December 1984

December 1984

SPAN 2 Reagan's Resounding Victory

by Mildred Sola Neely

6 An Interview With the President

8 An Echo of India

by Jacob Sloan

12 A Fine and Flowing Hand

by Barbara J. Graham

14 Listen to Martha Stuart

by Mina Krishnan

18 America Mourns Mrs. Gandhi

20 A Cornucopia of American Art

26 A Return to Religion

by Fran Schumer

33 On the Lighter Side

34 American Students' Perceptions of India

by Palayam M. Balasundaram

38 Mississippi Bookman

by Andrew H. Malcolm

39 The Rewards of Research

by Joseph Carey

42 When Is the Next Earthquake?

by Richard L. Williams

48

Coping With Disaster

by Jim Merkel

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor

Nirmal Sharma

Editorial Assistant

Rocque Fernandes

Photographs: Inside front cover-Avinash Pasricha. I-Mary Anne Fackelman, The White House. 2 left-Joe Pinto; right-Avinash Pasricha; bottom-Peter Souza, The White House. 3 bottom-Michael Evans, The White House. 8 top and center-Carol Hightower; left center-Homi Jai; bottom left-Avinash Pasricha; bottom right-Barry Fitzgerald. 13-Smithsonian News Service Photos. 14-17-Mina Krishnan. 19-Avinash Pasricha. 20-25-all transparencies courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 21-courtesy National Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City. 22 top-courtesy Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. 23 topcourtesy Yale University Art Gallery. 24-Private collection. 25-courtesy The Louvre, Paris. 26-© 1983 Ezra Stoller. 27-© 1983 Timothy Hursley. 28 (clockwise from top left)-© 1983 Greg Hursley; © 1983 Barbara Karant/Karant & Associates Inc.; © 1983 Gordon Schenck; © 1983 Gerald Moorehead. 29-John Goodman/Special Features. 30illustration by Eleni Constantopoulos. 36-courtesy P. Balasundaram.

37-Michael O'Halloran. 38-Bill Stover/The New York Times. 41courtesy National Institutes of Health except top by Dan McCoy/Rainbow.

42-C. H. Graves, Library of Congress. 44-William Garnett. 46 top- Rob Lewine; bottom- U .S Geological SurveylD. R. Pollard Associates. 47- Tom McHugh/Photo Researchers. Inside back cover and back cover-Max Mackenzie.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this maga· zine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Govemment. Printed by Raj Kumar Wadhwa at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs.25; single copy, Rs. 4. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.

Front cover: President Ronald Reagan won reelection in an impressive landslide victory. See pages 2- 7 for an interview with the President and pictures of his first term.

Back cover: Baltimore Uproar, a glass and ceramic mosaic byRomare Bearden, overlooks the expansive mezzanine level of the Upton Metro ·station. The mosaic depicts that neighborhood's colorful tradition of jazz music: see inside back cover for more subway art.

On behalf of SPANmagazine and the U.S. Infonnation Service in India, I would like to express our grief and to offer sympathy to all the people of India on the loss of their great leader, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The shock and sorrow of all Americans was expressed by President Ronald Reagan in this condolence message: I want to express my shock, revulsion, and grief over the brutal assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of the Republic of India. The people of the United States join me in extellc;lingour deepest sympathy and condolences to the people of India and the.Prime Minister's family as they mournMrs. Gandhi's death.

As Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy and Chainnan of the Non-Aligned Movement,Mrs. Gandhi was a source of global leadership. Her detennined efforts to promote peace, security and economic development in South Asia and throughout the world. will serve as a constant reminder of Mrs. Gandhi's commitmentto protect the shared values of democratic nations.

The Prime Minister and I had personal correspondence recently regarding the scourge of terrorism. Weagreed upon the necessity for freedom-loving states to strengthen our cooperation to stamp out this menace to humanity.

Her senseless murder serves as a vivid reminder of the terrorist threat we all confront. Wemust President Reagan signs the condolence book at the therefore renew our detennination to overcome Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. this threat and ensure that Prime Minister Gandhi's accomplishments and memorywill serve as an inspiration for humanity.

U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, when he arrived in NewDelhi as leader of the American delegation to Mrs. Gandhi's funeral, also expressed America's sorrow in the following statement: This is a sad occasion for India, for the United 'States, and for men and womenof ge:adwill throughout the world. Indira Gandhi symbolized India: She spoke for India's commitmentto a humanedemocracy, to a better life for all the people of India, and for peace and justice amongall people. She won the respect of all, not the least that of my fellow Americans, as a good and wise leader. Thus, she earned well her position as a world citizen of the first rank. Wemay be assured that her place in the history of our times is secure as it is seQlre in the hearts of her people ....

Your new Prime Minister has spoken of his mother's "dream of a tmited, peaceful, and prosperous India." He has called on his countrymen to complete her unfinished work. Weknowthat the people of India will meet this challenge ....

The United States strongly supports the independence, unity, and territorial integrity of India and recognizes its pivotal role in the region.

Weshare the important goals of peace and stability both in South Asia and over all the globe. Welook forward to working closely, productively, and in the highest of mutual regard with the new government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Wewill do so as we did with the goverrnnentof his great and distinguished mother to whomour thoughts turn so strongly, so warmly on this tragic day.

A statement by Secretary Shultz after meeting with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi--and tributes from other Americans--appear on page 18.

Reagans Resounding Victory On November 6 Ronald Reagan won re-election to the U.S. Presidency by a historic landslide. He became the second President to carry 49 of the 50 states (President Richard Nixon was first in 1972). Reagan's 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale's 13 was exceeded in the last 50 years only by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he captured 523 electoral votes to AlfLandon's 8 in the 1936presidential election. And Reagan's share of 59 percent of the popular votes is closest to President Lyndon Johnson's record 61.1 percent in 1964.

Photographs on these pages highlight. some of Ronald Reagan's activities during the first term of his Presidency.

Above: Reagan takes the oath of office as the 40th President on January 20, 1981. Above, right: President and Mrs. Reagan escort Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to a state banquet at the White House during her 1982 visit to the United States. Right: In 1983 the President signed into law a new national holiday to commemorate the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. Here, Coretta Scott King recalls her late husband's contributions to civil rights after the signing ceremony.

Left: During his May 1984 tour of China, President Reagan answered questions from students at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Below: The Presidentdisplays his doodling talent. Below, left: With West Berlin Mayor Richard von Weizsaecker (left) and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt by the side of the Berlin Wall in 1982. Bottom: The President meets with Afghan freedom fighters at the White House.

YOU ARE lEAVING THE

AMERICAN SECTOR SIE VERlASSEN DEN AMERIKAHISCHEN SEKTOR ~ US A,QMV

In the Senate, President Reagan's Republican Party retained its majority, but suffered a net loss of two seats. The present lineup in the Senate is: Republicans 53; Democrats 47. In the 435-member House of Representatives, although the Republicans wrested 14 seats from the Democrats, the Democratic Party is in control of the lower chamber with 253 seats. Of the 13 gubernatorial contests, Republicans won eight for a net gain of one seat, giving them control of 16 of the 50 states.

Political experts hailed President Reagan's unprecedented election sweep as a great personal victory, but disagreed as to whether or not it signaled a major party realignment in the United States.

"The American voters clearly demonstrated that Ronald Reagan was the leader they wanted," said former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss. "There was nothing Walter Mondale could do. I don't know two people in America who could have run against Ronald Reagan this year."

Speaking in a similar vein, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican Party's elder conservative, said the 59 to 41 percent victory margin "doesn't surprise me a bit. I think Mondale ran a very good race, but there is no Democrat alive who could beat Mr. Reagan."

Mondale himself was typically candid about why he lost, saying he could not persuade young and independent voters "that I had the vision of the future that I had." He also said that he was running against "a very popular President in the midst of what was perceived as good economic times and with an electorate understandably anxious for some continuity" after a string of one-term Presidents. Congratulating President Reagan on his victory, he added, "He is our President, and we honor him tonight.

This choice was made peacefully, with dignity and majesty .... We rejoice in the freedom of a wonderful people, and we accept the verdict."

Ed Rollins, director of the ReaganBush Campaign Committee, said: "The real message is that old-style liberalism has been repudiated by the American public." However, he minimized the importance of the idea of a party realignment. Noting that such a realignment would take several elections to become a About the Author: Mildred Sola Neely is a SPAN correspondent in Washington, D.C.

reality, Rollins stated: "If the young voters who went with Reagan 'stay with the Republican Party, such a realignment might take place in 1988 or 1992."

Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who fought Mondale for the Democratic nomination, said: "I disagree this is some kind of realignment. There's no mandate at all, because of the kind of campaign the President ran, it was a personality contest."

"It's too early to talk about realignment," said CBS-TV commentator Bill Moyers. What Reagan's popularity among traditionally Democratic groups in the electorate signaled, he explained, was "the end of the New Deal era in America." (The New Deal coalition forged by President. Franklin Delano Roosevelt-among blue-collar workers, blacks, southern Democrats and major ethnic groups-made the Democrats the majority party for nearly four decades in the country.)

According to Time magazine, "There is not much hard evidence" of realignment.

However, it added, "There were some indications that realignment is at least a possibility, given a successful Reagan second term. The election destroyed the long-held assumption that an increase in voting automatically favors the Democrats .... Most of the new voters obviously went to Reagan. On top of that, the President won nearly two-thirds of the votes cast by youths 18 to 24, his highest margin in any age group and something of a new constituency for the Republicans."

Disagreeing with this assessment, Wall Street Journal reporter Albert Hunt described the election as "a disappointing night for the Republicans in terms of party gains." Republicans, he pointed out, lost two seats in the Senate, gaining one governorship and only 14 seats in the House of Representatives.

Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, chairman of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, also thought that President Reagan's victory was a purely "personal" one that did not indicate any realignment of the two major parties. In 1980, he said, Reagan won with only 51 percent of the vote and still the Republicans gained 12 seats in the Senate. This year, he added, although the President's margin of victory in the popular vote shot up to 59 percent, Republicans have in fact conceded two Senate seats to the Democrats.

Democratic Speaker of the House

Thomas O'Neill also did not think the races in. the House and Senate "show a conservative mandate for the President."

Congratulating the President on his magnificent victory, O'Neill added that he and the President "can work together.

We've always been friendly after 6 o'clock at night when our philosophies don't jibe during the day."

Many political observers thought that it was the buoyant economy which set "the basic pattern of the vote" in the election.

Washington Post reporter Richard Harwood wrote that the American voters seemed convinced that "the Republicans can best maintain prosperity and deal with the nation's other problems."

"Elections in the United States are very mercurial," noted Stephen Hess, during an appearance on a U.S. Information Agency "Worldnet" satellite television program. A senior fellow in governmental studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., Hess added: "We have to be very careful about talking about great trends when so much of what the American people vote about and think about has to do with their preferences for' particular personalities, and has to do with their pocketbook and how rich or how poor they're feeling at that moment."

Sanford Ungar, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., endorsed Hess' assessment: "I think on the domestic economy, the people were saying they support what the President has done.

They feel better off than they were four years ago and they oppose a tax increase which Mr. Mondale was threatening or promising. " However, Baltimore Sun diplomatic correspondent Henry Trewhitt, speaking on the same program, disagreed. He said he detected "a conservative, a genuine conservative, tide at the moment."

Whether or not the election signaled any realignment of forces in American politics, President Reagan' himself seemed to harbor no doubts about the meaning of his victory. Vowing to extend his conservative mandate "into the next decade and the next century," the President declared: "Our work isn't finished.

Tonight is the end of nothing; it's the beginning of everything."

D President Reagan joins local citizens to sandbag a dike at the St. Mary's River during floods in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1982.

An Interview With During the final week of the election and on the afternoon of his victory, the editors of Time magazine met President Reagan twice. Here are excerpts of Time's interview.

provide the incentives, taxwise, that would create economic growth and reduce unemployment. We started out to rebuild our defenses and then to actively seek arms reductions. Those are still our policies.

Question: A lot of people have said that this election may bring a political realignment in America. Do you think so?

President Reagan: I've gotten superstitious about talking about things of that kind. But I do believe that there has been a realignment in the sense of political philosophy. Some of the things that we have tried to do in the economy have gained support. There is less of that great division between the two parties philosophically. Not the leadership; the Democratic leadership clings to the old tax-and-tax and spend-and-spend philosophies. But I think there are people out there, that, regardless of affiliation, want a return to a free economy and less Government invasion of their lives and their business. Whether that could make for a political realignment, or whether we are going to see some basic changes in the philosophy of the parties-that too could happen. Some people stay where they are in their own party, but they make their party go in a different direction.

Is tax reform the biggest domestic goal?

Oh no, I think it's a very important one and I think it has been a long time coming. When you have a system that can have at least $100,000 million that is not being collected from people who legitimately owe it-there's a flaw. [Tax reform] is a part of the whole economic problem that faces us. I think we've made a good start and this is a case now of going further with it. One thing, above all, I won't stand still for anything under the guise of reform that is just another way of saying a tax increase.

What can be done to encourage that process in a second term?

Continue our program of reducing the intrusiveness of Government, reducing the rate of increase in Government spending, have tax policies that provide incentive for growth in the economy and let the people see that, to their surprise, it works.

Do you view a second four years as primarily an opportunity to fine-tune what you have already accomplished, or do you think there is a chance for more large steps in the direction of your goals?

That is like asking a quarterback who has taken the team from his own 10-yard line down to the opposing team's 20-yard line is he going to change his game plan?

No. It's working. We started out to

In your U.N. speech in September, you made the point very vigorously about your desire for genuine arms reduction. Do you envision much more time and energy being focused on that?

We are going to devote whatever time it takes to bring that about. We do not give in to the idea that the Soviet Union walked away permanently from those negotiations. And I just happen to believe that we cannot go into another generation with the world living under the threat of those weapons and knowing that some madman can push the button some place. It doesn't even have to be one of the superpowers. A war could probably be triggered, as nuclear weapons proliferate, by someone else doing it.

My hope has been, and my dream, that we can get the Soviet Union to join us in starting verifiable reductions of the weapons. Once you start down that road, they've got to see how much better off we would both be if we got rid of them entirely. And then, if the two great powers turned to the rest of the world and said: "Now look, we've done itcome on. Even if it's only one or two you've got tucked away someplace, let's get rid of them."

Have you seen any signs from the Soviets that they are ready to come back to the negotiating table?

I think the very fact of my meeting with [Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei] Gromyko means there hasn't been any outcry on their part that they won't. They have even made some proposals to us. It is true that when we agreed with one of them, they did not take yes for an answer. But I am optimistic and I believe that they, themselves, are concerned with where this is all going.'

In your weeks of campaigning, what did you see that perhaps surprised you in its intensity or its direction?

I have been emotionally moved by, first of all, the very spirit and optimism and feeling of the country, the pride that you see now. Not too many years ago, while I was Governor of California, the campuses were burning down, the ROTC [Reserve Officers Training Corps] buildings and so forth. Even the adults were not very happy about our country. Now there is a rebirth of patriotism. There is a pride in the country that is so evident.

The other thing, of course, is their feeling about the economy, that we're back, that they can hope ~gain }nd they can have ambition. I wasn't quite prepared fQrthis feeling. I think it began for me at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics; to look down at those volunteers putting on that magnificent show. And from there it has just snowballed.

A prominent Republican leader said off the record that for the party to hold on to what he thinks wilL be a great ~ictory in this election, it will have to be seen as more compassionate, stand for less selfishness than some people believe it now does.

Does that make sense to you?

We have been compassionate. All of .these stories about throwing the people out.' into the snow or throwing them off the school lunch programs-they're just plain lies. We're spending more money on food than our predecessors were.

What we h"ave done is, we found that some of the programs were not able to do

the President all they should for the truly needy because they were so busy also helping some people that really should not be getting help from their neighbors.

So what we did was redirect [aid].

During this campaign, every poll showed a split along white-black lines and poor-vs.-affiuent lines. Are you concerned that blacks and the poor feel that your Administration has not done them any good?

I know they feel that way, but I also know that there are some pretty knowledgeable blacks who don't feel that way and who know the true story. Sometimes I suspect there are leaders of pressure groups and interest groups who are very concerned about keeping their very cushy jobs, and they can keep those jobs better if they can keep their constituents unhappy and believing that there is a cause.

But of the 6 million jobs [created] in these last 21 months, 1 million have gone to blacks.

Your nomination in 1980 ended a long ideological split within your party, and your political success since then has kept that down. But at the Dallas convention we began to see the feud revive. Is it going to be possible to keep the party together philosophically? Or as you get into a lame-duck situation, will we see the feud revive?

I think there is a fringe, may be two fringes out there, but they are fringes. I think there is a mainstream Republican Party that is very united around the type of thing that we have been advocating, and there is not any quarrel with them on wanting us to go forward on what we are doing. But I think there is a fringe that, yes, that is down a liberal side, and you can usually look at their voting record and find out that they don't very often support us. But there is also a fringe up at the other side. And that fringe, I know as a fact, as far back as 1976 tried to solicit some of us and wanted to get a third party started. So I don't think they are supporters that abandoned us. They were never with us.

About your new supporters, young-will that trend grow?

the

Oh, I hope so. That has been one of the most thrilling things, particularly for someone like myself with a background of being hung in effigy a few times [on campuses] back in my Governor days. It is just amazing.

The funny thing is, they are kind of practical about it. Oh, there is a patriotism, no question. But I asked a young lady that I sat down beside at a kind of picnic lunch on one of these campaign things-I said, well tell me, what has brought your generation to this point?

She laid it right out hard and fast: economics.

