January 1988

Election Fever Countdown to the Super Bowl Understanding Pain

A Summit in Washington

SPAN 1 American Football-A

Primer

3 A Disarming Summit

5

How the World Media Reacted

6 Hooked on Cacti

9 Pain What Is Science Doing About It?

by Stephen Budiansky

16 Election '88

18 Covering the Stampede

by Dom Bonafede

21 Walden and Civil Disobedience

22

Countdown to Super Sunday

28 Software by Satellite

30 On the Lighter Side

31 The Next Leap in Computers

by Paul Hoffman

35 A Caring Council

by Jacquelin Singh

39 Thomas Eakins

44

Focus On ...

46 Indian Winners: International Essay Contest

by Diganla Mijumder and Samir Dayal

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Warren W. McCurdy

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Associate Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editors

A. Venkata Narayana Snigdha Majmudar

Editorial Assistants

Rocque Fernandes Rashmi Goel

Photo Editor

Avinash Pasricha

Art Director

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: Inside front cover-illustration by Cameron Gerlach. 6_7'" Bhagwan Prasad Saxena except 6 bottom left and 7 top right by Avinash Pasricha. 9--courtesy NIH Pain Research Clinic, Bethesda, Maryland. 10 top--Doug Menuez!Picture Group; bottom-NIH Pain Research Clinic.

II-illustration

by B. Roy Choudhury based on USN & WR thermogram.

J3-NIH Pain Research Clinic. 17 top left-Carol Hightower. 21illustration by Alan E. Cober. 22-Peter Read Miller. 23 top--Ronald C. Moora; bottom-NFL Properties Inc. 26-27-Baron Wolman; bottom left insert by NFL Properties Inc. 28-29--courtesy Texas Instruments. 31John NordeJl!J.B. Pictures. 35--courtesy Council of International Programs. 37, 38-Avinash Pasricha except 38 top by R.K. Sharma. 39Philadelphia Museum of Art. Given by Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams. 40- The Corcoran Gallery of Art. 4 I top-Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; bottom left-Yale University Art GaJlery, collection of Stephen C. Clark; right-Joseph H. Hirshhorn Collection. 42-Property of Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia. 43 top left-Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy; right-Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; bottom left-National Academy of Design, New York; bottom right-The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund 1923.44 top left-PANA India; right-Soman Ponnempalath. 45 bottom left-Press Information Bureau, GOI; bottom right-RCA Records. 46courtesy Iowa State Daily. 47--courtesy International Underwriters!

Brokers, Inc., Vienna, Virginia.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi JlOOOI, 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 at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

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For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.

Front cover: President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev during the ceremony welcoming the Soviet leader to the White House for the historic summit in Washington, D.C., last month. See pages 3-5.

Back cover: Surrounded by an audience of top American and Soviet officials, the two leaders sign the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty in the East Room of the White House. See also inside back cover.

American Football

by JOEL SCHWARZ and WILLIAM A. HENKIN

American football, an offshoot of soccer and rugby, has surpassed baseball as the favorite spectator sport in the United States.

Much of football's surging popularity is attributable to television, which is ideally suited to capture the excitement and pageantry of the game; nevertheless, millions pack stadia around the country every weekend to root for their favorite teams.

Traditionally the football season extends from August, when professional teams begin practice games, through mid-January. Interest peaks on New Year's Day when the top college teams compete against one another in the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl and Orange Bowl games (played in California, Louisiana, Texas and Florida, respectively).

Later in the month, the professional title is decided in the Super Bowl, a game whose site is changed annually and which draws sellout crowds, and upward of 100 million television viewers.

In a typical autumn week, action starts on Friday, when most of the nearly 15,000 high schools that field teams play their games.

Saturday is the big day for the 649 colleges and universities with football teams. The professionals take the spotlight on Sunday afternoon and also schedule some of their games for prime evening television viewing during' the week. Countless other games are played every week, ranging from organized youth teams to semiprofessional leagues.

Football is played on a rectangular field covered with natural or artificial grass. The playing field is 48.8 meters (160 feet) wide and 91.4 meters (100 yards) long. In addi tionthere is a nine-meter (ten-yard) deep end zone at both ends of the field. At the back of each end zone is a goalpost shaped like the letter H. The field is divided into nine-meter (ten-yard) segments by chalk lines; the lines in front of each end zone are called goal lines.

As in most games, the object is for one team to outscore its opponent. There are four ways to score-a touchdown, a conversion, a safety and a field goal. A touchdown is the most common form of scoring and is worth six points. It occurs when a player carries the ball across an opponent's goal line or catches a pass in the opponent's end zone. A team can also score a touchdown if it recovers a ball dropped by an opponent in his end zone.

After a touchdown a team tries to score again on a conversion by kicking the ball over the crossbar and between the goalposts of the About the Authors: Joel Schwarz and William A. Henkin are free-lance writers.

other team's goal. This is worth an extra point and can also be earned by running the ball or passing it across the goal line.

The third scoring method is called a safety, worth two points. This happens when a team is trapped with the ball in its own end zone.

Finally, a team can score three points on a field goal from anywhere on the field with a kick from the ground that sails between the opponent's goalposts and over the crossbar.

Most field goals cover less than 36 meters, and field goals of more than 45 meters are rare. In recent years a number of talented soccer players from abroad have signed contracts to kick for professional teams.

A game has an hour's action, divided into four quarters. Because the clock is stopped between most plays, the game lasts about two and a half hours, including a break.

Each team has 11 players on the field at one time. The team with the ball, the offense, tries to move the ball across the defensive team's goal line by running, passing or kicking a field goal. The defensive team attempts to stop the offensive team by tackling the ballcarrier, knocking down or intercepting passes thrown by the offense, or by blocking kicks.

Play commences after a kickoff, which the receiving team catches and tries to return as far as possible upfield. The offensive team then has four plays, or "downs," to advance the ball at least nine meters. If it does this, it is credited with a first down and earns four more plays to try to advance another nine meters. A team can keep the ball as long as it continues to make first downs or until it crosses the goal line or kicks a field goal.

If the offensive team fails to gain nine meters in its four plays, it must turn the ball over to the other team. Usually when a team fails to gain nine meters in its first three plays, it will "punt," or drop and kick the ball before it touches the ground, to the other team, to improve its field position.

One of the best times to enjoy the color and excitement of football is on a Saturday, when college teams clash. They are organized by geographical proximity into conferences of eight or ten colleges or universities, but a number of teams playas independents.

Although there is no formal method of determining the national college champion, two U.S. news organizations-the Associated Press and United Press International-have panels of sportswriters and coaches, respectively, who rate the top 20 teams. These ran kings come out before the season begins, then weekly until the conclusion of the bowl games. Usually, the two polls are similar, but

more than one season has ended with each proclaiming a different "national champion."

Attendance exceeds 36.5 million annually for college football and the spectacle that surrounds it. The game, of course, is the central focus, but there is much supporting activity. Cheerleaders direct yells of encouragement for their own teams. Many universities also organize sections for fans who perform complex stunts spelling out messages with thousands of pieces of colored cardboard. College bands play before, during and after the games and take to the field at halftime to play and perform intricate marching maneuvers.

"You have to look at football from a standpoint of being an attraction, because it draws people together for pageantry," says Jackie Sherrill, head coach of Texas A&M (Agricultural and Mechanical) University.

"Going to a football game is a way for people to remain a part of a university, and many use it as a social gathering."

Professional football dates back to the mid1800s, but it didn't get going until 1921, when the National Football League (NFL) was organized. The NFL today is made up of 28 teams each of which plays a 16-game schedule.

At the end of the season the ten leading teams qualify for the playoffs, which culminate in the Super Bowl (see article on pages 22-27).

In an effort to make all of its teams competitive, the NFL employs a draft system in which clubs select eligible college players one at a time. The team with the poorest record in the previous season picks first, and so on. Teams often trade draft choices for established players or for future draft choices. The 12team United States Football League, which began play in 1983, is challenging the NFL by signing some college stars to high-salary contracts.

Teams employ scouts and use computer programs to evaluate players prior to the draft. As sophisticated as these methods are, some of the greatest players have been passed over in the draft because they did not stand out in college. Johnny Unitas, the former quarterback for the Baltimore Colts, one of the best passers in the history of the game, wasn't drafted at all. He attended a "tryout" camp and then went on to become one of the game's outstanding performers.

0 Facing page FOOTBALL-I.

THE ELEMENTS OF AMERICAN

Offensive team; 2. Defensive team; 3. Officials' signals; 4. Goal line; 5. Goalpost; 6. End zone; 7. End line; 8. Protective equipment; 9. Overview of stadium; 10. Placekicking; 11. Punting; 12. Football.

Although the Christmas season is behind us, I notice that some of the qualities associated with it remain with us still--the vision of peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, the generosity of spirit, the joy that comes from helping others.

I have seen this here in India with the concern of private citizens for those who have suffered the century's worst drought; the money that has been raised for them by individual donations, benefit performances, corporation contributions and government action has been truly heartwarming.

I also see those same qualities occurring in my own country.

Christmas is probably America's favorite holiday, a time for celebration with parties, the exchange of gifts between friends and relatives, holiday travel. But what many people outside of the United States may not know is that the period just before the Christmas season is also a time when the nation pledges itself anew to the spirit of giving--caring for its afflicted and disadvantaged members.

There are concerted voluntary campaigns encouraging citizens and corporations to pledge contributions to thousands of organizations helping millions of needy people.

Throughout the year, individual charities involve volunteers in fund-raising activities such as bake sales, solicitations of funds door-to-door, 24-hour telethons challenging viewers to match contributions of others, benefit tournaments that golfers pay to play in, charity concerts, walkathons where children ask family and neighbors to pledge $1 or so to a charity for each kilometer they walk. There are also spontaneous gifts--coins dropped in boxes in supermarkets, banks, airports.

The donations may be small, but they add up. In a recent year, for example, Americans gave $60,000 million to charities, 90 percent of it from individuals.

As in India, the tax policy in America deliberately fosters this tradition of giving. Says John Gardner, founder of Common Cause, a voluntary, nonprofit citizen group, "•••preserving a role for the private citizen in these matters encourages individual involvement and keeps alive the sense of personal caring and concern that is so essential if a mass society is to retain an element of humaneness."

This is perhaps the most important aspect of giving. One can contribute money and remain uninvolved, but once he or she volunteers to help, a personal commitment to caring and concern is made. As early as the 1830s, the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville saw something about Americans that is still visible.

"1 have often admired," he pointed out in Democracy in America, "the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common Object for the exertions of a great many men and induce them voluntarily to pursue it."

There are literally thousands of voluntary citizen groups, similar to Common Cause, allover the country, actively engaged in causes they believe in. These can range from a campaign against drug abuse or drunken driving to care for the environment, or the aged; from consumer protection, human rights and minority rights to legal aid for the poor. As many as 70 million Americans offer their services to the Red Cross alone each year.

Individual philanthropy, volunteerism and citizen concern with the issues of the day are important components of democracy at work on the grass-roots level.

