September 1985

Left top: An American model in Indian cottons at a Bloomingdales store in Washington, D. C. Other pictures show Americans participating enthusiastically in the Festival of India's mela. They danced, listened to music, sampled Indian food, and watched folk artists like bahurupias (impersonators) and craftspeople like banglemakers and kitemakers at work.

India Fever Ant erlca ill

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Spice, rice and everything nice; the sudden outburst of interest in India in America covers the gamut. Going home on . her annual visit, an American living in Bangalore is deluged with inquiries about India.

All the fuss started back in January, best as I can recollect. Suddenly, here in Bangalore, we were swamped with letters from America wanting to know more about our life in India-not just out of polite curiosity but honest interest.

"America is going India crazy," said one old friend.

"I cannot believe I am writing to two people who are living the Raj Quartet," said another. We could only chuckle to ourselves over that comic imagining.

Since January this year I can count enough serious requests for information on travel around India that I'm beginning to feel like a travel agent. And my husband has on his desk at least three resumes from long-lost buddies seeking employment "in some exciting location like Bangalore or other exotic locations in India."

One old friend keen to visit us spoke of the "India mania" sweeping the United States. "I've seen Passage to India four times," she said. "I'm on the last chapter of the book; and, of course, I'm religiously hooked on Jewel in the Crown, the 16-part PBS series which brightens my Sunday evenings.

Fascinating stuff! I must know more."

So when our annual home leave rolled around in April, we returned to America armed with the goods to tell more-gifts of cotton, Mysore silk and other handloom fabrics, packets of incense, mirrorwork tapestries and stuffed animals from Gujarat, spices, teas and rice fresh from the local markets. And we packed our own picture travelogue of slides. Somehow friends had the notion that we were living the life of the colonial British in

some technicolor splendor. So we had to start off by correcting that false idea. The slides were a heip.

No, we explained, we do not live in perp~tual "heat and dust." Climate and terrain are as various in India as in the United States. In Bangalore we enjoy mostly weather that is cool and mild for the tropics. And no, we do not live in an American compound surrounded by our countrymen and conveniences; we live the sole American family in a neighborhood of Hindus, Muslims and Christians of all skin tones, all speaking a musical ensemble of Indian languages that harmonize well enough with English. We do not have "servants"; we have a small staff of diligent employees who are respected and rewarded for their hard work. No, our car isn't imported; it's toe Ambassador model commonly found on Indian roads, hopelessly antique, but Muthuswamy can get us around in it.

Elephants are found mostly in the nature reserves, and monkeys are a part of the passing scene, like birds and cats and dogs and grazing cattle. Sometimes we have to compete with the monkeys for the ripe mangoes! Oh yes, Jeans are a common enough form of dress, and American pop music wafts out of cassette players.

All the clues should have forewarned u.s. But we were surprised to discover that the "India fever" spreading across the United States had its origin largely in the popular entertainment media, and more specifically the spate of Raj nostalgia films coming out of the United Kingdom.

Whatever message David Lean may have derived from E.M. Forster's famous

novel seemed lost on the average American moviegoer, and the superficial pageantry stole the show.

"Wait till you see the elephant ride and the scene with the charging monkeys!" enthused our travel agent in Washington.

"Well, it sells popcorn" was my husband's disenchanted critique as we left the theater, "but has little to do with what we know of India."

From our more discerning friends, we gathered that Passage was a disappointment in spite of the sweeping panorama, the long dark shadows suggesting "inscrutable" India.

They compared the film with the likes of Gandhi and found it limited in portraying more of the full scope of India in all her infinitely various parts.

Nearly coinciding with the Raj films, events in India of tragic proportion stirred American news watchers. People were stunned by the assassination of Indira Gandhi, who seemed utterly inseparable from India in the minds of most Americans. This, quickly followed by the terrible reprisals and increasing turmoil in Punjab.

Then like an antidote to disaster, Rajiv Gandhi emerged and with his strong sense of leadership and handsome youthfulness came a feeling of renewed vigor and great expectations for the future of India. People, especially of my generation, now look to India as a land more accessible, more receptive to the kind of new technology that will benefit its people, more relaxed about an open exchange in every realm.

In planning our return to the United States, I had decided that the best proof I had to offer of India would be in the

At the National Gallery of Art, Washington's great storehouse of artistic treasures of the Western world, "these treasures from India arrived like a magic caravan blown in from the East." tasting. After careful and repeated instruction from our ayah, Kamala, I had learned enough of south Indian dishes and to present at least one respectable chicken curry with all the trimmings.

Besides, I thought, if I slip up my guests will never know the difference.

The truth is they did know the difference. Most of my friends and family gathered at that suburban Washington, D. C., table had done the rounds of the area's Indian restaurants and knew every chutney, even by their Tamil names.

Happily the meal was a success anywaymaybe because of the raga background music I'd brought along to lend authenticity. Never mind the complaints about my thick raita or my lumpy rice.

"It's glutinous like Chinese, not perfect separate grains like Indian," somebody grumbled. But my mother, ever the one to salve wounded feelings, kept sniffing the steaming basmati rice I had packed from India. "You know," she finally announced, "that fragrance reminds me of the rice they used to grow in Virginia when I was a girl. Oh my, that's wonderful smell."

As the hours in the kitchen ticked away too fast, there was no time to do a proper naan, the one element lacking in this proper Indian meal. Just a short drive away the India Inn seemed a likely establishment. Posted on the door were newsclips from the local papers singing the praises of India Inn's special cuisine, mostly north Indian. In short order the proprietor, a native of Delhi, conjured up a most authentic paratha. When I mentioned to him that I was resident in Bangalore, he told me he was introducing dosa on the following day's menu.

Restaurants and "supermarkets" like these have grown rapidly over the D.C.

area to satisfy the needs of a growing Indian population-and the new tastes their presence has created for their American neighbors. People in Washington are accustomed to foreign flavors and enjoy good food with a unique difference. Right now the going difference in taste is definitely Indian.

Confident from the success of that first Indian meal on home turf, I kept doing repeat performances for friends across the Midwest. Oddly enough every kitchen I entered smelled suspiciously of curry powder. I got the distinct impression that everyone had been experimenting, even my mother-in-law who is strictly a roast beef and potatoes cook.

In Dubuque, Iowa, a teenage friend took a long whiff of the spicy kitchen air during my elaborate preparations and rushed to the phone to invite her girlfriends. "We can stretch it to feed three more, can't we," Jenny tossed off on the way upstairs to put on her new chemise and churidar for a "show and tell."

"Oh, sure," I said wistfully, praying the rice would grow a little in the pot. Jenny's world history class just happened to be in the unit on India, and these young schoolmates surprised me with the sophistication of their knowledge and questions about current political issues, about the new administration under Rajiv Gandhi. They have one wellinformed and inspiring teacher, or they're doing their homework with unusual diligence, I thought. Unfortunately the rasam was a bit too spicy for their tender palates.

As our discussion warmed, the peppery rasam and overspiced curries cooled on their plates!

Of course health-conscious friends in the United States have long known the benefits of an Indian diet high in fresh

fruits and vegetables and curds, and low in meat content. To questions about what our meals are like, I complain about the time I must spend in the kitchen for lack of those old staples, convenience foods.

Still, I feel spoiled by all the fresh produce Bangalore enjoys from the harvest of the Karnataka state's agriwealth. No, I say with pride, our bananas are not shipped in from Australia; they come off the native trees in such plenty that the going price for a dozen is 25 cents usually. And I can have a dozen "country" roses for less than a dollar! Friends just blink their eyes in amazement.

This year, besides good things to eat, our suitcases were bulging with Indian fabrics brought home on demand: meters of silk for my sewing friends who know the beauty and quality of India's silk products, and white cottons for those bent on keeping comfortably cool during the summer season. My niece, an aspiring model schooled in style-consciousness, greeted me in woven leather sandals and Madras skirt and blouse.

"All made in India," she announced with a flurry of model-like poses. Shops and department stores everywhere were showing the spring-summer fashions in colorful cottons-yes, Made in India, 100 percent cotton. And how were they selling? Very well, the salesclerks assured me again and again. Very popular. I noticed the price of women's clothing outrageously expensive this year. In most instances though, Indian cottons by comparison seemed more affordable.

New shops specializing in cotton readyto-wear seemed to be doing a flourishing business in the shopping malls-"Indian" attached to most of the designer labels.

At Bloomingdale's the whole of the women's sportswear department seemed

devoted to what had been loomed on the subcontinent, infinite meters gone into the making of the most designer-like fashions.

In Washington's National Gallery of Art, the Festival of India had just opened with a breathtaking exhibit of India's ancient sculpture in stone, bronze and ivory. Here at the capital's great storehouse of artistic treasures of the Western world, these treasures from India arrived like a magic caravan blown in from the East.

A thrill passed over me as I entered the carved gateway of Sanchi's Great Stupa in photomural framing the entrance to

the exhibit. There in reverent half-light the sculptures were aglow with life, each one basking under a halo of soft light to fully reveal the object's beauty and fine workmanship. Each one was generously spaced to allow for its freedom of movement and full viewing.

Plump-bellied Ganesha with trunk asway, Shiva gesturing with all eight arms, amorous couples entwined, serpents twisting, celestial creatures in flight-the unique pantheon seemed to emanate energy, both physical and spiritual. Indeed, the whole show danced, as one critic so aptly described it. In the respectful quiet, you could almost hear

One of the most popular events of the Festival of India in Washington, D.C., was the mela organized by the Smithsonian Institution as its 19th annual Folklife Festival.

Held at the National Mall for two weeks in June and July, the mela drew hundreds of Americans daily. The sights, sounds and smells were typical of an Indian fair.

Below, left to right: Among the attractions at the me/a were a potter, food stalls and a magician. American youngsters sometimes joined in the dancing. Women were fascinated by make-up demonstrations.

the strains of a morning raga-the sitar, the tabla, the Indian flute.

The two rooms of the Gallery's East Wing, 100 sculptures arranged between them, seemed hallowed ground. Viewers .,.spoke in hushed tones. It was obviousthe respect, the infinite care taken in presenting these objects of art and worship. Art historians, experts on India's art and iconography had been summoned to conduct tours, supplemented by regular lectures and a film series spread over the four-month exhibit. All the resources of the National Gallery and its friends had combined to present to the American public a remarkable visual and educational experience.

A stunning catalog, fully illustrated with the work of Harvard University's Pramod Chandra, gave further proof of the years devoted to studied preparation.

And not without rewards. I was told that already in the first weeks more than 1,000 visitors on an average weekday were passing through those doors, considerably more than normally attend a National Gallery exhibit.

Two businessmen had taken the morning off from the office to view the exhibit.

I was curious about their impressions.

Right: Visitors to the mela watch an open-air photo exhibit depicting life in India. Below: A stall selling Indian handicrafts does brisk business.

One, a frequent visitor to India's temples and archaeological sites, spoke with awe at seeing these sculptures presented under such ideal conditions. Out of the dusty museums and dark temple walls chock-a-block with images, he said, here you could really enjoy the full experience of individual pieces.

"But your eyes can't fill up fast enough," said a young woman from Cleveland, who had come to Washington with the sole purpose of seeing the show.

She, too, was familiar with the art of India because of her travels and the sizeable collection at the Cleveland Musuem of Art in her hometown. "The promise of religious art drew me," she said, "especially the early Buddhas of the Gandhara school."

I was amazed at the wide range of knowledge and interest shown by the visitors I spoke with. They arrived early when the Gallery opened and they stayed, giving full attention to each sculpture as if the hours didn't matter. Among the lingering visitors were two artists whose friendship had been sealed by a mutual love of India as far back as their college days in the late Forties. "Why, we've had India kver all our lives," said

the woman with a smooth silver bun.

"We were in love with Nehru. He was our idol when we were teenagers." And then they ticked off ,all the major and minor shrines and temple sites they had visited together in a lifetime of pilgrimages across the subcontinent.

One of the pieces that caught my eye was the slender bracket figure of a woman, poised as if in a doorway. She looked familiar and from the caption I saw that the metasilstone bracket came from the Karnataka State Museum located in the city of Bangalore, our adopted home. Adorned with a jeweled costume and framed with a crust of medallions strung on creeper vines, the whole seemed a busy affair at first. But on clear inspection, her face with halfclosed lids and her S-curved figure full in the breasts and hips suggested a quiet, elegant rhythm. Now the artist's intention was clear. The curving vines were repeating the focal sway of her body, and the effect was all harmony in motion. I was beginning to understand what a poet-friend in the Midwest meant when he said that more than anywhere else in the world, in India they knew the meaning of sensuousness.

"Like a gift from the gods, isn't she," a voice from behind startled me out of my reverie. The tall young man with a Carolina drawl had come to renew his long-time friendship with India. He spoke with eloquent fervor of the two years he had lived at the Sivananda Ashram at Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh.

And he had brought his family to the exhibit in the hope of sharing something of that experience with them.

Like a fever, the new fascination with India in the American popular imagination seems to have reached its peak-at least here at this writing in early June 1985. As the Festival of India is underway and Americans are introduced firsthand to the rich fabric of Indian culture in all its diversity, I am hopeful that Americans will be fired by something more lasting than a fever. I like to think that through a fuller, more genuine experience of the real India promised by the Festival, Americans will be moved to light a flame with India as enduring as the lamp of friendship.

D About the Author: Bonnie Tinsley is an American writer, poet, translator and art critic who currently lives in Bangalore.

September 1985

SPAN 1

India Fever in America

6

The Woman Behind "Little Women"

9 Brilliance in the Bronx

14 On the Lighter Side

A View From the Far Side

16 Fighting Filariasis

by Carole Vi/chis

20 Memories of Mark Twain

24 Realizing the American Dream

by Robin Knight

29

The Mathematics of Mayhem

32 Mid-Life and the Cello

36 Focus On ...

38

The Master at Work

39 The Fellowship of Scholars

by Darshan Singh Maini

43

Nurse on the Move

46 The Tiles That Bind

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Warren W. McCurdy

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor Copy Editor Editorial Assistant Photo Editor

Aruna Da~.~upta Nirmal Sharma Rocque Fernandes Avinash Pasricha

Front cover-Lee Battaglia. Inside front cover-Barry Fitzgerald except top left-Cliff Richeson; left center & bottom-Carol Hightower.

2-3-Barry Fitzgerald except bottom row center-Carol Hightower.

4-Carol Hightower. 7-courtesy American Film Institute. 9-13-John McGrail. 17 center, 18-19-Avinash Pasricha. 20-22-illustrations by Mickey Patel. 23-Lee Battaglia. 26-Alan Weiner for U.S. News & World Report. 27 top to bottom-Chick Harrity; Susan Biddle; Bart Bartholomew; all for U.S. News & World Report. 29-Diego Goldberg!

Sygma. 32-Jean Moss. 40-illustration

by Nand Katyal. 41-R.N. Khanna. 43-45-Kevin Horan. 46-48-Avinash Pasricha. Inside back cover and back cover-Barry Fitzgerald.

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. Government. 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 44b.

Front cover: Mark Twain made Hannibal famous as the small town of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In a fitting tribute, statues of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn gaze over Hannibal's main street. See also pages 20-23.

Back cover: Franco Gaskin has brought color to the dull steel gates of Harlem with paintings like this one of the Manhattan skyline, See also inside back cover.

You may h"'ivenoticed the alteration in our' September masthead. The changing of the SPAn guard has taken place once again and the magazine's seventh editor, Harren Hilliam .McCurdy, has taken charge. I want to take this opportunity to welcome Bill to our SPAN family and to commend him to you, our. faithful readers. Bill and I worked briefly together in vJashington half a dozen years ago when I was head of the press and publications division of the U.S. Information Service; he was a bright and upcoming senior editor of Horizons magazine, which for some years was distributed, in about 35 languages, in almost every country of the world except India (which of course had SPAN). Before that, he had been Latin American editor of the magazine's Spanish edition, working out of Mexico City and traveling extensively throughout Central and South America. Most recently, he and his wife, Kathleen, and tlteir two teenage sons were living in Vienna, Austria, where Bill edited magazines for Eastern European audiences for the last five years. In all, he has been in the writing/editing profession for almost 25 years. He holds a master's degree (in Spanish) fran Middlebury College in Vermont and a bachelor's (in philosophy) fran Kansas State University. He says that having been so long in frigid Austria, he and the family are enjoying the warmth of India, and especially the warmth of her people~ SPAN's coverage of the glorious Festival of India in America continues this month with a first-person account of the "India Fever" sweeping through the nation. Bonnie Tinsley, an American who lives with her. husband in Bangalore, writes about a dramatic change in the attitude of her friends, discovered during a visit hane to the United States earlier this year. She was besieged for Indian recipes and found that friends who formerly had a short attention span were mesmerized by her tales of everyday life in India. She reports that this India Fever--a fascination with the country and a desire to visit here--has been brought to a high pitch specifically by the Festival, which is scheduled to run through much of 1986.

This autumn marks the 150th birthday of Mark '!Wain and the centennial celebration of the publication of what many consider the finest American novel ever written--TIle .Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In. "Memories of Mark '!Wain" SPAN salutes '!Wain (whose real name was samuel L. Clemens) in a picture story on his horne town of Hannibal, Missouri, wl1ich along with the Mississippi River is immortalized in his writings.

The American Dream has been a hallowed illusion for about as long as any American - can remember. It is usually broad enough to drive a Greyhound Bus through, but always seems to incorporate such cherished hopes as horne ownership, expanding opportunities and the ability of anyone born to the sod--no matter how humble or poor--to get rich and even become President. In "Realizing the American Dream," we take a look at the current state of striving by success-seeking Americans from half a dozen cities and various walks of life. These are not the stories of EverYman, but they do happen often enough to keep the American Dream alive.

Finally, I would draw your attention to several additional delights fran this month's fare. "Mid-Life and the Cello" offers those who never tire of self-renewal a kindred spirit in Christian Hilliams who came to the cello at 35 and poignantly describes his slipping from ignorance to knowledge. In "Hatching the Master at Work," the reader will find a charming vignette by one of our colleagues in USIS Calcutta on noted filmmaker Satyajit Ray while Ray was making his latest movie, Ghare Baire.

And in an expansive memoir on the "Fellowship of Scholars," Professor Darshan Singh Maini demonstrates that academics can be far more interesting than their stereotypes.

--J.A.M.

hose days seemed endless, full of wonder and possibilities. For us, two sisters, little girls then, those long mornings listening to the cooing of pigeons and buzz of bees, reading our favorite books on the roof of Delhi's St. Stephen's College (where our father taught English literature) were pure magic, never quite possible to recapture again. And among our favorite books were those by Louisa May Alcott. We read them all, over and over again, each identifying with the characters differently, according to our individual perceptions of ourselves at the time. Strange how two Indian children should have so loved those characters and felt at home with them, though the author was an American, a New England woman, an eccentric spinster, a contemporary and friend of Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau (whom she secretly loved). Alcott's characters in her books, Little Women, Good Wives, lo's Boys and Little Men, were Victorian young women-Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. And, of course, there was Marmee, that ideal mother figure.

The first of the books, Little Women, chronicles the story of the four sisters growing up under their mother's tutelage to become what their father wants them to be: little women. While writing the book Alcott worried that its simple, moralistic story would bore readers. But the book articulated the wishes of innumerable American girls. And Alcott went on to write sequels on the continuing lives of the March family.