She said, "Next year I'm going to be looking for a job and we see that now there's something happening in which there's a future out there for us.

Earlier, people were telling us there wasn't any and it didn't look too good for us. Now we like what we see."

Prairie fire, that marvelous phrase you used as Governor in 1967, you used it again this week. That's another way of talking about political realignment or seachange. Is that what's happening out there with your re-election-a sea-change? Is it bigger than Ronald Reagan?

California was a perfect imitator 'of what was happening at the federal levelthe runaway spending, the runaway Government authority, more and more intrusiveness. I think in a way there has been some prairie fire that has reached the banks of the Potomac. I think what we're seeing out there-I've never taken it personally-is a lot of people who more and more felt the hand of Government on their shoulder, more and more awareness that Government was getting unmanageable and beyond their control and certainly unmanageable as to cost. I think this is what's happened. The people have seen an opening and they've said, "Yes, let's caqy it through." I don't think the people, having seen that changes could be made, are suddenly going to turn around and walk away and let the Big Government advocates creep back in and put everything back in place.

There has been some speculation that you would consider, midway through a second term, stepping down and letting George Bush carry it forward.

I don't know where that came from. It was a surprise to me. No. I haven't considered anything of the kind [chuckling].

And wouldn't?

And wouldn't.

How has it felt to be running your last campaign for public office?

Well, there can't help but be some relief in that. Because it's a hard road. I only had one previous experience of running as an incumbent, where you've got the job to do as well as campaign.

And I have to tell you, being the challenger is a lot easier.

A little regret along with the relief?

No. Maybe if I were a younger man. ... No, I've had my day. It's not over yet, but when it is ... I think that will

be it.

You rarely talk about what you feel about being President. What have you found most satisfying as President? Or disappointing?

The frustrating and the disappointing thing is trying to get the ponderous wheels of the legislative process in motion on things that you feel desperately need to be done. The other one maybe comes down to smaller things-the ability sometimes to have brought to your attention an individual case and to be able to do something about it. To rectify some injustice. Those are wonderful and rewarding moments.

Surely getting the 25 percent tax reduction must have been rewarding.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. With things like that you go back upstairs feeling ten feet tall.

You've actually made something come true.

You must feel ten feet tall today.

Ida.

D

An Eeho of India

by JACOB SLOAN

"These poets are trying to get the nowness of living and working in India. They have confidence in their place and moment in time."

"I am presenting to you poetry written by Indians in English since 1959. I've chosen to read from the works of five poets.

There are many more I would have liked to read from, but I thought I would restrict the number of writers so I could give a more comprehensive representation to the work of each. For this reason the reading necessarily presents a fragment of the total scene; within this limitation I have tried to cover as much ground in terms of style, subject matter and sensibility as I could."

The speaker was Gieve Gustad Patel-poet, painter, playwright and, not incidentally, private medical practitioner from Bombay. The place was the handsome, large library of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. A Wilson Center fellow for 1983-84, Patel was addressing an audience interested in Indian culture. (Ten days before, another Wilson Center fellow from India,,,,Chidananda Das Gupta-the former Managing Editor of SPAN-had been one of the three leading speakers at a workshop on Cinema and the Third World that he had proposed.) Patel's talk was being recorded for transmission on the Center's weekly radio program, Dialogue.

Patel named the five contemporary poets he would be introducing to this international audience in Washington: Nissim Ezekiel, Keki N. Daruwalla, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, and (Patel smiled slightly) himself.

At the outset he was careful to make it quite clear that each of the Indian languages has a flourishing contemporary literature. There are writers in those languages who are as good as any he would read from and comment on.

Nissim Ezekiel, now in his late 50s, was the most senior of these poets; 1959 was to be the starting point because that was the year Ezekiel had published his book The Unfinished Man. Certainly, Indians had been writing poetry in English long before that, but, Patel felt, "it was difficult to sustain interest in most of that work." The earlier poetry was "imitative Victorian and Georgian, without sufficient inner poise to merit a legitimate notion of literary influence."

Ezekiel was identified as Jewish, a member of the Bene Israel community that had come to West India several centuries ago from the Middle East. He is also a Maharashtrian, very much a Bombay man. Ezekiel, a prolific writer as well as a critic of literature and art, had written on a variety of Bombay city About the Author: Jacob Sloan, a former Editor of SPAN, is himself a distinguished poet who lives in Washington, D. C.

At the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. c., poet Gieve Patel (left and middle row, center) reads his poetry and that of other contemporary Indian poets including Arun Kolatkar (left, center), A.K. Ramanujan (far left) and Nissim Ezekiel (middle row, far left).

issues (such as civic cleanliness) for the popular press. On social issues, Ezekiel was an optimistic populist-but, philosophically, a skeptic, sardonic and iconoclastic. Nevertheless despite his clear-eyed sophistication, Ezekiel was "very touching in his insistence that the world can be improved step by dogged step."

Ezekiel's "A Morning Walk" was the first of his poems read, as a formal early work that reflects many of his continuing social concerns: "The city of Bombay, the rapacity of human commerce, and a troubled reaching out [by the poet] towards spiritual clarity." In the question period that followed his readings, Patel was to note some echoes in this pbem of the influence of the Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden: "The more he stared the less he saw/Among the individual trees." I personally was also reminded of Robert Frost's: "The garden on the hill is cool."

Patel moved on to "Night of the Scorpion," a later poem by Ezekiel and very different. "Runil and incantatory, it is a reminder that even the most urban Indian, like Ezekiel, still has rural links with his past." The audience smiled and sighed at the poem's moving and effective ending with its sentimental touch: My mother only said Thank God the scorpion and spared my children.

picked

on me

Two groups .of Ezekiel's poems were read as "thrusts in different directions": Sardonic poems ("Hangover" and "Guru"), and "reaching out" poems: "Touching" and "I Met a Man Once." Patel concluded his readings from Ezekiel with "Latter-Day Psalms," the Jewish poet's rewriting of the Biblical Book of Psalms "to make them conform to Ezekiel's contemporary sense of justice and fairness." Patel felt these new versions of classic spirituals to be "very moving ... a kind of 20th-century prayer": Rare is the man whose fruit is in his season. Yet, his leaf must wither, and that which appears to prosper, is often dying at the root.

A wry prayer indeed!

"Keki N. Daruwalla," said Gieve Patel, "has been a senior official in the Indian Police Service, and has worked for many years in the heartland of the Indo-Gangetic plain. He draws his effects in bold, harsh strokes, but the effects he aims at are big and important. ... Nature is a thing of merciless beauty."

The boldness and harshness of Daruwalla's poetry were apparent to the listeners in Patel's reading of three poems: "The Ghaghra in Spate," "Death by Burial" and "The King Speaks to the Scribe (3rd century B.C.)." The last poem, in which the Emperor Asoka instructs his scribe in the edict to be inscribed on his famous Asokan pillars, Patel characterized as a most

significant poem on mercy, rare for this powerful poet whose "temperament ... is obviously racked by the suffering it must see, but ... cannot allow personal squeamishness to get in the way of a clear-eyed viewing of any situation." The poem's ending, defying the gods, was memorable: I am not here to appease gods. Even they must be ignored for a while and their altar-fires turn cold.

Men don't have enough fuel to burn their dead.

Mind you Kartikeya, between me and them is blood.

Your words will have to reach across to them like a tide of black oxen crossing a ford.

"A.K. Ramanujan," said Patel, "is professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is a linguist, writes poetry in both English and Kannada, and is regarded as one of the foremost writers in both languages. He visits India frequently, and over the last 20 years he has been collecting' folktales from variou~ parts of south India." Last year Professor Ramanujan received the MacArthur Award, designed to enable talented people to be free from the pressures of bread-winning and devote themselves to their work (see SPAN, November 1983).

To Patel, Ramanujan's poetic persona is a fusion of his experience in India and the United States, his adopted country.

"It is a fusion also of the contemporary moment and of the life within the Indian classics that he translates so well." Patel cited one such translation by Ramanujan from a classical Tamil anthology of the 2nd century A.D. The translation itself is "a part of Ramanujan's modern self." Indeed, Ramanujan's poems in both Kannada and English are equally remarkable for their rueful wit. Here is a poet comfortable in many worlds. The translation reads: Like a hunted deer on the wide white salt land. a flayed hide turned inside ou l, one may run. escape.

But living among relations binds the feet.

Like Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar too knows the city of Bombay well. And, like A.K. Ramanujan, Kolatkar is an accomplished poet in two languages-in his case, in Marathi and English. He works in advertising as a free-lance visualizer and designer. As such, he has a considerable reputation, is a contemporary man, one who at times even breaks into American slang.

Kolatkar's Jejuri was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 1977. Jejuri, Patel explained, is a small temple town in Maharashtra, rocky, hilly, barren. "Its economy rests on the pilgrims who come regularly to worship at its temples."

Beneath the "apparent casualness" and "fine cleansing wit," Patel detected "a sympathy for folk religious music, a mystical temperament and religious ecstasy."

The bus goes round in a circle.

Slaps inside the bus station and stands purring softly in front of the priest A catgrin on its face and a live, ready to eat pilgrim held between its teeth.

From "A Song for a Vaghya": I killed my mother for her skin.

I must say It didn't take much to make this pouch I keep turmeric in God is the word and I know it backwards. ] know it as fangs inside my flanks.

Bot I also know it as a lamb between my teeth, as a taste of blood upon my tongue.

And this is the only song I've always sung.

These are bitter, angry, violent words-God as a dog whose fangs are in the poet's flanks. Arun Kolatkar's "Old Woman" is a beggar who infuriates the temple visitor with her insistence.

His reaction: You want to end the farce When you hear her say "Wbat else can old woman do on hills as wretched as these?"

You look right at the sky.

Clear through the bullet holes she has for her eyes.

The poem ends on a shattering note of diminishment humiliation:

and

And you are reduced to so much small change in her hand.

The audience responded with an audible gasp. For behind the apparently facile condescension to its subject and the mocking flight from the uncomfortable reality of the helpless old woman, one heard the crack of doom: And as you look on the cracks that begin around spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.

And the temples crack.

And the sky falls ....

her eyes

This is visualization of a very high order.

And, finally, the piece de resistance. The poet read from his own works (always the preferred poetry reading). Gieve Patel's first poem, "Nargol," resembled Kolatkar's "The Old Woman" in its subject-a beggar woman whom the poet encounters on each annual visit to his village. But Patel's treatment is quite different. His beggar woman is a leper and he, as a modern physician, seeks to treat her with the controlled emotion of a scientist. Nevertheless, he recognizes that his yearly encounters are in fact a kind of "private battle" which the reluctant donor, though supposedly more powerful, inevitably loses. He is aware that he is being manipulated, but gives in to her appeals to his superiority: At the end it is four annasFour annas for leprosy. It's green To give so much But I am a rich man's son.

She cringes-I've worked for vour mother.

She hasn't.

- You come just once a year.

All right, a rupee. She goes.

He is left with a defeat, a debasement that is not his alone, but that of a society guilt-ridden by poverty:

Walking to the sea I carry A village, a city, the country, For the moment On my back.

Unlike Kolatkar, Patel anticipates no doom; rather a state of continued, inescapable, ambiguous bewilderment. On his last return to the village: This time you did not come To trouble me. In the middle Of a lane I stopped.

She's dead, I thought; And after relief, the ~ext thought; She'll reappear If only to baffle.

Two of the poems Patel read derived from his medical experience. One is "Post-Mortem," pe~formed swiftly, neatly, and-as Patel envisions reality-to an evasive, indecisive conclusion: And all these insides That have for a lifetime Raged and strained to understand Be dumped back into the body, Now stitched to perfection, Before announcing death Due to an obscure reason.

"Forensic Medicine: Text Book" was, Patel explained, written in revulsion at the political and social horrors of the times. It extrapolates from textbook illustrations of anatomy to the images of torture and violence of our age, and ends on a note of inevitable despair. The evil world, like the human anatomy, will not change: You are now full circle With nothing Not thought of, not done before.

Patel's relation to religious tradition is, like Kolatkar's and Ezekiel's, uncertain, mocking and ambiguous. In "Vista," the poet lifts up a young boy at prayer and heaves him over his head on an impulse: Given thought I wouldn't do itI am no god-destroyer, I have little against prayer.

It was a "silly act," and yet the boy enjoyed it. He incorporated the joy of play into the act of prayer: Later he came to me, shy and merry: "This evening when I am praying," he said, "do it again."

"Dilwadi," the last of his own poems that Patel read, concludes on a similar note of slowly won, paradoxical hope.

The displaced villagers, so reluctant to change, gradually take over a new planned town and convert it into the image of the old: The contractors sigh.

From unpromising seed Dilwadi blooms into a makeshift town.

After the readings the questions were curious, answers candid and thoughtful.

QUESTION: But why should an Indian write in English?

PATEL: True, English speakers and readers make up only a small percentage of the Indian population. But our country is so large, even a small percentage means millions of readers.

Q. Why are the poems so melancholy, with all hope lost?

A. We are all suspicious of a too easy relief (from the difficult facts of life) in a return to God. Q. Which poets have influenced you personally?

A. I am particularly close to the classics-George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Q. But these are religious poets.

A. I also like Indian 16th-century Bhakti [liturgical] poetry.

Q. What is the connection between poetry being written in English in India and that written in other Indian languages?

A. I am not clear whether there is a connection. I have been told that Ramanujan (who writes in Kannada) and Kolatkar (who writes in Marathi) treat the same subjects in the Indian languages that they treat in English. Ramanujan writes [English poetry] like someone picking up a grain, delicately between two fingers ... like the traditional poetry he translates.

Q. How would you characterize the poetic situation in English in India today?

A. These poets are trying to get the nowness of living and working in India. They have confidence in their place and moment in time. The center of their world is here. They recognize that this is a young-old country. They no longer idealize the village, as earlier generations did, but they are fully aware of the problems of urban society. They are familiar with popular culture (like Bombay kitsch films), but it does not influence their poetry. They are not academic writers. They do not accept a shared literary heritage, either as burden or emblem.

To repeat: These poets are poets of the here and now: their country, their time. India, the present.

0

Located in the Norman style castle building on the Mall in Washington, D.C., that for more than a century has been, the center and symbol of the renowned Smithsonian Institution, is the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Center seeks from individuals throughout the world outstanding project proposals in humanities and the social sciences.

Fellowships are open to both academics and nonacademics.

Eligibility for academics is limited to the postdoctoral level.

Successful applicants have normally published at least one book beyond the Ph.D. thesis. Participants from other backgrounds are expected to possess equivalent maturity and professional experience. Fellows devote their full time to research and writing for periods ranging from four months to a year. Competition is very keen. One out of every 10 applicants is accepted yearly.

Since the first scholars began arriving at the Center in 1970, of the more than 700, 10 have been Indian. For 1983-84, of the 52 persons chosen from the 406 applicants from 36 countries, two were Indians: Chidananda Das Gupta, filmmaker and critic, whose project dealt with cinema and social change in India; and Gieve Gustad Patel, who worked on a play dealing with the subject of the bequeathing of civilization from one generation to the next. Since 1981, the Center has granted fellowships to four other individuals for projects that relate to India.

George Morris Carstairs, of the United Kingdom, former vice-chancellor of the University of York, worked on "Change and Resistance to Change in a Small Indian Village: An Anthropological Study, based on Fieldwork Spanning 31 Years, 1950-81." In 1983, Carstairs' book, Death of a Witch, based on his project, was published.

Jagat Singh Mehta, India's former foreign secretary, examined "India's role in a fragmenting but interdependent world."

And Nayantara Sahgal, novelist and journalist, wrote a novel, Rich Like Us. Chosen as a Wilson Center fellow for 1984-85 is socialphilosophical writer Rajrnohan Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi's grandson is working from September 1984 on an examination of some Muslims who have influenced India in the 20th century.

The moving finger writes and having writ writes on for at least 10 years before it belongs to an expert calligrapher.

The ancient Chinese believed there were only three true arts-poetry, drawing and calligraphy.

Within the past decade, that third art-the word itself means beautiful writing-has become a rising star on the American creative scene.

From youngsters to seOior citizens, from housewives to biologists, budding scribes are signing up for classes in the art of calligraphy. They turn to it for artistic self-expression, to letter wedding invitations, to write with flourish, to improve their penmanship or simply for a new pastime. Some come with little awareness of what the craft requires and do not return after the first class. Others study for several years, eventually becoming skilled enough themselves to teach.

"It's a question of seeing this on many different levels, like the rungs of a ladder," says Sheila Waters, an internationally known British calligrapher who 12 years ago inaugurated calligraphy classes for the Smithsonian Institution's Resident Associate Program in Washington, D.C. "You can stop on any rung you want. Some people get no further than addressing envelopes nicely.

Others make a partial living at it with birthdays and weddings, but maybe couldn't arrange the layout for a certificate. And that's fine."

Though there are no formal standards, some experts in the field recommend five years of serious study for a person to attain proficiency in the craft and 10 years or more of experience and training to teach and work as a fuIJ-time professional.

The Chinese regard their 3,000-yearold calligraphic tradition as their supreme achievement.

The treasured forms are created with brushes on traditional materials, such as rice paper. Soft brushes produce flowing, leisurely lines; stiffer brushes are used for rapid writing.

The calligraphy of Western nations dates back to methods and styles of writing used in ancient Rome and refined by scribes during the Middle Ages. The tools in this tradition are the reed, the

quill and, nowadays, hard-pointed pens, the products of technological development. The use of pens, and the faGt that Western writing uses letters of the alphabet rather than ideographs (word pictures) gives Western calligraphy a different look from that of the East.