A Disarming Summit

b,PRESIDENTRONALDREAGA

Last month, President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the historic INF treaty in Washington, D.C., under which the United States and the Soviet Union will eliminate their intermediate-range nuclear missile forces. Addressing the American people soon after, President Reagan said, "1believe this treaty represents a landmark in postwar history." The treaty, he added, is the first critical step "toward building a more durable peace." Here is an abridged version of his speech.

As I am speaking to you now, General Secretary Gorbachev is leaving on his return trip to the Soviet Union. His departure marks the end of three historic days here in Washington in which Mr. Gorbachev and I continued to build a foundation for better relations between our governments and our peoples.

During these three days we took a steponly a first step, but still a critical onetoward building a more durable peace; indeed, a step that may be the most important taken since World War" to slow down the arms buildup.

I am referring to the treaty that we signed. I believe this treaty represents a landmark in postwar history because it is not just an arms control but an arms reduction agreement. Unlike treaties of the past, this agreement does not simply establish ceilings for new weapons; it actually reduces the number of such weapons. In fact, it altogether abolishes an entire class of U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles.

The verification measures in this treaty are also something new, with far-reaching implications.

On-site inspections and short-notice inspections will be permitted within the Soviet Union. Again, this is a first-time event, a breakthrough.

That is why I believe this treaty will not only lessen the threat of war but can also speed along a process that may someday remove that threat entirely. Indeed, this treaty-and all that we have achieved during this summit-signals a broader understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is an understanding that will help keep the peace as we work toward the ultimate goal of our foreign policy: A world where the people of every land can decide for themselves their form of govern-

ment and way of life.

Yet as important as the INF treaty is, there is a further and even more crucial point about the entire summit process: Soviet-American relations are no longer focused only on arms control issues; they now cover a far broader agenda, one that has-at its root-realism and candor.

Let me explain this with a saying I have often repeated: Nations do not distrust each other because they are armed, they are armed because they distrust each other.

And just as real peace means the presence of freedom and justice, as well as the absence of war, so too, summits must be discussions not just about arms but about the fundamental differences that cause nations to be armed.

Dealing then with the deeper sources of conflict between nations and systems of government is a practical and moral imperative. That is why it was vital to establish a broader summit agenda, one that dealt not only with arms reductions but also peopleto-people contacts between our nations and-most important-the issues of human rights and regional conflicts.

This is the summit agenda we have adopted. By doing so, we have dealt not just with arms control issues but also with fundamental problems such as Soviet expansionism and human rights violations, as well as our own moral opposition to the ideology that justifies such practices. In this way, we have put Soviet-American relations on a far more candid and far more realistic footing.

It also means that while there is movement-indeed, dramatic movement-in

the arms reduction area, much remains to be done in that area as well as in these other critical areas I have mentioned, especially-and this goes without saying-in advancing our goal of a world open to the expansion of human freedom and the growth of democratic government.

So, much work lies ahead .... • On the matter of regional conflicts, I spoke candidly with Mr. Gorbachev on the issue of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Cambodia, Angola and Nicaragua. I continue to have high hopes-and he assured me that he did too-that we can have real cooperation in resolving regional conflicts on terms that promote peace and freedom. This is essential to a lasting improvement in our relations. • So too, on human rights, there was some very limited movement: resolution of a number of individual cases, in which prisoners will be released or exit visas granted. There were assurances of future, more substantial movement, which we hope to see become a reality. • And, finally, with regard to the last item on our agenda-scientific, educational, cultural and economic exchangeswe agreed to expand cooperation in ways that will break down some of the artificial barriers between our nations. For example, agreement was reached to expand and improve civil air service between our two countries.

But let me point out here that while much work is ahead of us, the progress we have made, especially in arms reduction, does reflect a better understanding between ourselves and the Soviets ....

Now that the treaty has been signed, it will be submitted to the Senate for the next step, the ratification process. [ will meet with the leadership of Congress, and I am confident that the Senate will now act in an expeditious way to fulfill its duty under our Constitution.

To this end, let me explain the background. In the mid- and late-1970s, the Soviets began to deploy hundreds of new, mobile intermediate-range missiles, capable of destroying major cities and military installations in Europe and Asia. This action was an unprovoked, new dimension of the threat against our allies on both continents, a new threat to which the democratic nations had no comparable counter.

Despite intense pressure from the Soviets, NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] proceeded with what we called a "two-track policy." First, we would deploy a limited number,of our own INF missiles as a deterrent but at the same time, push hard in negotiations to do away with this entirely new nuclear threat. And we set out to do this with a formula I first put forward in 1981-it was called the zero option; it meant the complete elimination of these missiles on both sides.

A t first, many called this a mere propaganda ploy. But we were persistent, our allies steadfast, and eventually the Soviets returned to the bargaining table. The result is our INF treaty.

The Soviet missiles, which will be removed and eliminated under the treaty, have been a major threat to the security of our friends and allies on two continents, Europe and Asia. Under the terms of this treaty, we will be eliminating 400 deployed warheads while the Soviet Union eliminates 1,600, or four times as many.

Now let me also point out that this does not, however, leave NATO unprotected. In fact, we will maintain a substantial deterrent force on the ground, in the air and at sea. Our commitment to NATO's strategy of being able to respond as necessary to any form of aggression remains steadfast.

And with regard to verification, as I have mentioned, we have the breakthroughs of on-site inspections and short-notice inspections not only at potential missile deployment sites but at the facility where the Soviet SS-20 missiles and their components have been assembled. We have a verification procedure that assures each side that the missiles of the other side have been destroyed and that new ones aren't built.

Here, then, is a treaty that shows how

persistence and consistency eventually can payoff in arms negotiations.

But if persistence is paying off in our arms reductions efforts, the question of human rights and regional conflicts are still problems in our relations. But T am pleased that some progress has been made in these areas also.

Now, in addition to these candid exchanges on our four-part agenda, Mr. Gorbachev and I did do some important planning for a Moscow summit next year. We agreed that we must redouble our efforts to reach agreements on reducing the levels of U.S. and Soviet long-range or strategic nuclear arms as I have proposed in the START [Strategic Arms Reduction Talks] negotiations. He and I made real progress toward our goal first agreed to at Geneva-to achieve deep, SO-percent cuts in our arsenals of those powerful weapons.

We agreed that we should build on our efforts to achieve agreement on a START treaty at the earliest possible date; and we have instructed our delegations in Geneva accordingly.

Now, I believe deep reduction in these offensive weapons-along with the development of SOl [Strategic Defense Initiative]-would do much to make the world safer. For that reason, I made it clear that our SOl program will continue, and that when we have a defense ready to deploy,we will do so.

About the future, Mr. Gorbachev and I also agreed that, as nuclear weapons are reduced, it becomes all the more important to redress the disparities in conventional and chemical weapons, where the Soviets now enjoy significant advantages over the United States and our allies.

I think then from all of this you can see not only the direction of Soviet-American relations but the larger framework of American foreign policy. As T told the British Parliament in 1982, we seek to rid the world of the two great nightmares of the postwar era: The threat of nuclear war and the threat of totalitarianism.

That is why, by pursuing SOl, which is a defense against offensive missiles, and by going fOf arms reducti'on rather than just arms control, we are moving away from the socalled policy of Mutual Assured Destruction by which nations hold each other hostage to nuclear terror and destruction. So too, we are saying that the postwar policy of containment is no longer enough, that the goal of American foreign policy is both world peace and world free-

dom-that as a people we hope, and will work, for a day when all of God's children will enjoy the human dignity that their creator intended. I believe we gained some ground with regard to that cause in these last few days.

Since my first days in office, I have argued that the future belongs not to repressive or totalitarian ways of life but to the cause of freedom-freedom of the marketplace, freedom to speak, assemble and vote. And when we see the progress of democracy in these last [few] years-from Latin America to Asia-we must be optimistic about the future of our children.

When we were together in Iceland, Mr. Gorbachev told me that this sort of talk is sometimes viewed in the Soviet Union as a threat. I told him then and I have said since then that this is no threat at all but only a dream, the American Dream.

And it is a dream that has meant so much to so many-a dream that still shines out to the world. You know a couple of years ago, [my wife] Nancy and I were deeply moved by a story told by former New York Times reporter and Greek immigrant, Nicholas Gage. It is the story of Eleni, his mother, a woman caught in one of the terrible struggles of the postwar era: the Greek civil war at the end of World War II-a mother who was tried and executed because she smuggled her children out to safety in America.

It is also the story of how her son secretly vowed to return to Greece someday to take vengeance on the man who had sent his mother to her death. But at the end of the story Nicholas Gage finds he cannot extract the vengeance he promised himself.

Mr. Gage writes that it would have relieved the pain that had filled him for so many years, but it would also have broken the one bridge still connecting him to his mother, that part of him most like her. As he tells it: "And her final cry ... was not a curse on her killers but an invocation of what she died for, a declaration of love."

These simple last words of Mr. Gage's mother, of Eleni, were: "My children."

How that cry echoes down through the centuries, a cry for all children of the world, a cry for peace, for a world of love and understanding ....

To sum up then: This summit was a clear success; we made progress on each item in our four-part agenda. Mr. Gorbachev and I have agreed in several months in Moscow to continue what we have achieved in these past three days. I believe there is reason for both hope and optimism.

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How the World Media Reacted

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The portrait of President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev smiling side by side over the signed INF treaty was from-paged around the world as . foreign media reported thm 'peace has broken out."

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elimination of a whole breed of weapons ....

"Gorbachev deserves a great deal of respect. His courage in accepting Reagan's medium-range missile proposals is matched only by his ability to convince his own orthodox colleagues [in the Soviet Union] that the disarmament process benefits ... the cradle ofsociaJism as well.

"By contrast, Reagan seems somehow forgotten. It is taken for granted that he is also part of the dramatic story that led to the INF deal and this week's summit in Washington.

Tuesday's ceremony showed Reagan as a triumphant, flexible and firm leader who, with some help from his Soviet counterpart, was able to translate the dream of reducing the world's weapons into reality .... " "Change of Heart in U.S. Population" A column by a Russian correspondent in centrist La Presse of Ottawa said, "Whatever one may say, such a rapid change in political perceptions compared to the political climate of the early 1980s incontestably is due to the American leadership's perception of a change of heart in the U.S. population about nuclear war. ... " POLAND: Treaty Has "Won Trust" Communist Party paper Trybuna Ludu of December 8 ran a byliner's assertion that the treaty "has won the principle of trust, supported by means of effective implementation of its provisions.

"For the first time the two sides agreed on onsite inspections of warheads and missiles, and for the presence of observers in the plants where the weapons are produced and assembled ...."

PHILIPPINES: "European and Asian Papers Are Hailing the INF Treaty" A December 9 editorial in the independent Globe of Manila stated, "By most press editorials and opinion surveys, Mr. Gorbachev's 'peace offensive' seems to have caught the imagination of the world's public. European and Asian papers are hailing the INF treaty in particular and are looking forward to more concrete steps toward securing global peace."

