SPAN: November 1975

A LETTER FROM

SPAN

THE EDITOR

.

This month is SPAN's 15th anniversary, and we're "celebrating" it by reprinting (left) 15 covers-one from each of the 15 years of SPAN's existence. When the first issue of SPAN appeared in November 1960, its opening pages carried a prose poem stating its purpose. It was a magazine "offered as a span from America to India ... from man to man, reading across seas and centuries ... a span of words and images to link our common hopes, our common pleasures and delights, our common goals and values." In the 15 years that have elapsed since then, SPAN has tried to do just that, in pictures as well as words, and we have tried to maintain high editorial and production standards.

SPAN's high standards, in fact, have engendered 'some misconceptions. A few weeks ago S.R. Madhu, our assistant managing editor, was interviewing a top Bombay adman who said to him: "SPAN's layouts are very professional. You must have a long lead-time to get them here from the U.S." This reminded us of the countless times our Indian readers told us: "SPAN looks so good because of that fine imported American paper it's printed on." The truth is that SPAN is printed on Indian paper, with Indian ink, by an Indian printer. Its layouts are made by SPAN's Indian artists in our Delhi editorial offices, and its blocks are made by Indian photo-engravers. We think it's time we made this known to all our readers, to dispel the popular but erroneous notion that high quality comes only from "imported things." Except for its editor and publisher, who are the only Americans on its staff, SPAN is as Indian as chappatis and the Taj. This month's SPAN has something for everyone-art, tourism, humor, fiction, ecology, the population explosion, smallpox eradication in India, book reviews, Indo-U.S. industrial cooperation, and America's proposals for a/ new partnership with developing countries. These latter proposals, summarized on pages 47-52 of this issue, may not be the most exciting reading but they're undoubtedly among the most important pronouncements in American foreign policy in many years.

When we were putting this issue together there seemed to be more than enough pessimism in the world. So we tried to find a cover story that made a case for optimism. We found a man who could-B. Bruce-Briggs, a "think tank" intellectual who argues convincingly ("The Case for Optimism," pages 7-11) that the world has abundant resources and that we need not fear famine, energy shortage, pollution, or population explosion. He says the next century-your grandchildren and minewill see the worldwide abolition of poverty.

We wanted to present "the other side" because we remembered the old saying that "pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism." Asking a well-known Indian writer, T.K. Mahadevan, to rebut Bruce-Briggs, we hoped he might proffer a "case for pessimism." But actually Mahadevan's article (pages 12-15) is cheerfully feisty rather than gravely gloomy as he locks horns with think-tanker BruceBriggs. Mahadevan simply warns us of the price we may have to pay for over-optimism. (Sure, granted the earth has the resources to maintain 30,000 million people, but is that the way we want to live?)

It all reminds us of a little light verse by American poet Phyllis McGinley:

o merry

is the optimist, With troops of courage leaguing.

But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.

2 4 7 12 16 18 20 24 30 33 36 38 42 47 53

It'tk'

-

Front cover: Two laughing girls symbolize the brave new world forecast in our lead story, "The Case for Optimism," by B. Bruce-Briggs. The case is questioned in a following article by Gandhian intellectual T.K. Mahadevan. See pages 7-15.

Back cover: A selection of dust-jackets reveals the high standards of book designing today. In the fiercely competitive world of publishing, these covers must act as magnets, drawing readers to explore a book's contents. See story on page 53.

Managing Editor: Carmen Kagal. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu, Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes.

Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani, B, Roy ChoudhUry, Kanti Roy, Suhas Nimbalkar.

Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the viewsor policies of the United States Government. Printed by Arun Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Ltd., Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay 400038. .

Photographs: Front cover-Bud Lee. Inside from cover-Avinash Pasricha. 2-R.N. Khanna.

3-R.D. Sharma. 7-Avinash Pasricha. 10 top-Grant Heilman; bottom left-International Harvester, I2-Avinash Pasricha. I7-Homi Jal. 24-29-Produced by Ruth Hopkins. 33-Courtesy Woshington .University Magazine. 38-George P. Miller. 39-4l-courtesy AD,A News, American Dental Association.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted, For permission, write to the Editor, Subscription: One year, 18 rupees; single copy, 2 rupees SO paise, For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. .

knowing more about the U.S. experience since ideas generated there have an impact on other parts of the world.

Dr. Eskow spent much of his time explaining .the concept of community colleges and how they developed in the United States. Community colleges are democratic institutions of higher learning designed to meet the needs of all the people in a specific community, or region.

Unlike traditional colleges with their more elitist orientation, community colleges provide higher education to every secondary school graduate who seeks it.

Their job-training programs are geared to fill local job-market needs. They are not purely vocational colleges, however, because they are equipped to prepare some students for baccalaureate programs in standard academic colleges. They also provide education to adults who seek new knowledge for its own sake.

What makes community colleges different from traditional colleges is their close relationship with the community.

Established to respond to local circumstances, they draw upon local resourcesboth public and private sector-for equipment and instructors. .

Community colleges also de-emphasize theoretical book-based learning and stress learning by doing, said Dr. Eskow. They often take learning beyond the walls of a campus to stores, factories, churches, prisons-wherever people are willing to learn. "Students do not learn for work but learn through work."

Dr. Eskow explained that a class in a community college often brings together an incongruous assortment-a mother and son pursuing the same program; a

policeman learning about minority group psychology; a housewife resuming an education interrupted by marriage; a young man of poor means who cannot afford a four-year college; a doctor of philosophy satisfying his curiosity about computers.

Community colleges serve their communities, said Dr. Eskow. They draw people of all ages into recreational, social, cultural and intellectual¡ activities.

Their swimming pools are open to the public during certain hours; their auditoriums are available for meetings, concerts and lectures; they arrange courses, Several of India's leading educators workshops and seminars for specialrecently exchanged views with a U.S. interest groups. Community colleges thus expert on one of the most exciting serve as a focal point for over-all social developments in American educationand economic development, catalyzing community colleges-in a series of five the efforts of other groups working for seminars sponsored by the U.S. Informacommunity uplift. tion Service in New Delhi, Bombay, America's factories, farms and offices ~aIcutta, Hyderabad and Madras. India's find community colleges a source of Minister for Education, Professor S. trained manpower because they prepare Nurul Hasan, inaugurated the first of millions of people for careers that do not the seminars, in New Delhi, on August require a four-year academic course17, 1975. More than 20 university vicecareers ranging from agriculture to airchancellors and key educators and planline hostess service, from photography to ners from all parts of the country participolice science. People often attend compated in these seminars on "Jobmunity colleges while working on a fullOriented Education and Community time job. In the process, they improve Colleges," at which the principal speaker their earning potential as well as their was Dr. Seymour Eskow, president of social standing and opportunities for a Rockland Community College in Suffern, more interesting and many-sided life.

New York.

How relevant are community colleges In his inaugural remarks, Minister to India? Dr. Eskow warned that there is Hasan said: "We are all watching the always some danger of importing a results of the community colleges in the model that may not fit. It is essential that United States and their impact on the "you study the grain, the texture, the educational level of the people." He addcontext of your community-what ined that India is continually reassessing its dustries you have, what people you have, •• educational system, and is interested in what training possibilities you have-and then design the institution around these considerations. " What is particularly transferable from U.S. experience, said Dr. Eskow, may be the idea of community assessment-a college designed to continually assess the job needs of its community and to try satisfy those needs.

Writing in the Statesman, the former Vice-Chancellor of Jodhpur University, Professor V.V. John, remarked: "The greatest achievement of America's community colleges is that they have taken down the walls that separate the world oflearning from the world of work.

We have been spending a great part of our scarce resources on building these walls. 'Walls are expensive' observed the American educator [Eskow] at the Delhi conference. Many who heard him dreamEducation Minister Hasan inaugurates seminar on community colleges. From left: ed of establishing in our country a netV. V. John, educator,. R.K. Singh, Vice-Chancellor, Himachal Pradesh University,. work of community colleges without Minister Hasan; Donald Gilmore, USIS,. Seymour Eskow, the main speaker. walls."

NEWS& VIEWS

MINISTER HASAN OPENS COMMUNITY COLLEGE SEMINAR

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN REVISITS INDIA, DELIVERS BICENTENNIAL ADDRESS / S-ll S--ILr

The American Bicentennial's observances in India began with a recent address in New Delhi by a distinguished historian, Dr. John Hope Franklin, Professor of History at the University of Chicago. The subject of his lecture: "Toward Freedom-Some Thoughts on the American Revolution."

Himself a black, Professor Franklin spoke about the struggle of American blacks for freedom and equal opportunity. He said that the Declaration of Independence has always provided an inspiration, a philosophy and a weapon for those Americans who have been underprivileged or who have suffered discrimination.

Professor Franklin delivered the same talk in Ahmedabad; Bombay, Calcutta, Hyderabad, and Madras. At Rajasthan University in Jaipur-as well as at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University-he lectured on "The Historian and Public Policy."

Professor Franklin last visited India in February 1974,to deliver an address in the USIS lecture series, "Modern Society and Traditional Government." (See January 1974 SPAN, pages 46-47.) In 1964, he was one of the founders of the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad. In 1957, he represented the American Council of Learned Societies in the centennial observances of the¡ Universities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. , Professor"Franklin is the author of numerous books including From Slavery to Freedom-A History of Negro Americans; The Militant South; The Emancipation Proclamation; and The Negro in the Twentieth Century. He is also the editor of the University of Chicago Press series titled Negro American Biographies and Autobiographies. For 20 years he has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Negro History.

DETROIT'S 'FESTIVAL OF INDIA' More than 300,000 Americans visited the "Festival ofIndia" in Detroit, Michigan, a few weeks ago to enjoy the sights, sounds, aromas and tastes of India. Visitors to the three-day celebration, organized by Detroit's Indian community, sampled spicy Indian foods, bought Indian handicrafts and textiles, and cheered traditional Indian dance and music performances.

The Festival of India is an annual event, organized every July as part of Detroit's "ethnic festival" (see January 1975 SPAN, pages 28-29).

Since Detroit draws its population from scores of foreign cultures, the summer festivals provide "oneof the most colorful dramatizations of the cosmopolitan nature of American society. Groups from 17 nations besides India take part in these festivals. This year's program had a special significance, however, as it formed part of the city's official American Festival queen Veena Aragade with Ramesh Verma, secretary Bicentennial celebrations. of the festil'~l committee, and Jim Sata, chairman (right).

"The ethnic festivals are a lesson in communal understanding," said Detroit City's Councilwoman Erma Henderson who has lived in Detroit for 13 years. who inaugurated the Indian festival clad in an Indian sari.

"The audience's response to the performances was beautiful Following the opening ceremonies, a prayer was said in and gratifying," said festival Vice-Chairman Kirit Pandy. "So Sanskrit and India's national anthem was sung. Dances, many people came to our festival. They loved it:' which varied from classical to folk, included both individual Proving that you can mix business and pleasure, the Festival as well as group performances like the raas, the garba and of India netted a profit. The organizers estimate that nearly the bhangra. In music, too, the features ranged from classical $250,000 worth of goods imported from India were sold. to folk; there were demonstrations on the tabla and the sitar. Some of the proceeds are earmarked for a Hindu temple the Highlight of the program was the selection of a festival Indian community is building in Detroit. To be named the queen. Many young Indian-American women took part in Bharatiya Temple, it will serve as the religious, cultural and the competition. The crown went to Mrs. Veena Aragade .social center for Detroit's Indian community.

THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION On the eve of America's Bicentennial Year, a noted political analyst reviews a book just reprinted in India: 'The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution,' by Richard B. Morris. A prominent U.S. historian, Professor Morris reminds us how much the American Revolution inspired the 'emerging nations' of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. the problems of statecraft, central to Throughout history, revolutions have which is the dilemma of support for the had a contagious effect. Besides radically ideal of liberty abroad, in keeping with upsetting the existing order in the country the American tradition, and reconciling of occurrence, they have affected lands this with the conflicting imperatives of and times far beyond it. The American foreign policy. The dilemma persists to Revolution of 1776 was no exception. As this day. It is not peculiar to America. the United States celebrates its BicenWhat is unique is the anguish and candor tennial in 1976, it is natural for one to with which American publicists have reflect on the nature of the Revolution written on it. Professor Morris, as he and on its impact on history. It is curious develops his central theme, never for a how grossly that has been underestimated moment glosses over this dilemma. His in comparison with the French and the account of one of the most successful Russian Revolutions. The American Revoexperiments in human equality in modern lution had a seminal effect and it is no exaggeration to say that it has still to . history is the more convincing for its realism and honesty. He writes: run its course-so profound and deep is "One may argue, and certainly many its message. critics do, that the Americans have paid Professor Richard B. Morris, a dislip service to the American Revolution tinguished historian who serves on the while behaving in ways quite contrary to American Revolution Bicentennial Comits central libertarian message. In every mission, has written a stimulating book schoolboy declamation, in every Fourth titled: The Emerging Nations and the of July oration, the slaveholding South American Revolution [Eurasia Publishing invoked the 'Spirit of '76,' equality of House (P) Ltd.; Ram Nagar, New Delhi rights, and the rights of man, while seeing 110055; Rs. 15].

The central argument of the book .is no inconsistency in confining that equality that "the American Revolution has meanto the people of one race and in denying ing and message for our own age, not only the applicability of the Declaration of for .the enduring political and constituIndependence to the people held in bondtional changes that it effected but also age. Admittedly, there is another and a because the profound transformation of less. attractive side of the shield, one American society that it sparked has exemplified by the screech-eagle expantouched the lives of people everywhere." sionist sentiments of the 1840s and by the imperialist ideology of the turn of The argument is developed with a the century. It is this paradoxical note in wealth of learning and with a candor and the American story that has heartened objectivity that compel admiration. The those who choose to regard America as Revolution brought into being a Union a counterrevolutionary force that has that emerged before long as a power disavowed her own libertarian traditions. of consequence.

And power brings in Those ... who feel that the values derived train its own dilemmas.

The Founding from the American Revolutionary exFathers of the Union were revolutionaries with a profound respect for the law and perience are still central to the American way of life and the American purpose as idealists who had s~on to grapple with

a nation, regard such accusations as an egregious distortion both of the American spirit and the American sense of national interest. " The "paradoxical note" to which Professor Morris refers occurs in the story of every successful revolution. France and the Soviet Union, for example, have not escaped it. What is remarkable about the American system is its continuity of purpose and its openness. The American Revolution and the American Constitution remain relevant to this day despite the storms they have weathered.

They have inspired many emerging nations of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

The American Revolution had many features that made it a model for countries struggling for freedom-including the Indian independence movement.

There is one striking parallel between the advocacy of the American Founding Fathers and that of the liberals in the Indian independence movement.

The Americans, Morris recalls, "fought for the rights of Englishmen as they believed them to be guaranteed by the British Constitution, and for the rights of man as they understood them to be guaranteed

by Nature and Nature's God." They gradually whittled down Parliament's authority and finally severed forcibly the remaining ties with the British Crown.

The Indian liberals rested their case on the pledge in Queen Victoria's Proclamation of November 1, 1858, shortly after the Mutiny: "We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects." The liberals asked for the same rights for Indian subjects of the Crown as were enjoyed by its subjects in the British' Isles. The

liberals, of course, were swept away from the scene as Gandhiji gained ascendancy in Indian politics.

* * * * *

The early Americans wanted to Americanize the English language. "You speak American well" was a common remark which the French traveler Chastellux reported as early as 1782. It is for the same reason that Ireland compels its children to study Gaelic, Israel adopts Hebrew as its official language, and India wants to make Hindi, not English, the language of instruction.

It was the urge to acquire a national identity. It is in the nature of things that every nation possessed by this urge fancies itself as a model for other nations.

This trait is reflected in U.S. foreign policy, and here again, as Morris points out with characteristic objectivity, America was the trailblazer. "From its inception the American Revolution was pitched on a moral and even evangelical plane.

The didactic character of the American Revolution has for better or worse permanently stamped itself upon American diplomacy. Stripped of its sense of mission the American Revolution would have lost much of its world significance....

That America now ventures to shoulder global responsibilities of awesome dimension is attributable in no small part to the rearing of the American people during the infancy of the Republic."

Second only to the success of their revolution was the impact of the ingenious system of government that the American Founding Fathers devised. They seemed to agree with Tom Paine's remark that "government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence." They abhorred concentration of power and adopted Montesquieu's doctrine of separation of powers.

But the Founding Fathers' enduring contribution was the concept of federalism, which seems so rigid and is yet so flexible and varied. Morris states that: "Indeed, each generation since Madison has been obliged to reassess the relative roles of the federal and state governments.

Since the New Deal the United States has enormously expanded the role of the Federal Government in' the fields of taxation, finance, business regulation, and social welfare, activities undreamed of when the nation was in its infancy. If, then, federalism today has more of a Hamiltonian cast than a Jeffersonian, it is because the ends of government have ranged far beyond the vision of the Founding Fathers. A welfare state in the nuclear space age simply must possess effective powers if it wishes to remain as a. functioning entity. Still, federalism in

the U.S. is by no means moribund."

Federations are of varied types but the American model has served as an inspiration to two in. particular-two that were "emerging nations" in the past, Canada and Australia.

The preamble of the British North America Act, 1867, which embodies the Canadian Constitution, refers to the desire of the provinces "to be federally united into one Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with a constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom." But as has been pointed out by eminent jurists, it would have been more accurate to describe it as a Constitution similar in principle to that of the United States.. As Professor Morris points out, the United States Constitution was carefully, scrutinized by the members of the Quebec Constitutional Conference of 1864. The American Civil War served to discredit states' rights advocates in Canada and strengthened the case of the Hamiltonian-minded nationalists. The confederation plan embodied in the British North America Act bore a striking resemblance to the suggestions submitted by Hamilton to the Philadelphia Convention on June 18, 1787. Among Hamilton's proposals that the convention rejected but the Canadians copied were the grant of residual powers to the Federal Government rather than the other way around, life terms for Senators, a federal veto over state laws, and the appointment of state executives by the Federal Government.

The states of Australia, on the other hand, voluntarily formed a union and their Constitution bears a closer resemblance to that of the United States, with the states enjoying the powers not expressly conferred on the Union.

The American Revolution was much more than a war of liberation. It was also a great mov'ement of social change. On the occasion of Great Britain's recognition of American Independence, Edmund Burke declared: "A great revolution has happened-a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of power in any of the existing states, but by the appearance of a new state, of a new species, in a new part of the globe. It has made as great a change in all relations, and balances, and gravitations of power, as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world."

It was a most perceptive observation, and Professor Morris's book gives a fine survey of the impact of the Revolution on Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Few realize how greatly and in how many ways it affected the course of events in France-the example of a monarchy overthrown, the experiences of Frenchmen who saw military service in America, the efforts of the emissaries of the Revolutionary Congress, the adroit diplomacy which the Congress pursued as a revolutionary, weapon and, ironically, the. bankruptcy brought about by the $2,000 million that France spent aiding the American colonies. It is hard to sustain absolute monarchy on empty coffers.

The French reaction to the American Revolution varied. Some rejoiced in the weakening of British power, but to many "America appeared to be the one place in the world where the utopian notions of Rousseau's Social Contract were put to work. Social contract, written constitutions, popular sovereignty, religious freedom, freedom of thought and speech, and separation of powers-these were all Enlightenment ideas."

Th~ constitutional committee of the 'French National Assembly was influenced by the American state constitutions. It referred to the Bill of Rights as "the noble idea conceived in another herni-. sphere" and urged its adoption in these fitting words-"we assisted in the events which gave to North America her liberty; she shows to us upon what principles we should preserve ours."

Morris wryly remarks that the Virginia statesman George Mason might well have instituted an action for plagiarism against the authors of the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen which the French National Assembly adopted on August 26, 1789. The resemblance to Mason's Bill of Rights which the Virginia Assembly had enacted back in June of 1776 is, indeed, very close.

One is tempted to say that similar "actions" might have to be brought against draftsmen of other constitutions as well. But the fact is that other nations did study the American Bill of Rights with care and admiration and adapted it to their particular situations. It remains, all the same, America's finest contribuJion to constitutional government, equaling if not indeed surpassing its contribution of a successful federation.

Other countries in Europe, of course, also felt the impact of the' American Revolution; and Morris cites some remarkable instances of the ways in which it was felt. In June 1776 Horace Walpole lamented: "All Ireland is America mad."

Three years later, he remarked: "It is now too publicly known to be disguised any longer, that Ireland has much the air of Americanizing."

The Dutch patriots took money from the French but ideals from the Americans when _they rebelled against the HOl~seof Orange in 1787. In the Belgian Revolution of 1789 the province of Flanders drew on the American Declaration of Independence. Many years later the priest Desire de Haerne, who had been active in shaping the Belgian Constitution, declared: "We are the only nation that has remained faithful in spirit to traditional rights and has followed America from the foundation of her political establishment and her liberal institutions." The American . influence was felt in Scandinavia no less, especially in its constitutional thought.

American works on the Constitution were in great demand. The Revolution fostered the liberalization of their governmental structures.

Morris cites a Soviet work published in 1966 by N.N. Bolkhovitinov, that sheds light on Russo-American relations from the American Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars. It documents the profound effect of the American Revolution 9n Russian intellectuals. Outstanding among the admirers of the American Revolution was A.N. Radishchev, whose Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow was the first notable example of a literature of protest in Russia. Inspired by a reading of Rayneval's Revolution de tAmerique, Radishchev wrote an ode, entitled "Liberty," which apostrophizes Washington, and informs the people of America that th-eir "example has set a goal for us."

The influence of the American Revolution on Latin America is a study in contrast. The Latin American revolutionary movements were more immediately triggered by the French Revolution and the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by Napoleon's armies. Two of the Founding Fathers of Latin America, Simon Bollvar and Jose de San Martin, had reservations about the United States as a model. The former was the more radical of the two; even so, his concept of government was a paternalistic one. The U.S. Constitution, in his opinion, was unsuitable for Latin America. He was surprised that federalism worked at all. However, he consistently lauded the United States as a "nation cradled in About the Author: A.G. Noorani, a well-

known lawyer, journalist and author, writes regularly for the Indian Express and some Indian magazines. His books include Aspects of India;s Foreign Policy, India's Constitution and Politics and the recently published Brezhnev Plan for Asian Security.

liberty, reared on freedom, and main- question many a time in Asia and Africa. tained by liberty alone," and George And the question arises only because Washington as "the outstanding architect America is what it is-a product of a of human freedom')-with just a hint of ¡revolution in the cause of liberty. Morris his own identification with that architect. asks: "Was the American Revolution a But, says Morris: "Despite the influ- self-contained and self-serving proposition ence of European Enlightenment thought or did the United States have an obligaon the Spanish-American liberators and tion to spread the contagion of liberty?"