Though the surge of popular interest in calligraphy in the United States is recent, it is rooted in a revival of medieval calligraphy in Britain during the glory of the Victorian age. Americans were primarily impressed by what is still regarded as the Bible of the craft, Edward Johnston's Writing & Illuminating & Lettering, published in London in 1906. At age 25, in delicate health, Johnston decided to forego the study of medicine to study and practice formal penmanship.

Although British and American lettering styles bear a strong resemblance, calligraphers on the two sides of the .Atlantic have differed in their interests.

"In England, the focus has been on original work for special purposespresentation pieces, manuscript books, the hand-done piec{f with gilding and illumination," Waters explains. "In the United States, the focus has been on the commercial, usually through printed reproduction. " This gap, Waters notes, is rapidly closing. "What we now have is a fusing, an amalgam of the two. The' younger generation of good British calligraphers is being influenced by what's going on in America . You get the best work from seeing the best in both," she says.

Less than a decade ago, Britain's prestigious Society of Scribes and Illuminators had no Americans among its members; today there are six. In the United States, professional organizations such as the Society for Calligraphy in Los Angeles, San Francisco Friends of Calligraphy, Chicago Calligraphy Collective and New York Society of Scribes have given the craft national prestige. In all, there are 100 calligraphic societies in the nation, with some 18,000 members. Art stores now carry calligraphy kits, and craft journals and magazines such as Calligraphy Idea Exchange are growing in circulation.

American calligraphy runs the gamut of styles and uses. It can be as simple as a calligram (a decorative arrangement of

letters) shaped like the head of a small girl, designed by Sylvia Keys, a Washington, D.C., calligrapher.

Or it can be as complicated as Water's "Roundel of Seasons," a miniature painting of a calendar with calligraphy displaying the months and seasons and encircled by the 12 signs of the zodiac. With a kaleidoscope of colorful intricate designs and figures interwoven throughout, Water's work took nearly six months to complete.

Calligraphy can be trendy. Pop Singer Lionel Ritchie used calligraphy for everything from thank-you notes to promotional advertisements for his first concert tour. Or it can be institutional. The White House employs four full-time calligraphers who letter up to 80,000 invitations, menus and other items each year. have been loInfluential calligraphers cated throughout the land. Early in the century, in Hingham, Massachusetts, William Addison Dwiggins distinguished himself in lettering, illustration and type design. Though he was unsuccessful in organizing a calligraphy society, he influenced the physical look of literature for 30 years as a book designer for Alfred A. Knopf, a New York publishing firm that emphasized aesthetic book design.

In the Rhode Island area during the 1920s, John Howard Benson read the Johnston manual and dedicated his life to the creation of beautiful letters, specializing in cutting letters in stone. Late in the 1950s, Lloyd Reynolds, who pioneered in italic handwriting, made Portland, Oregon, one of the country's foremost calligraphy centers.

But these geographic differences have not resulted in identifiable regional styles, according to calligrapher Dick Beasley who teaches the craft at Northern Arizona University in Fiagstaff. "In each area (of the country) there's always one strong person, and that influence lasts for a while, but basically speaking, it evens out," he says. "Some of the better teachers are traveling all over giving lessons, so people in various parts of the country are getting the same influences."

Calligraphy can be divided into three major categories. "Each style has its own natural speed. To acquire that skill and speed requires a lot of practice," Waters says. "It's a very fine-tuned motor skill, just like playing a musical instrument."

One style, utilitarian calligraphy, involves the lettering (and reproduction) of certificates, invitations, leaflets-those things which can also be done by type.

This form relies upon traditional layout and modern asymmetrical design, and legibility is essential. In the second category, an author's words are interpreted artistically. Original works for framing, wall posters and prints of quotations are familiar products.

The third category consists of calligraphy for self-expression. It becomes purely a personal art form, shifting dramatically into a world of sometimes-illegible, modernistic letter creations. These have brought both praise and criticism from within the profession for their unorthodox style.

"Thoughtful chaos" is the description chosen for this third genre by Eleni Constantopoulos, a calligraphy instructor at the Smithsonian, "You can't read it," she explains. "In classic calligraphy, the art communicates an idea through reading and beauty. With abstract or modern calligraphy, communication is through emotion. It elicits a state of mind."

Constantopoulos' background is in classical calligraphy-she has studied under the appointed scribe to Queen Elizabeth II-but she relishes the use of abstract expression in her work. She sometimes deserts her standard pens and nibs to use curtain rods, bamboo reeds and even carrots as lettering instruments.

Nor does she shy away from using liquids such as beet juice or rusty nail water as media rather than just inks and. watercolors.

Still, Constantopoulos emphasizes that "abstraction isn't thoughtlessness. The lettering is very skillfully controlled and translated abstractly." And while she encourages her students to experiment in their work, she warns those who want to learn this art seriously that the key to all good calligraphy, including the abstract form, is a solid background in traditional lettering. "In calligraphy the stroke is most important. It has to be honest," she cautions. "And before you can make a perfect stroke, you have to know how to make an honest stroke."

0 Barbg.ra J. Graham is a writer with the Smithsonian News Service in Washington, D.C.

About the_Author:

Clockwise from left: A calligram of a girl's face

by Sylvia Keys; an abstract arrangement of the alphabet by Eleni Constantopoulos; an invitation lettered by the White House staff; a definition of calligraphy in classic lettering by Sheila Waters.

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Every village has stories to tell-of its problems and needs.

But is anyone listening? How can villagers get their views across? Martha Stuart (right) has the answer. Videotape.

And she not only tells them how but also gives them the equipment so that they can make their own programs.

Listento Martha Stuart

TO:' "d

Are you listening?

Martha Stuart has been repeatedly posing that question in many parts of the world, including India, for the last several years-and the answer-is an enthusiastic "Yes." Because what she has to offer is unarguably worth listening to, worth seeing: pictures and moving images that tell factual tales.

Are You Listening? (A YL) is the title of Stuart's series of videotaped programs featuring conversations with people who are "endlessly talked about and rarely ever listened to." The subjects are contemporary-family planning, marriage, divorce, widowhood, drug addiction, energy self:sufficiency, Indochinese refugees-but, unlike most other radio or TV documentaries, the people talking are not experts but individuals who have been personally affected by the issues.

Stuart has edited these videotaped sessions into accessible packages that provide intimate and candid insights to problems that affect people the world over. Stuart, who started Martha Stuart Communications Incorporated more than a decade ago in New York, has made it an international series, shooting programs in Europe, Egypt, India, China and South America.

The programs are available for rent or sale and broadcast to interested institutions and individuals. The video cassettes are used at conventions, meetings, seminars and small-group discussions.

Over the last few years Martha Stuart has added a second-and perhaps more significant-dimension to her work. Traveling to villages in India, Mali, Indonesia, China and Jamaica, Stuart has not only shown her cassettes to the villagers-but has also given them the equipment and the knowledge necessary for them to make their own video programs. She exposes them to video, helps them take the first

ph"""ph, by MINA KRISHNAN

few steps in production and then leaves behind the equipment to create their own communications programs.

"By teaching Third World village people how to use small-format portable video equipment, I provide them with a means by which to exchange information and experience without falling prey to the distortions built into the use of conventional media," Stuart says. She helps the villagers to achieve a kind of self-sufficiency in such videotape experiences.

Martha Stuart Incorporated arranges to give the necessary video equipment to the villages-or to a rural development agency. Given the simplicity of video, they soon learn to produce their own programs. "Once they have the basic video equipment and the knowledge of how to use it," explains Stuart, "even villagers who lack any formal education are able to become participants in the work of community and national development rather than serving as targets for professional developers' aims." They can show their video cassettes to policymakers to get their own views across, or to other villagers to spread a message-be it family planning or proper sanitation.

The benefits of this kind of exchange transcend even country boundaries. Says Stuart, "People working in population control in villages in Indonesia and Egypt can learn more from each other than either can gain from what filters down from their national governments or international agencies. Language is no barrier since dubbing tracks can easily be added to videotape without affecting the feeling or tone of what is being shown.

This thinking resulted in the founding of Village Network, a joint project between the United Nations University and Martha Stuart Communications.

Its aim is to develop video production capabilities and an exchange mechanism for videotapes in various parts of the world. Stuart and her team

Clockwise from far left: Martha Stuart answers questions from participants at the video workshop she organized for the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEW A) in Ahmedabad; Neeruben, a senior SEW A member, turns . director; Sally Stuart, following in her mother's footsleps, explains the working of the equipment to women ill Gulbai Tekra, a locality in Ahmedabad.

came to Ahmedabad as part of the Network expansion program-to conduct a USAID-funded video workshop for SEWA (the Self-Employed Women's Association) in Ahmedabad.

Magsaysay Award-winner Ela Bhatt, the moving force behind SEWA, after seeing the use of video in social change in other parts of the world, recognized its potential for SEW A, an organization of 14,000 women workers, including street vendors, small-scale producers and laborers. SEWA provides its members with skills training, sets up cooperative organizations which help in the production and marketing of goods, advocates women's rights before the authorities and runs a cooperative bank that makes loans to women who run these smali businesses. Now that it is extending its activities beyond the city. into the surrounding countryside, SEWA needs powerful communication tools to explain its commitments.

"When we first saw what this equipment can do," said Ela Bhatt, "we were thrilled because it was so real, so live, so instant and also so powerful." Earlier she had felt frustrated and dissatisfied at the attempts made by other media to explain the work being done by SEW A. "They would take our photographs, film our activities, but we often felt that they had not understood the concept of what we were trying to do. We had this itch: 'Why can't we have this sort of equipment in our own hands so that we can say what we want to say?' " Sitting at the house where the SEW A video workshop was being conducted, Ela Bhatt related a part of the SEW A-Stuart story. "I first handled a camera at Mali and became convinced that I should have this technology for SEW A. I was really impressed by how easily uneducated women could handle the video camera. We plan to use it among SEW A members all over Gujarat and to expand our membership, to make our diverse activities known all over."

"SEWA," she says, "is a project by women for women. It provides a means of mobilizing women workers for organization and training in subjects such as health, childcare, banking and leadership. Video provides us a way to extend the impact of SEW A and to show how joint action on the model of the labor or cooperative movements can help women become integrated into the development process."

This writer visited the workshop at the end of its third week and observed some of the concluding sessions. I also saw a couple of the tapes they had produced. One sequence has stuck in my mind. A woman printmaker talks into the camera of how she works independently and earns her livelihood. There is pride in her face at her self-sufficiency. And strength, that lets her speak lightly of the hard work she puts in. She talks of how much money she makes; she is interrupted by one of the local traders who makes her state an inflated figure-the "official" figure. She corrects herself, apologizes for being "confused," but the message is clear. The tape ends when the trader turns on the video crew, and hurls a string of abuse. Instant video drama!

Powerful because it is simple and tells the truth. Amazing because it has been made by women who have had only a few days' experience with video equipment.

Watching Stuart and her team in action training the SEW A group is itself a vivid demonstration that communication is a function of intent and commitment, not just language. Her distinct Manhattan accent rings out across the courtyard of the bungalow at Gulbai Tekra, explaining how electrician's tape is used or pointing out which plug fits into which socket. She insists that every used tape be labeled and put away neatly and the equipment be covered against dust any time it is not in use.

There is steel in her voice but empathy in her eyes as, step by

Martha Stuart's team reviews the day's work-a video film made by SEWA members-along with workshop participants.

step, she rigorously puts the team through their paces. And there is ample reward in the avidity with which the women listen to her, and the affection with which they call out to "Marthaben." .

And "Marthaben" listens. "I love the word 'listen,''' she says. "It just says so many things." But not many people do it-and it was this realization that has made her a maverick in communications, waging her own form of insurgency. "I have found that television can be used to make understanding, not just report the lack of it," she says.

Her career in communications started ordinarily enough.

After graduating from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, she went to work for a newspaper in Oklahoma City. In St. Louis she divided her time looking after her family (her husband and two children-a girl and a boy) and doing "social public relations" froln the basement of her home. She always found the time for some community work. A few years later, divorced and living in New York with her children (both, now in their 20s, have worked with her), she got into producing TV shows, but it wasn't till 1963 that she decided to do that on her own.

Rebelling against the conventional and somewhat constricted approach of the big TV networks, she became an independent producer and evolved the format for the Are You Listening? programs in a way that challenged the conventional interviewtalkshow formats.

Instead of training a rapid-fire set of questions at participants, the program "brings together a group of people who have a particular experience in common and encoura'ges them to speak openly and candidly with each other of their thoughts and feelings," says Stuart, who usually gets the discussion going initially and then quietly withdraws. The video camera inconspicuously records the session. She eventually edits herself almost completely out of the conversation so that it flows along naturally. Stuart inspires a confidence in the groups that allows them to talk even about their most personal experiences with candor. They seem to forget that a camera is recording what they say. As The Washington Post put it, "Although the word 'listening' is in the title, this program is absolute television, beautifully produced."

Her object of "making social change through human exchange" she feels is best met by her two-pronged video projects. Stuart began to put into practice her views on the use of videotape in development more than a decade ago. Prepar-

SEWA's Ela Bhattfirsi handled a video camera ai Martha Stuart's workshop in Mali and realized the program's potential for SEWA.

ing a videotape in Colombia on family planning, she rediscovered what she had earlier noticed in other A YL series-that when people discuss a sensitive or threatening issue with their peers in an honest and open manner, they encourage others to come to grips with information and attitudes that they may not have otherwise confronted.

One of the men explaining his vasectomy said, "It is a river whose fishes have vanished, but it continues to be a river." Statements like these are more powerful in creating understanding and dispelling fears than the technical descriptions contained in official communications or the stilted responses obtained from conventional interviews.

This experience was revalidated in tapes produced in India on family planning for the 1974 Population Conference and through work done in Jamaica, Egypt, Indonesia, Mali, China and other countries in the 1970s.

While making these tapes, Stuart became convinced that an ongoing video capability should be left behind in the villages, so that the people could tell their own story and use the tapes to communicate directly with other people within their own province, their state, and in other parts of the country.

Is it a mere fad, catapulting people whose maximum exposure to technology has been a sewing machine or a transistor radio into the post-McLuhan electronic era? The answer is obvious in the reputation Martha Stuart has built for herself and her team-"a company that makes television as if people mattered."

Explaining the need and advantages of video, Stuart spells out the disadvantages inherent in the current communication and development projects.

"Firstly, development communication," she says, "is usually a one-way flow, proceeding from the top down, from the government to the people, from expert to the implementer, from the educated to the uneducated.

There is an assumption that the truth resides with the transmitter of the information, that the receiver exists only to accept and act upon the truths he is given.

"The collective official voice invariably predominates over the isolated individual voice. We are encouraged to believe experts and newsmen over the evidence of our own lives.

"A second characteristic is the reliance of development communication on the written word. Documentation of an experience in a report becomes the primary objective. From this flows the third feature-the blueprint fallacy: that communication exists to tell people what to do. At its extreme this

attitude creates people as targets at whom policymakers throw information decked out as instructions.

Success is then measured according to whether people do as they have been told."

Underlying all this is the orientation that literacy is the prime requirement for participation in the development process, that without literacy people can only be recipients, never initiators. And for the most part, the absence of feedback or interactive mechanism proves that the purpose of communication is taken to be delivering answers only, not raising questions or examining options.

Stuart offers an alternative approach that gives people the tools of communication and ideas and the experience of others and then invites them to make their own solutions. "It operates from .the standpoint that development is based on shared concerns, that instead of telling people what to do, there is more power in eliciting their involvement."

Her aim is to "reverse the flow of information" to let policymakers get an idea of the views of ordinary people. She also sees it as a "consciousness-raising tool," providing a spark for further debate. This approach will be far more effective than straightforward propaganda.

Stuart's approach stems from her belief -reinforced by her experiences while producing A YL programs-that "people want to be treated as human beings.

They like to be perceived as individuals, not stereotypes."

Video, Stuart is convinced, is a technology suited to serve these values. "Videotape," she says, "is a new kind of literacy tool. It gives the oral tradition a renewed and dynamic dectronic life. It remains in the user's control so that he or she can take in unfamiliar or threatening material at a comfortable rate by playing it over and over again. This makes it an ideal learning tool for use, individually or in groups.

"Video's unique strength is that it does not require central processing the way film, print, TV or virtually any other medium does.

It opens up many kinds of horizontal exchanges-material produced in one place can be taken and shown directly in another place with no prior need to go through a central lab or clearinghouse."

At the operational level, video is literally child's play.

"Portable videotape equipment is simple, easy to maintain and operate, durable and inexpensive.

It is truly 'appropriate technology'-small-scale, manageable," and suited to a wide variety of uses. It can be operated by people who have not had any prior experience with machines or equipment, with a minimum of training. It is a forgiving medium that encourages informality, intimacy and experimentation."

Video is especially important in countries with large-scale illiteracy. And, unlike most development tools, it does not have to be forced down people's throats. "People do not live their lives in accord with global consciousness, simply because they are told to, or encouraged by a centralized communication source that bombards them with the appropriate slogan," says Stuart. "It is the other way around. As people take the small actions that give them more control over their lives, the resulting sense of value and excitement propels them to connect and share with others like themselves. Global consciousness, like most thil}gs, grows from the bottom up; not the top down."

People have responded enthusiastically to Stuart's programs and have enjoyed being a part of the show. It is their show.

Martha Stuart has a grand vision of the difference selfexpression can make in people's lives. And she proves the validity of her vision through action.

