March 1986

SPAN 2 Worth a Hundred Million Words

4

Fiber Optics and India

6 The Principal's Day

11

Strategic Defense Initiative: The Rationale

14 Making Medicine's Miracles

by Libby Rosenthal

17 On the Lighter Side

18 The Four Faces of Sylvia Plath

21 Design Excellence

26 Focus On ...

28 Playwright with Passion

33 Can Him Old-Fashioned

34 An Academic Ashram

38 Orson Welles-Larger

than Life

42 "Reaching for Excellence"

by President Ronald Reagan

45 Costumes of Royal India

48

Politics Among Nations

Managing Editor: Himadri Dhanda. Assistant Managing Editor: Krishan Gabrani. Senior Editor: Aruna Dasgupta. Copy Editor: Nirmal Sharma. Editorial Assistant: Rocque Fernandes. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Art Db'ector: Nand Katyal. Associate Art Director: Kanti Roy. Assistant Art Director: Bimanesh Roy Choudhury. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Circulation Manager: Y.P. Pandhi.

Photographic Service: USIS Photographic Services Unit.

Photographs: Front cover-Sheldan Collins. c... ourtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York; costumes: left on loan from HHEC. right from Hem Singh (Chamba). Inside front cover-Avinash Pasricha. 1-Š Joji Sawa. 1986. 2-3-iIlustratioll by Paul Galli. Business Week: 3 top-Fred Ward/Black Star. 6-IO-Jim Estrin. 14-l6-courtesy Merck Sharp & Dohme International, Rahway. New Jersey. 18-courtesy Harper & Row. 21-22-courtesy National Endowment for the Arts. 23-courtesy Department of Transportation. 24-25-Pix # 4-Barry Fitzgerald: # 5-Pclcr Hendrick. courtesy of General Services Administration Art-ill-Architecture Progral!1; # 6-Mark Cohn. courtesy National Endowment for the arts; # 7-courtesy Vignelli Associates; # 8-Arvid Grant and Associates. Inc.; # 9-courtesy National Endowment for the Arts; # IO--courtesy Model & Instrument Works, Inc. 26 bottom-U.S. Department of Agriculture. 29-N.M. Engineer. 33-Š Jose A. Fernandez.

34-36-Avinash Pasrieha. 37-N. Shiva Kumar. 38. 39 top-Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collins. courtesy The Metn"'politan Archive; 39 boltom-Vernon Young 45-47-Sheldan \1useum of Art. Inside back cover, left, top to boltom-Collection of Judge & Mrs. Thornley K. S'wan: Springville Museum of An: LeConte Stewart Gallery of Art. Kaysville, Utah; Collection University of Utah Library: LeConte of Alan & Key Blood: right. top to bottom-courtesy Stewart Gallery of Art; Collection of Carl & Martha Brown. Back cover-Collection of Jane & Dam Stromquist.

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 magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed by Aroon Purie at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

STATEMENT FORM IV The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars about SPAN magazine as required under Section 19D(b) of the Press & Registration of Books Act. 1867. and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules. 1956.

United States Information Sen'ice, 24 Kas/urba

2. Periodicity of Publication 3. Printer's Name Nationality Address 4. Publisher's Name Nationality Address 5. Editor's Name Nationality Address

Gandhi

Marg,

New De/hi J]OOO]

Man/My

Aroon Purie Indian Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryqna James A. M{'Ginley American 24 Kasrurba

Gal/dhi

Marg.

New

Delhi

UOOO/

Marg.

New

Delhi

//000]

Warren W. McCurdy American 24 Kasrurba

Gal/dhi

6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one percent of the total capitaL I. James A. McGinley. hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

(Signed) James A. McGinley Signature of Publisher

Front cover: Mannequins glitter in costumes of royal India at an exhibition currently being held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. See pages 45-47.

Back cover: Dea/h Curve, painted around 1936 by LeConte Stewart. See also inside back cover.

Last month, India's External Affairs Minister Bali Ram Bhagat went to Washington to join with u.s. Secretary of State George Shultz in co-chairing the sixth meeting of the Indo-U.S. Joint Commission. Taking stock of the period since the last Joint Commission meeting in June 1983, the two foreign ministers said they were pleased with the level of Indo-U.S. collaboration in 1984~85. It was an era when President Reagan, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi paid special attention to new initiatives in Indo-American relations.

The Indo-U.S. Joint Commission was established in October 1974 when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited India (see SPAN January 1975). The substantive work of the Commission is done by four subcommissions--on Education and Culture, Science and Technology, Economics and Commerce, and Agriculture. The most visible of these linkages, of course, is the Festival of India in America, quite possibly the most ambitious attempt ever made by one nation to present its culture and heritage to another.

In 1984, a year and a half before the Festival of India opened in Washington, D.C., Indians experienced some of America's culture as well. Highlights of this Festival of America in India included lecture tours by composer Philip Glass and historian Daniel Boorstin: performances by the Merce Cunningham modern dance troupe with music by composer John Cage: and several American jazz groups for the Jazz Yatra, including the famous Woody Shaw who later toured India. (One of the American groups in the current Jazz Yatra is the "Jazz Quartet Oregon" shown here, featuring, left to right, Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless, Trilok Gurtu and Glen Moore.) Other major events of the Festival of America in India were an exhibit of "Modern Artists as Illustrators," from the Museum of Modern Art in New York: an exhibit of contemporary American porcelain from the Smithsonian Institution: a video workshop, with a follow-up video festival last November/December: a tour of the "Ambassadors of Opera," featuring stars from the Metropolitan Opera in New York: a series of concerts by individual guitarists, dancers, pianists: a bluegrass band and, the most applauded of all, performances by the New York Philharmonic Orch~stra led by Zubin Mehta.

In addition to the Subcommission on Education and Culture, which has been directly responsible for these two cultural festivals, the other subcommissions have also established their own important linkages. In previous letters from the publisher, we have talked about the spirit of cooperation that has manifested itself recently in the transfer of high technology from the United States to India. Indeed, the Science and Technology Subcommission has played a major role in furthering that cooperative spirit, as have the agricultural and commercial panels in their own areas of expertise.

Each is contributing to the overall strengthening of linkages between our two countries.

Any discussion of linkages would be incomplete without mention of the seventh New Delhi World Book Fair held last month. Anthony Read of the British Book Development Council may have set the tone when he pointed out that "Every country in the world has a demand for books published in other countries or in other languages. No country can expect, or even desire, to be self-sufficient in its book needs ••••" Participants came from more than 30 countries. On display in the American pavilion were 825 of the best university textbooks, 250 selected children's books, more than 200 recent prize-winning titles and, something that caused a great deal of interest: 100 specialty magazines, covering everything from computers, hobbies and education to film, sports and science. SPAN also had a booth at the Book Fair and sold about 600 new subscriptions during the ten days. The American Center Library did even better, enrolling 1,600 new members. Overall, some 100,000 visitors were attracted to the largest-ever American pavilion, where many books were bought and more ordered.

Cultural festivals, commercial ties, technology transfers, fair participation--the growing number of linkages between India and America will strengthen both. History has shown time and again that those nations with the most open societies, welcoming foreign exchanges, were the nations that developed into the great civilizations. Mahatma Gandhi put this most eloquently when he said: "I do not want my house to be walled on all sides and my windows stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible ••••"

A BURST OF LIGHT

.

Worth a Hundred Million Words In 100 years we have grown accustomed to the concept of radio-transmitted communications, but the concept must once have seemed terribly abstract and mysterious. Now the world of communications has turned its attention to the much more intuitive optical technology, which brings to mind images of smoke signals rising above the forests or flashes of semaphore lamps glimmering across the seas. Daily, we use our own "optical receptors" for communications.

If the capacities of optical fibers were fully exploited, the entire present telephone voice traffic in the United States could be carried on a single fiber. The contents of the U.S. Library of Congress could be transmitted in a few seconds. We have apparently discovered an inexhaustible' medium for com-¡ munication, yet fibers thus far have been used largely as direct replacements for electrical equivalents. Our everyday world has been changed little, if at all.

Lightwave 'communications began in earnest in 1970 when researchers at Corning Glass works in New York fabricated a useful lightwave conduit-a glass fiber about the diameter of a human hair. This achievement caught the attention of the communications industry in the United States because optical From Science 85. Vol. 6. No.9, November 1985. Copyright Š 1985 hy the Al1ll.:'rican Association for the Advancement of Science.

fiber offers an enormous "bandwidth" advantage over electrical transmission.

The bandwidth of a communication channel is a measure of range of frequencies supported-like the spread between the highest and lowest note on a piano. This critical number determines the information-carrying capacity of the medium.

The frequency of light is so much higher than that of the traditional radio frequencies that the bandwidth of a lightwave fiber is about a million times greater than a radio channel.

The past ten years have seen dramatic advances in how much an optical fiber can carry and how fast. The transparency of silica glass fiber has approached the theoretical maximum; light pulses can be seen after a transmission of more than 100 kilometers. The current experimental record is 4,000 million bits-about the information contained in a 30-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica-transmitted each second over a span of 117 kilometers.

With the information-capacity limit still perhaps five orders of magnitude away, it is likely this progress will continue through the coming decade.

An entire optical transmission technology, however, has not been developed in a mere decade. The superhighway of optical fiber alone does not make a useful communications system.

There must be means to gather traffic, to route diverse streams

The burgeoning technology of fiber optics will have a far~reaching impact on telecommunications and many other fields.

In medicine, for example, the tiny fibers (right) already allow physicians to look inside the human body without surgery.

of information, and logically to package and unpackage enormously fast streams of data. This is yet to come.

The next step in underlying optical technology should be to develop a collection of miniature light-wave "plumbing" modules-amplifiers, switches, couplers, filters, and isolators-and then integrate these devices into microcircuit chips.

The optical plumbing should enable the mixing of many wavelengths of light onto a single fiber. Radio communications has handled this nicely for many years. The AM radio band, for example, contains many different stations, each on its own frequency. Commercial optical fiber systems now generally¡ transmit data on a single wavelength, like a single radio station.

The enormous bandwidth of the optical fiber remains unexploited because of difficulty in establishing and manipulating subchannels.

Researchers are struggling with the plumbing problems because the full development of optical technology can come none too soon. The current flow of information is growing too large for electronic processing. Our useful electron will be replaced by the upstart photon.

The first commercial fiber systems in the United States linked only telephone offices. within metropolitan areas. Then the installation of long-haul fiber systems began with corridors

in the Northeast and in California.

Before the end of this decade the continental United States will be spanned with high-capacity, competing trunks lines-communications' superhighways of optical fibers.

In 1988 the first fiber submarine cable, connecting the United States, England and France, is scheduled to go into operation.

A similar system is planned for the Pacific, and undersea fibers will link islands with nearby mainlands.

Extension of optical fiber into the home is the next step, one made difficult by economics rather than technology. So far we have built superhighways without on and off ramps. The fiber throughway ends at a distribution point perhaps a kilometer from home. All that potential bandwidth yearns for the home, but copper telephone wires and coaxial CATV cables serve the market with an economy that fiber cannot presently match. The cost of fiber systems should drop, but even if it does not, fiber could at least multiply the services that wires and cables currently provide.

We could have hundreds of television

channels: The two-way videotelephone finally could become economical and ubiquitous, and the availability of image that we could browse material would be so instantaneous through television the way we leaf through a book, a magazine or a newspaper today.

Currently it is as if the fiber were a superhighway through undeveloped land. Our fiber highway will, like its travel counterpart, undoubtedly draw new businesses, commuters, and even Sunday drivers. Humans have never failed to use the full capacity of available communication technologies.

Past its developmental challenges, we will inevitably find new ways of using-and squandering-the potential of optical communication.

0 the Author: Robert W. Lucky is the executive director of the Communications Science Research Division of AT&T Bell Laboratories. Coauthor of a book on data communications, he is on the editorial advisory board of Science 86 magazine.

About

Fiber Optics and India Robert Weeks predicts a global revolution in com- the potential of different kinds of glass for 30 years. munication technology; a revolution that is moving on An international consultant and visiting lecturer to highways of tiny glass wires--fiber optics. Weeks, a governments and universities throughout the world, scientist and research professor at Vanderbilt Uni- Robert Weeks will be on a three-week lecture tour of versity in Nashville, Tennessee, has been investigating India this month.

QUESTION: What aspects of existent communication technology would become obsolete with the shift to fiber-optic transmission systems? For example, copper wire would be thrown out; what about microwave relays?

ANSWER: They would probably stay. The point in going to the optical wave guide is that you replace the copper cable with a lighter, longer-lasting, lower-cost-per-unit-Iength material.

You get an enormous enhancement of capacity-it goes up something on the order of a million for the same size cable.

Q: So you will have expanded enormously the amount of data that can be handled and the speed with which it can be sent?

A: And we will have provided it in a way that allows the receiving and transmitting stations to operate potentially at lower cost than any other mode of transmission.

Q: What is the purpose of your visit to India?

A: Primarily to discuss and stimulate interest in this area, to indicate what the options might be in entering this new phase of telecommunications systems, and what sorts of engineering and scientific training would be appropriate to provide the infrastructure necessary for it.

Fiber optics is viable for India not only because it's cheaper but because India has some of this technology in place with

which it could link. Although all of the infrastructure needed to support the kinds of technologies that will be utilized may not be in place right now in India, it's easy to conceive that it could be in place in the next few years.

Q: Do you have any idea of what India may be particularly interested in, in relationship to end use?

A: They are probably interested in the fact that you greatly enhance the capacity for voice communications with the use of fiber-optic cable as compared with copper. At places where phone wires are being installed for the first time, a single or double fiber can be run into a village from many kilometers away and have enough capacity tei serve every villager.

Q: Is the cable strung above ground just like copper?

A: You could do that; you treat it just as you would a copper cable. One of the advantages is that there is no atmospheric disturbance, such as lightning or electromagnetic interference, which can affect the signals. In addition to this you have the capacity for sending video data channels and TV channels into remote villages and for having a variety of receivers at the other end. I foresee this as an educational tool that would reach out to every village anywhere in India-of any size, even of a few hundred people.

Q: Are we talking about the equivalent of cable television as we know it in America?

A: Yes, that's right. It would be cable TV. You could put 50 channels into a fiber-optic communications system today as we do with cable television in the United States. It is enorm lusly useful for communicating all kinds of information or any data that need. to be communicated.

Q: To what extent will it be necessary to retrain engineers-in a country well known for engineering capabilities to begin with?

A: Well, I think a standard communications engineer-one who is conversant with satellite transmission systems or existing telephone systems-will need to learn some new things. But it is no radical departure from their past experience. Indians have been dealing with the transmission of electromagnetic radiation in almost everything they do. What they do have to know something about are the transmitters and receivers, which are somewhat different from the standard microwavelength.

Q: Do you anticipate any joint economic ventures where Indian businessmen, for example, would match funds on ongoing fiber-optic projects in the United States?

A: Yes. I believe that such inquiries and investigations on joint ventures are already under way.

Q: Theoretically, then, the demand in India for engineers trained to work with fiber optics would be there even though the technology is not in place now, right now?

A: Yes. As a matter of fact, there are some people in India who have been working on fiber-optic research, especially in the business of making the cables, laser generators and photo diode receivers.

Q: Turning to the fields that fiber optics could impact, apart from medicine and communications, what else would it include?

Transportation?

A: Certainly. I was just noting the other day that IBM has developed a fiber-optic computer link. in the transportation area, especially commercial aviation, there is a large amount of information that needs to be transmitted from receiving stations on Earth to central processing stations. And fiber optics offer the possibility of extremely rapid data transfer. Railroad lines now use what are effectively telephone links to keep track of what's happening on a rail line. Fiber optics can provide much greater capacity for more detailed and extensive information.

Q: When we talk about fiber-optic glass, what are we talking about chemically?

A: The basic material, the c!1.e'llical compound, out of which it is made is silicon dioxide-si:Jcon and oxygen. To mak~ the right properties, you add a little bit of germanium dioxide and that forms the central core of the fiber. Then there is a coating of silicon dioxide and on the outside there is a plastic, or organic polymer sheath which is an effective shield against abrasion, moisture and other impacts on the fiber itself. It's basically made out of the -most common compounds on the surface of the Earth.

Q: How safe is it environmentally?

A: Window glass, glasses from which you drink, bottles in which you store liquid are all made from this. It is, in fact, one

of the safest

chemical

compounds

one could

have

in one's

environment, as far as its effects are concerned. The fabrication of the material, however, does have some emissions that are potentially dangerous.

Q: --Have we developed adequate manufacturing safeguards in the United States?