INDIA: "Howdy, Mr. Gorbachev" The centrist Times of India said in a December 9 editorial that "Mr. Gorbachev has already impressed the West with his urbane

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IT ALY: "Gorbachev's Credibility Important to America" An editorial in centrist La Stampa of Turin concluded, "The road to serious disarmament...is still long and difficult...even though nobody denies that 'some progress' can be made these days. What i~ most important from the American point of view, however, is that Gorbachev give an overall impression of credibility, since disarmament measures are not sufficient if the two systems continue to be divided by bitter seeds of conflict."

"Hope of a Life Free From Fear" Giuseppe CoCentrist Il Messaggero's lumba said from Washington, "The destruction of U.S. and Soviet missiles on the European theater. ..has given way for everyone to the hope of a life free from fear. ...

"Who in the world would have ever thought of such an intimate exchange and such an astonishing 'opening' between the two great ad versaries? ... " WEST GERMANY: "Toughest and Most Rigid Verification Schedule Ever" TV One's evening newscast "Tagesschau" commented December 8, "The verification rules of this treaty deserve special praise. Almost two-thirds of the accord is devoted to this subject, and it is the toughest and most rigid verification schedule ever. ...All this will substantially change the relations between the superpowers ...."

BELGIUM: "New Period of Detente, Dialogue and Even Cooperation" Conservative, Catholic Gazet van Antwerpen remarked December 9, "In fact, what it is all about in Washington is no longer the removal of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, but a new period of detente, dialogue and even cooperation ...."

IRELAND: "Agreement Can Only be Hailed as Historic" In the view of the December 9 conservative Irish Independent, "No matter what suspicions each side may still have about the other, this agreement can only be hailed as historic .... " CANADA: "Reagan-Triumphant, Flexible and Firm Leader" In the view of centrist Ottawa Citizen December 9, the INF treaty "is a true achievement: the

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"Indeed, America's so-called 'silent majority' has paid the Russian leader its ultimate compliment by equating him with a 'traveling salesman' with whom it should be possible to do business."

"A Moment in History" Commenting editorially December 10 on the INF treaty, the independent Hindustan Times of New Delhi said: "Politicians play to the gallery; statesmen to history. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could have followed an easy course and followed the advice of conservatives in their backyards and in the process consolidated their power. The world has gained by their choosing to shun the easy course. By lending their signatures to the intermediate-range nuclear forces agreement the two leaders have seized a moment which, if rightly followed, will be historic."

ISRAEL: "The Light at the End ofthe Tunnel" In a December 9 editorial, liberal Hadashot noted: "The inhabitants of our planet, who for the last 40 years lived under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, can at long last see the light at the end of the tunnel. The next summit will be dealing with the ICBM issue ....

"The roads both men traveled converged yesterday at the White House assuring President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbacheva place in history," EGYPT: "An Important Agreement" An editorial in government-affiliated alGomhouriya declared that "this is an important agreement because it proves that the two giants can agree if they want to. Furthermore it raises hopes worldwide for further reductions in both nuclear and conventional weapons."

MEXICO: "Encouraging for Mankind" Natiorialistic El Sol de Mexico opined: "Although there are still dark clouds on' the horizon, the agreement is encouraging for mankind .... At last, peace seems to have gotten the chance it needed."

"Gratifying to the Third World" Official El Nacional said that "the agreement is particularly gratifying to the Third World .... Reagan and Gorbachev have now revived hopes for a world free of nuclear weapons."

0

Below: Bhagwan Prasad Saxena and his wife, Beena, tend the cactus garden on the roof of their house in Delhi. Right: It was the awesome beauty of the saguaro cactus forests in Tucson, Arizona, that turned Saxena into a cactophile.

Mammillariacompressa,one of the oldest plants in Saxena's garden, is about 25 years old. With 200 heads and over 60 centimeters in diameter, it is perhaps the largest cactus of its kind in India.

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Qutab Road near the New Delhi Railway Station is hot, crowded, chaotic. It is a narrow road and it carries ten times the traffic it is meant to: Tempos, cars, taxis, tongas, autorickshaws, handcarts, cyderickshaws and coolies bent under huge loads. The nearby railway station worsens the congestion. Tens of thousands of travelers arrive here and tens of thousands leave. So from dawn to midnight, it is bedlam on Qutab Road. One can't say there are traffic jams here. The traffic is always semijammed. The engines of auto rickshaws cough and splutter, tongawaUahs crack their whips, handcart pushers shout "chalo, chalo," and whoever has a working horn, blows it.

There is no tree, no shrub, no creeper, not a blade of grass on

Left: Beena Saxena helps her husband at grafting.

Gymnocalycium mihanovichii, an orangecolored mutant, has no chlorophyll and hence must be grafted to another cactus containing chlorophyll to provide it nourishment.

Echinocereus

pentalophus

Qutab Road. Gray, unpainted buildings flank it on both sides. But if you enter one particular building (39 Ram Nagar) and take the staircase to the roof, you will burst upon one of the most exotic cactus collections in Asia. I did. And I was knocked out. I saw cacti that were balls of fur. I saw a plant that looked like an eagle in flight, another that was a little more than one centimeter high, cream-colored, and resembled a stone. I saw wriggly cacti, snakelike cacti, old cacti and young cacti and, finally, thanks to skillful grafting, there were green stems on which were perched orange, dark brown, yellow and purple bulbs.

This cactus garden with 1,200 varieties is the creation of Bhagwan Prasad Saxena, 50, who lives one flight below. A zoology

in bloom.

lecturer in Delhi University's Deshbandhu College, he lives, breathes and dreams cacti. Every morning he walks among his 5,000 flowerpots, a bla<;lein his hand, slicing away a portion oJ a cactus that has begun rotting, watering another that is drying up, removing one cactus and putting it into another pot.

But what Saxena loves most is grafting. One morning I saw him do it. With a blade he first cut away the top bit of a green stem.

Then he took a small bulb from another plant, and after cutting away its lower portion, tied it on top of the snipped stem with a bit of string. "I have to do this," he explains, "because the stem tends to throwaway the bulb. But if! keep the bulb in place for 15 days, then it takes root in the stem and becomes part of the plant."

Serious cactus growers do not number more than a few score in India, so I asked Saxena whether people considered his hobby odd. "They consider me eccentric," he laughs. "They say I grow thorns. " What is it about cacti that he likes most?

"Their amazing shapes," Saxena says. "Look at these, for example. You can see round cacti, flat cacti, tall cacti, short cacti.

Some have leaves, some don't. Even the thorns are different.

Often, two identical plants will have different kinds of thorns. And when a cactus flowers, it is the most fascinating sight on Earth.

Scores of flowers will appear overnight on one plant and their colors will be pink, brown, purple, mauve, orange, dark blue, light green--every conceivable color you can think of in every conceivable combination."

Saxena first started keeping cacti when he was 22 and studying for his master's degree at Delhi University. But his interest was erratic. Then, in 1964, he went to the United States and joined the University of Kansas; the next year his passion was born.

It happened by accident. He had gone to meet an old friend in Arizona-the home of cacti-and on the way he happened to pass

"Don't underestimate the cactus's utility.

It is one of God's remarkable creations. It doesn't need care, it doesn't need much water. We should grow it in rocky and sandy regions to check soil erosion." through the Saguaro National Monument near Tucson. "I saw hundreds of these saguaro cacti, many 15 meters high, and that sight changed my life. They looked so beautiful in that bleak landscape.

Like sentinels guarding the Earth's treasures. There was no sound that afternoon as I gazed at these saguaros reaching up into the sky. There was no movement either, except for an eagle wheeling overhead. I thought to myself: 'God, how desolate this scene is.'

For months those saguaros kept reappearing in my dreams."

Saxena became a cactophile, as cactus lovers like to call themselves. And he returned to Arizona again and again. "During my seven-year stay in the United States, from 1964 to 1971, I saw every bit of America, except Alaska and Hawaii, but it was Arizona that kept haunting me," he says. "My passion for cacti was reinforced by Arizona's Grand Canyon. I would gaze at the rust-red rocky cliffs above and the Colorado River below and somehow those saguaros would keep flashing in my mind."

Returning to India in 1971 with a PhD in ecology, Saxena joined Deshbandhu College as a lecturer and soon after got married. He began keeping cacti, buying them at flower shows and asking friends of his in the United States to send him some. His wife, Beena, couldn't understand his love for cacti. "Why are you wasting money on these thorns?" she would ask. "Listen," Saxena would answer, "I don't drink, I don't smoke and I don't spend on entertaining. So let me spend on this hobby." Beena shrugged her shoulders but did not argue with him after that.

And Saxena continued with his hobby, even though it was becoming an increasingly expensive one. Keeping cacti meant buying not just the plants but also flowerpots, fertilizer, soil and insecticide. By now his family had grown to include three children.

His wife did not do a job. "I was perpetually short of money, but somehow or the other, I always added to my cactus collection," he says. By 1979, he had around 400 cactus varieties and 2,000 pots.

Saxena came to be so well known that he was asked to judge entries at flower shows. He recently founded the Cacti and Succulents Society of India of which he is president. It is the only society in Asia affiliated to the American Cacti and Succulents Society.

Bee~a's initial skepticism about her husband's hobby gradually turned into an appreciation for the beauty of their cacti collection.

For many years now she has been tending the cacti too and has, according to Saxena, become as knowledgeable as he.

Last September a rare cactus of theirs died. The next day both husband and wife did not eat. "It's like seeing your own child die," says Beena. Her husband nods.

Remembering something, Saxena takes me to his bedroom. On the floor is a green stem and a large bulb. "I had grafted that bulb on the stem but a cat knocked it down and the bulb broke off," he says. Can't he put it back? "No," Saxena replies. "I will make several pieces of the bulb and graft them on several stems." But he rates their survival at ten percent.

And the battle for the survival of the cactus garden itself is a constant one. The Saxenas' first problem is space: their roof simply isn't large enough for them to have as many cactus plants as they would like to have. And stray cats and birds often knock down or peck at cacti. But a bigger problem is that their neighborhood is so congested that hardly any breeze blows. And since cacti, like any other plants, need breeze to thrive, the Saxenas' collection remains stunted. No breeze-but there is plenty of soot from trains at the nearby New Delhi Railway Station.

"What I want," Saxena says, "is around 450 square meters of open space anywhere outside Delhi. There I will grow my cacti and other succulents on natural soil, and I will build a house which I will name 'The Cactus House.'''

Meanwhile, cactus growers from all over the world who hear of Saxena's collection drop into his place, often unannounced, to see the small but lush roof garden. "Only a few days ago a foreigner came here and he sat before my plants for more than four hours, not stirring," he says.

To that gray, bleak concrete of Qutab Road, Saxena has brought a bit of nature. That is why, every year, a bulbul and a dove come to the cactus plants, lay their eggs, and rear their offspring. Though these are the very birds that at other times peck at and damage his cacti, Saxena loves this annual ritual. "This is life renewing itself," he says.

But, finally, I ask Saxena, what purpose do cacti serve?

"Listen," he says, "don't underestimate the cactus's utility. It is one of God's remarkable creations. It doesn't need care, it doesn't need much water. We should grow it in rocky and sandy regions to check soil erosion, which is a great problem in India. In fact, I would suggest that we plant cacti in the Aravalli range and then nature will do the rest. Birds and winds will spread the cacti seeds and more cacti will grow and they will keep the soil together."