0 About the Author: Mina Krishnan is a free-lance photojournalist who lives in Bombay. Her main interest is communications.

America Mourns Mrs. Gandhi.

This is a sad day for India, for the United States, and for people who stand for democracy around the world. " It is also a day when India can be proud of the legacy of Indira Gandhi, who spoke for India's commitment to democracy, peace and justice. \ I have had the honor today to meet with India's new Prime Minister. I told him of President Reagan's personal sense of respect and admiration for Indira Gandhi, and of the President's desire to continue the fruitful dialogue and the renewed positive trend in Indo-American relations that have taken shape over the "past few years.

This is also a day for confidence in the future. As I told the Prime Minister at the outset of our meeting, the American Government has no doubts as to that future. Your new Prime Minister has spoken of his mother's "dream of a united, peaceful and prosperous India." He has called upon India to complete her unfinished work. The United States has the utmost confidence that the people of India will meet this challenge. And as a good friend, the United States stands ready to help ensure that future-a future which, in view of the manifest resourcefulness of the Indian people, their commitment to constitutional government, and the Prime Minister's leadership, is full of promise.

I speak for all Americans when I tell you how profoundly shocked we were by the brutal act of terrorism which has caused us to gather here today. It was an action which stands condemned by all civilized people.

Terrorism, of which this is such a truly frightful example, has become the scourge of our times; it has touched the lives of all; we are diminished by it wherever it occurs as we are diminished today by the murder of Mrs. Gandhi. Let us, I plead, rededicate ourselves to the task of ensuring that terrorism will not succeed in its deeply cruel and disruptive purposes.

India, the country that gave the word and thought of nonviolence to the world, knows well the hand of terror-the hand that on the very morning of her independence struck down Mahatma Gandhi, the inspiration and father of that independence. In the United States we have not been spared. Twenty-one years ago this month John F. Kennedy was struck down by an assassin's bullet. President Reagan three years ago was the target of a mindless assassination attempt. But both India and the United States have shown the strength, resilience and vibrancy of democracy in their times of crisis. And so, we know that the Indian people and their leaders, as did we in our days of trial, will have strength in their sadness and draw strength from their commitment to democracy.

In this spirit, I today reaffirmed to the Prime Minister, America's strong commitment to India's independence, unity and

territorial integrity, as well as to stability impressed with Mrs. Gandhi's plans for her throughout the subcontinent. I assured him nation and her desire to improve relations that the United States would continue to work between India and the United States. closely with India in pursuit of the many Her tragic death is a tremendous loss to her mutual goals we share. nation and a blow to the supporters of peace I gave the Prime Minister a personal mes- and democracy throughout the world. sage from the President in which he expresses Thomas (Tip) O'Neill the hope that the Prime Minister will visit Speaker, House of Representatives Washington for talks early in 1985 to open the Festival of India as Mrs. Gandhi had planned to do.

Moments of loss bring friends together. The And I was joined in my meeting today by American people have known the shock and this distinguished delegatioIl.,- which includes - sorrow the people of India are now suffering the Majority' Leader of the Senate, Senator and we share their grief with special intensity.

Howard Baker, Jr., and the distinguished In the midst of our sorrow, we are also senator from New York, Senator Daniel reminded once again that India is a constituPatrick Moynihan. tional society in which democratic governThe collective experience of this delegation ment can survive even the worst blows. with India, stretching back (wer nearly the Daniel Patrick Moynihan entire course of in-dependent India's history, is Senator an impressive demonstration of the deep interest of prominent Americans in India's I was deeplyshocked and saddened to learn life-and I can tell you that their emotions just now, as they greeted your new Prime of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Minister, whom several of them have known Gandhi and I know these sentiments are closely for years, were heartwarming and widely shared by my congressional coldeep. Here today in this delegation are" four leagues ....

This tragic episode should ... serve as a distinguished Americans who have served in reminder to the members of the world comIndia as Ambassadors. Over the years, their stature has represented the esteem we have munity of the common need to renounce for India, and they in turn have honored our violence as a means of solving political or nation by their distinguished service. I am other grievances. Assassination can never be justified or condoned. proud to bring such a delegation to India.

Dante Fascell Ambassadors Robert F. Goheen, Daniel PatChairman, rick Moynihan, John Kenneth Galbraith and John Sherman Cooper are representative of a House Foreign Affairs Committee tradition stretching back to the warm IndoAmerican relations during the great era of relaPrime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru-a ... Mrs. Gandhi has been one of Asia's tionship and a legacy that we seek to reaffirm most important leaders for nearly two decades and was the leader of the world's most today.

Our two lands, the United States and India, populous democracy during troubled and have a firm and enduring relationship, one turbulent times. that is based on our common democratic Terror and assassination, particularly of the kind which claimed the life of Mrs. Gandhi, heritage, our long history of a rewarding association, our rich web of personal ties, our must be vigorously condemned by all decent shared interest in ever-expanding mutual sup- people and freedom-loving nations the world port and cooperation. We share the important over. No matter what political grievances goals of peace and stability in South Asia and individuals or groups think they have, no good over all the globe. We look forward to purpose can ever be furthered by such resorts working closely, productively, and in the to violence.

Stephen Solarz highest of mutual regard with the new government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Chairman,

George P. Shultz Secretary of State It was with great shock that I heard of the tragic assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. I welcomed her to the House of Representatives in July of 1982, and I was

House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs ... The assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is an intolerable intrusion of murderous violence upon the process of consent so cherished by the Indian people. As Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy and as Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, Mrs. Gandhi was a source of global leadership.

Her determined efforts to promote peace,

Secretary of State George Shultz, head of the U.S. delegation to Mrs. Gandhi's funeral, speaks after meeting with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In the delegation were (from left): Ambassador Harry G. Barnes, Jr., Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, Jr., and former Ambassadors to India Daniel P. Moynihan, John K. Galbraith, John S. Cooper and Robert F. Goheen (not pictured).

security and economic development in South Asia and throughout the world will serve as a constant reminder of Mrs. Gandhi's commitment to protect the shared value of democratic nations.

Ambassador Jose Sorzano U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations I am shocked and saddened by this act of violence.... Let us hope that the new government will succeed in finding peaceful solutions to the many difficulties India faces.

Charles Percy Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee ... The United States shares and understands India's grief at the tragic and senseless loss of Indira Gandhi, as we too know the agony which comes from the loss of a leader to a terrorist's bullet. And like India we relied on the fundamental strength of our people and our basic commitment to democracy to continue on the road to progress and national development.

Claiborne Pell Ranking Minority Member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee ... Mrs. Gandhi led the Government of India for 15 years. The daughter of lawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister following independence, Mrs. Gandhi grew up within Indian political life. She was respected as a shrewd, resolute leader who pursued her father's policies of nonalignment, secularism, and democratic socialism. As Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement she was, as President Reagan attested, "a source of global leadership."

A democratic country suffers an immense double blow-loss of the person, cancellation of the people's mandate-when its elected leader is removed by violence. So it is with the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, four-time leader of the world's largest democracy and a commanding figure on the international scene ....

She saw India make impressive inroads on its backwardness, with the Green Revolution in agriculture and the consolidation of an urban industrial base ....

The Washington Post "If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation," Indira Gandhi said Tuesday night. Her assassination Wednesday morning left India to struggle on without her leadership but with her legacy of brave faith in a single, democ~ and forward-looking nation ....

Today it is customary to salute India's achievement, under Indira Gandhi, in preserving democratic government despite oversized ethnic and economic strains.

Once again a sudden drama of communal violence in India has stunned the world. As they pay tribute to a leader who loved her people, India's friends hope that her stubborn vision of a united nation will inspire Indiansthose who revered her and those who did not-in their common crisis.

International Herald Tribune . . .Her death is the more grievous because so much more was invested in her than in even a Pope, a U.S. President or British Prime Minister: the task of holding India together and free.

Political murder is as old as politics itself, yet each time it strikes some prominent leader it shocks us again. So it is with the tragic killing yesterday of India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, apparently carried out by 'her own guards. Her murder marks both the passing of an extraordinary leader and the beginning of a dangerous political passage for the world's largest democracy. It is also another reminder that while terrorists often preach about their noble goals, their real aim is simply destruction.

Indira Gandhi, the 66-year-old assassinated leader of the world's largest democracy, played a larger-than-life role on the world stage as Prime Minister of India for 15 of its 37 years of independence and as the best known spokesman for the less developed nations of the Third World.

She was a commanding presence at the United Nations, where she was one of the most visible of national leaders who attended General Assembly sessions. At forums around the world she carried the torch for increased aid for have-not nations and an end to the superpowers' nuclear arms race ....

Stuart Auerbach The Washington Post . .. Despite outbreaks of rioting ... initial signs were that, politically, the abrupt transfer of power would proceed smoothly as in the past. All of the nation's most distinguished leaders-Mohandas [Karam chand] Gandhi, lawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and now Mrs. Indira Gandhi herself-have died at the zenith of power; and the democratic fabric of the world's largest democracy has' always held ....

Mary Anne Weaver The Christian Science Monitor That Indira Gandhi was a leader few could doubt. Indeed, it was really her grasp of power, her nearly single-minded perception of the need to use it to shape her sprawling nation, that ultimately led to the events culminating in her assassination-the most stark of all political acts.

Her death has unleashed a sense of revulsion at the depravity of murder as a form of protest. ...

Now India will pass through a traumatic period-one, it is hoped, that will be evolutionary and forward-moving. Outsiders have long wondered how the nation could hold together so long, given its diversity and the intensity of emotions among its people. Their past success suggests Indians can survive this horror, too ....

A Cornucopia of American Art "A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting 1760-1910," an exhibition depicting the development of a distinctive American art opened to rave reviews in Paris earlier this year. The 110 paintings by 49 artists showed major themes that characterized the work of this era.

During the last century the work of American painters was held in low esteem by the critics and connoisseurs of Europe.

They felt it was derivative at best and at worst trivial. Of course¡ American artists were influenced by the Europeans, their contemporaries as well as the classic painters of earlier years. But without attracting much attention and praise, the Americans were bringing to their canvases some of the ebullience and originality of their young country. For example, Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), who settled in Philadelphia, was so enamored of the European masters that he named his sons Rembrandt, Raphaelle and Rubens. Two of them became accomplished painters and followed in their father's tradition.

As one critic noted: "There is no tract of art history whose prestige has changed more quickly than pre-1900 American art." One evidence of this was the suggestion of a perceptive Frenchman, Pierre Rosenberg, curator of painting at The Louvre in Paris, that the American art of this period deserved a wider audience. So he suggested to Theodore Stebbins of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that a limited exhibition be organized for showing in Washington, D. C. , Boston and in Paris.

An expert committee chose 110 paintings by 49 artists. "When the Museum of Fine Arts set out to organize this exhibition (eventually given the name A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting 17601910)," Stebbins reports, "we toyed with many approaches before deciding, simply, that only the best would do. Neither a survey nor a theme would determine our choices; only the demanding test of quality would be allowed. If we were going to send American art to Paris ... we would send only masterpieces-and if we couldn't send masterworks, we wouldn't send anything."

The exhibition can be roughly classified under nine general headings. Colonial Genius and the New Nation; The Grand Manner; Painter and Poet in the Land; The Ideal Landscape; American Outdoors; The Flowering of Still Life; International Styles; Painters of Light; and Homer and Eakinstwo of the most famous American artists of the late 19th century.

According to Rosenberg, "As it has finally developed, the exhibition could hardly be more beau~iful and varied. All that is constant, as well as all that is contradictory in American painting has its rightful place here; the lines of steady development and the sudden changes of direction are clearly traced. Here are the subjects closest to the artists' hearts-landscape, portraiture, trompe I' oei!, the leading art centers of Boston, Philadelphia and New York-and the themes to which they returned-solitude, tranquillity, truth. But here, above all else, is the birth of American painting."

Critics agreed generally with what Pierre Rosenberg had felt about the exhibition.

Robert Hugfies of Time magazine, even though he was critical of some omissions, commented that the show "may be the best survey show of its kind ever held. Certainly it is the first time that this area of American art has been seen in proper concentration and strength in Europe." Grace Glueck said in The New York Times that the exhibition "has the lift and elan of a celebration."

So rich was the selection of American paintings that The Washington Post was convinced that "For Americans, it will be one of the most compelling exhibitions of American art we are likely to see in our lifetime, and should be carefully viewed.

For such a group of masterpieces-long ignored but in recent years elevated to the status of national treasures-is not likely to be assembled again."

In the following pages SPAN presents a sampling of what A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting 1760-1910 had to offer. On the facing page is Raphaelle Peale's 1823 oil painting Venus Rising from the Sea-A Deception, one of the finest examples of trompe l'oeil (fooling the eye).

The story goes that Peale had hoped his nagging wife would think he had covered a salacious nude with one of her linen napkins. On page 22 is Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs. Church believed that only natural history spoke of Creation and signified the special destiny of the New World.

This belief took him to the Arctic where he created the painting. On the same page is Winslow Homer's Snap the Whip, which also eulogizes the great American outdoors.

Thomas Eakins, whose Will Schuster and Blackman Going Shooting for Rail is reproduced on page 23, was a realist who brought a new awareness of scientific accuracy to painting,. Before photography had been fully developed, he strived to capture fleeting moments of reality. Mary Cassett's The Bath is one of the finest examples of the Painters, of Light, while Thomas Eakins' The Pathetic Song shows his subtle use of light and shadow. Joseph Decker, like his contemporary Eakins, shows his hard-edged realism in Pears (page 24) and on the next page is James McNeill Whistler's celebrated portrait of his mother, which he termed Arrangement in Grey and Black.

Whistler rejected the detailed storytelling approach and developed his own unique manner which emphasized subtle tonal relationships and abstract structure. Of his mother's portrait, Whistler once commented, "To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait? It must stand or fall on its merits as an arrangement. "

A Return to Religion After failing to find adequate answers in such secular alternatives as political activism, science and art, some American intellectuals are being drawn to religion. So is the average American. Church membership is increasing. Many more university students are taking courses in religion. They seek moral answers to eternal questions.

There is not a seat left in Professor Harvey R. Cox's classroom at Harvard College. Students are sitting on the floor, straining to hear the words of today's lecture on Jesus and the Parables.

It is surprising enough that any lecture at Harvard, long a bastion of secularism, would concern itself with Jesus, but Professor Cox's course, entitled "Jesus and the Moral Life," is not even a campus oddity. It is one of 56 courses concentrating on religion, as opposed to less than half that number a decade ago.

"There's no doubt about it," says Cox, Victor S. Thomas Professor'of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, who last year had to turn undergraduates away from the course. "There's a tremendous resurgence of religious interest here."

It is not uncommon to see students wearing crosses or yarmulkes on cam-

puses across the United States, and few hide the fact that they go to church or synagogue. Not just students, but the academic community in general, long a haven for skeptics, is now giving religion a second look. "There is the sympathetic entertainment of religious belief in intellectual circles that you wouldn't have detected 10 years ago," says Peter Steinfels, executive editor of the Roman Catholic lay periodical Commonweal.

Unlike the 1940s and 1950s, when theologians such as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr exerted a powerful influence on religious thinking, the present interest in religion is less focused.

"There haven't been any major books or individuals responsible," says Professor Cox. "It's much more of a groundswell." Significantly, Cox's bestselling 1965 book, The Secular City, suggested

that people had lost interest in the sacred.

His new book, Religion in the Secular City, describes the current revival in religious concern, particularly among feminists and activists in Latin America and elsewhere.

It is not that a rarified group---:writers, artists and professors-is flocking back to houses of worship and becoming true believers. What these intellectual~ share is a revived interest in traditional religion and the questions it raises and seeks to answer. A century that has seen the Gulag, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the spread of nuclear arms has caused some Above: Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, designed by Richard Meier, 1981, Right: St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Pacific Palisades, California, by Charles Moore, John Ruble and Buzz Yudell, 1983.

Clockwise from left: Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, designed by E. Fay Jones, 1981; North Shore Congregation 1srael in Glencoe, lllinois, by Thomas Beeby, 1982; William R. Cannon Chapel at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, by Paul Rudolph, 1981; St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Houston, Texas, by Charles Tapley, 1982.

who used to champion rationalism and science to humble themselves. Since their secular gods have failed, they are beginning to view more traditional gods with a new curiosity.

Unlike the more impassioned swing to "born-again" Christianity recently, and to Eastern religions in the late 1960s, this revival is a more sober affair. "There is a reaction against extreme individualism and self, a preoccupation with and a search for roots with a capital R, which takes people back to religion," says Robert N. Bellah, Ford Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

"Tradition is back on the agenda with a positive force."

only a handful in the previous decade. "By Harvard's standards, that's almost a revival," he says.

At St. Paul's, a Roman Catholic church in Harvard Square, attendance at the 5 p.m. student mass on Sundays jumped from 250 in 1975 to almost 700 in 1983.

According to the Rev. Thomas Powers, the Roman Catholic chaplain at Harvard who is also director of Campus Ministries for the Archdiocese, a similar increase is noted among Roman Catholic college students throughout the greater Boston area.

Among Jews, the change is even more pronounced. "There's a markedly different attitude toward religion now than there was when I came here 25 years ago," says Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel. "Religion in general was on the defensive. ~<e is also e~idenee of a new But people lost confidence in progress, in - mterest m relIgIOn among the the social engineering they thought would usher in the Golden Age. This punctured American population at large. Although the self-confidence of the academy's church membership dropped dramatically between 1958 and 1975, it has since priests." Participation in weekly Hillel leveled off and even begun to rise slight~ services has increased sixfold during the Iy. In their book, The Confidence Gap, last decade. More than 3,500 Jews William Schneider, research fellow at attended High Holy Days services at Harthe American Enterprise Institute, and vard last year, compared to fewer than Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of 2,000 in 1973.