A: The fiber-optic factories meet all the Environmental Protection Agency standards. There are not known to be any particular problems with respect to those emissions. They can be handled in apparently routine fashion.

Q: Would fiber optics be considered high technology, rather than medium high technology?

A: Yes. The processing of copper ore is a very old and ancient technology-a medium- or low-technology process. The business of making fiber-optic cable is a very high-technology process. It is capital intensive, not labor intensive, whereas a lot of copper processing is more labor intensive. Fiber optics is the great revolution in communications of the end of this century. I think it's going to completely revolutionize the way we do things in our homes.

Q: Can you give examples?

A: Well, for instance, you will be able to get into your home all cable television programs through a telephone line. Another aspect of the fiber optics revolution will be the structure of buildings, facilities and homes. One of the things that one can do now with a fiber-optic cable, because of the enormous capacity for transmitting data, is to make a "smart building."

You can put in a central computer, and link it up to all kinds of activators allover the building such as thermostats, security alarms, elevators, smoke detectors, air-quality controls, and so on. Orders can be built into the computer to modify and service the multiplicity of systems which, to a large degree, will take care of themselves. What has held up this kind of development in the past has been the enormity of data that must be transmitted to accomplish tasks such as these: It has been impossible. To give you some idea, a copper cable capable of doing all three functions would have to be a bundle five to ten centimeters in diameter whereas with fiber optics, the cable would be half a centimeter thick and weigh just one-tenth or maybe just one-hundredth of what copper would weigh.

Q: What role can fiber optics play in medicine?

A: Fiber optics will have quite a number of medical applications. One of the developments is the use of laser light at various wavelengths to perform surgical processes, certain kinds of cauterization processes-what are called angio-spastic operations. That is a process by which plaque deposits on the walls of the arteries can be burned away by laser light. The process requires that the light be transmitted from the source outside the body through a fiber-optic cable which can be inserted like a catheter; the surgeon can see the walls of the artery as he inserts the cable. The polyp in President Reagan's colon was discovered by a fiber-optic endoscope. So, fibers of glass transmitting visual information for a physician are a tool already in use in the medical world.

The two technologies of fiber optics and lasers are developing and blending into technologies that would have been impossible to conceive just ten years ago.

D

The decor of Principal Bill Abernach's office at New York City's Public School number 59-Beekman Hill Elementary School-bespeaks its occupant's attitude toward his job. A man who forgoes his lunch hour everyday so that he can supervise two sessions of playground activity would naturally choose to clutter his room with finger paintings, drawings, papier-mache sculptures and other creations of his charges. .

Abernach knows all his students personally-because he wants to and also because the school is relatively small. It consists of a kindergarten and grades one through six. Many of the students come from distant neighborhoods and some of them are foreign-born (partly due to the school's proximity to the United Nations offices).

Even after having served as principal of Beekman Hill for almost two decades, Abernach still finds that "there's something refreshing about working with kids. I love it-it's like a peek into the future."

The, Prineipal~s DaYPlIOTOGRAPHS

BY JIM

ESTRIN

Principal Abernach arrives at school two hours before it opens (left). He heads for his office (facing page) so that he can finish the paperwork before classes start. Once the students start pouring in, he likes to devote all his time to them-teaching them, sitting in on their study sessions, or just sharing a student's favorite story with her (above).

Abernach firmly believes that the school should be a "supportive institution, not a punitive one."

When a teacher brings a young prankster to him (facingpage) Abernach faces the situation with just the right mix of sternness, reassurance and humor.

His thorough understanding of pupils in his care comes from more than two decades of experience.

He was a teacher at Beekman Hill for seven years before becoming its principal, and still likes to conduct classes (above). He also supervises two sessions of playground activity daily, occasionally joining in the fun and games (right).

Troubleshooting

Bill Abernach, here talking to a teary-eyed boy in the hallway, is always available to console youngsters facing the inevitable daily crises of school life-missed buses, illnesses, forgotten lunch boxes, or a fight with a classmate. His involvement with his job-and his success at it-all stem from one basic fact: He loves being in the company of children.

technologies.

He wrote in a National Academy of Sciences journal that his studies indicate that the basic two-layer defense, which could be operational in the early 1990s, could protect "90 to 99 percent of the nation's population ... from a massive nuclear attack." He said the advanced three- or four-layer defense proposed for the late 1990s or the end of the century could protect "perhaps even greater than 99 percent of the nation's population against a nuclear attack."

What good is a 90 percent or even a 99 percent defense when even one warhead can blow up a city?

STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE

The Ralionale A purely defensive system, SOl would go into action only if an attack were under way. The author argues that it is better to rely on this system for protection than on the weapons of mutual mass destruction. Robert Jastrow is the founder of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and author of How to Make

Nuclear Weapons Obsolete.

QUESTION: Don't scientists sayan effective U. S. defense against Soviet missiles is im-

possible?

If a Soviet general knows that only one warhead in ten will get through to its target, he knows he cannot hope to knock out our retaliatory power in a surprise attack. If he gives the word to attack, his own homeland will lie in ruins. They will never order an attack under those circumstances.

111 other words, a 90 percent defense against Soviet missiles gives 100 percent protection.

Can the Soviets overwhelm American defense if the nation builds it?

The Soviets have threatened to do this, but their threat is empty. The Soviets spent ANSWER: Only four scientists in the entire United States with full access to classified $500,000 million on the missile force they information on missile defense say that. now have. To overwhelm our 90 percent defense and get as many warheads through On the other side are G.A. Keyworth II (the President's science adviser), 50 leading to their targets as they would have if we had missile experts on James Fletcher's panel, no defense, they would have to beef up their arsenal to ten times its present size. That the brilliant weapons experts Lowell Wood means spending ten times $500,000 million. at Livermore and Gregory Canavan at Los The Soviet Union would be very hardAlamos, and thousands of scientists and pressed to spend [that much money] on engineers actually working in missile demissiles in the next five to ten years, on top fense. Nature, the leading scientific journal in the world, wrote recently that "a substanof its present military outlays. tial part of the technical community" agrees Ambassador Paul Nitze has emphasized that defense against missiles is feasible. the importance of the cost ratio "at the Nature concluded about the objections from margin," that is, how many dollars the some scientists, "Critics for the project Soviets have to spend on countering our should look elsewhere for ammunition." defense for every dollar we spend on adding Fifty-four Nobel laureates recently to it. These marginal cost ratios are aillo in signed an appeal opposing space-based . our favor. Studies at Los Alamos and missile defenses, or "Star Wars," but 53 elsewhere show that to counter our defense, of the 54 have no experience with missile the Soviets must spend three dollars for defense work. every dollar we spend on building it. For some advanced kinds of defenses the ratios How good will this defense be? are even higher: ten to one or more in favor James Fletcher, the former head of of our defense.

NASA [the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration], a physicist with exHow much will it cost? tensive experience in development of misFor the basic two-layer defense using siles, headed a panel of the country's lead"smart bullets," the cost is $60,000 million ing missile defense experts which spent spread over about five years, or $12,000 36,000 man-hours, on the study of the new million a year. This defense could be avail-

Fully effective defense system~ on both sides will lead to a world wherel able in the early 1990s. For the advanced three- or four-layer defense that might become available in the late 1990s, the cost is roughly $200,000 million spread over ten years. The figures of $1,000,000,000,000 or more tossed around by Soviet spokesmen and other opponents of SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] are groundless exaggerations.

For comparison, note that we are spending more than $40,000 million a year on nuclear weapons of destruction designed to keep the Soviets out of our backyard by the threat of retaliation.

How do you know it will work and will cost that much?

We won't be certain until we are farther along in the research, but all the calculations and experiments thus far are very encouraging. The "smart bullet" has been tested in flight against a Minuteman warhead and it vaporized the warhead. High-powered lasers are coming along faster than anyone expected. A laser has been tested at a peak power of 1,000 million watts with an average power of 100 million watts in sight. This is well above the level of 20 million watts considered necessary for a useful laser defense. There is amazing progress in building big mirrors cheaply, and also "rubber mirrors," that change shape to correct for air turbulence.

Transmission of a laser beam from the Earth to space was successfully tested in a recent shuttle flight. Research on railguns, used for launching "smart bullets" at very high speeds, is making rapid progress. Much of this research will have major scientific and commercial usefulness in addition to benefiting arms control.

Can't the Soviets foil American defenses with decoys and other countermeasures?

The defenses we are designing will be probing Soviet decoys in many different ways with lasers, radar and heat-sensitive instruments. The Soviets can try to fool these instruments with decoys, but the decoys will have to be very elaborate to work. For example, we can tell a decoy from a warhead by tapping both with a weak pulse of laser energy and then observing how they recoil. The decoy, being light and flimsy, will recoil from the tap more readily than the heavy warhead.

If the Soviets made their decoys heavy enough to fool us in this test, they would weigh nearly as much as the warheads. But if the decoys weigh nearly as much as the

warheads, the Soviets cannot release large numbers of them during their attack, and they will be of little value to them.

Aren't satellites very vulnerable? Can't the Soviets shoot down American laser satellites more easily than America can shoot down their missiles?

The opposite is true. Satellites can be made relatively more invulnerable; missiles cannot. The reason is that a satellite in orbit is weightless and we can plaster as much armor and shielding on it as we wish. For the same reason, a satellite can also carry heavy guns for its own defense-lasers, smart bullets, or particle beams.

If the Soviets try to shield their SS-18 [missiles] from our lasers bycoating the skin with one inch of protective material, the payload of the missile will be reduced by four tons. But four tons is the weight of all ten warheads on the Soviet SS-18s. Protected this way, they could not carry warheads. That would make these terrible weapons impotent and obsolete.

Isn't the computer program for SDI impossibly complicated?

The software for SDI will require about ten million lines of code. However, this has already been surpassed in length and complexity by the AT&T [American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation] program which controls the nation's telephone network.

That has 50 million lines of code. Also, the number of interconnections between "nodes" (nerve centers) in the AT&T .program is 14,000, whereas the number of interconnections in the SDI program is estimated to be about 4,500.

How can you test the SDI program fully, short of trying it in battle?

The one aspect of SDI that can be tested fully is the software. When signals are fed into the front end of the program, they look exactly the same regardless of whether they have been produced by a Soviet missile leaving its silo or by a piece of equipment that generates signals imitating the real battle.

In fact, this equipment can create Iiealistic "battles" that test the program more fully than a real attack. It can hurl more "missiles," "warheads" and "decoys" at us than the Soviets could ever build. And it can "launch" them more quickly than the Soviets could ever launch their missiles in an actual attack.

Well-developed techniques exist for test-

ing programs that deal with emergencies too dangerous to allow them to happen for test purposes. These techniques were used in testing the AT&T program. When that program was put into operation, it worked immediately although it had never been tested completely "in battle."

What about the fast-burn booster? Some critics of SDI say it could be a low-cost and highly effective Soviet countermeasure.

It took the Soviets about 15 years to build their present missile force. Fast-burn missiles-which burn out and release their warheads in less than a minute-are a much harder engineering problem. Experts on missile development agree that this very advanced kind of missile will not be available to the Soviets before the 21st century.

Cost is also a very serious problem for the Soviets in considering this countermeasure. Statements by Union of Concerned Scientists spokesmen that the Soviets could build a fast-burn Midgetman for $10 million each are not in accord with official Air Force figures for the cost of the Midgetman.

So, if the Soviets replaced their arsenal of approximately 8,000 warheads with fastburn Midgetmen, it would cost them $1,600,000,000,000.

Even spread over several years, this would be a very massive military burden for the Soviet Union, on top of its already massive military outlays.

Finally, the defenses recommended by the Fletcher panel on missile defense are designed to handle fast-burn missiles. So, even if the Soviets go to the trouble and expense of scrapping their entire arsenal to replace it with fast-burn ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles], it will avail them nothing.

Isn't it a bad idea to put weapons in space?

These devices-the smart bull~t, the laser and particle beam-are defensive.

They only go into action if the Soviets launch an attack to destroy us. It is much better to rely on them for protection than on the threat of using weapons of mass destruction.

Will the American defense involve nuclear weapons in space?

The smart bullets planned for early deployment are nonnuclear. All the lasers under study are also nonnuclear with one exception-the X-ray laser, mainly a hedge

nuclear weapons are useless and their disappearance therefore imminent. >

against a Soviet breakthrough in this area.

We know that the Soviets are working very hard on the X-ray laser.

If the United States' defense destroys Soviet nuclear warheads, won't that cause nuclear explosions in space?

No, because it is very difficult to make a nuclear weapon explode. If the bombs are "salvage-fused" to explode on approach of an intruder, there will still be no clouds of radioactive dust and no damage on the ground, provided the interception occurs above 15,000 meters. Since defense will prevent most bombs from ~xploding, it also greatly diminishes the I "nuclear winter" effect.

Some people say SDI will bring the world closer to nuclear war. Won't the Soviets feel threatenedby SDI and launch a pre-emptive attack?

In the near term, they won't attack for the same reason they don't attack the United States today, namely, because we have a strong submarine deterrent. In the long term, our government has announced that it will try to negotiate a parallel deployment of defenses with the Soviets so that neither side gains a military superiority through these defenses, and neither side can feel threatened. This is a cardinal point of our negotiating position in Genevaperhaps the most important point of all.

If SDI works against ballistic missiles, isn't the United States still vulnerable to low-flying cruise missiles?

A laser defense fixed to handle thousands of ballistic missile warheads and tens of thousands of decoys, traveling at 16,000 kilometers an hour, will have little trouble tracking and destroying cruise missiles lumbering along at the speed of a commercial airliner.

How about missiles launched from submarines?

A defense that protects against the greatest Soviet threat-their land-based missiles-will be even more effective against submarine-launched missiles.

First, only a fraction of the satellites in our defensive screen will be over the Soviet Union at any given time; the rest will be mostly over the world's oceans, watching for signs of missiles launched from Soviet submarines. Second, a submarine cannot launch all its missiles at once; they have to be staggered, which makes it much easier

for our defense because we can pick them off one by one. Third, as soon as the submarine fires one missile, we know where it is and can probably destroy it before it launches the rest. Fourth, submarinelaunched missiles generally travel slower than ICBMs, which makes them easier to track and destroy.

Will the defense work against the Soviet SS-20, and other short- and medium-range missiles that threaten Western Europe?

For several reasons,¡ SS-20s and other medium- and short-range missiles pointed at Europe are easier to defend against than intercontinental missiles, contrary to statements emanating from some American scientists and Western European spokesmen.

First, and perhaps most important, because of their shorter range, they spend a larger part of their trajectory in the atmosphere. This makes it much easier for our defense to discriminate the warheads from the decoys. (The decoys, being lightweight, are retarded more by air resistance.)

Second, they fly more slowly, which makes them easier to track and destroy. Third, they are smaller missiles with a smaller payload, and therefore carry fewer warheads and decoys, which, again, makes the defense against them easier.

What about missiles launched on low trajectories from submarines near U. S. shores? Wouldn't these Soviet missiles reach their targets-say Washington-too quickly for defenses to work against them?

Our ability to track and destroy these "flat trajectory" missiles will not be impaired by their short flight times.

First of all, like the SS-20s, they fly lower and slower than ICBMs, which makes them' easier to track and easier to intercept.

Second, our surveillance satellites detect them within seconds after launch, and our laser beams catch up to them in a hundredth of a second or less. As a consequence, it doesn't matter appreciably to our defense whether the flight time is 5 minutes or 20.

Does SDI violate the ABM [AntiBallistic Missile] Treaty?

SDI is a research program whose stated goal is research on ABM defenses. However, the ABM Treaty does not limit goals.

It only limits certain activities. We may bump up against the treaty in three or four years-if, for example, we begin to test space-based components. But for the next several years there is NO conflict between

SDI and the ABM Treaty. The Soviet Star Wars program will also bump up against the ABM Treaty soon. Some experts say it has already done so.

Why do we need SDI if nuclear deterrence has worked up to now?

Deterrence by the threat of retaliation has been effective, but there are signs of erosion of the U.S. position in this regard.

Our ballistic-missile submarines are the principal U.S. deterrent at the present time, but their invulnerability is compromised by research into methods of detecting submerged submarines. At some point in the 1990s we may find ourselves in a very dangerous position as a result.

President Reagan's strategic modernization program has been valuable-especially in restoring the B-1B bomber-which, unlike the B-52, has a fair chance of penetrating Soviet air defenses-but an even stronger deterrent would be a combination of an effective force of nuclear retaliation and a defense that prevents the Soviet Union from destroying the bulk of that retaliatory force in a surprise blow.