The saga of the March sisters has been read by several generations of schoolgirls. It has been recreated in plays, movies, condensations and translations. Little Women, particularly, has a special place in American culture, says Louisa Alcott's biographer Martha Saxton. "It's nearly un-American not to have read this monument to family life," she adds. And even continents apart-and a century away from the time they "lived" in-the Little Women were loved (and I believe still are) almost as flesh and blood sisters by many English-reading schoolgirls in India. It wasn't just Little Women; all of Louisa Alcott's stories of the March sisters weaved a special charm over my sister and me.

That cosy home, that sense of life being an adventure and a battle or Pilgrim's Progress, the good and "jolly" times had by the sisters and their endearing neighbor, Laurie, in spite of poverty ... it all appealed to us tremendously.

The story was perhaps more real in the reading because it was, in a sense, real, being based largely on the author's own family life. When she decided to write a book to earn money, "instead of retreating into a heady, imaginary world ... Louisa recreated her past into shapes and pictures of what it should have been. She summoned up her adolescence and put it into an ethical order," says Saxton. The March sisters were the Alcott sisters, sometimes more sometimes less. For the truth about the Alcott family was, in fact, far different from "the author's own syrupy fantasy." Yet, it was that very syrupy fantasy that had us all so enveloped in the life of the March sisters.

I suppose Jo March, that hoydenish tomboy, full of irrepressible spirit, with her very real struggles against herself, was my favorite. She dreamed of being an author, dreams I identified with and heartily approved of. I also sympathized with Amy, the youngest sister who attempted to lengthen her small nose, the bane of her life, by sleeping with a clothespin on that offending object. The March sisters, directed by Jo, were always trying out theatricals (Alcott herself had dreamed of

T

The Woman Behind

writing a play, as well as being an actress), and so were we. I would write short playlets, which would be acted by our small group of friends, with two of us holding up counterpanes for curtains. Inspired by the Pickwick Club of the March sisters, we too started a club and a magazine (of which I was editor), which contained our own and other people's literary gems. In school, we had a Kats Klub, which too was a literary idea sparked off

by Little Women. We were four members, just like the March sisters.

We read all of Louisa May Alcott's books we could get our eager hands on: Good Wives, Little Men, lo's Boys, Rose in Bloom, Under the Lilacs and Eight Cousins. Victorian and essentially didactic, they yet spilled over with life, repressed though it was. Why is the popularity of the books-especially Little Women-such an enduring phenomenon?

Says Saxton, "Little Women seduces everyone who wants to believe in a sensible universe. Louisa's world works with clockwise moral regularity. Every sorrow and act of abnegation brings an unexpected reward in love and self-esteem .... Little Women's' great appeal is this tidy justice .... Little Women became a handbook for girls desiring wisdom about becoming good women. It defines the dream of the American family."

The charm of the book-and its characters-doesn't fade with age. Re-reading them today I am still captivated by the vivacity of the telling and the endearing quality of the characters.

The four March sisters grew up in the difficult times of the American Civil War. Their father was away fighting in the war.

The brave little women, and their Marmee face life's tr.oubles at home with courage, devotion and a sharing of joys and troubles. Alcott gave the Marches qualities that she found in her own home. Meg, the oldest, is a delicate, graceful beauty, the ideal gentle and rather passive Victorian girl, who, of course, marries early and lives blissfully with her poor but good, young husband. Shades of Anna, the eldest Alcott daughter.

Jo, the second, loves to sit in the attic with a pile of books and apples, and a pet rat for conwany. With a great sense of drama and fun, she longs to makelife comfortable for her family, who are very much on the~(jge of poverty. She works as companion to that old Tartar, Aunt March. Louisa May Alcott in real life worked as a governess and as a seamstress to supplement the family's meager income. Later Jo's writings (like Louisa's) bring her money and fame, which she uses to make life better

LittleWomen

Little Women, the saga of the March sisters created by Louisa May Alcott (facing page) in 1868, was brought to the screen in 1933. The four sisters were played by (top, from left to right) Joan Bennett (Amy), Katharine Hepburn (Jo), Jean Parker (Beth) and Frances Dee (Meg). The film got Hepburn the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival that year. In another scene from Little Women (above) Hepburn is seen with Paul Lukas (Professor Fritz Bhaer) and Douglass Montgomery (Laurie).

for her sisters and Marmee. Jo is Louisa May Alcott's alter ego.

Beth, the third sister, like Louisa May's sister Elizabeth, is frail and gentle, a "little angel" loved by all. She fades away into death in the second book, Good Wives. Beth Alcott too died at the early age of 23.

Amy, the youngest March, is blonde, elegant, artistic and rather ambitious. The youngest Alcott, May, fitted the description, right down to being an artist.

Laurie, the boy next door, lonely and rich, is adopted by the March family, especially by Jo, as "our boy." Lively, generous, yearning for affection, he becomes very much a part of their growing up, being particularly "plagued, protected and petted"

by Jo. Later the boyish friendship and easy relationship with Jo turn to love, at least for Laurie, but Jo rejects his proposal. She can't stand "philandering" and "lovering" as she calls it. Her decision brings heartbreak to Laurie-and to generations of girls (and their mothers) who have wept and ached as they read

about Jo's renunCIatiOn of Laurie. I found myself doing so again, after all these years, when I re-read the book recently.

Laurie later marries Amy and Jo ends up marrying old Professor Fritz Bhaer, who is good, learned and kindly. She makes a happy life with him. But in real life no such happiness turned up for Louisa May Alcott. In an age when you were really "on the shelf" if you weren't married by 30, she accepted her spinsterhood with grace, and gave her love to her family and to her writing.

Mr. March, being away at war, is a shadowy figure in the books. He is based on Bronson Alcott, Louisa's highly impractical father, who was a philosopher and thinker.

Abba, Alcott's mother, was a sensitive, intelligent woman who was a great influence on the writer. When Alcott began to keep a journal, her mother often wrote in it. On her 15th birthday in November 1847, Abba, showing remarkable insight, wrote: "Light up your soul then to meet the highest, for that alone can satisfy your great yearning nature-your temperament is a peculiar one, and there are few or none who can intelligently help you." Alcott vowed to work for her mother, to be happy for her as she was "the best woman in the world."

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 on her father's birthday, November 29, in Concord, Massachusetts.

She and her sister, Anna, went to Henry and John Thoreau's school, the Concord Academy. They grew up in the vicinity of Walden Pond and the woods made famous by Thoreau.

As a little girl, Louisa used to pad around after Thoreau on his walks. She was somewhat in love with him, a fact she could never reveal, as Thoreau, an utter misogynist, would have despised her. She also wrote love letters to the 43-year-old Emerson, based on a translation from the German of Bettina von Arnim's Goethe's Correspondence with a Child. The book sanctioned and fired her fantasies; but the letters were never delivered to Emerson.

It was partly a desire to earn money that made Alcott' start writing. Her early efforts were mostly potboilers and sensational stories, which she sold to papers and magazines under a pseudonym. Like Jo, she was rather ashamed of her "blood and thunder" creations. But they brought so many comforts for her mother; for her beloved Beth, who was so frail and later died; for May to have her lessons in art, and travel abroad. In 1851, Alcott's first poem, Sunlight, was published under the pseudonym Flora Fairfield

by Peterson's Magazine, then America's most popular women's magazine.

In 1854, she published a volume of fairy tales titled Flower Fables; this was the first book to which Alcott put her name. In 1859 when ,the prestigious Atlantic Monthly accepted one of her stories, the family celebrated. .

She was paid $50 for the story. "Success," she wrote on her 27th birthday, "has gone to my head and I wander a little." This feeling of being "very happy" at her achievement was rare. She was usually either grudging about it or resentful of the publicity it got her.

Alcott always regretted bitterly that it was her less serious work that was appreciated.

The failure of her first adult novel, Moods, upset her greatly. Moods is a love story inspired by her secret childhood love, Thoreau, and is her only serious attempt to deal with relations between men and women. Saxton describes it as "an adult fiction about misunderstanding, misplaced love, disappointment, and redemption.,. unquestionably her most evocative and poignant story ... demonstrating remarkable insight, not just a facility for narration."

No one reading the cosy story of family life could guess that the author wrote it without much enthusiasm, finding the chore of writing a "girl's book" boring.

But Alcott had problems having it published. And when several publishers first either politely rejected her manuscript or asked her to trim it, she took to a form of "revenge" she often indulged in: writing thrillers under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard. In these "lurid stories she didn't need to be responsible for a morality, an expected metaphysic, a righteous ending," says Saxton. They also allowed her freedom to make her heroines more aggressive, sometimes even immoral, renouncing the claims of 19th-century womanhood. She gave rein to some feelings long suppressed. Overwhelmed by pressures on her to be publicly virtuous, Alcott never did acknowledge the authorship of the books, which she continued writing in between the juvenile tales, enjoying "the freedom from the fetters of predictable virtue."

To get back to Moods-she finally made some changes and had it published in 1864. Though nowhere near her Barnard creations, Moods was different from her more simple tales of loving and living. It was based on the premise that "it is a grave sin to marry without feeling complete, profound and overwhelming passion." Strong sentiments for those Victorian times. And the passionate Sylvia, the heroine, was probably closer to the real Louisa May Alcott than Jo March. The book was partly a reaction to sister Meg's "blissfull" marriage to John Brooke, which Alcott obviously considered "boring," though she later idealized it in Good Wives.

The first edition of Moods sold out within a week-and then the critical reviews started coming in. There were accolades too-from people like Henry James, Sr. (who kept calling it "Dumps") and Theodore Parker's widow. But on the whole the book was criticized an'd didn't sell well, making Alcott decide to write "rubbishy tales for they pay the best."

Alcott had been fairly sick while writing Moods-a result of her military stint as a nurse in a hospital in Washington. That experience, which she went into excited and happy in late 1862, left her emotionally and physically marked forever. She fell sick while working and was administered large doses of mercury (the standard treatment then, till it was banned in May 1863 when its long-term effects were more publicized). She returned home sick and delirious and, seemingly, near death-and never did recover fully.

"Hospital Sketches," articles written by her, based on her experiences, were published by The Commonwealth in three parts. Magazines and newspapers reprinted them. She accepted one of the many offers from publishers to print them in book form. This success pleased her-especially when Henry James, Sr., wrote her a letter of congratulations. One reader, William Weld, impressed by her nursing experience, offered her a trip to Europe as companion to his invalid daughter, Anna. For Alcott the trip was a dream come true.

In July 1865 she sailed for Europe with Anna and her brother, George Weld. In Vevey, Switzerland, they met a young Polish exile Ladislas (Laddie) Wisniewski, pronounced, Alcott explained, "by performing two hiccoughs and a sneeze."

A warm friendship, and, possibly, a brief romantic interlude,

ensued. But they had to part in Lausanne. The character of Laurie in Little Women is based a good deal on Laddie's.

However, in 1857, Alcott also befriended and mothered, in a big-sisterly way, Alfred Whitman, a young student at Concord.

Whitman collected and published their correspondence after her death, in the Ladies Home Journal to prove that he was Laurie. She did indeed refer to him as "my boy" and, of course, Laurie was distinctly American. Louisa wrote to Alfred Whitman in 1869: "Laurie is you and my Polish boy join~ly.

You are the sober half, and my Ladislasis the gay, whirligig half; he was a perfect dear."

After returning from Europe, Alcott did a little writing but soon fell severely sick. When she began working on Little Women in 1868, she looked much older than her 35 years. No one reading the cosy story of family life, could guess how much physical pain their author suffered while writing it. Nor would they guess that she wrote it without much enthusiasm, finding the chore of writing a "girl's book" boring.

As her readers began to ask for more and more of such works, Alcott found herself somewhat trapped by their expectations. As a woman and as a writer, she found she had fewer and fewer choices. But money began to pour in with these books, and she was able to realize her dream of doing so much for her family.

She had devoted herself so entirely to them that her mother's death in 1877 broke her heart. "My only comfort is that I could make her last years comfortable," she said.

Meanwhile May, her youngest sister, married Ernest Nieriker, a Swiss banker 15 years younger than herself. It was an idyllic marriage and May wrote ecstatic letters home. Alcott reflected on the vast differences between her sister's life and her own.

May, like Little Women's Amy, vigorously grasped life's rewards for herself. Alcott, with too strong a sense of duty, lived for others-as did Jo. There was May in Europe, young, happy and loved. And Alcott, aging, sick and constantly in pain, remarked at how May was "happy and blest. She always had the cream of things, and deserved it. My time is yet to come somewher~ else, when I am ready for it."

But May was not to enjoy her happiness for long. She died two years after her marriage leaving a baby girl, Louisa (Lulu).

In her last years Alcott struggled to write, as well as to look after Lulu, who, after May's death, had become "my baby."

But her body and spirit were worn out with the struggle.

In 1886, after seven years of rest from novel-writing, she planned Jo's Boys, but was so sick that she could barely write for an hour or two a day. Yet she finished it in five months. It is the last of the March family saga. It has an older, sadder Jo. Alcott too was older, sadder, sicker.

Racked by unbearable pain, the writer's tired body gave way-two days after her father's death in 1888. The little cemetery at Sleepy Hollow, where Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the other Alcotts lay, became her last resting place.

And if Jo March can still make us laugh and cry, then Louisa May Alcott's time did come, for what more can a writer dream of?

0 About the Author: Anna Sujatha Mathai is a Delhi-based poet and free-lance writer. She is currently preparing a selection of Indian poetry for 2Plus2, a Swiss-based literary magazine of which she is a contributing editor.

Brilliance in the Bronx Bronx High School of Science has produced more winners in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search contest than any other u.s. public school. Shown above are John Kuo (foreground), winner of fifth place and a $7,500 scholarship, and other students, who won honorable mention in a recent contest.

In a classroom at the Bronx High School of Science, in New York City, a dark-haired 16-year-old named Danny Pelty shoots up his hand. He points a finger for emphasis.

-'''Cemeteries are running out of space, right?"

His classmates eye him quizzically.

They have been debating the need for new energy technologies, not the logistics

of urban interment. But at the Bronx High School of Science, where the criterion for admission is an active mind, you never know where a class discussion might wander.

"Okay, I don't want to sound barbaric," says Pelty, brown eyes intense.

"But-after we all die-why not use our bodies as biomass, for fuel?"

There are no hoots. No titters. No

jeers, giggles, taunts or groans. No outraged sighs. Only a long contemplative silence. "You'd have a public-relations problem," a black girl with a spiky punk-rocker hairdo finally says. A boy named Wing Son Woong confidently announces: "Bodies would generate insufficient biomass to make it economically feasible."

Thinking, no matter how outre, earns

peer respect among the 3,200 students at this exceptional public high school.* Of 7,000 youths who apply each year, only about 900 pass the one-and-a-half-hour admissions exam. Some of Bronx Science's old graduates jokingly dub their alma mater "P.S. [Public School] IQ." Results are spectacular.

Since its founding in 1938, Bronx Science has produced three Nobel Prize winners in physics- Leon Cooper in 1972, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg in 1979-and a long roster of distinguished engineers and scientists such as the MIT expert on artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky. But Bronx Science also has produced two generals and a U.S. Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown. Black militant leader Stokely Carmichael is a Bronx Science graduate.

So are many successful journalists like The New York Times columnist William Safire. The school's achievers are as diverse as Ragtime author E.L. Doctorow and the late singer-composer and actor Bobby Darin, who graduated as Walden Cassotto.

In the Westinghouse Science Talent Search contest, in which student research is judged by professional scientists, Bronx Science has produced more winners over the years (95, at last count) than any other school in the United States, roughly twice as many as school number two. Annually, Bronx Science's graduating seniors are offered about two million dollars in financial aid for their first year in college, and virtually all go on to colleges and universities. As a Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching study put it, this "is a public school that works."

To find out what it is that works-in this era of worry over declining U. S. leadership in science and technologyeducators from across the country and as far off as New Zealand, Japan and Turkey trek to the Bronx. The secret, they learn, is a rigorous program that energizes students, who then inspire their teachers and each other: synergy.

"It's not really that our kids are so especially smart," says Bronx Science's cigar-puffing principal, Milton Kopelman, who-like almost everyone at the school-talks at high velocity. "There are schools in high-income suburbs where the students have the same intelligence level as our kids, and economic advan• In the United States a "public school" is one supported by tax funds and charging

no tuition.

tages most of our kids could only dream about."

About a quarter of Bronx Science's students come from low-income families, many living in the city's grimmer slums.

Nor are its facilities lavish-it boasts only two greenhouses, an inoperative planetarium, computer rooms and some specialized labs.

"What's special here is that the kids choose to be at this school," says Kopelman. "And the diversity of these kids is fabulous-they're from up and down the economic scale and from every religion, race and ethnic background you can imagine."

Discipline is rarely a problem, Kopelman continues. "When kids are having emotional problems, the way it shows up is usually through cutting classes and underachievement." He can remember only two or three. instances of students acting "fresh" to teachers.

Min Jin Lee, a Bronx Science junior, who immigrated to New York from Korea when she was 7, is typical of many of the school's students in at least one way: she must leave for school at dawn to arrive on time.

Min Jin, an ebullient girl whose bluntcut hair bounces as she talks, lives in a house on the city's far side, in the borough of Queens, where her parents own a wholesale jewelry store. Her journey to school requires two subway transfers, and two hours have passed in the rattling, graffiti-covered cars by the time Min Jin exits from the "D': train at the Bedford. Park Boulevard station, emerging onto the Grand Concourse.

Jauntily swinging a blue backpack, she hurries with other students past rows of nondescript apartment buildings, under the Jerome Avenue El, past a subway yard and into the sprawl of white and red bricks that is the Bronx High School of Science.

"It sounds sort of elitist, but here you meet better people, and they respect you if you know extra things. I went to a private school in Connecticut last summer where, if you knew something, those kids at first would categorize you as a 'brain,'" she says. "Here you read a book just because you want to. I'd send my kids here."

Like some of Bronx Science's students, Min Jin has no special interest in science.

"In fact, I used to hate math-my sisters are math whizzes- but I'm having an easier time with higher math now, prob-

ably because of the teachers," she says.

"Science is pushed here more than liberal arts, of course, but our liberal arts classes are advanced compared with ordinary schools." She plans a career in corporate. law and business; she hopes to go to Yale, followed by Harvard Law School.

She does not regret the school's emphasis on science: "After all, I might be president of a chemical company someday," she adds.

Students at most U. S. high schools would find Min Jin's daily schedule daunting. According to a Census Bureau sample survey, the average American high school student spends just seven hours a week on homework. "I do at least three or four hours of homework an evening," says Min Jin. "And then there are term papers,

Stephen Schonberg, himself a graduate of Bronx School, directs Kim Fitzgerald in the reading of a one-act play.

"Kids are incredibly encouraged here-not pushed, encouraged, because you're not an oddball here if you want to learn, to achieve:"

special projects, speeches and reports."

She also spends time with the school's community service club and the Korean club. "We have about 10 different ethnic clubs, but Italian kids join the Jewish club, and Polish kids join the Indian club-at this school we don't have any cliques."

Min Jin also works on one of the school's dozen publications, journals in fields from French to physics, where students can publish their original research results. A recent issue of the school's Journal of Biology contained such catchy titles as "A Comparison of Fatty Acid Metabolism in Bovine Liver Mitochondria to That in Rat Liver Mitochondria" by Ling P. Chen, "The Clotting Process" by Esther Melinda Mahabee and "Chemical Modification of the Fatty Acid Oxidization Complys in

Escherichia coli" by Maria Bilelis. For the social studies journal, Min Jin is working on a paper about the role of children in war. "Did you know that some of the people fighting in EI Salvador are under age 16?" she asks.