India can export cacti too, "just as we export roses or vegetables. There are 500 nurseries in the United States alone," Saxena points out. "If we grow cacti on a commercial scale we can export them even to the United States and Western Europe."

Would he consider going into the export business himself?

"Well, maybe, after I retire. Right now, I hardly have any space to grow duplicates and sell them. If I get a bigger place, have soiL." That Cactus House dream again.

0 About the Author: Arvind Ka/a, who was formerly with the Indian Express and Reader's Digest, now runs Special Stories, afealures agency in Delhi.

What Is Science

Doing About It?

Whether it is a migraine headache or an arthritis pain, to the sufferer the agony is made worse by the fact that no remedy really works. But now help may be around the corner. Recent American discoveries about how chemicals in the body transmit and block pain are paving the way for new approaches to interrupting the body's perception of pain.

If there IS such a thing as a universal human experience, pain is it. In the United States alone, every year, some 40 million adults experience chronic, debilitating headaches, 100 million have a bout with back pain and 90 million a hurtful throbbing in their joints.

As a strategy for surviving in a hostile world, pain is a brilliant biological invention. Countless times every day, pain saves us from injury, warning us that a suitcase is too heavy to lift, that a hot plate is a bad place to rest a hand, that a twisted ankle needs a rest.

But all too often, pain becomes "a burglar alarm nobody can shut off," says Dr. Mitchell Max of the Pain Research Facility at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. After many years of apathy to the problems of these chronic-pain sufferers, medical science is beginning to take the problem seriously. "Two decades ago, doctors did not know how to help a patient," says Dr. Ronald Dubner, chief of pain research at the U.S. National Institute of Dental Researcb. "Now they can successfully treat many cases."

For most of us the quest for relief begins with familiar, oVer-the-counter remedies.

Some 30,000 million aspirin tablets alone were swallowed last year in the United States. Add the cost of prescription drugs, surgery, psychotherapy-and the wide assortment of quack remedies peddled to victims of chronic pain-and the total annual American health-care tab for pain * With Joseph Carey.

Joanne Silberner.

Stanley

N.

Wellborn

and

approaches $40,000 million. Society's bill is even greater. A 1985 Harris Survey found that the average full-time American employee loses five workdays per year specifically because of pain problems.

That represents a productivity loss of $55,000 million.

If there were any doubt that pain is big business, consider the 1,000 or so pain centers and clinics that have sprung up throughout the United States to meet the demand. They range from comprehensive

Doctors at the Pain Research Facility of the American National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, examine a slide of spinal cord tissue sections to learn more about neurotransmitters in pain pathways.

pain centers affiliated with major research universities, to well-intentioned but not always knowledgeable practitioners attracted to what is seen as a hot new field of medical practice, to downright frauds who offer such pure quackery as injections of

bee venom to treat arthritis. From the reputable to the criminal, they are all doing a booming business.

Yet for the one in three Americans who suffers from chronic pain, especially back pain, arthritis and recurrent headaches, all too often relief has been elusive at any price. A key reason, say pain specialists, is that chronic pain has been chronically mismanaged by the medical community.

"Many patients with chronic pain do not respond to medical care provided them, and their suffering and disability remain and, with time, increase," says Dr. John Bonica of the University of Washington in Seattle, who pioneered the concept of the comprehensive-pain-treatment center.

Chronic-pain sufferers readily fall into a vicious circle, as excessive medication, loss of sleep, fear of physical activity and frustration and depression exacerbate the original pain. If, as often happens, physicians can find no physical cause for the pain, they may dismiss the complaint, and this backof-the-hand treatment can send the patient's state of mind spiraling further downward. The pain frequently takes over as the central focus of their lives.

Part of the reason most clinicians are bad at treating chronic pain is that they don't know much about it. Psychologist John Liebeskind notes that the medical students he teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles receive a total of three hours of lectures on the treatment of pain during their four years of medical study. That is unfortunately typical of most medical schools in America. And until quite recently, the medical community's indifference was reflected in research priorities as well. "Pain research remained conceptually stagnant for nearly a century," says Bonica.

Research has now taken off, however.

New discoveries about how chemicals in the body transmit and block pain are paving the way for a variety of new approaches to interrupting the body's perception of pain. The simple old notion of pain speeding along a sort of organic telephone line to the brain is actually much more complicated. There are two sets of pain signals, and the body has its own set of painfighting chemicals that are dispatched to various points when needed (see box on page 13).

Another major break has come in the growing recognition that while chronic pain usually begins as a medical problem, emotions and behavior frequently reinforce it. Effective treatment requires help-

ing patients to break out of their "pain behavior"-the depression and fear of activity that can perpetuate chronic suffering.

Such treatment programs have achieved dramatic results, especially in treating back pain. And even where no cure is possiblethe chronic pain that results from arthritis or certain injuries are examples-American pain centers have helped many patients learn to deal with their pain and regain some control over their lives. "For many of our patients, we are the end of the line," says Thomas Rudy, associate director of the University of Pittsburgh/Presbyterian University Hospital's Center for Pain Evaluation and Treatment.

Retired nurse Florence Dillon is a painful case in point. She recently came to the center after four years of medication and a nerve-block operation failed to relieve the pain of a back injury she suffered while helping a bedridden man in a body cast turn over. "I had gotten to the bottom," she says. At the clinic, she was told that a second operation a surgeon had recommended probably would not help. Instead, the center helped to wean her from the pain medication she was taking, provided physical therapy and an exercise program, and counseled her to avoid activities such as cleaning that strain her back. "It's not that I'm without pain," says Dillon of the results. "But it's not bone-on-bone pain. I have learned there are certain things I will never be able to do, like lift a one-year-old grandchild. I have learned to accept it and to live around it."

Today, in fact, nearly all postsurgical pain and most cancer pain can be treated effectively. The pain of arthritis generally responds well to aspirin and exercise.

Tough challenges remain in headaches, low back and muscle and skeletal pain. But in almost every case, something can be done.

Headache

Above: An illustration based on a thermogram-temperalure map-of a patient with a migraine headache caused by sinus congestion. The red shows where increased bloodflow has made the painjitl area hOller. Facing page, above: Harold Clulls's chronic pain is blocked by this lillIe box, an electrostimulator, which sends electrical impulses 10 electrodes in his brain to produce nalural pain-relieving substances. Leji: The Pain Research Facilily is one of lhe more lhan 1,000 centers in lhe Uniled Slales researching ways 10 end lhe agony of sufferers.

As a strategy for surviving in a hostile world, pain is a brilliant biological invention.

But all too often it becomes "a burglar alarm nobody can shut off."

They approach like a "pounding terror," says California writer Joan Didion. "That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing. " If the language seems overwrought, don't tell the 40 million people in the United States alone who seek specialized treatment for chronic, debilitating headaches. "More time is lost to headache than all the time lost to heart disease, stroke and cancer combined," says Dr. David Coddon, director of the Mount Sinai Headache Clinic in New York City.

"Headaches can make people miserable over entire lifetimes."

Experts at the two dozen clinics around the United States that specialize in headache pain also note that headaches very rarely-about one percent of the timeindicate a serious underlying health problem, such as brain tumors or head concussIOns. Researchers have identified three predominant types of headaches-migraine, tension and cluster. Tension headaches are far and away the most common. When someone is under stress or is unusually depressed or tired, muscles in the head and neck tighten, producing a "hatband" of

pain that many patients describe as a feeling that their heads are being squeezed in a vise. A survey by Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey, found that 84 percent of managers and executives in the United States have occasional tension headaches, and 29 percent reported headaches several times a month.

Fortunately, most tension headaches respond well to drugstore standbys. But experts say that the recommended adult dosages for many over-the-counter analgesics in the United States are overly conservative, and inadequate to kill the pain. The labels on some traditional nonprescription pain relievers specify a dose of two regularstrength, 325-milligram tablets. Yet many headache sufferers may actually require three tablets, says Harold DeMonaco, director of pharmacy at Massachusetts General Hospital. In the case of some over-thecounter products that contain ibuprofen, two to four 200-milligram tablets may be needed every four to six hours to ease a headache. That is the dosage doctors usually prescribe when ibuprofen is taken by prescription.

Logic notwithstanding, no one should increase the dosage of these pain relievers before checking with their doctor.

There are nonpharmaceutical remedies, too. One of the most successful is biofeedback, in which patients are trained to relax deeply and redirect blood flow to the arms and legs, reducing pressure in the head.

About 75 percent of headache sufferers who try biofeedback eventually find that it does provide them some relief.

In the case of migraines, both the cause and the treatment remain much more elusive. Migraines appear to involve not tight muscles, but rather blood vessels in the head that swell up and irritate nerves. But just what triggers the swelling varies greatly from person to person. Some victims say that a sudden release of stress precipitates a full-blown migraine. Others cite certain foods or weather conditions, menstruation and exertion, from jogging to sex.

Dealing with migraines seems to be mostly a matter of prevention. Experts say that migraine sufferers should stay in good geJ;leral health, eat regularly, avoid foods that may provoke attacks, get into a regular sleep routine and track possible clues by keeping a diary of things that seem to trigger attacks. Once an attack is in full swing, usually little can be done short of the time-honored remedy of retreating to a dark room and bed for hours or even days

until the throbbing finally subsides.

Cluster headaches are shorter-lived and affect only one or two percent of the U.S. population, nearly always men. But the pain, usually centered around one eye, is so intense that some sufferers have been driven to suicide. "I used to wake up at night with such pain that I started banging my head against the wall and then ran like a wild man out in the street in my undershorts," recalls Joseph Venditto, deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department's explosives unit. "I wanted to take my eyeball right out of my head."

Doctors at the Montefiore Medical Center Headache Unit in New York gradually brought Venditto's pain under control. At Montefiore, many patients like Venditto are given so-called calcium channel blockers. Calcium flowing into the muscular walls of blood vessels in the head can set off muscle spasms and cause the vessels to constrict, increasing pressure. The drug slows the calcium flow.

Dr. Seymour Solomon, director of the Montefiore program, believes that cluster headaches also may result from instability in the body's production of chemicals such as serotonin and norepinephrine, which regulate the brain's perception of pain. But why these headaches seem to affect mostly men and only a localized area of the head is not known. "Many of these changes occur at the submicroscopic level, and the exact mechanism isn't yet fully understood," he says.

Back About ten years ago, specialists at South Shore Hospital in Miami Beach noticed that many patients who came in for back surgery had difficulty doing the prescribed reconditioning exercises following their operations. Neurosurgeon Hubert Rosomoff, who directs the University of Miami Comprehensive Pain and Rehabilitation Center at the hospital, decided to bring patients in two weeks before surgery, so they could better learn the reconditioning techniques and get back into shape faster after their operation. To the delight of the patients and the surprise of the medical team, the exercises worked so well that they made the surgery unnecessary.

The doctors concluded that the pain came not from ruptured disks and bone spurs pressing on nerves, the usual reason for back operations, but from muscles, tendons and ligaments surrounding the nerves. The team has now turned a four-week course of

intensive exercises, originally intended to build up endurance and teach patients to use their muscles properly, into a regular treatment program. It has given them an 86 percent success rate in more than 7,000 patients followed for up to seven years.