At what point will the United States be able to scale down its offensive capability?

Our position is to maintain our present offensive capability threat for ten years while we pursue research and move toward deployment of a limited defense system.

Then, in concert with the Soviets, we hope to carry out a carefully phased, simultaneous deployment of fully effective defenses on both sides, leading to a world in which the nuclear weapon is useless and its disappearance can be expected, Would SDI trigger an arms race in space?

The Soviets are already racing ahead on missile defense as fast as they can.

Wouldn't SDI make a fine bargaining chip at Geneva, since the Soviets. want so much to get rid of it?

We cannot offer SDI as a bargaining chip, because if we do, the Soviets are likely to have an effective defense against American missiles in the 1990s, while the United States has no defense against Soviet missiles.

Faced with the prospect in the 1990s of a world in which the Soviets have a massive ' first-strike arsenal of more than 10,000 accurate warheads, and also have an effective defense against any American retaliatory blow, we must proceed with our research or place 0 America iq a very vulnerable position.

Making Medicine'S Miracles Human ingenuity and serendipity often provide the crucial breakthrough in the elusive drug-discovery process.

Sixty years ago in the United States, a child could look around the classroom in the fall and be pretty certain that at least one classmate would be dead by the start of the following school year-stricken by anything from pneumonia to polio.

Times have changed. Antibiotics and other drugs have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and revolutionized health care. Schizophrenics who, 30 years ago, would have required institutionalization now function in society, aided by a drug called chlorpromazine. And in the past couple of years, critically ill patients who need organ transplants-heart, kidney, liver, pancreas-have seen their chances for long-term survival improve dramatically because of a new immune-system suppressant, cyclosporine.

To what do these patients owe their good fortune? In part, to Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin; to the French psychiatrist Delay, who first used chlorpromazine to treat psychotic disorders; and to Jean Borel, the immunologist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals who masterminded the cyclosporine . Right above: Immunologist Cindy Ehrenfreund examines cell cultures for the production of monoclonal antibodies against the hepatitis B virus; at present the hepatitis B vaccine is derived from human blood. By combining monoclonal antibodies with DNA technology, Merck is developing a genetically engineered hepatitis B vaccine which will obviate the need for a continuous supply of human blood. Right center: Harri G. Ramjit,.a senior researcher at Merck. uses a high resolwion mass spectrometer to separate and characterize unknown products derived from organic synthesis, biotransformations and chemical degradation.

Left: A computer graphic of afamily of compounds, avermectins, that may prove effective against internal and external parasites in animals. Right: A scientist holds a petrie dish, seen enlarged on the monitor. An image analyzer measures concentration of an experimental antibiotic in body fluids of test patients injected with the new drug.

project. But alongside the scientist, there is a silent partner in new drug development: serendipity. The mold from which penicillin is derived was a contaminant in one of Fleming's bacteria cultures. Chlorpromazine grew out of an effort to synthesize new antihistamines. And cyclosporine is a chemical product of a fungus that was discovered in a soil sample brought back by a Sandoz microbiologist from a Norwegian holiday.

Serendipity and science are strange bedfellows. And it is this leap from the lucky break to scientific progress that makes the drug-discovery process so elusive. Says Zola Horovitz, vicepresident for drug development at the Squibb Pharmaceutical Company: "I'm not sure I could tell you how drugs are discovered. It's partly instinct; you just follow your nose."

New drugs currently entering the market, says Wall Street analyst David Saks, could produce a $1O,OOO-million-a-year sales increase by 1987. That's a lot of money to be riding on instinct and chance. So each year the industry spends close to $2,000 million on research and development (R&D) to encourage, to court-and recently, even to sidestep-lady luck.

To those with idealistic notions about the scientific method, the massive, random chemical screening programs that are the backbone of so much pharmaceutical R&D must come as a rude shock. Each year, millions of new compounds are either synthesized in labs or found in the field and tested for effectiveness against a wide variety of diseases. The result is high attrition: of 10,000 compounds synthesized, 9,000 may be eliminated very quickly, and only one preparation out of the 10,000 makes it to human testing.

But given perseverance, a high threshold for disappointment and a little luck, screening pays off.

In 1977, the Squibb Pharmaceutical Company decided to undertake a massive screening program to search for new so-called beta lactam antibiotics, those with the same ring structure as penicillin. The first fruit of that labor, a drug called Aztreonam, hit the market in 1983.

Ever since Fleming discovered that mold inhibited the growth of bacteria on his lab plates, it has been standard practice to look for new antibiotics in microorganisms. According to Squibb microbiologist Richard Sykes, "You go out into nature, collect a sample of organic material-soil, water or rotting vegetation-and isolate the microbes in the sample. There could be a thousand million microbes in a gram of soil-and you see if any produce metabolites active as antibiotics."

In one year of the search that led to Aztreonam, Sykes' department tested almost a million microbes. Researchers screened soil samples from around the world-:-from Morocco, Brazil and Canada. But ultimately they found the promising compound in the pine barrens of New Jersey-literally at the doorstep of Squibb International in Princeton. "Serendipity again," says Squibb chemist Chris Cimarusti. "The compound probably only exists in the pine barrens; if we hadn't looked there, we never would have found it."

The chemical clue arrived at Cimarusti's lab hidden in ten liters of murky liquid. It took 15 years to isolate penicillin from

mold, and biologists spent several more years determining its structure. Within two months of receiving the pine-barren broth, Squibb chemists had purified the new compound-an unusual one-ring l3-lactam, or monobactam. Minutes later, thanks to advanced spectroscopic techniques, its structure was clear.

Then came the next hurdle: although structurally promising, the compound Cimarusti and his colleagues had isolated was not very stable and, worse, was a very poor antibiotic. Drawing on knowledge gained during years of modifying penicillin to make "semi-synthetic derivatives," the researchers set out to make the antibiotic that nature had left unfinished. Using chemical reactions, they replaced the side chain in the naturally occurring compound that increased activity, they removed the methoxyl group that contributed to instability, and added a small one-carbon substituent that they thought would increase the molecule's effectiveness against previously hard-to-conquer gram-negative infections. A nip here, a tuck there-the strategy worked. "It was like using a menu from a Chinese restaurant," explains Cimarusti. "You take the backbone from the bacteria, a side chain from one place, a ring substituent from another, and you can make a combination that's good for anything you want."

Sometimes the sheer unpredictability of screening is its virtue. In 1969, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals' antibiotic search turned up an interesting new chemical structure that, through a few twists of fate, moved out of the antibiotic field. Cyclosporine, the transplant drug that is the metabolite of a fungus, "resulted from a fundamental principle at drug companies," reports Sandoz research director David Winter: "When microbiologists go away on vacation, they dig up samples of soil to look for new organisms and bring them back to the laboratory. " Unfortunately, cyclosporine, or compound 27-400, was a failure as an antibiotic and only a poor antifungal. Rejected by the microbiologists, it made the rounds of other departments in the hope that it might demonstrate some other attributes.

Sandoz immunologist Jean Borel decided to try the compound in a few basic immunology tests, or screens. And one man's poison proved to be another man's meat. "After the first tests," recalls Borel, "we were already sure that it worked and that it was very different [from the drugs normally¡ used in transplants]. It suppressed immunity but did not kill cells." In mice, it dampened the immune-system reaction that causes transplant rejection by up to 99 percent, without cellular damage. All drugs then in use to prevent rejection were double-edged swords-they killed good cells involved in bodydefense mechanisms as well as those that fought transplants and left patients vulnerable to serious infections.

As is often the case with drugs that result from shotgun screening, it is still unclear just how, or why, cyclosporine works. It now appears that the drug interferes with a chemical messenger in the immune system.

(Text continued on page 40)

"Notice all the computations, theoretical scribblings, and lab equipment, Norm ....

Yes, curiosity killed these cats."

ON

THE LIGHTER SIDE

THE FOUR FACES OF

ylvia Plath

by DARSHAN

SINGH MAINI

How, why and when a poet may blaze into the truth and burn him- or herself out like a rocket, leaving behind an incandescent body of verse, is a question that involves a whole complex of human relationships and a whole "metaphysic" of the poetic processes. And that is precisely what the more insightful critics of Sylvia Plath's poetry have been trying to do since. that fateful day of Februaryll, 1963, when she took her own life in her 31st year. Even the manner of her demise-thrusting her head into a gas oven with an SOS note for her doctor and instructions regarding the milk for her two babiessuggests a fiery ordeal that a poet courted as daughter, woman, wife and mother in that twilight hour of her unhappy life. For, at bottom, her suicide was a violent finis to the war of the selves that she saw no way of ending otherwise. Her poetry w"asin large measure an extension of this inner war, though, ipso facto, it also served to dissipate the fevers raging in her blood since early childhood, and thus prevented her from falling apart sooner than she did. Two earlier attempts at suicide-one soon after her father's death and the other while an overly ambitious student at Smith College-now naturally fall into a lethal pattern that Plath had begun ominously to see and weave out of certain obscure compulsions. As she was to write in a late poem, "Lady Lazarus," suicide attracted her like a flame. It had a certain kind of wry "aesthetic" about it.

Dying Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I've a call.

As the child turned into a precocious girl, however, and the girl into a ravishing woman, the demonic energies breaking into her verse, first as delicate little lyrics and villanelles, and then as dramatic poems of shattering force and controlled hysteria, simply annihilated the distance between the poet who wrote and the woman who suffered. As she pumped the "jet-blood" of her heart into her "hell-fired" poetry, she knew not where the song had turned into a lament, a cry, a shriek, a threnody, a requiem. And the four faces we see refracted in her verse make not a quartet of framed portraits, but a Picasso collage of' fractured features and caged feline energies.

The composite and laminated figure that peeps out of the canvas is, then, something of that "God's lioness" about which she sings in her famous poem, "Ariel."

Though the cult of Sylvia Plath, which shows no signs

of exhaustion, is more a cultural than a poetic phenomenon, it is not to be dismissed as something unrelated to the operative energies of her compelling, confessional poetry. The aura of glamorous fatality has always had an abiding appeal for the young, and a poetry that brings about such a dark consummation may not be fully understood without a look into this side of Plath's romantic and defiant American personality. In essence, it shares something of the temper of an Ahab overreaching the limits of the self and stretching out to meet his appointed fate. No wonder one critic called her "the James Dean of modern poetry." That is not the only ambiguous title she has earned, however. Such sobriquets as "bitch-goddess," "mannequin," "vampire," "Medusa," "white goddess," only seek in their own uncertain way to define her protean personality, at once attractive and abrasive, sun-lit and sepulchral, authentic and fake.

Since both of her parents were fully consumed in her work and remained disturbing presences in her unconscious until the end, any effort to penetrate the Plath problem must necessarily begin with the daughter called Sylvia, or Sivvy. For even when she was not talking. directly about her parents, they eventually got translated into constitutive symbols of great power, reach and . ( spread-especially lier father, a renowned professor and bee-specialist at Boston University. In the end, the German Otto Plath turned into an ugly totem in that terrifying poem, "Daddy," and into a massive metaphor signaling a female hunt for being in a world without men's "stings" and "knives," in the sequence from her famous bee-poems. But before we reach this harrowing stage in her journey to a Calvary of her making, we have to go back to that image of Plath that associates her in the American imagination with the unending dream of "the golden girl." It is an image that she cultivated with all her cunning and intuition, for the tall, handsome, glittering blonde needed a powerful persona to perpetuate her daughterliness on the one hand and her sexual mystique on the other. Yet, in her work we notice an element of nuclear ambivalence with regard to both parents. The mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, a kind, gentle and self-effacing person whom Sivvy celebrates as a "golden mom" in her letters home, becomes in Plath's autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, something of an insufferable inanity that a "bitchy" daughter slights and hates! Similarly, her father, whom she adored and would not forgive for deserting her in his act of death, surfaces in the poems as a Nazi monster, and an incestuous threat. In "Electra on Azalea Path," this dark underside becomes manifest thus: I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting in my throat.

o

pardon the one who knocks for pardon at Your gate, father-your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.

It was my love that did us both to death.

In "Daddy," her hatred, which is at the same time a violent form of inverted love, rises to a new black pitch: There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

The nursery-rhyme style and air do not dissipate the gloom despite their jauntiness; on the contrary, they help project her Freudian fears and repressions (the Electra Complex, if you like) in the form of gallows humor. Her ghoulish gothic verse reveals depths of despair that she could in no other way come to terms with. It's a dramatization of that supreme buffoonery of emotions which rocked her breast and made her enact a theater of clashing images and symbols. She wreaks her oblique revenge on her progenitors who created her a female in a world of male hegemony. Thus in her verse she assumes many roles in relation to the victim-victimizer theme, a daughter set adrift in human chaos.

To my mind, this gender insecurity accounts for Plath's lethal narcissism and her self If-aggrandizement. The demonic drive became a need of a psyche maimed at birth. In a journal entry, she wrote, "I have a good self that loves skies, hills, ideas, tasty meals, bright colors. My demon would murder this self by demanding that ¡it be a paragon."

Though her condition as a daughter involved from the beginning her tragedy as a woman and wife, it was sexual politics that turned the nubile girl into an object of sexual attention as a woman. While at Smith College, and later at Cambridge University in England, Plath courted a number of lovers, less with a view to experiencing the thrill of romance and sex than with the intention of collecting "an entire constellation of young male satellites," according to Edward Butscher.

As a matter of fact, in a curious illogical sense, she seemed to resent the act of sex as though it were a rape of her spirit instead of a joyful exercise. It also appeared comic, ugly and sad to her, an act so imperious in urge and authority and so incongruous in labor and effect. There was a strong streak of misandry in her, as affirmed by her friend, Nancy Hunter Steiner, and also seen in a poem, "Berck-Plage," wherein the hysterical hatred of sex breaks out despite Plath's sensual nature:

Obscene bikinis hide in the dunes, Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugar Of little crystals, titillating the light, While a green pool opens its eye.

Sick with what it has swallowedLimbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers Two lovers unstick themselves.

Again in "The Applicant," and in "Purdah," her revulsion takes on a shrill note. "Purdah" in particular combines her two anathemas, man and sexuality:

Attendants!

And at his next step I shall unlooseFrom the small jeweled Doll he guards like a heartThe lioness, The shriek in the bath, The cloak of holes.

And I, in my snazzy blacks, Mill a litter of breasts like jellyfish.

My mouth sags, The mouth of Christ When my engine reaches the end of it.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

Now the dutiful, loving daughter has moved away from the clever "Sivvy" poems of her earlier days and become a "demon lover," the eternal woman who has to settle her score with God and man. Thus, Plath knocks off poem after poem in which her intense black hatred, pain and suffering assume a hallucinatory aspect. Later, in her bee-poems, she often presents herself in the role of the bee-queen, affirming her freedom and centrality.

However, it was finally as a wife that all the freight of fears and repressions was sought to be unloaded in her verse. Now the dikes were fully breached and a Niagara of lament, protest, invective and indictment broke out in the form of stormy poems, frothing in their ire and wrath. It may be observed in passing, though, that while these poems were written at a time when her marriage with the British poet Ted Hughes was on the rocks, they do not lose their artistic discipline and control. In the main, they are tightly structured with her lapidary skill, giving the reader the impression of a hound straining at the leash.

Robert Lowell came nearest to defining this quality in his foreword to Ariel. He employed an equestrian trope in keeping with the spirit of the opening poem. Plath, he observed, was "like a racehorse galloping relentlessly with risked, outstretched neck-death hurdle after hurdle topped. She cries out for that rapid life of starting pistols, snapping tapes and new world records broken."

But it is well to remember that some of the fiercest moments of joy also came her way only in this tempestuous marriage. She saw Hughes, a fierce, hawkish and predatory talent in full cry, as the only mate worthy of her body, soul, talent and ambition. Her letters of the period amount to a long epithalamium and are radiant with inner energy. Writing to her mother she said, "I want to be the strongest female paean yet for the creative forces of nature, the joy of being a loved and loving woman; that is my song."

The color of the Devonshire skies began to change soon enough and the sweet gingerbread of marriage lost

nearly all of its icing. Her husband's infidelities and professional jealousies and her own prickly and provocative personality did not take long to tear apart a relationship that was already under siege. It was bound to come to grief since their ravaging egos and ravenous muses could not have sustained the "star equilibrium" that D.H. Lawrence talked about in rel<:ltionto the union of two equally powerful personalities. Even the two children of the storm- Frieda Rebecca and Nick -were an inadequate link-and remained marginal presences in the Greek tragedy that was unfolding before their innocent and bewildered eyes. It was acase of vampire mating where spousal savagery lay close to the surface.