She leaves school around four each day, her blue backpack stuffed with books and notes, and arrives home ready for a long evening of scholarship. At midnight or one in the morning, while the rest of her family sleep, Min Jin is still at her desk, sometimes dialing her friendsalso awake and studying-to thrash out knotty problems in chemistry. She sleeps only four to six hours a night. "But sometimes, to make up, I sleep for 20 hours straight," she says cheerfully.

Milton Kopelman sits in his large

office, surrounded by the metal forest of trophies Bronx Science students have won in everything from tennis to interschool physics duels, his plastic-tipped cigar sending up puffs of smoke that signal "No!" He has been asked, for the nth time, if Bronx Science is a pressure cooker.

"That's the myth," he says. "The reality is that no teacher here ever says to a student, 'Hey, how come you only got a 90?' True, a lot of kids here feel pressure to get high grades, to get into the best universities, but that competitive push comes from their families and from themselves, not from the school."

Only 12 to 20 students leave the school each year because of difficulties in meeting the demands. Of the annual total of 50 to 100 who leave, most do so because their families move away or they find that the commuting is too much for them.

While he is on the subject, Kopelman puffs away another myth: elitism. "The truth is that Bronx Science, if anything, is anti-elitist," he says. "Kids come here from feeder schools where they were big fish in little ponds, and they find that there are plenty of other kids-lots of them-who are smarter than they are, which is a kind of humbling experience."

Humbled or not, apparently students do succumb to an occasional twinge of specialness: "Most kids here will tell someone they go to Bronx Science and then wait for applause," says Min Jin Lee. But they have little time to gloat.

They must plow through four years of stiff courses in English, social studies and science, and three years of no-holdsbarred mathematics. They also must take two one-year electives such as probability and statistics, microbiology, human genetics and evolution, astrophysics and laser optics.

Also required are courses in drafting (including computer-aided design), music, art, health, physical education and computer literacy. In shop, for a change of pace, students make telescopes and flutes. They also must take at least three years of a language: Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Latin, modern Greek, Japanese or Chinese.

Meanwhile, students are encouraged to take college-level courses in everything from writing and European history to sociology and astrophysics. And they can nibble from a smorgasbord of "enrichment" courses like journalism, Asian history or oceanography. About a quarter of the students get really serious) they

enroll in the "research track," spending their sophomore and junior years learning scientific experimentation methods and conducting full-scale experiments of their own design, often using laboratory facilities at hospitals, colleges and universities around the city. It is these projects that have produced so many Westinghouse contest winners.

"The main thing here is the Socratic method-we don't tell students things, we ask them questions, and that goes for English as well as physics," says biology chairman Vincent Galasso.

In a nearby classroom, a peppy biology teacher named Ellen Berman plays Socrates as a roomful of freshmen study proteins. "What's the difference between a raw egg and a cooked egg?" Berman asks. Hands fly up. "The cooking heat changes the protein's secondary structure?" suggests a blond girl with intense blue eyes. "Why?" asks Berman. A black boy with enormous glasses: "It messes up the hydrogen bonding?" "But what about the disulfide bonds?" asks a dark-eyed girl, who~e neck, wrists, fingers and ears glitter with jewelry. A tiny boy asks: "Is there a breakdown in the disulfide bonds?" "OK," says Berman, "I'll diagram this and you tell me what's happening." Thirty pairs of eyes watch intently as she draws molecules; hands are poised to shoot up for the next round of questioning.

Bronx Science teachers insist they are not super teachers. "I taught 10 years in East Harlem, one of the. poorest schools," says Stephen Schonberg, who teaches drama and coordinates student activities. "I didn't come here and, overnight, get brilliant."

Yet, some of Bronx Science's 160 teachers, like Schonberg, who immigrated to the United States from Hungary at age 7, are themselves graduates of the school. Principal Milton Kopelman attended a specialized high school in Manhattan, entering college at age 15.

He has been on the Bronx Science faculty for 34 years. For many teachers, in fact, the school is so attractive that faculty turnover is minimal. As one teacher puts it, "You'd have to dynamite me out."

"But a lot of teachers don't want to come here because of the extra work," says Kopelman. "Some might even be intimidated by the students. The result is a self-selection process."

Joseph Scavone, a Manhattanite who has taught English at Bronx Science for 18 years, is one of the self-selectees. "I

was teaching honors classes at another school," he says. "But I wouldn't compromise my standards by giving them the high marks the school expected. So I moved to Bronx Science, where my standards match the school's."

The school itself came under pressure in the late 1960s to lower its standards, specifically by dropping the entrance exam. Minority groups charged that the test could be racially biased. The exam, now evaluated for bias, has stayed. So have the standards.

"For me, teaching would be the same at any school- I have no gimmicks, just share the literature," Scavone says. "But by the end of the year we have something." Bronx Science has produced more candidates for advanced placement in English literature (high school students attempting to earn college credit) than most other schools in the United States.

"We have kids who are creative enough to handle complex material, and why shouldn't we serve the needs of some of these gifted students with a special school?

"These kids do have intellectual curiosity-they have it!" he adds. "When those 30 minds in there spark off one another and start to go, they're infinitely better than my one mind."

It is precisely the emphasis on "mind" that is Bronx Science's secret. The school este~ms thinking the way some schools honor flashy dribbling and deft tackling.

Athletics are not slighted-Bronx Science offers most standard interschool sports (except football, because of the expense and the potential for injury).

And the trophies crowding Milton Kopelman's office represent championships in everything from volleyball to swimming, tennis and soccer. But most of the trophies, including monstrosities as big as shrubs, were won by the debating team ..

Students do have complaints, of course.

"Not enough guidance couns~lors" is a common charge. So is "Too much emphasis on science-the liberal arts get slighted here." Students worry that college admissions officers do not realize that a Bronx Science "B" may outrank a "B" at an easier school. Many chafe because students live citywide, making for poor attendance at sports events. One student, with a typically lengthy commute, moans: "Why can't it be the Queens High School of Science?"

But most of the complaints are quibbles. The students are well aware that the education they receive here is superior.

In a chemistry class, students work under the kindly gaze of Albert Einstein, one of the giants of 20th-century science.

"It's a good feeling to think for yourself and come up with a solution that's all your own, and that's how they teach here.'"

Larry Rudman, the son of a Bronx sanitation worker, is a tall, good-looking youth who might be a small Iowa town's star halfback. He has only one lament about Bronx Science: "No football team!" But he has one of the school's highest averages, and his shy brown eyes sharpen when he talks about math or physics. "It's a good feeling to think for yourself and come up with a solution that's all your own, and that's how they teach here," he says. "You can learn from the other students, too-in class discussions, I love to hear what people are saying."

"I heard about the Bronx High School of Science soon after we arrived here," says John Kuo, a senior, who moved to Queens from Taiwan when he was 9 years old. His research project in genetics"The Mechanism of Transposition of Tn5 in E. coli"-recently won him fifth place, a $7,500 scholarship, in the Westinghouse competition.

After playing violin with the Youth Symphony Orchestra of New York on and off since grammar school, Kuo had to drop out because he needed the time for his research. Nevertheless, he relishes Bronx Science's rigor. "Here, teachers aren't afraid to be questioned," he says.

"In chemistry, we'd stump Mrs. Cohen, but she'd pull out the apparatus and we'd all do an experiment and learn together."

As chemistry teacher Ruth Cohen puts it: "Kids are incredibly encouraged here -not pushed, encouraged, because you're not an oddball here if you want to learn, to achieve."

In her chemistry laboratory, she watches students bustle about with test tubes and beakers. A boy who resembles former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier brings her a beakerful of red goo to examine, deftly dancing his way across the jammed room, shuffling daintily around a cluster of students struggling with a recalcitrant Bunsen burner., pirouetting, pausing for a one-two count to shake his head in mock dismay at a Chinese girl's bottle of clear liquid, finally presenting his beaker to the teacher with a flourish and a bow.

"If I get depressed, I come to school and I'm happy again," says Ruth Cohen.

"Because, more than anything else, these are nice kids."

0 About the Author: Richard Wolkomir, a freelance writer, recently won a writing award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

AView From The Far Side Since his 1979 debut in the Chronicle, cartoonist Gary Larson's weirdly inverted depictions of life in the food chain have snared him not only a swift, "somewhat cancerous" fame, but a six-figure income. The success of "The Far Side" has enabled him to move from a basement apartment, "the size of an average men's room," to a two-bedroom suburban house, which he shares with a collection of snakes that would make Medusa blush.

Four Far Side anthologies have sold more than a million copies total, and, under a contract with Universal Press Syndicate, he has introduced a line of poster and greeting cards, and packed his bags for a book-signing tour.

San Francisco

"I've been swept along by the merchandising monster," he sighs.

Gary Larson is among the vanguard of young cartoonists (such as Nicole Hollander and Berke Breathed) whose irreverent and ironic humor is giving mainstream funny pages a facelift.

Larson once explained his artistic poipt of view to the presswith Mel Brooks' definition of humor: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

Predictably, his cartoonslike the one where a pilot ponders the appearance of a mountain goat in the cloud bank ahead-provoke nervous laughter among editors and occa-

sional criticism from readers.

"There have been some significant wars in cities between people who enjoy this kind ofhumor and those who don't, says Larson with obvious satisfaction.

In 1983, for instance, the Fort Wayne News Sentinel dropped "The Far Side," alleging it played to "thehumorofviolence."

A reader revolt brought it back.

More often, Larson's panels display a whimsical, albeit keenedged wit; insects pack a theater to see Return of the Killer Windshield, or a woman walks her snake in the park, carrying a long, thin pooper-scooper.

Larson's past is as checkered as a box of Ralston Purina [dry dog fObd]. As a child in Tacoma, he was terrorizedand perhaps unconsciously

inspired-by an older brother who "would wear a black cape and flow from the woods ... truly something out of a nightmare."

An admirer of Stephen King [America's best selling horror story author], Larson often recounts to reporters how, when hauling firewood up from the hated basement, where all the frightening beasts of his imagination lurked, his brother' would hold the door shut, chanting, "It's coming for you, Gary .... " He devoured Mad magazine and Tarzan comics, and was deeply affected by Rudyard Kipling's jungle books. In high school, Larson took as many science courses as possible.

Later, while majoring in communications at Washington State, he leavened his studies

"Well, shoot. I just can't figure it out.

I'm mavin' over 500 doughnuts a day but I'm still just barely squeakin' by.

with zoology electives.

After graduating in 1972, armed with a communications degree, Larson might have changed the course of, or at least tweaked the face of, advertising. Instead, he grabbed his guitar and formed a jazz group, "Tom and Gary-a duo as exciting as its name." They

played on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, which Larson admits was less like the Love Boat and more like "a floating nuthouse.:' To meet the rent, the repressed cartoonist then took a job as an animal protection officer (after running over a dog

on the way to the interview). In 1978, he sold "Nature's Way," an obvious precursor to "The Far Side," to the Seattle Times. The paper dropped the strip after a year, following a cool response to its odd subject matter. In 1979, Larson went for broke as a cartoonist. He showed his work to the San Francisco Chronicle which gave him a five-year contract.

Though he seems comfortable with the fact of his growing notoriety, Larson is unable to explain why "The Far Side"

has struck such a responsive chord.

"Humor is so subjective," he says. "It's a mystery to !TIewhat makes something funny. There's a wide range of stand up comics, yet they're all valid, all distinct.

On the other hand," he notes thoughtfully, "if I saw someone reading 'Nancy' and rolling over in a belly laugh on the ground, I would think that's bizarre."

D About the Author: Lisa Kinoshita is a Seattle-based free-lance 'writer.

Fighting Filariasis Since his first trip in 1976, Dr. Eric Ottesen of the U.S. National Institutes of Health has returned regularly to India to work with sc.ientists and doctors here in their bid to eradicate one of India's most troubling diseases.

Elephantiasis, chronicled in the pharaonic pamtmgs of ancient Egypt, is a disease as old as civilization. Unchecked by vaccine or drug therapy, it has wrought 50 centuries of human misery.

Today in India, 14 million p~ople still suffer from filariasissometimes in the elephantiasis form; sometimes as a chronic lung disorder, tropical pulmonary eosinophilia. Even more people carry the infection without exhibiting symptoms. Some 304 million Indians, living in areas where the disease is common, are considered "at risk."

Infecting more victims than malaria and tuberculosis combined, filariasis has been designated a chief target in the Indian Council of Medical Research's campaign to eradicate India's most troubling diseases.

Following a visit to the United States by the director of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in 1976, Dr. Eric Ottesen of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, came to the ICMR's Tuberculosis Research Centre in Madras.

There, he found three brilliant and dedicated Indian scientists and clinicians in Dr. S.P. Tripathy, Dr. K. V. Thiruvengadem and Dr. V. Kumaraswami. Together, they established what is now the Indo-U.S. collaborative filariasis study and laid the foundation for the sophisticated investigations and technology transfer that exist today.

Since 1983, when the already established study was incorporated into the Indira Gandhi-Reagan Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Initiative, scientific dialogue has accelerated.

American scientists, carrying out specific projects, visit India to study the disease firsthand and Indian collaborators visit the

United States to acquire advanced techniques.

To understand the directions that the research has taken, it is first necessary to understand the nature of the disease. For the 14 million victims, for the carriers, and for all of those "at risk," filariasis begins with a simple mosquito bite. A person infected with filariasis as a carrier has hundreds of thousands of microscopic larval worms, microfilariae, in his blood-but may never know it.

When a mosquito bites such a person, it ingests some of these larvae along with its blood meal. These develop in the mosquito's body until the third larval stage, when they migrate to the mosquito's proboscis. There they wait, ready to enter the mosquito's next victim through the hole left in the skin after the mosquito feeds.

What happens next may be luck, genetics or a combination of factors. In those persons who develop the grotesque swollen organs and limbs of elephantiasis, the larvae migrate to the lymph nodes where they develop into adult worms. The victim typically suffers painful week-long episodes of fever, inflammation and swelling of the affected organ or limb. Then the fever and swelling subside-until the next episode.

After multiple bouts of these "filarial" fevers and transient swellings, gradual destruction of the lymph node and changes in the affected organ take place that hinder recirculation of the lymphatic fluid. Swellings no longer subside.

"Elephantiasis" is the name given to this irreversible condition. Both sexes may develop swollen legs or arms.

Additional sites are, in men, the scrotum, in women, the breasts and vulva. While elephantiasis is not life threatening, Dr. P.R. Narayanan, director of Immunology at the Tuberculosis Research Centre, states emphatically, "Filariasis is a morbid disease in the sense that many pyople with elephantiasis lose their jobs or cannot do them properly."

He adds, "It is also a significant sociological problem. A man with a hydrocele or a young woman with a swollen leg will have great difficulty finding marriage partners." The story of filariasis is rife with tales of individual tragedy.

The world map shows endemic areas of filariasis. In India, these are primarily along the coastal regions and in the area irrigated by the mighty Ganges.

Far left: Taken in 1976 when Dr. Eric Ottesen (center) first came to Madras, this picture shows him with Dr. Ramesh Paranjape of the Tuberculosis Research Center (TRC) and Dr. S. P. Tripathy of lCM R. Left: The filariasis mosquito.

Above: Dr. Paranjape works on antigen detection. Left: In 1984 a doctor from the U. S. National Institutes of Health performed TRC's first broncholavage-a washing out of cells from the lungs' interior -an operation now performed routinely.

Unfortunately, there is little that one can do to "cure" elephantiasis. A lucky few can be offered hope in the form of surgery. At the Government Hospital in Thanjavur, Dr. S. Jamal performs miracles of reconstructive plastic surgery on his elephantiasis patients.

Yet even if Dr. Jamal were to spend 10 lifetimes transforming the hideous damage wrought by filariasis, only a small portion of the vast legions of sufferers in India would be reached. The numbers are just too overwhelming and, in any case, the cost of such a surgical approach to the problem would be astronomical.

Often, elephantiasis victims are among the poorest of the poor. Dr. Ottesen tells the story of a bicycle rickshaw driver in Madras whose leg was swollen beyond recognition. He wanted' to go to Thanjavur for surgery-but had no way of maintaining himself, let alone his family, for the three to six months the surgery and recuperation would take. Even the train fare to Thanjavur was beyond his reach.

Scattered across India, cases like that of the rickshaw driver number into millions. From a public health point of view, Dr. R. Prabhakar, director of the Tuberculosis Research Centre, explains, "We cannot afford ,surgery for all of the millions suffering from this malady. India is a country with financial constraints. " To control filariasis, he says, "There must be a sort of concerted effort by various disciplines-the clinician, the immunologist, the parasitologist, the entomologist." While edm;ation and mosquito control are important, Dr. Prabhakar advocates research which answers the questions: "How can we prevent the disease spreading from one individual to another?

Can we find a good vaccine to protect individuals from contracting the infection? How can we get rid of the adult .Dr. R. Prabhakar (right), directorofTRC, and Dr. S. P. Tripathy, senior deputy director general of ICMR, in the TRC laboratory in Madras. worms?" .

The drug currently in use, DEC (diethylcarbamazine), will kill the microfilariae within hours, but it is largely ineffective clear microfilariae, you stop transmission of the infection. At against adult worms that live in the lymph nodes. Even if all of least, you bring the level down so low that it just dies out." the immature worms are destroyed, the adult female will go on For the drugs to be effectively used, some system for identifying carriers is necessary. "The problem is that many of discharging more of them into the blood.

Dr. Ottesen, who also chairs the Filariasis Steering Commit- these carriers exhibit no signs of the disease," states Dr. tee of the World Health Organization (WHO), is enthusiastic Prabhakar, "these-asymptomatic, seemingly healthy peopleabout two upcoming drug studies. "There's been a big effort by are the potential d~nger to the community."

"What is needed," says Dr. Narayanan, "is a good immuno- .

WHO to develop a drug that kills the adult parasites as well as the microfilariae. One new compound developed by Ciba- diagnostic test, a quick and simple test to determine whether or Geigy that is effective in animals has never been given to not a person has larval worms in the body."

In 1983, Dr. Ramesh Paranjape of the Tuberculosis Research humans before. As soon as the drug is finally released by WHO, the Drug Controller of India will review it thoroughly and, . Centre (TRC) spent a year in Dr. Ottesen's laboratory at the hopefully, permit the Phase 1 studies to begin before the end National Institutes of Health studying the latest techniques in antigen detection and in preparing the very specific qetection of 1985." tools called "monoclonal antibodies" that are needed to "Even more exciting" is the way he describes the potential of a second antifilarial drug, Ivermectin, developed by Merck, develop such techniques.

Dr. Narayanan explains, "Dr. Paranjape did a wonderful Sharp and Dohme in the United States. "It has already been used on Africans with the filarial infection, river blindness. It piece of work in the United States. The goal of his research was has proved very effective and there is some evidence suggesting to find a simple diagnostic test to identify the carriers of an effect on adult worms. It has passed all the local ethical filariasis. After he came back, he developed other clones, and committees and is now being reviewed by the Drug Controller that gives us the confidence that this very important technology of India. If approved, there will be a large collaborative study can be done here." by the NIH, ICMR, Madras Medical College, Government In addition to the carriers and those who have developed Hospital and the Corporation of Madras to be finished by the elephantoid limbs, there is a third group of people who suffer end of this year." from an important but less common form of filariasis: tropical "Both drugs," he adds, "are single, oral dose medicines. One pulmonary ¡eosinophilia or TPE. time and it's done. If you can carry out mass treatment and When their blood is examined no larval worms are found.