The U.S. Secretary of State, Dr. Henry, their rejection of a number of North American' constitutional principles as A. Kissinger, has attempted an answer to unadaptable to the condition of their Professor Morris's pertinent question in constituents, it is remarkable just how his speech at Minneapolis on July 15, 1975, on "The Moral Foundations of much the Latin American nations borrowForeign Policy." Kissinger said: "Our ed from the American Revolutionary experience. In the first place every state, choice is not between morality and on revolting, issued a Declaration of pragmatism. We cannot escape either; Independence. " nor are_ they incompatible. This nation Finally, let us turn to the impact of the must be true to its own beliefs or it will American Revolution on African and lose its bearing in the world. But at the Asian countries. same time it must survive in a world of The American Revolution and the sovereign nations and competing wills. creation of the American Republic have We need moral strength to select among inspired many of the independence move- often agonizing choices and a sense of ments of the Third World. It is pointless purpose to navigate -between the shoals to summarize the record, but we have of difficult decisions. But we need as well already mentioned parallels between the a mature sense of means, lest we substiAmerican independence movement and tute wishful thinking for the requirethe Indian independence movement. And ments of survival." it is common knowledge that the framers It is useful to recall that in his famous. of the Indian Constitution drew heavily work, The Necessity for Choice, written on the American Constitution. Decisions in 1960, Dr. Kissinger warned that of the U.S. Supreme Court are cited in "democracy is doomed if the leading India as precedents of great persuasive democratic countries behave with diffiauthority to this day. dence about their fundamental values We mentioned earlier the dilemma of and do not make even the intellectual the American Founding Fathers: reeffort to explore their relevance to the conciling ideals of liberty abroad with new nations. In a crucial sense, then, the the conflicting imperatives of foreign future of freedom abroad will depend policy. The dilemma exists today. It is in importantly on the conviction with which the realm of foreign policy that acute we can confirm freedom at home. We differences have arisen between many cannot be convincing to others unless we Asian nations and the United States. convince ourselves."

Morris makes much the most perceptive In sum, the ideals of the American remark in his excellent study when he Revolution are very relevant to the new points out that the focal point of these age and to the new societies. Nor are differences is the age-old problem: How they necessarily incompatible with the to reconcile the "instinctive libertarian conduct of a sound foreign policy whether feelings" of a people who won their by the U.S. or, indeed, by the other freedom through a revolution with the nations who share those ideals. If it is demands of allies or the claims of exunrealistic to ignore the stark reality that pediency in international politics. Amerthere will be lapses in their pursuit, it is ica's principal allies in the Cold War defeatist to abandon the effort on that when it broke out in cold fury in 1946 score. The Bicentennial commemoration of the American Revolution is an apwere colonial powers. It made a "calculated assessment of the new balance of propriate occasion for a reaffirmation of 0 colonial power which might well tip the faith in its ideals. scale in the Cold War." There have been several other situations If you would like to own a when the U.S. had to decide whether to copy of the book reviewed on intervene on behalf of freedom or restrain these pages, "The Emerging itself for reasons of security or peace.

Nations and the American America faced this problem in the 19th century at the time of the Greek revolt, Revolution," see special SP AN in 1956 in Hungary, and in 1968 in offer on pages 51-52.

Czechoslovakia. It has faced the same

TBI

CASI rOB OPTIIIISII Are the neo-Malthusian doomsayers right when they predict that the world's resources are running out and population growth "will lead to mass starvation and pollution? In the article overleaf, a prominent U.S. historian says NO. Arguing the case for optimism, he says we have only begun to scratch the surface of the earth's abundant reserves amI' that, given continued growth, the next century will see the worldwide abolition of poverty.

he past few years have seen a spate of of the New York Times. claims that the modern era of populaTo be sure, opposition to economic tion and economic growth is about to be growth and material progress is not a new halted by scarcity of resources and en- development; it goes back at least to the vironmental pollution. The most influen- origins of the idea of progress itself. Pertial and well-publicized of such claims haps the most renowned critic of growth have been those based on world computer was the Reverend Thomas Malthus, whose models contrived by Jay Forrester, Dennis Essay on Population (1798) first circulated Meadows, and their colleagues for the the thesis that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply and the Club of Rome.* The Forrester-Meadows studies project that continued population masses would always be doomed to and economic growth will lead to mass minimal subsistence. Since Malthus has starvation, resource exhaustion, and/or the raising of air and water pollution to lethal levels. In the foreseeable future, probably in the next 50 years, billions 'It is criminal to expect the will die and the world will stabilize with Third World to remain a residue population living at subsistence impoverished' on the erroneous levels. The more the growth, the sharper ground that economic growth the crash, and the more miserable the remainder of history. will exhaust resources and Since Meadows's Limits to Growth was pollute earth's air and water. published, the computer models used by Forrester and Meadows have been run forward, backward, and sideways, and each variant has revealed a new error. been wrong for 150 years, the common Recently a team of scholars at the Univer- labeling of the limits-to-growth school sity of Sussex demolished the world model as "neo-Malthusian" may seem a smear; in excruciating detail. In his reply to them, yet Meadows, Heilbroner and others have Meadows took up a few minor points, willingly admitted Malthus as their foredisregarded hundreds more, and then bear, and we may therefore honor them asked why some people foolishly insisted with his name. on believing that further growth is posLike any diversified group of thinkers, sible. Here Meadows got to the heart of the neo-Malthusians differ considerably the issue. For while the limits-to-growth among themselves, particularly on the argument has been savaged in the tech- question of which sort of catastrophe will nical press, it has gone from success to hit us first and how soon. But I think success in the elite universities and most the following is a reasonable statement of highbrow publications and is now being the tenets of the school: pushed hard in the mass media and the • Exponential population and producschools. Limits to Growth itself has sold tion growth are rapidly exhausting the well over a million copies in 20 languages. earth's food, energy, and mineral reserves.

It is given to Dutch schoolchildren. Re- Key resources will be expended in the portedly it is circulated to Soviet party next century. The current energy crisis leaders by the KGB. Its theses have been and sub-Sahara famine are precursors endorsed by world and national leaders- of worldwide chronic and worsening in politics, science, and the arts. Growth shortages. must stop-so we are told by Lester • Because the cream has already been Brown of the Overseas Development skimmed from natural resources, and the Council, Rene Dubos of Rockefeller best land is already under cultivation, exUniversity, Dennis Gabor of the Imperial pansion of mining and agriculture must College, E.J. Mishan of the London resort to lower quality mineral deposits School of Economics, Robert L. Reil- and less fertile land. broner of the New School, and hundreds • Improved technology and massive caof popularizers, including Anthony Lewis pital investment may extend growth for a few decades, but will vastly increase and other damage to the ecopollution "The Club of Rome is limited to 100 members who share the conviction that "the problems now facing mankind are system, thus making the eventual cataof such complexity and interrelationship that traditional clysm even worse. policies and institutions arc no longer able to cope with them." A majority of the club are Europeans, with sub• It follows that the industrialization of stantial North American, and Japanese and Third World the Third World would be disastrous, and contingents.

Almost all the members are industrialists and intellectuals. further growth of the overstuffed develop-

T

ed world is simply criminal. The rich nations should halt, slow, or control growth and deal with international gaps by sharing their current wealth with the poor. If they do not, worldwide class war over diminishing resources is likely.

• Business-as-usual will no longer work.

Worldwide decisionmaking and tough governmental controls are necessary.

Such is the current conventional wisdom with regard to the prospects for mankind. But there is also another position which draws a quite different picture of the future: • The earth can easily support populations and gross world products many times larger than today's. Population growth is in any case slowing down, and current energy problems are the result not of scarcity but of bad government and bad business policy.

• We have almost certainly only scratched the surface of resources, which will be available in plenty for everybody for centuries.

• Pollution has been shown to be relatively easy and cheap to control once the will to do so is evident. .

• It is criminal to expect the Third World to remain impoverished, foolish to expect the rich to 'share significantly with the poor, and silly to believe the poor will become strong enough to grasp from the prosperous by force. But given continued economic growth, the next century will see the wc,rldwide abolition of historical poverty-a goal toward which all men should aspire.

This latter position, common in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is seldom heard articulated today in any respectable forum -which is all the more remarkable since the case for it is plausible, while technically the neo-Malthusian position is very weak and many of its proponents slur over or ignore obviously relevant evidence.

Population growth is slowing down. In the U.S. for the first time in its history, the birth rate has dropped below replacement level. Other industrial nations show a similar pattern. Scattered returns from around the world strongly suggest precipitous drops in birth rates, particularly in those countries with rapid economic growth. In 1973, the U.N. published population projections for the remainder of the century based upon data available in 1968. In almost every case, actual census counts in 1970-72 were lower than the U.N. "low" projection, not to mention the "medium" projection commonly cited by proponents of the "population explosion."

In no country was this drop caused by starvation or malnutrition.

On the classic Malthusian issue of food, .agricultural economists have made the simple and believable calculation that the world has enough cultivable land to feed 30,000 miIIion people at present U.S. levels of consumption with existing agricultural technology. Modern transportation and distribution systems make local famines less likely. The terrible tragedy that is l!.0W afflicting the peoples along the southern edge of the Sahara is due to backwardness, not to excessive growth. All these lands are pre-industrial; many are pre-agricultural.

As for mineral resources, a characteristic neo-Malthusian calculation goes like this: There are X known reserves of mineral M which we are using up at such a rate that they wiII be exhausted by year Y; even if we assume that reserves are twice as big as currently estimated, mineral M will be depleted by year Z. What the reader is rarely told is that most mineral reserves have been climbing as fast as consumption; extrapolating this trend will give us more reserves in the future than in the past. The neo-Malthusians also disregard substitutions-when copper becomes scarce we can shift to aluminum, when bauxite becomes scarce we may shift to other ores.

The exploitation of the energy crisis by neo-Malthusians is a story in itself. Dif.ficulties in getting gasoline make the impending-scarcity thesis credible to the aver: age citizen, but the current "energy crisis" is an economic and political problem,

not one of scarcity. The fundamental and lasting cause of the energy crisis is that oil is too plentiful and cheap in the Middle East. Persian Gulf crude can be landed at U.S. ports at a cost of $2 a barrel (price is another matter-half the retail price of gasoline goes to Arab and U.S. governments). Domestic oil costs twice that amount and alternative sources of hydrocarbons cost three to five times more. No one has a credible scheme for any other source within competitive range. In the foreseeable future, the Arabs wiII be able to undercut any unprotected competitor.

Arab undercutting is almost certain if the .oil cartel collapses, and it is much more likely to crumble than to hold together.

Therefore, any development of domestic sources, particularly if they require massive capital outlay, will require a long-term guarantee of protection from Arab competition.

The United States has enough known oil to last us the remainder of the century.

Only a third of the oil has been taken from existing drilled weIIs; another third can be extracted by secondary operations. That is, the U.S. can duplicate its total historical production of oil without drilling another foot of well. And added to this is Alaskan oil, conventional estimates of which do not include all the naval reserves on the North Slope.

We need not even try to conjecture about oil potential in off-shore drilling, shale, tar sands, and coal gasification, or the vast amounts of oil that will be dis-

THE

WORLD

IS ABoUT 1'0

END

covered by the packs of American, European, Japanese, and Arab oil prospectors now probing the globe. Our grandchildren may worry about the implications of geothermal, solar, breeder fission, and fusion power; our immediate concern should be the implications of the crash in energy prices when the new sources all come in at once around 1980.

But what of pollution? The neo-Malthusians would have us believe that all we can do about worsening poIlution is throttle back the activities which lead to poIlution. For example, the neo-Malthusians say that to cut down auto emissions we must drive less: The gasoline shortage, it is claimed, improved the air in our cities.

Yet the gasoline shortage resulted in a cut in driving of at most 20 per cent while present emission controls on new cars cut emissions by over 80 per cent. Legislated U.S. standards wiII reduce emissions to three per cent of what they were a decade before. Honda is putting a car into production that poIlutes less than two per cent of the uncontrolled average. These gains have been made with modest and inexpensive modifications of existing technology.

The air and water quality of New York is much better than it was a decade ago. The evidence is spotty, but it all points in the same direction: Once a serious effort is undertaken (usually, under strong pressure from hostile critics), it is easy to stop polluting. And it also appears that polluted bodies of air and water return rapidly to their natural state after the source of pollution is eliminated. Those howling about permanent damage to the environment harbor Faustian conceits of man's power over nature; the damage we can do to the earth is almost certainly finite.

Management of the earth's resources is perhaps the easiest issue of all to deal with, since most problems can be handled by primitive price mechanisms. If, when, and as resources become scarce, the price will begin to rise; consumers will use less or convert to substitutes, or producers wiII bring in new sources which were previously unnecessary or unprofitable. This elementary bit of economics seems to be un known to many educated people (including some economists).

Using the above line of reasoning the Hudson Institute has made calculations for operating a world of 15,000 to 20,000 million people with an average per capita income of $20,000 (the current figures are just under 4,000 miIIion and $1,200; per capita income in the U.S. is $6,000). The Hudson analysts used no computer or

Food for the world's hungry. Resources for economic growth. A pollution-free environment.

Viewed optimistically these are not problems but challenges that can be met. Some economists believe that the world has enough cultivable land to feed 30,000 million people-andfeed them well. Top: Row upon row of soybean stretches to the horizon in the State of Colorado. Above: A chemist at a Chicago steel plant samples water cleaned after use in steel production to see if it is potable for human beings.

Left: A Texas refinery continues operation throughout the night to meet the growing demand for fuel. Above: A helicopter adds a final touch to the installation of a unique chemical absorption system designed to prevent sulfur dioxide from polluting the air at a plant in the State of Washington.

fancy assumptions. With nothing more sophisticated than a pocket calculator, they , added up land, food, and resource availability and found them sufficient ,for a 'world producing and consuming a hundred times more than today's. The only assumption was great wealth, which Hudson derived by continuing and gradually slowing down existing economic growth rates.

Such a world could afford to pay for lowquality resources, massive pollution control, and plenty more, while leaving more than enough over to provide the {lverage world citizen with a personal consumption income equivalent to that of an uppermiddle-class American today. What is striking about the Hudson "world" is that it would function with present known and proven technology; no innovations would be necessary to make it work-no solar, geothermal, or fusion power, no artificial food, no cheap space travel.

Of course, no one is under an obligation to believe the Hudson calculations. They are plausible, yet they are mere speculation. The same, however, is true of the neo-Malthusian projections. The earth has a volume of 65,000 million cubic miles; within mining depth of the surface are 50 million cubic miles of material. Although geologists have many theories, no one really has the dimmest notion of what all that material is. Estimates of reserves are the crudest guesses, usually accQillpanied by qualifications like, "under existing, economic and operating conditions"-in other words, today's prices, wages, technology, and marketing patterns. (These estimates, moreover, are usually made by geologists in the employ of materialsexploiting companies and countries with a vested interest in scarcity.) We are equally ignorant on the subject of pollution. No one knows how much the atmosphere or the ocean can absorb or how the different pollutants will interact or what can b~ done about adverse effects, or even how adverse certain effects are. (Thus, despite all our polluting activity, and despite all our fears about hazards to health, life expectancy continues to creep upward.)

Nevertheless, in the face of all this ignorance, some people confidently in5ist that we are entering an age of scarcity and that we must halt growth and change our values to kill the notion of material progress. To a Southern sharecropper or a Brazilian peasant, the benefits of growth and prosperity are self-evident. But to a fascinating coalition of enlightened people they are not. The growth issue cuts across traditional ideological boundaries, linking

leftists with precapitalist reactionaries and ever-growing numbers of conventional liberals. Since the last-named dominate the formation of public opinion in the West, the neo-Malthusian thesis has become the conventional wisdom.

'When all the world is rich

by American standardswhen the economic problem will have at last been solved-mankind can devote itself to higher things.'

The recently released Energy Policy Study of the Ford Foundation anticipates that soon we will no longer believe "more is better" but rather that "enough is best."

"Enough is best." But for whom? To the already prosperous, with. positions of prestige to protect, the limits-to-growth argument is as appealing as the prospect of mass prosperity is disquieting. The prosperous-be they individuals or companies or nations-are like members of a golf club. Up to some point they have benefited from the growth of the club as a whole. A critical mass is necessary in the first place in order to raise capital to buy the golf links, and later on expanded membership permits more diverse and luxurious facilities. But eventually a limit will be arrived at. The courses and clubhouse become more crowded. Because it is a desirable club each additional member increases its total social utility but slightly reduces its utility to each individual member. The board of governors begins to see a certain wisdom in restricting future expansion; thoughtful and serious people, they also find some high-minded and socially beneficial justification for this move.

One can make a case that it is the prosperous in the advanced nations who'have, been paying for growth throughout this entire century. I do not speak of the very rich (who can always afford to pay), but of the upper middle class-the professionals, middle proprietors, executives, and others earning two to five times the median family income. Relatively and absolutely the quality of life of this group has been in decline since before World War 1. The upper middle class at that time enjoyed high status in the community. Long-distance travel, although slower, was much more luxurious and uncrowded than to-

day, and local transport was superior: the roads were unclogged and the commuter line efficient. Concerts, golf clubs, museums, ball games were easy of access and cheap. Measured in terms of life expectancy, upper-middle-class medical care was just about as good as today; measured in terms of convenience and luxury, it was better. By the 1920s most modern conveniences for the home were already available, not to mention the greatest convenience of all-household servants.

Two generations ago, the upper mIddle classes had every reason to believe in progress. Its evidence was all around them.

They clearly lived better than their own grandparents, who may have had servants and status but also had poor medical care, sanitation, and terrible transport. Fifty years ago the quality oflife improved along with gains in the standard of living: growth paid. Further ,growth has not paid-at least not for this particular group. Mass prosperity has eroded the quality of life of the upper middle classes.

The intent of the neo-Malthusians is didactic; they hope to shock us into changing our evil ways. They would have us be more generous and unselfish and less greedy and materialistic. No decent man would disagree, but are Forrester, Meadows, and Mishan more persuasive than Confucius, Buddha, Isaiah, or Jesus Christ? Have computers greater authority than Scripture?

Perhaps when all the world is rich by American standards-when the economic problem will have at last been solvedmankind can devote itself to higher things.

But even with the most optim~stic cut in the birth rate, there will be over 5,000 million souls on this earth at the end of the century. These people must be fed, housed, and provided with a decent life.

For them, a world of zero growth would be a world of conflict, an age of iron and blood. Only continued growth can begin to deliver, in modest degree, what the . coming world will require by way of health, 0 welfare, and human dignity.

tA.J:t {i XGthor:

B.

Bruce-Briggs, a prominent American histo- rian, is a consultant to the Hudson Institute, one of the most reputable "think tanks" in the U.S. He is coauthor, with Herman Kahn, of the book Things to Come.

Bruce-Briggs's charming lampoon of the neo-Malthusians in the preceding article is part of a growing body of literature which, taken in the round, constitutes what' may be called the Theology of Technology. There is such a family resemblance among the producers of this literature that I think they deserve a distinguishing label. With malice toward none, let me call them the "neo-theologians."

The neo-theologians, so far as I can see, are for the most part engaged in what I shall facetiously call a war of projections. Like much else in this somewhat eccentric last third of a preposterous century, the war of projections too-whether computerized or merely tapped out on a simple pocket calculator-is fast attaining an exponential growth rate! So much so that-after we shall have hopefully defused the other explosions (in pecking order: information, technology, population, pollution)-the projections explosion will remain to bedevil our minds and confuse our thinking for a long time to come.

The art of conjecture is nothing new. It began when man first invented language and has since been an integi-alpart of his ways of thinking. Peering into the future gives one a sense of direction. You get the cozy feeling that you are going somewhere, although that "somewhere" often turns out to be a mi(age. With the arrival of electronics, however, that delightful art has been reduced to a science. Today we no longer conjecture: we futurize, extrapolate, and work out scenarios.

It's all very well if these sophisticated exercises converge at some point: then there is clarity. But if there are as many projections as there are individuals or institutions engaged in the exercise, then confusion rather than clarity is the result.

This is because the war of projections is conducted more on the basis of imaginative guesswork than on that of hard facts -which in any case are hard to come by. At best speculative, at worst manipulative, one set of conclusions seems as plausible, or as implausible, as any other. Where then do we go from here? Let me suggest a point of departure.

I am not a doom-sayer. Nor am I a doom-nayer. I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. History, as we know it, has always been a succession of surprises.

It has never been a jump-free linear bxtrapolation from things past to things present. What has been true of history must, I venture to hope, be true of the future also. Except for one little snag: that the technological revolution has so conclusively stood history on its head that we are pretty much in the position of being cast adrift on an uncharted sea. Whither we are headed we just don't know. It is futile to turn to the doom-sayers or the doom-nayers for light.

They are as much in the darkness as we are. And I am reminded of a mystic statement in the Upanishads: "Unto darkness are they led who tread the path of nescience-and unto blinding darkness those that tread the path of science!"

Heaven help us all.

It is a characteristic infirmity of the human species that it has scarcely ever been able to get along without a god.

Look at the long pantheons of gods, of all shapes and sizes, that have helped brighten the otherwise dull course of our history. If the gods needed us, as the legends say, we needed them much more. Without them our civilization would have been worth nothing.

Our latest god, for whom we have apparently created a permanent niche, is that chrome icon we call Technology. Its glitter is so blinding that we kowtow and humble ourselves before it in much the same way as our ancestors knelt before a Zeus, a Jehovah or a Rudra. I am not, dear reader, indulging a poetic conceit. The god of technology is a very ubiquitous presence. You can mark his footprints all over the earth, in rich and poor countries alike. Why, he is often to be seen streaking across outer space. He is the new Trivikrama-the legendary Hindu colossus who covered the entire universe in three giant strides!