If intellectuals are growing more relipolitical science and sociology at Stanford Universityand senior fellow at the Hoover gious personally, they are also paying Institution, report that as of 1981, only more attention to the subject in a scholar14.5percent of the people had confidence ly sense. "In the last five years, whenin the U.S. Congress, but almost 60 ever there are sociology conferences at which papers on religion are delivered, percent had faith in religious institutions.

But it is among the young and among they're jammed," says the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, research associate at the intellectuals-two groups traditionally considered the most resistant to orga- National Opinion Research Center In nized religion-that the change is most Chicago and the author of The Religious pronounced. In 1978, only 27 percent of Imagination as well as several bestselling teenagers told the Gallup Poll of an novels. All over America, there has been interest in studying the Bible; in 1981, a spurt in the number of courses offered that figure jumped to 41 percent. in New Testament Bible and Jewish At Harvard, there has been a sig- studies. Across the board, enrollment in nificant change within all three major divinity schools is up.

"When I first'started teaching here in religious denominations. "When I first came here in the late 1960s," says the 1966, the study of religion was viewed as Rev. Peter J. Gomes, minister at Har- intellectually sort of kooky," says Profesvard's nondenominational Memorial sor Cox. "Now, there are very few people Church, "there was so little activity I won- who would make a serious case that the dered why they needed a second minister. teaching of religion doesn't belong at There wasn't enough work to keep one Harvard."

"There is a growing student interest in person busy."

That is no longer the case. Attendance at the humanities in general, and the study dailymorning prayers has gone up since the of religion is part of that," says Alan 1960sand attendance at Sunday services has Segal, chairman of the religion departdoubled from its nadir of 200 in the early ment at Barnard College in New York.

Frequently, among U.S. writers, artists 1970s.Furthermore, Gomes performed five agnostiadult baptisms last year alone, compared to and political activists-whose

Daniel Bell, professor of social sciences, Harvard:

"There is no rational way of proving or disproving God's existence."

Hilary Putnam, professor of philosophy, Harvard:

"The most valuable parts of any discipline are always on the edge of contradiction."

cism used to be taken for granted-one finds several who have quietly renewed a long-lapsed religious faith. The writer Paul Cowan has made a public example of the discovery of his Jewish faith in his recent book An Orphan in History, whereas others, like Ted Solotaroff, a senior editor at Harper & Row, prefer to keep theirs more private. Carl Oglesby, national president of Students for a Democratic Society from 1965 to 1966, is now a newly religious Christian; the writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, raised a Jehovah's Witness, today calls herself a "serious" Roman Catholic.

"Society is going through one of those periodic immersions in religious faith, so it is not surprising that those themes would show up in the works of writers," says the novelist Joyce Carol Oates.

AmoI1g the most obvious examples are the works of Walker Percy, Cynthia Ozick and Mark Helprin.

It would have been hard to imagine a similar revival 20 years ago. On April 8, 1966, Time magazine asked on its cover: "Is God Dead?" Among intellectuals today, God is not pronounced dead easily.

Science and religion are not viewed as necessarily incompatible, and logical attempts to disprove God's existence are viewed as somewhat arcane.

"There used to be the notion of 'God of the gaps,'" says Dale Vree, 39, once an activist in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and now editor of the New Oxford Review, a religious publication.

"Whatever we didn't understand, we'd attribute to God. If there was an earthquake, it must have been because of God. But once science explained those things, you had a crisis of faith."

Few modern intellectuals are plagued by such a crisis. "The 19th-century view of religion as superstition makes little sense today," says Daniel Bell, Henry Ford 2nd Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard. "Science and religion are in two separate realms. There is no rational way of proving or disproving God's existence."

Many intellectuals nowadays accept the notion of God as a metaphor for some kind of all-encompassing goodness. That it may be a paradoxical notion, or one that cannot be proved, is of little relevance. "The most valuable parts of any discipline-poetry, philosophy, religion-are always on the edge of contradiction," says Hilary Putnam, professor of philosophy at Harvard and political

A stylized cross and church spire by calligraphy instructor Eleni Constantopoulos.

activist turned religious Jew. "It's the old, anthropomorphic God who's dead," observes Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, whose book, Public Man, Private Woman, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. "The new God is more a concept of how we ought to live, with an emphasis on community and responsibility. " All of this would have surprised our intellectual predecessors. "At the end of the 18th and to the middle of the 19th century, almost every Enlightened thinker expected religion to disappear in the 20th century," Daniel Bell said in a seminal lecture, "The Return of the Sacred,". at the London School of Economics in 1977. "The belief was based on the power of reason." The theory was that man could use his mind to overcome his problems, and religion would wither away. But that has hardly been the case.

"We've gained enormous power over nature via technology," Bell said in an interview. "And yet, the 20th century is probably the most dreadful period in human history."

For intellectuals, according to Bell, there have always been secular alternatives to religious faith: rationalism and the belief in science; aestheticism and the

belief in art; existentialism as expressed' in the works of Kierkegaard and the early Sartre, and politics-the cults of Stalin, Lenin and Mao. Yet, one by one, those alternatives, particularly the political ones, according to Bell, have exhausted their power to move individuals.

"Forty years ago, you had Stravinsky, Kandinsky, the birth of modernism," said Bell. "Where's the excitement in art today? And science? It's true there are developments in particle physics and cosmology that are exciting to the people involved in them. ,But they don't have the philosophical resonance and there aren't the intellectual debates which characterized physics in the first two decades of the 20th century."

And yet, certain advances in science today make scientists more, not less, interested in the question of religion. In 1981, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle wrote, "A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology ... there are no blind forces in nature." Although he is not personally religious, Robert Jastrow, professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and author of God and the Astronomers, echoes Hoyle's view: "The material universe, which means the material seed of every star, planet and living thing in this cosmos, is the product of forces that are supernatural in a literal sense-that is, outside ,nature as we know it."

It is not so much science but "scientism" against which many 20th-century intellectuals are rebelling. Dazzled by technology and science in the 19th century, scholars emulated the scientific model in all their disciplines. Ethics became intertwined with semantics; philosophy turned to a new logic and mathematical notation. "The modern world view, which became dominant in science, left no room for dealing with purpose, meaning, value, and left out everything that's really important," says Douglas Sloan, professor of history and education at Columbia University Teacher's College. Such an approach naturally ruled out the "larger questions"-about man, goodness, the meaning of life-questions that religious thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine used to ask.

At the same time, attacks on reductionism-the attempt to reduce man to his various chemical, biological

and psychological drives-have grown more intense. Critics have begun to question some reductionist assumptions, such as that man is nothing more than a gaggle of nuclebtides on a string of DNA, or that idealism, disinterested love and other "virtues" are genetically determined.

In a symposium in 1980, David Bohm, a protege' of Einstein and a theoretical physicist at the University of London, for example, described as unacceptable the reductionist view of the universe as "a vast space full of dead matter moving mechanically, while man is a tiny creature living on a mere speck of dust." Such critiques are moving science in a direction that allows it to be much more compatible with religious thought.

"The meaning of the good life invites, or at least allows, a reconsideration of traditional theological questions," says Michael Sandel, associate professor. of government at Harvard. It is possible to ponder these questions in a wholly secular way, but to many in the intellectual community, religious answers beckon.

"Even after a short time of study, say seven or eight years," says Professor Sandel, "one finds that the existential questions recur and that modern secular philosophy can't put them to rest."

"Who would have thought in the 1960s that we'd be talking about religion in the 1980s?" asks Hilary Putnam.

Active against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s, he was the only tenured faculty member at Harvard to join not only the radical Students for a Democratic Society but also its more extremist offshoot, the Progressive Labor Party. "But it was a painful experience to learn that many on the left were as willing to accept killing and torture in the name of politics as on the right," says the 57-year-old Putnam.

"I grew leery of people with political panaceas."

In recent years, Putnam has renewed his religious affiliations.

He is now a conservative Jew who attends services regularly with his wife and family. As it was for many intellectuals, the political movement of the 1960s was Putnam's first experience with "transcendence""Belonging to a group larger than oneself," he says.

"I recognized that I was, by nature, a religious person," he explains, "that I should no longer fight this but accept it.

Whatever one's image of God, there is a notion in religious thought of an obliga-

tion very far from one's own vanity. I fry to think about the question of service now, service to the culture. I try to do what George Santayana said, to 'walk away from the burning city of vanity.'

"Those of us who are going back to some degree of traditionalism never really experienced in our own lives the negative side of tradition," Putnam continues.

"Unlike Nietzsche and Ibsen, we didn't have traditional religion to rebel against.

If I rebelled against anything, it was Marxism."

Robert Coles, professor. of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of the celebrated Children of Crisis series of books (see SPAN October 1978), has long been a rarity among intellectuals for his overt respect for and interest in religious faith. This inclination was reinforced during the political movements of the 1960s. A veteran of the desegregation movement in the South, he watched the civil-rights crusade blossom out of poor, rural Southern churches.

That and his work among the poor in the South and in Latin America reinforced his respect for the power of religion in people's lives. It was the "secular" turn of political movements in the late 1960s that caused him to view politics as no substitute for faith.

Coles teaches an undergraduate course called "The Literature of Social Reflection." One of the most popular courses at Harvard, it emphasizes spiritual themes in the works and lives of writers like George Orwell and James Agee. During one recent talk to a packed lecture hall, Coles told the story of how he began writing the Children of Crisis series.

¡~,. lA

/ :-\; :,);; s a young psychiatrist in ;.' 1958, he told the class, he was drafted and sent down South. While living in New Orleans three years later, he encountered 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, who was among the first black children to integrate the city's schools. "Every day, Ruby was picked up by Federal marshals and walked past crowds who shouted: 'You don't deserve to live'; 'You're worse than an animal.' And yet, each day she went to school. " One day, he heard that Ruby had been talking to the crowd heckling her.

"Ruby," he said to her, "your teacher told me you were talking to t.he people in

the mob. I wondered what you were saying to them."

"I wasn't talking to them," she replied.

"I was praying for them. They need praying for." "They do?" Coles asked incredulously.

"Yes," Ruby answered.

"That's what God would want me to do."

The point of the story is not to canonize Ruby or to put down the angry, white crowd-"They, too, felt betrayed by history," Coles explains-but to put to rest the "simple-minded notion of religion as the 'opiate of the people.'"

"These strange people came into Ruby's life and offered her a moment of grace, which she saw and took."

Ruby Bridges embodied a feeling that distinguished the political movements of the early 1960s. "The virginal New Left was concerned with the well-being of others-the inner-city poor, minorities, the oppressed," says Dale Vree, of New Oxford Review. "But the Free Speech Movement, the sexual revolution and the experimentation with drugs changed its direction from an altruistic movement to one oriented toward self. The youthculture phenomenon blossomed in the late 1960s. The 'me decade' took hold.

People became concerned with their feelings. The social-justice element gradually dropped out of the movement."

Where Vree found it revived, he says, was in the teachings of the church, in his case, the Roman Catholic Church: "Did you feed the hungry? Did you clothe the naked?

These are the questions we ought to be asking. Wasn't it St. Francis who told us in giving we receive?"

Dale Vree's New Oxford Review is a nonaffiliated religious publication with a curious mix of liberal-left attitudes on nuclear arms and workers' rights, but more conservative views on social issues, such as abortion.

Under the heading "Harvard Diary," Coles writes a column for the Review. Recently, the magazine has taken out a flurry of advertisements

in The New York Review of BookS, The Washington Monthly, Harper's and other publications that appeal to the intellectual community.

There is strong disenchantment among many intellectuals with the so-called culture of narcissism as well. They mock its preoccupation with self, which many' blame on an overdose of psychotherapy.

Religion, they say, does the opposite, humbling man, focusing on God or some notion larger than self and providing a

certain stoical faith with which to respond to situations people cannot change.

Coles recently lamented to a group of students the so-called value-free orientation of some psychiatrists: "We psychiatrists tend to learn how to deal with schizophrenia, but often not with the moral and ethical problems of everyday life, which can generate serious psychological difficulties. Health is not only a physical but also a spiritual state." He also urges his students to read the more spiritual works of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy along with their medical texts.

Although many churches have become more liberal-including women in their rituals, for example, or encouraging open discussion of political issues-there are church leaders who do not believe the church itself has changed substantially since the 1960s. "I'm persuaded that there's been a change in the general climate, because we haven't changed," says Gomes of Harvard's Memorial Church. And Harvey Cox agrees: "I think it's the intellectuals who've changed more than the churches."

II

0ÂŤ than any oth., issue, - nuclear arms has had an effect on the current religious beliefs of intellectuals. "People live in daily consciousness of the inevitability of their own extinction," says Gomes. "They perceive the world as eminently more precarious, which gives an urgency to things that they might otherwise postpone, like religion.

There's a stability, a permanence here. I sense a lot of people are looking for that. " "It's ironic that my generation should be the one coming back to religion," says Alan Dershowitz, 45, professor of law at Harvard Law School. "We were the generation that had all the freedom and all the choice." And yet, it is the rootlessness of much of that freedom that has brought so many intellectuals back to religion.

"What made liberalism endurable for all these years was the fact that the individualism it generated was imperfect, tempered by older restraints and loyalties, by stable patterns of local, ethnic, religious or class relationships," writes Michael Walzer, professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, in his book, Radical Principles. But many of those ties-to family, religion, tradition and class-have weakened.

"We are starting to acknowledge that inner visions, religious commitment and family nurturance all can help further social reform," says Professor Elshtain of the University of Massachusetts. Along with many current social theorists, she believes that religion is more successful than politics at fostering ethical and moral commitment.

As an example, Professor Elshtain describes a study conducted in 1975-76 by the moral philosopher Philip Hallie of the French village Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

The town, renowned .for its resistance to the Nazi occupation of France, saved the lives of thousands of Jews by hiding them and helping them to escape. "Profound communal and religious ties made possible a certain kind of moral courage," says Professor Elshtain.

"This sense of community is very important, and yet, churches and synagogues are the only. large grassroots organizations there are now in this country," says Diana L. Eck, an associate professor of religion at Harvard.

Lately, it has been observed that the intellectual community is becoming more active in the ritual element of religion.

"A decade ago, it was all right to give money to the temple and let the rabbi say the prayers," says Rabbi Gold of Hillel.

"Now people feel it's important that the religion be integrated into daily life. They don't want to delegate that task to others."

"It was all right to be a Jew at Harvard, but not to be Jewish," Professor Dershowitz says of the last few decades. ~'I go to synagogue these days not exclusively for religious reasons, but also for ethnic and symbolic reasons, and partly because I want my students to see me there." His statement underscores what may be perhaps a central paradox: Many intellectuals want to believe in religion more than they are actually capable of believing. Like a Harvard philosopher of another era, William James, few find it easy to make the actual leap of faith.

"I can't say to you I believe in God," says Coles, who mIght be described as a spiritual wanderer rather than as a believer in any particular faith. "There are moments when I do stop and pray to God. But if you ask me who that God is or what kind of image He has, my mind boggles. I'm confused, perplexed, confounded. But I refuse to let that confusion be the dominant force in my life."

Simultaneous with the revival of religion, there has been a renewed interest in ethics, morality and other humanitarian concerns traditionally associated with re-

ligion. Resurrected from the politl~al movements of the 1960s, social justice has emerged as a predominant issue. In fact, "Justice" is the title of one of Harvard's most popular courses. "There is remarkable eagerness among students to search for a firmer framework in which to put their ethical and moral concerns," says Michael Sandel, former Rhodes scholar and associate professor of government, who teaches the course.

Elsewhere in academia, the emphasis on ethics and morality is underscored.

Courses in medical ethics and legal ethics are now common. Harvard made it a rule, beginning in 1981, that the majority of undergraduates take one of the courses in "moral reasoning" before graduating.

Academia, in general, has become more receptive to what Alan Segal of Barnard calls "the overwhelming questionswhich are religion's stock in trade."

Like many intellectuals in the 1980s, Ted Solatoroff, 55, who in the last three years has renewed his affiliation with Judaism, finds in religion a framework in which to make decisions based not on politics or ideology but on ethics. "I ask myself: 'Is it right before God?'" says Solatoroff, who is studying Biblical Hebrew so he can daven with a group at Ansche Chesad, a synagogue popular with many intellectuals on New York City's Upper West Side.

Many intellectuals wonder whether the current drift toward religion is merely a fleeting fad or if it is indeed a long-term evolutionary change. "Religion stumbles in the same way the secular philosophies do," says Robert Nozick, professor of philosophy at Harvard. What most intellectuals do agree on is that the essence of religion-the concern with transcendence, the interest in ethics, morality and a desire for roots-will continue to seek expression in the culture.

"The exhaustion of modernism, the aridity of communist life, the tedium of the unrestrained self ... all indicate that a long era is coming to a close," writes Bell.

What will replace it, he and others suggest, will inevitably have something to do with the sacred. "What people fail to realize," Bell said in an interview, "is that the institutions that have survived the longest are religious ones. The existential' questions are always with us-love, death, tragedy, obligation. The most coherent responses, historically the most potent responses, have been the religious responses."

0 About the Author: Fran Schumer is a free-

lance writer who lives in New York.

ON THE

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"Yes, Howard, I heard you. If I don't let you go bowling th'en you'll turn me into a cloud of randomly movinx subatomic particles."

Reprinted

pen:nission from The Saturday Evening ~ost Society, a division of BFL and MS Inc., © 1984.