Their coming together was, of course, good for their poetry, but wicked for their lives. They drained each other of the juices of love and, in the end, produced a weird, wild verse and a wilder poetics. No wonder poems now flowed out of her in a rage of despair. A uniquely feminine voice with all the force of a male intellect became her "signature tune," so to speak. To quote her own words from a BBC broadcast, she had started "courting the experience that kills." No wonder, both marriage and man are seen as an aspect of the menace that life poses in all its existential mystery and misery. Here then are a few snippets of her misogamic verse. From "The Detective": There is a smell of years burning, here in the kitchen, These are the deceits, tacked up like family photographs, And this a man, look at his smile, The death weapon?

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold.

A living doll. everywhere you look.

It is in "The Couriers" that the marriage ceremony is rebuked most in that cryptic, razor-sharp, gimlet style that Plath was now fashioning for the working out of her multiple injuries and abominations: A ring of gold with the sun in it?

Lies. Lies and a grief.

Frost on a leaf, the immaculate cauldron ....

Ted Hughes was now, together with her father, a hated symbol in her expanding iconography. Indeed, in a strange, disturbing manner, they both became her despoilers in this verse of victimhood. Yet in her letters home, she maintained a curiously light tone and even a kind of dry cheeriness, but her smarting poems give the game away. In one letter to her mother, she wrote thus on the subject of happy marriages: "Let The Ladies' Home Journal blither about these." Marriage was now a trap, a sw.amp, a blind ditch.

Sylvia Plath's role as a mother was not of that seminal importance in the understanding of her poetry as the other About the Author: Darshan Singh Maini has retired from Punjabi

University at Patiala, where he was professor of English. He is a frequent contributor to SPAN.

three roles. It is not only that there are fewer direct poems on her children, but that the whole clumsy business of children did not rouse her muses to the pitch where they would start ticking compulsively. Although the days of her own troubled childhood and the trauma of her father's death figure endlessly in her poems under various guises almost until the end, "Daddy" and the bee-poems bring the wheel full circle. In "Lament," one of her juvenile poems, her father-fixation is there, but the poem does not come through fully. As for the mother, there is seldom a feeling of groundswell in the poems written about her.

The subjects of childbirth, mother-love, mother-fixation, modern mother complex are there and the theme is viewed from the child's and mother's points of view. But there is a fatal tendency in Plath to reduce everything to objects and phenomena for her pitiless muses. There is little sense of celebration and ceremony. As the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates put it, "Even her own children were objects of her perception ... and were not there as human beings." Perhaps the clue to this kind of clinical attitude can best be seen in The Bell Jar, where foetal revulsion seems to extend to the bothersome world of babies. Plath had earlier told a boyfriend that "Children make me sick." Thus, in a poem like "Morning Song," written on the birth of her daughter, she examined not only the physical phenomenon of birth and its rich mystery but also the poetic art of creation as an analogue: Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.

I'm no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind's hand.

In "Nick and the Candlestick," an obscure poem about her son, the child is almost refined out of existence. Plath the mother is plainly a misfit.

Which brings us back to where we started, with her suicide and those intense poems written at 4 a.m. in the hush and chill and dark. Did she have a schizophrenic condition? Was she "a Laingian heroine," as the major Plath critic Marjorie Perloff argues? These are questions that cannot be answered here. All that I can affirm is the authenticity of the poems, which, in their rich and torturing ambiguities, suggest a daring new aesthetic.

"Art," said Plath, "is wild as cat and quite separate from civilization." Perhaps it is a doubtful formulation, 'but she meant it, with all of its hazards. One thing is clear. As with Keats, intense suffering was a condition of her creativity. The only difference was that Keats' death-wish was not half as wild as Plath's. Her last poem, "Edge," shows her precariously poised at the edge: The woman is perfected.

Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, ' Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over ....

Design Excellence SPAN presents the first winners of the Presidential Design Awards instituted by President Reagan to encourage standards of excellence in American government projects.

Design Excellence

he government as an avant-garde designer? Strange as that may sound, the fact is that the U.S. Government is America's largest single builder, printer and design client for objects ranging from the monumental to the miniscule. From dams to postage stamps, houses to maps, national parks to road signs, the American landscape is dotted with government design. Seeing this overwhelming and all-pervasive presence, the U.S. Government has in recent years started a federal design improvement program. In 1983 President Ronald Reagan established a quadrennial presidential design awards project "to publicly recognize successful achievements ... and inspire standards of excellence throughout the government."

The President recently presented the first of these awards to a group of 13 winners that included architects, engineers, graphic designers and government officials.

The winners were selected from 630 entries (representing more than 50 federal agencies) by a jury of experts headed by architect I.M. Pei. The jury was looking for more than just beauty. The awards are meant to foster design with utility and economy; for, in addition to its aesthetic impact on surroundings, good design should make economic sense.

The government, especially, has a role to play in saving money-by cutting down on waste materials, minimizing duplication of effort, setting standardized systems and simply making life easier. The participating agencies had to answer: How did the entry contribute toward improving the federal function it serves? How did it

successfully serve the American public? Is there any documentation on its safety, durability, life-cycle costs, accessibility to the handicapped or energy efficiency?

The design disciplines eligible for entry included architecture, engineering, graphics, interiors, landscape, product and industrial equipment and urban projects. The competition was open to designs completed or implemented between 1974 and 1984.

Apart from the ten winners shown on these pages, the Presidential Design Awards also went to the following three other entries: A city restoration project in St. Paul, Minnesota; the distinctive graphics designed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for effectively communicating high technology; and a project in Boston, Massachusetts, that effectively combines flood control, navigation, pollution control and environmental sensitivity.

According to Frank Hodsoll, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (which administers the awards program), the range of winning entries "clearly illustrates what is possible when dedicated designers work with able administrators to produce functional, cost-effective products and public services."

Said President Reagan, as he presented the awards, "Good design can help us save money, and you know how much that warms my heart."

1. PUBLIC HOUSING. The design of the houses in the Scattered lnfill Public Housing Project in Charleston, South Carolina, is a return to an indigenous Charleston design of a century ago: narrow structures with side porches permitting good air flow. An

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SIGNS. Used in thousands of transportrelated facilities throughout the United States, this standardized system of symbol signs helps make life easier for the traveler.

The 50 symbols were refined and adapted by the American Institute of Graphic Artists which, along with the US. Department of Transportation, surveyed and inventoried symbols around the world.

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outgrowth of a citywide survey pinpointing vacant lots in residential neighborhoods as sources of trouble, this project of the Department of Housing and Urban Development has created more than 100 housing units on 14 lots.

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to view these remains. An underground museum, housing National Park Service exhibits, completes Franklin court.

DESIGN. A unified and simplified graphics concept, the Unigrid System has been designed by Massimo Vignelli for brochures for the National Park Service. With a few basic formats, standardized typography and open layouts, Unigrid has increased their effectiveness while decreasing their costs.

7. UNIGRID

8. INTERCITY -BRIDGE. The designers of this bridge between Pasco and Kennwick in Washington state were cited "for their innovative, aesthetic, economical, durable and well-received solution" for the 0.8-kilometer loop crossing the Columbia River.

The jury added that it is "not just a technical accomplishment; it is a work of art." The bridge was commissioned by the US. Federal Highway Administration.

9. LINN COVE VIADUCT. The jury called the viaduct "an elegant

5. ART-IN-ARCHITECTURE.

curving ribbon that caresses the terrain .... It gives the motorist the sensation of driving tantalizingly on air while the Earth goes by." A part of the North Carolina segment of the National Park Service's Blue Ridge Parkway (which celebrated its50th anniversary in 1985), the roadway was constructed of precast concrete segments, set in from above on precast segmented piers which were also lowered into place. This innovative engineering solution answered the challenge of building a road in a rugged location without marring the surrounding environment.

6. FRANKLIN COURT. To evoke the house and workshop of Benjamin Franklin, the architects built a full-scale steel framework abojJe the archaeological remains of the real house in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Openings in the floor allow visitors

10. THE SEA TILE FOOT. Unlike most prosthetic feet, the Seattle Foot is designed to be both anatomically and cosmetically correct. It works like a spring, converting compressional energy into forward thrust. The Design A wards jury cited the research group in Seattle, Washington, and the Veterans Administration (the supporting agency) for their ingenuity and sense of service in developing this aid for the disabled.

4. HISTORIC PRESERVATION. More than 9,000 historically significant buildings have been rehabilitated all over the United States through a National Park Service program o/tax incentives.

Lobbies and plazas of federal buildings all across the United States display a wide variety of art works in many media by professional artists, under this program run by the US. General Services Administration.

Design Excellence "The range of winning entries illustrates what is possible when dedicated designers work with able administrators to produce functional, cost-effective products and public services."

4. SEARS WORLD TRADE BUILDING ON THE REVITALIZED PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, WASHINGTON. D.C. 5. SCULPTURE BY ROBERT HUDSON IN FEDERAL BUILDING IN ANCHORAGE, ALASKA 6. FRANKLIN COURT, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYL VANIA 7. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE BROCHURES 8. INTERCITY BRIDGE BETWEEN PASCO AND KENNWICK IN WASHINGTON STATE 9. LINN COVE VIADUCT, NORTH CAROLINA 10. AMPUTEE WITH SEATTLE FOOT

FOCUS

Tryst with Uranus On January 24, Voyager 2 created history when it became the first man-made spacecraft to rendezvous with Uranus. It took the tiny spacecraft, which was launched in August 1977, almost eight and a half years to travel nearly 3,000 million kilometers through space to keep its date with the solar system's third-largest and most mysterious planet.

Voyager came as close as 81,000 kilometers to Uranus' cloudtops before it used the planet's gravity to continue its journey for an encounter with Neptune. All through this brief six-hour f1ypast, Voyager's television cameras and an array of instruments took spectacular pictures and other readings of the frozen planet, its rings and its moons.

As the data poured into the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Project Scientist Edward Stone exclaimed, "It's the crescendo of discovery."

The statement was no exaggeration. For the data sent by the craft have revealed more about Uranus than scientists have known since it was discovered by astronomer William Herschel in 1781. In addition to the planet's five known moons, Voyager

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently introduced a new remote-controlled miniplane to help farmers solve one of their major problems. It offers an efficient, safe and economical solution to the control of insect pests and diseases of orchard crops where some trees may grow as tall as 20 meters.

The 2.5-meter wingspan biplane, controlled from the ground by a portable radio transmitter with a ground-toair range of about ten kilometers, is powered by a 40horsepower chainsaw engine.

The miniplane is used to expedite the gathering of data needed to develop safe biological pest and disease controls. It has been particularly useful for gathering data on the ebb and flow of insect and disease organism populations that cripple orchards.

To accomplish this mission radio-controlled systems, which weigh up to 20 kilograms, are placed aboard the craft. One of the systems traps insects, spores and pollen at various altitudes above an orchard. These are then analyzed for disease-causing agents. Another system then

has detected nine more small moons orbiting Uranus, and there may be more. Scientists believe Uranus may have as many as 30 moons. Saturn presently holds the solar system record with 20 moons, followed by Jupiter.

The mission also provided scientists with information on the planet's physical makeup-probably a liquid core, a deep ocean, water with some dissolved minerals and organic materials. Stone thinks that Uranus' atmosphere is made up of hydrogen, helium and a little bit of methane.

Another revelation has been the presence of distinct cloudlike formations, whose movement seems to confirm earlier estimates that a Uranian day is about 17 hours long.

Still another Voyager finding has been the detection of a Uranian magnetic field about a third the strength of Earth's. The presence of the magnetic field, which is stronger than anticipated, suggests that the giant gaseous planet has a liquid core.

Once the data are fully interpreted, scientists also hope to solve the riddle of why Uranus almost lies on its side, its axis of rotation more or less perpendicular in relation to the other planets. They suspect that hundreds of millions of years ago a large object, possibly as large as the Earth, slammed into Uranus, upsetting it so that it remained tilted on a 95-degree vertical axis. Uranus orbits the sun with one pole in sunlight for 42 years, while the other is in darkness.

The hardy Voyager was originally designed to have a life of only five years to encounter just two planets-Jupiter and Saturn, which it visited in 1979 and 1981, respectively. However, it has surpassed even the wildest expectations of its makers.

Scientists now say that it may live, and transmit data, for another 20 years. However, for the present, Voyager is hurtling through the void of space toward Neptune for its last planetary visit on August 25, 1989, before it begins another exciting adventurereaching the very edge of our solar system, perhaps even interstellar ¡space.

dispenses environmentally safe materials such as bacteria, fungus spores or viruses that infect only the target insects or weeds.

Scientists are convinced of

the utility of the miniplane for keeping crops healthy. "The craft can do a lot more, in f?ct, " they note. "The potential. of the new system has hardly been touched."

New York's skyline is in for a dramatic change when two massive construction projects in and around the city are completed in the early 1990s.

Newport City (right) is planned as a $2,000 million minicity on the New Jersey side of Hudson River. The plan includes 9,000 units of low- and high-rise apartments, a regional shopping center, three hotels, offices, waterfront boutiques, boat slips, an aquarium, a museum and a park. Newport City's

Last month, a U.S. Engineering and Construction Services Mission visited India to evaluate the Indian market and explore the potential of joint ventures.

Organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the delegation, which included top executives of five leading American engineering and construction firms, was headed by Charles H. Becker, deputy vice-president of the U.S. Exim (export-import) Bank.

During their five-day stay, the members held discussions with the officials of the Government of India and private- and public-sector companies.

Speaking to newsmen at the end of their visit, Becker said that the delegation was highly satisfied with its discussions with Indian business. "We found their enthusiasm for American high technology very encouraging," he noted, adding, "We also are equally keen to help India acquire American technology in several fields, particularly in the power sector. A collaborative effort between India's highly skilled manpower and American high technology would be an excellent arrangement for starting joint ventures herein India as well as in third countries."

The U.S. ¡Exim Bank, Becker said, is making available $10 million credit each to its Indian counterpart, Exim Bank of India, and the State Bank of India. The Bank also has offered a $30-million loan to the Karnataka State Electricity Board for buying gas turbines from General Electric Company in the United States and another $27 -million loan for proposed collaboration between American Control Data Corporation and India for the manufacture of computer mainframes.

The Exim Bank has as many as 15 lending programs for American exporters. This, Becker said, could be utilized by Indian companies for imports from the United States and collaborations with American companies.

centerpiece will be a circular 80-story tower.

The other project is a 13-block complex in Manhattan (left), whose centerpiece will be the world's tallest building-a tapering 150-story tower with offices below and apartments above. Called Television City by developer Donald Trump, the massive undertaking will also include six 76-story apartment towers and a separate 65-story building housing television production and broadcasting facilities.

Oral Rehydration Therapy Oral rehydration therapy (aRT), a simple, inexpensive mixture of sugar, common salt and water, can go a long way in saving the lives of some four million children all over the world who die each year from diarrhea-caused diseases. The most serious consequence of diarrhea is dehydration of the body which leads to disability, malnutrition, stunted growth and death.

The importance of aRT, which has proved 99 percent effective against dehydration, was highlighted at the recently concluded second International Conference on Oral Rehydration Therapy in Washington, D.C., which was attended by 1,200 specialists from more than 100 countries, including 21 from India.

In a message to the conference, President Reagan pledged America's "continued support in the cooperative effort to make this lifesaving solution available

worldwide within the decade.

It holds the promise of so much hope to so many families that we must make that hope a universal reality."

The meeting was sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in cooperation with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Program. India was represented at the conference by officials from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, All-India Institute of Medical Sciences and other government and nongovernment agencies.

In concert with the Government of India, USAID has been popularizing and emphasizing the importance of aRT therapy in five states since 1981. It has developed training materials and courses to teach health workers how to promote aRT in villages. The USAID is at present holding discussions with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to extend the oral rehydration therapy program at the national level.

Don Evans

Playwright with Passion

Don Evans is stage director, playwright and artistic director of Karamu House, a center for cultural activities in the arts in Cleveland, Ohio. He received the 1974 Arena Theater Award for his outstanding contribution to black theater.

Late last year Evans conducted a highly successful four-day workshop on AfroAmerican theater at the Prithvi Theatre in Bombay. Meant for actors and directors, it focused on how to prepare for a play within the Afro-American idiom.

(He also held similar workshops in New Delhi and Madras.)

When I first heard about the workshop, I was curious but a little doubtful. Broadway and the regional theaters seem to offer little by way of innovation at the moment, and the only kind of American theater I have felt drawn to has been the maverick kind-guerrilla theater and things of that sort. It seemed unlikely that an official emissary would have much to say about that.