So much for the god of technology. What about the theological dogmas that have sprung up around him? Here I am afraid the neo-theologians have bungled quite a bit.

Their chief dogma, it would appear, is the presumption of technological omnipotence. Given time, they asseverate, technology can achieve anything; it can make and unmake things at will. Good! I am willing to accept them at their word. But isn't their claim somewhat paradoxical and selfcontradictory,? For, obviously, omnipotence can only be a product of omniscience. Unless we know all, or have the potentiality of knowing all-neither of which is within man's reach-how can we hope to attain everything that we want?

At this day and age-aye, even after Apollo-Soyuz-it must be a very naive scientist indeed who will lay claim to such a vain hope!

Why do I say so? For two reasons. The first reason is easy to understand. The information explosion-which gets top place in my pecking order of explosions-has produced two lethal results. On the one hand, far from increasing our knowledge, it has merely accentuated our over-all ignorance.

On the other hand, it has encouraged a runaway technology to produce such a glut of useless, unnecessary and destructive goods that our civilization is in grave danger of being buried in their debris!

The second reason is somewhat more complex and it goes to the heart of my thesis. The thesis, of course, is nothing new. It embodies a simple truth which our ancestors knew by heart but which, surprisingly, modern man seems incapable of grasping-that every known system in our universe (including the universe itself) is by and large a closed system. It works within the constraints of a closed-circuit bind of laws. These laws are not iron-clad and are variably flexible, but they cannot simply be stretched to infinity.

Technology is one such closed system and it is subject to the same constraints. Not being a neo-theologian, I see no good

Don't grossly underestimate 'the disaster that an endlessly exploding population can bring about. What swarms of locusts can do, swarms of men can do equally well. People "are" pollution!' reason for exempting technology from the operation of what is, after all, a universal principle.

Now in every closed system there exists a critical point beyond which we dare not go. Once that point is passed, the system begins to collapse-and not all the king's horses, nor all the king's men, can put it together again! A homely example is the human body. Of course, the physical, physiological and metabolic powers (or, if you please, limits) of aIJ human organisms are never the same. They vary from person to person. For instance, while I may have to stop at three large whiskies if I am not to make a fool of myself in the company of others, my neighbor may go on to imbibe four or five such with impunity. Nevertheless, it goes without saying, with everyone of us there is that critical point which we may transgress only at our peril.

What is true of the human individual is equally true of the numerous structural systems-political, social, economic, religious, cultural-that make up human society. The core of my thesis is simply that aIJ closed systems-technology among them-are uniformly victims of an in-built infirmity. This can be very simply described, without recourse to esoteric jargon, as the inexorable law of finitude.

Complementary to this law that everything works only up to a point, collapsing when that point is passed, is what may be caIJed the law of social inertia. Also known as the Hawthorne Effect, it has shown empirically that a system works best either at the.beginning or whenever c;:hanges(even regressive changes!) are introduced into it. Perhaps the aptest example of this law is the amazing vitality of modern technology, which one can attribute only to its continual

"I

dOI/"

like the look of things, Bronson. Lately, all my yes-men are saying 'Yes, but ... .' "

power of innovation and improvisation.

So far I have tried to deal, as clearly as one can within a limited space, with the perils of transgression. But transcendence is another matter. From time immemorial, man has tried to transcend the limits within which he is doomed to function. Ancient Hindu works are replete with examples of such attempts at transcendence. They have also worked out in great detail systems of discipline which, if practiced assiduously, could lead to such transcendence. But the truth or falsity of these ancient explorations is not empirically demonstrable, and one is left with the recourse of accepting or rejecting them according, let us say, to one's taste or temperament or predisposition. Nevertheless, the law of finitude is inexorable; and even transcendence, I should presume, wiIJ work only within certain well-defined limits.

* * * * *

At this point I must take leave of philosophy and come down to .brass tacks. What is the brunt of Bruce-Briggs's attack on the neo-Malthusians? Although futurologies are now a dime a dozen, Bruce-Briggs has chosen to train his guns upon the Club of Rome thesis and to pit against it what may be caIJed the Hudson Institute blueprint. This makes my analytical task so much the easier. On further thought, I feel that the essential hollowness of this Rome-Hudson war of projections can best be brought out in the form of an imaginary dialogue. Here goes: ROME: Poor Mother Earth! We have fed on her sinews with such gluttonous abandon, she'll soon be nothing more than a wizened old hag fit for the grave.

Alas, what have we done!

HUDSON: Come, come! You seem to have a highly exaggerated notion of man's powers of destruction. In any case we have touched but the hem of her skirt.

What after all do we know of the real extent of her resources? We've made some wild guesses-that's all.

ROME: Ah, but you grossly underestimate the disaster that an endlessly exploding population can bring about. What swarms of locusts can do, swarms of men can do equally well. People are pollution!

HUDSON: How do you mean?

ROME: Well, the more people you have, the more technology you¡will need. A high level of population cannot be supported except by a high level of technology.

HUDSON: Nonsense! You're again undervaluing the earth's potential. Without adding another screw to the present level of technology, she can feed 30,000 million people sumptuously, or more than 10 times that number at a fairly high level of subsistence.

ROME: What do you think men are? Animals' to be fed and fattened? Man does not live by bread alone.

What about the quality of life? Does it mean nothing to you?

HUDSON: Quality of life indeed! First bread, my dear man. Then Bach and Beethoven. At any rate, what makes you think population is shooting up?

ROME: Ha hat Of course population is tumbling down-isn't that so?

HUDSON: Well; U.N. projections have consistently been refuted by what the census figures say.

ROME: Which census figures? Certainly not those of the Third World.

HUDSON: Technologize the Third World. That'll start bringing down the population.

ROME: Good heavens! Are you suggesting that they should also sup of the horrors that we have gone through? Such a spread of technology will most definitely destroy the ecosystem beyond repair.

HUDSON: Keep them down where they are, eh? In the name of saving the earth, you want to deny the vast majority of your fellow men the benefits of technology you have yourself enjoyed for so long. What a morbid thought!

ROME: You haven't heard me through and you're coming to all manner of conclusions! Listen. What I have in mind is something very noble. Let the rich nations halt their growth, tighten their belts just a little, and share what they have with the p03r nations. Get me? That'll at a stroke get rid of at least three of our most recalcitrant problems: poverty, overpopulation, and pollution.

HUDSON: A noble thought all right-but pretty stupid. Such nobility, my dear man, is not of this world.

What you are asking for is nothing less than a miraculous transformation in man's relations with man. That .will never come about~take my word for it.

ROME: I suppose you realize what the alternative is.

It's pretty horrendous. Like the desert locust, the starving billions of the Third World will one day come storming into our cozy citadels and denude us of everything we have. Surely you can't cherish such a prospect, can you?

HUDSON: Why should I bother? I know things will never come to such a pass. The poor will never be powerful enough to take on the rich in the way you suggest.

I never knew you could be as naive as all that! ...

Enough of this dialogue of the deaf! I¡am reminded of the truism that truth is simply what you want to believe. The same earth-oh, how utterly beautiful and lonesome it looked in that first Apollo 8 photograph from the moon orbit!

-and here we are quibbling over our petty projections, while it sidles away quietly to a slow death. Which of the two sets of arguments shall we believe? They sound equally true and equally false.

For the ordinary man, who has neither Bruce-Briggs's pocket calculator nor the Forrester-Meadows ultramodern computer, the issue is simplicity itself. So long as the doomsayers and the doom-nayers clandestinely share the same theological dogmas, their war of projections reduces itself to a burlesque. Good for a belly-laugh-that's all.

The fate of the world will be decided not by which of the scenarios, half-hearted as they all are, turns out to be true,

"What do I do with my industrial waste?" <C 1974. Reprinted.by

permission

of Saturday

Review/World

and Robert Censoni.

but by dragging down that chrome icon of technology from its niche. This calls for courage and wisdom of a kind to which modern man has become increasingly unacclimatized.

There lies the heart of our tragedy.

But it is never too late. All that we need do is to start detheologizing our minds and learning to live without a god. For all our gods are veneered artifacts. The shine rubs off after a while, leaving behind nothing but the clay feet.

The god of technology-will our neo-theologians please take note?-is no exception. It is no less a false god. Pursuing it will take us nowhere-unless it be to the edge of the precipice!

The god of technology may, for all I know, be capable of every single power that the neo-theologians ascribe to it.

But capability is not everything. Indeed it is not the central issue at all. The central issue is whether the world that technology is fashioning for us, with a determination that seems relentless, callous and irreversible, is one that is desirable. Is this the kind of world that we have been dreaming about?

Do we really relish the prospect of being packed like sardines upon a denuded planet? Are we human beings-or locusts?

I know these questions have been asked often enough.

But they have always fallen on deaf ears. For man needs his gods as much as he needs air and water. He will not desert them. But in the end it is these very same gods which will drag him to his doom. Not man, but the gods he has himself created, will have the last laugh. It has been so in the past. It will be so in the future. When, oh when, will modern man understand this simple truth?

0 About the Author: T.K. Mahadevan is a distinguished Indian writer, editor and philosopher. Editor of the quarterly Gandhi Marg, he has contributed a chapter on Gandhi to a new history of Indian philosophy titled Indian Thought. When asked by SPAN to provide us with a short biodata, this is what he wrote: "T.K. Mahadevan's work ispromiscuous but purposeful. Its chief characteristic is a consistent foreboding about the future of man. He has just completed an experiment in philosophical biography. The theme: Gandhi. His other recent works: a novel, a miscellany, two colloquia. Chief among his projected works is a post-Maileresque novel on 'megalopolis in man,' Fifty-six and widely traveled, he expects that the novel will be his swan song,"

MEETING ART BUCHWALD A long-time fan of Art Buchwald's, the author recently traded gags with the famous American columnist in what was described as 'a summit meeting' of two great humorists.

Washington is full of monu"Get the hell out of the U.S. ments-the Washington Monu- Try China or Siberia." ment, the Lincoln Memorial, the "You are an ape."

Jefferson Memorial, and so on.

"I do not read a single word of Somewhat in the same categorywhat you write. For heaven's sake not quite a monument, but cer- stop writing." tainly an institution-is Art "We girls think you most conBuchwald, America's top news- temptible. Go to hell." paper humorist, who has been "Are you a writer or an idiot?" described as "the most comic ob"You stink."

"You and your articles are server since Mark Twain."

Everybody in America can both awful." read Buchwald in the 500 odd "I turn the page whenever I newspapers that reproduce his read your name." inimitable column; not everyWhat kind of man is this body, however, can meet him in Buchwald, who enjoys exhibiting person. But since I am not every- "stinkers" that a politician would body I had the opportunity of .keep hidden away like a skeleton meeting him in his office with a in a cupboard?

Arthur Buchwald, born in friend of mine.

We were welcomed by Miss 1925, was not a great admirer of Colte, his secretary. Since Buch- formal education and as a result wald had not returned from was a drop-out from his New lunch, I looked around the office York school. Later he said: and found a number of certi- "Since I did not take a school ficates on the walls. It's all right diploma, there was no sense in for a doctor or a lawyer begin- taking a college degree." He ning his practice to make a show joined the U.S. Marine Corps as of diplomas and certificates. But a private and left as a sergeant. why should a first-rater and When Buchwald received his an established humorist like first $250 as war veteran's benefit, Buchwald exhibit his university he wanted to donate the sum to a or school certificates? good cause, but on second Miss Colte guessed what I was thoughts he felt that going to thinking. She smiled and said: Paris was as good a cause as any.

"Go ahead and read some of So he bought a one-way ticket those. They're a small selection to Paris, a city that did him imof the letters he receives every mense good. He was a legman for Variety magazine and later week."

They were some of the most managed to get a column in the interesting "certificates" I've ever New York Herald Tribune, an read. I quote here some of the assignment in which Buchwald succeeded far beyond his own specimens.

"You are a nasty ugly old expectations. He started with a "Paris After Dark" column and man."

When you accept the charges then added another, "Mostly About People." The two columns made against you by a critic, it were combined for American takes the wind out of his sails! readership into "Europe's Lighter When a high government official Side." Time magazine rated Art accused me of writing unadulBuchwald as having "an institu- terated rot, I accepted the charge tional quality," and the 12 years and said: 'So far, I've been (1950-62) in Paris established known to write adulterated rot, Buchwald as the best light col- but never unadulterated rot.' The papers reported later that Presiumnist of the time.

With the victory of John F. denfEisenhower laughed like hell Kennedy in the Presidential elec- over that one." tion of 1960, Buchwald decided Buchwald receives over 300 to move his seat of judgment to letters every week. Most of them the U.S. capital and gleefully of- are complimentary, some are crifered himself up to what he tical, some are nasty and some termed "capital punishment." suggest new subjects for his Since then he has been supplying columns. "When you accept a a much-needed note of humor suggestion and write a piece on at the breakfast of political it, what do you give the person champions three times a week who gave you the idea?" T on the edit page of the respected asked him.

Washington Post and on the back "The letter writer does not really expect any money. I send page of the International Herald Tribune. His column also appears him the original script as a gift in 500 papers in several languages and he is happy. He is delighted in such far-flung areas as Latin that his suggestion has been acAmerica, the Soviet Union, cepted and has found its way Spain, India ane!the Middle East. into hundreds of papers," BuchSpeaking of his work, Buch- wald said. wald says: "Everyone thinks I "How do political and social have one of the best jobs in the leaders in the U.S. take your world, but if you look at it objec- sarcastic comments?" I asked.

"We'll," he replied, "I have tively and examine it from all sides, I do." Not many people enjoyed complete freedom to parody anything I choose. This can say this about their jobs.

While I was reading the testi- country adores humor, as is evimonials in the office of this dent from the unlimited scope greatest of modern humorists, I humor gets in newspapers, TV, was told by his secretary that he films, advertisements, politics, etc. puts in about four to five hours Even religion now depends on of actual work a week, but his humor-the pastor likes to start research for digging out a sub- his sermon with a humorous ject goes on all the time. As Miss anecdote. Most of the leaders I Colte was explaining the way he have made fun of have been very works, in walked Art Buchwald, nice to me, though there- are a few with a cigar in his mouth and a instances of personalities who smile behind his horn-rimmed have been critical. A humorist glasses. "Come on in, gentle- can do very well in America. men," he said and took us to We are a people who always like his inner office. "I go out of this to see the bright side of things: room because I can't stand the like the doctor who announced the death of a patient in these cigar smoke," he said. words: First the good news-the After a formal introduction, the first question I asked him was temperature has fallen!" Buchnaturally about the nasty letters. wald continued: "The TV shows He smiled and said: "Oh! That's that get the highest ratings are what I get every week and I ad- the light programs-the comedy mire the readers who take so shows."

Thurber once said that it is much interest in my columns.

hard to sustain humor at a time when mankind seems to be trying on the one hand to invent the pill or miracle drug that will cure us all of everything and on the other hand to invent a machine for instant annihilation. And still, America is doing fine with sustaining the humor of the sharpest of political satirists.

"It must be a hard job to find subjects for two to three humor columns every week. How do you manage that?" I asked.

"Well," Buchwald replied, "one source is the letters I receive. America is a country full of energy and variety and looking around can provide any number of subjects. Our politics, arts and social developments have unlimited scope for humor. I made fun of women's liberation and received a spate of protest letters, many of which again inspired me to write on the subject. When I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece on the Beatles, hundreds of teen-age girls sent letters attacking me, some of which I have kept as treasures. I travel a lot, which gives a new dimension to my humor. I undertake lecture assignments which bring both money and new experience."

Buchwald is like an Indian humorist in one respect: When he is short of subjects or tired of poking fun at presidents, politicians or other celebrities, he enjoys kidding his wife and kids!

After all, the wife is the last resort of a humorist.

Buchwald is married to the former Anne McGarry, a fashion and public relations specialist.

The couple ha ve three adopted

children, all born in different countries: Ireland, Spain, France.

Though Buchwald has always made fun of U.S. Presidents, some Presidents have been among his greatest admirers.

"Have you been to India'?" I asked, trying to persuade him to make a trip. "No," he said, "but I would very much like to come to India. I am sure I will enjoy a visit and it will also give me a fresh rash of subjects for my column."

There is hardly anything Buchwald hasn't made fun of. The President, Congress, American universities, youth and women's lib movements, the intelligence service, U.S. foreign policy, the Peace Corps, Hollywood, the political scene in Europe, missiles, American tourists-all come in for their fair share of witty barbs at the hands of the inimitable Buchwald. He may be the only person in America wh6 can get away with anything. (One subject you won't find in his columns is driving automobiles.

Buchwald is one of those rare Americans who does not know how to drive. He says the amount he spends on hiring taxis would easily buy three cars every year!)

Buchwald presented me with his latest book, with an autograph and good wishes for my success as a humorist. As we Mft his office I told my American friend: "This was a meeting of the world's two greatest humorists." He said, "No, Ramesh, this was a summit meeting of a small humorist with a great humorist."

I protested: "No, no, Leo, Art is also a great humorist."

0 About the Author: Ramesh Mantri is a noted Marathi humorist and a prolific writer, with 38 books to his credit.

Last year his parody of James Bond -Janu Bande,an Indian superspywon him the Maharashtra Government's annual award for the best work in the category of humorous writing. A widely traveled man, Mantri has visited a number of countries including the United States.

A BUCHWALD S One of America's funniest journalists, Art Buchwald writes a thrice-weekly column that is published in over 500 newspapers around the world. No person is too important, no institution too sacred to be a target for Buchwald who seems to get away with lampooning everything and everyoneincluding the President of the United States. Here are four of our favorite Buchwald columns.

SLEEPING BAG INVASION I was very surprised to read in the newspaper last week that Mrs. Ford said her family was cutting down on their food bills as a way of fighting inflation. The reason why I was surprised was that Mrs. Ford has teen-agers and there is no way under the sun that you can cut a food budget when you have teen-agers living in the house. It isn't the immediate family that costs moneyit's feeding everyone else's children that sends your food costs skyrocketing.

In the past, most of us could get away with giving a strange child a glass of milk and a cookie.

But in recent years we seem to be sustaining large masses of youth, which I have dubbed, for the want of a better name, the Sleeping Bag Generation.

Last month my grocery bill for a family of four on Martha's Vineyard was $791. This is what happened.

Three sleeping bags showed up at the door. A voice from one of the sleeping bags said: "We're very good friends of your daughter Hilda and she said we could camp on your property when we got here."

"I have no daughter named Hilda," I said.

"What's her name?" a voice from another sleeping bag asked.

"Jenny. "

* * * * * "That's it," the voice said.

"We're good friends of Jenny and she said we could sleep on your lawn so we won't be arrested by the police."

"We won't be any bother," a voice from another sleeping bag said. "We have stale doughnuts for dinner."

I gave permission for them to camp out on the lawn. When my

daughter came home, I informed her that three of her dearest friends had arrived and set up camp.

"Boys or girls?" Jenny asked.

"How the hell would I know," I replied.

It turns out that sleeping bags require large amounts of nourishment. While those of us who lived in the house could get by on bluefish or eggs, the sleeping bags had to be fed steak, ham, imported cheeses, French bread, butter and a good brand of beer.

Every day my daughter, who never did find out their names, carried down provisions to the sleeping bags. The zippers would open up automatically and they would consume $60 worth of groceries at a feeding.

In exchange for the food, the sleeping bags strummed music on a guitar in our living room . while I was trying to watch the evening news.

* * * * * After the sleeping bags departed, a new group of sleeping bags arrived and said they were friends of my son Edward. I probably would have been nicer except I have no son named Edward. The nearest thing to it was Joel. While it bothered me, it didn't seem to bother Joel. He took aJI the. sleeping bags to Kronig's grocery store where they charged everything to me for a picnic they were holding with some other sleeping bags on the beach.

Now that I'm back in Washington, the sleeping bags are starting to show up here. Many turn out to be friends of the sleeping bags who camped on my property on Martha's Vineyard.

If I refuse hospitality for them, I am considered an ogre by my children, Hilda and Edward, or whatever their names are. But if I let them spread out on the grass I'm going to get another

$800 grocery bill.

I'm sure Mrs. Ford is telling the truth when she says she's been able to cut back on her food bills. But I figure the only way she has been able to do it is by having the Secret Service boot all the goose-feather sleeping bag acquaintances of her children right off the White House lawn.

Last week it was reported in the newspapers that a Saudi Arabian sheikh made an offer to buy the Alamo, Texas's most revered shrine. It seems Sheikh al-Aharis al-Hamdam contacted a Houston lawyer, told him his son had been in San Antonio and had been taken with the beauty of the famed Texas fort and, since he loved his son very much, he wanted to buy it for him.

The attorney immediately contacted Governor Dolph Briscoe and was informed the Alamo was not for sale. This came as a surprise, since this is the first time since the oil crisis that anyone in the United States has refused to sell something to an Arab sheikh.

But I'm sure there will be other calls from the Middle East concerning our monuments.

"This is Sheikh Abdullah Ben Doom. I am looking for a small wedding gift for my daughter.

What would you suggest?"

"Well, sheikh, how about a priceless diamond necklace and tiara?"

"I had something a little more sentimental in mind. When my daughter was a schoolgirl, she visited the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City."

"Yes?" "I would like to buy it for her."

"I'll check it out for you, sheikh-one Mormon Tabernacle. Let me ask you this. If for some reason it's not for sale, could you give me a second choice?"

"She also said she liked Yosemite National Park."

"Right. If! can't get Yosemite, do you think she'd take the Yellowstone National Park instead?"

"My daughter didn't say anything about Yellowstone. It has no sentimental value for her."

"What about Las Vegas, sheikh? It would be kind of fun when she cuts open the wedding cake to find the deed inside," "It's too frivolous. My daughter is a very serious person. Could you tell me how much they're asking for St. Patrick's Cathedral?"

"Not offhand, but I'll call the cardinal this afternoon and see if he'll accept an offer. You wouldn't consider the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an alternate, would you?" â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ "Sheikh al-Rumallah gave his daughter an art museum last month. I want to do something better for my child, who is twice as beautiful."

"I gotcha. You want something tasteful but different than the run-of-the-mill sheikh wedding present. I'll tell you what's really nice-the Supreme Court Building in Washington."

