big and the fingers big and firm. His chocolate-co loured skin was soft, smooth and healthy. He was seventy-three.

His fingernails, hands, feet, body were immaculate; the loincloth, the cheesecloth cape he occasionally wore in the sun, and the folded, moistened kerchief on his head were bright white. Once a drop of yellow mango juice stained his loincloth and he scratched it intermittently during an hour.

His body did not look old. He did not give one a feeling that he was old. His head showed his age. His head was large, wide at the top and tapering down to a small face; big ears extended away from it abruptly.

His upper lip, covered with a black-andwhite stubble moustache, was so narrow that it almost met his down-pointed nose.

The expression of his face came from his soft and gentle eyes, the sensitive lower lip which combined self-control with strength and showed suffering, and from his everpresent smile.

Lloyd George looked like a great man.

One could not help seeing that Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt had stature and distinction. Not Gandhi. (Nor Lenin.) Outwardly he had nothing remarkable about him; perhaps the lower lip. His personality was in what he was and what he had done and what he said. I felt no awe in Gandhi's presence. I felt I was in the presence of a very sweet, gentle, informal, relaxed, happy, wise, highly civilized an. I felt, too,. the miracle of personality, for by sheer force of personality, without an organization-Congress was a loose organizationor government behind him, Gandhi had radiated his influence to the far ends of his country and, indeed, to every corner of a divided world. He did it not through his writings; few people anywhere had read his books, and his articles, though known abroad and republished widely in India, were not the source of his hold on people. He reached people through direct contact, action, example and loyalty to a few simple, universally flouted principles:

non-violence, truth, and the exaltation of means above ends.

The big names of recent history: Ch urchill, Roosevelt, Lloyd George, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, the Kaiser, Lincoln, Napoleon, Metternich, Talleyrand, etc., had the power of states at their disposal. One has to go back centuries to find men who appealed as strongly as Gandhi did to the conscience of individuals. They were men of religion, in another era. Gandhi showed that the ~pirit of Christ and of some Christian fathers, and of Buddha and of-S0illleHebrew prophets and Greek sages, could be applied in modern times and to modern politics. He did not preach about God or religion; he was a living sermon.

He was a good man in a world where few "resist the corroding influence" of power, wealth and vanity. There he sat, four-fifths naked, on the earth in a mud hut in a tiny Indian village without electricity, radio, running water, or telephone. It was a situation least conducive to awe, pontification, or legend. He was in every sense down-toearth. He knew that life consists of the details of life.

"Now put on your shoes and hat," Gandhi said. "Those are two indispensable things here. Don't get a sunstroke." It was 110° with practically no shade except inside the huts, which were like heated ovens.

"Come along," he said in a friendly tone of mock command. I followed him to the common dining Iiallwhich consisted of two long walls of matting connected by a third back wall of the same material. Where one entered, the building was open to the elements. andhi sat down on a cushion near the entrance.

At his left was Kasturba, on his right Narendra Dev, an Indian Socialist leader whom the Mahatma had undertaken to cure of asthma. I was Dev's neighbour.

There were about thirty diners. Several bright-eyed youngsters between the ages of three and eight were opposite me. Everyone had a thin straw mat under him and a brass tray in front of him on the ground.

Male and female waiters, members of the Ashram, moved noiselessly on bare feet, depositing foo on the trays. A number of pots and pans were placed near Gandhi's legs. He handed me a bronze bowl filled with a vegetable stew in which I thought I discerned chopped spinach leaves and pieces of squash. A woman poured some

G

continued

salt on my tray and another gave me a metal tumbler with warm water and another with warm milk. Then she came back with two little boiled potatoes in their jackets and some soft, flat wheatcakes baked brown. Gandhi handed me one hard, paper-thin wheatcake from a metal container in front of him.

A gong sounded; a robust man in white shorts stopped waiting on the trays, stood erect, closed his eyes leaving only a white slit open-it made him look blind-and started a high-pitched chant in which all others,' including Gandhi, joined. The prayer ended with "Shanti, Shanti, Shanti" which, Dev said, means "Peace." , Everyone started eating, fishing out the vegetable stew with a wheatcake folded in four. I was given teaspoon and then some butter for the cake. Gandhi munched busily, stopping only to serve his wife, Dev and me.

"You have lived in Russia for fourt~n years," was his first political remark to me.

"What is your opinion of Stalin?"

I was very hot, and my hands were sticky, and I had commenced to discover my ankles and legs from sitting on them, so I replied briefly, "Very able and very ruthless."

"As ruthless as Hitler?" he asked.

"At least."

After a pause, he turned to me and said,

a

"Ah," he exclaimed, "you must add plenty of salt and lemon."

"You want me to kill the taste," I interpreted.

"No," he laughed, "enrich the taste."

"You are so non-violent you would not even kill a taste," I said. . "If that were the only thing men killed, I wouldn't mind," he remarked.

I wiped the perspiration from my face and neck. "Next time I'm in India ... " Gandhi was chewing and seemed not to have heard me so I stopped.

"Yes," he said, "the next time you are in India. . . ."

"You either ought to have air-conditioning in Sevagram or live in the Viceroy's palace."

"All right," Gandhi acquiesced.

He encouraged banter. One afternoon when I came to his hut for the daily interview, he was not there. When he arrived he lay down on his bed. "I will take your blows lying down," he said, inviting questions. A woman gave him a mud pack for his abdomen. "This puts me in touch with my future," he said. I did not comment.

"I see you missed that one," he noted.

I said I had not missed it but thought he was too young to think about returning to the dust.

"Why," he declared, "you and I nd all of us, some in a hundred years, but all

"Have you ยงeen the Viceroy1" I told him IOl'ner or blter, will do it."

I had, but he dropped the subject.

"You can have all the water you want," he told me. "We take good care that it is boiled. And now eat your mango." I began to peel it and several people, Gandhi too, la1,lghed. He explained that they usually turned it in their hands and squeezed it to make it soft and then sucked on one end, but he added that I was right to peel it to see whether it was good.

At lunch on the second. day, Gandhi banded me a tablespoon for the vegetable dish. He said the tablespoon was more eommensurate with my size. He offered me a bOiled onion from his pot. I asked for a raw one instead; it was a relieffrom the flat food: of the menu.

At lunch on the third day, Gandhi said, "'Fischer, give me your bowl and I will give ~ some of the vegetables." I said 1had ~ spinach and squash four times in two ~ _had no desire for more.

"You don't like vegetables," he com-

~ted.

"illon'like the taste of these vegetables ~'\l~

running."

n another occasion he quoted a statement he had made to Lord Sankey in London: "Do you think," he had said, "I would have reached this green old age if I hadn't taken care of myself?

This is one of my faults."

"I thought you were perfect," I ventured.

He laughed and the eight or ten members of the Ashram who usually sat in on the interviews laughed. (He had asked me whether I objected to their presence.)

"No," he declared. "I am very imperfect.

Before you are gone you will have discovered a hundred of my faults and if you don't, I will help you to see them."

Usually the hour's interview began with his finding the coolest place in the hut for me to sit. Then with a smile he would say, "Now," inviting "blows." As the hour was about to end he would, with an unerrins time sense, look at his big "dollar" watch and proclaim, "Now, your hour is up." He was minutely punctual.

One day when I was leaving his hut after

O

a talk, he said, "Go and sit in a tub."

Crossing the sun-baked hundred yards be tween Gandhi's hut and the guest hut, the heat made the inside of my head feel dry and I decided that sitting in a tub would be a very good idea. In fact I thought I could improve on it. Adjoining the one living room-bedroom of the guest hut was a smal water room with cement floor on which stood a variety of pots, pitchers, tubs and bowls; an old woman kept them filled with water. Six or seven times a day I would step into this bathroom, slip off the two pie'ce of clothing and sandals I wore, and take a standing splash bath with the aid of a cup The werst ordeal of the day was typing the complete record of my conversations with Gandhi and others in the Ashram After five minutes I was tired and wet al over with perspiration. Stimulated by Gandhi's suggestion to sit in a tub, I placed a small wooden packing case in one of the tin wash-tubs filled with water, put a folded Turkish towel on the packing case, then se a somewhat larger wooden packing case just outside the tub and placed my portable typewriter on it. These arrangements made, I sat down on the box in the tub and typed my notes. At intervals of a few min utes, when I began to perspire, I dipped a bronze bowl into the tub and poured the water over my neck, back and legs. By that method I was able to type a whole hour with.out feelin! e'lh.luยงt~d. TI\~il\t\6vAtlo stirred the Ashram to mirth and jolly com ment. It was not a glum community. Gandhi saw to that. He made eyes at the little children, provoked adults to laughter and joked with all and sundry visitors.