The workshop turned out to be a voyage of discovery. It set me on the track of a different, an almost dissident, theater that runs parallel to the one we are more familiar with. We know a great deal about Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neil, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, John Guare, David Rabe, Sam Shepard.

The black playwright, Amiri Baraka, who is something of a political figure, is well known. But we are entirely unfamiliar with the plays of Ed Bullins, Ron Milner, Adrienne Kennedy.

And we have heard nothing about successful earlier experimental plays of the Federal Project era (during the Great Depression of the 1930s when writers and artists were subsidized by the U.S. Government) such as The Trial of Dr. Beck,

Run Little Chillun', Big White Fog, NaturalMan and Turpentine. As for the newer plays by black playwrights, we are quite in the dark.

Since our information comes mainly from newspaper and magazine reviews,

Don Evans at the Gateway of India, Bombay. we hear only about what reaches Broadway. But even in the more serious publications, Afro-American theater is dismissed with only a paragraph or two. It was only after being exposed to Evans' workshop, that I began to look around more carefully and discovered Quita Craig's fascinating and revealing account of black drama of the federal era.

My dormant interest in black theater has become an active one and, I suspect, the same is true for several other participants in the workshop.

The reason is that, while all good drama speaks to the soul of man and not to his race, certain kinds of playwrights appeal directly to those who have a shared experience.

Our colonial past has left its mark on us. Indian culture has sufficient racism and color prejudice to make the black experience familiar to us. For each stereotype devised by white folks, we have one of our own to match: for the "mammy" who neglects her own children and is supposed to love the white child in her charge, read "ayah" or "Mary"; for the good-far-nothing drunken slave, who is slow and useless at work, read "tribal house-servant" who actually carries the whole burden but, naturally, tries to shirk what he can.

Some participants explained that when

looking for plays to produce, they had bypassed those by black playwrights, assuming that these would be outside their experience, or that black speech would be difficult to reproduce. Excerpts from two plays acted and directed by participants dispelled that notion.

At the outset, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, by August Wilson, presented a few problems because we needed information about the history of Ma Rainey and her times. But very soon, it all began to make sense. Ma Rainey was a singer who had achieved some fame, but not the dignity due her as an artist. Evans also explained that music is an integral part of the life of black people. It is expressed in the way they walk and talk; and the theme and speech of August Wilson's play too is imbued with music.

When, next, we did an act from Don Evans' own play, The Trials and Tribulations of Staggerlee Booker T. Brown, our enjoyment was immediate. We could not at the time have grasped all of its finer points, its clever use of Negro folklore, the ironical use of stereotypes such as John Henry (all muscle and no wit) to make him an entirely human and endearing person. But we readily understood the story of Staggerlee, the aging man of God, hankering for women and his lost youth, serving God sincerely and yet holding a dialogue with Mammon. The denouement, which is rich in comedy, makes full use of the "dual communication" system (talking to blacks over the heads of whites). Having made a Faustian deal with the devil, Staggerlee nonetheless manages to get away with it.

These brief enactments, and the passages that Evans acted out for us from other plays, whetted our appetite for more. They revealed that Afro-American plays are within our reach; more than that, they are worth exploring as possible models.

In an interview for SPAN after the workshop, Evans talked candidly of his

"If one play by a black playwright is done here in India that might not experiences, disappointments and hopes as a black playwright.

TONI PATEL: Did you have a problem, when you first started writing, deciding whom you would write about, or whom you would address yourself to?

Did the fact that most of the literature you read was by white people and addressed to white people affect you.

DON EVANS: I was influenced by whites to the degree that I didn't take seriously any talents I might have had, because I didn't know that blacks were writing. In other words, I didn't have any role models. No one taught me about black writers until I was out of college and teaching in college, to be honest. The only black playwright that I knew about was Lorraine Hansberry-and I only encountered her after high school. It wasn't until my senior year in college that I took a course in Afro-American literature, but that covered only novels, not plays.

PATEL: So your first awareness that it was possible' to write plays about your own experience came around that time, when you were 20 or 21 years old.

EVANS: No. Believe it or not, that didn't come until ten years later, when I was in my early 30s. I was teaching a course in theater and, in my playwrighting class, I developed a format whereby each student had to bring in ten written pages to every class. I wrote right along with them and when I finished the play, I was able to sell it-and it was done Off Broadway!

PATEL: A full-length play?

EVANS: Two one-act plays. So that's when I decided I was going to write. And in those plays, i wrote about people I knew. The idea of writing about anyone else just never occurred to me.

PATEL: Would you say that among Afro-American writers there is awareness and concern about each other's work-in the sense Of promoting it and helping it to grow?

EVANS: Well, yes and no. What we generally do not do is criticize each other's work. What we do is give each other moral support and encouragement to complete whatever work it is we are doing.

PATEL: Could you give me an example?

EVANS: The very first productions of my plays were done by a fellow playwright, Ron Milner, at his theater out at Detroit.

It never was a competitive thing, and it isn't now. Ron has his niche in the theater and I have mine, and we are very supportive of each other. I want him to continue writing and he wants me to do the same. That doesn't mean we blindly give support to every play that comes along. We do give support to the need for the play.

PATEL: What about the need for criticism and awareness? What if there are weaknesses in the work?

EVANS: That's for the audience to decide.

PATEL: Have you ever played the role of critic ... written about plays?

EVANS: I do that all the time as an academic. That's a very different kind of thing, because it is not about maligning a play, or holding it up for its quality; it's about trying to put the play in perspective in the historical sense. As critic, I try to explain what a play means, whether or not it worked for this or that reason at the time it was created. But the starting point is acceptance of the play.

PATEL: When you came out to India, was there a question in your mind as to whether black plays would work for audiences here?

EVANS: No, not really. I saw it as a very special privilege to carry the literature and spread an understanding of what we were about to another place. In the United States, we do not get the exposure-or the consideration-due serious artists. So, the idea was to make sure that our work is recorded, that it is, at some level, experienced. Because, like all good art, it is not limited by adjectives. The fact that a play is written by a black playwright doesn't mean that it is only of value to that community-and it's like if you don't want me to play in your backyard, I'll go play in somebody else's backyard. It's as simple as that.

PATEL: So, in fact, you were aware that plays by black playwrights should work anywhere.

EVANS: Yes, I was aware of that-I just didn't know how well. And I was amazed, hearing my own play read by the

actors at the Prithvi Theatre workshop and finding that the life-force of the play was very much intact. I see no reason why it can't be done with any other playwright. We do it all the time in Western theater. We take a play from another culture and we use it to interpret that culture, to understand it. But insofar as it also relates to our culture, we call it a fine play.

We do Sean O'Casey, Harold Pinter, Anton Chekov in the United States and we don't think of them as being foreign, but they do think of Afro-American plays as being foreign. They even do Kabukistyle plays in the United States. AfroAmerican works could be done the same way. And if one play [by a black playwright] is done here in India that might not have been done prior to my coming, then I will think that my time has been well spent.

PATEL: I think you'll find a spate of Afro-American plays being done. Your workshop has really made an impact here. Peopie have become aware of another body of writing in America which could apply to our needs. The problem of how accurately to reproduce black speech does not appear insurmountable, now that we are aware of the speech rhythms.

That which is intrinsic in the text is what we have to search for.

EVANS: Now that's exactly what I wanted to do. I was, to start with, intimidated because in a sense one is an ambassador with two garlands. One is that I am an American-and although there are many things in the United States that I have questions about, I am still very definitely a patriotic American.

The other, and this may seem to some people contradictory, is the fact that I am a very proud Afro-American. I am very proud of my African heritage. So, in coming here I felt a great responsibility to be honest and not hedge on questions, but at the same time not to drag up old arguments.

India is an ancient land and what we have back in the United States, regardless of what we may think, is new. And when you come into another culture you must respect where it has been and what it's doing, so that I couldn't come here giving answers. I can merely raise the questions ... and it is a responsibility unlike any that I've had before.

have been done prior to my coming, then my time has been well spent."

PATEL: There are some parallels, though, between the situation in the United States and India. We have all these separate regional and religious groups, each group with a distinct identity. On the one hand, there is this need to be like everyone else, to be "Indian," part of the mainstream; and, on the other hand, the awareness of the difference, which is rooted in one's source of being, the separate religion and community to which one belongs. If that is taken away from you, you become a nonperson.

EVANS: Yes, it gives you confusion. For black Americans for a long time-and I guess for many even today-that was the contradiction, and it sometimes shows up in our attitude toward our art. We would look at a play and say that's not right, even though the writer was a black person.

What we were really doing, we found out later, was challenging that person's right to think.

PATEL: You spoke of the ancient lineage

of this country, but there is something that we can learn from America, and that is the courage to stand up to the powers-that-be in times of repression. I am speaking of the way writers and scientists stood up for human rights during the McCarthy period and the way in which members of the legislature and judiciary went after the truth in the Watergate episode, even when they feared it would shake the foundations of the very institutions they held in high esteem.

EVANS: I think we all select-and elect-to utilize things from other cultures that we think we need, and we take what's viable from another culture. One of the things that has impressed me most during my short visit in India is the sense of decorum, the sense of confidence which I see in people, which comes from being a part of a total scheme ... that's so much easier to deal with than this pushy character that the American has, this crassness that's part of the youth of our country.

PATEL: Where did you get your exposure

to theater?

EVANS: Well, my first contact

with theater was when I was a college undergrad and was acting in a play. I enjoyed the camaraderie, the fact that it was alive, unfike the research I was doing as an

English major on social studies, history and that kind of thing.

I was thinking of experience of theater that is nearer the mind, not theater with a capital T, but happenings or theater which happened. I'll give you an example of what I mean. In Bombay, we have an annual procession during which images of gods, decked out and painted, are taken out on trucks to the beating of drums and other musical instruments, and then immersed ceremonially in the sea. We also have, on certain festivals, scenes from the lives of epic characters, or gods, enactedsomewhat crudely-on cul-de-sac streets in crowded, middle-class, residential areas. So you are exposed to "theater" though not necessarily aware of it.

EV ANS: We are, too ... we are, too.

Theater as ritual, things of that nature.

Well, most black people come in contact with performances of theater through the church. I grew up doing church plays, pageants and ... the whole service is a ritual-and that's theater, that's the heart of it. And for the yearly Christmas pageant you get to be, perhaps, Josephand that's okay because everybody is black, and nobody cares that you may not look like Joseph.

PATEL:

I get the impression from some of the things you've said earlier, that black playwrights now feel less constraint in their choice of subject matter, less of a need to define themselves in relation to white society.

EVANS: When the oppression is most severe, the playwright becomes a soldier and his craft becomes a weapon he uses in the hope of lessening the oppression .We as playwrights thought it was our job to tell the country, as Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King had done: "This is what you are doing. Why don't you stop?" Then we found that part of the problem was that people didn't know us, and we didn't know ourselvesthe humanity of black people, the dreams of black people. What we were doing wouldn't create a theater for us, because it kept us talking to white people and we never turned round to talking to black people.

PATEL:

Yes, talking to black people.

Are there plays which hold a mirror up to

PATEL:

their errors or mistakes?

EV ANS: All of them do that. All good

plays when they are about people and they heighten behavior, challenge folks to see themselves. If you don't like it, and you are a thinking person, then you begin to take steps to change it. In an oppressive society, we can look at the results of oppression. This can be seen vividly in Ed Bullins' In the Wine Time. He shows people how ugly their lives can become, how self-destructive, and how, as a result, they can cause pain and suffering to their families. Now that is telling people by showing them, giving them an option to see with clarity, what it is they are allowing to be done to their lives.

And was the reaction against that play very violent?

EVANS: There was resentment, yes.

They resented his getting that close to their lives, so they denied such things existed. But that's the first step toward healing, and they are coming out of it.

Playwrights like Ron Milner and Ed Bullins are pulling into the theater, people who are for the first time saying, "That's about me." "That's about the person who lives next door to me" and "That's the way they are." Such plays are so much more potent than the plays we wrote earlier where we were saying, "You got to stop it, because we are going to do this to you, or that; you better let up on us." Well, if the people aren't going to let up, why write the play? Let's do something else.

PA TEL:

PATEL: Are there any playwrights of the

world theater who have impressed you?

EVANS: Shakespeare works best for me.

Throughout, the groundlings are there.

He wasn't intimidated by reputation and position. His kings become ordinary folk because they think like you and their motivations are the same. If they were only grand and noble, they would become dull and uninteresting. We have a lot of this type of play coming out of the United States about.black people. Those who are in the marketplace seem to think that if you create the lives of black folk on stage you must always make them heroic.

But we don't need heroes unless they are human. Their great deeds mean nothing to me unless I know about the fear and indecision that took place prior to the event that gives us the heroes: I need to

know that Martin Luther King was scared I did another play on Louis Armstrong to death in front of those dogs that were which touched on his beginnings. He had set upon him. Once I understand that, I worked in houses of prostitution. His first know a lot more about him. I know how wife was a prostitute and his mother was much faith he had in his God; that it not unfamiliar with that lifestyle. A very overshadowed his fear-and that's im- important reviewer said I was irresponsiportant. I know that he had such faith in ble because Armstrong's mother was a himself and his mission, that he could God-fearing woman and people didn't stifle that fear. Yet, if I were to write a need to see the play because it was a lie. scene that showed a frightened Martin ,He hadn't done his research, I had-but I Luther King, white liberals, and a lot of didn't have a column, he did. The fact js the black middle class; would say: "We that Armstrong's mother became what don't need that. That's not true. He was he describes her to be, in later years. a great man." He was great because of his When her son was prominent and her life fear and not in spite of it. was easier, she turned to the church. I There's a lot of work in this area that interviewed Louis' brother and I read black writers have to do to let our everything that Louis wrote. He said he audiences mature with us. We are ready, had six daddies by the time he was 17, but certain factions of the audiences Now, what does that mean? aren't. And-as in the case of Ntozake People have to grow to accept the truth Shange's play, For Colored Girls Who that life gives to us. Because we have Have Considered Suicide When the Rain- been so heavily oppressed, we are afraid bow Is Enuf-people will band together of the images that are laid bare. We say to demean the work. we need heroes. Nobody needs heroes only. Well, it depends on how you define PATEL: What was there in that play that heroism. There's the heroism of ordiupset them so much? nary, everyday people who have to go to EVANS: The play speaks of the loss of work every day-and that becomes the faith that some black women feel in most heroic thing they do in their lives. dealing with black men. All over the nation, they were saying, "That's an ugly PATEL: You mentioned that Afroplay. It's a terrible play." But it made American plays have not really been people come face to face with some accepted in the United States as plays aspects of reality. suitable for projection on a national scale. Don't you think, perhaps, that's a PATEL: As a playwright, then, would good thing? Doesn't one see theater as you risk writing a play that would really something one wants for a particular kind anger people? of audience and, therefore, is not unhapEVANS: I don't know if it would anger py that it is not on Broadway or its them till I get finished with it. I've been in equivalent? that controversial kind of situation on EVANS: It is true that every play has its two occasions, and it had almost stopped own audience but what you have to deal me from writing biographical plays. with in the United States is that we can I wrote-a play that we have been doing sell and market anything. That's our The this year [1985] Off Broadway, on great national skill-salesmanship.

Mahalia Jackson. I love Mahalia greatly truth of the matter is that you can sell any as an artist and as an embodiment of play which you can create an audience certain aspects of my culture: she was for. The attitude of the American prothere. She was a person whose life was ducers is that black people don't go to the the church but she was also tormented by theater. And the reason black people don't go to the theater is because it that, because the church was very narrow and she was not that narrow. She ques- doesn't have anything to do with them. tioned things about herself and the life Whenever there has been any play that has had-even tangentially-something she had to lead to satisfy the church.

Some churchmen objected strongly to my to do with black folk, they've been there. point of view, though it was based on Somebody has to want to sell that.

And we found that whenever Broadresearch. When the play opened, some people said I had tarnished the image of way was in trouble, when the audiences this woman. No, I found her heroism. I were not coming up for the traditional Broadway musical revival (which is usualfound what I thought made her strong.

ly what it is), then they quickly turn to things black. They will put up a play with an all-black cast, hoping to tap the black audiences that will come out. The audience is still potentially there. But as long as you don't develop that audience, it will never make demands, it will always be like an unwelcome guest.

PATEL: Why aren't black entrepreneurs backing theater?

EVANS: Because it is big business and so risky and, economically, we are at the lower end of the totem pole.