More pain specialists are recognizing that back surgery is frequently unnecessary. In fact, says Dr. John Loeser, a professor of neurological surgery and director of the Clinical Pain Service at the University of Washington in Seattle, "unless a patient has a clear-cut indication that it is due to a ruptured disk, an operation may make it worse." New diagnostic techniques have helped to identify the one percent of patients whose back pain definitely comes from structural damage such as a ruptured disk. CAT scans, in which an X-ray machine rotates around the body to produce X-ray "slices" that a computer can turn into three-dimensional images, can provide a precise picture of such damage. Nuclear magnetic resonance, another imaging technique that promises even more detailed pictures without any exposure to X-rays, is now under study.

For the other 99 percent who represent the vast majority of patients with back pain, diagnosis and treatment are less clear-cut. "We have a very poor understanding of who gets severe back pain and why, and our management of it leaves much to be desired," says Loeser. About all doctors can say with assurance is that most back pain, from a crick upon waking to the twisted agony that turns adults into parodies of crabs, will go away within a few weeks-and that patients can take steps to avoid chronic problems. "Risk factors that increase the likelihood of long-term problems are being overweight, out of shape and having a physically and mentally stressful job," says Loeser.

Recurring back pain can become a vicious circle in which ineffective treatments, frustration and depression feed on themselves. There are hundreds of treatmentsincluding special diets, special exercises, heat, deep brain stimulation, acupuncture and nerve stimulation through the skin. .While each may work for some people, none has ever been proven effective in controlled clinical studies.

Many pain centers emphasize the need to break the patients' "pain behavior."

Wilbert Fordyce, a psychologist at the University of Washington pain center, says that the health-care system, and even social attitudes, encourage behavior that traps a

@ From the thalamus the message continues on to the cerebral cortex, where pain perception occurs

A New Route to Comprehending Pain Scientists thought for decades that pain was like a message sent over a telegraph line: Nerve cells simply sent electrical impulses to the brain. But new research is uncovering a vastly more complicated picture, one involving dozens ofbiochemical and electrical processes that can operate both to heighten and to dull our perception of painful stimuli. While the complete pathway still is not fully understood, recent discoveries point to¡ new ways the pain process might be interrupted. "Until very recently the picture was black and white," says Allan Basbaum, a neurobiologist at the University of California in San Francisco. "We can now add color."

The process starts at the point of injury.

Say you burn your finger on the stove.

The sudden heat stimulates two types of nerves-"slow" ones and "fast" ones.

Both types respond by sending out electri. cal signals. It takes the fast impulse less than a sixth of a second to race the length of the nerve to the spinal cord. There the signal prompts a chemical called a neurotransmitter to squirt across a tiny gap to nearby spinal-cord nerve cells. These nerves carry the signal up to the brain stem and the higher brain, where you finally sense the pain. The "fast" signal is felt for only seconds, as a sharp, localized pain. The "slow" message, a sec;ond or so behind, is longer-lasting, not as localized and more disagreeable.

Back at your injured fingertip, other chemicals are exacerbating the situation.

The burned tissue has released hormones called prostaglandins, which attract blood. That is good, because blood contains white blood cells and substances that fight infection and promote healing.

But the prostaglandins also sensitize the nerve fibers, meaning that less of a stimulus will fire them off. Pressing the burned area is going to hurt a lot more than pressing your other fingertips. At least two other classes of chemicals, bradykinins and leukotrienes, also flood the site of the injury. Like prostaglandins, they make the nerves more sensitive.

The pain pathway is not a one-way street. The brain and spinal cord have their way of cooling things off. Natural painkillers, including one called

Pain messsage is carried along nerves leading to spinal cord

Injured tissue produces prostaglandins, substances that increase pain sensitivity.

Drugs such as aspirin inhibit their production. Other substances that increase pain might be inhibited as well. At the spinal cord, pain is relayed to the brain when chemicals called neurotransmitters plug into specific "receptor" sites. New drugs might block the receptors. Passing a tiny electrical current through the midbrain triggers it to release natural opiates that stop pain.

enkephalin, are sent down the spinal cord. Enkephalin stalls the release of substance P, a neurotransmitter in the spinal cord. With substance P neutralized, the pain message is jammed.

This new understanding also explains how some painkillers work. Aspirin, it seems, blocks the production of prostaglandins, which keeps swelling down and the nerves less exquisitely sensitive. Local anesthetics interfere with the electrical signal. Opiates, such as morphine, deactivate specialized chemicals in the nerves of the spinal cord and brain that receive the message.

The discoveries also suggest new ways to intervene. Deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes that carry a small electric current are implanted in the brain, has been used at several medical centers in the United States to block pain signals from reaching patients' brains and to stimulate the release of the brain's natural painkillers. The process carries some risk

and is only used on people who desperately need it.

While blocking substance P may seem a good idea, it leaves animals not only painfree but paralyzed. Researchers are still hopeful, however, that neurotransmitters involved in relaying pain can be zeroed in on and specifically blocked.

More immediately promising are substances that block the leukotrienes and bradykinins, the chemicals released in the area of an injury. Leukotriene inhibitors have performed well in animal trials and are going on to human testing, says Dr. Jon Levine of the University of California at San Francisco. A major benefit, he says, is that they may help people for whom drugs like aspirin don't provide relief. A group of Baltimore researchers recently reported that bradykinin-blocking drugs seemed to keep laboratory animals- pain-free. Whether they can do the same for people remains to be seen.

-Joanne Silberner

patient in chronic suffering. "A lot of patients we see are addicted to medication," says Fordyce. Many have also grown fearful that even the mildest activity will injure their backs, and perceive themselves as permanently disabled. In fact, inactivity is the worst course---exercise is essential to regaining muscle strength. A program that addresses the patient's behavior and concerns, and a carefully graduated exercise program, has proven effective for many patients who had virtually given up hope.

Joints For the millions who suffer from arthritis and other joint diseases, the knowledge that medical science can do little to cure their underlying disease can make the pain especially difficult. The sense of despair in many cases leads to severe depression and family problems. But a recent study at the University of Missouri shows how people can overcome this discouraging pattern. A group of patients with rheumatoid arthritis were given training in relaxation and other stress-reducing techniques.

The result: They had significantly less pain and a better mental outlook than two groups of patients who received standard medical treatments. Study Director Jerry Parker

sees an increasing role for such "coping programs" to complement the effect of anti-inflammatory drugs against arthritis.

Similar programs could contribute significantly to improving life for patients with other joint diseases as well. Osteoarthritis, in which the cartilage in the joints breaks down, allowing the bones to grind together painfully, afflicts about 16 million Americans, or 60 percent of those with arthritis. It is often linked to obesity. An additional seven million Americans suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, which may be caused by a viral infection or a change in the body's defense mechanism in which antibodies turn on the body's own tissue instead of attacking invaders such as bacteria. Rheumatoid arthritis occurs when the membrane lining a joint becomes inflamed and the joint becomes damaged. It often strikes the hands, arms and legs, making movement stiff and painful. Other joint diseases include gout, scleroderma and lupus-diseases of connective tissue.

Treatment is most effective when begun before the disease has gained a foothold.

Yet arthritis has not always been easy to diagnose. Discovery of a "rheumatoid factor" in the last decade has helped. The factor, which seems to be hereditary, is an

abnormal but easily spotted antibody in the blood of 80 percent of adults with rheumatoid arthritis.

X-rays are often helpful, and a biopsy, or sample of tissue, can be used in questionable cases.

Therapies don't cure arthritis but can help patients feel better and move more freely. For osteoarthritis, drugs can reduce the swelling. Aspirin, despite its mundane reputation, remains among the most effective. Steroids are only advisable for days or weeks in most cases, because they decrease resistance to infection, promote bleeding and weaken the bones. Treatment also includes physical therapy, heat and exercise. When a patient can no longer use the joint, a synthetic hip, knee or shoulder can be surgically implanted. Gold salts--ehemical compounds based on pure gold-help rheumatoid arthritis and may also actually arrest the disease. They can now be taken orally, avoiding the need for injections.

Cancer Cancer pain may be pain at its cruelest. It adds to the fear and anguish that the disease evokes, and poses a final insult to the dying. The World Health Organization estimates that 3.5 million people around the globe, including one million in the

Beyond the Limits of Traditional Medicine If you are plagued by constant pain, few would blame you for looking past the edge of established medicine for comfort.

It's only natural that you would wonder if such "alternative therapies" as hypnosis, acupuncture or massage might deliver you from pain's clutches. In fact, pain specialists increasingly are finding that some of these relatively unconventional approaches can be useful as part of a comprehensive treatment program.

• Chiropractic.

Chiropractors treat some problems of the muscles and skeleton-such as back pain, sprains, spasms and stiffness-by manipulating the spine.

Like physical therapy, such treatment can stretch tight muscles and improve muscle tone-an important step in overcoming chronic back pain in particular. There is no scientific justification, however, for the claims made by some chiropractors that a wide range of pain and diseases can be treated by manipulating the spine. In the United States, chiropractors are li-

censed to practice in all 50 states but cannot prescribe medications. And because pain may have a serious clinical cause, such as cancer or coronary heart disease, patients should see a medical doctor to rule out the possibility of an underlying illness.

• Hypnosis. Far from the brooding Svengalis of old, many of today's hypnotherapists are dentists, psychologists and physicians who use hypnosis as an adjunct to other pain therapies. Although no one really knows how hypnosis works or which people will find it helpful, experts generally think of it as an altered state of consciousness that allows some individuals to screen out pain by forming a mental picture of pleasant sounds or scenes-a process known as "imaging. " • Acupuncture. This centuries-old Chinese therapy involves the insertion of thin, stainless-steel needles into specific body sites. In a modern version, a small

electric current is passed through the needles, which apparently blocks the pain from traveling from nearby nerves. Some studies suggest that acupuncture triggers the release of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers.

Success has been reported in treating muscular and joint pain, migraine headaches and certain other types of chronic pain. The technique has yet to be proved effective, however, in controlled clinical studies.

• Massage. Once popular mainly with athletes, massage has left the parlor and entered hospitals, health clubs and corporate headquarters in the United States.

Properly administered, it can relax the muscles. Massage therapists treat chronic back pain, headaches and stress, claiming that massage-relaxed muscles heal more quickly and are less prone to injury. Contrary to some assertions, massage will not cure arthritis or remove fat. Whether or not massage provides real medical benefit, some feel that the pleasure derived

United States, suffer daily from cancer pain. About 25 percent of all cancer patients throughout the world die in severe pain, with no relief.

Yet the proper use of drugs could control the pain in more than 90 percent of these people. A landmark 1973 study at New York's Montefiore Hospital found that doctors were overly cautious in prescribing painkilling drugs for cancer patients, apparently because of fear of addicting the patient and their own lack of knowledge about proper dosages. Many studies since then have confirmed these findings. "Society has a strong antidrug attitude, and these cancer patients are caught in the middle," says Dr. Kathleen Foley, a neurologist at New York's Memorial SioanKettering Cancer Center. "There's no excuse for a cancer patient to he suffering from pain."