"No, I believe that is more for a boy. I want something that has a little romance to it."

"There's always the Grand Canyon."

"I think that's a little showy," "What about Princeton University?"

"Hmnn. That's not a bad idea.

But I'll be honest with you. If I'm going to buy her a school, I'd rather buy her Oxford. It bas

a more antique feeling to it."

"I don't want to knock the British, but I heard Oxford is really run-down. She would have to spend a lot of her own money fixing it up. With Princeton the upkeep is cheaper and she can move right in tomorrow."

"I am not interested in bargains. This is my eldest daughter and price is no object."

"Of course. Well, I think I have a good idea of the ball park we're talking about. I'll make a few calls and get back to you."

"Thank you. By the way, what news do you have about my offer to buy Grant's Tomb for my grandson?"

"I'm working on it, sheikh, I'm working on it."

"Abbot always was cost-conscious," I said.

"He's called for a complete revision of our inventory accounting methods. This means we can't store too many cans of chicken soup in the closet at one time."

"He wants me to keep my shopping lists in triplicate and to submit requisitions to the executive committee before I buy any household appliances over $25.

When he first retired, I humored him about it. I realized he was in a decompression tank, and it would take time before he realized he was no longer in business.

"But instead of getting better, it's getting worse. Last night he asked me if I intended to take a position on spinach. I said I hadn't given it any thought, and A HOUSE he pointed out that a superCHAIRMAN market was having a sale on The toughest thing for a busi- spinach, and it might be a good' ness executive, when he retires, time to buy up as much as we is to realize that after a long could. By summer, he said, career of directing people and spinach could be in short supply, and we could make a killing in it. making major multimillion-dollar "I replied that we couldn't decisions, he has no one to order around ar.d no vital business keep spinach until the summerproblems to resolve. While this time, and since there "ere only is very frustrating for the retired two of us, there was just so much men, it's even rougher on their we could consume. He said some¡times you have to take chances wives.

The other day Zuckert's wife when you're running a housecame over to see me. Zuckert hold, or the competition will kill had been a very successful vice you. He ordered me to set up a research and development departpresident of a large corporation and has been retired for six ment so we could find a way to months. Mrs. Zuckert was begin- keep spinach fresh until summer." ning to show the strains.

"You really have your hands "I don't know what rm going full," I told Mrs. Zuckert. to do," she said. "Abbot's driving "You don't know what I've me up the wall. He's running the been going through," she said. house just the way he used to "Every time I come home, Abrun the business."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"All the drive and energy that went into his 35-year career is now being directed toward me.

I am no longer a housewife. I am now vice president in charge of household management. This includes cooking, house-cleaning, marketing and getting rid of the garbage.

"Abbot insists that I haven't been running the house at full efficiency, and there is a great deal of overlapping of duties.

He's instituted a systems control so we can cut costs and, as he puts it, 'get a bigger bang for the buck.' "

bot has a new chart in the kitchen showing accounts receivable, cash outflow, expenses and income.

He keeps talking about increased production and slashing labor costs. Since I'm the only labor in the house, it obviously makes me very nervous."

"Who wouldn't be?" I asked.

* * * * * "The worst things are his memos. Every night I find one on my pillow pointing out a household management mistake I had made that day. Last week for my birthday he bought me a large sign with one word on it, 'THINK.' " "I have an idea," I told Mrs. Zuckert. "Why don't you threaten to resign?"

"I have," she replied tearfully, "and he said if I did I would lose my pension plan."

THE HUMAN ENGINEER There is a new science in this country which is called human engineering. The object of human engineering, as I understand it, is to fit human beings into inhuman conditions.

I made this discovery while riding on an airplane from New York to Washington the other day. Seated next to me was a man who was taking very careful measurements of the space between us and then writing it in a notebook.

I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was a human engineer, and it was his job to see how many more people he could squeeze on an airplane without doing permanent bodily harm to the passengers.

"We used to have five seats across," he said proudly, "but we've managed to put another seat in each row, and as you can see we can now get six people across. " "How on earth did you do it?"

I asked him.

"We cut the center aisle in half. The passengers have to walk sideways, but just think of what the extra seats mean to the company's payload."

"Which, of course, is all that you're worried about."

"You can bet your sweet

whistle on that," he said. "I'm more concerned, though, that there still seems to be room between your knees and the seat in front of you."

"Only about two inches," I said.

"Well, if you take two inches away here and two inches away there you can put another row of seats on the plane."

"Then my knees should be flush against the seat ahead?"

"Naturally, my dear boy. You can't expect leg room on such a short hop. One more thing. I was wondering how you feel about a reclining seat as opposed to a stationary one."

"I prefer a reclining seat. It gives me a chance to rest a little."

* * * * * He started writing in his book: "Customer too tempted by reclining chair, so I strongly recommend stationary kind which will allow us two more rows in back."

He looked at me. "You came on board with a package. What did you do with it?"

He wrote again: "Customer can still get package under seat, which means we're wasting valuable space which could better be used for air freight."

"You people really think of everything," I said.

"We try to," he replied, "but it's a tough struggle. There are a lot of people in the aviation business who are behind the times, and we have to show them that their best interests lie no"t with the passengers but with the stockholders. I'm having a devil of a time trying to get the company to remove the armrests."

"You want to do away with the armrests?"

"Of course. If you did away with the armrests, everyone would be forced to sit closer together, and we could get eight people in a row."

"Say, have you ever thought of putting people in the baggage rack overhead?" I asked him.

He studied it for a few moments. "It could be done, if we could fit them in horizontally."

He made another note: "Check about stuffing people into overhead baggage rack."

"You covered all the bases," I said in admiration.

"Not quite," he said, staring at the washroom. o 19

SMALLPOX ERADICATED FROM INDIA A few months ago, as the final battle against smallpox was being waged in the villages and towns of Bihar, we sent SPAN staff correspondent Mohammed Reyazuddin to cover the eradication campaign that banished the centuries-old scourge from India. Here is his story.

The sun was rising when the jeep headed north from Nalanda.

Last night's storm had left no visible mark on the brown and green landscape. But David Heymann, a young American epidemiologist working with the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), looked as if he had been caught in the vortex of the storm. Asked why, he said: "Oh, I didn't get to bed last night until 4 a.m."

How come? "Well, the meeting with the Civil Surgeon took longer than expected, and then at the dak bungalow there was a party, the men were singing, the dogs barking, the mosquitoes biting.

So I didn't get to sleep until nearly sunrise." With that he dismissed the night's discomfort, and began to talk about smallpox.

Smallpox, the dread disease that has killed, blinded and scarred millions over the centuries, has been the constant companion of 29-year-old David Heymann ever since he left the pleasant surroundings of the London School of Tropical Medicine and came to India in July 1974 to work with W.H.O. That July was .an especially bad month for smallpox in Bihar. The state had reported 14,076 cases, or more than two-thirds of the world's total.

Undaunted, Heymann went to work, first in Bhagalpur District and then in the Santhai Parganas. He mentioned with a touch of pride that these two districts had achieved a rate of zero smallpox.

Now he was the coordinator for Nalanda District, and working under him were three other epidemiologists-a West German, an Indonesian and an Indian.

While he talked about his job, the jeep sped along to Gulni, Above: Epidemiologist a small village very close to the ancient ruins of Nalanda Uni- David Heymann talks to versity. There were two cases of smallpox at Gulni, something villagers in Gulni very unusual for March 1975. A year earlier, two cases in one to make sure that the village didn't even merit a raised eyebrow because there was so smallpox containment much smallpox in India. In 1975, it was alarming because small- program is working well.

Right: Dr. S.S. Narvekar pox had almost been wiped out of the country.

Heymann and his paramedical assistant led the way to the in- examines smallpox fected house. A guard blocked them. No visitors allowed unless scabs of a three-year-old they could show a revaccination scar. Very strict. Even Heymann child in a Patna had to roll up his sleeve, and since the guard could not make out suburb, as SPAN writer his vaccination scar, he was forced to take a revaccination. Hey- Reyazuddin watches.

mann then signed his name in a carefully kept visitor's book and led the way into the house. The door opened into an open, brickpaved courtyard. To the left, in a large room that served as a kitchen, two women huddled together. On the front verandah was Saroj-lO years old, thin, her beautiful face pock-marked for life.

Her emaciated body still had smallpox scabs; she would live, but she would carry the scars forever. In the other room was her 30-year-old brother Suresh, also down with smallpox.

Two smallpox cases in one house. Wasn't that alarming? "Yes and no," said Heymann. "Yes, because it was not possible to track down the source of this infection. Most times we are able to find out from whom a person caught the infection. In this case we just don't know, but presume they caught it from a beggar or nomad.

On the other hand, it is not alarming because we know that Suresh got the infection from his sister."

Saroj and Suresh represented the last vestiges of smallpox in India. They were among the 43 outbreaks of the disease reported in March 1975, most of them from Nalanda and Patna Districts.

By the end of June, there was not a single case of smallpox in the country. Health Minister Dr. Karan Singh announced at that time that India had eradicated the scourge of smallpox, a disease that has ravaged man since time began.

* * * * *

, In 1974, India accounted for 188,000 cases, or more than 80 per cent of the world's smallpox victims, with the State of Bihar alone responsible for 126,872 cases. Within a year, the number has been reduced to zero-surely one of the most dramatic achievements in the annals of medicine.

The World Health Organization spearheaded the campaign against smallpox, and achieved such extraordinary results in India because it was able to devise for its eradication program an effective and relatively inexpensive method known as "search and containment." The method uses two medically tested facts about smallpox. One, that smallpox is passed from human to human (there are no other carriers); and two, while there is no cure or treatment for smallpox, it is the first disease for which an effective metho.d of prevention-vaccination-was found nearly 180 years ago.

In the search-and-containment method, the first task is to find smallpox cases, and then isolate them from the rest of the population so that the virus is not passed on to others. Heymann explained: "It is like having rangers standing in a watchtower in a forest looking for fires. Once a fire is located, it is isolated from the rest of the forest, and then the effort is made to extinguish it.

Likewise, in fighting smallpox, we first find where it exists, and we do this by a house-to-house search. Once we locate a smallpox case, we try to make sure that the infection does not spread."

The mass vaccination method is no less effective but impossible to carry out in countries with large populations. Indonesia, for instance, switched from the slow-moving mass vaccination to the fast, hard-hitting search-and-containment program, and within three and a half years was rid of all smallpox. Similarly, India had begun an ambitious program in 1962, aimed at vaccinating the entire population within three years. Then, in 1967, emphasis was shifted to surveillance and containment measures, and smallpox cases plummeted from 83,943 that year to 30,295 in 1968.

In 1970 India recorded its lowest incidence of smallpox: 12,341 cases. But then something happened, and there was an upward surge again; by 1972 the figure was up to 27,707.

Alarmed at this sudden spurt, India, with the help of the W.H.O., introduced a new approach to smallpox detection-a carefully organized village-by-village, house-by-house search for smallpox cases. "It was a stupendous task," said Dr. A.C. Achari, Deputy Director of Smallpox, "because Bihar alone-which had most of the smallpox in India-has 78,840 villages." And it took a while to get the operation going. As Dr. Donald Henderson, chief of the smallpox unit at W.H.O., said: "Despite comprehensive training programs, the search operation took time to perfect and not until the spring of 1974 was it reasonably effective in most areas. Unfortunately, this was late in the smallpox season and the disease had spread extensively. Major epidemics occurred in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh."

Yet just when things looked their worst, they were actually getting better. "Increasingly better supervision ensured that each outbreak was dealt with quickly-all contacts were vaccinated, the source of the outbreak was identified and all visitors were immunized," said Dr. Henderson.

To do all this W.H.O. recruited epidemiologists from all over the world: from India and 37 other countries. The epidemiologists joined for a three-month tour of duty, but many-like Heymann --chose to stay longer. Their expertise was complemented by hundreds of Indians-junior medical officers, paramedical assistants, laymen.

Back in Gulni, Heymann continued his story. "Many surveillance techniques have been tried in the past," he said, "but what has proved most useful are the monthly village searches. Special attention has been given to visiting remote hamlets, villages and the border areas of each block." He added that another very useful source of information has been the market search in which W.H.O. staffers visit the weekly village market.

Other effective tools in the smallpox eradication program have been wall markings and advertising of a Rs. 100 reward for reporting smallpox outbreaks. "They have proved to be well worth the effort and money spent," Heymann said. The smallpox recognition card-a plastic-sheathed, post-card-size card with a color picture of a child with smallpox-has also been extremely helpful. "Our experience in the use of this card is that by showing it, particularly to groups of children, we often get information about cases of smallpox that weren't reported. All smallpox searchers carry this card."

"Experience has shown that beggars, nomads and brick-kiln workers are responsible for a disproportionate number of smallpox cases, and therefore we pay particular attention to them," said Heymann. "In many cases, like the one in Gulni, we can't trace the source of infection because in all probability it was brought in by a nomadic beggar."

Since it was not possible to trace the source of infection in Gulni, the World Health Organization did the next best thing: They threw a cordon around the house and isolated the village.

Two guards were posted outside the infected house and two more on the main road that leads into the village.

In 1974 there were 188,000 cases of smallpox in India-which was more than 80 per cent of the number of cases in the world. Within a year the number of smallpox victims in the country has been reduced to zero-one of the most dramatic achievements in the history of medicine.

Satisfied that everything was in order, Heymann took off again.

This time for Harnot, also in Nalanda District. The patient there was 13-year-old Lokhar Ram. The epidemiologist in this area was Dr. Udl Schuss of West Germany. Heymann and Schuss spent some time with Lokhar Ram and with the junior medical officers, discussing various rumors they had received of smallpox cases elsewhere.

By the time they had finished, it was getting late for the meeting that Heymann had called in Patna, but he still had one more case to see-in Poonadi, Patna District. This was an unusual case.

Epidemiologists were divided in their opinion. Some thought that 30-year-old Manu Saha had chicken pox. Others thought he had smallpox. "Most times it's easy to differentiate between the two," said Heymann. "In chicken pox the rash is mostly on the chest and back, and the pocks are smaller. In smallpox it's mostly on the face, arms, the palms and soles of the feet. Manu Saha had a rash like chicken pox, but the distribution was most peculiar.

Very baffling."

Anyway, W.H.O. was taking no chances. Smallpox or chicken pox. the decision could wait till the lab reports came in from New Delhi. In the meantime, Saha was being treated as though he had smallpox and his house was isolated and kept under observation.

When'Heymann drove into Poonadi, the village looked as if it had been invaded. Four W.H.O. jeeps lined the road that led from under the railway track. Epidemiologists were busy making arrangements. Searchers were going from house to house. Three teams of vaccinators were scouring the village, vaccinating everyone. The entire smallpox containment machinery was in motion.

From Poonadi to Patna was just a short drive, but Heymann was already about an hour late for his meeting. Neither Heymann nor the other epidemiologists seemed to notice for, as Heymann pointed out, "in this business it's very difficult to keep proper timings. Usually, I don't even stop for lunch; it's just one long day for all of us. And we consider ourselves very lucky if we can get to bed by 10 p.m., after almost 15 hours on the road."

* * * * *

Patna, the capital of Bihar, posed a big problem for the smallpox eradication program. In villages it is usually easy to unearth smallpox cases. Everyone knows everyone else and .the medical teams can ferret out the necessary information. "But in an urban area like Patna, it's just not possible at times," said Robert Boyd, another American epidemiologist working with W.H.O. "One indulgent father so effectively hid his daughter's smallpox that our staff never knew that she had it till she was almost well. Fortunately for us, just at the time a searcher was passing her house after receiving the usual negative answer from her father, he saw this girl crossing the courtyard. Her fresh scab marks were unmistakably smallpox. He immediately reported the case," said Boyd.

"Or take the case of three-year-old Naushad, who we believe is among the last cases of smallpox in this city." Naushad came down with fever in late March. Three days later when the rash had developed into smallpox, his father reported the case to

the W.H.O. and received Rs. 100 reward. "Very commendable," said Boyd, "but later, we discovered that the father had taken his little son to a hakim in the mohalla."

W.H.O. workers rushed to the hakim to find out who was present when the child was brought in to see him. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "I'm too busy to keep track of the people who come to see me." Does he keep a register of patients he treats?

"No, but I have some notes that I make of the medicines I prescribe," the hakim volunteered. From those scribbled notes, the W.H.O. staff were able to gather the names of 18 people who might have come in contact with Naushad. All 18 were contacted and vaccinated.

Little knowing what a problem he had been for the smallpox eradication program, little Naushad whimpered as he suffered from the high fever. When Boyd pulled out half a dozen oranges from his cloth bag, Naushad smiled and momentarily forgot his distress.

Bob Boyd, his bag slung from his shoulder, is a familiar sight in the poorer suburbs of Patna, even though he has not been in the city for very long. Wherever he goes, he seems to draw children. "I love children, have two of my own in Florida," he said nostalgically. "And in this program I find that children are indispensable. They are my allies in finding unreported cases of smallpox." Like Heymann, Boyd is an old hand at ferreting out smallpox. An officer of the U.S. Health Service, he worked in Nigeria on the' smallpox eradication program before coming to India in January 1975. "And I have already signed up for another three-month term," he added.

Why? "Because the job I'm doing is very important. I think it's important to be here at this time. It's service to mankind, service to the world. Just imagine what a different world it will be whe'1. there is no smallpox-no one will die of this disease, no one will be blinded or scarred." Boyd added: "And just being able to say that I was in Bihar when they eradicated smallpox is going to be worth a lot to me."

The work does not finish merely because the last case of smallpox has been reported. That is why people like Boyd and Heymann, Dr. C. Rasidi ofIndonesia and Dr. S.S. Narvekar of Maharashtra have stayed on for more than their usual three months.

As Dr. Henderson said: "Two years of intensive activity must continue after the last known case. Next, an international commission will need to be convened to assure the world that transmission of this disease has really been stopped in India." Only then can it be safely said that smallpox has been eradicated for good. Once that happens, there will be no need for anyone to be vaccinated, and as W.H.O.'s Director General Dr. Halfdan Mahler said: "The resources developed to overcome smallpox can then be focused on other major health problems that besiege us."

"The eradication of smallpox from India, and eventually from two other countries where it is endemic-Bangladesh and Ethiopia -will represent a historic milestone in medicine. It will be the first eradication of a major disease. Or as David Heymann put it: "It's the only disease that will have been eradicated in my lifetime."D

This is Bihar in March 1975 as smallpox eradication teams zero in on the last few cases of the dread disease. Clockwise from top left: A smallpox eradication jeep with its usual crowd of curious but informative children.

A paramedical assistant queries a boy about cases of fever and rash in his home, as part of the house-to-house search. Epidemiologist David Heymann (checked shirt) confers with eradication program workers in Poonadi, Patna District. A child protests vigorously against being vaccinated. Epidemiologists Heymann and Udl Schuss of West Germany look at a smallpox case in Hamot.

R~..-\~<tt"' TOURING AMERICA

Until a few years ago hardly anyone had heard of a place called Soho in New York City, where the chief pursuits are warehousing and light industry. Today this seedy section of the city is a major tourist attraction because it's where so many top American artists live and work.

But why a worn-out area like Soho?

One answer has to do with the billboard size of many present-day canvases. In the mid-sixties American artists began experimenting with huge canvases or enormous sculptures and found they needed more studio room than they could afford. Soho provided a solution because here they could hire huge lofts at nominal rents or buy whole buildings at reasonable prices.

One of the "first settlers" of the Soho frontier was Louise Nevelson, doyenne of American sculptors, who visited India early this year to repres~nt the U.S. at the Third Triennale. She bought an old building and converted it to her needs. Little by little, other artists infiltrated the enormous lofts of the grubby half-deserted section officially designated as the South Houston Industrial District. ("South Houston" provides the acronym "Soho.") In addition to Nevelson, other famous Soho denizens include Claes Oldenburg, Lowell Nesbitt, Dan Johnson, and the late Adolph Gottlieb.

Like many "pioneers," these first settlers paid scant attention to legal niceties.

Zoning laws made it illegal to live in Soho.

It had been "zoned" as a factory area, and

First citizen of Soho, both from the standpoint of time and stature, is sculptor Louise Nevelson (above right). She bought an old building ( corner house in background) in 1958 and converted it into studios, storage spaces, and residence.

Clogging Soho's main street, West Broadway (right), trucks feed warehouses and factories that were here long before the artists moved in. Looming in the' distance are the twin towers of Manhattan's World Trade Center.

Artist Bill Tarr and his wife Yvonne (far right) take a break on an elevated platform above his massive we'ldedsteel and bronze sculptures which lend an exotic atmosphere to the 27-meter-long studio.

24

T T f I ~.

::J II

I';,...:.... ~~~~~,

_

.1_1\

\

•

~-;f~~:!I· . ~-:: .-

,~i_

,

.; :~!1~

tall"' .•, ~.'

~,

.-i-(

,

•••

i I

I

'-::E~f!!t.-~

!

A leading Soho pacesetter and a major figure in American art, Adolph Gottlieb (top) died last year. In this photo Gottlieb, confined to a wheelchair, works on one of his last paintings.

In his loft over a factory, paintersculptor Dan Johnson (above right) pulls diluted oils across the canvas with a squeegee.

He calls it "experimenting with letting color manage itself"

Artist Deborah Remington (above) works on a canvas in her Soho studio. She shared the risk and adventure of buying and converting an old warehouse into studiohomes with five other painters.

One of America's most famous sculptors, Claes Oldenburg (right) bought a whole building in Soho. He lives on one floor, works on another, has seamstresses on the third to stitch up patterns for his cloth sculptures, rents out the fourth.

SoNo existing civic services were not meant to meet the needs of homes and families. For years the artists ingeniously hid their beds from building inspectors. Finally, in 1971 the city relented and legalized their tenancy. The city "re-zoned" Soho to make it a residential-industrial area, and thus the squatter-artists became legal residents.

The average tourist may not find Soho an idyllic setting for artistic endeavor, yet it's a neighborhood vibrant with creative activity. Some of the city's most prestigious

galleries have opened branches in Sohathere are 30 of them to date. Art buyers and tourists dodge the trucks in the streets.

Boutiques and restaurants have appeared.