I asked Gandhi to be photographed witb me. "If a photographer is around byaccident," he replied, "I have no objection to being seen in a photograph with you."

"That," I said, ~'is the biggest compliment you have paid me."

"Do you want compliments?" he en quired.

"Don't we all?"

"Yes," Gandhi agreed, "but sometimes we have to pay too dearly for them."

During the week he enquired whether I knew Upton Sinclair, Dr. Kellogg, the food spec.iaIist of Battle Creek, Michigan, and Mrs. Eleanor ~oosevelt. But I noticed n general curiosity. He focused his attention on issues which he could affe~~ ~nq 0 questions put to him.

I left the Ashram on June 10th by car for the Congress hostel in Wardha. Severa hours later, the car returned to Sevagram to

fetch Gandhi for consultations in Wardha.

At three in the afternoon, Gandhi entered the hostel alone. Three-quarters of a mile from Wardha the car had broken down.

Gandhi got out and walked the distance in the broiling Indian afternoon June sun.

When he reached the house he was in a gay mood; if he suffered from fatigue it was not noticeable and must have retreated before the pleasure of being able to comment on the unreliability of "these newfangled technical achievements of the industrial age." .

had e great charm. He was a remarkable natural phenomenon, quiet and insidiously overwhelming. Intellectual contact with him was a delight because he opened his mind and allowed one to see how the machine worked. He did not attempt to express his ideas in finished form. He thought aloud; he revealed each step in his thinking. You beard not only words but also his thoughts.

You could therefore follow him as he tfioved to a conclusion. This prevented :!fun from talking like a propagandist; he talked like a friend. He was interested in an exchange of views, but much more in the e,$tablishment of a persdnal relationship.

Even when evasive, Gandhi was frank.

'I was asking him about his dreams of the post-independence India. He argued back and forth. "You want to force me into an admission," he said, "that we would need rapid industrialization. I will not be forced hito such an admission. Our first problem is to get rid of British rule. Then we will be free, without restraints from the outside, to do what India requires. The British have seen fit to allow us to have some factories and also to prohibit other factories. No, for me the paramount problem is the ending of British domination."

That, obviously, was what he wanted to talk about; he did not conceal his desire.

His brain had no blue pencil. He said, for mstance, that he would go to Japan to try to end the war. He knew, and immediately added, that he would never get an opportunity to go and, if he went, Japan would not make peace. He knew too that his statement would be misinterpreted. Then why did he make it? Because he thought it.

Gandhi asserted that a federal administration would be unnecessary in an independent India. I pointed out the difficulties that would arise in the absence of a federal

H .'

administration. He was not convinced. I was hamed. Finally be said, "I know that despite my personal views there will be a central government." This was a characteristic Gandhi cycle; he enunciated a principle, defended it, then admitted with a laugh that it was unworkable. In negotiation, this faculty could be extremely irritating and time-wasting. In personal conversation, it was attractive and even exciting. He himself was sometimes surprised at the things he said. His¡thinking was fluid. Most persons like to be proved right. So did Gandhi.

But frequently he snatched a victory out of an error by admitting it.

Old people are prone to reminiscences .

Lloyd George would commence to answer a question on current events and soon be talking about his conduct of the first World War or a campaign for social reform early in the century. At seventy-three, Gandhi never reminisced. His mind was on things to come. Years did not matter to him because he thought in terms of the unending future. Only the hours mattered because they were the measure of what he could contribute to that future.

Gandhi had more than influence, he had authority, which is less yet better than power. Power is the attribute of a machine; authority is the attribute of a person. Statesmen are varying combinations of both. The dictator's constant accretion of power which he must inevitably abuse, steadily robs him of authority; Gandhi's rejection of power enhanced his authority. Power feeds on the blood and tears of its victims.

Authority is fed by service, sympathy and affection.

One evening I watched his secretary, Mahadev Desai, spin. I said I had been listening carefully to Gandhi and studying my notes and wondering all the time what was the source of his hold on people; I had come to the tentative conclusion that it was his passion.

"That is right," Desai said.

"What is the root of his passion?" I asked.

"This passion," Desai explained, "is the sublimation of all the passions that flesh is heir to .... Gandhi is under his own complete control. That generates tremendous energy and passion."

It was a subdued, purring passion. He had a soft intensity, a tender firmness and an impatience cotton-wooled in patience.

Gandhi's colleagues and the British sometimes resented his intensity, firmness and impatience. But he retained their respect,

often their love, through his softness, tenderness and patience.

Gandhi sought approval; he was very happy when the great Tagore agreed with him. But he could defy the whole world and his political next-of-kin.

Gandhi was a strong individual, and his strength lay in the richness of his personality, not in the multitude of his possessions. His goal was To Be, not To Have.

Happiness came to him through self-realization. Fearing nothing, he could live the truth. Having nothing, he could pay for his principles.

Mahatma Gandhi is the symbol of the unity between personal morality and public action. When conscience dwells at home but not in the workshop, office, classroom and market-place, the road is wide open to corruption and cruelty and to dictatorship.

Gandhi enriched politics with ethics. He faced each morning's issues in the light of eternal and universal values. He always distilled a permanent element out of the ephemeral. Gandhi thus broke through the framework of usual assumptions which cramp a man's action. He discovered a new dimensio,n of action. Unconfined by considerations of personal success or comfort, he split the social atom and found a new source of energy. It gave him weapons of attack against which there was often no defence. His greatness lay in doing what everybody could do but doesn't.

"Perhaps he will not succeed," Tagore wrote of the living Gandhi. "Perhaps he will fail as the Buddha failed and as Christ failed to wean men from their iniquities, but he will always be remembered as one who made his life a lesson for all ages to come."

GANDHI REVISITED I ARRIVED at the New Delh.iairport on June 25th, 1946,and drove to the Imperial Hotel.

I was tired from the flight from Cairo; 1 needed a bath and shave. But I had an uncontrollable impulse to see Gandhi immediately. My first act in India, I felt, should be to have a word with Gandhi. So instead of making sure I had a room in tbe hotel, I left my luggage in the lobby and took a taxi to Gandhi's little stone hut in the Harijan colony.

He was at his evening prayer meeting in an open space outside the hut. Approximately 1,000 persons were at the services.

Gandhi in loincloth, a moist white pad on continued

he next morning I was up early enough to sip a cup of lukewarm black tea and eat a banana and find a taxi which brought me to Gandhi's hut at 5:30. We walked for half an hour. He talked most of the time about the negotiations with the Cabinet Mission. The following day, June 27th, I went to Gandhi again at 5:30 a.m. and walked with him for thirty minutes.

On Monday, July 1st, I flew to Bombay and on Tuesday evening I commenced a three-day sojourn at Dr. Dinshaw Mehta's nature-cure clinic in Poona where Gandhi was staying.

needs material goods and perhaps had the illusion that they brought happiness. We had the material goods but knew they did not bring happiness. The West was groping for a solution.

"But I am an Asiatic," he commented.

"A mere Asiatic." He laughed; then after a pause, "Jesus was an Asiatic."

It was 8 :30 in the evening when I arrived at the stone building of the Poona naturecure clinic. I was shown his room and walked in. He was sitting on a pallet; a white shawl enveloped him from neck to ankles.

He did not look up. When he finished writing the postcard, he raised his head and said, "Ah." I knelt in front of him and we shook hands. He had a way of figuratively putting his arms around you and making you feel welcome to his house and India.

"You have come by the Deccan Queen," he remarked. "On that train there is no food."

I said I didn't mind, I had already been promised dinner. "The weather here seems wonderful,". I volunteered. "You tortured yourself in the summer heat of Sevagram."

"No," he objected, "it wasn't torture.

But in New Delhi I would melt ice in the bath and sit in it as you did in Sevagram.

I was even unashamed to receive people in my bath and dictate in the bath. Here in Poona the weather is delightful." He appeared very relaxed.

"I did not intend talking with you tonight," he added, "and you have not eaten."

I rose to go. "Sleep well," I said.

"I always sleep well. Today was my day of silence and I slept four times. I fell asleep while I was on the rack."

"During his massage," a woman doctor interpreted.

Gandhi did not seem to have aged since

"You must get massage here," Gandhi

Gulbai, Dr. Mehta's wife, brought me a

1942; his stride was not as long and lusty, urged. but walking did not tire him nor did days After dinner, I passed Gandhi's bed on of interviews. He was in almost Cconstant the open-air stone terrace. Two women di~ciples were massaging his feet and shins. good humour.