The wellspring of cancer pain is both physical and psychological. A tumor itself can press on a nerve or invade the bone.

Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment may alleviate cancer pain by treating the cancer, but they can also be painful themselves. The stress and fear of a cancer diagnosis often heighten a patient's perception of pain as well.

from a skillful massage is psychologically helpful. In "rolfing," a more controversial approach, the ligaments, tendons and connective tissue are massaged vigorously and deeply. This can be painful, but some patients reportedly have gotten relief from headaches, stiffness and chronic neck and back pain. â&#x20AC;˘ DMSO. Dimethyl sulfoxide-an in'dustrial solvent and veterinary medicine-is a highly controversial drug, approved in the United States only as a treatment for interstitial cystitis, a painful bladder disorder. OM SO's proponents, encouraged by animal tests, claim that the drug can relieve the chronic pain of arthritis and even reverse the course of the underlying disease. But critics insist that while DMSO may provide some temporary relief, the chemical has no effect on the swelling and inflammation of arthritis. OM SO, moreover, can give users burning and itching sensations or leave a lingering garlicky odor. Animals given

Besides providing adequate doses of painkillers, doctors can ease the suffering of cancer patients by administering opiates orally rather than by injection, according to Dr. Mitchell Max of the NIH pain clinic.

Only when reliefis needed quickly, or when a pa~ient has problems swallowing and absorbing the drug, is injection preferable.

Injections give sudden large doses that rapidly wear off, cycling the patient between overmedicated sleepiness and undermedicated pain.

One potential treatment long awaited by cancer patients in the United States has yet to be made available-heroin.

Heroin proponents claim that the drug is effective where other opiates are not. A number of countries, including Canada and Britain, already allow its use, and the hospice movement in Britain has found that heroin can be used without creating problems.

But many researchers say that heroin is a red herring. Mitchell Max of NIH says studies have shown that heroin is no better than morphine, which is already available.

Other research has proved that heroin, in fact, is converted into morphine in the body. "Those of us who did trials in people with severe pain wish that it had been the answer, but it wasn't," notes Max.

large doses have also suffered eye damage. Both the critics and proponents of DMSO strongly caution against its use without a prescription, because the pro-' duct available on the open market in the United States contains chemical impurities that the solvent can carry directly into the bloodstream.

Experts urge caution about therapists who offer only a single, "fashionable" treatment.

Unscrupulous entrepreneurs are unfortunately in good supply, ready to exploit people whose agony has made them desperate. Quack arthritis remedies alone are estimated to cost Americans nearly $1,000 million annually. The main thing to remember, say specialists, is that chronic pain is a complex problem, best tackled in a comprehensive treatment program. And any search for alternatives should be tempered by the knowledge that one sufferer's relief may be another's expensive disappointment.

The real issue, say many researchers, is that powerful drugs are available and just are not being used properly. "Heroin is the wrong focus," insists Foley. "The more important problem is for cancer patients to get legally available narcotics."

Nerves When the nerves themselves are affected by disease or injury, the pain can be very bad news indeed. Take shingles, a skin eruption that strikes some 300,000 Americans a year, mostly older persons. The disease is caused by herpes zoster, the virus also responsible for chicken pox. The slightest touch to an affected area triggers a searing pain that lasts for hours or days.

Only powerful drugs can take the edge off the torment.

Even after the disease clears up, a condition known as post-herpetic neuralgia often remains. Tender nerve endings in the skin have been so extensively damaged by the virus that the pain persists almost constantly for months or even years. Steroids help--sometimes.

Another nerve pain, known as trigeminal neuralgia, sends recurring, stabbing bolts centered on the forehead, cheek and jaw areas on one side of the face. ihis facial-nerve malady, commonly called tic douloureux-French for painful spasmis experienced more frequently in middleaged or older persons, especially men. An attack often lasts less than a minute, but the pain virtually paralyzes its victim. Sometimes the onset is triggered by a jaw movement while eating or engaging in conversation, washing the face or stepping out into a cold wind. Tic douloureux has been successfully brought under control in most victims by carbamazepine, an anticonvulsant drug.

Perhaps the most difficult-to-treat nerve pain is causalgia, a condition seen primarily among combat soldiers hit by rifle bullets. If a bullet "twanged" a nerve-passing near but not severing it-the result can be excruciating and virtually constant pain.

The best hope for such sufferers may lie in learning to deal with .their pain and, ultimately, in research that may lead to new drugs that specifically block pain transmitters in the spinal cord. It is not a forlorn hope. Given the current boom in pain research in the United States, that twinge, throb, ache or ouch may yet be relieved. 0 About the Author: Stephen Budiansky is a senior editor o/U.S. News & World Report.

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ELECTION

T¡he Primaries

Perhaps the most difficult of the four major hurdles on the long road to the White House is the state primaries-state elections that send delegates (pledged to certain candidates according to the outcome of the primaries) to the national conventions of the Democratic and the Republican Parties-the two major political partib. The states that do not have primaries select delegates through party caucuses.

The first primary this year will be held in New Hampshire on February 16, and the first caucus (another way states choose presidential candidates) in Iowa on February 8, followed by many more in the months ahead. Months before the primaries, the presidential aspirants undertake grueling campaign tours in these states to woo voters, hoping to gain national attention and prestige, and to demonstrate their vote-getting ability to their respective parties.

Above, John F. Kennedy talks to coal miners in West Virginia in his 1960primary campaign; he won the state's delegates, which proved to be crucial to his winning his party's nomination.

The Convention

The Campaign

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While various polItical parties, large and small, hold national conventions to choose their candidates for the presidency, it is theconventions ofthe Democratic Party (to be held this year from July 18-21 in Atlanta, Georgia) and the Republican Party (August 15-18 in New Orleans, Louisiana) that capture the major share of the nation's attention.

Conventions are notable for their razzmatazz, carnival atmosphere and sense offun rather than for serious political deliberations. The frivolity can be deceptive, however. The convention is the only occasion in any four-year period when the parties get together on a national scale. Much business is transactedthough behind closed doors, not on the floor.

With thousands of delegates and party officials in attendance and millions following the proceedings on TV, radio and in the press, each party nominates its candidates for President and Vice President, and adopts a party platform.

Photo above shows the 1964 Democratic Party Convention, which nominated incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson as its standard bearer.

Once the parties have chosen their candidates for President and Vice President the campaign gets into high gear. Contenders use various strategies to court the different segments of Americans. They crisscross the country by bus, car, plane and train (photo at top shows President and Mrs. Ford stopping their train at a wayside station to acknowledge greetings from people during his 1976 campaign). They kiss babies who can't vote, to charm parents who can; shake thousands of hands; meet workers at stores (as does Jimmy Carter here during his successful bid for the presidency in 1976).

For the more politically conscious citizens, ~e .presidential hopefuls give scores of speeches, explaining their position on key issues. They also buy time on television and space in newspapers and other print media. .'"

In addition, they have a large army of supporters who mail pamphlets explaining their stand. And then there are thousands more who lend the campaign a carnival atmosphere by sporting buttons, displaying bumper stickers on their cars or wearing T-shirts portraying their favorite candidates.

Election Day

Covering For American journalists and television networks, covering a presidential campaign is the grand prix of their profession. For them this is, in a real sense, creating history on deadline.

National election day for the presidency is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in years divisible by fourNovember 8, this year.

Voting is a simple process; after having registered in their voting districts some weeks before, voters need only be identified before retiring to the privacy of the voting booth and indicating their choice on the billlot or the voting machine.

When Americans vote, however, even though they may think . they are selecting a presidential candidate, they are in fact voting for delegates to an electoral college, which elects the President.

In this electqral college, each of the 50 states has one vote for each of its senators and representatives (states have two senators and representatives according to population-there a~e 435 House members). The District of Columbia has three electoral votes. Thus there are 538 electoral votes in all.

If a presidential candidate carries a state in the popular vote, he takes all its electoral votes (except in Maine). The candidate with a simple majority in the college becomes President.

In the photo above, Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower mails her and her husband's absentee ballot from a hospital.

Every four years, the news media in the United States gird themselves to cover the presidential campaign like an army preparing an invasion. They expend more money, manpower, time and resources on the quadrennial contest than on any other event-barring a real, all-out war or similar calamity.

For many journalists, covering a presidential campaign is the grand prix of their profession-notwithstanding the canned speeches, staged happenings and other forms of news manipulation, long bouts of boredom and enervating travel they endure.

The stakes are so high, the office so critical and the race for the presidency so intense that the nation, as well as the rest of the world, must--or should-pay attention. For the American political press corps this is, in a real sense, creating histor:y on deadline.

This time around, news media notables-who normally affect a blase, unflappable air-are uncharacteristicaily excited. The 1988 U.S. presid~ntial campaign has all the elements of a first-class story: suspenseful drama, a diverse cast of players, sharp competition, an incomparable prize and an uncertain ending.

And because the presidential candidates are out scrambling earlier than ever, the news media are too. The fast early pace of this presidential race presents challenges to the news media about how, when and where to deploy their forces. Because of the exceedingly large field, none of the American news organizations is assigning reporters or television c.rews full-time at this stage to each of the candidates. Rather, media biggies such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Knight-Ridder Newspapers have designated reporters who are responsible for news coverage of the various candidates-an assignment sometimes referred to as a "body watch"-but who do not always travel with them. For'the time being, the media organizations are covering the campaign on an ad hoc basis-by events or, as in Iowa and New Hampshire [where important early polls wil1 take place], by locales.

"The blessing of all this is that it causes us to rethink our traditional way of covering the campaign," said George Watson, ABC News Washington bureau chief. "Instead of covering each candidate, you cover the race or the issues."

But the three major television networks [ABC, CBS and NBC], once the unchallenged leaders in portraying the political landscape to the American public, appear to be making a less-t~an-total commitment to covering the presidential race, at least until the field narrows. "They have been at the major events, but they are not as visible as they were four years ago," said Bill Nigut, political reporter for WSB-TV in Atlanta, an A~C affiliate.

The big networks' limited presence in the early campaign skirmishes makes it difficult for some of the lesser-known contenders for the presidency to gain the recognition they are striving for.

"It seems to me that the networks are cutting back," said Mike Kopp, press aide to Senator Albert Gore, Jr., of Tennessee, a Democratic presidential contender. "As I understand it, it's a

the Stampede budgetary situation; the election cycles are getting longer, and that puts the networks at a big disadvantage." Kopp said that when Gore goes into a metropolitan area, "one of the first things we do is contact the media hub there." He said that candidates naturally like to attract national network coverage but at this stage have to rely more on local and regional news media.

The 1984 presidential campaign had its dramatic moments, at least within the Democratic Party: The participation of Geraldine A. Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated by either party for Vice President, and of Jesse Jackson, the first black to make a serious run for the nomination; the surprising ascendancy of Senator Gary Hart of Colorado; Walter F. Mondale's catchy inquiry, "Where's the beef?" But the outcome-President Reagan's renomination and re-election-was easy to predict.