But Soho is more than a place. It's a state of mind. "The milieu is so overpowering that it immediately envelops you and relationships are easily established," said SPAN's Art Director Nand Katyal after his New York visit. "One gets a feeling of being a part of Soho's artist community.

In that free and casual atmosphere, walk-

ing around the streets, meeting people in the cafes creates an understanding and appreciation of the painters and their work."

In short, Soho has become the place for New York artists to live-just as New York has always been the place for American artists to live. Similarly, Soho is a "must" for any tourist with an interest in modern art. And Soho¡ is easy to find because it is right next to where most artists used to live and where most tourists always go-Greenwich Village.

SONO

Right: Oldest gallery in Soho is Paula Cooper's, dating from 1968. Here she works with an assistant on the arrangement of a set of six drawings by sculptor Mark Di Silvero.

Right center: Transformation of a run-down loft into this chic living room cost artist Deborah Remington many months of hard work.

Far right: A hangout of Soho artists, Fanelli's Bar is one of the oldest in New York City.

Below: Solzo's superrealist painter, printmakeI' and draughtsman Lowell Nesbitt is known not only for his huge paintings offlowers but also for his collection of exotic plants. Nesbitt has 150 of them in his top-floor loft, more on the roof

Right: Top-ranking galleries have opened branches in Soho. Here, in a gallery called "Let There Be Neon," a visitor ponders John Leitzel" s kinetic light piece. Various colors flash through the neon tubes (representing hands on bicycle handlebars) to give a suggestion of racing.

ORDER OF INSECTS A story by William H. Gass

We certainly had no complaints about the house after all we had been through in the other place, but we hadn't lived there very long before I began to notice every morning the bodies of a large black bug spotted about the downstairs carpet; haphazardly, as earth worms must die on the street after a rain; looking when I first saw them like rolls of dark wool or pieces of mud from the children's shoes, or sometimes, if the drapes were

pulled, so like ink stains or deep burns they terrified me, for I had been intimidated by that thick rug very early and the first week had walked over it wishing my bare feet would swallow my shoes. The shells were usually broken. Legs and other parts I couldn't then identify would be scattered near like flakes of rust. Occasionally I would find them on their backs, their, quilted undersides showing orange, while beside them were

smudges of dark-brown powder that had to be vacuumed carefully. We believed our cat had killed them. She was frequently sick during the night then-a rare thing for her-and we could think of no other reason. Overturned like that they looked pathetic even dead.

I could not imagine where the bugs had come from. I am terribly meticulous myself.

The house was clean, the cupboards tight and orderly, and we never saw one alive. The other

place had been infested with those flat brown fuzzy roaches, all wires and speed, and we'd seen them all right, frightened by the kitchen light, sifting through the baseboards and the floor's cracks; and in the pantry I had nearly closed my fingers on one before it fled, tossing its shadow across the starch like an image of the startle in my hand.

Dead, overturned, their three pairs of legs would be delicately drawn up and folded shyly over their stomachs. When they walked I suppose their forelegs were thrust out and then bent to draw the body up. I still wonder if they jumped. More than once I've seen our cat hook one of her claws under a shell and toss it in the air, crouching while the insect fell, feigning leaps-but there was daylight; the bug was dead; she was not really interested any more; and she would walk immediately away. That image takes the place of jumping. Even if I actually saw those two back pairs of legs unhinge, as they would have to if one leaped, I think I'd find the result unreal and mechanical, .a poor try measured by that sudden, high, head-over-heels flight from our eat's paw. I could look it up, I guess, but it's no study for a woman ... bugs.

At first I reacted as I should, bettdinKover, wondering what in the world; yet even before I recognized them I'd withdrawn my hand, shuddering. Fierce, ugly, armored things: they used their shadows to seem large. The machine sucked them up while I looked the other way. I remember the sudden thrill of horror I had hearing one rattle up the wand. I was relieved that they were dead, of course, for I could never have killed one, and if they had been popped, alive, into the dust bag of the cleaner, I believe I would have had nightmares again as I did the time my husband fought the red ants in our kitchen. All night I lay awake thinking of the ants alive in the belly of the machine, and when toward morning I finally slept I found myself in the dreadful elastic tunnel of the suction tube where ahead of me I heard them: a hundred bodies rustling in the dirt.

I never think of their species as alive but as comprised entirely by the dead ones on our carpet, all the new dead manufactured by the action of some mysterious spoorperhaps that dust they sometimes lie in-carried in the air, solidified by night and shaped, from body into body, spontaneously, as maggots were before the age of scien~. I have a

single book about insects, a little dated handbook in French which a good friend gave me as a joke-because of my garden, the quaintness of the plates, the fun of reading about worms in such an elegant tongue-and my bug has his picture there climbing the stem of an orchid. Beneath the picture is his name: Periplaneta orienta lis L. Ces repugnants insectes ne sont que trop communs dans les cuisines des vieilles habitations des villes, dans les magasins, entrep6ts, boulangeries, brasseries, restaurants, dans la cale des navires, etc., the text begins.

Nevertheless they are a new experience for me and I think that I am grateful for it now.

The picture didn't need to show me there were two, adult and nymph, for by that time I'd seen the bodies of both kinds. Nymph.

My god the names we use. The one was dark, squat, ugly, sly. The other, slimmer, had hard sheath-like wings drawn over its back like another shell, and you could see delicate interwoven lines spun like fossil gauze across them. The nymph was a rich golden color deepening in its interstices to mahogany. Both had legs that looked under a glass like the canes of a rose, and the nymph's were sufficiently transparent in a good light you thought you saw its nerves merge and run like a jagged crack to each ultimate claw.

Tipped, their legs have fallen shut, and the more I look at them the less I believe my eyes.

Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I've a collection now I keep in typewriter-ribbon tins, and though, in time, their bodies dry and the interior flesh decays, their features hold, as I suppose they held in life, an Egyptian determination, for their protective plates are strong and death must break bones to get in.

Now that the heavy soul is gone, the case is light.

I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we'd never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we'd find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with tilted as they always were-rib cage, collar, skull-still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection. After all, what does it mean to say that

when our cat has bitten through the shell and put confusion in the pulp, the life goes out of them? Alas for us, I want to cry, our bones are secret, showing last, so we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats.

Two prongs extend like daggers from the rear. I suppose I'll never know their function.

That kind of knowledge doesn't take my interest. At first I had to screw my eyes down, and as I consider it now, the whole change, the recent alteration in my life, was the consequence of finally coming near to something.

It was a self-mortifying act, J recall, a penalty I laid upon myself for the evil-tempered words I'd shouted at my children in the middle of the night. I felt instinctively the insects were infectious and their own disease, so when I knelt I held a handkerchief over the lower half of my face ... saw only horror ... turned, sick, masking my eyes ... yet the worst of angers held me through the day: vague, searching, guilty, and ashamed: After that I came near often; saw, for the first time, the gold nymph's difference; put between the mandibles a tinted nail I'd let grow long; observed the movement ofthejaws, the stalks of the antennae, the skull-shaped skull, the lines banding the abdomen, and found an intensity in the posture of the shell, even when tipped, like that in the gaze of Gauguin's natives' eyes. The dark plates glisten. They are wonderfully shaped; even the buttons of the compound eyes show a geometrical precision which prevents my earli~r horror. It isn't possible to feel disgust toward such an order. Nevertheless, I reminded myself, a roach ... and you a woman.

I no longer own my own imagination. I suppose they came up the drains or out of the registers. It may have been the rug they wanted. Crickets, too, I understand, will feed on wool. I used to rest by my husband ... stiffly ... waiting for silence to settle in the house, his sleep to come, and then the drama of their passage would take hold of me, possess me so completely that when I finally slept I merely passed from one dream to another without the slightest loss of vividness or continuity. Never alive, they came with punctures; their bodies formed from little whorls of copperish dust which in the downstairs darkness I couldn't possibly have seen; and they were dead and upside down when they materialized, for it was in that moment that our cat, herself darkly in-

visible, leaped and brought her paws together on the true soul of the roach; a soul so static and intense~ so immortally arranged, I felt, while I lay shell-like in our bed, turned inside out, driving my mind away, it was the same as the dark soul of the world itself-and it was this beautiful and terrifying feeling that took possession of me finally, stiffened¡ me like a rod beside my husband, played caesar to my dreams.

The weather drove them up, I think ... moisture in the tubes of the house. The first I came on looked put together in Japan; broken, one leg bent under like a metal cinch; unwound. It rang inside the hollow of the wand like metal too; brightly, like a stream of pins. The clatter made me shiver. Well I always see what I fear. Anything my eyes have is transformed into a threatening object: mud, or stains, or burns, or if not these, then toys in unmendable metal pieces. Not fears to be afraid of. The ordinary fears of daily life.

Healthy fears. Womanly, wifely, motherly ones: the children may point at the wretch with the hunch and speak in a voice he will hear; the cat has fleas again, they will get in the sofa; one's [ace looks smeared, it's because of the heat; is the burner on under the beans? the washing machine's obscure disease may reoccur, it rumbles on rinse and rattles on wash;" my god it's already 11 o'clock-; which one of you has lost a galosh? So it was amid the worries of our ordinary life I bent, innocent and improperly armed, over the bug that had come undone. Let me think back on the shock .... My hand would have fled from a burn with the same speed; anyone's death or injury would have weakened me as well; and I could have gone cold for a number of reasons, because I felt in motion in me my own murderous disease, for instance; but none could have produced the revulsion that dim recognition did, a reaction of my whole nature that flew ahead of understanding and made me withdraw like a spider.

I said I was innocent. Well I was not. Innocent. My god the names we use. What do we live with that's alive we haven't tamedpeople like me ?-even our houseplants breathe by our permission. All along I had the fear of what it was-something ugly and poisonous, deadly and terrible-the simple insect, worse and wilder than fire-and I should rather put my arms in the heart of a flame than in the darkness of a moist and webby hole. But the eye never ceases to change. When I examine . my collection , now it .

isn't any longer roaches I observe but gracious order, wholeness, and divinity .... My handkerchief, that time, was useless. . . . 0 my husband, they are a terrible disease.

The dark soul of the world ... a phrase I should laugh at. The roach shell sickened me. And my jaw has broken open. I lie still, listening, but there is nothing to hear. Our cat is quiet. They pass through life to immortality between her paws.

Am I grateful now my terror has another object? From time to time I think so, but I feel as though I'd been entrusted with a kind of eastern mystery, sacred to a dreadful god, and I am full of the sense of my unworthiness and the clay of my vessel. So strange. It is the sewing machine that has the fearful claw.

I live. in a scatter of blocks and children's voices. The chores are my clock, and time is every other moment interrupted. I had always thought that love knew nothing of order and that life itself was turmoil and confusion. Let us leap, let us shout! I have leaped, and to my shame, I have wrestled. But this bug that I hold in my hand and know to be dead is beautiful, and there is a fierce joy in its composition that beggars every other, for its joy is the joy of stone, and it lives in its tomb like a lion.

I don't know which is more surprising: to find such order in a roach, or such ideas in a woman.

I could not shake my point of view, infected as it was, and I took up their study with a manly passion. I sought out spiders and gave them sanctuary; played host to worms of every kind; was generous to katydids and lacewings, aphids, ants and various grubs; pampered several sorts of beetle; looked after crickets; sheltered bees; aimed my husband's ¡chemicals away from the grasshoppers, mosquitoes, moths, and flies. I have devoted hours to watching caterpillars feed.

You can see the leaves they've eaten passing through them; their bodies thin and swell until the useless pulp is squeezed in perfect rounds from their rectal end; for caterpillars are a simple section of intestine, a decorated stalk of yearning niuscle, and their whole being is' enlisted in the effort of digestion. Le tube digestif des Insectes est situe dans Ie grand axe de la cavite generale du corps ... de la bouche vers t anus . . . Le pharynx . . .

L' (Esophage Le jabot ...

Le ventricule Yet chylifique Le rectum et tileon ...

when they crawl their curves conform to graceful laws.

My children ought to be delighted with me as my husband is, I am so diligent, it seems, on their behalf, but they have taken fright and do not care to pryor to collect.'My hobby's given me a pair of dreadful eyes, and sometimes I fancy they start from my head; yet I see, perhaps, no differently than Galileo saw when he found in the pendulum its fixed intent. Nonetheless my body resists such knowledge. It wearies of its edge. And I cannot forget, even while I watch our moonvine blossoms opening, the simple principle of the bug. It is a squat black cockroach after all, such a bug as frightens housewives, and it's only come to chew on rented wool and find its death absurdly in the teeth of the renter's cat.

Strange. Absurd. I am the wife of the house. This point of view I tremble in is the point of view of a god, and I feel certain, somehow, that could I give myself entirely to it, were I not continuing a woman, I could disarm my life, find peace and order everywhere; and I lie by my husband and I touch his arm and consider the temptation. But I am a woman. I am not worthy. Then I want to cry 0 husband, husband, I am ill, for I have seen what I have seen. What should he do at that, poor man, starting up in the night from his sleep to such nonsense, but comfort me blindly and murmur dream, small snail, only dream, bad dream, as I do to the children. I could go away like the wise cicada who abandons its shell to move to other mischief. I could leave and let my bones-pla~ cards and spank the children .... Peace. How can I think of such ludicrous things-beauty and peace, the dark soul of the world-for I am the wife of the house, concerned for the rug, tidy and punctual, surrounded by blocks.

0

William H. Gass (right) makes a dramatic point to his students at the University of Washington. St. Louis, where he teaches philosophy. But Gass's preeminence derives mainly from his novels, short stories and essays. Hisfirst book, Omensetter's Luck, which he wrote in 1968, was described by Newsweek as "a dense, provoking, vastly rewarding and very beautiful first novel." And of his book In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, a collection of stories from which "Order of Insects" has been reprinted, a critic in the New York Times Book Review wrote: "This collection defines Gass not as a special but as a major voice.... No writer I've read, not even Joyce, can celebrate his world with a more piercing sadness."

The well-spoken passions of William H. Gass 'No writer of fiction prior to Gass,' says the author, 'has shown the same preoccupation with language and the need to show what cannot be said ..â&#x20AC;˘. Enter, enter; pleasures of the senses and the soul await you in William H. Gass's Garden of Essential Delights.'

Two old women hurry down the street, crones, gesturing with arthritic hooks, huddling in linted coats to guard the temperature of their blood. A third old woman passes them. A meeting of blunted eyes occurs, three white raisins are rearranged into smiles.

Cackle, crackle, dear; God bless, good-bye. One woman 'of the pair speaks of the third, telling a story, illustrating a point: love or social welfare, the dangers of the latitude in winter or the killing qualities of the summer air. The story has a beginning, a middle, an end. It reflects life, seeks out truth, convinces by example. A fine fiction is being made, secondhand life to the speaker, thirdhand life to the listener, something as tangible as the felt carapace of an old woman in winter and as useful as the lead editorial in this morning's Times. Mary McCarthy approves, Kurt Vonnegut gives it a good grade, and there is an excellent chance that it will be made into a film.

Th~ stormy psyche of Beethoven makes his music great and moving, sounding out his life; who will listen equally enraptured to a partita by a man who banged out scores of kids? Plisetskaya imitating a swan is plastic-armed magic, but when she becomes a position, lets herself into a mere form, where is she going?

Aging questions, arguments already made" but not proved in fiction until the work of William Gass.

If Gass is new, where has he come from? Antecedents, please; the place, the very pier from which he embarked. It is not enough to say his work is pleasing, beautiful; br even that the consciousness of the reader will be increased by the experience of the work.

There are conventions, bands must play, credentials must be worn; history follows history-only God may start from nothingness.

As Edmund Wilson knew when he introduced his readers to Axel's Castle. He began by referring to Whitehead's tracing of Classicism and the influence of Descartes and Newton to the revolt against those influences that became Romanticism. Then Wilson went on to Darwin and Naturalism, Bergson and Symbol~ ism, the relativity of Einstein and the work of Proust, and finally to Joyce and Freud. The next step is to Gass and Wittgenstein.

In one of the essays in Fiction and the Figures of Life, Gass describes his attendance at a seminar with Wittgenstein and calls it " ... the most important intellectual experience of my life... ~" It could not be otherwise, for no writer of fiction prior to Gass has shown the same preoccupation with language and the need to show what cannot be said. Ideas founded in Wittgenstein have led him to understanding fiction. as an art made of words, an architecture with concepts for its building material. Gass is no old woman stealing from life to make secondhand prose; he makes fictions of words.

The fiction is languag,e itself; the reader's experience is firsthand and the more affecting for it. The Heart of the Heart of the Country is not in Indiana; it is there in the words on the page. Gass does not tell us what it is like there; he makes the place and the characters of words-we are there.

There is no purpose to his work; Gass is not telling us anything, he is making something. More antecedents, another history: poets, beginning with Poe, who said, "He must be theory-mad beyond tedemption who ... [attempts] to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters o(Poetryand Truth."

Baudelaire, Mallarme, then Valery, who wrote poetry "to no useful end,:' believing "the reality of a discourse is only thewords and the forms."

A Gass novel 'cannot be read on the morning train ... nor can its humor be quoted over lunch. An evening will not do, or even a day. The work makes demands upon us, like life.'

In his introduction to Valery's Art of Poetry, T.S. Eliot paused and comfortable sounds, that paltry life. in his admiration to say, "There is, however, one direction in Omensetter's Luck is an imperfect novel. It is needlessly fudwhich Valery's theory and practice take him, _whichseems to me dled with a plot drawn out of some prior conception of the novel. not without its dangers." Then Eliot proceeded to sum up Valery's Omensetter's Luck is also, page after page, one of the most dangerous idea with mathematical clarity: "Poetry : Prose : : exciting, energetic, and beautiful novels we can ever hope to read.

Dancing: Walking (or Running)."

It is a rich fever, a parade of secrets, a novel as American as To Valery prose was always in some measure didactic; it had Huckleberry Finn and as torturously comic as Ulysses. The deliriaims, and when the aims were accomplished, the prose was ous, tormented song of the Reverend Jethro Furber, come to abolished. "The effect," he said, "swallows up the cause, the end Gilean at the end of the 19th century to preach the path to heaven, absorbs the means." When the walker arrives at his destination is terrifying and comic, for the Reverend is lost in lifeless lechery the walk is lost, abolished. Unlike the movements of the dance. and sinful words. His opposite, for whom he has hatred, envy, Eliot wrongly accused Valery of failing to consider "seriousness, and a strange admiration, is Brackett Omensetter, a "natural" experience" in his theoretical work, overlooking perhaps that man, a man almost without words, close to the source, as the Valery had said the poem "is a machine for producing the poetic grunt of the Navajo medicine man is said to be closer to holiness state of mind," echoing Poe, who said, "A poem is not the Poetic than any word he can utter. faculty, but the means of exciting it in mankind." The terminology To quote the novel here is to damage it, for it is not a casual has changed in the critical essays of Richard Gilman and of Gass construction, buttons on a string of plot. With thinnest fingers, himself-they speak of consciousness now-but the idea is un- Gass weaves a world of words, each sentence having the history of the sentences before. There is a context, we read in a fever, for changed, the seriousness Eliot could not find remains.

The -misunderstanding -also remains. The editor of the New the fever of Rev. Furber is contagious; it is not in another town, York Times Book Review calls Gass's work "attenuated" (a word another time, the fever is in the words on the page. The mad we generally think of now in connection with bacteria and viruses) preachments, the limericks, objects, sensations, shame, envy,.and and "post-Modernist" (a term used for painting). How strange suffering enter us, as if ... as if ... (do we dare to say it?) as if that new and bold fiction should be termed thin and weakened! life could be made of language and thus lived in secret-common.

Or shall we eschew that danger and live comfortably with the Perhaps the problem is in the reading? Gass's novel, Omensetter's Luck, cannot be read on the morning train from Old Greenwich, adventure stories of old women?

That question and others more serious and more clearly nor can its humor be quoted over lunch. An evening will not do, thought are better asked by Gass himself in his critical essays, or even a day. The work makes demands upon us, like life. It is which are collected under the title Fiction and the figures of Life. not a digest of life or a facsimile of life. Gass is not "ordering experience," sending us on to higlier morality; he is not docu- The fictionist, trained as a philosopher, examines the art of fiction, menting anything. The work is there, and the work is beautiful. its tools, and its relation to philosophy with thoroughness, speakThe experience of it is a significant and exciting ordeal from which ing always to the point until the consistency of the essays becomes we cannot emerge unchanged. the flaw in the collection.

An ordeal, is that what we get for $6? Better to do macrame or Though the essays are written with unfailing grace, the read<;.r press flowers in a book, watch clouds or the laughter of children. of Gass's fiction will find them redundant, for the subject of the A vase can be still and beautiful, birds are graceful riding the fictions is often fiction. In his essay, "The Concept in Fiction," currents over the trees in summer. A potter of cockeyed pots Gass is erudite and analytical about the names of characters. In doesn't suffer an ordeal of words. The bent lady speaks eloquently, Omensetter's Luck he is convincing: her mouth like the top of a gathered bag pumping wind, telling us of ordeals, sparing us. Must we pay $6 and a week of our hearts If each man were in his syllables somewhere, he could be to walk on fire? put our tongues to the knife? reached that way. And touched. Over and over. Loved? What "Let others complain that the times are wicked,"'said Kierke- did it matter? He could be chewed and swallowed. Jethro, gaard. "I complain that they are paltry; for they are without pas- for instance ... or Matthew. He knew true habit's hollow. sion. The thoughts of men are frail like lace, and they themselves Omen-What if Romeo's name were Bob? Jethro. What if are feeble like girllacemakers."

Jethro's name were-what? a wise adviser, a fluent liar, a We must rest from thoughts of the hydrogen bomb, death by slippery spier, a loud woe-crier, a God-denier with his soul on flesh gone mad, the ambitions of underlings, the curse of superiors, fire-no-what if his name were-what? But you couldn't the hungers of children, the cries of wives; we are tired. The old wear out Romeo. He grew with each repeating. Omensetter. woman tells tragedies no more painful to us than losing a hand of Simpson. Suppose it were Simpson. Or Henry Pimber. Or was habit's hollow. Stitt. penny-ante poker; the cost, the entertainment are the same; the Olus Knox. A pig wallow-that nerves unbend, the crotch is lightly sweated as in early sleep. Must Tott. Cham/ay. I've your name here, bucko, with my spit we have this new fiction? Imitations are lived with comfortably, around it-how do you like that? Hatstat. Flack. Cox. Hawthey keep their decent distance; why must Gass put us in the kins. Cobb. Well there might be something in it. room with torments?