Instead, it shows evidence of a raging battle with the parasite.

Vast numbers of a special type of white blood cell, the eosinophil, and high levels of allergic antibodies (IgE) against the parasite, are found.

In this condition the body is doing its job of fighting off the parasite too well. TPE victims respond so vigorously to the parasites that their own hyper-response causes profound damage to the lungs.

Patients complain of asthma-like symptoms-coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, lack of vigor. Later on, fibrous scarring develops in the delicate lung tissue, impairing elasticity and the ability to absorb oxygen. In some cases, there is also heart damage.

In 1976, Drs. Ottesen, Tripathy and Thiruvengadem began intensive studit:s of the immune response and host defenses involved in this disease. Over the years, it became increasingly obvious that the actual site of the inflalnmation, the lung itself, should be carefully studied.

In 1983, Dr. Tripathy, then director of the TRC, gave a senior medical officer in charge of lung function studies, Dr. V.K. Vijayan, a deadline'-to set up a bronchoscopy suite and recovery room in two months. Exactly two months later, a team from the NIH's pulmonary branch, headed by Dr. R.G. Crystal, arrived. They performed the first bronchial lavages at the TRC. Using a bronchoscope, a long, flexible tube that. is passed through the breathing passages into the lung itself, they were able to perform a lavage, literally, a washing out of cells from the lungs' interior. Analysis of the cells and fluids recovered from the lungs in this way, gives a much more informative

picture than indirect methods (such as X-rays) can.

Dr. Vijayan recalls, "Then Dr. Ottesen made the proposal that Dr. Kumaraswami and I should go to the NIH. I was there for nearly four weeks .... I became proficient in basic lavage techniques. That training also helped me to become confident-that is the most important thing." He adds, "We are now doing lavage here."

One outcome of this improved study of TPE is likely to be a different approach to its treatment. Formerly, after a threeweek course of treatment with DEC, a patient's outward symptoms disappeared and he went on his way-until the symptoms recurred.

Now even after the standard treatment, Dr. Ottesen explains, "We see that there is still inflammation there-signs that a battle is still going on and the lungs are being damaged further.

"In a preliminary trial a couple of months ago, some of these DEC-treated patients were given steroids and we found that, in fact, you can turn off some of those destructive r~sponses.

"We'll be doing parallel studies at the NIH on patients who have lung diseases that are similar but not caused by filaria.

Then we'll compare data. This approach will help define what is unique about each disease-so you can treat it effectively."

Dr. Vijayan considers the application of this technique to other diseases to be a major advantage. Tuberculosis, still a major health problem in India, is one obvious area.

Other beneficiaries of this technology will be those unfortunate victims of the Union Carbide disaster at Bhopal who suffered lung damage. Dr. Vijayan has been selected to establish a facility for evaluating lung function at Bhopal, where the ICMR will conduct a long-term study of those patients and how best to treat them.

Experience with the lavage technique has made Dr. Vijayan a firm supporter of the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Initiative. [As a result of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's recent U.S. visit, the Initiative has been extended till 1988.] He contrasts his current experience with a past one, in which research activities were being done by doctors in India. They were getting project money, but state-of-the-art technology was not being passed on.

Dr. Narayanan adds, "Technology transfer is the only way to keep up with the development of techniques in various other programs in the world."

He also feels that a scientist coming from the United States .equally benefits from the special combination of facilities at the TRC in Madras. "We have the human patients. Dr. Ottesen and his team can combine the clinics, the epidemiology, the chemotherapy as well as the immunology in one single place.

Cooperative patients are available, enthusiastic clinicians are available." Best of all, over the last 10 years, scientists from both countries have enjoyed "a fantastic rapport."

In that decade, research has been set in motion to investigate the varied and¡ baffling forms of filariasis. Will the next decade bring the development of a good, immunodiagnostic test?

Will drug therapy destroy the parasite in carriers? Will improved treatment help those suffering both from elephantiasis and TPE? If so, filariasis, known in Egypt 50 centuries ago, may then truly become a disease of the past.

D About the Author: Carole Vilchis is an American free-lance writer who

recently spent some time in India.

F;.::ÂŁ;l(;: :.:.-

Persons attempting to find a motive'in th,s narrative will be prosecuted; pergo:os attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it wiII be shot. i

By ORDER OF THE AUTHOR. .'

Adventures of HucMeberry Fillil . [r884]. .YO/lce

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Memories of

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He lived there only 14 of the nearly 75 disrupted river traffic in 1861.

Years later, Mark Twain described years of his life. He left for good when he was 18. He wasn't even born there. Yet, what it meant to be a riverboat pilot: "I Hannibal, Missouri, is inextricably en- loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and took a measuretwined with the life-and legend-of America's beloved author Mark Twain, less pride in it. The reason is plain: a whose 150th birth anniversary is being pilot, in those days, was the only unfetcelebrated this year. tered and entirely independent human Born in Florida, Missouri, in Novem- being that lived in the earth .... " And, of course, the river gave Mark ber 1835 as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain moved with his family in Twain his name: "mark twain" is a 1839 to Hannibal, a small Mississippi riverboat pilot's term indicating "safe River town 193 kilometers northwest of water." When the water's depth reached twain" St. Louis. Here he spent his boyhood, two fathoms (3.7 meters)-"mark steamboat could wandering along the river banks and on a knotted rope-a lounging on the levees listening to the tall safely pass without fear of scraping bottales of the rugged rivermen. As Mark tom or hitting an underwater hazard.

Twain wrote later, "When I was a boy, First using the nom de plume in 1863, there was but one permanent ambition Clemens adopted it as his own.

Even though his boyhood in Missouri among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was short, as was his time on the river, it was a formative period in his life, and a was, to be a steamboatman."

Son of a judge and unsuccessful mer- time he drew upon repeatedly in his chant, who died when Sam was 11, young writings. His memories and reminisClemens was through with his rudi- cences found their way into The Advenmentary formal education by the time he tures of Tom Sawyer, the idyllic boyhood tale called by William Dean Howells, was 13 and working as an apprentice printer. Soon, he was working on his Twain's friend and literary counselor, brother's Hannibal newspaper, learning "altogether the best boy's story I ever read. It will be an immense success." It to write, and contributing to the paper.

Restless, he left Hannibal in 1853, and was, and is still the most popular.

But Twain's masterpiece was Advenspent several years as a journeyman printer and journalist in St. Louis, New tures of Huckleberry Finn; 1985 marks York, Philadelphia and other cities. the hundredth anniversary of its AmerThen, in his early 20s, and with all ican publication [see SPAN March 1985]. Complex, with Huck confronting intentions of sailing on to South America, Clemens boarded a New Orleans-bound clashes between what is right and what steamboat. It was piloted by Horace society has taught him is right, the book Bixby, who was to become famous in gave Twain an opportunity for acerbic Twain's Life on the Mississippi. The social commentary. It was a revolutionyoung man persuaded Bixby to train him ary book. Since the day it was first as a pilot, eventually won a pilot's license published, Huck Finn has been-and still and began on the mighty waterway a is-one of the most admired, and most career that lasted until the Civil War controversial, books in American literature. Its publication changed forever the course of that literature, and the life of a A collage of snippets from Mark Twain's small Mississippi River town. writings goes into the making of a portrait of Twain and his wit.

Hannibal became familiar to millions

of readers worldwide as "St. Petersburg," the small town of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Clemens' mother was the model for Tom's Aunt Polly, his brother Orion the model for Tom's brother Sid, friends the models for Huck and for Tom's sweetheart, Becky Thatcher. Twain's ability to absorb experiences that he could later put to use began early.

Referring to those years, Twain said: "In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-drawn character, I generally take a warm personal interest in him [because] I have known him before-met him on the river."

The fortunes of Hannibal still have a tie to the Mississippi. The city of 18,800 people, tucked between two bluffs along the river, lies in a rich farming region and remains an agricultural supply center.

Gigantic grain elevators border the water, and each year thousands of tons of grain move out on the river.

Today, echoes of its famous son abound in Hannibal. The town takes its Mark Twain legacy seriously, and annually welcomes more than 250,000 visitors, who come to savor the sights, the smells and the sounds that he immortalized in his work. Mark Twain tourism is estimated to pump $ 40 million into Hannibal's economy each year.

The small frame house Sam Clemens knew as a boy has been restored and is open to the public as the Mark Twain Boyhood Home; a museum of memorabilia is next door. Judge Clemens' law office has also been restored. Tourists can explore the near\;Jy cave visited by Tom and Huck. Throughout the area names of landmarks have been changed to fit the fictional ones made famous by Twain's writings. The fence outside the Clemens home is now "Tom Sawyer's Fence," and

whitewashed a gleaming white. Across the street, the childhood home of Laura Hawkins, the model for Tom's girl, is now "Becky Thatcher's House."

A paddlewheeler, the Mark Twain, takes passengers for rides on the river.

And Hannibal is a port of call for the Delta Queen, a restored stern wheeler , and the Mississippi Queen, its re-created sister ship, as they ply the mighty river, giving 20th-century passengers an idealized glimpse of a way of life immortalized

by Mark Twain.

Each year a pair of Hannibal's seventh grade students are chosen to portray Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher at local functions. And every July Fourth, Independence Day in the United States, Hannibal celebrates with National Tom Sawyer Day, raft races, fencepainting and jumping-frog contests.

During this year, as Hannibal celebrates the lSOth anniversary of Samuel Clemens' birth, festivities are much bigger and elaborate. The sesquicentennial events, which began on May 4, will go on

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till November 30. They have included parades, symposia and a writers' conference, concerts by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and performances by numerous other groups on five different stages, a Railroad Reunion Week and an American Sternwheelers Association Convention. Plans call for a September gathering at Hannibal of all the steamboats on the river. Hal Holbrook, internationally renowned impersonator of Mark Twain who recently regaled Delhiites with his famous show "Mark Twain Tonight," will

perform in the city to climax the events.

Twain's stature as perhaps the preeminent author in American Iiterature-75 years after his death he continues to shape American thought-assures that the echoes of that association with one small Mississippi River town will continue to reverberate far into the future to the greater glory of Hannibal.

0 About the Author: Sandy Greenberg is a picture story editor for SPAN. She is based in Washington, D.C.

TER of 1864-65in THE N DREARY ~l~ a notebook. ScatAngels Camp, he . ep about the weather tered among no~a~JOns amp meals lies an and the tedious mml~g-~ d heard that day entry noting a story Idede~ermine his course -an entry that wou 'th his jumping frogforever: "Coleman w:m er had no frog, and bet stranger $s~str h g mean time stranger C. got him one:-m \ :hot and he couldn't lille¡dC's frog full , 0 fog won." ¡ump. The stranger s ~. enius, the story J Retold with his deSCriptIVe ~rossthe United as printed in newspapers a as "The Celew b me known " States and .eca ro of Calaveras County. g brated Jum.p\n F . ~al reputation was now Mark Twam s natl~'the wild humorist of the well established as ilicsl~-

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\ A montage of the salientfeatures of life on the Mississippi with vignettes of how" The Celebrated] umping Frog of Calaveras County" and the pen name "Mark Twain" came into being (left). Youngster~ (top), at the his friends into painting legendary restoredfence that TomSawyerconned for him, posefor photographs inperiodcostumesas Tom and Becky.

Visitors on the Mark Twain (above) savor the jiav(Jr of life on the Mississippi.

Realizing the American Dream The American Dream. It seems as strong and pervasive as ever.

To a young couple, it may involve scrimping to save money to buy a home.

To a black, it might mean making it in a field once inaccessible because of racial prejudice. To an immigrant, the dream often is the chance to start from scratch and succeed.

However defined, the American Dream embodies the feeling that anything is possible in this nation, that opportunities are expanding and that the future will surely be better than the past.

Today, judged by opinion surveys, such optimism is burgeoning as the doubts of the 1970s recede. Half of all Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going, twice as many as five years ago. Seven in ten think it possible for a person to start out poor in this country and become rich by working hard.

This confidence is a traditional American characteristic, but it has been reinforced powerfully by the economic and social progress achieved in the past three decades.

Since 1970, real per capita incomes have grown 28 percent. The number of small businesses tripled from 1953 to 1983. In the past 10 years, 19 million new jobs have been created. One in seven of the population now lives below the poverty line, compared with one in five a generation ago. More than twice as many women belong to the labor force as in 1950. The number of blacks in college today is four times greater than in 1960.

Nevertheless, barriers to the American Dream remain formidable. Minorities still suffer the effects of discrimination.

Crime is a nationwide worry. Inflation erodes the fixed incomes of the elderly.

High interest rates mean hardship for many new and aspiring homeowners. In much of America's industrial heartland, joblessness is a disillusioning scourge.

"Not everyone is a millionaire in this country," observes a Jewish newcomer from the Soviet Union. "It isn't easy adjusting to America if you are illiterate and have no special skills," echoes¡ a refugee peasant from Southeast Asia.

So just how attainable is the dream in

.

1985? Why do immigrants still flock to American shores in great numbers? How strong is the spirit of free enterprise?

To seek answers to such questions, correspondents of the U.S. News & World Report traveled the country, meeting with a cross section of success seekers in contemporary America. Their reports follow.

Can Anyone Be President?

SAN ANTONIO

Articulate, urbane and personable, Henry Cisneros, 37-year-old mayor of this historic city of the Alamo, puffed at his pipe and considered the topic-can anyone born in the United States realistically hope to be President?

It was not an idle question. Early last year, Cisneros had journeyed to Minnesota to be interviewed by Walter Mondale as a potential vice presidential nominee-the first Hispanic ever accorded such national political status.

Out of the blue, the mayor-son of an immigrant Mexican mother and Mexican American father-became a folk hero to 15 million Hispanics long relegated to the margins of American politics. .

"The melting-pot concept is working as never before, at least to the degree that there is greater opportunity for participation in politics in our society," Cisneros responded to the question. "Probably there's more opportunity in the political process now than in any other sector of our society-more, for example, than in the corporate sector or in the professions or in education."

At the Democratic convention in San Francisco in July last year, speakers vied with each other to support Cisneros' claim. "My dad was a preacher and my mom taught music. We never had a dime," recalled Walter Mondale. Geraldine Ferraro [finally selected as the vice presidential candidate in 1984] spoke as "the daughter of an immigrant from Italy." New Mexico's governor, Toney Anaya, alluded to his family's "adobehouse with a dirt floor and no utilities."

Marion Barry, mayor of Washington D. C. , mentioned in his speech that

he was a sharecropper's son.

Upward political mobility never has been confined to one party. And it is not a recent phenomenon. President Abraham Lincoln's father was a carpenter.

President James Garfield once worked as a canal bargeman . Yet in the past two decades, this process seemingly has acquired new dynamism.

Blacks provide one example. In 20 years, the number of black elected officials has quadrupled. More than 250 cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta, have black mayors. For the first time, a black man-Jesse Jacksonhas made a serious run at a major-party presidential nomination.

What has touched off such developments, argues Cisneros, is that "outsiders-blacks, Hispanics, women [see "Madam Governor," SPAN August 1985]-have organized at the grassroots level, won local power and shown by example that they can govern capably.

Before this year, the conventional wisdom was that a person of minority extraction couldn't win," explains Cisneros. "But all it takes is one person to explode the myth, and once it is exploded there is free movement within society.

Yes, I think it is possible-barely possible, but possible-to say that almost anyone can move forward in American society today."

The first Hispanic to become mayor of San Antonio since the era of Texas independence 140 years ago, Cisneros' career is a vivid reflection of these expanding horizons. Born into a political family, he won scholarships to three universities, a White House fellowship and a doctorate in public administration.

In 1975, he was elected to the nonpartisan San Antonio City Council. Six years later, backed by both Hispanics and Anglos, he became mayor. In 1983, 94 percent of the San Antonio electorate endorsed his bid for another term.

Cisneros has his critics. He is said to be overly cautious and calculating. Pressure groups accuse him of straddling the fence on tough issues. His ambition also fuels wisecracks. "Around here, the saying is: 'Henry sees the Presidency as a steppingstone,''' jokes a friend. So far, the barbs

"Anything is possible in America ... opportunities are expanding and the future will surely be better than the past."

"The melting pot concept is working as never before .... There is greater opportunity."

HENRY CISNEROS

have not stuck. Instead, Cisneros' reputation and influence grow. Yet he readily accepts that his rise has its roots in the new political muscle being exercised by minorities in general. "I would like to believe that I'm being judged solely on my merits, but that's not accurate," he remarks. "My work today is a result of years of sacrifice by persons who came before me-people who blazed the trail in a much more difficult period and sacrificed their political careers on the brambles of discrimination."

A Place to Call Home DENVER

When Nancy and Bob Crook bought a house in Milwaukee in 1974, it cost them $60,000. A couple of moves and 11 years later, they live in a Denver home worth five times as much. "Each time we sold a house, we got twice what we paid," recalls Bob Crook. "There's a very small group of us between the ages of 36 and 47 who made a lot of our net worth then."

Today, the market has changed. Interest rates have more than doubled since 1965, housing-related costs rise steadily, and more often than not first-time buyers need two salaries to afford even a small apartment. Yet the American Dream of a home of one's own retains all its traditional allure. Take the young. To Roby Simons, 31, and his wife Susy, 27, "con¡ trol" and "equity" are the key reasons they are prepared to pay $850 a month on

a $70,000 mortgage, despite the dis- Federal Government regulations and appointing $4,000 capital gain they made high interest rates- has ground to a halt. on the first house they bought five years Fewer people are moving. And children are living at home longer. ago.

Despite all this, comments David HerThat willingness to make sacrifices to buy a home is widespread, says Janet linger of the Colorado Housing Finance Scavo, past president of the Colorado Agency, "Those of modest income still do Association of Realtors. "The desire for whatever they have to to make the Amerhomeownership is stronger than ever in ican Dream come true." In the past five the baby-boom generation." Adds John years, Herlinger's agency has helped Maldonado, director of Colorado's Divi- 12,000 households with an average insion of Housing, "There's no difference come of $21,000 a year finance a between blacks, Hispanics and Anglos mortgage-and the delinquency rate on over homeownership. It's a common the loans so far is less than 3 percent. aspiration. " "You can't make large amounts of Currently, 65 percent of American money any more buying and selling households live in owner-occupied houses," concludes Bob Crook, who is homes, compared with 55 percent in marketing director for a Denver medical1950, and more than a quarter of all equipment firm. "But the fact is that a houses in the United States were built in home is not supposed to be an investment the 1970s. Although prices have soaredvehicle. You buy a house to live in, not to the average cost of a new single-family get rich. To us, the American Dream home is now $100,000-and interest involves freedom of choice. Living where rates again are high, innovative financing and how you want to is a major part of deals and new designs have generally that choice." kept demand buoyant.

Around Denver, expensive new developments are sprouting. At Highlands The Rewards-and Hazards-of Ranch, luxury homes with three-car gaBusiness rages, Jacuzzi pools and built-in security CHICAGO systems sell for $285,000. In Keystone, a ski resort in the Rockies, developers say Michael Birck and Gary Stern gave up demand is strong for two-bedroom con- promising careers in the mid-1970s to dominiums costing a half-million dollars. start their own businesses. Both chose And in Cherry Creek, near downtown electronics. Both met with early success.

Denver, builders are relocating 1930s- But there the similarities end. style bungalows to lower-income neighToday Birck, 46, earns $140,000 a year borhoods and "infilling" the empty sites as chief executive officer of a public with $300,000 townhouses. company with 1983 sales of $85 million.