At the beginning of my first morning His bed was a mattress-covered wooden stroll with him in New Delhi he asked plank with two bricks under it to raise the about the rumours of war with Russia. I head higher than the feet. A mosquito net said there was a good deal of talk about hung over the bed. Several young women war but perhaps it was only talk. "You were sitting on the mats near him and should turn your attention to the West." laughing. He called out to me, "I hope you

heaped bowl of peeled and sliced fruit and placed it on the mat. Gandhi had alread had his third breakfast, so I ate while he talked. He said he was trying to create a classless and casteless India. He yearned for the day when there would be only on caste and Brahmins would marry Harijans.

"I am a social revolutionist," he asserted.

"Violence is bred by inequality, non violence by equality." Gandhi's religion

his head, his feet on his thighs, sat in the centre of a large elevated wooden platform with several disciples. His eyes were closed.

Occasionally he opened them and beat time with his hands to the singing. On the ground, in front of the platform, sat the women worshippers; behind them the men.

The curious stood around on the periphery of the congregation. The Indian and foreign newspaper correspondents were there, also Mridula Sarabhai, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Cripps.

I posted myself at the foot of the three wooden steps where Gandhi would descend from the prayer platform. "Ah, there you are," he said. "Well, I have not grown better-looking in these four years."

"I would not dare to differ with you," I replied. He threw back his head and laughed. Taking me by the elbow, he walked towards his hut; he ask~d about my trip, my health and my family. Then, probably sensing that I would like to stay for a talk, he said, "Lady Cripps is here to see me. Will you walk with me tomorrow morning?"

T

"IT' he replieQI "I hiive not ~onvin(jed will be up in time to have breakfast with India. There is violence all around us. I am a spent bullet."

Since the end of the second World War, r suggested, many Europeans and Americans were conscious of a spiritual emptibtSS. He might fill a comer of it. India

me." He said first breakfast was at 4.

"I'd rather be excused from that one."

"Then second breakfast at 5."

I made a face and everybody laughed.

"You had better have third breakfast with me at 9," he said. "Get up at 6,"

I was up at 6 :30. Whe I stepped out into the courtyard, Gandhi was chatting with an Indian. He greeted me and we started on his morning walk.

"You said last night," I recalled, "that Paul altered the teachings of Jesus. Will the people around you do the same?"

"You are not the first to mention this possibility," he replied. "I see through them. Yes, I know they may try to do just that, I know India is not with me. I have not convinced enough Indians of the wisdom of non-violence." e talked at length about the persecution of coloured races in South Africa. He enquired about the treatent of Negroes in the United States. "A civilization," he said, "is to be judged by its treatment of minorities. " Later, I looked into Gandhi's room. It had no door, only a curtain which I pushed aside. He noticed me and said, "Come in, you a e always welcome." He was writing an article for Harijan and submitting to questions in the vernacular by three Indians. I went in and out until 11 a.m.

Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was reading Reuters news bulletins to him. Now and then he muttered "Hm." The South African items made him shake his head sadly.

"President Truman," a flash radiogram stated, "yesterday signed the Indian immigration and naturalization bill."

"More than anyone else," I said to Gandhi, "the man who is responsible for the passage of the bill is the President of the India League of America, J.J. Singh Would you write him a letter?" He promised and gave me the letter a few days later.

merged with his sociology.

I said I knew that the mounting prej udice against coloured peoples in South Mrica disturbed him; he had fought it fo twenty years. "But I hope," I added, "you, will do nothing violent in this connectio You are a violent man." He laughed

"Some of your fasts are violent," I continued. "ÂĽou want me to confine myself to violent words," he commented.

"Yes." "I do not know when I am going to fast," he explained. "It is God who determines that. It comes to me suddenly. But I will not act rashly. I have no desire to die."

The prayer meeting was held later that afternoon. Hundreds of Poona citizens stood in a field on the other side of the clinic's low fence while Gandhi and his friends conducted the services on a wooden platform on this side of the fence. During the singing it commenced to rain; worship:Persput up their black umbrellas. A murmur of protest arose from those in the rear and all umbrellas were lowered. Somebody held one over Gandhi.

Before dinner, Gandhi invited me to walk with him. "Surely you are not going 'to walk in the rain," I protested lightly.

"Come along, old man," he said and stretched out his arm.

I had been given a private room that pened on the terrace where Gandhi slept. te in the evening, when I was about to tire, I passed Gandhi's bed. I greeted him 'lently with a raised hand but he called ut, "You must sleep well tonight. But will disturb you with our prayers at 4."

"1 hope not," I said and approached ¡m.

Re addressed himself to Mrs. Mehta in . dustani or Gujarati, and I thought he twas scolding her. "We are talking about u and you are curious," Gandhi reked.

"Somehow I knew it," I replied. "Now ou have made it worse by telling me but disclosing what you were talking about. should offer Satyagraha against you until ou tell me."

"All right," he laughed.

"I will sit by your bed all night."

"Come along," he said with a lilt.

"I will sit here and sing American songs."

"All right, you will sing me to sleep."

Everybody was enjoying the fun.

Gandhi's laughter was physical and ental; it was amusement plus agreement r at least amusement plus tolerance. It was e laughter of a man who is not afraid to caught with his visor up and his guard

own.

It had grown late and I wished them night. I talked to Mrs. Mehta. Gan-

dhi had scolded her because she served my breakfast in his room at II instead of 9 and this had held up the noonday meal of the others and besides she had given me special food; no one should receive privileged treatment.

I awoke very fit and went to Gandhi's room. He invited me to walk. He left me for a while to talk to a young Indian woman.

I had noticed him walking up and down the terrace with her the day before in agitated conversation. Then she had gone away and a young man stepped to Gandhi's side and they talked together for about a quarter of an hour. Pyarelal told me who they were. She was a Harijan and limped from an accident. The young man, likewise a Harijan, was her husband and he had had a forearm amputated. They were having marital difficulties and Gandhi wanted to patch up their relations. hen we resumed our constitutional, he began a discussion of Europe and Russia.

I said Moscow had nothing to give the world; it had gone nationalistic, imperialistic and Pan-Slav.

This could not feed the West. The democracies were beginning to realize that world peace would only come with internationalism and spiritual regeneration.

"Why do you want me to go to the West?"

"Not go to the West, but speak to the West."

"Why does the West need me to tell them that two times two are four? If they realize that the way of violence and war is evil why am I necessary to point out the obvious truth? Besides, I hav~ unfinished work here."

"Nevertheless," I said, "the West needs you. You are the antithesis to materialism and therefore the antidote to Stalinism and Statism." He talked about the increase of the spirit of violence in India since 1942.

Pedestrians gathered to watch Gandhi as we moved to and fro on the path that led to the city. There were factories near by and occasionally their whistles blew, but he never stopped talking; nor did he lift his voice; he talked through the noise.

I asked whether he had read my book A Week with Gandhi. He had, and apart from a few minor errors (I mis-stated Kasturba's age, for instance) he thought well of it. He had also read my Men and Politics; he read it in his "library," as he

called the lavatory where he kept a shelf of books.

Late in the afternoon, I went to Gandhi's room and found him spinning. I said I thought he had abandoned spinning.

"No, how could IT' he asked. "There are four hundred million Indians. Subtract one hundred million children, waifs and others; if the remaining three hundred million would spin an hour each day we would have Swaraj."

"Because of the economic or spiritual effect?" I asked.

"Both," he said. "If three hundred million people did the same thing once a day not because a Hitler ordered it but because they were inspired by tIie same ideal we would have enough unity of purpose to achieve independence."

"When you stop spinning to talk to me you are delaying Swaraj."

"Yes," he agreed, "you have postponed Swaraj by six yards."

The next morning Gandhi and about ten companions and I walked to the Poona station and boarded the express to Bombay. The party had the use of a special third-class carriage with a hard wooden bench down the length of each outer wall and another down the centre of the carriage.

Tt rained heavily throughout the journey, and soon water began to pour from the roof and through openings in the window frames and door. Large puddles formed on the floor. At a number of stops en route, local Congress leaders boarded the train for conferences with Gandhi. Between times, he wrote a brief article for Harijan and corrected another article. He looked up at me once and smiled and we exchanged a few remarks. When his editorial worK was finished he stretched out on the wooden bench and in a moment he was sleeping serenely.

END

About the author: Though Louis Fischer is best known for his association with Gandhi, he has written extensively on other subjects, particularly the Soviet Union. Born and educated in Philadelphia, he began his career in 1921 as the Berlin correspondent of the New York Post.

For the next 25 years, he served on newspaper assignments in Europe and Asia. His other published works include Gandhi and Stalin, The

Soviets in World Affairs, Men and Politics, Empire, and The Great Challenge. Now 73, Louis Fischer lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

SOMECOMEOFFthe streets, abandoned by their parents. More are sent from orphanages too crowded for another youngster. Others are brought by the police under court orders.

This is their past. Not very encouraging. But they enter into a unique atmosphere where concern and love will, at the least, give them an opportunity for a future.