Entertainment should be as quick as the changes of scene in Tn the es-sayshe deals brilliantly with a Platonic vision of lana hit movie; why should w~ suffer this man who gives us prose to guage and reality, calling for a fiction in which characters, "freed be read at the speed of speech, asking for attention that died with from existence, can shine in essence, and purely Be." But the the oral tradition? The choice of what we read is dangerously difference between the stories spilled like all-too-digested dinners close to the choice of how we live; the old women are always from the mouths of old women and the fiction that can "shine waiting, ready to lull us with the purring of crones, those distant in essence, and purely Be" is demonstrated in Gass's fiction.

He is not the only writer working toward that goal; Barthelme, Borges, Coover, Hawkes, and others also give us fiction "freed from existence," and while any or all of them may at this moment be correcting the galleys of a masterpiece, their published works, for all their brilliance, have disappointed us. Gass, perhaps inadvertently, points out the difference between their work and his in the title essay of Fiction and the Figures of Life: they lack feeling. Perhaps Gass is a pWegmatic fellow who passes his days trussed in a hammock, but his work is passionate. We respond to a Borges or a Barthelme story by thinking about our thoughts; at the end of a Gass story we are twice worked, feeling about our thoughts and thinking about our feelings.

Gass also works occasionally as a reviewer. He is more successful at that poor business than most writers have been, but book reviewing is journalism on the subject of books and not an exploration of art-revelations are not expected. When the reviewer strives for revelations the results are sometimes very nearly comic. In a brief piece on the work of LB. Singer, Gass made his often-quoted remark about "and," calling it an "empty conjunction." Poor "and," it is almost always empty, but not always.

Here is "and" at work: Down the back streets the asphalt crumbles into gravel.

There's Westbrook's, with the geraniums, Horsefall's, Mott's.

The sidewalk shatters. Gravel dust rises like breath behind the wagons. And I am in retirement from love.

typography salesman. The book is printed on a surface of tricks: various papers, fonts, photographs, and even a brown ring meant to represent the stain left by a sloppy cup of coffee printed on the navel of a naked woman who represents the art of fiction.

A tragedy: jewels set in slops, some of them surely buried. The lapse of taste that allowed him to write a book of 47 pages without numbers and then advise the reader that the number of pages in the book is equal to his age is demoralizing. Why? How can the author of Omensetler's Luck, which Richard Gilman rightly calls "the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation," have fallen to drawing brown circles around belly buttons? e.e.cummings' rearranging grasshopper was scrambled type well used, and still it was a trick; can Gass not have known? Does a concept in an 8 point sans serif type differ from the same concept in 18 point Century Schoolbook? There must have been a traveling salesman, a Svengali of the literary borscht belt, for beyond the tricks of Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is an important fiction on the art of fiction.

The lady of the novella is fiction herself, now in middle age, remembering her lovers, seeing the fall of her youth in a mirror, recalling intimacies with sardonic and sad wit. She recognizes mortality, the inevitable passing. But Gass rescues her, as he has rescued the novel, with language brilliantly and newly used. Fiction need not become those crones walking down the street on the way to death, a new life is promised, and Gass, father and first master of the new life, closes what might have been one of the marvels of fiction with a charge spoken by the lonesome muse to her future lovers.

Read the paragraph again, leaving out the conjunction. The narrator is a different man. His eyes are narrower, there is less darkness beneath. The author of that paragraph knew well the sound and the sense of words. How careful he was to leave out Then let us have a language worthy of our world, a demothe conjunction before the last word in the series of the second cratic style where rich and well-born nouns can roister with sentence, pointing to the use of the conjunction in beginning the some sluttish verb yetjind themselves content and un complained last sentence. This "and" is far from empty; it holds all the of We want a diction which contains the quaint, the rare, the sadness of the paragraph. technical, the obsolete, the old, the lent, the nonce, the local Gass has played a joke on himself, become the victim of slang and argot of the street, in neighborly conjinement. Our his own mastery. The paragraph is from the title story of his col- tone should suit our time: uncommon quiet dashed with common lection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, which is perhaps thunder. It should be as young and quick and sweet and danthe most successful and beautiful work he has published. An un- gerous as we are. Experimental and expansive-venturesome named narrator describes a town in Indiana. He speaks of grass, enough to make the chemist envy and the physicist catch upstores, neighbors, cats, and Christmas. The story is made of things, it will give new glasses to new eyes, and put those plots and a surface of ordinary objects, plain people and insignificant acts, patterns down wejind our modern lot in. Metaphor must be its yet it is a story of love lost or art failed (the surface holds at least god now gods are metaphors. It should not be too cowardly of that much), and it makes an almost unbearable sadness as it is song, but show its substance, sing its tunes so honestly and loud read. Line after line of lovely longing shines into the reader. "My that even eyes can hear them, and contrive to be a tongue that It's not the languid pissing prose will is like the rosy dustlike light in this room: soft, diffuse, and is its own intoxicant .... we've got, we need; but poetry, the human muse, full up erect gently comforting," says the narrator of himself.

There are elements in the story that lead one to think of auto- and on the charge, impetuous and hot and loud and wild like Messalina going to the stews or those damn rockets streaming biography: B. is "a small town fastened to a field in Indiana."

Gass taught philosophy at Purdue. The narrator is a writer who headstrong into stars. makes sex an analogue of fiction, as Gass is wont to do. A father A man who writes about another man's work is not the maker in North Dakota figures briefly in the story. Gass was born in North Dakota. How autobiographical it might be if autobio- of anything, nor the explainer, for fiction cannot be hermetic-a graphical fiction were possible! What nice material for gossip! world made of words is as available as the pages on which it is But gossip and autobiography are repetitions, deaths on the dry printed, as universal as a pyramid of sunlights or beauty itself. tongues of old women; fiction is new, made of such energy and One who writes about fictions is at best a doorman, a barker, a so elegantly balanced that the changing of a word, the deletion cawing priest.

I tip my hat and hold the door, bidding you Enter, Ladies and of an ordinarily empty conjunction, reshapes the universe.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is the "new" fiction Gentlemen, step inside and hear the novel born again, feel fiction at its best, an unfalteringly feeling and beautiful experience for come back from the dead, experience resurrection firsthand. Enter, the reader. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, a more recent Gass enter; pleasures of the senses and the soul await you in William H. 0 book, could have been equally successful. Unfortunately, the man Gass's Garden of Essential Delights. who began his essay, "The Medium of Fiction," by writing, "It seems a country-headed thing to say: that literature is language, About the Author: Earl Shorris is a well-known American critic and that stories and the places and the people in them are merely novelist. His articles often appear in s/lch magazines as Esquire and made of words ... ," seems to have been visited by a traveling Harper's; he has written two novels, Ofay and The Boots of the Virgin.

A RECORD GRAIN CROP Symbolic of the rich crops expected this year in the U.S. is this shower of wheat (below) from two mechanical combines.

Barbara Knox, owner of a farm near South Haven, Kansasthe heart of America's "wheat

release of the coin in her city.

It features on one side a profile of President John F. Kennedy; and on the other side, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

One-dollar and quarter-dollar Bicentennial coins have also been released. These feature respectively the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall and a drummer in the Colonial Army.

belt"-smiles as she watches the grain filling up a truck.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts a record crop of both wheat and maize2,140 million bushels of wheat, 5,850 million bushels of maize -good news not only for Americans but also for importers of U.S. grain.

BICENTENNIAL COINS Numismatists in particular, and Americans in general, are excited about the new Bicentennial coins-probably the most visible souvenirs of America's 200th birthday. Mary Newman (above), a bank employee in Atlanta, Georgia, displays a new half-dollar to commemorate the Bicentennial, soon after

WIMBLEDON "'INNERS ARTHUR ASHE AND BILLIE JEAN KING

> ...140'3

Months after Wimbledon, Americans are still talking about its two victorious stars Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe, shown at left with their trophies. Ashe is the second black player to win at Wimbledon. The first was Althea Gibson (1957 and 1958).

King is without doubt the queen of women's tennis. She's won the singles crown six times and a total of 19 Wimbledon titles in her remarkable career.

King and Ashe were complimented personally on their triumphs by U.S. President Gerald Ford.

A DAUGHTER'S-EYE VIEW OF THE PRESIDENT Americans are talking about Susan Ford, the sprightly teenage daughter of the President, who frequently helps out as White House hostess. Susan is a student at Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Marylanda high school that requires its seniors to take a job for a month in a chosen field.

\IIERI CANS ~RETALKING ~BOU1i Susan opted for photography and did a one-month stint at the White House under the supervision of David Kennerly, the President's chief cameraman.

One of her best shots was the genial pipe-smoking photo of her father (below left) which many u.s. newspapers have published.

It was taken at a White House press conference where Susan joined America's most seasoned reporters and lensmen and clicked away with three cameras.

Susan regards herself as a real professional. When someone jokingly suggested that the President should economize by firing Kennerly and hiring Susan, she shot back: "That wouldn't save much."

THE SCARIEST MOVIE EVER?

It's the golden age of disaster movies. After Airport 1975, Towering Inferno and Earthquake comes the scariest movie of them all-Jaws. Thousands are queuing up at theaters all over the U.S. to see Jaws and ;--get the fright of their lives.

And the memory of the film lingers long after it's over.

Says producer Richard Zanuck: "There is no way that a bather who has seen or heard of the movie won't think of a great white shark when he puts his toe in the ocean." True enough: vacationers continue to throng beach resorts, but they hover nervously near the shore. And movie houses are cunningly playing on people's nerves.

One theater announces: "Jaws is playing. See it before you go swimming."

The impact of the film is

such that sharks leap out at you everywhere-from posters, newspapers and signboards, even from items of apparel.

Almost overnight, a creature that shared this planet 63 million years ago with dinosaurs and pterosaurs seems to have become something of a national symbol in America. Cartoonists are using sharks to symbolize every dreaded phenomenontaxes, unemployment, inflation, male chauvinism. (One cartoon shows women's libber Gloria Steinem swimming down to bite a shark.) There's a boom in sharkware-shar k-emblazoned T-shirts, beach towels, shark's tooth pendants. There's a new Jaws discotheque. In New Jersey, an ice-cream stand has renamed its staple flavors sharklate, ¡finilla and jawberry.

All this is just the kind of impact that producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown and director Steven Spielberg hoped to create. No wonder that the film, which cost $8 million, grossed $60 million in its very first month. Critics say it's well set to displace The Godfather (which has made $150 million worldwide) from its position as No. J all-time moneymaker.

Made from a bestselling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws is a fast-paced thriller about a 25-foot, 3-ton great white killer shark that terrorizes an island community, culminating in a terrifying contest between the shark and three men, one of whom gets swallowed alive.

Jaws contains some classic suspense sequences. It heightens ,excitement by delaying its --calamities. It keeps the audience aghast when children by the hundred bathe in water where

the shark is supposed to be lurking. The audience knows the danger but cannot warn the innocents on the screen.

"This is Hitchcock technique in a context the master has never explored," one critic observes.

Director Steven Spielberg "twists our guts with false alarms, giving us the real thing

with heart-stopping suddenness."

For director Spielberg, Jaws was something more than just another film. "Because when I read Benchley's novel, I felt that I had been attacked.

It terrified me and I wanted to strike back." Apart from Spielberg's direction, Jaws derives its hypnotic power from Benchley's script from his own novel, which was rewritten several times by himself and by others; from the magnificent acting performances of Robert Shaw, Roy Schneider and Richard Dreyfuss; from the underwater photography by Rexford Metz; and, more than anything else, from the genius of special-effects man Robert Mattey. Though live sharks are seen in the film (photographed

off the Australian coast), the great killer shark that dominates it is a mechanical monster.

Mattey's tricks made the shark surface, swim, submerge, snap its jaws, thrash its tail, roll its eyes, and gobble up Robert Shaw. How was this done?

Thirteen technicians wearing scuba equipment operated the controls of a 12-ton steel platform to which the mechanical shark was attached. The technical perfection of Jaws, says Judith Crist of New York magazine, makes "all those burning buildings, toppling towers and stricken ships and planes of recent disaster movies look like Tinkertoy debris on a playroom floor." She sums up Jaws as "an exhilarating adventure entertainment of the highest order."

There have been other rave reviews. Time compares it to The Godfather for craftsmanship, and adds: "If the great white shark is one of nature's most efficient killing machines, Jaws is an efficient entertainment machine." The only prominent voice of dissent amid the chorus of praise heaped on Jaws is that of Penelope Gilliatt in the New Yorker. She dismisses Jaws as "a foolish exercise in special effects, not to be mistaken for science fiction. The shark is plastic. The film is punk."

But the people connected with Jaws are too happily busy to be upset by such criticism.

Ultimately, it is expected, producers Zanuck and Brown could make $20 million apiece, Peter Benchley $10 million, director Steven Spielberg $2.5 million. "They are laughing their way to the nearest swimming pool," says Time. 0 If

REVOLUTION. IN DENTISTRY I ~-3.lC

The quiet revolution that has taken place in American dentistry over the past decade is the result of many developments -widespread fluoridation of water, high-speed drills that make dentistry almost painless, and the discovery that 'plaque' is the major cause of cavities.

There is no turning back. You have procrastinated as long as possible, but the hour of your dental appointment is at hand. Middle-age memory. of your last visit to a dentist, admittedly much too long ago, is still keen. It leaves you altogether skeptical of frjendly reassurances by your children about painless new treatment. You can still see the cheerless bare walls, sterile porcelain and the grim, gleaming steel of his "operating room." Worse, you can still feel that screaming drill as it probed ever closer to the nerve while your tormentor told you it wouldn't hurt much longer. Today, in fact, your hands sweat at those recollections as you push open the door to the dentist's office.

But wait a minute! Surely you have come to the wrong place. You back part way out to look again at the name on the door. Not only did you glimpse bright yellow walls hung with colorful pictures as well as soft orange carpeting, but you also heard music. This is a dentist's office?Yes, it seems to be, and your surprises have only begun.

After a wait (dentists obviously are still as busy as ever) in his pleasant reception area, where there are toys for younger patients and a variety of reading matter for adults, you meet your new dentist. He is

youthful (well, more youthful than you), informal, tending immediately to allay your worst fears. While you recline in a contour chair, he repairs a couple of cavities in your molars with such brisk efficiency you hardly are aware the job is done.

And you scarcely felt a thing. Then he introduces you to his hygienist, an attractive young woman who manifests authority as well as charm and who then proceeds fo indoctrinate you in the new ways of preventive dentistry.

First you are treated to a lecture on tooth care, with colored slides that include microscopic photographs of. the bacteria that besiege the teeth and gums. Then comes a demonstration, in which you participate, of proper tooth brushing. (She expresses horror at the way you have been doing it for nearly 50 years.) You learn about plaque, which is a new word to you and you are sent on your way with a kit containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, mouth mirror, red "disclosing" tablets and, in case you forget your lesson, a booklet of instructions.

You have just taken part in the quiet revolution in Amer!can dentistry that began some 10 years ago-a revolution that is helping more and more Americans to have fewer cavities and to lose fewer teeth. It is an incomplete revolution so far, because it has not been adopted by all dentists, but it is spreading rapidly. And it holds out a twofold promise that anyone can appreciate: less pain from tooth problems and less dental disease.

The revolution can be summed up in a word: prevention. While dentists of the old school are usually repair men, filling cavities, pulling teeth and otherwise trying to _. lessen the ravages of dental disease, now the goal is to prevent that disease.

"Our highest motivation," says Dr ..

Joseph L. Bernier, chairman of the Oral Pathology Department, Georgetown University School of Dentistry in Washington, D.C., "ought to be to put ourselves out of business."

<OJ don't mind the dentist's chair either. it's the barber's chair that scares the heck out of me."

Elimination of dental disease is a long way off, but the goal is not altogether unrealistic. Today's dentists talk of dramatically new scientific understanding of the basic causes of dental trouble-the trouble that gives young children toothache and makes. older people lose their teeth. This / new knowledge has affected the water that Americans drink, the food that they eat, the way they brush their teeth (and the toothpaste they use to do it) as well as the treatment and advice they get from their dentists.

The revolution has changed some of the most cherished rules of the old dentistry: • For example, most dentists once thought that it wasn't necessary for children to visit a dentist until the first permanent teeth came in. Now many encourage parents to bring children in at the age of two or three, to lay the foundations for a lifetime of dental health.

• Once dentists told their patients to brush after every meal. Today, many say (for adults) brushing once a day is enough, if it's done properly.

Left: Comfortable and relaxed, Julie Nolan is • Once dentists told patients to brush up not afraid of pain as dentist Robert Freid and down. Now you brush side to side, gets ready to drill and fill her tooth in his using a soft brush, according to detailed Columbia, Maryland, office. New developments instructions, following up with dental floss. have made dentistry virtually painless.

• Perhaps the most welcome change of all Attractive decor for dental offices-wall-tocomes when the dentist must fill a cavity: wall carpeting 011 the floors, TV sets for It doesn't hurt so much any more. Thanks patients to watch while being treated-create to new high-speed, water-cooled drills and an atmosphere of a home rather than a, clinic.

anesthetics, dentistry. in many cases has become almost painless, so that childrenand their parents-no longer have to look ahead with dread to a dental appointment.

Some things haven't changed. Dentists still advise people to avoid eating sweets or other foods that are rich in sugar and to make periodic visits to the dentist. But these rules, old and new, fit into a concept of "preventive dentistry" that has a new focus-not on cavities so much as on the dental problem called periodontal disease.

And there is the new villain-"plaque."

The basic idea of dentistry is still the same: to keep people from losing their teeth. But the focus of dentistry is shifting from a concentration on the teeth themselves to include the tissues that hold those teeth in place. A major aim of the new dentistry is to prevent the wasting away of those tissues. In the new scheme of things, periodontal disease claims at least equal importance with the old established menace, cavities. And dentists believe that they can strike blows at both these problems by fighting plaque.

"The current concept is that plaque, a jellylike adhesive mass of bacteria, is the prime cause of dental caries (cavities) and of periodontal disease," said Dr. Howard L. Ward, head of preventive dentistry at the New York University College of Dentistry. "By scrupulous elimination of plaque, we now believe, one can markedly reduce both caries and periodontal disease."

The old dentistry was based on the belief that food particles in the mouth played a major role. So dentists advised patients to brush after every meal to scrub away food. Now food partiCles are definitely secondary (although dentists still believe diet is important). The focus is on keeping plaque off the teeth, and the theory is that you can't start too young or work too hard to fight the damage done by plaque.

As scientists have found, plaque is an accumulation of millions of bacteria that manufacture their own glue from materials found in saliva. Using that glue, the bacteria form a transparent but tenacious coating on the teeth. That's plaque.

"Plaque has been specifically identified only in the past seven or eight years, although we've known generally of its existence for a long time," says Dr. Bernier. "It was just 'debris' in the old days."

Once they are glued into place, the bacteria in plaque use sugar to manufac-

ture a variety of chemicals that attack both the teeth and the tissues that support them.

Most experts believe that cavities are caused by acid which is manufactured by plaque and that eats through the tough enamel coating of a tooth into the tender tissues inside.

Periodontal disease is blamed on the secretion of many different toxins that ooze out of plaque and eat away at the soft tissues of the gums. Over the years, those toxins can cause the gum tissue to recede.

They can eat away at the fibers that root the teeth in the bones of the jaw and finally weaken the bone itself, until the teeth are so poorly supported that they fall out.

In addition, plaque can pick up minerals from the saliva and can form a hard, stonelike material called calculus, or tartar. This can creep below the gum line, further weakening the tissues that support the teeth. Over the years, the damage done by plaque can make tooth after tooth fall out.

"Plaque has become the chief villain, the central target," according to Dr. Charles Amenta of Chicago, cofounder in 1969 of the American Society for Preventive Dentistry, whose journal is circulated to 80,000 of America's 100,000 practicing dentists and 6,400 students.

The society's rapid growth is evidence of the increasing acceptance of the new approach to tooth care in America. Dr. Amenta sums up that approach as "motivating the patient to do most of the job himself." He calls it "maintenance of his oral ecology." Georgetown's Dr. Bernier says the country's leading dental schools have psychologists and social scientists on their faculties to teach their students how

to motivate patients to adopt a once-a-day preventive routine at home.

The "motivating" most often is ultimately delegated to assistants. Their instructions for the home-front war against plaque include these steps: â&#x20AC;˘ Brush with a systematic approach, using a soft-bristled brush and fluoridated toothpaste. Slow, short back-and-forth strokes are recommended, with half the bristles on the tooth and half on the gingiva (gum tissue). â&#x20AC;˘ Attack the areas unreachable by brush with dental floss. Only three of the five tooth surfaces can be adequately cleaned with a brush, and most dental disease results from plaque remaining on both sides, particularly where teeth are close together. â&#x20AC;˘ Chew one of the harmless disclosing tablets from the kit. The dye in the tablet adheres to any plaque still remaining on the teeth. A mouth mirror will help locate the spots missed. Attack these spots with brush and floss until they are removed.

Since research has found that it takes approximately 24 hours for plaque to reestablish itself, this technique, done every day, can keep the teeth almost free of plaque. Over the long run, dentists feel, it can save many teeth. ' Dentists already have an example of how dental research, put to work, can stop trouble before it starts. That example is fluoridation, which has caused a drastic decrease in the number of cavities in many cities and towns.

The story of fluoridation began in the early 1900s,when Dr. Frederick S. McKay, a dentist in the State of Colorado, noticed that many people there had brown stains

=== WAN"""" "I'd appreciate it if you'd not touch the buttons."

on their teeth. These same people, he found, also had far fewer cavities than normal.

It took years to discover that the reason for the brown stains and for the freedom from cavities was something in the water that these people drank. That "something" was fluoride, a chemical that was absorbed by the enamel of the teeth and that made the enamel tougher, so that fewer cavities occurred.