There are plenty of lower-priced His accumulated wealth clearly puts him ventures, too, including small garden- in that millionaire class always so magic.al apartment condominiums and town- to Americans. houses designed to appeal to two single In contrast, Stern, 40, spent time last people who pool their incomes to buy a year in a bankruptcy court struggling to house. But the bottom line, claims Mal- refinance an operation that as recently as donado, is that much more of the average 198] earned $11 million in profit. Yet household's net income is going to what links the two men-despite their housing-related costs-in Colorado, 21 vastly different fates-is a belief that percent in 1970 and 51 percent in 1980. American entrepreneurship is alive and "Over half the single-family households well. in Denver cannot afford to buy the "The spirit of capitalism is still there, average house," he says. "To do so takes the opportunity is still there," asserts an income of $50,000 a year."

Birck. "In fact, it may be easier to start a Meanwhile, Colorado's low-cost housing new business today. There are a lot of program-hurt by changes in the venture capitalists around. If you have an

idea and it passes the 'sanity test,' those guys will throw money at you. Of course, that's both a blessing and a curse, because it tends to produce a lot of competition. " Statistics from the Small Business Administration support Birck's argument. In 1983, a record 596,000 new businesses were incorporated in the United States.

One-third of these companies never opened their doors, and within five years, reports the SBA, 70 percent of the rem<;linder will fail. This sounds like dire prophesy, but it is a fact.

In spite of such odds, small business is

thriving as rarely before. During the first three years of this decade, such companies produced 2.7 million new jobs at a time when large businesses were shedding 1.7 million workers.

Moreover, small firms dominate America's fastestgrowing industries. Birck's success story is typical. With five associates, he scraped together $160,000 in 1975 and formed Tellabs, Inc., a manufacturer of telecommunications and data-services equipment. In its initial year, the firm lost $47,000, and the six partners worked gratis. "No question about it, we were a shoestring operation," 'recalls Birck.

Ten years later, Tellabs is a healthy, growing corporation with a bright future.

"Timing is everything," notes Birck.

"Although 1975 was not an upbeat year, it turned out that the telecommunications industry was just about to take off. We achieved some success rather quietly before anybody realized where the industry was going."

Stern, too, took a big gamble when he assumed the assets of a bankrupt pinball firm in 1977 and moved into videogames.

"The market looked very strong at the time," he reflects now. "But in 1982, the bottom just fell out of the game busi-

"The American Dream isn't just lying out therefor you to fall into."

CHRIS AND RHONDA MATHEISON

(far left) "The opportunity there. "

is still

"To us, the American Dream involves freedom of choice."

BOB AND NANCY CROOK

(below) "If you use your head and work hard, success is here for you."

PHIL TRINH (bottom)

ness." To survive, Stern halved his salary, cut his work force by 60 percent, moved into smaller premises and diversified into printed-circuit boards. Problems persisted. In July last year, Stern Electronics filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection-a device sometimes used to buy time to continue operating.

Yet Stern does not doubt that one day he will recover. Nor does he regret going forth on his own, even though it Il)ay be years before he tastes success. In this regard, at least, he resembles Michael Birck. As Birck puts it: "The best part of owning your own company is control,

You have so much more working for yourself than for others."

Refuge for the Downtrodden LOS ANGELES

AND NEW YORK

"Freedom-it's that simple," the former Cuban insurgent began. "It's not all smooth sailing here, but there really are no barriers other than those you impose on yourself."

Rinaldo Gonzalez, 44, nowadays a successful accountant, was outlining why he came to America 21 years ago. His words are echoed by millions of immigrants who have come to the United States down through the decades.

Currently, about 14 million foreignborn people live in the United States, with 600,000 legal immigrants arriving each year. About 1.5 million foreigners are on waiting lists to follow them, and up to 6 million workers-more than half from Mexico-may now be employed in the country illegally.

Such facts and figures, though, convey little of what America represents to the world's downtrodden. There are as many stories as immigrants.

Dr. Phil Trinh arrived in the United States in 1966 from Vietnam. By 1974, he had opened a dental clinic serving refugees from his war-torn homeland.

Now, Trinh is chairman of the board of United American Bank, one of the first Vietnamese-run banks outside Vietnam.

It serves a prospering Vietnamese enclave in the Southern California community of Westminster. "We are beginning to move away from the image of refugees to the image of making a contribution to the community," Trinh says with some pride. "I tell people this is a great country, full of opportunity and full of challenges. If you use your head and work hard, success is here for you."

A continent away in Stamford, Connecticut, Anatoli Fainstein, a 41-year-old engineer, and wife Yelena, 39, are just two of the 100,000 Jews who left the Soviet Union between 1972 and 1981.

Their motives for coming to the United States were simple. "Here, you are never afraid of saying you are a Jew," says Fainstein. "I wanted to be free." The Fainsteins-their names have been changed to protect relatives still in the U.S.S.R.-have found, however, that freedom has a price. While attending language school in 1980, Anatoli toiled long hours for low pay as a janitor. Home

was a cramped Brooklyn apartment.

Learning English proved difficult and time-consuming, and a fear of crime haunted the couple.

"Many times in the first six months, I said to myself: 'I am stupid to come to this country, giving up a good position and a big apartment,''' Anatoli recalls.

Such doubts are not uncommon among Soviet emigres. Many arrive here with unrealistically high expectations and scant awareness of the competitiveness and individualism of American society.

Often, says Mark Handleman of the New York Association for New Americans, such people are "somewhat traumatized by the lack of gold in the streets." For the Fainsteins, life at the bottom did not last long. Within six months, they found jobs with an engineering firm in Norwalk, Connecticut. Now, the signs of material progress are evident in their threebedroom condominium with two color television sets, a video recorder and two stereo music systems.

Unlike some Russian emigres, Anatoli has few regrets about his new life, though he admits that the transition from East to West was harder than he expected.

Above all, he values his freedom to travel. "I plan to go everywhere I can," he says with a laugh. "In the Soviet Union, I worked and ate. Here, I intend to live, not just exist."

Two Visions of Black America ATLANTA

The American Dream flourishes but does not come easy in this Southern city many call Mecca for black Americans.

Atlanta, 67 percent black, wears two faces for its black residents: A highly visible middle class and an equally visible lower class. From 1960 to 1980, the number of black professionals here tripled. Yet more than one quarter of Atlanta's residents still live at or below the poverty level. Today, there are about 3,000 homeless persons in a population of half a million, and nearly 70 percent of the 10,000 families living in public housing have annual incomes under $2,500.

At one pole are Chris and Rhonda Matheison. He is a 32-year-old medical technician and she a 31-year-old auditor.

Their two-story colonial home is set amid the rolling hills and neat lawns of Roswell, an affluent suburb north of Atlanta.

Readily apparent are the trappings of success. But the couple does not disguise

that it has been a struggle to get this far.

As Chris Matheison emphasizes, "The American Dream isn't just lying out there for you to fall into."

One who knows this is Susan Gholston, 30, a waitress in a fashionable Atlanta restaurant. As a child, she grew up in a rural community in northeast Georgia and received little incentive to succeed.

But by hard work and drive, she has escaped her past. "As far as I'm concerned," she says, "I'm successful right now. I meet a lot of people, and I'm happy with my job."

Though a wide gulf separates the worlds of Gholston and the Matheisons, all display confidence that life is there for the taking. Atlanta as a focus of black aspirations strengthens this optimism.

"As we perceived it," says Chris Matheison, explaining why he and his wife moved here from New York in 1983, "we saw a black power base in Atlantaa progressive, upwardly mobile place.

We felt we wanted to be part of that." To John Hutcheson of Georgia State University's Center of Public and Urban Research, the Matheisons' attitude is no surprise. "People believe things are getting better," he affirms. "They see people like themselves and see opportunities that tell them things aren't hopeless."

Others argue that racial prejudice continues to make the American Dream something of a hollow notion to many blacks. Contends Anna Grant, chairman of Morehouse College's sociology department, "It seems to me that white people are obsessed with the idea of being better than someone else. They look upon blacks as one big monolith, and no matter what you achieve, you are still black."

The Matheisons are among the few blacks living in Roswell. "We intermingle with our white neighbors on a superficial level," says Chris. With a baby due soon, the couple is concerned. "We definitely have to expose our child to bl~ck people," Chris remarks. Yet to hear the Matheisons tell it, race so far has not been a major obstacle in their quest for upward mobility. "Maybe it's just all a part of my knowing at an early age that you have to be better than the average white person," Rhonda theorizes.

For Susan Gholston, too, the key to a better life lies largely with oneself. "I got no encouragement," she says. "But if my daughter has a goal, I encourage her.

Getting your hands dirty, paying the price-that's the way you make a dream come true."

0

Math of May The riddle of cbaos-disorder; turbulence in water, in the atmosphere, in the erratic fluctuations of wildlife populations, even in the fibrillation of the human hearthas had physicists bewildered ever since inquiry into the laws of nature began. Mitchell Feigenbaum (left), a 39-year-old physicist at Cornell

University in Ithaca, New York, has become midwife to a new scientific discipline that is exploring turbulence and disorder of a kind that a decade ago seemed impenetrable. This new discipline at the moment does not even have a proper name; it is informally called "chaos. " "Chaos is asking very, very hard questions," says Joseph Ford, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "It offers the possibility that the answers are going to severely modify our view of the universe.

There is a notion that we are beginning to get the microscopic details of how the universe may work," he adds.

The following article details which way chaos theory and its proponents, like Feigenbaum, are going.

rival weather forecasts much more accurately.

How can simple causes produce chaotic effects? For one answer, turn to biology. In the early Seventies, Professor Robert May of Princeton University in New Jersey devised an unrealistically simple mathematical model of the dynamics of an insect population.

It contains only two things: a natural (exponential) reproductive rate and a finite food supply. None the less, merely by increasing the food supply, he was able to tune through an intricate range of possible developments that had all the richness of the real world.

With little food, the population dies out altogether. Repeat the calculation with an increased food supply and the population reaches a stable level. But as food becomes more abundant, things start to go awry. The population begins to wax and wane on a regular cycle. First it returns to its original value every two years, then every four, then every eight. This "period doubling" accelerates as the food supply is increased. Very soon, the population begins to vary in what is, to all intents, a random fashion-just as real insect populations do.

As a result of Professor May's work on insect populations, Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum, then at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, made an important mathematical breakthrough.

He showed that Professor May's formula was S;encc ;s about cause and effect. Apples fall because not unique; it belonged to a whole class of equations that took exactly the same period-doubling route to chaos. As the control of gravity; creatures look the way they do largely parameter (for example, insect food supply) was varied because of blueprints in their genes. Scientists believe steadily, the ratio of the intervals between two successive that, in principle, every phenomenon can be explained in this way. In practice, though, they concenperiod doublings was always the same: about 4.6692. This trate on effects that are regular and predictable. Large tracts of number, along with a few other "Feigenbaum numbers," popped up in a computer simulation of turbulence in fluid flow the turbulent world remain beyond analysis.

Picture how a smooth, calmly flowing stream plunges into a performed by an Italian, Dr. Valter Franceschini. Chaos theory swirling torrent, or a thin flame billows into strange shapes. had begun to take shape.

Period doubling is not the only route to chaos. At a Orderly behavior, explicable in terms of simple fluid dynamics, conference on chaos in 1983 at Los Alamos in New Mexico, six becomes a mathematical mess. A growing number of scientists other routes were discussed. Most are still confined to abstract realized that this cannot be the end of the story. mathematics.

One that is not is called intermittency.

Short The first inkling came from meteorology. In the Sixties, Dr. bursts of chaos are separated by intervals of regular behavior.

Edward Lorenz, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, By varying one parameter, it is possible to make the bursts uncovered the weatherman's nightmare. He built a model that more frequent, until chaos takes over completely. reduced the physics of the atmosphere to a few mathematical equations and used these to simulate weather forecasts on a Work by Japanese scientists on Josephson junctions (superconducting electronic switches) confirmed that intermittency is computer. Repeating one forecast, he fed the computer with not just a theory. By increasing the current through the data (for example, temperature and pressure) rounded off to junction, they shortened the average period between bursts in three decimal places rather than the usual six. The new forecast was alarmingly different from the old one. A weather forethe otherwise regular oscillation of the voltage. Intermittency looks just like random static, caused by some external source, cast, in the jargon, displays "sensitive dependence on initial but is in fact connected with the mathematics underlying the conditions. " This came as an unwelcome surprise. In meteorology, as in experiment. most branches of science, it had been customary to believe that To study even the simplest examples of chaos, a computer is essential. A pendulum driven by a motor is a good example. Its relations between cause and effect were "linear": small changes behavior can be summed up by one equation, and encoded into should have small effects. But Dr. Lorenz's equations were On the computer screen, the researcher uses a nonlinear, and small changes were having big effects. This is a computer. convenient mathematical shorthand to represent the pendulum, why long-range weather forecasts may forever remain notoria single point in an abstract world called phase space. The point ously poor: the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Hong Kong contains all the relevant information about the pendulum in the might affect next month's weather in London. real world-not only its position, but also its velocity. If the Dr. Joseph Ford of the Georgia Institute of Technology pendulum is swinging regularly, the point travels in a closed argues that sensitive dependence is the kernel of chaos theory: the if you spin a roulette wheel, the place where the ball ends up is circuit. But as the power of the motor is increased, pendulum begins to flail about in a chaotic manner. determined not by chance but by all the little forces acting on So what? Well, this pendulum makes a simple but not the ball and the wheel. Given enough information about how unrealistic model of an oil rig, swaying to and fro in the North the ball was thrown and the wheel spun, roulette forecasts could

Sea. If the rig begins thrashing about in a tumultuous way, the in the laboratory, Dr. Leon Glass of Canada's McGill Universiproblem is no longer academic for the engineer. More involved ty and his colleagues have found that the responses can be models of oil rigs have been investigated by Professor Michael explained by the equations of chaos theory. Dr. Glass suggests Thompson of University College, London. Chaos results, often that two or more "pacemaker sites" in the heart can affect each via period doubling. other, like the motor driving the pendulum, and lead to chaotic behavior.

To the eye, the pendulum moves erratically. The computer, however, gives more profound insight. If a record is kept of the Dr. Arun Holden of Britain's Leeds University is applying places that the point visits on the screen, a pattern gradually the theory to the human brain. Using similar methods to those appears, as if out of a mist. These patterns-known as strange of Dr. Glass, he has shown that the responses of nerve cells to attractors-have become emblems of chaos theory. They electrical stimulation also follow predictable routes to chaos. represent the unsuspected order in chaos.

Dr. Paul Rapp of the Medical College of Pennsylvania is Chaos theory is turning up in some unexpected places. working on a model of the brain that allows some cells to Astronomy is one. Planets orbit the sun and moons orbit behave chaotically. Using mathematical models, he is looking planets with archetypal monotony. But look closer and you find for a mechanism that would explain epileptic seizures. The idea that even here there are chaotic motions. The best example may is that the seizures might spread, like the butterfly effect in be a tiny moon called Hyperion, which orbits the planet Saturn. weather forecasting, from very small instabilities observed in just Most moons, like the earth's own, rotate on their axis in the a few cells.

One field for which chaos theory might seem particularly same time it takes them to revolve around the planet-which is appropriate is economic and social theory. Dr. Alvin Saperstein why you always see the same side of the moon.

Not so Hyperion. It seems to be tumbling around its orbit of Wayne State University in Michigan has recently described a like a drunken reveler. This was noticed during the recent chaos-theory model for the transition from arms race to war.

Voyager mission past Saturn. Dr. Jack Wisdom of the He concluded that the Soviet-American arms race is at the moment not en route to chaos, but admits that the model, like University of California and colleagues have an explanation.

When they take into account Hyperion's odd shape, described Professor May's insect-population models, is very crude. as somewhere between a hamburger and a cigar, and feed it Some chaos theoreticians, not content with such practical into the equations that govern the moon's motion, they find applications, are out to revise the laws of physics. They have that the solution to these equations behaves in a chaotic way. already made their point with Newtonian mechanics, showing 1Jle moon rotates on its axis in fits and starts, tumbling rather that pendulums and planets are not necessarily reliable. thlln turning.

Emboldened, they are attacking the bastion of quantum From the astronomic to the microscopic: chaos theory is mechanics, which explains the workings of the atom. infiltrating atomic physics. One obstacle to the peaceful The challenge is to explain how atoms of hydrogen can be application of fusion power-the release of large amounts of stripped of electrons by intense microwaves. Experiments have energy from fusing charged hydrogen atoms-is that the fuel confirmed the effect; chaos theory claims it can predict it, but cannot be contained for long enough to keep the reaction going. quantum mechanics cannot. According to the chaos-theory Charged hydrogen atoms-collectively called plasma-are held approach, electrons drift away from the hydrogen atoms, in place by a powerful, doughnut-shaped magnetic field. But because they are being jiggled too hard by the intense the magnetic field has a tiresome habit of finding its way into the microwaves-the pendulum again. Quantum mechanics, plasma, and forming what scientists call magnetic islands. The however, says that ionization (loss of electrons) depends only islands grow and multiply and eventually become turbulent. on the frequency of the radiation, not on its intensity. And The plasma wanders off, melting a chunk of the reactor microwave radiation, by this criterion, is unsuitable for ionizing walls. hydrogen.

Using computer simulations, researchers at Princeton UniSo, is quantum mechanics outclassed? Most scientists think versity have found that, as they change the magnetic field or the not. According to Dr. Roderick Jensen of Yale University, density of plasma in the reactor, chaos theory accounts well for quantum mechanics will eventually give a satisfactory explanathe turbulent behavior that results. The hope is that, in future, tion. The calculations are just too mathematically strenuous at fusion reactors can be designed to run more smoothly, by the moment. knowing exactly how and why chaos takes over.

Chaos theory seems to challenge conventional science on Biology has not escaped the theory. Dr. Richard Cohen, of many fronts. So is it fruitful heresy, as the proponents would the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has run a computer have it, or simply hype? Certainly, some scientists feel that the model of the heart, which simulated many of the 60 or so word is too sensational. They argue that the crux of the theory, irregular rhythms that physiologists have observed in the way nonlinear dynamics, has been around for decades. Moreover, the heart beats. He was able to tune through these different chaos theory accounts for only weakly turbulent effects; the full patterns by varying the time that muscle fibers' stay contracted rush of a bubbling stream is still a closed book to science. in the ventricle, the central pump of the heart. One of the Yet the evangelists of chaos theory maintain that it is rhythms, Dr. Cohen discovered, goes through a pattern of nothing less than a revolution in scientific thought, opening period doubling and leads to potentially fatal "ventricular whole new areas of nature to the inquisitive mind. The methods fibrillation," where different parts of the heart are beating of chaos theory have even reached the kitchen sink. Dr. Robert chaotically out of step.

Shaw of the University of California at Santa Cruz is just A more difficult task is confirming the simulation studies in completing a seminal treatise on regular and chaotic behavior in real hearts. By applying electrical pulses to chicken heart cells a dripping faucet.

D

Mid-Life and the Cello Five years ago, I, then a fellow of 35, was struck by an impulse of the romantic and irreducible sort, which I have since often compared to the thunderbolt scene in The Godfather, except that it was not a Sicilian virgin who fired my thoughts but a shapely descendant of the famous violin family of stringed instruments, the violoncello.

Straightaway I obtained a rental instrument of heavy plywood and appeared before Wendell Margrave, professor of musical instruction. It was winter.