Boys Town began in December 1964 in a small rented house in Calcutta's Kidderpore district. Its first occupants were nineteen youngsters ranging in age from four to seventeen.

Today, Boys Town retains a primary school at Kidderpore.

But the main institution sprawls over twenty-five acres of farm land and fish ponds at Gangarampur. There, at last count, 109 youngsters live, work and study under the direction of a 37-yearold Ceylonese priest named A.H. Vanigasooriyar, better known as Father Van. His operating philosophy is simple. "My aim is to see that boys who have nobody are well cared for and to give them a chance to make a bright future for themselves," says Father Van. "I try to provide for them whatever normal homes and normal parents provide their children. I The Rev. A.H. Vanigasooriyar want to bring them up in the spirit of a true home to be good children and good citizens of this country."

Why Calcutta? "I wish to contribute my share to finding solutions to some of Calcutta's problems," he says.

Few rules and regulations bind the youngsters to Boys Town.

If they want to leave, they are free to do so. And some, unused to any form of discipline or security, have left. But most stay.

They are free to follow any religious faith. "The children are advised only to know and to love God in their own way," says Father Van, a Catholic. "This is in order to help them become good citizens."

Boys Town's "citizens" reflect all communities of India, including one orphan of Chinese extraction. To some extent, its admission policy is much the same as America's famed Boys Town, where the motto is, "There is no such thing as a bad boy."

The only restrictions Father, Van places are that the youngsters come to Boys Town before they are ten years old and that they be what he terms "total orphans" with no family to provide for them.

Father Van's zeal and industriousness, along with the success achieved over the past few years, have brought Boys Town a wide range of contributors. CARE (Co-operative for American Relief Everywhere) has been the Town's major benefactor. It has donated a tractor, a water pump, seeds and construction material for the¡ fish tanks.

Machinery for the workshop came from West Germany. A French organization supplies milk to the Kidderpore youngsters.

Calcutta's Mother Teresa's mission presented a van that helps transport the youngsters between the city and Gangarampur.

Two well-known names in films¡-Indian actor Dev Anand and American actress Shirley Maclaine-helped raise a substantial

sum for the school buildings. Both have visited Boys Town and Father Van recalls their tours with enthusiasm. "Their visit gave me a lot of encouragement," he says.

A number of Calcutta organizations, among them the Ladies Study Group, the Cambridge Society and the Dramatic Club of Calcutta, also provide aid, giving Boys Town local, as well as international, support.

"Somehow or another," says Father Van, "nothing has been found wanting." Yet, just as any other parent, he has even bigger plans for the youngsters of Boys Town.

"One must have big plans," he says, "in order to be able to do even a tenth of what one dreams."

Recipe for a successful home:

Mix together fun, nutritious food, clean surroundings, dedicated leadership, on-the-job training, good primary education and plenty of rest. Result: sturdy, bright, self-confident youngsters. Photographs reflect the day-to-day routine at Boys Town, a unique five-year-old experiment in turning waifs into useful citizens.

Checking artwork, Kantilal Rathod issues instructions to cameraman Dayaram Chawda (bending over to adjust lens) and assistant Mackly

Cama.

THE ARDUOUS ART 0

ANIMATION

Ideas, imagination, a staff of artists-and infinite patience. That's all it takes to make an animated film. As producer-director of a Bombay film unit, Kantilal Rathod has all these and more; and together with his talented group he has produced a colourful cartoon film on the labour movement in America. continued

IN A NARROW,cluttered room in Bombay, four men sit around a table. They are studying three sets of draw.ings-stylized representations of men, buildings, factories and cities. After the sheets of paper have been passed from hand to hand, agreement is finally reached on a style.

This is the beginning of the animated film, Strife to Stability, made by Akar Films of Bombay for the U.S. Information

Service. The 35-mm colour movie tells the thousands of drawings, each slightly different from the other, which when prostory of the American labour movement, and will be screened as part of the regular jected give the illusion of movement. This is the principle; but putting it into practice USIS films programme.

One of the earliest steps in film-making is extremely complicated and tedious. It takes about forty drawings, for instance, is production of the storyboard-drawings of the movie's main scenes in sequence. just to show a man raising a cigarette to These are displayed on a board, and it is his lips. In all, the ten-minute labour film only after they have been thoroughly dis- involved some 20,000 drawings.

The movie's characters are first done in cussed by director, designers and artists pencil, with hundreds of drawings going inthat the work of animation begins.

Briefly, an animated film is a series of ;¡.toeach scene. Then they are photographed Text continued on page 27

Members of the AkaI' Films unit discuss merits of different cartoon styles, above. From left to right are Bhim Sain, chief animator Ram Mohan, and Srikant Naik Satam, with Kantilal Rathod(back to camera). At story-board stage, below left, details o/animation are worked out. Below, an animator enlists help of Mackly Cama in capturing true-to-li/e facial expression. Artists sometimes work holding a mirror be/ore their faces.

ANIMATED

FILM

Text continuedfrom page 22

Meticulous care is taken at every stage of the animation processfrom the mixing of artists' paints to the final frame-by-frame shooting. and later projected in what is known as the line test, to see whether their movements are correct. The outline of each one of these drawings is then traced on to a transparent cel (a piece of celluloid). Set aside to dry, the cels are later flopped over and the colours filled in. Great care is taken that the colours match exactly, so they are mixed in one lot for use over several weeks.

In the meanwhile the backgrounds of vari-

ous scenes have been painted on separate sheets of paper. The final shooting is again done frame by frame, with the cels-showing the characters' movements-placed over the background sheets.

Throughout, lighting must be constant and camera equipment in perfect shape. At one stage in the shooting of Strife to Stability, it was noticed that the fluctuations in Bombay's electricity produced subtle differences in the exposed film, so entire sequences had to be reshot at night when the current is steady, Technical problems apart, making the labour film involved hours of research, of poring over old books, files, photographs and records. All of this was done by Producer-Director Kantilal Rathod, who had the responsibility of planning the action, conceiving the characters, and presenting

and interpreting ideas. For instance, to place just the right emphasis on the U.S. Government's concHiatory rore, RatIlocf had the Federal mediator remove the olive branch from the Great Seal of the United States and wear it in his hat in subsequent scenes. This kind of device-like the management official's ubiquitous cigar-helps the audience identify the characters.

Though most ideas came from Rathod, help and advice was sought from others.

The suggestion for one scene, in which the factory gates are opened just wide enough to admit one worker at a time while the police stand guard nearby, was contributed by an American friend. There can be little doubt as to the scene's authenticity, because the American had actually seen it happen during Detroit's labour strife back in 1935.

END

While chief aninUltor draws characters' main actions, assistants fill in intermediate stages. Artist at left prepares pencil artwork. Rathod looks on as drawings are hand-flipped to check movement 0/ characters, bottom. Members 0/ the group critically judge preliminary screening 0/ the film.

r

HOW THEY CRACKED THE GENETIC CODE The search for the chemical secrets of life is amongst the most exciting of man's scientific hunts. The work of three dedicated American scientistsincluding India-born Dr. Har Gobind Khorana-who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine, has brought nearer the day when biologists can correct genetic defects, control heredity and perhaps even create life itself 'in the laboratory.

IT WAS A routine day at the fifth International Congress of Biochemistry during the summer of 1961 in Moscow.

In a remote conference room in Moscow University, a young and little-known American scientist arose to deliver a ten-minute paper. Less than a dozen people were on hand. Ten minutes later the room was in an upr~ar.

The quiet, shy American had announced one of the century's most significant scientific achievements-he had deciphered the first word in what has come to be known as the "genetic code of life."

The scientist was Dr. Marshall W. Nirenberg, of the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who in October 1968 was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine, in conjunction with two other American molecular biologists, India-born Dr. Har Gobind Khorana of the University of Wisconsin and Dr. Robert W. Holley of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in California.

What is the mysterious "genetic code" which determines the unique characteristics of every living thing?

It is a mechanism by which all the inherited characteristics of an organism are transmitted from one generation to another. Molecular biologists have described it as a coded "language" originating in the genes of the cell which directs the synthesis of proteins, the body's building materials, of the exact "specifications" for the body's structure and growth, e.g., whether a person is to have blue eyes or brown, is to be short or tall, lightskinned or dark, etc.

The language of the code consists of amino acids that are spelled out in the triplet combinations of four

"letters" (nucleotides). The letters of the code are carried in the genes in the form of molecules of nucleic acid known as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). The hereditary "blueprints" of the code are determined by the arrangement of the nucleotides, four different chemical sub-units in the DNA molecule, each of which acts like a letter in a fuur-letter alphabet. The nucleotides are strung together in three-letter combinations. The manner and sequence in which these combinations link up determine the "words" (amino acids) and "sentences" (proteins) which spell out each individual's unique collection of hereditary characteristics.