Eventually, researchers found that the bad staining activity of fluoride could be separated from the good tooth-strengthening effects, simply by reducing the amount of fluoride. It was found that it takes about eight parts per million of fluoride in drinking water to cause staining. Only one part per million can strengthen the enamel enough to give a 50 to 60 per cent reduction in the number of cavities.

This research was put to work after World War II. A study was done in two cities in New York State, Newburgh and Kingston. One part per million of fluoride was added to the water in Newburgh, while people in Kingston kept on drinking nonfluoridated water. The study was supposed to run for 10 years. But the reduction in cavities among Newburgh children was so striking that fluoridation was recommended for all American cities long before the 10 years were up.

Today, about 95 million Americans drink fluoridated water-about half the population. Millions more brush their teeth with toothpaste that contains fluoride. In addition, many dentists give fluoride treatments to young patients. All these different forms of fluoride treatment seem to help.

"If you put one part per million of fluoride in drinking water you get a 60 per cent reduction in caries," said Dr. Irwin D. Mandel of the Columbia University School of Dentistry in New York City. "If a dentist applies it topically, you get a 40 per cent reduction. If you use it in tooth paste or mouthwash, you get a 20 per cent reduction.

"To some extent, the protection is additive. If you use all three forms of fluoridation, you get maybe an 80 per cent reducti 0 n."

However, fluoridation of drinking water does not benefit everyone to. the same degree. For one thing it must be given when a person is young to be most effective. Fluoride is incorporated in the enamel during the early years, when the teeth are taking shape and growing. Fluoridation will not give the same protection to an adult whose teeth are already mature. Also, many Americans-about one in four-get their water from wells, which cannot be fluoridated.

So dental scientists are working to develop new methods of protection-for example, an attack against the bacteria

---=~-IY,f~ "But 1just came in to deliver your mail!"

Drawing by Paul Swan

"Can't you ever relax?"

Drawing by Bob Schoche!

that cause the trouble in the first place.

One basic method of guarding teeth against germs is to eat less sugar. Scientists have found that bacteria thrive on sugar, which gives them the raw materials for making the acid that eats away enamel to cause cavities. Since Americans eat an average of 45 kilograms of sugar per person each year, the damage done by an improper diet is obvious. That's especially true for children, who love candy and other sugar-rich foods.

Since it doesn't seem possible to keep children away from candy, scientists are trying other methods of protecting teethfor example, by building a plastic shield between the germs and the enamel. After years of experimentation, scientists have developed plastic sealants that can be painted on the teeth and that harden quickly into a protective coating that is invisible but effective.

There are two problems with these plastic shields: First. they are effective only against one kind of decay-the kind that starts in the pits and fissures of the occlusal areas, the place where tooth meets tooth, And second, although the plastics worked well in tests, they still have not been in use long enough for dentists to be sure that they will be effective for everyone. In addition, the plastic coating may have to be renewed periodi~ally.

Other methods of protecting the teeth are being developed by scientists in the National Caries Program, a project of the National Institute of Dental Research, one of the U.S. Government agencies responsible for improving dental health. The goal of the National Caries Program is simple: to eliminate all tooth decay.

Among the ideas that are the focus of research efforts are a vaccine against bacteria-causin~ germs, a mouthwash containing antibiotics that would kill the germs

and treatments that would strengthen the teeth even more than fluoridation does.

None of these ideas is ready for use, but there is hope that some of them will move out of the laboratory and into the dentist's office in the next few years.

Meanwhile, as noted, the dentist's office has become a very different place from the torture chamber some older people remember. Early indoctrination is producing a generation of Americans who need no longer panic at the prospects of visiting the dentist. Many dentists now specialize in caring for children's teeth, and these dentists make' sure that their offices are pleasant places to visit. Many dentists will have music playing for patients in the dental chair, and some even let the patients watch television while the dentist does his work.

Control and prevention of dental disease, with virtual elimination of those diseases which are preventable, is the stated goal of American dentistry today. It is an ambitious goal. Th~ obstacles suggest that it will be several decades before the u.s, dental profession is "out of business."

But the revolution seems irreversible.

Its main elements are (1) more knowledgeable, more effective and less painful treatment in the dentist's office and (2) compelling emphasis on the importance of teeth maintenance at home. It needs to intensify and expand, of course, but public and professional support is increasing to the extent that its promulgators confidently predict at least a dramatic reduction in dental disease for the next generation of Americans. 0 About the Author: Edward Edelson was a Rockefeller Fellow at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism where he took a special program in science writing in 1964.

He joined the New York Daily News in 1971 and has been its science editor since 1973.

AMERICAN BUSINESS COLLABORATES WITH INDIAN PUBLIC SECTOR

OILrOR IIDIRS IIDUSTRY Aviation fuel for jet planes, kerosene f~r village lamps, and many different lubricating oils to turn the wheels of industry-these are among the wide range of products manufactured by Madras Refineries. plant in the country, and that it offers a wider It is almost like walking through an equa- desk; even the managing director.

And so to the office of the managing range of products than other Indian refineries. torial jungle, and to heighten the illusion the pipes are painted green. In places they are so director. Dr. M.S. Nadkarni, who has an M.S. "In transport and in industry," says one obclose together as to completely shut out the and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from server, "MRL really helps to keep the wheels sun. Here and there, narrow yellow staircases Clev~land's Case Institute of Technology, has moving."

The refinery's products include: petrol; wind themselves around tanks, like parasitic headed MRL since 1972. The company, he creepers. Circular controls group together, a tells me, involves collaboration of three kerosene; liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cluster of tropical flowers. Suddenly, a jet of partners-the Government of India with 74 cooking; naphtha for fertilizer and petrochemical feedstock; aviation turbo fuel for steam erupts downward, like the hiss of a per cent share capital, the National Iranian snake underfoot. A whistle shrills overhead, Oil Company, and Amoco India Inc. (a sub- jet planes; high-speed diesel oil for road and as when a parakeet darts screeching from the sidiary of Standard Oil of Indiana), each with rail transport; light diesel oil for tractors and treetops. And as the jungle is alive with sound, 13 per cent shares. MRL is truly an interna- agricultural pumping sets; fuel oil for indusall this throbs to' the steady roar of machinery. tional venture: The entire process design work try; and asphalt for road building. As one was done by the Bechtel Corporation of Cali- MRL official remarked: "Our oils are used It warns of lurking danger.

Indeed, danger is ever-present here-in the fornia; the engineering and construction of for everything-from protecting the tender form of flash fires and sudden ex~losions, in the process units was carried out by Snam skin of babies to helping build mighty steel Progetti of Italy; and most of the offsite facil- bridges." the behavior of volatile and temperamental MRL's manufac!uring processes lie far chemicals. For we are walking down a pipe ities were constructed by Engineers India beyond the comprehension of the layman. alley at Madras Refineries Limited (MRL), Limited.

The source of MRL's raw material is tiny Especially since all of the distillation and one of the most modern and complex plants Kharg Island, off the coast of Iran in the fractionation and addition of catalysts seems of its type in the world. ;I Persian Gulf. From the Darius Oilfield there, to take place within a series of chimneys and On a total area of some 140 hectares, MRL's 13 major processing units are located supertankers of the Shipping Corporation of towers which loom up against the' sky like within a four-hectare plot, arranged in the India .transport the crude to a specially built some surrealistic sculpture. A few figures shape of a gigantic "u" with a single control jetty at Madras Port. Then, coursing through taken at random will provide some idea of room in the center. Here, one entire wall is a pipes that pierce the bowels of Madras City, the refinery's scale and complexity. Here are mosaic of dials, clocks, gauges, buttons and the oil flows directly into MRL's storage some vital statistics: 218 kilometers of pipe; switches. Needles quiver, beeps sound, lights tanks.

206 kilometers of power and control cable; "Madras¡ Refineries," says Nadkarni, "is 201 columns and vessels; 224 heat exchangers; flash on and off-all speaking a language understood only by the bright young technicians designed to process a very high-sulfur crude 14 furnaces; 258 pumps; 416 electric motors; who man the control room 24 hours a day. oil. To remove the sulfur compounds from 104 tanks; and a staggering total of 3,100 inAway from the main complex, there are miles the finished products requires extremely so- struments of all description. At anyone time, of roads and rail tracks; and four huge squat phisticated techniques. It also means greater 360 million liters of water are in circulation tanks sit apart like truncated ship's tunnels investment and higher operating costs. Un- at MRL. washed ashore. They are the four largest tanks like the Darius crude, all indigenous oil has a Complicated though the refinery operations are, a tour of the plant is a fascinating built in India, each designed to hold 35,000 low sulfur content." tonnes of crude oil.

This is one aspect which sets the Rs. 45- experience. Take the working of the LPG Throughout MRL's other units-the labo- crore MRL project apart from the eight other unit. The bright red empty cylinders jostle ratories, the canteen, the administrative build- refineries in India. It is the only one to pro- each other along a conveyor belt until they ing-everything sparkles with the fanatic duce elemental sulfur-some 40 tonnes a day reach the storage bullet. There is a highcleanliness usually associated with hospitals. -an item which is in short supply the world pitched whine as each is filled with a jet of over. Another of MRL's distinctive features 15 kilos of liquid, which is converted into gas The time-honored institution of the chaprassi is out, I am told. Everyone dusts his own is that it has the largest lube (lubricating) oil once the pressure is released. The cylinders

are dunked in a tank to detect any leaks, then loaded on to trucks which will speed them to the Indian housewife, impatient for her month's supply of cooking gas. Each cylinder, I am told, retains minute quantities (between 50 and 200 parts per million) of mercaptan, a sulfur compound, so that the odor of gas is discernible.

The manufacture of LPG has tripled since Madras Refineries went on stream in June 1969. So has that of asphalt, while petrol production has risen by 50 per cent. These facts are revealed by Dr. Nadkarni, a soft-spoken man whose modesty tends to belittle the extent of MRL's achievements. However, he does say: "We have several records to our credit. Designed to process 2.5 million tonnes

Above: A pipe alley at the

Madras Refineries-specifically the walkway beneath the lube unit pipe rack. The refinery has pipes of all sizes, widths, thicknesses and description218 kilometers in all.

Left: A cluster of circular valve manifolds which help control the volatile chemicals that flow through the pipes.

OIL FOR INDIA'S INDUSTRY continued

of crude, we exceeded 2.6 million tonnes last year; and plans are now under way to expand capacity to 3.5 million tonnes. MRL became profitable in the second year of operation, yielded a dividend of 9 per cent in the third year, and of 12 per cent in the fourth and fifth years. During the first five years the company's foreign exchange savings totaled Rs. 77.5 crores, and we had contributed Rs. 382 crores to the central and state exchequers by way of duties and taxes." MRL's operating costs are the lowest among Indian refineries. With its staff of 450 it also has the lowest manpower of any refinery in India -despite its great complexity because of lube oil integration with the normal fuel refinery, and processing of the highest sulfur crude oil in the country.

Working conditions at MRL must be close to ideal, judging from the employees one meets. There is a sense of pride in their work, an absence of intimidation before higher officials; they seem alert, cenfident, contented.

Small wonder. ~ecause MRL provides a host of amenities: group accident and life insurance; annual medical checkups; loans to build houses, to buy scooters and cars; and elaborate safeguards for the worker's safety. MRL won three prizes in various categories of the National Safety Awards of 1973, and has an award of merit from the American National Safety Council.

The workers, of course, are directly affected by their association with the refinery. But MRL touches the lives of more people than one can imagine. And its influence extends far beyond the magnificent complex at Manali, 25 kilometers from Madras and reached by a road that hugs the edge of the ocean.

On a rubber plantation in Kerala, the trees are treated with insecticide mixed with a diluent spray oil to guard them against a fungus disease. In a rayon plant in Rajasthan, the yarn is coated with a lubricant which reduces friction and imparts softness to the fiber. In a Himachal Pradesh apple orchard, oils are used in the form of emulsion with water to combat insect pests. In a Mysore paper factory, workmen use several kinds of metal working lubricants. All these are MRL products.

And in thousands of villages throughout South India, as the housewife lights the traditional kerosene lamp, MRL bathes the inside of her simple hut in soft warm light.

AMERICAN BUSINESS COLLABORATES WITH INDIAN PUBLIC SECTOR

rlBTILIZIB rOBliDIA'S rIB.S The sophisticated technology used by Madras Fertilizers to produce thousands of tonnes of fertilizer is supplemented by a modern agricultural extension program to help the farmer reap bountiful harvests.

The prill tower dominates the scene for miles around. Not so much by reason of its height; there are other structures equally tall.

But because of the impression it conveys of sheer mass and power. It is a mighty upthrust of concrete about 65 meters high, 15 meters across on the inside. Its dark gray exterior is streaked with white where chemicals have spilled over. And from four metal spouts on either side, it disgorges steam furiously, adding another cloud to those in the sky.

The elevator ride to the top of the tower, though, is swift, smooth, noiseless. From spray heads above falls a gentle rain of hot liquid urea which is met by a countercurrent of air. This converts the urea into prills, or granules, which collect in the tower's bottom.

The view from the tower is breathtakingspread out below is the entire plant of Madras Fertilizers Limited (MFL). In the distance there is the glimmer of water from the effluent and storage tanks, with the cooling tower nearby. The NPK building is a big, boxy structure, and there are chutes connecting the plant to storage and bagging sheds. At the foot of the urea tower is the ammonia plant, with its immense crisscross sweep of pipes that look from this height like the warp and weft of fabric.

The ammonia plant is the starting point of MFL's whole manufacturing process. Here is a simplified-rather, oversimplified-description of what happens. A compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, ammonia is produced from naphtha and from steam and air. MFL's entire requirement of naphtha-some 250,090 tonnes per year-is met by the nearby Madras Refineries. MFL's other main raw materials, phosphoric acid and potash, are imported.

Next, to make urea, ammonia and carbon dioxide are reacted in a stainless steel vessel.

MFL's finished products are urea, some of which is bagged directly as high-grade fertilizer, and NPK. The latter is a granulated complex fertilizer made up of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). These are combined in varying ratios-17 -17-17 and 14-28-14-and then mixed with other inert additives. Granulation has many advantages: It makes the fertilizer water-soluble; it provides more plant nutrient per granule and per bag, so fewer bags are needed: it makes adulteration difficult; it ensures uniform

distribution of nutrients; and it is far easier to apply-it will not fly in the wind as powdered fertilizer would. Production of urea and NPK during 1973-74was 174,000 tonnes and 268,000 tonnes respectively. Interestingly, the basic NPl}. granulation process used at MFL was originally developed in the 1930s by the Tennessee Valley Authority and was modified by Dorr-Oliver (India) Limited.

Like the refinery, Madras Fertilizers is a collaborative venture between the same three partners, except that in this case the Government of India has 51 per cent ownership and Amoco India Inc. and National Iranian Oil Company have 24.5 per cent each. MFL's foreign exchange requirements were met by a loan from the Chemical Bank of New York, arranged by Amoco. The prime contractor of this Rs. 65-crore project was Chemical Construction Corporation, New York.

Both Madras Refineries and Madras Fertilizers are public sector projects. Now, in the minds of many, the public sector in India is associated with inefficiency, with delays, with failure. The fact that this is not necessarily so is borne out by a visit to either of these plants. As MFL's managing director, Dr. Easo John, says: "We are quite ready to be compared to the best private sector fertilizer plant anywhere in the world."

"There are two or three aspects," says Dr. John, "that distinguish us from other Indian fertilizer plants. For one, we have the largest single-stream ammonia plant in the country, with a capacity of 750 tonnes a day.

Our urea plant is perhaps the second largest, producing 885 tonnes a day. And we have the largest NPK plant, using the most modern technology. Unlike most other plants too, we bag directly from the production line."

At MFL, bagging takes place in great barnlike sheds where the gaily printed jute sacks are filled automatically, sewn by machine, carried along conveyor belts to storage, and then straight on to trucks or wagons. A railway track, in fact, sidles right up against MFL's storage shed.

"Bagging, of course, comprises a very small part of our work," says Dr. John. "But I think it has more than economic significance-it has psychological significance. Dealing with a machine, the worker feels he is doing skilled, not just manual, labor. This gives him a sense of

dignity, and so the whole- quality of labor is upgraded."

MFL's attitude toward its employees is reflected in a wide range of amenities and in a genuine concern for their welfare. Dr. John talks about the June 1974 accident in the ammonia control room, in which nine men were killed. "After the accident," he says, "we appointed an investigating committee which published its report in our house magazine, so that everyone knew what had happened, why it had happened, and what precautions were being taken to prevent its recurrence. I think our employees have shown a tremendous degree of confidence in us because we've had no labor trouble at all." However, the accident did cause a hiatus in normal MFL operations which were resumed after a lapse of several weeks. Production for 1974-75 is 82,000 tonnes of urea and 259,000 tonnes ofNPK. But what doth it profit a plant if it produce tonnes of fertilizer that never reach the farmer? In this respect, MFL's sights have been clearly set. From the very beginning, even before production started, the company has had a Technical Extension Program under which surrounding villages are exposed to a broadside of agricultural information in the form of demonstrations, booklets, postefs and films.' In July 1974, MFL inaugurated its Village Adoption Program which teaches farmers in 21 villages in Tamil Nadu the best cropping patterns, the correct varieties to grow, the quantity of fertilizers to use, proper land and water management practices.

All this has resulted in some remarkable success stories. To cite only two: In Coimbatore District, Nachimuthu Gounder harvested a paddy yield of 22 tonnes per hectare per year-just a little short of the world record of 25.65 tonnes. And in Thanjavur District, P. Muthuswamy Thevar used MFL fertilizers, and harvested such a bumper crop that he could build a well with the additional profits.

In the office of MFL's managing director, with its sleek modern furniture, stands a small brass Iota, or pot. It strikes an incongru. ous note amid those streamlined surroundings. But it is kept there because it had been presented by a villager whose plot was adopted

by MFL-and it symbolizes the gratitude of thousands of South India's farmers. -C.K.

FERTILIZER FOR INDIA'S FARMS

continued

The MFL brochure entitled This Is Our Story ends with a quote from Gandhiji which says: "Remember always the half-starved and sunburnt farmer, toiling on his little piece of land in the scorching heat to earn an honest livingall you do, do for his good."

These words sum up MFL's guiding principle, because its activities are all directed toward the betterment of the Indian farmer. Thus, it has a free Soil Testing Service which analyzes some 16,000 samples each year. In its Soil Testing Laboratory, a standard flask (right) reflects the atomic absorption spectro-photometer (below), a versatile instrument used to determine soil micronutrients. In the cavernous potash dump (bottom right), a pay-loader scoops the raw material on to a conveyor line. Madras Fertilizers is the largest single consumer of potash in India.

~WECOMMIT OURSELVES TO OUR COMMON SUCCESS' In his September 1st speech to the United Nations, Dr. Henry Kissinger concluded: 'We can say once more to the new nations: We have heard your voices. We embrace your hopes.

We will join your efforts. We commit ourselves to our common success.' The following article contains questions and answers about the meaning of many important sections of his address.

On September i, i975, U.S. Secretary further amounts from the new trust fund of State Henry Kissinger's address to the based on shortfalls in commodity export Seventh Special Session of the U.N. receipts.

General Assembly was read by U.S. 3. Change the formula for calculating Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan. A con- export shortfalls, which would signifidensation of this major speech is being cantly increase the size of compensable sent to SPAN subscribers under separate shortfalls. cover. (Nonsubscribers may obtain copies 4. In addition, the loans the facility of the condensation-or of the full textmakes to the poorest developing countries at USIS offices in New Delhi, Bombay, could, in certain cases, be converted to Calcutta and Madras.) grants by the new trust fund.

After the speech was delivered, there QUESTION: Why does the U.S. proposal were many queries seeking a summary of emphasize over-all export earnings rather the American proposals. There were also - than income from exporting individual several questions seeking detailed clarifica- commodities? tion of the meaning of certain proposals.

ANSWER: For development purposes, To answer the first category of query, stabilization of over-all export earnings the U.S. delegation to the session issued a is more meaningful than stabilizing a "position paper" containing a skeletal out- narrow portion of a country's export line of the American proposals. SPAN is position. Many LDCs are not dependent printing that position paper in the box on on exports of a few commodities. Rather, pages 48-49. they export a diverse range of goods, To answer more specific questions about including manufactures, whose value can details of the proposals, the State Depart- still fluctuate markedly. Our proposal ment published a hypothetical series of would provide substantial additional comquestions and answers about the speech. pensatory financing for countries expeSPAN has excerpted those questions and riencing problems because of the conanswers most relevant to India and is centration of their exports in a few comprinting them below. modities.

QUESTION: What are the Secretary's proposals for increasing access by deQUESTION: The Secretary proposed a new development security facility in the veloping countries to the international international Monetary Fund (IMF) to capital markets? compensate developing countries for short- ANSWER: His proposals include: 1. Continued support for the interfalls in their export earnings. in what respects is the proposed new facility a national financial institutions, including resignificant increase in compensatory financ- plenishment of the Inter-American Development Bank, negotiations for Asian ing available from the IMF? Development Bank replenishment, and ANSWER: The new facility would: 1. Substantially increase the maximum Congressional authorization for the U.S. outstanding amount of a country's com- to join the African Development Fund.

2. Major expansion ofthe capital of the pensatory drawings from IMF-by $2,500 International Finance Corporation (IFC). million per year or even more.

3. A new open-ended multibillion dollar 2. Under certain conditions, increase the amount a country can draw in any International Investment Trust under the given year from 25 per cent to .50 per cent management of the IFC to invest in of its quota. In addition, under the- new debt and equity instruments of developing facility, a developing country could draw country enterprises.

4. Work by the IMF/World Bank development committee to develop other measures to assist developing countries' access to international capital markets.

QUESTION: What is the U.S. doing for the Asian Development Bank? What negotiations is the U.S. agreeing to participate in?

ANSWER: We now have before the Congress requests for $121 million for the Asian Bank's capital and $50 million for its special (soft-loan) fund. In his. speech the Secretary added that the U.S. will participate in negotiations beginning this fall on replenishment of the special fund and, subsequently, of the bank's ordinary capital.

QUESTION: Is the proposal for the International Investment Trust a new proposal?

What is its purpose?

ANSWER: The proposed International Investment Trust would be managed by the International Finance Corporation.