Do not take me for a madman, rube or returning musi~al prodigy (I explained to Margrave while his hand was still warm from shaking mine), but all my life I have admired from afar the instrument of Casals, Piatigorsky and Rostropovich, and now at long last I wish to be formally introduced. I was prepared for my love of the cello to be unrequited, I explained. I knew (the sophistication of my unworthiness) that I would never really be any good at playing it.

Margrave only smiled. "You can be as good as you want to be," he said rather mysteriously. On a scrap of paper he drew a staff with two notes, the notes E and F. He showed me where to put my fingers on the neck and how to draw the bow. Then, with a soft pencil, he entered my name in his book: 10 a.m. Tuesday. Tuesday followed Tuesday, and soon it was spring.

Thus began my voyage out of ignorance and into the dream. Is there one among us who has not had this dream? Who has not picked up a friend's guitar and felt the songs locked inside? Who has not wondered if he could learn to play the Moonlight Sonata, at least the easy beginning part? To speak French? To learn to parallel-ski, fly a sailplane, land a white marlin? Finish the screenplay?

Cook in a wok? We are all good at something already, that is the problem. We make our living at it, in fact. We no longer learn but teach. We grow sure. We cling to what we have.

But what if we tried to have more? What if we embraced the fantasy, drew it close? What if, one day five years hence, we slipped onto a piano bench at a party and launched without advertisement into a Scott Joplin rag, watching an old pal turn, open-mouthed, and stupefiedly say, "My God, Beatrice, I didn't know you could play the piano!"

This would happen to me, be said to me, just like that, through the simple expedient of a dream engaged, a door

thrown open by me into the fun house of the self.

It was most remarkable to have a teacher again, after all those years of pretending to have all the answers. And I had Margrave. He had been a music critic for 20 years at The Washington Star. He had an undergraduate degree in French, a master's in psychology from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate from Cornell in musical composition. He had studied with Roy Harris and Arnold Schoenberg. He could play nearly every instrument, including the harp and flugelhorn. He was a founder of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. He had written a book called Naval Ordnance and Gunnery, which covered every ship's weapon up to the 16-inch gun and which was for 10 years the standard text on the subject at the United States Naval Academy. He was knowledgeable about politics, cooking, the Civil War, string tricks; was 68 years old when I met him and had a belly so fat it put the cello almost out of reach.

E-F, E-F, we played together-and moved on to G. It was a happy time. I was again becoming, and no longer trapped in what I had become. Surely the most abominable recognition of middle life is that we are past changing. Oh, we switch-switch salad dressings, wives, and mutual funds-but we don't change. We do what we can already do. The cello was something I demonstrably couldn't do. Yet each Tuesday I could not do it slightly less. That sounds backward, and for adults it is: adults make progress, step by step. It is children who become, slipping from ignorance to knowledge by a magical and automatic process, until one day finally they know their times tables; until one da,Ythey can drive a car; until one day-secretly astonished-they deliver their first fully formed opinion about the future of the Common Market.

That day is the last of their becoming. The net of learning, . now complete, will sweep forever after for proofs that the primary child was right, harvesting justification from experience. We become cleverer, but we remain what we become.

Yet sometimes, picking up a newspaper in a summermorning doorway, or waiting for a train to arrive, there comes the sudden, foggy remembrance of an earl,ier, still-changing time. A scent, an echo, a pattern from a faded upstairs wallpaper. We turn our heads, embarrassed. Locked in an embrace, the cello and I fell back into that time.

No one was watching, and a good thing. In an upstairs

room of my city house, at midnight, I would send through the open windows and out into the thick August night long, tortured fragments of Alwin Schroeder's 170 Foundation Studies for Violoncello to mingle with the squeals of cats being run over by police cars. The footfalls of unseen passersby would curiously stop, then resume in haste. In summer, clad in boxer shorts and the dust of rosin, I played, perspiration dripping from my chin down the face of the instrument and into the F-holes. In winter, when the radiators cracked dry heat and the plywood cello fell into shrunken pieces-fingerboard sprung, purfling split, back warped and Iifted- I stuck it all back together with glue and kept on.

After a year I joined a small, nameless orchestra that gathered Sunday afternoons at a local college. Its conductor was a young graduate student, a Joan of Arc cut prematurely from her stake. She had hoped, no doubt, for a crew of players with whom to explore the horizons of the orchestral literature. Instead, she was stuck with 30 or so total incompetents.

A number of the violinists were young. They played perfectly well, but somehow without making a sound. A number of the rest were adult and postadult instrumentalists who played poorly and out of tune but with great relish and volume, all the while beaming like lighthouses.

After a trial period J was accepted among them. Lurking ostentatiously in a chair near the wings, I would wait until the notes E and F turned up in whatever they were rehearsing, leap on them with a vengeance, and then drop out until the chance returned again.

I had heard much about the camaraderie of orchestras, but this one had none. We came, we rehearsed, we went home. The concerts were attended by family members who shuffled in like impressed seamen called to witness punishment of a well-liked man--in this case, Mozart.

Burned in my ear forever is our Overture to The Magic Flute as it taxis toward tempo, takes flight for one white-knuckled moment, then sinks beyond the runway to disintegrate in a welter of flaming pieces.

I determined to give musicales in my home. Bethlyn Bates and Don Shirley were respectively excellent piano and flute players who happened to report to me at the office. We played the Handel flute sonatas and toured the easy baroque landscape.

I had, in fact, made some progress. Eight or nine friends could now occasionally be found lounging in the living room eating artichokes and sipping wine and talking perhaps too loudly as we entertained them; yet on the whole I thought how nicely everything was turning out.

Thus ended the second year of my study. In the third, my wife, tiring of the sound of the student's cello, brought home a new instrument of marvelous sonority. I redoubled my practice efforts, playing with the robot accompanists of a special phonograph record as a replacement for Bethlyn Bates, who had for some reason moved to Staten Island, and Don Shirley, who had fled to Hollywood.

There were of course moments of despair and oddity. I could not seem to produce vibrato, that tremulous effect that gives the strings their voicelike warmth and emotion.

My playing was usually wooden and full of effort, no

matter how gay I might feel. And whenever I managed an invitation to play with other people, I was always the least fluent in the written language of music. It must have been confusing for them, because I looked the part of a cellist-a bit gray at the temples and equipped with the proper instrument. But I was always the first to get lost in the sight-reading and the last to find my way back, and suddenly it would dawn on them: "Been away from the practicing for a while, eh?" "No, er, just started studying a couple of years ago."

Revealed as the galoot I was, I seemed to swell before their eyes to a fantastically noticeable size.

The epiphany, when it came, was in two parts: 1. As I was riding home on the No. 37 bus one snowy night and perusing thr: study score of Mozart's C-Major Quintet the page burst into music in my hands. I could by then more or less read a score, and was more or less humming the cello line, when suddenly all five parts blossomed harmonically in my head. The fellow across the aisle stared as if he had just seen [the enigmatic anthropologist/author] Carlos Castaneda's hair catch fire.

I met his glance with tears streaming, for I was reading music like a book, actually hearing the music in my head for the first time. Could he hear it too, perhaps? No; he got off at the next stop.

2. Late one night, after two hours of [football-coach] Vince Lombardi-style dedication to "0 Belle Nuit" from Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, I retired to bed to lie in a haze of tobacco smoke and puzzlement.

I knew the notes and I knew the rhythm, yet what I had been playing was not "0 Belle Nuit" but some horrid, ventriloquial thing that was tantalIzingly similar but not at all the same. I fell asleep with the Offenbach tune running, flawless, through my mind-that same tune that had never reached my fingers or my cello. Arising early to a gray dawn, returning in a daze to that very room, I picked up the instrument and played it. Played it sweetly and beautifully.

Agog, I played it again, the eerie waltz flowing from the strings as lovely as from my dreaming pillows.

Only then did I flip open the score and see immediately that

~ pp had nothing to do with it. They were only notes! I had been trying hitherto, with muscles, brain and eyes,. to play notes. That dawn I played my first music. I cannot really explain this, nor am I sure I want to. Perhaps the principle of music, like the tao, is the principle of spontaneity.

You cannot You cannot

get it by taking thought; seek it by not taking thought.

I had a hearty breakfast, and then the car would not start.

None of my progress reports fazed Wendell Margrave, professor of musical instruction. "It's not a fantasy at all, playing music as an adult," he said. "It's a perfectly

practical goal. You don't need motivation, you've already learned how to learn. Except for injury or arthritis, there's nothing to keep your hands from working. I think Rubinstein played better between the ages .of 70 and 80 than he ever did as a younger man. Why, I remember an old lady in Mound City-that's in Illinois-whose husband would never let her have a piano. Well, he died, and as soon a:; she laid him to rest she went to Cairo and bought herself a grand piano and started in at the age of 68. I met her three years later, and she was playing most of the hymns. Her great dream had been to play 'The Flower Song' by Gustave Lange. It's a pretty terrible piece of music, but she learned to play it pretty well."

As these years passed, my daughter passed into the teenage vale. By no accident, she too had studied an instrument, and she had developed a youthful proficiency on the instrument of Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin. My goal was that she and I would one day perform together on a stage, after which, in addition to a bath in rose petals from admiring other parents, I would receive the Father of the Year Award despite not having been home much. I also wanted to perform in public with and for my peers, and to be secretly envied.

Both goals were met on the same day, Sunday, August 6, in the fifth year of the cello, in Annapolis, Maryland.

In the basement of the First Presbyterian Church, as the only adult performer in a recital of children aged 7 to 14, I heard my own daughter say, "I will now accompany my father in Johann Sebastian Bach's March in G Major." Then, together, we caused the linoleum floor to resound with a song of250 years ago. We finished to applause from the 30 parents. Afterward I tried to tell her what we had done, how in Africa Albert Schweitzer had pondered our selfsame Bach, how we two had brought history and beauty to blind, deaf, damned Today.

But she was at the cookie table making googly eyes at some Clearasil-caked lad and was no longer in concert with me.

That was the afternoon. At 7 p.m., soprano Joan Hamilton, pianists David and Lynada Johnson, Rick Maurer with his recorders, and I with my cello mounted the altar of nearby St. Anne's. It was a lowering eve, heavy with impending rain, but from nave to narthex I saw many familiar faces. The concert had been hand billed to a fare-thee-well, and it struck me suddenly that all present had chosen us over the popular TV program 60 Minutes.

The draft of responsibility was as real as the rising wind, which sent currents of cool air through the old apse to the echoing tin roof high above.

Lynada signaled to begin, the recorder player drew breath, I touched bow to string, and simultaneously a thunderclap struck the church like a bomb. Deafened, blinded by the flash of lightning through stained glass, I could hear nothing. A few feet from me Maurer tootled madly, Lynada Johnson hammered her piano keys, but in the new torrent of rain against tin their music was utterly obscured. I tried to play, find my place, rejoin my comrades, but in vain. The Niagara above thrummed too loudly. Sweat appeared on my brow as I surveyed the raccoon eyes of the dimly lit audience closely watching.

Mortified and lost, I could only raise the bow a few inches above the strings, paste a beatific smile on my puss, and pantomime a happy, confident cellist while not making a sound. The first movement ended, the rain slackened. We commenced the second movement-all of us. Joan Hamilton sang. There was an intermission, during which the storm passed. The second half of the program went well.

I was standing in the transept, smoking, when from the chatting crowd emerged Dr. Stuart H. Walker. Walker is a personal friend of [the famous former football player] Roger Staubach's and has written six books, the latest of which is titled Winning: The Psychology of Competition.

He stuck out his chin.

"I didn't know you could play the cello," Walker said.

St. Anne's has invited us back again this year. I will be there, but it won't be the same. Fantasy, it turns out, is debased in the attainment. Before, when I heard a cello, it was all beauty and light. Now, as the TV camera pushes in close to Rostropovich's face I recognize that charismatic grin as a mask of fierce determination. Even for him, the cello is an intractable instrument, difficult and unforgiving of ambition. When the master's hand seems to flutter in "thumb position" over the highest reaches of the fingerboard, I now sense the steel strings cutting into his flesh, and decades during which his talent was prepared for these few measures, and the absurdity of any implied kinship between us.

I am like the dog of Alexander the Great, who, falling in step with his master, imagines for a moment that he¡too is 22 and off to conquer Persia. But then, in another moment, the stride breaks and he is a dog again, and it is enough to have such a master and not be him.

Is this how it ends, then? At the final turn down the last corridor of the house of fantasy, is there only a fun-house mirror? Is our only destiny, no matter how we press on toward renewal, to become the same self over and over again?

I see the cello in a corner of my study, waiting. I move to pick it up-stop-sink back into the chair. The great Casals, touring America as a young man, went climbing in the mountains on his day off. A piece of rock fell, bloodying his hand. His companion was aghast at the implication. But what Casals remembered, relating the story many years later, was an unexpected flood of relief.

Perhaps he would never have to play the cello again! It turned out to be a minor injury. Perhaps all injuries that are survived are minor injuries.

So I pick up the cello, screw tight the hairs of the bow, and soar once more into "0 Belle Nuit," the vibrato still wobbling like an unbalanced tire. As good as I wanted to be, I am as good as I'm going to get. It is good enough.

I am quite excited again these days, however. I'm thinking of taking painting lessons. Oh, I'll never be Monet. But if I could paint a few water lilies, a rustic bridge, an anchored, plumb-bowed yacht ... why, that would be enough, eh?

D About the Author: Christian Williams is a staff writer for The Washington Post.

EXCELLENCE AND

RESEARCH

Recently President Ronald Reagan honored 32-year-old Terry Dozier as the 1985 National Teacher of the Year at a ceremony held at the White House. Dozier, who teaches world history at a secondary school in Columbia, South Carolina, was chosen from among 2.5 million American schoolteachers as the one who most "epitomizes the best teachers that the American public education system has to offer."

Dozier, who was adopted and brought to the United States as an infant from an orphanage in her native Vietnam, was educated in Florida where she received many academic honors. " I have always wanted to teach," she says, "and I have always considered education to be my prized possession as an American. It is the one thing I know I could never have received had I not been adopted and brought to the United States from the country of my birth."

In July the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded six research grants, totaling Rs. 3,748,465, to Indian scientists.

Funded from the PL 480 rupees, the grants will be used for conducting research in such diverse agriculture-related fields as biology and control of the citrus blackfly, studies on the biosynthesis in plants and the effect of salinity on symbiotic nitrogen fixation in pulses and other legumes. Each Indian researcher will have an American scientist collaborating on the project.

The recipient of the biggest grant-Rs. 1,159, 788-is Dr. O.P. Garg, professor of botany at the Panjab University in Chandigarh. Dr. Garg will study over a period of five years the processes by which legume plants such as moong, cow peas and chickpeas "fix" their own nutrients with irrigation water that is highly saline. The findings will be of worldwide significance because of widespread use of irrigation water which often leads to salt buildup in soils.

Dr. N. Appaji Rao, 'professor of biochemistry at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, who has been granted Rs. 1,083,079, will conduct a five-year research study on the molecular-level regulation of mE?thionine biosynthesis in chickpea, moong, peanuts and soybeans. This project is important as the demand for plant proteins has increased appreciably in recent years with population growth. An earlier project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture had shown that biosynthesis of enzymes, which convert serine to methionine, do affect the quality of plant protein produced.

Dr. R.P. Kapil, professor of zoology at Haryana Agricultural University in Hissar, has been granted Rs. 580,800 to carry out research in the management and conservation of the megachi lid bee. A number of bees are very effective plant pollinators and have the ability to "trip" flowers which increases seed production. Of these the megachilid bee, which pollinates alfalfa, is of particular importance to Indian agriculture since it can admirably adapt to the harsh environment of the semiarid regions.

Another recipient of a Rs. 410,378 grant is Dr. M.J. Chacko, entomologist-in-charge at the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Hebbal Agricultural Farm, Bangalore. He will investigate the ecology and behavior of parasites of the gypsy moth, a pest that plays havoc with fruit and nut trees both in India and the United States.

Dr. Raina, a senior lecturer in the department of zoology at Nagpur University, has been granted Rs. 281,800 to conduct research on the identification of population dynamics of the citrus blackfly, which damages orange trees in the two countries. Raina will aim at developing biocontrol practices for use by citrus producers in India as well as in the United States.

The sixth recipient of a Rs. 232,620 grant is Dr. T.C. Narendran, a reader in the department of zoology at the University of Calicut. Narendran will do a three-year research on parasitic wasps to gain a better understanding of which parasites these wasps help control. The project will prove useful in utilizing these parasites in integrated pest-management programs in India.

ADVANTAGE

Visiting India this month is Shirley Anne Seguin, one of America's most accomplished pianists. During her 20-day tour, she will give a series of concerts in Indian cities: Pune (Sept. 4), Bombay (Sept. 6), Calcutta (Sept. 9), New Delhi (Sept. 14), Mysore (Sept. 19) and Madras (Sept. 22).

Seguin is one of the five Artistic Ambassadors chosen by the U.S. Information Agency in Washington from among 49 nominees to give concerts around the world this year.

(The Artistic Ambassador program aims at creating better world understanding through sending American musical talent on goodwill missions overseas.) The five musicians have already given recitals in 22 countries.

Seguin comes to India after her eminently successful tours of Far East and China.

Her first musical experience abroad came in 1958 when she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Paris. In Paris, she studied with the noted French Pianist Alfred Cortot, and Jules Gentile at L'Ecole Normale de Musique.

A year later, she was awarded the License de Concert and the renewal of her fellowship.

Later, she received a silver medal at the Queen Elizabeth International Piano competition in Brussels, and the third Grand Prize in the Magda Taliferro Piano competition in Paris.

Seguin was admitted to Bendetson Netzorg's School of Music in Detroit at age 5 and gave her first public recital at age 10 in Detroit.

AMRITRAJ

Tennis ace Vijay Amritraj's dream came true when the Britannia-Amritraj Tennis Coaching School (BAT) was recently inaugurated in Madras. Funded by the National Bisquit Company (NABISCO), Britannia's parent operation in the United States, BAT has been set up initially for seven years. Eight young tennis players of promise, who have been selected from all over the country, will be trained by two American coaches in Madras.

At the inaugural ceremonies, a visibly excited Vijay Amritraj said, "I was keen to have this tennis school. I wanted to give back to tennis at least a part of the great joy and satisfaction it has given me. And I was also keen to base it in Madras. It is not only my home, in a way it is also the home of Indian tennis, because of the Krishnans and the Amritrajs." He also emphasized that the BAT program will aim as much on .the all-round development of the boys as on sharpening their tennis talents.

During their training period, the boys, all in the age group of 12-15, will attend academic¡ classes at the Madras Christian College school, taking the full school curriculum, and practicing on the school courts. Aerobics,

A group of 15 faculty members from five Midwestern educational institutions in the United States recently spent six weeks in India to study the rich and diverse culture of this country. The tour, organized by the John A. Logan College in Carterville, Illinois, was part of a project to gather background information that could be incorporated into teaching courses related to India in American colleges.

Through a series of lectures and panel discussions conducted by eminent Indian academicians, scholars and specialists, the American teachers' group explored a variety of areas under the theme "Twentieth-Century India: How India Is Responding to the Post-Independence Era." They were given an over-

body-building exercises and a special nutritious diet form part of the overall plan for the group. They will live together as one family in a house under the care of Vijay's mother.

Ted Murray, 31, and Fred Roecker, 33, the two U.S. tennis coaches who have been selected to train the young aspirants, are also excited about the BAT program. "It's a challenging assignment," said Murray. "The boys are very talented and still young enough to be molded into great tennis players."