In Moscow, Dr. Nirenberg had reported finding which letters composed a word of the code, but not the sequence, or "spelling." Three years later at the next biochemistry congress in New York City, Nirenberg once again spoke to his colleagues. Scientists from a score of nations had gathered to hear the latest findings in what was turning out to be one of the greatest scientific hunts ever undertaken-the search for the chemical secrets of life.

This time Nirenberg announced that he and his associates had synthesized three-letter code words and found the translation (amino acid) for each codon.

Marshall Nirenberg was not the only scientist working on the genetic code. The search for its secrets had drawn in scientists from countries throughout the world.

Although Nirenberg had provided the all-important first clue, others were gradually filling in more pieces of the puzzle.

At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Khorana, headcontinued

The genetic code is the mechanism by which the inherited characteristics of an organism are transmitted from one generation to another.

ing a team of senior researchers from twenty-seven countries, confirmed the Nirenberg findings and added great detail to them. He had begun by experimenting to combine several nucleotides or "letters" of the code.

Gradually, he worked out a method of building whole synthetic chains of these nucleotides with the code letters in known sequence. By 1965, Dr. Khorana was able to determine that each of the three-letter words is always read separately and does not share any of its letters with another word. The words are read off continuously along a strand of DNA, much as a punchedtape message is read by a teletype machine. Last year Dr. Khorana and his group synthesized all sixty-four of the possible three-letter combinations.

Meanwhile, Dr. Robert Holley at Cornell University in New York had approached the genetic code problem from another angle. In 1965, after nine years of painstaking research, he finally resolved the structure of a nucleic acid molecule known as transfer RNA (ribonucleic acid) which helps transfer the code messages from RNA to amino acids which are needed to create particular kinds of protein.

What Holley did, over his nine-year effort, was to purify seventy-seven-unit RNA molecules from commercial baker's yeast, break the molecules apart chemically, analyze the units in the fragments, and eventually determine how they fit together. This showed how the RNA molecule was put together by nature. It was something like arranging seventy-seven anagram letters into an intelligible sentence.

The end result of the work of the three scientists, acting independently, was that the genetic code had been deciphered. Nirenberg provided the key to its structure, and Khorana and Holley proved the structure in detail and showed how it is used by the cells to synthesize protein.

None of the three winners has been resting on his laurels. Holley is studying substances that promote cell growth and Khorana is trying to solve the problem of how proteins and nucleic acids are synthesized. Nirenberg divides his time between research on how nerve cells function and studies of how the cell's reproductive machinery knows when a message begins and when it ends. In other words, he is trying to figure out the punctuation marks in the genetic code.

Taken together, the feats of the Nobel winners and

Nirenberg: Deciphering the hieroglyphics of life's genetic code has been the preoccupation of Marshall W. Nirenberg for the last eleven years.

After taking a master's degree in biology from the University of Florida and a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Michigan, he joined the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and became chief of the section of biochemical genetics. Tall, dark and slender, the 42-year-old biochemist is modest about his scientific achievements and insists that his associates receive recognition with him. Concerned with the social implications of his work, he has written several articles on the subject.

many other scientists have given deep insight into the fundamental questions of biology. They have brought much nearer the day when molecular biologists will be able to correct genetic defects, control heredity, and perhaps even create life itself. No one is more concerned about the implications of these discoveries on the f~ture ()f mankind than the scientists themselves. In a speech made two years ago, Nirenberg pointed out the following: "New information is being obtained in the field of biochemical genetics at an extremely rapid rate. Thus far, this knowledge has had relatively little effect upon man. More information must be obtained before practical application will be possible, and the technical problems that must be overcome are formidable. However, when these obstacles have been removed, this knowledge will greatly influence man's future, for man then will

Khorana:

Born in Raipur, India, in 1922,Har Gobind Khorana-now an American citizen-is a pioneer in the complex field of nucleic acid chemistry. He qualified for his master's degree in chemis:ry from Punjab University and proceeded to England for further studies, taking his doctorate at the University of Liverpool. For eight years -from 1952to 1960-he was head of the organic chemistry division of the University of British Columbia, Canada, which he left to join the Enzyme Institute at the University of Wisconsin.

He has published nearly three hundred papers and received numerous awards, including the Padma Vibhushan from the Government ofIndia.

Holley: Winner of the coveted Rs. 75,000Albert

have the power to shape his own biologic destiny. Such power can be used wisely or unwisely, for the betterment or detriment of mankind.

"Where do we stand today? The genetic language now is known, and it seems clear that most, if not all, forms of life on this planet use the same language, with minor variations. Simple genetic messages now can be synthesized chemically. Genetic surgery, applied to micro-organisms, is a reality. Genes can be prepared from one strain of bacteria and inserted into another, which is then changed genetically. Such changes are inheritable. Thus far, it has not been possible to programme mammalian cells in this way ....

However, I have little doubt that the obstacles will eventually be overcome. The only question is when. My guess is that cells will be programmed with synthetic messages within twenty-five years. If efforts along these lines were

intensified, bacteria might be programmed within five years.

"The point which deserves special emphasis is that man will be able to programme his own cells with synthetic information long before he will be able to assess adequately the long-term consequences of such alterations, long before he will be able to formulate goals, and long before he can resolve the ethical and moral problems which will be raised. When man becomes capable of instructing his own cells, he must refrain from doing so until he has sufficient wisdom to use this knowledge for the benefit of mankind. I state this problem well in advance of the need to resolve it; because decisions concerning the application of this knowledge must ultimately be made by society, and only an informed society can make such decisions wisely."

END

Lasker Medical Award, Robert W. Holley is now a resident fellow at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California. He took his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in 1947 and was a member of the research team that first synthesized penicillin. His association with Cornell University as research chemist and professor of biochemistry lasted twenty years up to 1968. The 47-year-old biochemist is the author of some sixty papers in scientific and professional journals. While the study of living organisms takes up most of his time, he is a man of varied interests with a love' of the outdoors and a fondness for long walks.

by PAUL UNDERWOOD

The riddle of the

One of the most baffling archaeological finds in the U.S., Serpent Mound, a long curved earth embankment near Cincinnati, Ohio, is believed to have been built about 2,000 years ago by early inhabitants of the continent.

ABOUTEIGHTYMILESeast of Cincinnati, Ohio, near the village of Locust Grove, is a sinuous earth embankment nearly a quarter of a mile long. This man-made curiosity represents an enormous serpent in the act of swallowing some food, and it is one of the largest and best-preserved primitive effigy mounds in the United States.

Over the years, many theories have been advanced to explain the purpose of this imposing mound. It has been variously described as an idol, a place of sacrifice and a religious symbol. Around the turn of the century, a Baptist minister offered the theory that the serpent had been placed there by God to mark the site of the Garden of Eden.

Reprinted with permission/rom The New York

Times. Š 1968 by The New York Times Co.

The age of the mound also has been disputed. In the past, some people believed it was older than the pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China. Some even speculated that it antedated the Biblical flood.

Now, however, it is generally accepted that the Serpent Mound, as it is called, is the most impressive relic we have of an early people popularly known as the Mound Builders. They established relatively elaborate cultures in this area of the North American continent long before the coming of the white man.

The o'rigin and history of the Mound Builders are matters of speculation among archaeologists and anthropologists. However, the consensus is that the first men to inhabit the Western Hemisphere. crossed over the frozen Bering Strait from Asia during the last Ice Age, or sometime be-

serpent lDound tween 18000and 14000 R.C. These early inhabitants slowly worked their way south. There is evidence that, by 8000B.C., nomadic tribes of hunters roamed what is now the Western plains of the United States. They made weapons from flint,eventually developing the arrow, and apparently used animal hides for clothing and shelter in much the same manner as the plains Red Indians of the nineteenth century.

Apparently, their descendants spread gradually throughout the continent. Some of them moved southward into what is now Mexico and Central America, where eventually there developed the great preColumbiancivilizations of the Olmecs, the Mayas and the Aztecs.

Others moved eastward. Around 1000 B.C., they began developing a series of

probably related cultures that were the forebears of what are known as the Hopewell, Adena and Fort Ancient cultures.

The decline of the, last of these, which seems to have set in about A.D. 1000, led to the development of the Red Indian nations as the first settlers found them.

The Ohio Valley was a major centre of these early cultures. Large earthworks of various shapes are widespread throughout the area, and some of the earthworks, like the Serpent Mound, probably had religious significance. Others appear to have been walled, defensive positions.