It would draw its capital from industrial countries, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and developing countries, as well as from the IFC and private participation.

QUESTION: What countries would benefit from the proposed International Investment Trust?

ANSWER: We expect that most investments would be made in the middle-level developing countries most of which are no longer receiving bilateral assistance from us. These are the countries which have to depend on private capital markets for the bulk of their inflows and consequently need this type of assistance.

QUESTION: What are the Secretary's proposals for technological transfer and technology institutes?

ANSWER: His proposals include: 1. A new broadly based International Energy Institute to help developing countries plan national energy programs and diversify their energy sources.

2. Several agricultural technical assist-

their technical assistance and research in agriculture? ance and research projects, including ANSWER: A major component of our expanded agricultural research and train- expanded training and research program ing through already established regional in food production and nutrition is that agricultural research centers, a major new proposed by Congressman Findley and program to involve our land grant uni- Senator Humphrey and introduced in the versities in providing technical assistance House as H.R. Bill 9005, Title XII Amendand research in agriculture; and an aid ment to the Foreign Assistance Act. consortium to help developing countries This amendment would enable our land improve their productivity in nonfood grant universities to link more broadly agricultural products. and systematically with developing-coun3. An International Industrialization In- try scientists and counterpart institutions stitute to undertake and sponsor 'research and use their agricultural expertise and in problems of industrialization in devel- research capacity. oping countries.

QUESTION: What would be involved in 4. An International Center for the Ex- the proposed aid consortium on natural change of Technological Information on products such as timber, cotton, jute, and on-going research and new findings relevant natural rubber? to the needs of developing countries.

ANSWER: If other countries agree, the QUESTION: What would the proposed proposed aid consortium could be modelInternational Energy Institute do? ed on the already successful consultative ANSWER: It would develop a program group on international agricultural reof technical assistance to LDCs in plan- search, which focuses largely on probning national energy programs and diversi- lems of edible crops and livestock. fying their energy sources. It would adapt Thus, an organization of public and techniques for exploiting solar, hydro, private donors could provide capital and geothermal, and other energy sources with core support adequate for program flexthe needs of the developing countries in ibility and 'continuity, while an advisory mind. It could operate through a network committee of distinguished experts from of regional and functional bodies. developed and developing countries could QUESTION: What is the major new pro- provide technical guidance for program gram to enable U.S. universities to expand development. Such an umbrella organi-

u.s. PROPOSALS IN A NUTSHELL

On September 5,1975, the United States presented officially to a U.N. committee a position paper summarizing the major u.s. proposals made by Secretary of State Kissinger. The text of that paper follows.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE Proposals: 1. That a development security facility be established within the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to stabilize overall export earnings of developing countries from commodities and manufactured goods.

2. That a consumer-producer forum be established for every key commodity to promote efficiency, growth, and stability of markets. Copper should be given priority.

3. That in keeping with the Tokyo Declaration, rules on nontariff barriers should be adapted to provide special consideration for developing countries.

Statements of policy: , The U.S. intends to sign the tin agreement.

The U.S. is participating actively in negotiations on coffee. .

The U.S. will join in the cocoa and sugar negotiations.

The U.S. will support liberalization of IMF financing of buffer stocks to assure that this facility is available without encumbering other drawing rights.

The U.S. will put into effect its GeneralizedTariff Preferences on January 1, 1976.

The U.S. will undertake in the Multilateral Trade Negotiations to lower tariffs on manufactured and processed goods of developing countries.

The U.S. will seek early agreement in the Multilateral Trade Negotiations to reduce tariffs on tropical products.

The U.S. will join with others in negotiating supply-access commitments as part of the reciprocal exchange of concessions.

zation could involve research institutes already operating in a number of importing countries together with existing or to-be-established counterparts in producing countries. Research would be addressed not only to problems of production but also to problems of utilization.

QUESTION: How will this program be financed?

ANSWER: It would be appropriate for financing by the International Fund for Agricultural Development when the fund is established.

QUESTION: Where is the U.S. participating in formulation of transfer-of-technology guidelines?

ANSWER: The U.S. has been working in the UNCT Ap committee on transfer of technology and also in the OECD committee on science and technology to draw up guidelines for the transfer of technology. These guidelines especially concern relations between transnational enterprises as suppliers of technology and host countries as recipients. At the next meeting of the UNCT AD committee this November, an outline of such guidelines is scheduled to be drafted and discussed.

QUESTION: What do we have in mind in considering an "International Centerfor the Exchange of Technological Information ?"

private resources to developing countries.

2. That the capital of the International Finance Corporation be at least quadrupled to increase the flow of private resources to developing countries.

3. That a major new international,. effort to expand raw material resources in developing countries be undertaken and that the World Bank and affiliates playa fundamental role in bringing together public and private investors with host governments in developing countries.

4. That developed countries provide technical assistance and expertise to developing countries ready to enter longterm capital markets.

5. That bilateral support for training and technical assistance be increased to help developing countries find and exploit new sources of fossil fuel and other forms of energy.

Statements of policy: TRANSFER OF REAL The U.S. will seek authority to join the RESOURCES FOR FINANCING African Development Fund.

DEVELOPMENT, The U.S. will join in increasing the AND INTERNATIONAL resources of the Inter-American DevelopMONETARY REFORMS ment Bank to $6,000 million.

The U.S. will join in a large replenishProposals: 1. That an International Investment ment of the resources of the International Trust be created to increase the flow of Development Association.

ANSWER: The need for adaptable tech- duled to meet again early next year to nology is so great and the resources complete the preparation of its work devoted to its development so limited program for submission to ECOSOC. that duplication of effort is prohibitive- The work of the Commission is supported ly costly. Yet many developing-country by an information and research¡ center scientists and engineers and their .which has been established within the research institutions are isolated from U.N. secretariat. their counterparts in other developing QUESTION: Will not many of the procountries as well as in the industrialized posed guidelines put forward in the Secworld. We are willing to help fund a retary's speech be unacceptable to the center for information exchange in order developing countries and thus serve to to overcome this communication problem heighten North-South tensions? and thereby increase the effectiveness of ANSWER: The subject of private foreign investment, and the transnational comworldwide technological research.

QUESTION: The U.S. proposes to work pany in particular, is a highly emotional within the U.N. Commission on Trans- issue. Countries want foreign investment national Corporations and other bodies to for the benefits it brings but they fear it help develop a body of basic, balanced because it is foreign. It may be difficult principles to guide enterprises and govern- to agree on basic guidelines, but it is ments in their mutual relations. What is necessary to try. The multinational corthe U.N. Commission on Transnational porations are, and can continue to be, a major source of capital, technology, Corporations?

ANSWER: The U.N. Commission on managing and marketing skills in the TNCs is composed of delegates repre- developing countries. Balanced guidelines senting 48 member countries, broadly for these enterprises and governments in representative of both the developed their mutual relations, reached by conand developing world and including the sensus, could help to ensure the contiUnited. States, set up under Economic nued flow of these resources to the develand Social Council (ECOSOC) auspices oping countries.

QUESTION: What are the Secretary's to act as a focal point within the U.N. proposals to make the trading system system on issues relating to multinational enterprises. The Commission held its better serve the interests of development? first meeting in March 1975 and is sche- ANSWER: The Secretary proposed:

The U.S. will participate in negotiations for replenishment of the Asian Development Bank. , The U.S. will contribute to the United Nations revolving fund for natural resources exploration.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Proposals: 1. That an International Energy Institute be created to assist developing countries in energy development.

2. That an International Center for the Exchange of Technological Information be established for the sharing of research findings relevant to developing countries.

3. That there be a major expansion of multilateral support for community health service delivery in developing countries, using paramedical personnel.

4. That an organization be created to coordinate and finance assistance to improve the productivity-and competitiveness with synthetics-of nonfood, agricultural and forestry products.

INDUSTRIALIZA nON Proposals: 1. That an International Industrialization Institute be established to accelerate

industrialization in developing countries.

2. That international standards of conduct be defined to establish reciprocal rights and obligations on the part of enterprises and of host countries.

3. That the productive role of transnational enterprises be facilitated by the adoption of agreed standards including the prohibition of restrictive business practices, harmonizatio~ of tax treatment, promotion of arbitral procedures to settle investment disputes, and investment insurance programs.

Statement of ]folicy: The U.S. will participate in bilateral consultations to identify and resolve potential investment disputes concerning transnational enterprises.

1. A fundamental improvement in the relationship of the developing countries to the world trading system. (This would involve various forms of preferential treatment for the trade of developing countries; the preferences would be phased out gradually as the developing countries progressed.)

2. Trading opportunities for the developing countries in the manufacturing sector. (The U.S. Generalized System of Preferences will go into effect on January 1,1976.)

3. Encouragement to the processing of their raw materials in the developing countries. The U.S. will make a special effort in the Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTN) to reduce tariff barriers on processed goods.

4. The reciprocal exchange of commitments in the Multilateral Trade Negotiations on access to supply and¡ the negotiation of improved rules governing the use of export restraints.

5. Adaptation of the rules on nontariff barriers to the situation of developing countries.

6. Early agreement on reducing barriers to tropical products that are the major source of LDC earnings.

QUESTION: The Secretary suggests that there should be a fundamental change in the world trading system to provide various

research centers be expanded.

4. That a new International Fund for Agricultural Development be established at an early date.

Statements of policy: The U.S. will increase university-based technical assistance and research in agriculture of developing countries.

The U.S. will seek $200 million from Congress as a contribution to the International Fund for Agricultural Development provided that others will add their support for a combined goal of at least $1,000 million.

The U.S. is asking Congress for authorization to double its bilateral agricultural assistance thjs year to $582 million and urges other affluent nations to increase their contributions as well.

FOOD AND AGRICULTURE RESTRUCTURING Proposals: 1. That a world food reserve system be OF THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SECTORS OF created, as a matter of urgency, with the THE UNITED NATIONS SYSTEM United States holding a major share.

2. That postharvest food losses be cut Proposal: . That 1976 be dedicated as a year of in half by 1985 through a comprehensive review and reform of the entire U.N. program in developing countries.

3. That the capacity of the consultative development system, with an intergoverngroup for international agricultural re- mental committee formed at this session search and the international agricultural to begin work immediately.

forms of preferential treatment for developing countries. But he adds that this treatment should gradually be modified for a particular LDC as it attains higher levels of development until it reaches equality of treatment with industrialized countries; Is this a new idea?

ANSWER: The idea is not new but we have not previously enunciated it as U.S. policy. Its purpose is to make clear that while the U.S. fully supports the idea of "special and differential treatment" of developing countries in the international trading structure in the interest of their development, we believe specific proposals of this kind should have built-in mechanisms to assure the gradual assumption by the developing countries of full obligations as their economies develop.

QUESTION: What kinds of preferential and special treatment does the Secretary have in mind?

ANSWER: These include: 1. Tariff preferences for the exports by developing countries of manufactured goods (and some other products) under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) that will become operative on January 1, 1976.

2. Provision for special treatment of developing countries under rules on nontariff barriers that will be negotiated in the Mutilateral Trade Negotiations. Special treatment may be feasible in such matters as countervailing duties and subsidies, and government procurement.

3. Requests for reciprocity from developing countries in ways that will be con. sistent with their individual development, financial, and trade needs.

QUESTION: What is the current status of the program for Generalized Tar~ff Preferences for developing countries?

ANSWER: The Generalized System of Preferences was authorized by the Trade Act of 1974. We have announced the countries designated as beneficiaries as well as those currently under consideration for such designation. We have also proposed a list of products to be accorded preferential tariff treatment, and public hearings were held regarding this list both by the U.S. International Trade Commission and the Administration.

Later in the year we will have a firm program including a final list of products and implementing regulations. There will be a Presidential proclamation on these matters. We expect to begin to operate this system on January 1, 1976.

-QUESTION: How will the Generalized System of Preferences work when implemented?

ANSWER: All preferential tariffs on products included in the system are set at zero for exports from eligible developing countries. Should a beneficiary country become "competitive" in a particular product, it would no longer require preferential treatment on that product.

A country is presumed to be competitive in a product when its exports of that product to the U.S. exceed a ceiling initially of $25 million or 50 per cent of total U.S. imports of that product in a calendar year.

QUESTION: What are the Secretary's proposals for action on commodities?

ANSWER: His proposals include: I. An international system of grain reserves to provide reasonable stability in the availability of food in commercial markets.

2. A consumer-producer group for every key raw material, to discuss. how to promote the efficiency, growth, and stability of its market, with priority for the establishment of a consumer-producer group on copper.

3. U.S. membership in the International Tin Agreement, subject to ratification by the Congress.

4. Active U.S. participation in the current-coffee agreement negotiations, and in the forthcoming negotiations on cocoa and sugar, with a view to joining them if the agreements are satisfactory.

5. Expanded investment in natural resource development to ensure a reliable and growing supply of critical raw materials, with a major role for the World Bank Group in this effort.

6. U.S. contribution to the U.N. revolving fund for natural resources exploration which is designed to help the developing countries locate and evaluate their mineral and other natural resources.

QUESTION: One of the principles laid down by the Secretary to govern an international grain reserves system is assured access to supply for participants. What does assured access mean and how would this d~er from treatment for nonparticipants?

ANSWER: First, we see a food reserve agreement as providing a context in which coordinated action by the principal producing and consuming countries could be taken to maximize world food availability when the supply situation becomes tight.

Secondly, in serious shortage situations participants would have assured access to reserve stocks; nonparticipants would have no such assurance. In the extreme event that a series of world crop disasters reduced total food availability below current world needs, participants com-

plying with the terms of a reserves agreement would be given access to the available supply.

QUESTION: The Secretary endorsed stocking arrangements as the most effective technique to moderate commodity market instability. Do wefavor buffer stocks for all commodities?

ANSWER: No, we recognize that each commodity has its own particular characteristics and problems peculiar to it.

For some commodities, the dominant problem is not instability but competition from synthetics. For others, it may be declining or sluggish secular demand.

For yet others it may be over-production as new suppliers come onto the market.

The remedies for these problems would not be buffer stocks but other measures including diversification, improved productivity to enable producers to compete on a price and quality basis, etc. Moreover, some commodities such as bananas cannot be stored.

However, as a general matter we believe buffer stock arrangements have important advantages over other commodity stabilization arrangements. They do not constrain production but smooth it, so that capacity need not be idle when demand is depressed or overtaxed when demand peaks. They permit lower-cost producers to expand output and the pattern of production to shift in response to changing costs. They do, however, involve substantial initial investment costs which mayor may not yield a financial return over operating costs.

QUESTION: Why is the U.S. prepared to join the new Tin Agreement?

ANSWER: We believe the several successive tin agreements are a good example of effective producer/consumer cooperation which has endured for nearly 20 years. U.S. participation would strengthen this cooperation.

Our willingness to join the Tin Agreement now demonstrates that our policy of examining commodity arrangements on a case-by-case basis is a positive policy and not a dodge. We believe there is a good case for a buffer stock agreement to stabilize the tin market, and we think the international tin agreement can help to do this.

QUESTION: What are the Secretary's proposals for helping the poorest developing countries?

ANSWER: The Secretary called for preference to the needs of these countries for elemental economic security and immediate relief of suffering by such measures as: 1. The establishment of a trust fund in the IMF to provide up to $2,000 million

annually for emergency relief.

2. Conversion to grants, under certain conditions, of the loans of the poorest LDCs from the new development security facility in the IMF. 3. Provisions in the budget for increased food aid, including almost six million tons of food grains in this fiscal year.

4. A major international effort to reduce postharvest food losses.

5. A new approach to basic health servicesat the community level, combining medical treatment, family planning, and nutritional information.

Further, the Secretary called for preference to the needs of the poorest developing countries for future economic growth, through such measures as: • Concentrating U.S. development assistance on the poorest developing countries. (More than 70 per cent of U.S. development assistance will be devoted to the poorest countries.)

• Substantial replenishment of the International Development Association. (The U.S. will join other contributors in a substantial replenishment, provided that the oil-exporting countries make a similar contribution.)

• The early establishment of the new International Fund for Agricultural Development to increase the ability of the poorest countries to feed their .people.

(The U.S. will seek authorization from the Congress for a direct contribqtion of $200 million to the fund, on the assumption that others will add their support for a combined goal of at least $1,000

million. The U.S. will also double its bilateral agricultural assistance if the Congress approves.)

QUESTION: What is the proposed IMF trust fund?

ANSWER: The U.S. proposed late in 1974 an IMF-administered trust fund to give highly concessional balance-of-payments assistance to the poorest countries hardest hit by increased prices of oil and other factors. Resources for the proposed trust fund would come both from contributions made by oil-producing states and from the use of a portion of the IMF's gold holdings. The latter feature would be consistent with the general objective of phasing gold out of the center of the monetary system.

QUESTION: What is the present status of the trust fund proposal?

ANSWER: There now seems to be widespread international support for it.

At the June meeting of the IMF/IBRD development committee, there was agreement that the executive board of the fund should work out the details. It would be easier to implement the trust fund after amendment of certain of the IMF articles of agreement relating to gold. This is not absolutely necessary, however.

In view of the urgent financing needs of the poorest countries, the U.S. will press for early action to set up the trust fund even before the amendments in / question are finally agreed.

QUESTION: What sort of resources would the trust fund have available?

ANSWER: Over the next several years at least, we would hope it would have up to 52,000 million a year available for concessionary loans to the poorest countries.

QUESTION: What countries will receive U.S. food aid ill Fiscal Year 1976?

ANSWER: Some 80 countries will receive Title II donations through the programs of voluntary agencies or the World Food Program. Title I (concessional sale) allocations are not yet final, although we have initiated negotiations with a number of countries on FY -76 programs.

QUESTION: The United States proposes that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in conjunction with United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank, set a goal of reducing postharvest food losses by 50 per cent over the next 10 years, and develop programs to carry out this objective. What is the magnitude of the potential food savings in the developing countries if a coordinated drive, such as suggested by Secretary Kissinger, can be mounted to reduce postharvest losses?

ANSWER: While estimates of postharvest losses vary, some experts maintain that on a worldwide average basis they are about equivalent to the current level of global food aid. The World Food Conference Secretariat, for instance, put losses due to inadequate storage, transportation and pest control in developing countries at 5-10 per cent of production for cereal crops and higher for other crops. In addition to quantitative losses,

LIGHT UP A LIFE AT FESTIVAL TIME! Give

a Gift of

SPAN

To make sure your relatives and friends are as informed as you are, enlighten their lives with a year's subscription to SPAN. If you give a gift of SPAN, we will send you a gift book, 'The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution: b,y Richard Morris.

See coupon on reverse side.

prevailed at the earlier meetings.

If the fund is established on a sound improperly stored food deteriorates quali- financial basis, it should attract substantatively in terms of vitamin and protein tial support from the traditional donors content. of assistance as well as from OPEC In order to provide more detailed in- countries and will make a major contriformation on the scope and magnitude bution to expanding agricultural producof the problem in the developing coun- tion in the developing world. Our offer tries, the National Academy of Sciences of a direct U.S. contribution to a soundly of the United States is undertaking a structured fund is intended to advance special study which is expected to be the negotiations and encourage comcompleted in 1976. mitments to contribute from others.

QUESTION: The U.S. President will seek QUESTION: How would the United authorization for a direct contribution of States strengthen the leadership in the $200 million to the International Fund central U.N. secretariat and the entire for Agricultural Development. What is U.N. system for development and economic the origin of the fund? What is its present cooperation? status?

ANSWER: The U.S. believes that the ANSWER: Originally, the fund was a most important way to provide such major proposal made by the LDCs, strengthened leadership would be to including OPEC members, at the World reorganize the Department of Economic Food Conference. The fund was to be and Social Affairs within the U.N. itself designed to mobilize additional external so that it is more heavily oriented towl;lrd resources to help finance projects in serving in a headquarters staff capacity developing countries primarily for agri- and is less burdened with operational activities. We have not decided whether cultural production.

An ad hoc working group composed the new position of director general for of interested countries has already met development and international economic twice to discuss possible articles of agree- cooperation, as recommended by the ment. The suggested size of the fund is group of experts, would be the best way $1,250 million annually. Technical points to do this. such as membership requirements, lend- QUESTION: Why should there be a ing criteria, allocation of voting power, rationalization of the U.N. 's fragmented relations with existing institutions, all development assistance programs? have yet to be settled. The prospects for ANSWER: As noted in the report of the making further progress on the articles group of experts on the structure of the at the next meeting in Geneva are favor- United Nations system, the U.N. system able given the spirit of goodwill which is more a product of historical circum-

stances than of rational design. The U.S. believes that it is time for the various separate U.N. development assistance programs to be reviewed as a whole in order to assess how they can be interrelated to assure maximum productivity. Whether such a review would call for their full consolidation into a single new agency, as recommended by the group of experts, is a most important question that needs careful study.

QUESTION: What kind of outcome do you expect from the Seventh Special Session of the U.N.?

ANSWER: Our objective in laying before the session a series of specific and meaningful proposals is to engage in a constructive dialogue leading to practical solutions to world economic problems. We do not anticipate that the special session itself will be the forum to achieve these specific results. We hope, however, that the session will focus on endorsement of practical goals and projects, referring implementation to specialized bodies.

QUESTION: Can it really be expected that the pattern of confrontation between developing countries and the industrialized countries can be changed in this two-week â&#x20AC;˘ session?

ANSWER: We do not expect a revolutionary change all at once. We hope it will be possible to begin to turn away from past patterns of confrontation toward concentration on specific projects of cooperation. That is why our presentation stresses practical steps that can be taken.

0

---------------------Mail with remittance to: SPAN Subscription Service, SUNDEEP,4 New Marine Lines, Bombay 400020

l\.. T S.rn" 1ll~ ORDER FORM

To order one subscription (12 issues). send Rs. 18 .

For two subscriptions, send Rs. 32 (give two addresses).

For three subscriptions, send Rs. 45 (give three addresses).

If you give a gift of S~AN, we will send you a gift book, 'The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution,' by Richard Morris.

To order, please fill out these coupons

Address

_

Address

Address,

_

P.O.

_

P.O.

_

P.O.

_

City

_

City

_

City

_

_

Dist.

_

Dist.

Dist.

State

L-

PIN CODE 000000

_

State

------------------J

_ PIN CODE 000000

~