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by Stevenson;

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1984 The New Yorker

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American Students' Perceptions of India

A survey of 500 students attending selected U.S. universities reveals that American students today are better informed about India than they were two and a half decades ago.

I arrived at the campus of Columbia University in New York City on a bright and warm day in September 1983-a quarter of a century after my last visit to the United States.

The America I flew into seemed different. Of course, the few old friends I met had aged. But more than that, the campus seemed a totally changed place, and not just physically. The students seemed much more informal in their dress and social behavior.

Had the American students' perception of India too changed much in all these years? I had undertaken a survey on that subject in 1956-57; and I did a follow-up survey last year.

During the previous survey I had questioned 400 undergraduate students (an equal number of men and women) from 12 Ivy League colleges and universities in the United States. My 1983 survey, keeping in mind some criticism leveled at my earlier selection, was more representative of America. I surveyed both graduates and undergraduates and included colleges from more parts of the United States than I had in 1956.

My questionnaire was submitted to 500 students (400 undergraduates and 100 graduates) in 10 institutions. The questions, many repeated from the previous survey, related to Indo-American relations and to important facets of contemporary India. The responses required from the students were mostly in a "closed" form to facilitate coding and data processing in the computer.

Some questions were included as a logical follow-up of the results of the last survey. For example, the 1956-57 study had indicated that students who had personal contacts with Indian nationals were more favorably disposed toward India. So the students in the present study were asked about their contacts withIndian nationals in classrooms, socially or elsewhere. They were asked if they had dated any Indians and if they had difficulty in understanding them due to language or other problems.

The 500 students queried in the present survey were from Columbia University (Columbia College, Barnard College and Columbia graduate schools), the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Brooklyn College and the City College of the City University of New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of California at Berkeley.

The major consideration in selecting the institutions was that they should be spread out in different parts of the United States, with corresponding regional characteristics which, to some extent, explain the responses. Some of them are privately managed, others are run by the state or the city where they are located. Five of them have centers of South Asian studies with extensive courses offered on India and are affiliated to the American Institute of Indian Studies with headquarters in New Delhi. Four of the institutions polled this time were also included in the 1956 study.

The institutions are all well known and the wide range of economic,social, religious and ethnic backgrounds of the respondents represents a fair sample of American university students.

They were sel~cted on the spot from classrooms, dormitories, libraries, student unions, lounges and dining halls. Though caught unawares, most of them took a delight in answering the questionnaire handed out to them.

Excerpted below are responses to some of the questions raised in the survey. Where the question is a repeat of the 1956 survey, I have also indicated the results of the earlier survey.

Image of India The visions conjured up by that question in 1956 included Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Marco Polo and his voyage to India, polo, fallen maharajas, yogis sitting on spikes, ropetricks, jungles, India rubber, the Taj Mahal, the caste system, Indian fairy tales, elephants, tigers, camels, snakes and the sacred cow. The emphasis was on things exotic.

In 1983, though some students still mentioned sacred cows and the caste system, the awareness about contemporary India had obviously increased. They talked about Mahatma Gandhi (31.6 percent-an obvious fallout from the Gandhi film), India's poverty (30 percent), religious beliefs (22 percent), overpopulation (17.8 percent), art and culture (8.2 percent), and Indira Gandhi (5.4 percent). There was, incidentally, no confusion about the two Gandhis. The movie Gandhi had obviously been seen by many of the students who described the Mahatma as "a great religious leader, saint, statesman, philosopher, and a man of peace, love and integrity."

Interestingly, while 2 percent of the students polled in 1956 had referred to Indian villages, not a single student mentioned rural India in 1983. Though a lot of them indicated that they had eaten Indian food, they weren't aware that some of the ingredients used to prepare those dishes were produced in Indian villages and then imported to the United States.

What are the principal sources from which American students learn about India?

Source

Graduates (%)

Undergraduates (%)

Movies

64.5

65

Newspapers Personal contacts with Indians

54

68

42.2

60

Magazines

42

48

Books TV programs Courses

32.7 29.5 27.5 4.7

32 29 18\

Seminars Others

8.5

12 11

The survey also indicated that while movies gave them a favorable impression about India, newspaper reports contributed to any unfavorable impressions that they had.

In 1956, the list of sources of inforrnation was topped by newspapers (The New York Times-63 percent); magazines (Time-42 percent), books (nonacademic-28 percent), TV programs (18 percent) and radio (9 percent). Other sources were school lessons, seminars and international relations clubs in colleges. More than half the 400 undergraduates polled had obtained information about India from geography classes in the secondary schools they had attended.

Considering the modern traveling facilities and institutional sponsorships of travel abroad, there hasn't been a significant increase in the number of American students visiting India.

However, the percentage of polled students who had been to India in 1983 ('k8 percent ).was twice the 1956 perceQtage.,

However, considering the fact that five of the institutions have ' South Asian centers and offer courses (not all taught by Indian nationals, incidentally) in most of these languages, the percentage is small. But compared to 1956, when an Indian language was a novelty in the United States, Indian languages today have entered the American academic world of scholars in a relatively big way.,

Knowledge of Indian Subjects

Knowledge of Indian Facts

The respondents were presented with a list of 20 subjects and asked how much they knew about each one-a great deal, a moderate amount, a little, or nothing. This is how the "moderate amount" listing reads:

Gandhi's freedom struggle Caste system

46.2 42.6

Geography Culture Food

33.8 30.6 29.4

History

27.2

Partition Foreign policy Economic development

19.2 16 14.4

since Independence

U.S.-aided programs Hindu religious movement in the U.S. Cl,Irrent Sikh unrest in India

13 11.2 10.8

International

10.1

aid programs

Assam discontent Constitution, of India Indo-U.S. imports and exports Indo-U.S. trade relations

9.8 7.2 6.4 5

Question: When did India become independent?

Correct answers (percentage): Undergraduates (1983)

Graduates (1983)

9.5

28

19

Question: Name three products India currently exports to the United States (1) and vice versa (2).

Answers included: (1) textiles, spices, tea, handicrafts, rugs.

(2) foodgrains, nuclear fuel, medical supplies, fertilizers, heavy machinery.

Question: In general how would you rate the quality of Indian exports to the United States?

S~ami Ramakrishna

2.6 2.4

Excellent Good

2.7 18

American Institute of Indian Studies

1.2

Fair

14

Poor Don't knQw

2 55.5 7.8

Thirteen (2.6 percent) of the respondents knew at least one of the following languages: Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Urdu, Sanskrit. And every institution in the study had at least one student who knew an Indian language.

(1956)

A few students came close, missing out on the right answer by just a year. The reason why more undergraduates knew the right answer could be that Indian Independence was still a relatively recent event then.

Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture

Knowledge of Indian Languages

Undergraduates

No answer

Understanding Indians

An interesting point revealed by the present study is that American students do have some problems in understanding Indians in the United States, owing mainly to language Palayam M. Balasundaram, aformer differences. Cultural differences and social distance between professor of sociology at the Unithe communities are other reasons for this. versity of Madras, has spent more That recalls my own problem in understanding Americans than a decade in the United States-as when I first visited the United States in 1946 as a student at a student (for his graduate, postgraduate and doctoral studies), and Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania (see SPAN as a Visiting Fellow and Scholar. His August 1968). After a few days stay on the campus, one evening publications include three books on a classmate came to my room while I was getting dressed for Indo-U.S. relations. He has again dinner and said, "Heavy date tonight, P.M.?" I had no idea been invited as a Visiting Scholar by what he meant. To me a date was a fruit-why should it be the MIT Center for Internati0l1:al heavy? I finally asked another student who-very amused at my Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, ignorance-explained that "it is simply a boy and a girl going for the fall semester of 1985. out together and doing 'nice' things."

An American girl of Barnard College, New York, who \Vas among those polled in the 1956 survey explained how she found

shows they periopically put up offer Americans an interesting window on India.

For many years, a controversy has been raging in India and the United States about whether the U.S. should give more direct technical aid to India or whether such aid should be chaneled through the United Nations and its specialized agencies; whether there should be more reciprocal trade between India and the United States and whether there should be more educational and cultural exchanges between the two countries. This is how the students responded to questions on these subjects:

Undergraduates

Graduates

(Percentage of positive response) More direct U.S. technical aid to India More U.S. aid through U.N. and its agencies More reciprocal trade

39.7 57.5

More educational and cultural exchanges

it difficult to understand certain things about her Indian roommate and how it had produced an unfavorable impression on her: "I realize that she is an individual case and therefore she has in no way affected my attitude toward India except by her views on the caste system. The Indian girl accepts the caste system and refuses to associate with the Indians in the United States with whom she would not associate with in India. This made me wonder if all upper class Indians felt and behaved the same way as far as caste distinctions are concerned."

The situation is somewhat different now and there is, comparatively speaking, a better understanding of India and Indians. This could perhaps be linked to the increasing numbers of Indians prospering in the United States-students or professionals who have contributed to America's economic and cultural development. The Indian community in most American towns is now usually fairly well organized and the cultural

One graduate student from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, elaborated on his response. "In certain respects, on the political level, I think there are certain built-in constraints inherent in conflicting views of the United States and India. In this respect, better and fuller understanding between the two countries and their citizens will probably succeed best on a more localized level (like research, classes in American and Indian studies in universities, etc.)."

More than half (55.5 percent) the students polled in 1956 too had felt that relations between the two countries could best be strengthened by cultural exchanges. They had spelt out the methods too: Increased publication of news and magazine articles, showing of cultural documentary films, a more sympathetic and objective dissemination of Indian information in the United States. They also stressed the need for increasing the exchange of students and educators.

In 1983 too the response was similar. But few were aware of the fact that in the meantime something had been done about it-not many knew about the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture or the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Asked if there was a need for improving Indo-U.S. relations "at the present time," 60.7 percent of the undergraduates and 76 percent of the graduates said, "Yes." Most of the others gave no opinion. Just a few-4.2 percent and 1 percent-gave a negative response.

Given the nature of surveys, this assessment of American students' perceptions of India has of necessity been little more . than a reeling off of cold statistics. But, under those decimals and fractions-and compared to 1956-there can be glimpsed an increasing awareness of modern India, a warmer understanding and proof that Indo-U.S. interaction at all levels is bearing fruit.

D

Granite n City, Illinois, the young deckhands ~ood under the light by the bow, ready to tie up their string of heavily laden barges in the lock for the two-meter drop to the next level of the Mississippi River.

From the dark, high up on the lock wall, came a man's voice.

"Would you boys like somethin' to ~ead-books or magazines?"

"Uh, ycssir," said Glenn Barnes, "thard be real nice."

Down came a yellow plastic bucket on a length of clothesline. The bucket was crammed with old magazines and books.

Later, as they thumbed through the pages, the riverboat men could read a little message stamped in black ink on the cover: "Compliments of Lonesome Jim, Locks 27, Granite City, Illinois 62040."

Almost every night in recent months, this Johnny Appleseed of books has appeared here near St. Louis at Locks 27, the busiest on the United, States' busy inland water system. Hour after hour he stands at the water by a large pile of books and magazines. Lonesome Jim greets each boat with the same question, waving at the pilothouse and then disappearing in an old car about midnight.

He is becoming a minor legend on the river, where thousands of people work, moving much of the nation's commerce.

Living and working on the Mississippi is not an intellectual experience. It is a roundthe-clock struggle involving strong arms, grinding winches, thundering diesel engines and 30 days without a day off.

There are only television, where the signals fade every few hours, and an informal network exchanging X-rated video cassettes.

Although Samuel L. Clemens' experience as a Mississippi River pilot inspired his pseudonym, Mark Twain, and his greatest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, books have not been an integral part of life on the river.

But Lonesome Jim is trying

I

Copyright Š 1984The New York Times Company.

Reprinted by permission from The New York Times.

to change that. "I do it," he says, "because I know how awful it is to have nothing to read."

Lonesome Jim is James Hearon, a 57-year-old bachelor. When he leaves the lock at night, he returns to his threeapartment room, second-floor to pursue his own reading.

"My goal is to read 150 books a year, all kinds. But I'm a little behind in Shakespeare."

By day Hearon runs the library at the old Army Supply Depot, for which he earns $15,000 a year. It is his mission, believes, to introduce as many people as possible to the joys of reading.

The reading matter he distributes to the riverboat crews consists mainly of paperbacks

hI

and magazines ,he has collected from people cleaning out cellars and attics; a few are hardcover books discarded by the library.

Hearon's father was killed in an automobile accident when the boy was 6. So he grew up on his grandparents' farm in Kentucky, reading his Uncle Charlie's dime westerns and his grandmother's romance magazines. "I read everything I could get my hands on," he said, "even detergent boxes."

Then he would climb up on the woodshed to watch the clouds and make up his own stories.

"I wanted to be a writer, a really keen writer," he said. "I'm not a writer, but I deal with words and what other people write."

Hearon was in the Air Force

Mississippi Bookman

~r'

U

and taught English in Afgha.nistan, Washington and rural Kentucky after studying library science at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia.

Four years ago, when he took over the depot's little library, overgrown bushes obscured the front door. All the books were crammed into two small rooms.

Today the bushes are gone.

Hearon put in a flower bed instead. The 19,500-volume library, which has everything from classics to cookbooks, sprawls over larger, more modern quarters. There are tables and chairs for those who want to stay and read.

On Wednesday mornings at 11 o'clock, Hearon has all the neighborhood's day-care children in for a story hour. "I make up every story as 1 go along, just as I used to on the farm," he said.

But Hearon's greatest pleasure comes from his river work.

The lock crews all know him and his ll-year-old Toyota, riding low in the rear because of all the books and magazines he collects.

Word about Lonesome Jim is getting around on the river, too. A barge worker recently asked the lock crew to tell "the book guy" that he would be back upriver in 10 days and wanted something to read.

The other day, just as a bucketful of reading matter was descending to a barge, the captain aimed his spotlight at Hearon, switched on his loudspeaker, blasted his ship's horn and said, "How y'all doin', Lonesome Jim?" "What a thrill that was," Hearon said later. "They know

me!"

But the best was yet to come.

"I lowered some books to some guys," Hearon recalled, "and when they got them, they didn't say anything, not thank you, not anything. They just started reading. I mean seriously reading right there on the bow. And I thought to myself, now isn't that just about the greatest reward I could ever ask for?" 0 About the Author:

Andrew

H. Mal-

colm is a New York Times reporter.

The Rewards 01 Research From discovering the origins of life to designing new drugs and devices, scientists at the National Institutes of Health in America are turning today's research clues into tomorrow's medical advances.

On 124 hectares of sloping verdant land outside Washington, D.C., scientists squeeze frog embryos into test tubes, alter genes of anemic mice, wire a Pennsylvania butcher's head with electrodes and recommend that dentists use plastic on teeth to prevent decay.

This is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, the United States' foremost center for biomedical research. From a single laboratory opened on Staten Island in 1887, NIH has grown to 11 research institutes, with an annual budget of $4,500 million and a staff of 14,857, including 1,541 M.D.s and 1,847 Ph.D.s.

"Our objective is broad-to improve the health of the American people and people everywhere through new knowledge," says Dr. James Wyngaarden, NIH director.

From all over the world, scientists come to find new clues to-and treatments for-ailments ranging from epilepsy and cancer to infertility and heart disease. Over the years, 61 scientists have won Nobel Prizes while working at NIH or with NIH funding.

Of the agency's total budget, administrative costs absorb $500 million. The rest is spent on research, with $537 million worth performed on the NIH main campus. The remainder-nearly $3,500 million-goes to scientists in universities, medical schools and private industry.

The route from research clue to medical breakthrough is slow, twisting, often strewn with false leads and as dependent on good luck as on good science, as the story of Dr. Baruch Blumberg and his "Australia antigen" illustrates.

In 1963 Blumberg, aLthe National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, and Dr. Harvey Alter, at the NIH blood bank, found a mysterious substance in the blood of a hemophiliac.

First seen in an Australian aborigine, the substance had been dubbed "Australia

antigen." The turning point came in 1966 when a 12-year-old boy with Down's syndrome, a form of mental retardation, suddenly acquired the antigen in his blood and came down with hepatitis.

Blumberg suspected the antigen was linked to hepatitis.

After years of research, Blumberg won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for identifying the marker for hepatitis B. Today, blood banks in the United States routinely reject blood with this antigen-thus reducing the number of hepatitis B cases from transfusions and saving about $500 million a year in medical costs.

More recently, scientists have developed a vaccine against this kind of hepatitis.

"There is no mandate to cure disease X by year Y," explains Wyngaarden. "Science doesn't work that way. More often, we make observations day by day, then find a lead with great promise, change tack and follow that lead."

In a small, cramped laboratory of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, biochemist Martin Eglitis peers through a microscope that magnifies 200 times a single-cell embryo of a specially bred anemic mouse. Maneuvering a tiny needle that holds genes of the missing blood factor that prevents anemia, he punctures the embryo and injects the normal gene. Repeating the process several times, he then implants the mice embryos in surrogate mothers. During the next few months, Eglitis will analyze the offspring to see if the new genetic message took and if they are no longer anemic. They also will be mated to find out if the trait can be passed on. "If we understand what controls a normal gene," says Eglitis, "that will help us understand what happens with abnormal genes."

Medical research is reeling from the explosion of genetic-engineering techniques that offer new ways to treat many diseases. Eglitis' work may lead to ane-

m'ia treatments, possibly by transmitting to the patient the gene for the missing blood factor.

Someday, other types of gene technology may even help prevent heart attacks.

There is mounting evidence that clogged arteries might stem from a defect in the gene that regulates the metabolism of fat.