Many of the mounds were destroyed by the early settlers. Others have been levelled by suburban developments. But many still remain, and some of the most impressive ones have been incorporated into State or local parks. One large one, the so-called

"Miami Fort" site was once part of a farm owned by President William Henry Harrison, ninth President of the United States.

General Harrison, hero of the War of 1812, was so impressed with the engineering of the earthworks that he described them as the work of a military genius.

Excavations on the sites of Mound Builders' villages indicate that the people of these cultures were settled farmers and craftsmen of considerable skill. The sites show a continuous occupancy over long periods of time. The inhabitants raised beans, corn and other crops, and they were capable of making efficient tools out of stone, bone, shell and wood.

They also made excellent pottery, which they tempered with crushed grit, as well as elaborate jewellery from copper, meteoric iron and silver, often in combination with pearls or shells. Their frequent use of such materials as copper, mica and sea shells, which are not found locally, suggests to archaeologists that the Mound Builders carried on an extensive trade with inhabitants of other areas of the country.

Excavations of the Serpent Mound have uncovered no implements or ornaments, but they did indicate the care with which the construction had been undertaken. Flat stones and lumps of clay had been carefully laid out on the ground as a pattern for the earth that was piled over them.

However, excavations of three nearby burial mounds brought to light relics characteristic of the Adena culture. On the basis of these discoveries, it is generally assumed that the people of this culture constructed the serpentine effigy, probably sometime between 200 B.C. and A.D. 700.

The body of the serpent winds in seven sinuous curves along a bluff overlooking a small stream. At the head is an oval wall of earth that is separate from the main body. For a long time, it was assumed that this oval represented an egg the serpent was preparing to swallow. Now, however, experts believethe oval is actually the mouth of the serpent closing down on some food.

An object of some curiosity and even fear to early settlers in the area, the Serpent Mound was not properly surveyed until 1846. In 1886, Frederick W. Putnam, of Harvard University's Peabody Museum, became interested in it and succeeded in raising the money necessary to purchase the site.

Under his direction, excavations and reconstructions of the serpent and the three adjacent mounds were completed. Subsequently, the site was deeded to the Ohio Historical Society, which now maintains it as a State memorial.

END

FAREWELLTO DICKAND JANE America~s new school year begins this month and many youngsters will learn to read from primers unlike any their parents. ever saw.

In the old texts~ city children~ poor children and Negro children hardly ever ¡((xist d. Now~ in a different kind of reader, students can identify themselves¡ with the familiar situations of everyday life.

Oh, Jane.

Look, Jane, look.

Look, Jane.

Look, look.

See Dick.

FOR DECADES, American school-children started their reading experience with these simple words. Each succeeding group of six-year-olds was handed a pre-primer with the story of Dick, Jane and their dog "Spot;' romping together in the green fields of a small town. By memorizing the simple basic vocabulary-entirely too simple many educators feel-first-graders were launched on the exciting adventure of learning to read.

And, for many, this experience worked.

But for thousands of city children, particularly those from low-income areas, it was so frustrating that they became poor readers from the start.

For one thing, all the faces in the book are fair-skinned and pretty. All the homes are neat and pretty. Father dresses neatly and goes off to work in an office. Mother is neat and pretty, smiles all the time, and never seems to have a problem. Even the streets are neat and pretty. Many young students find these unfamiliar scenes a startling contrast with their own world-a crowded, noisy, often dirty and unhappy world-one that is not good enough to be written about in books.

Instead of opening a new avenue for him, the disadvantaged child met a new difficulty in gaining the fundamental skill of learning to read well.

But recently, American educators, helped by grants from the Federal Government and funds from private foundations, have been takin; a closer look at this youngster and his world. In the last few years, the realization has dawned that the economically disadvantaged child or the Negro, Puerto Rican, or Mexican minority child sorely needed respect-for himself, for his family, for his neighbourhood.

Could his first book help him to gain this respect and, at the same time, help teach Combining realism with charm, new reading books have been received enthusiastically by students. For the first time, they portray youngsters of varied races playing together, left and right.

him to read more quickly and easily? A few enterprising publishers attempted to find out.

One of the first new readers to emerge was issued by the Follett Company, using illustrations of big city neighbourhoods, with pictures of children-white, black, brown and yellow-skinned-working and playing together. The books were far from perfect. They still used the traditional vocabulary-more of the classroom than of the street. But they were greeted enthusiastically, and with excellent preliminary results, by the Detroit, Michigan, teachers who were among the first to use them.

Other publishers embarked on similar programmes. Three series are now out and

in extensive use: Macmillan's Bank Street Readers, the McGraw-Hili Skyline Series, and even a series published by the famous Dick and Jane producers, the Scott-Foresman Company.

These new readers are not just a mild modification of the old textbooks. They embody a completely new philosophy. One reason is the choice of authors and editors.

Instead of using traditional textbook writers to put together stilted, limited vocabulary words to fit a teaching pattern, these companies gathered staffs combining the skill and imagination of children's authors with the experience and know-how of gifted classroom teachers. One of the dividends has been the use of a truly easier-tocontinued

Neighbors Neighbors are people who live on your street, And tell you you're noisy, or naughty, or sweet.

They smile when you're helpful; they frown when you're bad.

Neighbors are folks like your mother and dad.

"Life on the pages of the new textbooks is real and recognizable." read, natural, conversational vocabulary.

Certainly few children will be able to say of the new books as one perceptive firstgrader did of the old "Look, look, see Dick" books: "Nobody talks that waynot even babies!"

The chief writer of the Skyline Series for example, was a Negro city child herself, and for a number of years a teacher of city children in St. Louis, Missouri. The stories she wrote were based on things children had said and done, which she stored away in "pigeonholes" in her mind. Her stories are, as a result, close to children's lives and fascinating to them.

The Bank Street Readers staff, too, had years of work with city children, and included editor-writer Irma Simonton Black, author of nineteen juvenile books, who had been teacher, psychological tester and

researcher in nursery and elementary education as well. With people who understand children writing about things children understand, there is a special quality in the new books combining realism and charm.

On the whole, the new texts are better literature and they contain livelier, sometimes amusing, sometimes touching, art.

These things are important, but to the sixty per cent of American children who live in cities, there is a change that is even more exciting. It is the simple but-to them, wondrous-fact that they and their surroundings are in the books they hold in their hands.

Instead of focusing on the same brother an sister throughout the primers, each story tells of another youngster. Each is set in the kind of scene any of the young

readers might see from his apartment house window. A noisy street comer. An empty, overgrown lot. A neighbourhood candy store. A sidewalk with a jumping game chalked on it, and a fire hydrant spouting cool water for children to splash in on a hot summer's day. Since he knows the scene as well as he knows the ten fingers on his hands, it is easier for him to learn the words on the page which speak of it.

There is someone with whom every young reader can identify. There is fairskinned, brown-haired Ben, temporarily housebound by a broken ankle, who looks longingly out the window, wishing he could ride on the merry-go-round in the street below. There is tan-skinned, darkeyed Carmen, who cannot go outside because it is raining, but spends a busy day in her big apartment house-going for the

What are you doing?

But you can't I'm writing

write!

to my sister.

That's OK! My little sister can't read.

ii, helping mother do the laundry in the ment laundromat, buying milk from automatic machine in the lobby. There the stray cat nobody wants-until a -haired boy adopts it.

There are even adaptations of fairy tales. ead of the traditional Little Red Hen plants the grain herself, harvests and Is it herself because her friends are lazy n eats the cake she has baked herself re is an industrious Negro oy named ry. Henry finds a box, and his friends Id not help him carry it home. So he ches wheels to it. When he is finished, asks who would like a ride, all are ~ousto do that. But because they would work, they cannot have a ride. e adult characters are different, too. ad of the bland, homogenized parents Dick and Jane family, there are real e-sometimes fat and sometimes thin, times happy and sometimes sad, . es pleasant and sometimes angry. have familiar occupations-Iabourchers, grocers, bus drivers, doctors. , like the children's own neighbour, not every home is complete with and mother. Some have only one t, some-like the story of the child with his grandmother and yearning ther and father-have none at all. n the pages of the new textbooks is ;,and recognizable. Like real children here, they have worries and fears, ations and difficulties. They can be or excited, hurt or proud. It is reg for the little boy or girl learning to know that other children, too, I as they do. tory in a primer of the Bank Street series speaks very intimately to 6ttle first-grade pupil. Its descripthe events of a hot summer's day ;;recallssomething which so many n children have experienced. hot. The sun is high in the sky. is hot. e $treet is hot. The boys and girls ;!Theysit on the steps. It is a hot, k comes down the street It is a 15;. A boy runs out into the water.

f:Uckgoes away. A girl sits on It is hot. A man comes. He turns on. Water runs out on the street s go in the water. Boys run in! :girls play in the water. A dog is cooll" . dfrom the comfortable home in continued

"Negro children identify more readily with characters in mtegrated books, and this increases their interest in, and rate of, learning. n the suburbs also gains from the new series and has the opportunity to see realistically the way some of his less fortunate fellow citizens live. Children from one wealthy suburb who used the books were astonished to discover that in a country where ten crore telephones are in use, and everyone they know has one or more in their home, there were still families without phones.