Vijay and his brother Anand will also periodically visit the school to monitor the progress as well as personally coach the youngsters.

viewofthecountry'speople, its culture, arts, architecture and literature; progress made by the country in agriculture, industry, technology and education since Independence; and the steps India is taking to control population and improve housing and public health.

The group also visited Agra, Aurangabad, Bangalore, Bombay, Calcutta, Jaipur, Madras, Pune, Srinagar and Varanasi.

For most participants the tour, which was coordinated by the Jamia Millia Islamia, the U.S. Educational Foundation in India and the Ministry of Education and Culture, was their first exposure to this country. "The tour for me is an eye opener," said one participant. "The phenomenal progress made by India in the areas of development and welfare came as a surprise, and helped dispel many mis-

conceptions that I had about India. There are many problems, of course, but they are problems of any evolving democracy. I must say that we were deeply touched by the hospitality of the people."

Dr. Jnan Bhattacharyya, field director of the group and professor of political science at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, summing up the visit said, "The trip has been a remqrkable success. The group has been able to view and experience the vastness and diversity of India, as also gather a vast amount of information -slides, recordings and books -in their special areas of interest. This firsthand experience will be of tremendous help in developing new courses on India in American colleges and major universities. "

The Master atWork Calcutta may no longer be the "second city of the empire," but it is still a vibrant metropolitan center full of interesting, creative people. It boasts, for example, at least two residents whose remarkable accomplishments have elevated them to the status of international celebrity.

Their names are instantly recognized by millions of people all over the world. I refer, of course, to Mother Teresa and Satyajit Ray. Ray is a member of a small, select group of internationallyacclaimed artists. He is one of that handful of film directorsAkira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman are two otherswhose names on a movie marquee will guarantee audiences for a film more surely than will any of the movie stars who might happen to appear in their films. And many movie stars would give a great deal to be able to attract the kind of appreciative, intellectually discriminating audiences that Ray's name is sure to draw in London, Tokyo or New York.

Satyajit Ray's latest film, Chare Baire, opened recently in the United States. If past experience is an accurate guide, it will draw large crowds. I can attest from personal experience to Ray's drawing power among American audiences.

In the Sixties, I watched what must have been the second or third revival of Pather Panchali in a theater in Washington, D.C. The house was full. In 1978, I saw The Chess Players at another Washington cinema house. Again, the house was packed, although the film had been playing for weeks. There is no reason to think that Chare

Baire will be any less popular.

A couple of years ago, I had the good fortune to spend part of an afternoon watching Satyajit Ray shoot a scene for Ghare Baire in Calcutta. It was the first time I had ever been on a movie set. Someone with experience in filmmaking would undoubtedly have noticed many professional and tech-' nical details that completely escaped my untutored eye. But it was still a fascinating and instructive experience.

I have no way of comparing what I saw with what happens on movie sets in other parts of the world, but I suspect that what I saw differed in many respects from what one might see on a set for a movie directed by say, Steven Spielberg or Peter Bogdanovich.

The scene I watched being filmed involved two actors.

Soumitra Chatterjee, one of the film's stars, plays a rabblerousing, pseudo-revolutionary troublemaker.

In the scene, he meets in a deserted building with an old man, played by Bimal Chattopadhya, who is the manager of a large estate in Bengal in 1907. The two have met clandestinely to plot mischief among the estate's workers.

The scene was shot in a movie studio in south Calcutta.

The studio, a huge barn-like structure, resembled nothing so much as an abandoned warehouse. Inside was constructed the set for the scene being shot-a small room inside a dilapidated old building near a river. The studio was not airconditioned, so it was naturally warm inside and made even warmer by the banks of lights needed for the filming. Relief was provided by several huge fans that produced a loud whirring noise. The last sound heard before the camera rolled and the action began was a stentorian shout in Ray's deep voice, "Fans off"! The whirring stopped, the lights went on, and the heat increased.

Ray used a single camera, and to my inexperienced eye it looked surprisingly 'Small and

The Master chats with Kenneth Wimmel, Information Service, Calcutta.

simple. It certainly did not resemble the monsters mounted on huge cranes I have seen in photographs of Hollywood movies being filmed.

The camera was propped up on a small table. When it had to be moved, for a new shot, two men hoisted it in the air while two others moved the table to the next location.

Ray is a tall man even by American standards.

With his craggily handsome face, spare frame and rather grave manner, he is, to an American, "Lincolnesque."

He dominated the movie set and not just because of his imposing physical presence.

Everyone paid close attention to everythinghedidorsaid.

Hehad only to issue an order or make a comment in a low voice, and everyone sprang to do his bidding. One could not help but feel that he, alone among the group making the movie, was an indispensable person. Anyone else, including the stars, could be replaced and the movie would proceed. But if Ray were removed, the entire undertaking would inevitably collapse.

He worked from a notebook which apparently contained his plan for the film. Down the left side of each page was a series of sketches with handwritten

chief of the United States

notes on the right side opposite each sketch. They apparently constituted the' plan he had worked out for each scene and each camera angle. As each sequence was shot, he would consult the book, and sometimes he appeared lost in thought for a while as he considered the next sequence. As I watched him, I thought to myself, the man has already screened this entire film in his head. He has already worked out how each scene will be filmed and how it relates to what precedes and follows it. He knows exactly what effect he wants and how to achieve it. He would hold short conferences with the two actors and other members ofthe crew and explain quietly what he was trying to achieve with each bit of dialogue and action. Everyone listened attentively. It was all done very quietly, efficiently and expeditiously. What was noticeably absent was the frantic bustle and emotional outbursts that I had always thought constitute the normal atmosphere of a movie set.

The centrality of.Ray's towering, dominating presence was one powerful impression I received from watching the master filmmaker at work. Another impression was the incredible

economy of the undertaking.

The set, the camera, the equipment, the crew all seemed to be the minimum required for the job. Indeed, it seemed incredible that a major feature film, likely to be screened for the most discerning audiences all over the world, could be made using such simple techniques.

The entire budget for Ghare Baire would probably be insufficient to p~y for filming just one small scene 10 one of the Hollywood blockbusters of yore.

More than a year later, I was able to see the completed film when it opened in a Calcutta theater. Naturally, I was on the lookout to see "my" scene. It turned out to be of relatively minor importance, and it slipped by rather quickly. But I was interested to see how it fitted into the completed film. When I had watched the filming, some minor details-a clock on a shelf in the background, a packet of cigarettes on a tableobviously were intended to carry special significance, but I could not fathom what it was.

Watching the film unfold, I was able to grasp it. It was rather like having watched a craftsman fashion some individual tiles and then seeing how they fit into a large, finished, beautiful mosaic. I was also struck by how much care and attention to detail had been lavished on a relatively minor scene.

Chare Baire, by the way, is an excellent film. Some knowledge of the historical background of the story-the first partition of Bengal early in this century and the associated Swadeshi Movement-is necessary to understand fully the plot and the motivations of the principal characters.

I also believe that the film generates resonances for Indian, and especially Bengali, audiences that a foreigner, even someone with extensive knowledge of India, will not feel.

But anyone, anywhere, who appreciates fine cinematic art will find much to admire in this latest creation by a master film artist.

D

The

Fellowship of Scholars

by DARSHAN

SINGH

MAINI

The author, a distinguished professor of English and Henry James specialist, recalls some of his memorable moments with contemporary American scholars.

The image of a University Professor in the Western world has been for long an image redolent of monkish and sectarian scholarship, of Germanic solemnity and lugubriousness, of a general air of intellectual brilliance and a detach~ent fro~ creature reality. Add to this stereotype such fnlls as hiS proverbial forgetfulness, his crankish ways, his sartorial shab~iness, his drooping cigar and moustache, his tousled gray h~lr, and you have something of that windblown person who remaInS the raconteur's delight, the student's amusement, and the spouse's despair. And, it's an image .that is typical~y male, heavy in thought and aspect, shuttmg out ~unshme ~nd laughter, and a whole world of dreams and deSires centenng round the kitchen and the parlor, the nursery and the backyard. That's perhaps why a female professor in such a As context strikes one as a freak or an extravagance. incongruous as Dr. Johnson's female bishop or archd~acon. So, the heavy Germanic image abides. To what extent, thiS persona is a willed construct, and to what extent a requirement of his psyche is difficult to tell, if only because quite often the mask becomes the man, and you may never know where the one begins, and the other ends. .

However: whatever its value or validity at the medIeval Oxford or Cambridge, Hamburg or Cologne today-and even there, it's a vanishing image seeking hospitality in old spires and perches-it doesn't seem to answer the Ameri~an case at. all.

When you cross the Atlantic and step into a sunlIt and spacIOus plateglass campus that gives off an aroma of h.on~ysuckle and maple, of ginger and malt and ale, of boy and gl~l In a dream ?f youth, of teacher and student in a commune of mterests and In an ease of colloquy and argument, the European "model" suddenly comes to grief. Even, in an Ivy-League college or campus, where such a ghost is likely to linger, it's a th.ing uncertain, out on the limb, suspiring, suspect. Here, then, IS a different academic world with its own unique aura and ambience; an American world that's as American as apple-pie or jazz or jeans. Even the air we breat.~e has little of that mustiness and pedantry which somehow chngs to the hallowed halls of learning in Paris or Rome or Vienna. We have come to Bacon's dream of the New Atlantis, an unfinished Utopia which is destined to produce "great and marvelous works for the benefit of man."

To be sure, America too has its own stereotypes such as the trigger-happy cowboy, the ever-smiling salesman, and, above all, Mom. However, there's one small species, the American Professor, that has largely escaped such a fate. Undoubtedly, there are tales and novels and plays about this tribe. Willa Cather's The Professor's House, The Groves of Academe by

Mary McCarthy, Herzog and The Dean's December by Saul Bellow, and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at once come to one's mind; and, indeed, a new genre, the Campus Novel, is already around, dramatizing the broad comedy of academic life in closed little communities, and the tragedy of love and sex and ambition in an atmosphere of opportunity, freedom and dissent. But, by and large, the university teacher does not make the columnist's copy. Because the American don resists being reduced to a stereotype. He is as fully integrated into the American life of the street and the lane, of the drugstore and the bar, of vaudeville and the weekend baseball as the man next door. In his aspect or mien, in his dress or carriage, in his speech or idiom, he's no different from the Common Standard American Man. He wears his scholarship lightly and well, as though it were more a song than a sorrow, more a lark than a load, more a rose in the buttonhole than a crown of thorns. Even the finest mind among his kind is somehow never so sui generis as to claim a separate station or fate or destiny. His learning may add to his charm, here and there, but it doesn't isolate him. What's more, our professor could as well be a "swinger," or a "high flier." Even a Nobel laureate. And the American universities produce a regular crop each year as though the soil were peculiarly suited to that breed. Yet he is nearly as subject to the pull of Cokes and hamburgers, of a Woody Allen or a Marilyn Monroe as the plumber who sings to America as he fixes the "great man's" leaking faucets! That, in sum, is the American Professor, taking the world in his stride, making you feel as though you were a lost cousin come home to a supper of caviar, cucumber sandwiches and Campari!

It is time, I trust, to turn from the species to a few specifics.

During the last 20 years or so, I have run into scores of American professors here in India and abroad, at seminars and conferences, at lectures and symposia. I have visited their homes and stayed under their roofs; supped and dined with them and their families, and received pecking little kisses of protocol on the proffered cheek; exchanged many a candid comment over a measure of sherry or cognac; and many, many a letter ranging from courtesies and greetings to thoughtful variations on writers and books, on cultures, societies and civilizations. And out of my American portfolio and album, I pull out just a few snapshots to share some P10ments of felicity and camaraderie with the reader. Clearly, I cannot cite all those men and women who have, at one time or another, touched me deeply in this expanding orbit of relationships, and all I can do is to acknowledge the beauty of the American spirit as it brushed my person during those strolls into "the realms of gold" in their company.

To start this collage of snapshots with Lionel Trilling (left) is to recpgnize how talent, heritage and perso-

nality may, through an intuitive understanding of the moral processes of life, and through a disciplined and cultivated mind that will not bow before any imperium of ideas or ideologies simply to keep up with the intellectual "Joneses," achieve a fine spiritual balance. It's primarily a feat of the psyche and the will in the employ of what he called "the liberal imagination," and the balancing act is so delicate and difficult as to become finally a matter of personal aesthetic; which is, however, not to suggest elitist or patrician ways. For such an aesthetic is always and inevitably linked to moral categories in the Hegelian sense, and to a sentiment for the evolved beauties and felicities of life. It's at once a received thing-a sum of perceptions, insights and values that one imbibes as the milk of moral nourishment-and an adventure of the spirit into the new and the unknown. I suppose, that's how "moral lyricism," to use one of Trilling's memorable phrases, becomes a condition of sensibility, and keeps it from going under in moments of darkness and distress.

His position as a great moral critic and as a historian of modern culture undoubtedly authenticates all such views. But what I wish to bring out is the personal aspect that remained, to me, almost wholly in tune with his critical perceptions and beliefs.

Trilling, the man, had somehow evolved a persona which gave his fine Jewish face an air of well-bred elegance and amusement, of spiritual ease and restfulness, of intellectual delicacy and refinement. In earlier times, he might have ended up as a distinguished rabbi. As it is, he was, when I came to know him at Harvard, a neat, dapper man in dark gray who coul~ have easily passed for a diplomat or a legal luminary or an editor. If there ever was a touch of intellectual hauteur about him, he certainly took care to leave that baggage behind in his native Columbia University.

Today, after a haze of 15 years or so when he is already gathered with the grasses, I can still recall that pale, mellowed face and those soft, responsive eyes as we met week after week for the Tuesday lunch at Eliot House. As the English faculty-at least, a dozen professors were always around; among them Harry Levin, Morton W. Bloomfield, R.A. Brower, D,D. Perkins, J.M. Porte, A.E. Heimart and the visiting professor Gay Wilson Allen-browsed among the day's papers in the anteroom, sipped sherry or port, and carried their food trays from the student hall to the adjoining faculty room, Trilling was always a picture of amused patience and sweet reasonableness. Though the discussion across the tableVietnam, Nixon, nuclear warfare, student unrest, or hippies (no palaver on literature, please!)-seldom reached a discernible pitch of passion, Trilling's comments were indirect, subtle, disarming. One could see a settled imagination, in the fullness of years. T.S. Eliot's somewhat ambiguous statement. about Henry James' mind as something so fine no idea could violate it seemed peculiarly apt in his case.

It was the year of his Norton lectures at Harvard, later published as Sincerity and Authenticity, and the packed galleries showed the respect he commanded at a time when the academic establishment and the professoriate in general were having a fairly rough passage in American campuses. All high¡flown lectures and sermons were pure anathema. I think, something in Trillil}g's person and publications suggested an ideal of a balance between a Greek serenity and a Hebrew vision of morality, which even the protesting youth seemed instinctively to understand in the midst of all their rhetoric of wrath and dissent. It was a measure of his "authenticity" that he could still speak to them in accents which in other pedagogues rang as

critic who has so fully surrendered his own imagination to another as an act of spiritual adventure as Edel has done. To be in labor for nearly half a century with all the industry, adoration and insight of an acolyte-turned-surrogate in the process of discovery, is to show how in the end criticism partakes of aesthetic creation as a matter of integral relationship between two cognate souls. Thus, Edel's monumental five-volume critical biography of James and his four-volume collection of James' Letters edited with loving care, thoroughness and taste-not to speak of scores of articles, commentaries and critiques-help swell the Edeliana into a literary phenomenon of great reach and range and plenitude. It suggests the presence of what the Master himself called "the imagination of loving."

Apropos of Edel's Freudian exertions, I recall an interesting little comment that Gay Wilson Allen made to me soon after a visit to New York. He wondered if, in positing a theory of "Geminian" rivalry between Henry James and his ambitious and talented elder brother, William James, Edel was not simply projecting his own personal rivalry with a "philosopher" brother. Another "turn of the screw," if you like!

Richard Ellmann, Goldsmith Professor of English at Oxford, is not exactly a "passionate pilgrim" who comes to the Old World to authenticate his cultural roots, though his long stay in England would suggest a drift in that direction. As it happens, his sustained interest in two of the greatest writers in the Englisp language-James Joyce and W.B. Yeats (incidentally, both Irish)-could not but finally bring him to these shores if the kind of scholarship he represents-"American writing and literary criticism at its distinctive best," as a TLS reviewer of Eminent Domain put it-had to find its proper locale and ambience. As a literary and critical biographer, he has used Freudian insights in an extended but judicious manner to set up an exciting "theory" of interpretation, and in this he is well served by a system of referential checks and balances. In Golden Codgers, a series of what he calls "biographical speculations," Ellmann defines his critical credo thus in the preface: "A secret or at least a tacit life underlies the one we are thought to live .... Ultimately what the biographer seeks to elicit is less the events of a writer's life than the 'mysterious armature' as Mallarme called it, which binds the creative work." It's the office of the biographer, then, to "illuminate both the fiery clay and the wrought jar." And this he does admirably whether the author is Joyce or Yeats, George Eliot or T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde or Ezra Pound. With something like a laser beam, he is able to reach the heart of the man and of the text, each written down ineluctably as a requirement of the beleagured imagination.

It is amazing though, how living hourly in the company of "wild" geniuses and "golden codgers," Ellmann himself remains supremely cool and composed. Our first meeting at a USIS !>eminarin Mussoorie, Uttar Pradesh, was something of a' four-day dialogue between lectures, papers and meals.

It was this kind of American ease and urbanity, wit and scholarship, warmth and geniality which made me seek him out during my visits to Oxford over the years. And in 1980, when I left a telephone message for him, it was amusing to learn that what had driven him out of Oxford temporarily was the annual St. Giles' Fair just outside his house. That, he said, was a yearly "cross" he had to bear. Otherwise, the dreaming spires of Oxford.~tiU inv~igled th~ imagination of wO'nder and worship.

To know Leslie Fiedler, Samuel L. Clemens Professor at the of no modern

At a'seminar on "The Jamesian Novel" sponsored by USIS, the author arguesa fine point with professor Charles Anderson and Anita Dhir.

offensive, but became a part of "the moral slang of qur day" when they came from him.

Again, I recall my last meeting with Trilling in his up~tairs room in Warren House which houses the English department office.I was to leave for India at the end of my assignment, and it was in the nature of a farewell visit. However, as he began to warm up to my projected book on Henry James, we soon were in a state of animated argument about his famous essay on The Princess Casamassima, about the element of colloquialism in later James; an argument we were to continue through letters for years.

Trilling as a critic belonged in the classical tradition of Matthew Arnold on whom, full of insights, he wrote a book.

His readings in Marx, Hegel, Freud helped evolve a genre of criticism where ethics, history, social sciences and psychology fused in to a discipline of critical perceptions. It is this widening of the imagination which he brought to bear upon the business and traffic of life. Like John Laskell, the hero of his semiautobiographical novel, The Middle of the Journey, Trilling finallyleaves one with an impression of moral health achieved through a strenuous exercise of the spirit.