Not this time.

"We are operating on a different terrain," said David S. Broder, chiefpolitical correspondent of The Washington Post. "There have never been so many contestants so early in the campaign, or so many contests on a single day [20primary elections will be held on Super Tuesday, * March 8]. That is unusual, if not unprecedented." Most news executives and political reporters agree with Richard T. Cooper, Los Angeles Times Washington deputy bureauchief, that the unfolding 1988campaign looks "more interesting and important" than the 1984 contest.

For the first time since 1968, both parties will be engaged in nomination contests without a President seeking re-election. This factor has been largely responsible for an exceptionally early kickoff: More than a year before the traditional kickoff of the general election campaign, candidates were out campaigning.

The campaign is also unusual in that no candidate has yet forged to the front in either the Republican or the Democratic Party. To a large degree, that may be because, nationwide, voter interest is still low, despite continuing news media coverage. Public interest is expected to pick up dramatically, however, by the time the returns are in from the Iowa caucuses on February 8 and the New Hampshire primary on February 16 and the spotlight shifts to the South and Super Tuesday.

This campaign marks another departure from tradition because of the record-high number of debates scheduled by both partiesabout 20 by March 6. The news media's participation in the process is reflected in the fact that several debates are being sponsored or cosponsored by news organizations, including ABC, CBSand NBC, The Atlanta Constitution and The Atlanta Journal, The Boston Globe, Cable News Network (CNN), The Dallas Morning News, The Des Moines Register, KERA-TV (Dallas) and Texas Monthly. And, as noted by Andrew Glass, Washington bureau chief of the Cox Newspapers, the presidential campaign draws the curtain on Reagan's two terms as President; those seeking to replace him, Glass said, "will have to define the issues and deal with reality on their own terms."

All these factors-the early start, the large cast of players, the lack of an incumbent, the failure of any candidate to push to the °The u.s. presidential nominating process has been changing regularly over the years.

But none of these changes has been as potentially revolutionary as Super Tuesday, the one-day, 20-state primary.event in the American South to be held on March 8. It will be the closest thing to a national primary that the United States has ever seen.

front, the importance of Super Tuesday, the televised debates and the end of the Reagan era-should combine to yield a rich harvest for the news media.

With the weakening of party discipline, the news media's impact on presidential politics has grown immeasurably, although politi-. cians, political scientists and journalists themselves are uncertain as to the extent of the news media's influence. Media analyst Michael Robinson of Georgetown University contends, for example, that the influence of the press is "consequential" more than direct. Be that as it may, there is no question that candidates would much prefer a "good press" to a critical press-or even worse, a press that ignores them.

Nor is there much doubt that the media is the forum in which modern campaigns are played out and that campaigns are built around. Candidates' speeches and appearances are designed for maximum exposure, and no serious candidate seeking the presidency would dare to run without a professional media consultant.

If, as has been said, "the contest shapes the coverage," it is egually true that the coverage shapes the contest. Whether the news media influence voter behavior or simply reinforce existing attitudes, the perception that most people have of public figures and events is largely filtered through them. Given the pervasiveness of modern mass communications, news coverage can enhance, distort or destroy a candidate's chances-extreme examples being Gary Hart's withdrawal under a deluge of [sex scandal] headlines [Hart is since back in the race], the accusations of plagiarism lodged against Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Democrat- Delaware, and, in 1984,the condemnation of Jesse Jackson for an anti-Semitic remark and the drumbeat of questions about Ferraro's family finances.

American news organizations are not unaware of their potential impact, and every four years, they say, they seek to improve their coverage, introduce innovative approaches, stress more meaningful themes and go .beyond the surface of events.

Among the criticisms traditionally leveled at the news media are that they begin their campaign coverage too soon, don't focus enough on the issues, tend to give heavier play to the early leaders than to the slow starters and generally treat the presidential campaign as a horse race. Such criticisms may be less valid today than they were just a few years ago-which is not to deny that campaign press coverage is disorderly, erratic, episodic and sometimes imprecise, as is the art of politics itself. The news media launch their coverage mostly in reaction to the early start-ups of the candidates. "It's not true that the media start too early,': Broder said. "The candidates have been at it for two years, drawing little media attention. The nominating process determines the pace more than the media."

Print editors for the most part insist that they explore the issues, although perhaps not as thoroughly as they should-because often they end up publishing what the candidates talk about, rather than bringing up issues on their own. An equally important problem, they maintain, involves the necessarily redundant coverage of issues and low readership.

Because of the fleeting nature of the TV image, it is generally agreed that television is hard-pressed to handle issues as well as the print media do, or at least can. But Christine Dolan, the Washing-

ton-based political director of CNN, said that the news media should attempt to portray the presidential candidates and the campaign in more realistic terms. "If there are staged events, I would hope that the political reporters would stress that they are stagec, or that a straw poll in some county is pretty insignificant," she said. "And if the candidates don't deal with the issues, the media should do it."

As for visualiziIlg the campaign as a horse race, most political reporters assert that the campaign for the White House is indeed a race and that voters are avidly interested in who is leading.

It has become axiomatic in American journalism that every presidential election season, the national news media lament that they spend too much money on campaign coverage and devote too much space, tiJ1leand energy to it-yet always exceed the outlay in the next cycle. While most news organizations are reluctant to cite specific figures-some say that the costs are difficult to calibrate because their regular staff would be on the payroll anyway-all concede that expenditures are rising. Increases in transportation costs and the necessity of covering a large number of candidates are cited as reasons why campaign budgets reach six and seven figures for major news organizations.

Glass of the Cox Newspapers said that campaign-coverage costs for the Washington bureau alone could go as high as $250,000.

Cooper of the Los Angeles Times said: "The paper is committed to full coverage of national political affairs, and it is safe to assume that our budget this election cycle will be higher than it was in 1984....We have already had more travel at this time than we did four years ago; it's almost constant; you have to go to every 'cattle show' and debate."

Once conducted on a catch-as-catch-can basis, press coverage.of modern U.S. presidential campaigns has become a more carefully choreographed operation, requiring quick shifts in personnel and rapid news judgments. Major news organizations assign teams of reporters and technical personnel to the story; several have set up special campaign desk operations. Most big papers at this early period have between nine and 15 reporters working full-time on the campaign, with others moving in and out. When the campaign peaks, the numbers could double. The Washington Post, as well as some other American news organizations, have established temporary bureaus in Iowa and New Hampshire to serve as operations centers.

Starting in the 1950s, American network television changed the nature of presidential politics. The late Theodore H. White, chronicler of the presidential campaigns, once said: "Television is the political process; it's the playing field of politics. Today, the action is in the studios, not in the back rooms."

But now the big three networks appear to be in trouble because of budget squeezes, personnel reductions and dwindling audi-

ences. With the emergence of competition from cable television and independent stations equipped with satellite hookups, the giant networks indicate that their glory days, when they reigned over the political scene, may be slowly fading.

David Buksbaum, a CBS vice-president for special events who is in charge of the network's political coverage, said, "We will have the same number of personnel or slightly fewer [covering the campaign] than in 1984." In past campatgns, CBS, along with ABC and NBC, seemed oblivious to costs and assigned one or even two correspondents and crews to each presidential candidate.

This year, he said, CBS "obviously can't cover the campaign as in the past."

At CNN, however, the atmosphere is clearly upbeat. "We are expanding our coverage," Dolan said. "We have been out on the' road since March 1987 covering event to event, and have more reporters and crews out with the candidates." She said that in addition to its regular political coverage, CNN is planning a new five-day-a-week program, Inside Politics.

With each presidential campaign, the news media's role comes under scrutiny by politicians, political scientists and journalists. A timely view was offered by Michael W. Traugott, a University of Michigan political scientist, in Before Nomination: Our Primary Problems (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Re~ search, 1985). Traugott wrote: "The news media have become central actors in this process, both nationally and locally, because of the chronology of the primaries. They provide information about the candidates, about both their positions and their style, to a public that is relatively uninformed about many of them and relatively uninterested in the process of electing a President at this stage of the game ....

"The media also establish standards of performance for the candidate and report on their progress in meeting them. In this limited but important way, they have replaced the parties in the candidate selection process through their efforts on winnowing the field. This is not an unreasonable role for some political institutions to play, but the fundamental question is~whether the criteria of newsworthiness, the pressure of meeting deadlines and policies of allocating news space should be as important as they are in determining success in the presidential nominating process."

While the news media's influence on the presidential election poses problems, it was acquired by default; with the withering of the political parties in the United States, there are few alternatives.

Thus, the media's role will likely become more pronounced. This is a role with which many members of the U.S. press are not entirely comfortable because, more than anyone, they are aware of their limitations and shortcomings. If the presidential campaign has incorporated elements of show business, the candidates and party leaders must assume responsibility as accomplices.

Yet there have been significant changes within the American news media. No longer does an elite group of two dozen or so national reporters dominate and determine the course and flavor of the presidential campaign. Reporters representing specialized journals and newspapers in key primary states have broadened the field. And local TV stations no longer are solely dependent on the networks. Meanwhile, the printed press attempts to provide more substantive coverage of the issues and the candidates, all the while recognizing that there is always room for improvement. 0 About the Author: Dam Bonafede is the senior contributing editor of

National Journal.

Walden and Civil Disobedience

by Henry David Thoreau Owen Thomas (ed.), Prentice-Halla! India, New Delhi, 1986, 424 pp., Rs. 45.

Some books grow upon a reader in the manner of a period wine, insinuating their way into the imagination as a thing of time and taste. The initial response m%, then be no indication of its multiple beauties and riches, for it is in the nature of such classics to hold back their charm until the answering intelligence rises to the required pitch.

If I view Walden thus, it is in a way to record, among other things, the changing graph of my own involvement with this book. After three or four readings over a period of 25 years, it today emerges as a measure of my own evolved aesthetic.

Some parts of this "many-splendored" classic still stick in my craw ,and some of its peculiar inadequacies such as the absence of evil in Thoreau's scheme of things, and the absence of sex, stillcomein the way ofa full surrender. But something in its pith and grain finally compels an accommodation with its imbedded serenities and truths in the midst of its prickly and pontifical ethics. To put it differently, while its tone tends to make Walden an insufferable Yankee "bible" at times, its visionary impulse, its aesthetic of direct experience, and its impassioned yet honed prose lift it at once to something like a song on the summit! It is this sum of values that accounts for its staying power when otherwise it seems to mock the entire thought and drift of modern Ame.rican life.

However, whatever Thoreau's standing in the pantheon of American letters-and it is pretty safe and high~"the sage of Walden" still exercises a unique spell over the Indian mind. from Mahatma Gandhi, who acknowledged him as one of his spiritual and political mentors, to the lay student and scholar, there is an unbroken bond of continuities and correspondences. It may not, therefore, be inappropriate to see Thoreau as an American Yogi in Boston breeches and boots.

The publication, therefore, of this celebrated volume along with authoritative Darshan Singh Maini, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a former professor of English at Punjabi University, Patiala.

phony at nightfall, and the frozen pond begins to "thunder" in those winter months, a sense of awe descends upon the imagination, demanding a lyric response.