These children also may discover that they can learn much from the less affluent members of their society. For children in poorer families-in life, and as it is reflected in the books-there arises the need to make do with what he has, to create what he does not have. Who is to say which child is really more fortunate-the one who is given a shiny, elaborate toy fire engine to drive, or the one who turns an old packing case at will into a fire engine one time, a boat another, an airplane the next?

For such substantial easons, the new books are finding a market outside of the city as well as within it. But most of the sales have been to schools in large cities with sizeable minority populations. From all indications, the sales have been excellent. To the surprise of some, consignments of the integrated textbooks have even found their way into schools in Hie traditionally segregated-although now increasingly integrated-Southern States of Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Negro leaders would like to see far more, but at least beginnings have been made.

Since the new texts came into use, reports have been favourable. Detroit public schools, among the first to test the new books, reported: "Negro children identify more readily with characters in integrated books, and this increases their interest in, and rate of, learning." Even older children who had failed to learn with traditional texts responded, and, with a fresh start on the new books, learned to read at last.

Teacher reports are full of phrases like, "content meets needs of the children," "my children were more and more excited with each new book," "illustrations enabled children to identify."

Said a New York City principal, "Even though these books are more difficult than he traditional ones, we find our children

are more successful. There is greater motivation for them, because they identify with the children in the books. This past year, we sent our first-graders on to secondgrade, meeting the city-wide testing norms.

In other words, our children, all from culturally deprived homes, did as well in reading tests as the average city youngsters.

We are very excited, and feel that something important is happening."

A Philadelphia principal believes that the books affect teachers as well as pupils.

She explained: "We have a teacher who is one of the most creative and enthusiastic on our staff, but last year was listless and almost apathetic about her work. When the new readers arrived, she identified with them and became much more creative as a result. She is, you see, a Negro herself."

Teachers in general are delighted with the escape from the old, "Run, Dick, run," books. Even the pre-primer books try to emulate natural speech patterns and experts feel this use of familiar language will help all young readers. Says Donald Lloyd, associate professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, "Reading instruction must be closely tied to speech in order to be successful. It should begin with the familiar materials, the more familiar the better .... The child must learn to see the way he normally talks in the print on the page."

Even slang appears when apPTopriatea real departure for U.S. texts, which in the past completely ignored the existence of the language of the vernacular. This fits in with a national trend to introduce youngsters to the different levels of language. As one teacher explains it, "I teach my children that language is like clothes.

When they play or stay at home, they put on their old clothes, and nobody bjects.

But when they go to school, or downtown, they have to dress up to be presentable. I tell them that slang is perfectly all right at home. But I insist that they must learn 'dress-up' language, or proper speech to get good grades and to prepare for a job."

Social studies, science and mathematics books are also facing up to the fact that U.S. school-children bring with them to class a very mixed ethnic heredity. Many new texts include children of all races in their illustrations. To build self-respect in the Negro child and multi-racial respect in

the white child, stories about the contributions of prominent Negroes like U.N. official Ralph Bunche, singer Marian Anderson and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, all of whom have played an important part in America's history and growth, are now being incorporated in history and social studies textbooks.

Even Negro leaders disagree on the kind of approach that is needed. In Detroit, for example, some 10,000 copies of the city's first integrated pl:inier were withdrawn because of complaints that the Negro children were placed in slum surroundings in the book. The primers were replaced with a new one built around the life of a comfortable Negro family living in the suburbs. The idea here is that young Negro readers can thus aspire to progressing to better, fuller lives, as they read about families that have already achieved this kind of success.

There have been other criticisms-that publishers have overcompensated and swelled the importance of some minority figures out of proportion to their deeds.

Some have complained that the Negro spirituals of the days of slavery should not be included .n the books, because they are a reminder of a shameful past. Others argue that they are a piece of history all Americans need to be reminded of, so that they may build a better today and tomorrow for Negroes.

Too much. Too little. Too critical. Too complimentary. The many criticisms are perhaps the best compliment in themselves, for they show that something is being done, something is happening in this most important area of all in a democracy-educa. tion. Civil rights leaders know this. Teachers know this. Parents know this. Most of all, children know this.

For example, when a new primer wa handed out to a group of older children in a Philadelphia school who had all had reading difficulties in early classes, the children refused to return them at the end of the class. They pleaded to be able to take them home. They seemed to know that, at last, they had found a book they could call their own.

END For young pupils, the new primers make learning¡to read both exciting and memorable, while providing better insights into everyday living.

'.

~<IJ."

.-;..

We're playing shadow tag.

Do you see what we're doing?

Now you're It, Andy.

THEY HAVEN'TBUILTa skyscraper with it yet, but wallE, ceilings, floors and furniture made of paper are the latest developments in the seemingly endless parade of imaginative uses for this ancient material. Lightweight, colourful, disposable and inexpensive-these familiar qualities of paper have long inspired both artists and industrial designers. Today, with the addition of strength and durability, there is little that cannot be made with paper. A unique exhibit, organized by New Yark's Museum of Contemporary Crafts and the Container Corporation of America, brought together more than 400 paper-based items from sixteen countries, including India. An installation constructed entirely of paper provided an inventive showcase for the products. Emphasizing the dimensional uses of paper, the exhibit included architectural structures, home furnishings, folk art and even a children's playground.

Some of the items in the exhibit are shown on these pages.

Would you believe

it'sall paper?

Above: French chair and hassock, made of compressed paper tubing. Left: From India, horse carried in processions, made of tissue paper glued to bamboo frame and decorated with foil cutouts. Right: Colourful column of egg crates makes an unusual/loor-to-ceiling lamp. Below: Accordion-pleated houses for migrant farm workers in California. Shell combines paper and polyurethane foam with a polyethylene coating, making the houses water-proof and fire-resistant.

Cutout dress of paper fabric,

by New York designer.

Cut from folded handmade paper, this motif has been used for good fortune for centuries by Mexican Indians.

Lamp shade, scored, cut and folded, (ortythree centimetres high, from England.

Dear Sit:

Dear Sir: I wish to express my deep appreciation for the article "The Unforgettable Victor Paranjoti" (July, 1969) which was a feast for mind and heart. The lucidity and perspicuity of the author's style kept me glued to the article and I could leave it only when I had finished the whole of it.

I am no musician but a student of engineering, yet I can say that the character of Victor Paranjoti has left an indelible mark on me. Men like him who are gregarious, scintillating, effervescent, and convivial are really unforgettable. I am reminded of what Shelley said about Keats, which so appropriatelyapplies to the Maestro, "Until the future forgets the past, his name and fame shall be an echo and light unto eternity."

PREMKUMAR Kanpur

most complex plant" is a compliment to Indian scientists and engineers now occupying positions of responsibility in industry.

T.S. CHANDRA SEKHARAN Bombay

Dear Sir: The article "Tarapur:

India Goes Nuclear," is a mine of information and describes in a clear and lucid manner details of the project. Tarapur will be a living monument of Indo-American friendship for many long years and a fitting memorial to two of the greatest democracies of the world today.

The photographs accompanying the article were a visual treat.

K.J. HEMRAJANI Bombay

Dear Sir: Jamila Verghese's article, "The Un-

Dear Sir: The excerpts from the biography of

forgettable Victor Paranjoti," was really thoughtprovoking.

My late aunt, who was the classmate of Mr. Paranjoti's sister in Madras, used to give vivid accounts of Victor coming to the college premisesto visit his sister. Although then very young, he was sought after by students, whom he would entertain vocally with his pure classical airs (all on-the-spot compositions). He was a lonely child and in many respects his early life resembled that of Schubert's.

Now he belongs to the ages but he has stamped the imprint of India's musical image abroad. His work today offers encouragement to all interested in his art.

JOSEPH RAJKUMAR TITUS Trivandrum

Joseph Pulitzer by W.A. Swanberg (June, 1969) are both entertaining and enlightening to any student of journalism. His four ethics of journalism will surely be a guiding light to a journalist in the making. His true greatness lies in the fact that he made the masses feel that they have certain rights as citizens of the country and that he fought for such rights.

This inspiration, an infectious spirit of optimism and the zeal for reform in all fields of human activity are also evident in the writings of the late Acharya P.K. Atre, a veteran Marathijournalist.

One is tempted to compare P.K. Atre with the great Pulitzer.