To pass on from Trilling to Leon Edel, despite their differing profiles and personalities, is not to experience a different order of intellectual culture, for both these critics drew their energies from the same strain in the American liberal tradition which seeks to press all matter in the service of the spirit, and use wealth as a means of liberating the imagination for higher purposes. It is not, therefore, a fortuitous circumstance that both of them were drawn to Henry James and Edith Wharton who symbolize that aspect of American middle-class life which is for ever seeking a transcendence of sorts in. the midst of contingencies and contradictions, ambiguities and imponderables. However, whereas Trilling's ambit of interests had a great intellectual sweep about it, and his imagination was at home in all manner of philosophies, Edel elected, from the beginning, to appropriate the entire estate and imperium of Henry James as a massive metaphor for a charter to meet "the assault of reality." It is as though the critic found in the novelist's corpus a fairly complete code of conduct and vahiesto become for him something of a Scripture and a Church. I know

University of New York at Buffalo, is to be thrown into the company of an American maverick of a rare species-a scholar who would be a pop artist, a teacher who would be a cult guru, a critic who would be at once an iconoclast and a messiah! For, as you clap your eyes on that amused, bearded, broad face, and see a stocky frame in check shirt and sloppy corduroys or faded jeans, the idea of the American Professor as folk hero instantly springs up to lead you in the direction of pop music, sign art, rock festivals, horror comics, popular cinema and kitsch culture. For that is precisely the kind of image Fiedler has sought to project both in life and literary criticism, though even then, or perhaps because of it, he remains a disturbingly powerful presence at seminars, with a whale of wit and intelligence in his work. He appears to be the hearty, beefeating type that's not afraid to immerse in "the destructive element."

For behind all this intellectual "clowning" is a lethal seriousness that tracks down the American archetypes to their dark, psychological lairs. The dreams and the distempers make a very tangled tapestry. His seminal and highly influential book, Love And Death in the American Novel, where Freud, jung, Marx and American folk figures jostle one another in a field rich with ambiguities and dark epiphanies, is now an acknowledged critical classic. And he takes the palm for saying provocative and abrasive, but thoroughly earnest and honest, things about contemporary American writers. I believe, living under the shadow of the Niagara Falls, it's not perhaps odd for him to have worked out a rhetoric of "No, in thunder!"

As a critic of culture, Fiedler, referring to the labors of Indian students and teachers of American literature in a letter dashed off in midair, wrote: "There is a certain sense in which it helps to be simultaneously inside and outside a literary tradition." And by way of a gesture (perhaps a sop to my vanity!) added, about his trip to India, " ... And one of my more special pleasures was getting to know you a little."

By contrast, Murray Krieger, professor of English at the University of California at Irvine, evokes a very different response, even though his creature heartiness is as palpable as Fiedler's. The image that solicits the imagination and compels tribute at one level relates to his intellectual rigor and range, and at another, to his spiritual gaiety. To be sure, there's a link between the two, and what Krieger seems to offer to the admiring eye is an integrated personality. Here is a typical American Professor and critic in whom the love of ideas per se and the penchant for critical polemic-he's undoubtedly one of the most engaging and daring minds in the field of literary theory today-have not, in any manner, dimmed the desire for the good life, or diminished the feel for the little ceremonies and flourishes that go to generate a grammar of reciprocities.

To listen to him at a formal lecture where he brings his intelligence and thoroughness into play with an abandon characteristic of his American bravura is one kind of experience. But the Krieger I admire and value, above all, is the man called Murray, walking briskly along on a Hamburg quay, dispensing beauties of speech and comment, the face animated by the dip and dapple of things, nearly always ready to be wreathed in a smile at the slightest hint of fun in the offing.

Clearly, a generous eye, a magnanimity of mind and an ease of temperament have come together to create a type of professor who mocks the European stereotype. And when he learns I am in Delhi during a recent lecture visit (which coincides with his

trip) sponsored by the USIS, he and his genial wife have me and my wife over at their hotel for lunch. And, it's then, the two couples discover to their surprise and joy that they were married on the same day in the same year, and, what's more wonderful, have carried the jolly "cross" over a span of 37 years!

This is not the place to refer to his battle of wits with Jacques Derrida and other Deconstructionists, or to his revels and forays as a critical "heavyweight" in general, though it may be helpful to recall at least one revealing remark. "For mine," writes Krieger, "has been a tradition that has treated poetic ficti.on as a holistic construct sacred in its integrity-a 'totalization' that Jacques Derrida, for example, would treat somewhat derogatively, as the mythification (and mystification) of language." Needless to add, it's this "holistic," and, shall I say, holy, feel for life that lights up the Krieger landscape at home or abroad, in criticism or in daily commerce. There is an endearing boyishness about his enthusiasms and his handshakes and his soaring spirits. A criticism springing up from such energies cannot but create its own appeal.

It so happens that though my American hours include some spent in the delectable company of women professors alsoand the one to figure lately in my thoughts is Marjorie Perloff of the University of California at Los Angeles, a distinguished Lowell critic and a beautiful human being whose dear head rises above the mists, framed, as it were, in a nimbus of love and learning in front of the Heine House in the medieval town of Luneburg-it's to a professor's manque, but a Jamesian critic of prodigious industry and erudition, Adeline R. Tintner, that I must turn for a brush with feminine scholarship at its American best. An idea of her sway over the Jamesian studies may be had from the fact that an analytic bibliographic essay in The Henry James Review of Fall, 1983, lists as many as 12 articles and commentaries on James in international journals in a single year by this redoubtable scholar. A vertiginous feat indeed!

And all that brings me "reeling" back to her East End apartment in Manhattan, New York, high up in a sun-drenched tall building on a late September afternoon opposite the city mayor's lush and sprawling residence by the river. As my wife and I and our Indian escort-an old student from Patiala-are ushered in, Tintner, tall and slim and regal with a face that's surprisingly so vibrant and youthful despite its 70 winters or so, greets us in a ceremony of welcome, at once gracious and informal. Her husband, an eminent New York physician, who looks equally sprightly and well preserved, dutifully plays second fiddle, though as I am to learn soon enough, he's as keen a Jamesian after his fashion as any Jacobite! The place is chockfull of "Jamesiana" and other books, all jumping out of their jackets, so to speak. And here over a splash of champagne and a spread of smoked salmon and olives and American cookies, we remember the Master whose birthplace in Washington Square lies just a maze of streets and skyscrapers away, and who presides over our imaginations of necessity, making each "Jamesian" home another "great good place," except that in this case, there's an elegant and upright American lady-an Isabel Archer come home in the evening of 0 her life-to break the monastic dream of James' fantasy.

Darshan Singh Maini, a former professor of English at the Punjabi University, contributes to several magazines, including Gentleman, The Illustrated Weekly of India and the Sunday Observer.

About the Author:

Nurse on the Move When Barbara Mochocki [pronounced mo-kho-skee] graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

"I"d spent a lot of time in school working in hospital settings," she recalls. "And I knew that it wasn't for me. The controls were too great, the situation too routinized.

You couldn't use your own skills and intelligence to their fullest ex-

tent. I decided right away that I wanted to go into community health."

Mochocki returned to her native Chicago, Illinois, and joined the staff of the 96-year-old Visiting Nurse Association (VNA), a private, nonprofit organization that dispatches nurses to the homes of the sick, the dying and those recently discharged from hospitals. "Being a visiting nurse gives me much more flexibility and independence, and makes it possible for me to give patients ideal care,"

Mochocki says.

"Once the physician gives his basic orders about drugs and treatment, a visiting nurse is pretty much on her own. If I need advice or supervision, it's as close as the telephone.

And of course we keep in touch with the primary physicians. But the day-to-day treatment is in my hands."

Mochocki carries a case load of 18 to 23 patients at a time and visits eight or nine of them each day that she works in the field, the Northwest Side neighborhood, where she drives her

own car from house to house.

The reasons for her visits range from checking up on premature infants. (who need growth and development checkups and whose mothers need advice and reassurance) and the chronically ill (who need various therapies) to the dying (who may need drugs for pain control and whose families need support and instruction).

Besides performing the expected nursing tasks like changing dressings and giving injections, Mochocki spends "a lot of time teaching and supervising. r show families how to administer drugs, for example, and supervise the work of the various therapists~physical, occupational and speech are the most common~whose services are prescribed by the physician. r get to use all my knowledge and skill." The VNA also employs nutritionists, who help patients on special diets with cooking and planning their meals, and home health aides who may come every day to do simple nursing tasks and light housekeeping for bedridden or disabled patients.

Mochocki is one of approximately 100 registered nurses on the staff of Chicago's Visiting Nurse Association which now serves a population of 3,000,000 (including Chicago and some of its suburbs). The association has changed enormously since its founding in 1889; its switchboard then was a pay telephone in a corner drugstore, and the nurses spent much of their time dealing with infectious epidemics and manning soup kitchens for the hungry. Like many of its more than 500 sister agencies, whose services extend to virtually every community throughout America, Chicago's VNA had its initial impulse when a late-19thcentury flood of immigrants swelled the ranks of America's poor. Among the many philanthropic services started by Christian and Jewish organiza-

tions was free health care for the needy. A number of today's home-health-care agencies began as clinics in poor neighborhoods.

The poor are still served today.

Medicare, the U.S. Government's health insurance for those over 65, pays for a visiting nurse for at least eight weeks after an elderly patient leaves a hospital. Private health insurance plans also pay visiting nurses' fees. For patients who are not covered by either of these, the Visiting Nurse Association requires payment only according to a family's ability to pay. The poor need not pay at all. Like many other nonprofit institutions, the Visiting Nurse Association relies on donations as well as fees to support itself; voluntary contributions make it possible for the association to provide services for those who are unable to pay. In 1983, the association provided $2 million worth of free care.

Home health care is growing more popular as an alternative to prolonged hospital or nursing-home care for a number of reasons. Advances in medical technology have made it possible for a large number of therapeutic treatments~such as intravenous feeding and chemotherapy and blood dialysis for those without functioning kidneys~to be administered in the home. At the same time, America has seen a dramatic increase in the proportion of its population that is over 65 (up 27.9 percent between 1970 and 1981 and still rising). Because most people prefer to stay at home, and because home care is much less expensive than hospital care, home health care has expanded greatly. Between 1980 and 1983, Medicare recorded a 140 percent increase in the portion of its budget consumed by home-care services.

In Chicago, this expansion meant 12,565 visits by Barbara Mochocki and her equally dedicated colleagues last year.

D

Right: Barbara Mochocki checks the respqnses of a 13-day-old prematurely born infant to a test of head control. Far right: Mochocki talks to the husband of a patient.

Above: She demonstrates a new kind of dressing to the husband for use on his wife's catheter for intravenous feeding. Top: Mochocki replaces the dressing on the leg of .. a patient whose vascular condition has caused an ulcer.

M ochocki often calls on her former patients.

Here, she checks progress of as even- monthold prematurely born baby with the baby's mother (top); gives a sympathetic hearing to a patient, an important part of nursing care (above); and helps an elderly woman, recoveringfrom a broken rib, with her walking exercise (left).

The Tiles That Bind In the shadow of the sacred Tirumalai hills of Andhra Pradesh is one of India's most modern ceramic floor-tile factories.

The Rs. 90 million plant of Spartek India in the temple town of Tirupati manufactures floor tiles, a relatively new concept in India. Ceramic floor tiles, which have replaced most of the conventional flooring materials in Europe and America, combine beauty and elegance with downto-earth practicality. Made in different

sizes and shapes, colors and textures to please the most discriminating eye, ceramic tiles are stronger than mosaic floors and cheaper than marble. They are, in addition, easy to install and are scratch and stain resistant.

"Spartek tiles," says Krishna Prasad Tripuraneni, the Spartek managing director, "are in the same price range as mosaic tiles but they are better looking and technically superior. Ceramic tiles do

not absorb water as much as mosaic tiles, and therefore there is no seepage when ceramic tiles are used in bathrooms and in kitchens. Another great advantage is that the ceramic tiles are a readymade flobr. Once laid, there is no polishing required, so there's saving on labor."

Spartek is also an example of reverse brain drain. It has brought an Indian scientist- Tripurane~i-h.qIPe and in the process, the latest technology in y

Krishna Prasad Tripuraneni, managing director of Spartek Ceramics India, and his father T. Venkateshwara Rao (top) proudly show ceramic floor tiles made at their plant in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh. The main raw material for the tiles (above) is ordinary red clay held by the father (left). At right, above, pressed tiles move along a 90-meter-long glazing line where a variety of designs and surfaces are created. The tiles are then fed into a massive gas-fired kiln (right) whence they emerge ready for use 60 minutes later.

Returning home after advanced studies in the United States, an Indian has set up one of the world's technologically most sophisticated ceramic floor-tile manufacturing plants in Andhra Pradesh in collaboration with Ceramic US, a leader in the field for 70 years.

ceramic tiles. According to the young Tripuraneni, "When I went to the United States for higher studies some years ago, I knew that I would come back with a business collaboration that offered either a technical advantage or a product advantage or both and should have export potential as well."

In setting up Spartek India, Tripuraneni has achieved all his goals. He has returned to India, brought state-of-the-

art technology and a product that has both a domestic market and a great export potential.

"The idea for a ceramic-tile plant," Tripuraneni added, "came naturally to me as my family has been in this business-clay mining for the ceramic industry-for years. But I wasn't interested in the sanitaryware industry because there were already a number of manufacturers in India, and I didn't see

much future in chinaware either.

"The tile industry, on the other hand, looked promising. I found that there was a big gap in the technology available here in India and that in the United .States; plus the fact that the product concept was relatively new here. The Indian industry was limited to making tiles for walls as far as I knew.

"So, after ascertaining the potential of the ceramic floor-tile industry, I

approached several companies, and finally struck a deal with CeramicUS, a company with 70 years' experience in ceramics technology."

One of America's leading manufacturers and distributors for ceramic floor tiles, CeramicUS, which holds 11 percent equity in Spartek, has provided the Indian company with the latest technology and trained its personnel. (A number of nonresident Indians living in the U.S. have also invested in Spartek India.)

Spartek in fact uses technology from three countries-the United States, West Germany and Italy. Some of its machinery has been bought from Sacmi Impianti of Italy and the kiln has come from Heimsoth of West Germany. Sacmi, which has helped set up about 100 similar plants all over the world, is also helping Spartek with technical assistance.

"CeramicUS was most enthusiastic about the collaboration and it wanted the Spartek plant to be the best anywhere, and ours is!" said Maintenance Engineer P.S. Chellappa, who is one of the several Spartek personnel trained by CeramicUS. "It incorporates new-generation technologies which even CeramicUS plants don't. For instance, CeramicUS suggested for us a wet-grinding plant which is a superior process than what it uses itself." In the CeramicUS factory, he added, "they have a powder plant, and water is mixed in, then the slip goes to the presses for compressing the tiles. In our process, we do it with wet-grinding whence it goes to the spray-dryer where the water is separated, evaporated out and then converted into powder. It is this Spartek uses the latest technology. After wet grinding in the ball mill the mix is spray . dried to produce a better homogenous tile.

powder which is fed to the presses." have to make first-rate tiles."

This greatly helps the homogenous The mined clay is brought to the composition of the tile, according to Tirupati plant and mixed with other Tripuraneni, for each ingredient is mixed ingredients in a ball mill and wet-ground thoroughly. "CeramicUS has also pro- into a fine slip. The slip is then stored for vided us with the firing cycles, the control a few days and spray dried to form a fine powder of uniform consistency so that, parameters, and how we should maintain each parameter. This is vital technical when it is compressed in a 680-ton press, know-how, giving us great flexibility and it maintains its homogeneity. The mascontrol on the size, design and surface sive press gives the tiles the required finish of the tiles." strength, shape and thickness.

Not only this. CeramicUS also assured From the press the tiles are sent along a Spartek that it would sell any quantity of 90-meter-long glazing line, where they acquire surface finish, and where the tiles that Spartek would like to export.

"CeramicUS has assured us an export of requisite designs are screen-printed.

From the glazing line, the tiles are 60 percent of our production," says the managing director. "CeramicUS itself _automatically fed into specially designed imports tiles into the United States and rail trolleys. The trolleys take the tiles to markets them under its brand name. The the head of an 84-meter-long kiln.

American market imports almost 60 perThe massive kiln is the heart of the cent of its tile requirements from over- tile-making operation. Inside it rages a seas. And we should be earning valuable ball of fire-at 1,200 degrees Celcius! It foreign exchange for our country soon." bakes about 2,000 tiles a day, and each Spread over 5 hectares, the joint Indo- tile takes an hour to reach the other end U.S. plant is located in one of the most of the kiln on a belt of 1,680 rollers. And industrially backward areas of Andhra throughout the 60-minute curing cycle, Pradesh. But it is an area rich in high- operators closely monitor the tiles on quality clay-the main raw material in closed-circuit television to ensure that the manufacture of quality ceramic tiles. each one is fired to just the right degree.

The clay used by Spartek is really "The kiln is crucial to the whole sediment deposits which collect at the process," Tripuraneni points out. "Norbottom of irrigation tanks and village mally tiles in India are baked in a tunnel ponds. "Most villages in this region," kiln in which the firing time is somewhere Tripuraneni says, "have irrigation tanks in the range of 72 hours. In our kiln, it is that fill up during the rainy season. just an hour. CeramicUS, which has the During the summer months the rain same kiln, uses even less time-a 30water is used by the people, leaving minute cycle for certain kinds of tiles." behind fine red clay. In mining this clay The Spartek kiln is by all accounts the we also help desilt the tanks for use by most advanced of its kind. It uses liqthe farmers again. uefied petroleum gas (LPG), one of the "The clay is just right for the making cleanest fuels. "Many tile plants in India of tiles. It has the right strength, the right run on furnace oil or coal, both of which plasticity-in fact all the essential propaffect the quality of tiles. Oil has sulfur in erties that CeramicUS insisted it must it and coal has tar and ash content which interfere with color quality. Moreover, sulfur reacts with the chemicals used for glazing tiles, and this leaves a patchy effect and pinholes in the tiles. That is why most overseas manufacturers of tiles of international quality have switched over to gas-fired kilns."

Another big advantage of an LPG kiln is its fuel efficiency. "We save about 70 percent in fuel expenditure, which is the single biggest cost component in tiles. In the manufacture of tiles roughly 50 percent of the cost is accounted for by the fuel. This saving gives us a vital cost advantage. " One leaves the Spartek plant amazed at how modern technology transforms a waste product-the lowly earth-into tiles of exquisite beauty and a joy for the modern home or office.

0

Franco's Boulevard For the past five years, Panamanian-born artist Franco Gaskin (below) has been engaged in a project that will soon become one of the world's largest outdoor art galleries.

His picturesque landscapes and whimsical characters have brightened up some of the gray security gates installed after racial riots 20 years ago along New York's 125th Street in Harlem. The first of Gaskin's paintings in this collection of .rollaway art is a magnificent magnolia tree ,Set against a blue backdrop (right). Decorated with bright pink blossoms and with pieces of glittering mirror serving as leaves, the painting covers the gate of a boutique.

Soon other store owners, anxious to offset the grimness of the security gates, commissioned Gaskin to transform their doorways into radiant tropical isles, shimmering lakes and rain forests. He has already painted more than 100 gates. The subjects range from fantasy to realism and often advertise the stores' products.

Some gates carry lofty messages: the Gelgold department store's five gates have the theme of brotherhood running through them (below, right).

Franco Gaskin first turned to drawing as a youth in Colon, Panama, to express himself when a speech impediment made it difficult for him to talk. In 1958 after establishing himself as an artist in Panama, he came to New York. Here he extended his talents to several media: murals, sculptures, paintings.

But he has got his greatest pleasure-and recognition-from transforming the stark security gates into works of art. Beginning at dawn, he works for three hours before the gates go up and continues after the stores close in the evenings. On Sundays he has the boulevard to himself-and to scores of tourists who come to see him at work. Admirers of his art have asked the city to rename the thoroughfare "Franco's Boulevard" in appreciation for his picturesque contribution to Harlem.