The heart institute's Dr. French Anderson says it is theoretically possible to give patients a gene that would allow people to handle more cholesterol fat, thus reducing the risk of clogged arteries and heart attacks. "It's the ultimate kind of hope," he says.

In buildings numbered 5 and 7 at the center of the NIH campus, scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases splice genes to design new vaccines for hepatitis, influenza, herpes, malaria, gastroenteritis, gonorrhea, chicken pox, childhood diarrhea and respiratory illnesses. "We're going after the diseases that are most important medically and where technology now makes it feasible to produce a vaccine," says immunization expert Dr. Robert Chanock.

So far, new vaccines against influenza, hepatitis B and herpes, designed by the institute's Dr. Bernard Moss, have been tested in animals. They may be ready for humans in three to five years. And someday there may be a single vaccine to protect against several diseases at once.

Genetic research also has led to a new understanding of the very beginnings of life. In a laboratory laced with the aromas of mice and frogs, Dr. Igor Dawid of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development squeezes luminous day-old frog embryos through a dropper into a petri dish.

With gene-splicing tools, Dawid and his team crack open the embryo and extract ribonucleic acid, or RNA, the chemical messenger that tells deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, when to turn on during early development. The goal is to examine how and why various parts of the body develop in the embryonic stage.

"Eventually this may have benefits for understanding birth defects and problems . in fertility," says Dawid.

Another major goal of research is to unravel key steps in the disease process in 'hopes of preventing the final phase that causes illness.

In a laboratory at one end of the NIH campus, Nobel laureate Dr. Carleton Gajdusek of the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke worked on kuru-a

strange, progressive and deadly nervoussystem disease confined to natives of New Guinea. It took 10 years of research to prove that a slow-acting virus-taking as long as 30 years-caused the disease.

Gajdusek's discovery set off a new view of major diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, a form of senility; Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and even cancer.

"A cancer may be smoldering for years or decades before switching on-before it finds cells in the body it can act on," notes Dr. Clarence Gibbs, a colleague of Gajdusek's.

To decipher today's mystery disease, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, which can incubate for nine or more months, NIH has launched a crash $34-million research effort.

Studies by the National Cancer Institute's Dr. Robert Gallo of blood samples from 120 patients treated at NIH helped identify the cause: a variant of human T-cell leukemia virus called HTLV-3.

Scientists now are working to develop a

The

stress is on getting to

know more about genes and how to manipulate them to prevent disease. blood test to spot AIDS in transfusions and a vaccine against the deadly disease.

It's a unique place, NIH's 14-story 540-bed Clinical Center, the' world's largest hospital devoted entirely to medical studies on humans. All of the patients are enrolled in research programs, and many have ailments that did not respond to standard therapy elsewhere. At NIH, they have a chance to benefit without charge from the latest experimental treatment that mayor may not become tomorrow's therapy.

Testing new drugs before they are approved for general use is one of the center's main activities. In the 10th-floor eye clinic, doctors from the National Eye Institute administer the new drug cyclosporine, which helps prevent transplanted organs from being rejected, to patients with uveitis, an eye inflammation that accounts for 10 percent of the cases of severe visual loss found annually in the United States. The drug was successful in animal tests and in an initial study of 16 patients. Cyclosporine is being compared with standard steroid therapy in 270

patients in the eye clinic.

The cancer institute has spent $1,000 million on new drugs since 1955 and helped to develop "most of the compounds now used in clinical treatment," says Dr. Bruce Chabner, head of cancer treatment. About 50,000 patients a year are cured by drugs, he notes. "When you consider their earning power, the investment is paid back manyfold."

Sometimes promising drugs don't work out. Doctors once thought the drug vasopressin might aid Alzheimer'sdisease patients because it improved memory in rats. But tests on 28 humans were disappointing. "They told us that animal models are not always reliable," says Dr. Thomas Chase of the neurology institute.

Research on humans is also essential to understand how complex diseases actually affect people. On the hospital's third floor, 50 patients a week pass through the brand-new pain clinic of the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR).

Founded by NIDR scientists first interested in facial pain, it's the world's largest center for human-p8in studies.

"There have been major breakthroughs in experimental research in animals to understand how pain signals are transmitted and turned off cell by cell," says the center's Dr. Mitchell Max. "We're looking to see if this science also applies to humans."

A floor up from the pain clinic is the 1.5-by-3.5-meter sleep laboratory of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Sitting on the bed there is a 32-year-old male volunteer in a nylon garment borrowed from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The spacesuit is stuffed with plastic water pipes and attached to a machine designed to disrupt the normal temperature changes of his body.

"Normally, the body rhythm of temperature varies about 11/2 degrees during the day," explains psychiatrist Wallace Mendelson, who studies the link between the sleep-wake cycle and body temperature. "Some think depression is a manifestation of abnormal body rhythms.

Eventually, this work may help treat depression. " Across the street in a converted house, NIMH researchers review tapes of the interactions of a depressed mother and her 21/2-year-old daughter. The apartment setting is specially designed to study mood disorders in youngsters.

"We know that the children of seriously depressed people also have problems,"

Top: A severe epileptic seizure is recorded on film while an electroencephalogram charts the accompanying variations in the patient's brain waves.

Center; An aerial view of the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Maryland.

Left: A blood bank technician crossmatches blood for transfusion.

Above: Blood cells reveal anemia in a patient's blood.

says psychiatrist Donald McKnew, "but we don't know if the link is genetic or behavioral. " On the Clinical Center's ground floor is the experimental $ 3-million diagnostic scanner-positron-emission tomography, or PET, developed at NIH, that helps doctors find where neurological disorders occur in the brain. On the center's fifth floor, doctors from the neurology institute work on new ways to treat epilepsy in patients who have not been helped by standard therapy.

Irvin Stiffler, a 43-year-old butcher from Windber, Pennsylvania, has experienced worsening seizures ever since a head injury seven years ago. He sits in a special room with TV monitors, a metal-and-wire apparatus attached to his head. For six-hour periods, 16 electrodes monitor his brain waves and heart rhythm to record changes when a seizure occurs-an essential step in prescribing therapy.

Although the electrodes are ullcomfortable, Stiffler believes coming to NIH is his best chance. "I haven't worked in seven years. 1 want to get better," he says.

Under way at the cancer institute is a study of some 300 women with early breast cancer to see whether treatment with less-disfiguring surgery plus radiation or drug therapy can be used instead of removing the breast entirely. "It's an effort to see if we can accomplish the same results with less-mutilating treatment," says Dr. Robert Young, chief of the medicine branch of the institute. "So far, results are good in both groups, but a five-year follow-up is necessary."

NIH also assembles expert panels to establish guidelines for medical practice.

A recent conference on dental care urged the wider use of plastic sealants on teeth to prevent decay. At another conference, experts recommended low doses of estrogen supplements for women after menopause to prevent bone thinning-a crippling disorder that causes 200,000 hip fractures a year in the United States.

As NIH looks to the next decade, it is searching for ways to maintain its leadership in basic research and the development of new treatments.

"Some problems of critical importance will take a long time," says Dr. Murray Goldstein, director of the neurology institute. "NIH is unique because it can take them on."

D About the Author: Joseph Carey is an associate editor with the U.S. News & World Report.

When is Ihe Nexl

~.DTUftII.III:~ ~

,.

Haicheng is an industrial city of 90,000 people in north China, east of Beijing and north of the Liaotung peninsula. On the evening of February 4,1975, the temperature was well below freezing, but hardly anyone was snug at home. Instead,' people were shivering in open-air shelters, watching the flickering shadows of outdoor movies as though it were summertime.

Chinese scientists had predicted that a great earthquake would occur in the Haicheng neighborhood on that day. At 7:36 p.m. it came-a long, shuddery heave of the ground. When it was over, nine out of ten buildings were severely damaged or destroyed, but perhaps 100,000 lives in and around the city had been spared.

(Reforce of 500 such bombs. (Both portedly the Chinese had addiare dwarfed by hurricanes, tional successes the following which release energy equivalent year, but details are scanty.) In to half a million atom bombs a 1978 the Soviets were able to day while over the ocean.)

Around the world, earthpredict a major earthquake in the Pamir Mountains just a few quakes kill 10,000 to 15,000 hours before it occurred. people a year and inflict an average of $7,000 million in As of mid-1983, these are the only significant earthquakes in damages.

The number of history that Man has been able deaths varies widely according to predict with any degree of to where the quakes happen, precision. The implications of but in 1976 as many as 700,000 such imperfect may have died, most in a single foresight are event in China that was not profound for millions of people predicted. who live along the earth's zones Earthquakes have leveled of potential seismic activity, for the great temblors are among . cities, as happened to Lisbon in the most devastating of all na1755, and killed as many as 800,000 people, as happened in ture's forces. The energy released by a major quake is Shensi Province in China in stupendous; in the 1964 Good 1556. The most famous quake Friday earthquake in Alaska, it to hit the United States may be the San Francisco earthquake equaled 12,000 Hiroshima-type atom bombs.

The explosive of 1906, but the most fareruption of Mt. St. Helens, in reaching appears to be a series of three near New Madrid, Miscomparison, approximated the

.

1;.-:-'

nutes, killing about 60 people.

Today in the United States and throughout the world, researchers work to refine their still shaky art, in the hope that in the future earthquakes can be forecast with enough accuracy to save lives.

The scientists face not only virtually impossible technical problems-they cannot afford to instrument all of the earth's fault systems with creepmeters, tiltmeters and level lines-but knotty ethical issues as well, One of the worst for the consequences of an quakes to hit erroneous prediction can be sethe United States rious indeed. One bad predicwas the 1906 tion could cause unnecessary San Francisco pandemonium-a series of earthquake. them the same effect as the boy who cried "Wolf!"

The goal-accurate shortsoun, In 1811 and 1812, which an elusive changed the course of the Mis- term prediction-is one, for the science of prediction sissippi River and stopped is still in its infancy. As Professor clocks as far away as Boston.

California; of course, re- T. V. McEvilly of the University mains the most seismically ac- of California, Berkeley, a member of the U.S. National Earthtive state in the United States.

The state has experienced Prediction Evaluation 12 quake Council, puts it, "Many scienlarge or major quakes since 1906; seismologists expect a tists now realize that we are at major quake there in the next square one, and that we don't know how to predict earth10 years. A 1980 government study foresaw 20,000 dead, quakes."

Learning wil! be expensive, but there is no other $69,000 million in property way, McEvilly says. "You can't damage and all normal activity halted if a major quake were to make long-distance calls with tin cans and string." occur near Los Angeles.

Yet progress has been and is No part of the United States being made, and the s.uccesses is totally immune from the danand the ger. Boston was rattled just 17 in China Soviet Union have added impetus to days after the great Lisbull the effort. In the United States, quake in 1755: walls and chimneys collapsed, stone fences fell the search is a main mission Surapart, fish were killed in the of the U.S. Geological vey (USGS), which conducts harbor. In 1886 an earthqu.ake shook Charleston, South Caro .. and funds most of the nareIina, for more than eight ml- tion's earthquake-prediction

search. The National Science Foundation is another contributor. On the palisaded west bank of the Hudson River, scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty \ Geological Observatory huddle over their computers and before rocksqueezing presses.

On the slopes around Denver, in the leafy heart of Menlo Park, California, and in other laboratories from Ithaca, New York, to Palo Alto, California, more scientists are pondering and searching. In the field, scientists and engineers are speeding to the scene of a seismic event almost before the shaking has stopped. They are all seeking to learn when, where and. how strongly the next great quake will strike. The best way to learn, ironically, is to watch one happen, and then search for a pattern of events that can provide a warning for the next quake.

Just what is an earthquake?

It is the shaking that occurs when a slowly accumulated strain in the earth's crust is suddenly released, typically along pre-existing fracture lines called faults.

Stress most often builds up in places where parts of the earth's crust are moving past each other along faults. Scientists believe the crust is actually a number of gigantic plates that ani driven by the movement of the underlying convecting mantle. In some places, as along California's San Andreas fault, one plate is slipping horizontally along the edge of another. In others, as along the coast of Peru, one plate is diving beneath another.

Earthquakes happen because as portions of the earth's crust slide past each other, their edges can become pinned by friction. Rocks are elastic, and energy can be stored in them just as it is in a spring. As the two blocks move on opposite sides of a fault, the motion strains the rocks near the fault.

When the stress exceeds the strength of the frictional lock, the bond fails and the rocks

rebound to an equilibrium position, slipping along the fault.

In areas where one plate is sliding by another, in the way that the Pacific plate is sliding by the North American plate along the San Andreas fault system, only about two-thirds of the adjustment is made by slippage along the fault system itself. The remaining third of the strain is distributed throughout the western United States, causing earthquakes and faulting in eastern California and adjacent mountain states.

The earthquake that destroyed the four-block business section in Coalinga, California, on May 2, 1982, for example, was centered about 30 kilometers east of the San Andreas fault.

More difficult to explain are "intraplat~" earthquakes, such as those that devastated the central Mississippi Valley between St. Louis and Memphis in 1811 and 1812. It is history more than scientific understanding that makes us assign a high earthquake risk to that area.

Earthquakes kill indirectly.

A person would be quite safe ir an open field, for example, during even a great earthquake.

Fissures rarely open up on the surface. People are killed and injured by buildings collapsing on them, or by flying glass, falling objects, flooding from broken dams, fire or explosions from broken gas and electric lines, landslides, or tsunamis, the deadly ocean waves sometimes produced by quakes.

To be able to talk about earthquakes, scientists, disaster-agency planners and the rest of us need ways to measure and compare them. Most familiar is the Richter magnitude scale, which measures the height of earthquake-generated waves recorded on seismographs. Actual readings are adjusted for distance from the quake and its depth in the ground. The scale is logarithmic: a quake of magnitude 7 produces waves 10 times larger than one of magnitude 6. The difference in energy is still

I

greater: a quak~ of magnitude 7 releases roughly 30 times as much energy as a 6.

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 measured 8.3; the 1964 Good Friday quake in Alaska measured 8.4. By comparison, the quake that struck Coalinga in May 1982 was 6.5 (San Francisco's was 900 times more powerful).

More easily understandable is the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale, which measures earthquakes by what actually happens on the ground. The more shaking and the more damage, the higher the intensity. At Intensity 2, the quake is felt by only a few people at rest, especially on the upper floors of buildings. By Intensity 6, some heavy furniture moves and a little plaster falls. At Intensity 12, damage is total. Waves can be seen moving through the ground, and objects are thrown into the air.

Obviously, the rating on the Mercalli scale depends on how close the observer is to the epicenter (a point on the ground directly over the earthquake's focus) as well as the power of the quake itself. The magnitude scale is more objective, but a lot can happen to seismic waves between the place where the rocks break and the seismograph.

Scientists are turning more and more to a third approach, the "seismic moment," which more accurately measures great earthquakes. This is the product of the area of the rupture, the average displacement along the fault, and the strength of the rocks that split.

As for earthquake damage, the number that really counts is horizontal acceleration-how much and how fast the ground will shake from side to side when a quake does come. The map on page 46 gives the most recent estimates of the Geological Survey. It considers not only the likelihood of earthquakes themselves but how much shaking would result over how wide an area; depending on the characteristics of the

rock involved, earthquakes .of the same magnitude can produce very different results. The New Madrid earthquake, for example, caused severe damage over an area many times larger than the San Francisco quake.

Most earthquake-prediction researchers in the United States and abroad are young, and so is their science. The field is still less than 25 years old and dates roughly from the adoption of the plate-tectonics theory.

Plate tectonics has given science a handle on long-term prediction.

Investigators know that earthquakes are bound to happen whe.re the plates collide. They know that the west coast of South America is threatened by the Nazca plate diving beneath it, and that Japan is more than due for more than one great qU<ike.

And they know that the southern portion of California's long San Andreas fault is an area where no major earthquake has happened since 1857, and where a great one is coming, inevitably.

What they don't know-and are determined to find out-is where a great quake will happen first, and when-with an exactitude fitting in with their generalized, long-term "by the end of the century" forecasts.

What they would like to be able to formulate, in short, is immjnent prediction as reliable and routine as weather forecasting.

They need to know more about ground shaking: how it depends on the type of fault and length of rupture. When they know that, they will be able to estimate how much shaking will occur at a given point. That is why some scientists are concentrating on interpreting seismograms of strong motions recorded by instruments near the source of an earthquake.

These waves and an assessment of the intensity of shaking and damage during an actual earthquake will help in determining architectural standards designed to endure such intensities.

To help narrow their predic-

tions from decades to days, geophysicists are using everything from the most venerable techniques of 75 years ago to the very latest and highest technology. They are trying to find still better ways to measure how much elastic strain has accumulated in the rocks on either side of a fault, and they are examining every possible clue to see which are precursors to major quakes.

Wires and quartz rods are laid directly across faults for precise measurements of how one side is creeping relative to the other. Geodetic measurements of how much a base line across a fault is lengthening or shortening are made with laser reflectors and satellite reflectors; researchers even use pairs of radio telescopes that measure the differences in arrival time of a light wave from a quasar billions of light-years away.

The most obvious precursors to a major quake are a series of foreshocks, but not all great quakes have them. So geophysicists are turning elsewhere: • Tiltmeters, some as simple as cylinders of water connected by a horizontal tube, reveal any changes in the slope of the land-and possible tectonic activity.

• Gravimeters are able to measure minute changes in elevation because the force of gravity at the earth's. surface depends on its distance from the center of the earth.

• Electronic instruments measure changes in the local magnetic field and in the electrical conductivity of the rock.