A lot of our plays are done on a shoestring budget. And yet you have people in the United States who produce plays as a tax write-off. They back a play so they will lose money. We just don't have the economic base. Some friends invested in my play It's Showdown Time and I was scared to death. They were college professors, middle-class folk, and I knew they couldn't afford to lose $5,000.

When you begin to see who is not represented on Broadway, you will find it is people who do not have a strong economic base.

PATEL: Are there other possible venues for plays in the United States-for plays that don't fall into the "big business" category?

EVANS: There are the regional theaters which are professional, but not commercial. They rely heavily on grants and spend their time doing revivals of plays they know they can sell to their audiences.

PATEL: One would expect some experimentation at least there. Why do they have to do old plays?

EVANS: Because that's what people will come and see and pay for. If you have a play by Don Evans and a play by Tennessee Williams, everyone will go, to see Tennessee Williams because they know what they are going to get for their $20.

PATEL: But they've seen Tennessee Williams several times. How long can that go on?

EVANS: Till someone tells them that there's another Tennessee Williams! 0 Toni Patel is a freelance theater critic based in Bombay. She has also directed two plays-Friedrich Von Schiller's Mary Stuart and Nissim Ezekiel's Nalini,

About the Interviewer:

Call Him Old -Fashioned Who says nice guys finish last? In the tough world of supermarkets, George Jenkins' $3,200 million (sales), closely held Publix Super Markets of Lakeland, Florida, is something of a legend. Jenkins' employees Own 62 percent of the stock (he and his family own the rest) a'nd get back 20 percent of the profits, right down to the bagboys.

A share of Publix stock bought in 1960 for $10 would be worth $400 today, and there are veteran Publix employees with a lot of it. c.L. Newsome, 56, Southeast Coast division manager, for example, started as a bagboy 43 years ago and now owns 101,000 shares worth $1.6 million at its current price of $16 a share.

The result is workers who hustle. Wearing badges that say "I am a Publix stockholder," energetic stock clerks seem to be everywhere. When a writer visited stores in Miami to snoop around, he was stopped every few minutes by workers asking if they might help find ¡something.

In turn, that keeps customers happy. Says one housewife: "This store is clean, and the people here are always polite. I drive by a Winn-Dixie store that's closer to my house to come here."

It's worked so well that Publix, the ninth-largest supermarket chain by sales, has the fattest net profit margin of the ten biggest chains. Its 2.36 percent is two-and-a-half times that of industry sales leader Safeway.

"Really, there's no secret to our success," says Jenkins, now 77. "We're not the only people who treat their people well, we just make a bigger deal out of it."

Jenkins' own Horatio Alger life provides motivation, too.

The son of a rural G~orgi,a grocer, he went to Florida in 1927 and started as a stock clerk at a local Piggly Wiggly grocery store. By the age of 17 he was the store manager and at 20, h,aving grown a mustache to look older, he borrowed $ 2,000 to start his own store across the street. By 1940 Publix was a going chain of 19 stores, and Jenkins has added an average of six every year since.

Not surprisingly, the way to the top at Publix is to start at the bottom. Jenkins doesn't hire from the outside except for an occasional computer programmer or other specialist. More than half his store managers started as bagboys-as did Publix President Mark Hollis, 51, and Jenkins' son, Howard, 34, vice-president of research and development.

"We feel that everyone is in management training," Hollis says.

While the founder never went to college, his secondgeneration managers are professionally trained. Hollis has a master's degree in supermarket distribution from Michigan State University, Howard Jenkins majored in economics and his cousin Charles Jenkins Jr., vice-president for real estate, has a doctorate in business from Harvard.

The new generation is bringing new ideas-like Publix' six new large combination stores, with pharmacies and more nonfood items like hardware, toys and, soon, liquor. Publix was one of the first big supermarket chains to install bar-code scanners to automate the checkout lanes. It had an automaticteller cash machine network before Florida banks did, and is

experimenting with debit card stations by the cash-register in 16 stores. Hollis has also begun psychologicaL testing of managers and issues a videotaped president's report every six weeks to all stores.

A lot is riding on how well these innovations blend with Jenkins' folksy, old-fashioned style. Once virtually alone in much of Florida, Publix now faces giants like Safeway, Lucky Stores, Kroger, Albertson's and American Stores. For a long time Jenkins refused to stay open on Sundays, but about three y~ars ago he caved in after losing a big chunk of market share.

To cover his flanJ< against Grand Union and other discounters 15 years ago, he 'started a chain of discount stores called Food World. He opened 24 of them in ten years, but closed all but three last year. "The only difference between them and Publix is that Food World is painted blue and Publix is green/' says Howard Jenkins. What really went wrong, says his father, is that neither management nor workers were really committed to the idea: "Our people work on a percentage of the profits. They didn't want to run a discount store."

-But so far, the mix of old and new management techniques at Publix is working out pretty well. Major reason: George Jenkins himself approves just about every change, still shows up at every new store opening to bag groceries and still watches everything like a hawk. Showing visitors around a store in Lakeland, Jenkins eyes strawberries he thinks are too expensive, examines the floor for dirt and SlOps almost every employee he meets. "I heard that somebody had to wait in line for 15 minutes here the other day," he tells them. Then to his visitors: "You know it all really begins and ends here in the store. We can't ever forget that."

0 About the Author: Robert H. Bork Jr., is a staff writer in the Southwestern bureau of Forbes magazine.

An Academic Ashram Text by MEERA SHENOY Photographs by AVINASH PASRICHA

With 93,000 books on its shelves, scores of journals, a rare-books section and a scholarly ambience, the ASRC in Hyderabad is a unique facility for research in American studies in India.

When Mythili Nayar of Madras University wanted to do her PhD in English literature, her dissertation guide advised her to choose an American. topic.

"Why?" she asked with some curiosity.

"Because of the ASRC," was the simple answer.

Tucked away in one corner of the Osmania University campus in Hyderabad, the American Studies Research Centre (ASRC) has over the years established itself as a fine repository of American studies books. "This is perhaps the best collection outside the United States," says Dr. Ronald Chapman of the University of Hawaii, who has been ASRC's library consultant. And, as one

scholar confided, "It's just not possible in India to do research in American studies without the assistance of the ASRC." Providing resources for Indian scholars is the chief aim of the Centre, fondly called the Academic Ashram by users.

"Our job is to see how best we can serve the Indian academics," says Dr. John Hurd, ASRC director.

The Centre has been eminently successful in its dual role of making new ideas available for public use and providing a haven for reflection and scholarship.

It awards a number of study and research grants and periodically conducts seminars and workshops which are attended by some of the most eminent Indian and American scholars.

Research scholars from all over India visit Hyderabad to draw upon ASRC's superb library holdings. At any given time, one can see scores of readers in the library totally immersed in their subjects.

Mary Ann Zacharias, a research scholar at the University of Hyderabad, is surrounded by books on black literature, which is her field of study. Mohanty, a PhD student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, is here on an ASRC grant. Dr. Sujit Mukherjee of Orient Longman is visiting the Centre to collect material for a paper he has to present at a Harvard University conference being held as part of the Festival of India in America. The paper is on "IndoU.S. Relations: Why the Conflict?"

(Greatly impressed by the library's holdings, Mukherjee plans to return to the ASRC to do research on American novels about India. As he explains, the novelist can reflect current social attitudes in a way historians cannot.)

It is not only Indian scholars who benefit from the Centre. "We welcome academics from overseas and a number of them have utilized our library facilities over the years," says ASRC Deputy Director Dr. Prafulla Kar. Among those from abroad recently have been Qr. Akmal Hussein, chairman of the Department of International Relations at Dhaka University, Bangladesh; Dr. Sunanda Mahendra, head of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka; and Dr. Haran Nazdan of the University of Kabangsaan, Malaysia.

The library is the Centre's heart, its raison d'etre. Unhampered by any official considerations, there is no subject that is

Professor and Mrs. B. Das of the North-Eastern Hill University campus in Kohima, Nagaland, were recently at the Centre as scholars-in-residence.

taboo; the library's collection spans practically all schools of thought. For example, it has dozens of books on the Ku Klux Klan. Karl Marx, who wrote about the American Civil War, is also there.

With books stacked in row upon row on steel shelves, the library overwhelms the visitor, giving the impression of compressed knowledge-so much accumulated wisdom, so tightly bound. Says Librarian Sreenidhi Iyengar, "The library was first envisaged¡ as a collection of 25,000 books, but as the demand for its services rose so did the shelf space.

Today we have 93,000 books.

Another reason .for the library's phenomenal gf0wth is that, unlike in the past when it concentrated mainly on books of and on American literature, its holdings now encompass numerous other disciplines- American arts, arcI:titecture, political science, philosophy, religion and economics. Literature comprises only 28 percent of the present collection.

The library also maintains an extensive reference section, subscribing to hundreds of scholarly American journals, and methodically binding back volumes.

It also has important official documents and newspapers on microfilm. A major component of the microfiche collection is the Library of American Civilization "with more than 6,500,000 pages of primary material relating to all aspects of the American experience, from the colonial period to the outbreak of World War I." The library also has a rare-books section, which houses a number of motheaten books that are brittle with age.

"This library is full of surprises," says Professor Satyanarayana, of Osmania University, who is a Steinbeck scholar.

"Each time I come here to read I find some interesting rare book, like this

travelogue I am now reading."

On the wall are these lines from Emily Dickenson: A precious moldering pleasure 'tis To meet an antique book In just the dress his country wore, A privilege, I think His venerable hand to take And warming in our own A passage or two, to make In times when he was young ....

The rare-books section has appropriately been named after the late Olive 1. Reddick whose services in the cause of Indo- U. S. scholarship are now legend.

As the first director of the U. S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) from 1951 to 1954 and again from 1957 until her retirement in 1965, she laid the foundation for exchange of stUdents, teachers and scholars between the two countries under the Fulbright educational exchange program. She was also the moving spirit behind the establishment of the American Studies Research Centre.

Although the idea of an institute of American studies in India was discussed by a group of Indian academics in 1950, it took shape in 1962, at a seminar sponsored by the USEFI in Mussoo~ie, Uttar Pradesh.

Participants recommended that, in view of the burgeoning interest in American subjects in Indian universities, a research center be set up. The ASRC came into being in April 1964, funded by the Indian and American governments and the USEF1.

The foresight of the founders has paid rich dividends. In the two decades of its existence, interest in American studies has increased manifold in this country.

Beginning with the Osmania University, which became the first Indian institution

of higher learning to introduce a course in American literature in 1956, a vast majority of Indian universities today offer courses in American studies. According to available statistics, as many as 60 percent of all PhD dissertations in English literature are on American subjects. "We publish some of these dissertations in our journal IDEAS (an acronym for Indian Doctoral Engagements in American Studies). Recently we also introduced a prize for the most outstanding PhD thesis," says Dr. Kar. But how does the ASRC reach the thousands of serious students of Amer~ icansubjects throughout the country who lackfunds to travel to Hyderabad, or the timeto spend there? Acutely conscious of this need, ASRC set up an outreach program. Each year hundreds of thousands of books are mailed to members on loan, mainly to lecturers and professors spread all over the country.

(The minimum qualification for membership is an M.A.) The Centre also has numerous corporate members-Indian universities and colleges which are entitled to receive deposit collections.

A unique feature of the Centre is its working philosophy-to be a guide, phi-

losopher and friend to budding scholars.

The collegial relationship between staff and scholars is very close. "We believe a library is not a place where you don't make noise but a place where people must feel at home," "says Dr. Chapman.

"This naturally means our attitude toward the users is different. In many libraries, the staff assume that the user knows it all and if he doesn't, they let him stumble along. We adopt an aggressive helping attitude, encouraging questions and enquiries."

Scholars using the Centre's resources testify to this in ample measure. Some comments: • "Imagine, if some material we need is not in the library, then they borrow or Xerox it for us."

• "There's everything here that you need to know for your research. More important, perhaps, is the attitude of the staff who go out of their way to help."

• "For a political scientist like me, ASRC is a stimulating place not only because of its books but also because here you meet and interact with scholars in different disciplines and also because of the discussions and the seminars held here. All this helps me view my work in a

broader, comprehensive perspective."

• "This is the only institute of its kind which encourages academics at the middle level to get back into the mainstream of research."

• "Calcutta has the National Library and many embassy libraries. But from the research point of view, they are no comparison with the ASRC. An opportunity to do five to six weeks of intensive research at a stretch here is a real boon for the scholar."

To sum it, the American Studies Research Centre has been eminently successful in its mission of bringing a better understanding and appreciation of America to the Indian scholar. As former U.S. Ambassador to India Chester Bowles said at the Centre's inauguration, "In the long run the outcome of IndianAmerican relations will depend upon widespread public understanding of each other's history, culture, economics and politics. Such an understanding has to begin with research: research by Americans about India and by Indians about America."

0 About the Author: Meera Shenoy is a Hyderabad-based free-lance writer.

ASRC's New Director

"Do chai dijiye," Dr. John Hurd, the new director of ASRC orders in fluent, polite Hindi. "Surprised?" he asks at my raised eyebrows. "Well, at the South Asian Regional Studies Center in the University of Pennsylvania we had to learn at least one language. I opted for Hindi." Dr. Hurd's association with India began with the choice of his doctoral dissertation, "Some Economic Characteristics of the Princely States of India-1901-1913." He visited India for his field work, scrutinizing documents and administrative booklets that would help him understand how, for example, the judiciary in British India differed from that in the princely states.

Hurd is on sabbatical this year from his position as chairman of the Department of Economics and Finance at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. To spend a second year at ASRC, he will take unpaid leave from the university next year. He is a member of the' American Economic Association, European Economic Association and Association for Asian Studies. He has contributed a chapter to the much-acclaimed scholarly work Cambridge Economic History of India. His undergraduate degree was

f

from Yale University, Connecticut.

"My very first impressions of India," he remembers, "were formed by a film screened twice in school called Mother India. There is this incredible scene where a man kisses the head of a cobra. Only when I came here did I realize one would actually have to hunt for this tribe. The Festival of India in America is balancing this one-sided projection." Back in India after 20 years

his economist eyes are amazed at the marked rise of consumerism and the spread of the middle class.

Each director brings his own skills and emphasis to the ASRC. Some have preferred to work in library cataloging; others have sought to counsel scholars. Hurd's objectives are "how best to serve the Indian academics." He has prepared a questionnaire to be sent off to different universities soliciting suggestions on how to improve the Centre and what it should be doing. "This would also help in making Indian academics in smaller universities in remote places aware of our facilities." Being an economic historian, he fully intends to give impetus to multidisciplinary research.

Talking about Indo-U.S. relations, Dr. Hurd says, "The interaction between India and the United States has continued at all levels for years despite politics. In science or the arts, there has always been an exchange of programs and scholars leading to a lively interchange of ideas. An information flow is also created by the increasing family ties between the people of the two countries.

Politics come and go. Research will go on -M.S. unperturbed."

first saw Orson Welles in December 1934 when he was 19 and I was 18. He was in the Katharine Cornell production of Romeo and Juliet in which he spoke the chorus and played Tybalt. I had never heard of him but knew at once that I would hear of him agalO. His presence was powerful, and his voice was already as rich as it ever became. A few weeks later I met Welles, for the first and only time, at the home of an Irish actor named Whitford Kane whom he had known in Chicago. (Seven years later all Whitford's friends assumed that the naming of Welles' first film was a private joke between the director and the older actor.) I was struck by the difference in the offstage Welles. The powerful young man seemed here more like an overgrown baby; the rich voice was frequently punctuated with high-pitched giggles.

This difference between the public Welles and the private Welles is much too pat to explain him. (Thompson, the reporter in Citizen Kane, says of Rosebud: "I don't think any w0rd explains a man's life.") Nothing that follows is meant neatly to categorize a multifarious career. But the difference that struck me at my one meeting with him was certainly in my head during all the 51 years that I followed his doings, and in generalimpressionistically, at least-it seems to be relevant.

In his earliest years, the public Welles (in my terms) predominated. He went from strength to strength. I saw virtually all his theater productions in New Ydrk, most of which were, if eccentric, irresistibly exciting. In 1938 he did a good production of Shaw's Heartbreak House and played Captain Shotover; and his picture was on the cover of Time, at the age of 23, in a white wig and beard. I heard very many of his radio productions, including the sensational War of the Worlds, which were certainly the best radio plays in my experience.