M.G. PATWARDHAN Kolthare, Dist. Ratnagiri

Dear Sir: "The Last Days of Joseph Pulitzer," Dear Sir: In publishing the informative article, "Tarapur: India Goes Nuclear" (June, 1969), you have done a good turn to Indian readers in making them conscious of the development taking place in India.

Mr. M.N. Chakravarti's statement that "India's scientific talent is by no means poor ... our scientists and engineers can be relied upon, after due training, to run successfully even the

makes delightful reading. It is not merely an experience to be introduced to a man of genius and an incurable eccentric; it is an education.

Pulitzer's assertions about the ethical standards of newspaper production are a warning against inaccurate news reporting, sensationalism, inadequate editorials and meaningless photographs.

RAMA KANT New Delhi

Dear Sir: I read and enjoy SPAN for its beautiful photographs and its entertaining and informative articles. But I did not enjoy the article about Damoo Dhotre (July, 1969) and his unfortunate animals. If a wild animal is "never, never tamed" there should be no fun in breaking its spirit for human entertainment.

N.Y. SASTRY Madras

Dear Sir: How fascinating is Damoo Dhotre (July, 1969)! The writer has made the leopardbreaker a truly unforgettable and lovable personality.

DAYAMOY ROY Suri (West Bengal)

Dear Sir: I liked the article "Is Village Life Changing?" (July, 1969) very much. The writer not only has shown his deepest interest in the subject by acquainting himself with things like the 'tulsi-tree, 'and the religious sacred sweet-basil tree but also has shown the essential factors and proper environment that could playa great role in the development of the rural economy.

DA YARAM UWARI Gauhati

Dear Sir: I have read with great interest your article "Moon Landing: The Countdown Begins," (July, 1969). This issue of your magazine came in my hands when the three brave astronauts had almost landed on the moon and had exploded the myth that inter-planetary movement was not possible and that the moon was a mystical planet.

What a great and wonderful achievement by a brave team, and a great nation which sent man in peace to the moon almost four lakh kilometres away from earth. Equally commendable is the openness with which the epoch-making mission was carried out.

R.L. MALHOTRA Chandigarh

'IITHEWGILD Every 45 seconds an aircraft takes off or lands at Chicago's sprawling O'Hare International Airport. Spread over 7,200 acres, O'Hare was constructed about ten years ago with the future in mind. Yet with the advent shortly of superjets carrying 350 or more passengers and the steady rise in air traffic, O'Hare already faces growing pains.

Above: Dots on ground controller's radar screen represent planes within five-mile range of O'Hare. Left: Crowds at ticket counters are a measul'e effairport's busy traffic.

With 100,000 passengers daily, it takes a staff of 16,000 to keep people and planes moving swiftly.

In glass-walled aerie topped by radar bubble, controllers, below, maintain constant vigil on every plane movement.

An essential part of the operations is inspection and overhaul of aircraft by highly trained personnel, far right.

Air cargo, right, is tagged/or shipment.

More than 10 per cent of the income of u.s. airlines comes from carrying freight.

Streaks of light, right, on a time exposure photograph indicate number of /lights in the space of a few minutes.

.

The Boeing 747, scheduled to be put into service this month, will carry 350 or more passengers. Supersonic Transports (SST), expected to go into operation in the mid-'70s, will haul half as many passengers but will fly three times as fast. A little later there THEGROWTH of air traffic and the changes made in airport design will be the giant Lockheed L-500, seating more than 900 passengers. These superjets are expected to usher in an era of unand traffic control to meet the needs of today's (and tomorrow's) jet aircraft are nowhere better illustrated than by Chicago's precedented mass air travel. Forecasts, which may actually fall O'Hare International Airport-the world's busiest air terminal. short of the mark, are that the 'seventies will see a three-fold Each day O'Hare handles some two thousand flight operations, increase in passenger traffic and an eight-fold increase in freight. which means that an aircraft lands or takes off every forty-five The much bigger aircraft and the soaring volume of air traffic seconds. As many as twenty-two airlines, besides some military will doubtless add to the congestion and present new problems.

Among the problems these "giants" will present any airport aircraft and private planes, use the airport. The airlines carryover are two seemingly prosaic ones: passenger and baggage handling.

100,000 passengers a day, in addition to a large amount of cargo.

The increase in passenger traffiG has exceeded even the most The very thought of coping with hundreds of passengers and their optimistic estimates of a decade ago. It is a tribute to the foresight accompanying baggage for each flight is a nightmare to airport of the airport's planners that, in spite of this, O'Hare has been authorities the world over. As U.S. Senator Warren Magnuson able to cope fairly adequately with the present traffic. But its remarks: "Can you imagine 5,000 people all crowding into a capacity is nearing saturation point and the authorities look with terminal at the same time, grabbing for phones, porters ... with some trepidation to the future and the further anticipated boom 10,000 to 15,000 suitcases tumbling into the terminal at once?"

Though formidable, the problems are not beyond the capacity in air traffic.

Named for Edward H. O'Hare, a U.S. Navy officer who was of modern technology. Already U.S. airlines and the State and honoured for his exploits in World War II, the airport covers Federal Governments are pooling their resources to find answers.

7,200 acres and was built in stages, the last having been completed It is estimated that eighteen U.S. airlines through 1976 will in 1963. The large area permits continued expansion. J.P. Dunne, invest some $2.5 billion in new airport facilities. In a message head of O'Hare operations, says: "The airport has elastic walls; recently sent to the U.S. Congress, President Nixon urged the House to make allocations of $250 million a year for the next they expand to meet demand."

A special feature of the airport is the tangential arrangement ten years to build facilities and equipment. He also proposed that of its six runways including two 10,000 feet long and one 11,600 Federal aid for airport development be increased from $65 million feet long. A seventh runway is under construction. These runways a year to $250 million a year for the next ten years.

"The challenge confronting us is not one of quality or even of radiate like spokes from the central terminal area, so that none intersect; aircraft can take off or land on all of them simultane- technology," the President said in his message asking for legislaously and In various directions. At point of landing or touch- tive action on his proposals. "Our air traffic control system is the down, the runways are over a mile apart, and at point of loading best in the world; our airports are among the finest anywhere."

But with the greatly increased number of persons travelling by or unloading over 1,500 feet apart.

The terminal's two-level design, which has since become the air, Mr. Nixon added, "We simply do not have the capacity in prototype 'of many of the world's new airports, has speeded pas- our airways and airports ample to our present needs or reflective senger movement from and to the aircraft. Departing passengers of the future."

No one is working harder, or spending more money than the emplane through the upper level of the terminal via some seventy gates and covered corridors that telescope out to meet planes. airports themselves. O'Hare, like many other airports in the Incoming passengers leave their aircraft at the second level but United States, is undertaking major expansion programmes to descend to the first floor by escalator. The design thus eliminates cope with the anticipated upsurge in air traffic. Besides the additional runway and a new control tower, passenger amenities are much of the confusion found in single-level terminals.

Another feature of the airport is its underground fuel tank being improved and modernized. In less than a year's time, the farm. Ranging in capacity from 168,000gallons to 504,000 gallons, airport hopes to install computers which will make the issuing of tanks are connected to hydrants at the aircraft parking position, ticket~ automatic. A traveller will insert a credit card in the eliminating the danger inherent in transporting fuel by truck. machine and press buttons to indicate where he wants to go, by A new control tower, 200 feet high, is expected to open shortly. which airline he wishes to travel and any other preferences. If a It will enable controllers to see every corner of the expanded air- seat is available, the computer will produce a ticket. The passenger port and will also house the newest radar equipment. will then detach the baggage-claim check and affix part of it to The terminal, with its ticket counters, waiting rooms, baggage his bag. The bag will be placed on a conveyor next to the computer facilities, offic~s,restaurants and shops, consists of three buildings. which will carry it to the aircraft by which he is travelling. These Two "arms," each 750 feet long, are joined by a three-storey, all- innovations are expected to expedite both passenger and baggage glass structure in the middle. Passenger facilities include a main movement. The authorities are also working on adding new gate dining room, a cafeteria, cocktail lounge and snack bars. The positions and wider taxiways, longer and stronger runways and airport can feed 1,500 persons at one time. Existing car parking larger parking lots. capacity, which it is proposed to double, is adeq).latefor 6,000 cars.

With these and other revolutionary changes that are in the The major problems which confront O'Hare~and other airports offing, O'Hare gives the picture of an airport determined not only are those of future expansion arising from the increase in size to avert any crisis but also to offer quicker and better service to the and speed of new aircraft ready for operation or expected to be its patrons and maintain its position as America's-and world's-busiest airport.

E 0 ready within the next few years.

"The airport has elastic walls," says O'Hare's operations chief. "They expand to meet demand."