Geophysicists believe that when rocks are stressed to about half of their breaking point they begin to expand, filling with numerous small cracks.

The cracks fill with water, which changes the rocks' elec-Thegiant scar of the San Andreas fault runs across the surface of Carrizo Plain in central California, the most seismically active state in the United States.

650,000 may h~ve been killed. trical and magnetic properties.

Nevertheless, with an army of • Radon-gas measurements in well water are one way to 10,000 scientists and a network detect such expansion. The idea of 100,000 amateur observers, is that the cracking exposes the Chinese are going all out on large areas of new rock surface earthquake research. The proto the underground water, fessionals monitor sophisticated which dissolves larger 'quanti- instruments, while amateurs reties of the radioactive gas. port on such things as peculiar The scientists are also look- animal behavior. Shortly before ing at some things that, until earthquakes, horses, cows and recently, were generally dismis- pigs reportedly stampede for no sed as folklore. On occasion apparent reason. Chickens and eerie lights have been reported geese fly around dazedly. Dogs i~ the sky just before or during bark, seemingly at nothing. a tremor. The lights may result Snakes slither out of their holes from electrical charges in the in winter and freeze. The folk atmosphere generated by fric- wisdom is that such strange, tion of rocks moving along a anomalous behavior is a sign fault line.

Folk wisdom in China has Geophysicists follow every lead from the latest held that "earthquake sounds" immediately precede an earth technology to the oldest shock. According to Charles F. folklore, as they strive to Richter, the developer of the predict earthquakes. first magnitude scale, the sounds are most often com- that an earthquake is coming, pared to those of "thunder, but nobody knows for sure gunfire or heavy traffic at a whether it really is. distance. It is produced directly Scientists in Beijing are by the transfer of elastic wave trying to learn more about energy from the ground to the animal restlessness as a possible air. " quake predictor; the USGS has While the scientists are using spent $600,000 since 1976 on their instruments to create a similar studies. contemporary record, they are Another area of research has also striving to maintain and gathered impetus from the extend the historical record. successful Chinese prediction at Knowing when earthquakes Haicheng-the plotting of have occur-red over long sequences of seismic activity. A periods of time affords them a series of small earthquakes had pattern from which they can followed an arc from the make assumptions of a reason- southwest toward the northable "repeat time" between one east. Apparently some kind of earthquake and the next. It deformation front, perhaps in helps long-term prediction no the earth's mantle, had trigend to know where and when gered each event in turn. The earthquakes have occurred in, front was moving slowly, about say, Peru, where the record 110 kilometers per year. The dates back to the early Spanish Chinese seismologists drew a missionaries, or in Japan, which line through the epicenters. boasts a 400-year chronology When they extended it, they of earthquake activity. The saw that the line headed directChinese have observations dat- ly toward Haicheng, and they ing back for more than 2,000 were able to issue their warning years.

I in time.

Time and activity patterns, Indeed, China has become a focal point for seismological in- the precise pinpointing of terest. The Chinese are by no quake-prone areas, and the facmeans unerring; they did not tors that precede and follow predict the 1976 Tangshan quake occurrences are all part effortquake in which as many as of the prediction

measurements that must be taken over and over, calculations that must be checked and rechecked. It is tedious and time consuming. But prediction, most geologists think, will inevitably become precise by this careful honing-not by a spectacular breakthrough or a new formula to foretell an earthquake. This is why U.S. scientists are protective of their budgets and projects; they are afraid that the pool of information and ideas, so carefully built over the years, will be threatened by an information gap if those budgets and research projects are not maintained in a continuum of steady, thorough exploration.

It is of little comfort to reflect that the Japanese program for earthquake prediction has four times as much money to spend as that provided for comparable research in the United States.

In China, 10,000 full-time workers were involved in earthquake studies in 1975; America has perhaps 1,000 full- and part-time investigators.

Most now at work think they can predict. Discussing his colleagues who are dubious about the prospects for prediction, Lynn Sykes of Lamont-Doherty says, "I think they are far too pessimistic. If you look at California or Alaska-compared with 1968 when we had almost no idea of which were good places to look for the next big earthquake- I think we can pick si~ sites in California that we know long-term, say, over the next decade or two, have quite a high probability of being the sites of good-sized earthquakes. We will not have all the sites of the large earthquakes in California for the next 10 or 20 years, but we are at least picking a lot of the right areas for good reasons."

The same thing is true, Sykes says, in southern Alaska, where scientists have picked two seismic gaps (places where earthquakes have not happened in a long time and therefore are to be expected).

Even predictions within 10 or 12 years-still called longterm-can be helpful in deciding whether to locate a nuclear power plant in an area or what kinds of building codes should be required in high-risk areas.

Bruce A. Bolt, professor of seismology at the University of California, Berkeley, feels that in the United States the ability to forecast how much the ground will move at a specific location is more important in reducing earthquake losses than prediction of the actual occurrence of the earthquake itself.

"Earthquakes remain great killers and inflict heavy economic loss," Bolt says, "yet much is known about earthquakes and how to reduce damage."

Improved zoning is the first and most fundamental step in reducing earthq uake damage.

The better we get at delineating areas of seismic risk, the better we can decide where to build-not only homes, but schools, hospitals, dams, bridges, high rise buildings and power plants.

Some older buildings can be made more earthquake resistant: houses can be improved, for ex'ample, by anchoring the sill to the foundation, adding bracing to supports for floor joists and the load-bearing walls of garages, and strapping the chimney to the house. New buildings can incorporate the latest technology, including shear walls that bend into parallelograms rather than crack when subjected to horizontal force. Gas-, electricityand water-distribution systems can be made less susceptible to. disruption.

Even knowing that an area will be quake-free for a considerable length of time because it is early in its seismicgap time period can be an incentive for i'rlyestment in buildings that need only that much longevity to realize a profit. It may make economic sense to build at a place that has just had an earthquake.

The scientists have learned that they cannot be too careful

about what they predict, and that they must be aware of the public reaction to their predictions. They are acutely conscious of the consequences of a spectacularly wrong guess made by two young American scientists in 1979. At a meeting in Argentina, Brian Brady of the U.S. Bureau of Mines and William Spence of the USGS, both assigned to Denver, forecast three earthquakes off the coast of Peru-the first and smallest about June 28, 1981, with larger ones to follow on August 10 and September 16. The predictions had evolved from Brady's work with rock fracturing in mines, work he extrapolated to the much larger fault systems of Peru.

The earthquakes did not occur and still have not, but the predictions caused an uproar in Peru. There was some panic buying of foodstuffs and survival supplies, and some residents of Lima left the city around the June date. Members of the U.S. National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, which had rejected the prediction, declared that they would be perfectly relaxed about being on the Peruvian seacoast on the all-too-precisely predicted days. The Lima newspapers challenged the predictions, and John Filson, chief of the office of earthquake studies for the USGS in Reston, Virginia, went to Lima to reassure the press and the public.

Spence issued an elaborate disavowal before the June date, and Brady withdrew his prediction on JuLy 20. He still believes that any time now, great quakes will wreak havoc along as much as 2,500 kilometers of the coastline of Peru.

Like all seismologists, Clarence R. Allen of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, who is also director of the evaluation council, is concerned about the scientists' dilemma. As Allen recently wrote: "One has the uneasy feeling that the Peruvianprediction episode may not be completely over. Seismologists

Above: This contour map shows areas of seismic risk in the United States; danger of earthquakes .increases from yellow to red. The map is based on highest horizontal acceleration-the most damaging aspect of an earthquake-that can be expected in any area in the next 50 years. Top: Scientists are using tools of modern technology to learn how quakes are caused. Here. a

reflector on one side of afault returns a laser beam from the other side; ground motion alters light's travel time. Facing page: The 1971 earthquake in the San Fernando Valley area of California left 64 persons dead and extensively damaged buildings, bridges and freeways like the collapsed one shown here. Restoration costs were estimated at $ 1,000 million.

have pointed out for a number of years that, on the basis of the generally accepted, seismic-gap concept, parts of coastal Peru and northern Chile represent perhaps the most likely locality anywhere in the world for a truly great earthquake, such as last occurred there in 1868."

The fear is that somebody, by chance and for the wrong reasons, will predict an earthquake that will in fact occur on

the predicted date. Seismologists will then have the problem of persuading the public that the apparently successful prediction method has no basis in reality.

A more difficult question concerns predictions seismologists feel more sure of-how much should scientists tell the public-and when? C. Barry' Raleigh, director of LamontDoherty, says, "Our ability to

interpret the observations [of fault zones] and relate them to premonitory events of a great earthquake is improving.

Indeed, our progress makes it almost inevitable that a large earthquake will be predicted for one of the major metropolitan areas of China, Japan or the United States within the next 20 years.

"What then? How will people respond, and what effects

will the prediction have on the social and economic fabric 'of the affected area? We are not very knowledgeable about the answers to such questions. We are still in the dark as to the best way to arrive at and issue a public prediction."

Robert Wallace of the USGS thinks people will ignore earthquake predictions until they are forecast with a probability of 50 percent or more.

Any predictions made today would go first to the U.S. National Earthquake Prepiction Evaluation Council, a standing committee of government and academic scientists that advises the director of the Geological Survey.

If there were a consensus that the prediction was valid, the director would announce it and alert the governors of the affected states.

In practice, state and local officials would be kept informed all along of the progress of the prediction evaluation.

California has its own predictionevaluation council; the federal and state bodies coordinate their efforts.

A mature seismic gap exists in Southern California today, but no one is ready to order the evacuation of Los Angeles.

Seismologists can say the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 7 has risen to about 13 percent in California as of now, but they can come no closer. They may not be able to come closer until the next great quake does occur, and they can go back through the detailed records they have so carefully amassed to see if they can pull out genuine precursors. As Robert Wallace put it, "You can chase just so many jackrabbits at a single time and there are always jackrabbits out there, always signals to be chased, and you have to find out what is meaningful or not meaningful-but that's just the way science is."

0 About the Author: Richard L. Williams is a contributing editor with Smithsonian magazine.

Coping With Disaster In August

1983, Hurricane

Alicia

disrupted the lives of Texas. It left 24 dead and hundreds of thousands of people without essential services in America's fifth largest city.

Although Houston residents still have not recovered from the nation's most damaging natural disaster in 1983, the loss of life was relatively light compared to hurricanes qf similar magnitude in U.S. history. For example, a tidal wave and hurricane in 1900 at Galveston Island killed 6,000 people.

The relatively light loss of life suffered by the Houstonians from the havoc wreaked by the hurricane was the result of advance preparedness, improved weather forecasting, sound building practices and a number of measures that the United States has taken over the years to reduce the death and destruction that accompany unavoidable natural calamities. For example, the seawall built in 1917 specifically to prevent a recurrence of a 1900-type disaster made conditions much safer for the island's residents when Hurricane Alicia struck. Again, with the help of weather satellites, computer models and aerial reconnaissance, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, predicted two to three days ahead that there was a 51 percent chance that Hurricane Alicia would come ashore at the western tip of nearby Galveston Island, which is exactly where it moved inland from the Gulf of Mexico.

In most American cities, public works projects, education programs and legislation offer subsidized flood insurance to local governments passing measures to discourage building in floo'd-prone areas. In addition, legislation and special subsidies by the Federal Government have led to the establishment of "emergency management" agencies in the 50 states and in thousands of municipal and county governments.

The most important of these agencies is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) which, like other U.S. national government bodies, steps in only when the "severity and magnitude" of the incident is "beyond the capability of state and local governments."

In such cases, the President is authorized to provide direct assistance and co or- . dination of the recovery effort, by declaring a major disaster.

Through a disaster assistance center, FEMA provides a central location where representatives of federal, state and local agencies, as well as volunteer groups, can offer help by way of housing, grants and low-interest disaster loans.

Following the August 1983 storm in Houston, FEMA received only 8,500 applications for housing assistance. "By the first week of October, everybody had been given some kind of housing," said Bill McAda, an officer with FEMA. However, in most cases of natural calamities, it is voluntary groups that provide immedi,ate assistance to victims. "The Red Cross is always there before we are," McAda noted."When you don't have anything left, it's a wonderful feeling to know that there are people to help you," said Belinda Narivanchik, whose house in Baytown, about 25 kilometers west of Houston, was completely destroyed.

Along with her husband and five children, she is now living in a four-bedroom house FEMA provided for them.

In some ways, the greatest help people receive is the advance warning provided by improved forecasting methods.

Gilbert Clark, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center, says satellite pictures have enabled the center to improve its accuracy of hurricane prediction by 25 percent. "As

more than two million people in Houston,

by JIM M~RKEL

a result, there have been only four or five hurricanes since the 1940s that caused more than 100 deaths."

There have been similar improvements in prediction of such sudden disasters as flash floods and tornadoes. Using satellite pictures and weather radar that can detect tornadoes even before they hit the ground, forecasters at the National Severe Storm Forecast Center (NSSFC) in Kansas City, Missouri, have been successful in pinpointing storms in time for people to take cover. "We haven't missed a big storm system in a long time," said NSSFC Director Fredrick P. Ostby. . In part, the National Weather Service's forecasts of severe weather activity have been helped by a network of tens of thousands of volunteer spotters, who call weather information in to centers around the United States.

One area where these spotters have been particularly helpful is in Pennsylvania, a mountainous state in the industrial northeast. Filled with communities that grew up along rivers and creeks, the state has a greater incidence of flooding than any other state in the country. When a 1972 hurricane moved inland in the northeast, it brought 118 deaths and $4,500 million in damage from flooding.

Today, "there is hope that Pennsylvania's fears of a deadly flash flood on any given day will soon become a memory.

Throughout the state, volunteers regularly read rain gauges and telephone the information to local officials. When combined with reports on soil conditions, the height of the watertable, computer models and general weather information, the data can give areas like Johnstown, whose location at the bottom of a narrow valley has brought serious loss of life three times in the last 100 years, a few hours warning that a flash flood may be on the way.

Though U.S. disaster relief officials generally acknowledge that not to live in disaster-prone areas is the best bet against natural calamities, they also say the southward and westward movement of Americans is inevitably bringing them into areas which are pione to natural disasters.

One of these is the populous state of California. Shifts along the San Andreas"fault in California have caused a number of earthquakes in this century, and scientists predict a severe quake by the year 2000.

To reduce the risks, agencies at all levels of government are working with FEMA to improve their disaster response. In November 1983, the California Office of Emergency Preparedness launched a series of mass media awareness campaigns designed to help state residents better prepare for natural hazards, including earthquakes.

Early this year the Los Angeles metropolitan region with some 10 million people, organized an Earthquake Preparedness Week.

To educate children how to cope with an earthquake, Hanna-Barbera, a producer of children's animated cartoons, granted permission for one of its more famous characters to be the "Spokesbear" for the week. Yogi Bear spent the week telling children watching television, going to movies and listening to the radio how to survive an earthquake.

If he was successful in getting his message across, and if . the predicted disaster occurs, someday children in southern California may say: "Yogi Bear helped us get through an earthquake."

D About the Author: Jim Merkel is a free-lance writer living in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

New Year's Gift Color photographs and illustrations from SPAN's quarter century of publishing take readers on a nostalgic trip. And, in the center ofthe magazine, is a fold-out map of the United States.

The Eagle Soars The cover hologram of an American bald eagle will sparkle with the colors ot the rainbow. This special cover of our Silver Jubilee issue displays the wonders of holography. The hologram-a record of laser-light patterns-takes on different perspectives and colors as one views it from different angles ..

Spanning 2S Years Nayantara Sahgal on the birth of America; Dom Moraes on the burnished landscape of the great Indian desert; Kamala Das on Walt Whitman's influence on a young girl in lush Malabar-herself; Archibald MacLeish on his poetry-an art which won him Putlitzer Prizes; Maya Pines on mind and matter. ... To celebrate its silver jubilee, SPAN presents this memorable collection of articles from earlier issues.

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13.9. 16.9, 19.7, 25.6, 30.8, 41.7, 42.1 Short Wave: 19.5,19.7,30.7, 30.9, 31.1, 42.1, 42.2, 49.1 Medium Wave: 190 Short Wave:

Short Wave:

25.4,31.1,42.2,

49.8 Short Wave:

13.9, 16.9, 19.8

Short Wave:

25.4, 31.0, 41.2,

48.9 25.4, 31.0, 31.1,

Short Wave:

49.6 Short Wave:

19.4, 25.3, 31.0,

41.6 Short Wave:

13.9, 16.9, 19.8

Short Wave: 41.5

19.8, 25.1, 31.4,

Medium Wave:

190

Baltimore's Underground Art Galleries The concept of public art-taking art where the people are, rather than warehousing it in museums-has been progressing noticeably in the United States.

The art in the Baltimore, Maryland, subway stations is among the more dramatic examples.

The frustration of just missing a train may be assuaged somewhat by the chance to examine closely a lively mural by Romare Bearden, one of America's outstanding artists (see SPAN, September 1978). Inspired by the jazz that had been played in Baltimore, where both Eubie Blake and Billie Holiday came from, Bearden created a glass and ceramic mosaic, titled Baltimore Uproar, featured on the back cover.

The Baltimore transit authority commissioned artists to create mobiles, paintthe ings and other works to ornament stations and their entrances. Instead of the graffiti and garish advertisements that are found in many subway stations, Baltimore offers pop art, geometric patterns and representational scenes of local life.

Above: Backlit photographic montages of faces

by R. Thomas Gregory dominate one end of a mezzanine level in a Baltimore station.

Right: A neon tube sculpture by Stephen Antonakes at the Charles Center station.