In 1939 Welles went to Hollywood, and many of us, conditioned by the prevailing cultural hierarchies, feared that this was the end. Good-bye to the soaring genius. Our fear was heightened by the long delay in settling on his first film project and getting it launched. At last he made his film. (Between the finish of the film and its release, Welles came to New York and directed a dramatization of Richard Wright's Native Son.) Then in May 1941 Citizen Kane opened. No one who was not sentient at the time can understand the effect. Most of the people I now know grew up with Citizen Kane as a cultural fact, a piece of history, a locus of legend. But to be there when it arrived! Here was a young man who, after a pyrotechnic career in theater and radio, after a blazing rise to national prominence, had disappeared into Hollywood for almost two years as into a quagmire, and who emerged with an achievement that surpassed anything he had ever done. Not just a good film, not just (to this very date) the best serious American film, but (as many knew at once) one of the best films in world history. It was overwhelming. And he was just 26. Who could say what treasures lay ahead?

All this was the public Welles, as was The Magnificent Ambersons, even in the released version mangled by the producers, as was Macbeth, in Welles' original version, lately restored. As was his exuberant 1945 Broadway production of Around the World in Ei/?hty Days-Jules Verne set to Cole

I

About the Author: Stanley Kauffmann, film critic for The New Republic, is the author of Before My Eyes: Film Criticism and Comment and A World on Film.

Orson Welles Larger than Life

Porter songs, with Welles in several roles.

Still, through the early 1940s the private Welles, the overgrown-baby Welles, began to emerge (and, as later became clear, had something to do with allowing producers the chance to interfere with his films). Not long after the 'Cole Porter failure, he moved to Europe for tax and other reasons, and he remained there, with occasiomil return visits to work, for almost 30 years. Thus most of Welles' life was spent abroad, as an acting-directing vagabond, without the rootedness and cultural continuity that, retrospectively, he seemed to have needed. In those years, increasingly showered with nearly indiscriminate praise especially by' European rhapsodists, Welles allowed the self-Willed, capricious baby in him to rule.

Nothing that he directed ever lacked some touches that no one else could have approached, but films like Othello and Mr. Arkadin seemed to have a subtext of whim, almost petulance.

He had always done as he pleased, but now his determination seemed childish conceit rather than artistic subscription. His acting, in his own and other people's films, became c.asual and referential. ("I expect you to supplement my performance here with your knowledge of what I've done in the past and who I am.") He was too talented not to give occasional good performances (The Third Man, Compulsion), but he was in a lot of trashy. films, and in them as well as in better ones, he seemed invisibly to be sticking his tongue out at the world, telling it that he was going to do just as he liked.

At last he moved back to America, with the wayward child now buried in a grossly obese body. Here he added another color to his character, the genius whom Hollywood forgot, a la D. W. Griffith. He said he couldn't find backing for the projects he wanted to make. He did shoot a good deal of a film called The Other Side of the Wind, and of course I wish he had been

Above: Orson Welles (at podium) makes a speech in a scene from his classic film Citizen Kane. Facing page: The creator of CitizenKane with Rita Hayworth in Lady in Shanghai. Right: Welles, as he appeared in the motion picture The Immortal Story.

able to finish it, although the clips that have been shown are ambiguous. But he carefully prepared the role of dethroned king, the exile even when he was at home, and it served him juicily in TV commercials and talk show appearances.

To me, those commercials and Falstaffian chats were horrible because of the gifts that he had. Not gifts that he had lost-I never thought of him, in terms of talent, as a "has-been"-but gifts that were still his and which, with that legerdemain of which he was so proud, he sometimes let us glimpse.

To have watched Welles through the years, to have seen his career as it happened, bit by bit, instead of in retrospect, was to become dourly aware of the Heraclitus tag: character is destiny.

He was a man for whom everything was possible, absolutely everything, in the worlds of theater, radio, film, television. He could have been a major changer and shaper of our performing arts. But in the middle 1940s the spoiled child took over.

He had overcome plenty of difficulties before' then, but about that time he seemed to assume that the world now owed him a smooth path and that he would pay the world back for its refusal to pamper him by giving it only virtuosic arrogance.

Well, history will not witness the chronicle as it was registered year by year. The view will be retrospective, not serial. And that's all to the good because immediacies of disappointment will dim, the heights of his achievements will dominate. History will care less than does a contemporary that Welles' best works were bunched early in his career. Rossini,

who died at the age of 76, quit operatic composing at the age of 37, and though doubtless many of his contemporaries were anguished or angry, history remembers only what he accomplished. Among Welles' accomplishments, one is supreme. He made a film that changed film. Other directors-Griffith, Ford, Godard-have had sizable careers of immeasurable influence.

But I can think of only two films that, in themselves, altered film vision. One is Eisenstein's Potemkin. the other is Citizen Kane. In year.s to come, as the man and his life fade, who will care how old Welles was when he made it?

0

But in an industry in which efficacy is the bottom line, cyclosporine has received glowing reports. Since the advent of cyclosporine, one-year survival for kidney transplant patients has risen from about 55 percent to 90 percent and for liver transplants, from more than 40 to over 70 percent.

Despite the inelegance of screening, it does give serendipity a chance. Cyclosporineis such a complicated molecule that it could not have been deliberately synthesized in a lab. And no sane chemist would have tried to make a molecule like Aztreonam for use as an antibiotic. "No one was thinking about monobactams," says Cimarusti.

"The dogma was that for antibiotic action you needed two rings."

But where screening can be avoided, it is. Often, researchers have biochemical clues or historical jumping-off points to guide them. To develop a drug effective against severe acne, Hoffmann La Roche scientists modified the vitamin A molecule, a compound long known to be active against skin disorders.

When Donald Walz, a pharmacologist at Smith, Kline & French Laboratories, was first approached to find a drug to cure or arrest crippling rheumatoid arthritis, he had several leads to follow and rejected screening hands down: "1 was not going to take shots in the dark."

Instead, he and his colleagues searched the literature, examining the different types of compounds that had been used . to treat arthritis in the past. They looked at nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents, they looked at antimalarials, they looked at antiproliferative agents and then- Walz says, "for right or for wrong"-they decided to focus on gold-based drugs.

It was a decision Don Walz stood by tenaciously for 16 years, through personal disappointments and despite skepticism at Smith Kline and in the medical community at large. What kept him going? "I guess it's the same as when someone asks your wife, 'How did you put up with it for all these years?' It's a commitment, a love, a challenge."

The notion of using gold to treat aches and pains first evolved in China about 2500 B.C.-which makes Smith Kline's antiarthritic the drug with the longest development period ever in an industry notorious for lengthy R&D projects. It also left Walz open to the criticism of having "reinvented the wheel."

In many ways, the most difficult task was to develop a laboratory model of rheumatoid arthritis. If a scientist wants to test a new antacid, the procedure is relatively simple: dump some acid in a test tube, add the drug, and if the resulting solution is less acidic-he's got a success. But rheumatoid arthritis is an extremely complex malady, a web of immunesystem deficiencies and severe inflammation.

Since the problem was too big to approach with a single screen, Walz tackled it piecemeal. He spent years developing a laborious step-by-step procedure for inducing a condition in rats that mimicked-with 95 percent accuracy-the complex biochemical, immunological and physical changes that occur in rheumatoid arthritis. He gave the animals antigens to raise their

antibody levels; he induced skin weals, typical of another type of immune-system reaction seen in the disease.¡ With this model in hand, Walz tested 130 gold-based compounds.

A few performed well, and by 1974 Walz-ever the nervous parent-was on the phone with Abraham Finkelstein, of the Albert Einstein Medical Research Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the latter gave the first dose of the new drug to a patient.

"Should I do it, Don?" Walz recalls being asked.

"Go to it," he responded.

Critics had scoffed that "Gold is gold." But Ridaura, as the proved that was not so. The drug new drug was christened, inhibits the abnormal immune response of arthritis at low doses, with virtually no toxicity (often a problem with drugs containing heavy metals). "When I saw the results," recalls Walz, "I was floored." No other gold compound could do that.

Consider the current state of Valium, which was developed

by Hoffmann La Roche chemist Leo Sternbach in 1959.

Today there is Valium and there is valium. There are now scores of benzodiazepines available.

Chemists have added oxygens, removed acidic groups, tacked on a positive charge, hacked off carbons-all in the hope of producing something with faster action, fewer side effects and a shorter duration of action, so that a pill taken at night will not interfere with performance the next day.

By the late 1960s, all the minor molecular fiddling that could be done with the benzodiazepines had been done; Valium remained the best-seller. When chemists at the Upjohn Company set out to develop their own tranquilizer, they had to try more sweeping changes.

After much experimentation, the addition of a ring containing three "nitrogens to the Valium backbone produced the compound now called Xanax, a sort of souped-up Valium. Ten times more potent than the original, it acts more quickly and is eliminated from the body in about half the time.

Like it or not, figures show that clinical serendipity is, historically, one of the most successful strategies in the drug industry.

But serendipity is not a sound basis for either medical progress or corporate profits. Instead, slowly but surely, researchers in the drug industry have been developing the tools for making designer drugs-drugs that are the product of carefully planned and executed research programs in which, supposedly, human ingenuity, rather than chance, provides the crucial breakthroughs.

One trend setter is Capoten, a medication that combats high blood pressure. Essentially, Capoten is a compound chemically constructed to have the right shape and electrical charge to fit into and block the action of Angiotensin Converting Enzyme (ACE), a catalyst involved in a process that raises blood pressure.

The first substance to block ACE was discovered serendipitously in the venom of the South American pit viper. Working on a tip from British biochemist John Vane, Squibb chemists

David Cushman and Miguel Ondetti found a peptide called teprotide that could lower blood pressure.

It was a classic case of good news and bad news. The research team had a concept that worked, but teprotide itself wasexpensive to make (patient costs would have been $200 to $300a day) and had to be given by injection. Since most people with high blood pressure feel fine on a day-to-day basis, they are not likely to follow so strict a regimen.

Fortunately, a group of scientists at the University of North Carolina had just located the active site of an enzyme called carboxypeptidase A, which functions like ACE; both act by clipping a few amino acids from the ends of small molecules.

Perhaps, suggested Ondetti, the two had structurally similar active sites. He surmised, for example, that the active site of ACE, like the active site of carboxypeptidase, would have two precisely spaced positive charges and that, as a result, any compound that would successfully block the enzyme would have to have two corresponding negative charges. He also decided that compounds containing a ring between these two crucial charges would be the most successful. "Rings add rigidity," he explains. "To be anthropomorphic, it's easier to hold onto something that stays still than something that's floppy. So, it was all a game of .analogies."

As Squibb chemists began building potential blocking models based on the researchers' guess about the configuration of ACE, it became clear that the hunch had been correct. By and large, the compounds that Ondetti thought had the proper structure to block the enzyme did lower blood pressure. Those that had other structures did not.

The compound Squibb decided to market had all of the structural landmarks necessary to block ACE. But overall, it lookednothing like the enzyme's normal substrate, the peptide angiotensin 1. Thus, it cannot be broken down by the enzymes.

And, because it is smaller than angiotensin 1 and not a peptide, it can be absorbed orally.

Had¡the researchers been designing Capoten today, their

job would have been simplified by molecular-modeling computers. They could have programmed notions about the structure of the enzyme's active site into a terminal and tried to place different molecules in the receptor as it appeared on a display screen-just like fitting a piece into a jigsaw puzzle. "It does not replace chemical ingenuity," Ondetti stresses, "but it could have done some of our initial testing. We could ask it, 'We would like to make this compound, does it make sense?' and if we got a strong 'no' we would stop."

No drug has yet been designed from scratch at a computer terminal. But at Merck, a pioneer in the field of molecular drug modeling, researchers have found computer graphics invaluable. Graphics are particularly useful in cases in which the shape of a receptor site or an active molecule is known, and the researcher's job is to design a synthetic impostor that will either block or mimic the natural component. With this technology, Merck has developed its own ACE inhibitor. And it is using its graphics facility to formulate a molecule that will fill in for the hormone somatostatin, which prevents release of glucose from the liver into the blood.

For the moment, the computer's application to drug design is still rather limited. There are very few enzymes involved in disease processes for which the active site is known.

"The challenge of the future," predicts John Donahue of Hoffmann La Roche, "may be to learn to copy something that the body makes naturally to combat an abnormal state." By understanding more about the chemical basis of disease and by perfecting recombinant DNA techniques, scientists may be able to return to the body the natural molecule that the disease process has taken away. A few pharmaceuticals now function in this way: insulin for diabetes, L-dopa to combat Parkinson's disease and interferon to attack viruses. Upjohn markets synthetic prostaglandins, chemicals produced by the body that are involved in processes that include. inflammation, the onset of labor and maintaining fetal circulation. One product, Prostin VR Pediatric, is now administered to maintain the circulatory system in babies whose congenital heart defects would make adult circulation impossible; when a child is strong enough, the defect is corrected.

High-tech pharmacology is still primitive. Recombinant drug making may not bear its full fruits for "10, 20, maybe even 30 years," predicts Donahue. And computer modeling, too, remains a developmental technique. Says John Adams, vlcepresident of the U.S. Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association and an early researcher in drug design, "There have been no dramatic breakthroughs because of computer modeling. But I'm sure there will be."

And in the meantime, as mankind awaits medication specifically tailored to its ills, those who have taken penicillin to clear an infection, or aspirin for a pounding head, can be thankful that serendipity-aided by the observing mind-has worked so well.

0 About the Author: Libby Rosenthal is a former assistant editor of Science Digest.

~Reachingfor Excellence' ... I have come to review with you the progress of our nation, to speak of unfinished work, and to set our sights on the future. I am pleased to report the state of our Union is stronger than a year ago, and growing stronger each day. Tonight, we look out on a rising America-firm of heart, united in spirit, powerful in pride and patriotism-America is on the move.

But, it wasn't long ago that we looked out on a different land-locked factory gates and long gasoline lines, intolerable prices and interest rates turning the ... country into a land of broken dreams. Government growing beyond our consent had become a lumbering giant, slamming shut the gates of opportunity, threatening to crush the very roots of our freedom.

What brought America back? The American people brought us back-with quiet courage and common sense; with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours, for the future belongs to the free.

Tonight the American people deserve our thanks-for 37 straight months of economic growth; for sunrise firms and modernized industries creating nine million new jobs in three years; interest rates cut in half and inflation falling from over 12 percent in 1980 to under 4 percent today; and a mighty river of good works, a record $74,000 million in voluntary giving just last year alone.

Despite the pressures of our modern world, family and community remain the moral core of our society, guardians of our values and hopes for the future. Family and community are the co-stars of this Great American Comeback. They are why we say tonight: Private values must be at the heart of public policies.

What is true for families in America is true for America in the family of free nations. History is no captive of some inevitable force. History is made by men and women of vision and courage. Tonight, freedom is on the march. The United States is the economic miracle, the model to which the world once again turns. We stand for an idea whose time is now: Only by lifting the weights from the shoulders of all can people truly prosper and can peace among all nations be secure.

Teddy Roosevelt said a nation that does great work lives forever. We have done well, but we cannot stop at the foothills when Everest beckons. It is time for America to be all we can be.

We speak tonight of an agenda for the future, an agenda for a safer, more secure world. We speak about the necessity for actions to steel us for the challenges of growth, trade and security in the next decade and the year 2000. And we will do it-not by breaking faith with bedrock principles, but by breaking free from failed policies.

Let us begin where storm clouds loom darkest-right here in Washington, D.C .... Tonight, let us speak of our responsibility to redefine government's role: Not to control, not to command, not to contain us; but to help in times of need; above all, to create a ladder of opportunity to full employment-so all Americans can climb toward economic power and justice on their own.

But, we cannot win the race to the future shackled to a system that can't even pass a federal budget. We cannot win that race held back by horse-and-buggy programs that waste tax dollars and squander human potential. We cannot win that race if we are swamped in a sea of red ink.

Mr. Speaker, you know and I know and the American people know the federal budget system is broken. It doesn't work. Before we leave this city, let's ... work together to fix it. Then we can finally give the American people a balanced budget. ... Passage of Gramm- Rudman- Hollings [the deficit elimination act] gives us a historic opportunity to achieve what has eluded our national leadership for decadesforcing the federal government to live within its means ....

How often we read of a husband and wife-both working, struggling from paycheck to paycheck to raise a family, meet a mortgage, pay their taxes and bills. Yet, some in Congress say taxes must be raised. Well, I'm sorry, they're asking the wrong people to tighten their belts. It's time we reduced the federal budget and left the family budget alone. We do not face large deficits because American families are undertaxed; we face those deficits because the federal government overspends.

The detailed budget we submit will meet the GrammRudman-Hollings target for deficit reductions; meet our commitment to ensure a strong national defense; meet our commitment to protect Social Security and the truly less fortunate; and, yes, meet our commitment not to raise taxes.

How should we accomplish this? Not by taking from those in need. As families take care of their own, government must provide shelter and nourishment for those who cannot provide for themselves. But we must revise or replace programs enacted in the name of compassion that degrade the moral worth of work, encourage family breakups and drive entire communities into a bleak and heartless dependency.

Gramm-Rudman-Hollings can mark a dramatic improvement. But experience shows that simply setting deficit targets does not assure they'll be met. We must proceed with Grace Commission reforms against waste.

And tonight, I ask you to give me what 43 governors already have-give me a line-item veto this year. Give me the authority to veto waste, and I'll take the responsibil-

Once a year, the American President addresses a joint session of Congress to give his assessment of the state of the Union and present an agenda for the future. Below are excerpts from President Ronald Reagan's 1986 address.

ity, I'll make the cuts, I'll take the heat.

This authority would not give me any monopoly power, but simply prevent spending measures from sneaking through that could not pass on their own merit.

And you can sustain; or override, my veto-that's the way the system should work. Once we've made the hard choices, we should lock in our gains with a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

I mentioned that we will meet our commitment to national defense. We must meet it. Defense is not just another budget expense. Keeping America strong, free and at peace is solely the responsibility of the federal government; it is government's prime responsibility. We have devoted five years trying to narrow a dangerous gap born of illusion and neglect. And we have made -important gains ....

We pledged together to hold real growth in defense spending to the bare minimum. My budget honors that pledge. I am now asking Congress to keep its end of the bargain. The Soviets must know that if America reduces her defenses, it will be because of a reduced threat, not a reduced resolve.

Keeping America strong is as vital to the national security, as controlling federal spending is to our economic security. But, as I have said before, the most powerful force we can enlist against the federal deficit is an ever-expanding American economy, unfettered and free.

The magic of opportunity-unreserved, unfailing, unrestrained-isn't this the calling that unites us? I believe our tax rate cuts for the people have done more to spur a spirit of risk-taking and help America's economy break free than any program since John Kennedy's tax cut almost a quarter century ago.

Now history calls us to press on, to complete efforts for a historic tax reform providing new opportunity fur all and ensuring that all pay their fair share-but no more ....

We cannot and we will not accept tax reform that is a tax increase in disguise. True reform must be an engine of productivity and growth and that means a top personal rate no higher than 35 percent. True refor!ll must be truly fair and that means raising personal exemptions to $2,000.

True reform means a tax system that at long last is pro-family, pro-jobs, pro-future and pro-America.

As we knock down the barriers to growth, we must redouble our efforts fOT freer and fairer trade. We have already taken actions to counter unfair trading practices and to pry open closed foreign markets. We will continue to do so. We will also oppose legislation touted as providing protection that in reality pits one American worker against another, one industry against another, one

community against another, and that raises prices for us all. If the United States can trade with other nations on a level playing field, we can out-produce, out-compete and out-sell anybody, anywhere in the world.

The constant expansion of our economy and exports requires a sound and stable dollar at home and reliable exchange rates around the world. We must never again permit wild currency swings to cripple our farmers and other exporters. Farmers, in particular, have suffered from past unwise government policies, and they must not be abandoned with problems they did not create and cannot control. We've begun coordinating economic and monetary policy among our major trading partners. But there's more to do, and tonight I am directing Treasury Secretary Jim Baker to determine if the nations of the world should convene to discuss the role and relationship of our currencies.

Confident in our future, secure in our values, Americans are striding forward to embrace the future. We see it not only in our recovery, but in three straight years of falling crime rates, as families and communities band together to fight pornography, drugs and lawlessness, and to give back to their children the safe and innocent childhood they deserve.

We see it in the renaissance in education with rising SAT [scholastic aptitude test] scores for three years-last year's increase [was] the greatest since 1963. It wasn't government and Washington lobbies that turned education around~it was the American people who, in reaching for excellence, knew to reach back to basics. We must continue the advance by supporting discipline in our schools; vouchers that give parents freedom of choice [in selecting schools]; and we must give back to our children their lost right to acknowledge God in their classrooms.

As we work to make the American Dream real for all, we must also look to the condition of America's families.

Struggling parents today worry how they will provide their children the advantages their parents gave them. In the welfare culture, the breakdown of the family, the most basic support system, has reached crisis proportions-in female and child poverty, child abandonment, crimes and deteriorating schools. After hundreds of billions of dollars in poverty programs, the plight of the poor grows more painful. But the waste in dollars and cents pales before the most tragic loss-the sinful waste of human spirit and potential.

We can ignore this terrible truth no longer. As Franklin Roosevelt warned 51 years ago standing before this chamber: Welfare is "a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit." And we must now escape the spider's web of dependency. Tonight, I am charging the White

"Let us speak of our deepest longing for the future-to leave our children a land that is free andjust in a world at peace."

House Domestic Council to present me by December 1, 1986, an evaluation of programs and a strategy for immediate action to meet the financial, educational, social and safety concerns of poor families-I am talking about real and lasting emancipation, because the success of welfare should be judged by how many of its recipients become independent of welfare.

Further, after seeing how devastating illness can destory the financial security of a family, I am directing Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Otis Bowen to report to me by year-end with recommendations on how the private sector and government can work together to address the problems of affordable insurance for those whose life savings would otherwise be threatened when catastrophic illness strikes.

Tonight, I want to speak directly to America's younger generation-because you hold the destiny of our nation in your hands. With all the temptations young people face, it sometimes seems the allure of the permissive society requires superhuman feats of self-control. But the call of the future is too strong, the challenge too great, to get lost in the blind alleyways of dissolution, drugs and despair.

Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive-a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement.

As they said in the film, Back to the Future: "Where we're going, we don't need roads."

Today physicists peering into the infinitely small realms of subatomic particles find reaffirmations of religious faith; astronomers build a space telescope that can see to the edge of the universe and, possibly, back to the moment of creation.

This nation remains fully committed to America's space program. We are going forward with our shuttle flights. We are going forward to build our space station.

And we are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport and accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low-Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours.

And the same technology transforming our lives can solve the greatest problem of the 20th century. A security shield can one day render nuclear weapons obsolete and free mankind from the prison of nuclear terror. America met one historic challenge and went to the Moon. Now, America must meet another-to make' our strategic defense real for the citizens of planet Earth.

Let us speak of our deepest longing for the future-to leave our children a land that is free and just in a world at peace. It is my hope that our fireside summit in Geneva and Mr. Gorbachev's upcoming visit to America can lead to a more stable relationship. Surely no people on Earth hate war or love peace more than we Americans.

But we cannot stroll into the future with childlike faith. Our differences with a system that openly pro-

claims, and practices, an alleged right to command people's lives and to export its ideology by force are deep and abiding.

Logic and history compel us to accept that our relationship be guided by realism-rockhard, clear-eyed, steady and sure. Our negotiators in Geneva have proposed a radical cut in offensive forces by each side, with no cheating. They have made clear that Soviet compliance with the letter and spirit of agreements is essential. If the Soviet Government wants an agreement that truly reduces nuclear arms, there will be an agreement.

But arms control is no substitute for peace. We know peace follows in freedom's path and conflicts erupt when the will of the people is denied. So we must prepare not only by reducing weapons but by bolstering prosperity, liberty and democracy however and wherever we can.

We advance the promise of opportunity every time we speak out on behalf of lower tax rates, freer markets and sound currencies around the world. We strengthen the family of freedom every time we work with allies and come to the aid of friends under siege. And we can enlarge the family of free nations if we will defend the inalienable rights of all God's children to follow their dreams.

To those imprisoned in regimes held captive, to'those beaten for daring to fight for freedom and democracyfor their right to worship, to speak, to live and prosper in the family of free nations-we say to you tonight: You are not alone freedom fighters. America will support with moral and material assistance your right not just to fight and die for freedom, but to fight and win freedom-in Afghanistan; Angola; Cambodia; and Nicaragua.

This IS a great moral challenge for the entire free world. Surely, no issue is more important for peace in our own hemisphere, for the security of our frontiers, for the protection of our vital interests-than to achieve democracy in Nicaragua and to protect Nicaragua's democratic neighbors ....

What we accomplish this year, in each challenge we face, will set our course for the balance of the decade, indeed for the remainder of the century. After all we've done so far, let no one say this nation cannot reach, the destiny of our dreams. America believes, America is ready, America can win the race to the future-and we shall.

The American Dream is a song of hope that rings through the night winter air. Vivid, tender music that warms our hearts when the least among us aspire to the greatest things-to venture a daring enterprise; to unearth new beauty in music, literature and art; to discover a new universe inside a tiny silicon chip or a single human cell. . . . .

The world's hopes rest with America's future. America's hopes rest with us. So let us go forward to create our world of tomorrow-in faith, in unity and in love. 0

Costumes of ~yal qlldia India's former princely states are holding court again-to an audience of thousands of New Yorkers at "Costumes of India," a Festival of India exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show, which opened December 20, 1985, and will run through August 1986, features more than 100 complete costumeselegantly worn by mannequins-on loan from some of the former princely states.

Complementing the glittering selection are some contemporary saris from Varanasi and Travancore, accessories ranging from fans to jewelry, photographs and paintings ofthe royal families, a gentle sandalwood fragrance especially prepared for the exhibition by Guerlain, and an East-West blend of music.

The exhibition has been organized by Diana Vreeland and Stephen Jamail of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, with Martand Singh coordinating from India.

Singh pointed out that "there is not a piece of textile here that is not produced today." The techniques on show-tiedying, brocading, hand embroidery, intricate weaving-are still practiced. As Time magazine noted: "'Costumes of India' celebrates an ongoing tradItion-of craft, of coloration."

Left: A child's royal costume-a kurta of pink silk satin brocaded in white and lavender with gold embroidery and ribbon applique- worn with a matching pyjama and kantopi (the headgear); mid¡20th century, on loan from Begum Mebtab Zamani Ali Khan of Rampur. Far left: The angarkhan (a tunic) shows a penchant for the elaborate even in menswear-they have silver and gold brocade, quilting, with gold ribbon woven into the silk; mid19th century, on loan from Bhawani Singh of Jaipur.

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come a classic text of international relations, and continues to influence thinking in this field 38 years after its first publication.

The sixth edition, prepared

by Kenneth Thompson after Morgenthau's death, updates factual material, but leaves the essential principles intact.

In the volume, Morgenthau and Thompson present a realist theory, proposing that international politics is based on objective laws rooted in a power-seeking human nature. In the anarchic, competitive international system of nationstates, they say, rational leaders are preoccupied with national interest, which is equated with the survival of a state's physical, cultural and political identity.

To promote the national interest, they say, governments. seek to accumulate and exercise power, making international politics basically a "struggle for power." According to the authors, governments pursue three types of power objectives-preserving power (status quo), extending power (imperialism) and demonstrating power (prestige).

The authors assert that while power struggles are endemic features of international politics, war is not inevitable and can be avoided in several ways: If governments pursue only vital national ·interests, free from the distortions of ideological crusading; or if governments seek to establish a balance of power, resting on an international consensus about a particular distribution of power. This conTom A. Travis, currently a Fulbright scholar in India, is a political science professor at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

POLITICS AMONG NATIONS H.J. Morgenthau and KW. Thompson, Kalyani Publishers. New Delhi.

688 pp., Rs. 80. sensus can be molded by skillful diplomacy, say the authors, where conflicting national interests are adjusted by diplomatic accommodation.

Successful diplomacy should be devoid of crusading spirit, should rest on limited national interests sustained by adequate power, and should be conducted secretly by experienced diplomats who understand the perspectives of rival governments and are willing to compromise on secondary issues. . Politics Among Nations is important because it represents one of the first efforts to construct a systematic theory of international politics based on historical data; it presents the most incisive and thorough statement of political realism; it offers an often illuminating and provocative analysis of international power; and it attempts to make theory relevant to policymakers.

Despite these merits, the book has met with growing criticism In the United States. Its approach is typical of earlier theories of international relations that rely on a single organizing device-in this case, power. While power is a significant feature of international politics, other characteristics, such as consensus, cooperation, bargaining and integration, are important as well. Indeed, recent research has shown that cooperation is more frequent than cO'nflict in international politics, which is contrary to the thrust of the realist perspective.

While the nation-state continues to be the primary actor in international politics, the authors slight the

growing importance of nonstate actors, such as intergovernmental and international nongovernmental ones .

The authors' power-realist approach ignores the existence of a competing and increasingly convincing alternative paradigm of international politics. This is the transnational/ecological approach, which views international politics as a process of collaborative problemsolving among a variety of state and nonstate actors.

Morgenthau's and Thompson's preoccupation with the nation-state and power struggle stems from a dubious premise and a methodological flaw. Their view of human nature as power-seeking seems simplistic and narrow.

Human "nature" seems variable, instead, with motives depending on different personality traits, bureaucratic roles, cultural norms, etc. If national leaders are so consumed with power, how do the authors explain the frequent interstate cooperation and how can they realistically urge these leaders to practice greater restraint andaccommodation?

This seems contradictory The methodological error is their use of so much evidence from the 18th and 19th centuries to support their theory.

At times, the authors seem caught in a time warp. International politics of the 20th century differs in important respects from earlier periods, particularly in the type of actors, and amount of collaborative activity.

Morgenthau's and Thompson's view of national leaders as rational actors seems erroneous. Students of decisionmaking have convincingly shown that rational foreign policymaking is difficult, hampered by informational gaps, perceptual problems, bureaucratic pressures and domestic constraints.

Con-

spicuous by its absence is a chapter that might have been devoted to a multifactored theory of foreign policy decisionmaking, suggesting why governments pursue various modes of behavior, such as policies of the status quo or imperialism.

The volume also suffers from conceptual ambiguity and superficiality. For example, it is uncertain just what "national interest defined as power" means. Power is referred to in different places as an objective, a capability, a balance, a means and a form of control. Thus, the meaning of the concept central to the volume remains obscure, diminishing the usefulness of the work to scholars and diplomats.

The authors' argument that, in the nonconsensual, international context, morality is culturally relative (or specific to each state) might be correct.

Yet, it is disappointing that they let the matter drop there. Particularly In t.his troubled age, political scientists have a responsibility to move beyond empiricism to normative analysis and at least to identify normative approaches that might allow students and diplomats to conceive of certain universal values to guide international behavior.

The authors might respond that this would return international politics to the pitfalls of idealism, which their realist perspective tries to overcome. Yet, to reject universal ideals totally is to condemn international politics to the despair of nihilism.

Politics

Among

Nations

should be read by every political scientist because it is the leading statement of realist thought that has been so influential in the post-World War II period. Yet, the book has unfortunate flaws and presents a rather narrow, outdated picture of international politics.

D

A modest middle-class home in Hyderabad houses the family of Jagdish Mittal-and a treasure trove. This 60-year-old collector and art historian has lent valuable items from his little-known museum to Festival of India events like "India!"-the exhibition of Indian art from the 14th through the 19th century at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Engineering the Wind What causes property damage worth $3,000 million a year in the United States? The answer is blowing in the wind: tornadoes, hurricanes and severe winds. Now a once-obscure science-wind engineering-is being refurbished to help tame and meet the challenge of the deadly force.

The coal miner, the skyscraper window washer, the communicationtower climber, the housewife, the tanner. .. they all work hard at making our world comfortable.

Little Schoolhouse on the Prairie One-room schools in the United States have dwindled from 149,000 in 1930 to 800 today. But suddenly educators are discovering that the new concepts of peer-group teaching, multi-age grouping and mainstreaming the handicapped are all old realities in these smalltown schools. Many now have computers and other audiovisual aids.

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LeConte Stewart was born in the western stafe of Utah in 1891 a.nd, except for a few years in New York studying art and in Hawaii and Canada working as a young Mormon missionary, he has remained in Utah all his life. Now 95, he continues his painting and teaching.

He is said to have recorded every house, barn, hill and field in Davis County in the belief that "Art is an expression of the sense of the thing rather than a reproduction of it. When you know and love a tree, you can paint its spirit, the quality God gave it."

Snowbound~'Ogden Valley (1929). "1 try to produce a~ emotional reaction."

Threshing Wheat (undated). Like most of his 4,000 works, this was painted within 50 kilometers of artist LeConte Stewart's home in Utah.

Derelict House (c. 1936). It is the shapes and colors of the country that attract Stewart.

Stubble and Sage (undated). "My middle name is 'Old Barn.' 1 have painted thousands."

Tract Housing (c. 1936). "This town used to be full of old barns and silos and old sHeds. But they bulldozed them down and built new homes."

The Mormon Chapel (1948). It seems to stand as a protective force in the harsh land.