We have, then, some glorious "inset" pictures offish and fowl, of rain and cloud, of sun and ice, some done in the manner of impressionistic watercolors, and some in that of rich and somber oils. All in all, Walden is a joyous song of "the call of the wild," and as Thoreau puts it, it "is life near the bone where it is sweetest."

The critical pieces included here do give us a fairly wide, accurate and incisive account of the rising fortunes of Walden and "Civil Disobedience." Emerson's obituary essay on Thoreau instinctively fastens more on the man than on his writings, for, to him, no "truer American existed than Thoreau." His eminent contemporary, James Russell Lowell, on the other hand, in a long and acrimonious critique touches upon Thoreau's "intellectual selfishness" and indolence. In Lowell's view, the Concord hermit proves in word and deed that "the narrowest provincialism is that of self." Van Wyck Brooks, while decrying the "doses of moral quinine" in Walden still thinks that Thoreau's essential warmth is somehow salted away in "those fossil truths, clean and dry" which he had excavated from Hindu scriptures. In a major essay, F.O. Matthiessen argues that Walden has a deep organic "structure," which answers to Mark Schores's idea of "technique as discovery." Again, S.E. Hyman regards "Civil Disobedience" as "an allegory for direct communion with the Emersonian our time on the artist as politician." while George Hendrick traces pamstakingly Oversoul. Indeed, the quest theme,.which at times gets blurred and mystified to the Thoreau's influence on Gandhi in the light point of exasperation, is stated in that of the Mahatma's utterances and actions. famous Thoreau fable of the lost hound, It appears to me that Waldeninparticuhorse and turtledove at the outset. How- Jar owes its peculiar appeal to the energies ever, it is oneofthe glories of Waldenthata of rhetoric. I share E.B. White's view that transcendent world view is continually - it is "a profoundly rhetorical book" and linked to the quotidian world of bread and th'at it carries a whole freight of epiphanies butter, of hammer and nail. He is, in fact, and resonances. I set down below a handsuggesting the sanctity and blessedness of ful of Thoreau's aphorisms picked at corn and salt and beans as a highway to random from his writings:

texts, background sources, brief annotations, select critical essays, reviews and bibliography make this Norton Critical Edition a volume to peruse, ponder over and treasure, more so when a hardback of such elegance, range and scholarship is available for the price of a lunch in a downtown restaurant. The publishers have done great service to a great book.

Walden, as we know, is, at bottom, a spiritual experiment, though ostensibly it is a poetic chronicle of a brief stay in 184546 at Walden Pond whose waters were to Thoreau "as sacred as the Ganges." Quite clearly, the aim was to prove not only the creature self-sufficiency of man in the midst of nature's largess, but also his moral growth in terms of an inner economy. No wonder, some critics see this book as another "Prelude," where a spirit in labor seeks to hoist a vision of life in

salvation and divinity.

Living, then, in alogcabin* by the pond, "a gem of the first water which Concord wears to her coronet," and playing host to Nature's "ladies" and "gentlemen"those royal beauties in feather and fur that left their "visiting cards" and their "signatures" at his door each morningThoreau's "exile" is, indeed, a theater of Iife'sendlesssolicitations and ambiguities.

As their sounds gather into a weird sym*It is no longer there, and when I visited it in the fall of 1969, only a plaque commemorated that piece of hallowed land.

Nature is as well adapted to our weak-' nesses as to our strengths.

Moral reform is .the effort to throw off sleep.

A written word is the choicest of relics.

All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Where and when a writer's muse seeks an economy of words to express both complexities and amplitudes, there we witness the birth of a style which inevitably tends toward the gnomic and the dramatic at the same time.

D

n Sunday afternoon, January 24, at precisely the same instant throughout the United States a hush will settle over the nation. Streets will be deserted except for an occasional car with its radio on. More than 100 million people will be inside, perched in front of a television set watching the kickoff of the annual Super Bowl game to determine the best football team in America.

Although the National Football League (NFL) has been around since 1922, the Super Bowl is a relatively recent phenomenon. Super Bowl I was played in 1967 and the annual quest for the championship was under way.

Most professional football players consider winning the Super Bowl as the ultimate achievement. "Tomorrow is never promised to you," said Walter Payton, the star running back of the Chicago Bears-one of the teams that played in Super Bowl XXI in 1987.

"Unless you make the Super Bowl, you have not accomplished everything." Duane Thomas, a former player with the Dallas Cowboys, however, has given a different view of the Super Bowl.

"If this is the ultimate game," he once said, "why is there another one next year?"

Thomas's observation aside, the championship of professional American football gets bigger and bolder with every passing year. More than 127 million people watched the January 1986 clash between the New England Patriots and the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XX. And in 1987, 55 countries, including China (where 300 million people witnessed the fury three months after the game was actually played), viewed Super Bowl XXI either live or via tape delay.

The players who make it to the Super Bowl in January begin their quest some four months earlier. The 28 NFL teams play once a week during a 16-week schedule beginning in September. At the end of the 16 weeks, the ten best teams (according to won-lost records) qualify to play additional games, called playoffs, to determine the eventual Super Bowl contestants.

There have been 21 champions. The Pittsburgh Steelers are the only NFL team to win four Super Bowls-in 1975, 1976, 1979and 1980. The Minnesota Vikings also have played in four but never won. The Green Bay Packers won Super Bowls I and II and have not made it back since. The last two champions come from America's largest cities: The New York Giants (1987) and Chicago Bears (1986) both captured their first crowns after many long, lean years. The San Francisco 4gers so far are the only team to win two Super Bowls in this decade. Says 4gers player Joe Montana, "The Super Bowl is what I dreamed about since I was a small boy. It's al111pstimpossible to put it into words. The feeling is so scary, so exciting, so unbelievable."

Those who are not familiar with America's version of football may wonder what all the excitement is about. After all, they may say upon seeing their first game, all they are watching is a bunch of large, heavily padded, helmeted men wantonly pushing and shoving one another across a field. Football is a game requiring brute strength and crunching physical contact, but, just as important, it is a game involving finesse, agility, skill, intelligence, teamwork and strategy.

One college football coach explained American football's attraction this way: "It is the ultimate team game because it incorporates running, jumping, catching, kicking and throwing. It

O

About the Author: John Hawkins is a sports writer for The Washington Times and specially wrote this article for SPAN.

has its ups and downs for the fans to enjoy. Players make mistakes and then make a big play, and like a story, it has a climax."

All the action in a football game centers on the players, of course, but someone is needed to keep order on the field. The officials, led by a referee, make sure that the game is played according to the rules. An NFL referee once described his duties as " ...trying to maintain order with a little whistle, a hanky (yellow handkerchief to signify penalties) and a ton of prayer during a legalized gang brawl involving 80 toughs."

Besides being a game, American professional football is a moneymaking sport. The average NFL player is paid $230,000 per year and a Super Bowl champion collects another $60,000 or so after having advanced through the playoffs and winning the big game.

Money, obviously, is an incentive for players to reach the Super Bowl. Even the losers receive a substantial bonus for playing in it.

But in America, few people remember who was second best. So, the desire to be the best is, perhaps, the overwhelming motivation for most football players. As the late Vince Lombardi, who coached his team to two victories in the first two Super Bowls, said: "Winning isn't everything ...it's the only thing."

The Super Bowl has it all-drama, pathos, comedy, excitement.

It has heroes. Jim O'Brien's 35-meter field goal with five seconds left gave the Baltimore Colts a 16-13 victory over the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl V in 1971. And, there are "goats"players who have the misfortune to make a costly mistake that may cause their team to lose the game. Jackie Smith, who played

Reprinted

from U.S. News & World Report, January

published

at Washington,

27, 1986,

D.C.

n 1986 in Chicago, just before Super Bowl XX, they were Iselling alligator-meat pizzas like crazy because coach Mike Ditka of the Chicago Bears football team joked that his players ate alligator meat before games. In rival Boston, a gourmet grocer drew hordes of New England Patriots fans with trays of bear meat for dishes such as bear stew and bear roast.

For many, the incredible hype for the January [1986] Super Bowl showdown between the Bears and the Patriots was paying off in hard cash.

Scalpers in Chicago were demanding $300 to $2,000 for tickets to the game. Thousands of New England fans went to New Orleans even though they had to stay in hotels 160 kilometers away. Hawthorne Tours in Salem, Massachusetts, flew fans down on an airliner with an open bar the morning of the game and jetted them back home that night for $499.

Chicago football diehards who wanted the thrills to outlive the big game could take a March 16-23 Bahamas cruise with the Bears. For prices ranging from $1,835 to $2,060, they could hobnob with their idols at autograph parties, photo sessions and exercIse programs.

In Boston, street venders hawked "Bear Buster" T-shirts. The Jordan Marsh department store lured customers to buy souvenirs with a videotape replay of a big Patriots win during the regular season.

Wieboldt's, a chain of Chicago-area department stores, installed 24-hour, toll-free telephone lines for customers to order mementos such as "Refrigerator" T-shirts lionizing the Bears'

for the Dallas Cowboys, dropped a sure touchdown pass in the fourth quarter for Super Bowl XII in 1979.His team lost that game 35-31. Smith, who spent a dozen years as an outstanding player, will forever be remembered for dropping the ball in the end zone while the world was watching, just as O'Brien will always be remembered for that winning kick.

O'Brien, who was only 23 then, says, "What do you do after you've won the Super Bowl?I was single and immature; I did some dumb things." He was involved in a barroom fight that cost him some of his vision in one eye. He is now 38, happily married and working in construction management, and on inventions in his spare time. "I've finally figured it out. We have no heroes of substance, only athletes and movie stars. The inventors, the cancer-cure finders, are in the real game. It could have been better for me if I had never made that kick."

Sometimes Cliff Harris, who played for the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl X, misses "a defined field....Even watching games now, the emotions of football flow through me." The Cowboys lost that game and, surprisingly, Harris found a degree of inspiration in the experience. "You have something to look forward to only if you do lose. After one that we won [in Super Bowl VI], I looked over at Charlie Waters and whispered, 'But whom do we play next?' When you win the Super Bowl~1 hesitate to say it~ you're depressed."

Jeris White, who played for the Washington Redskins when they won Super Bowl XVII, refused to think of himself as a

150-kilo rookie, William "the Refrigerator" Perry. The stores had sold more than $500,000 worth of Bears items since December 1, 1985,and expected to do that much business again before the hoopla ended.

Said spokesman Paul Costello for Chicago retailer Marshall Field: "The Bears have been excellent for business--except when they're playing. Then, the store is empty."

Football mania also boosts media profits. The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun- Times each saw newsstand sales shoot up by as much as 20,000 copies the day after Bears' games. The Boston Globe sent 23 reporters and photographers to cover the 1986Super Bowl.

With TV commercials selling for $250,000 a half-minute, CBS earned $13 million from the Bears' last pre-Super Bowl game.

For the big event itself, NBC charged a record $510,000 per commercial half-minute, and its 26 minutes of breaks had been sold out for two months~a $26.5 million take.

The number-one song in Chicago, with sales of more than $1million, was ditty called "The Super Bowl Shuffle," recorded by 24 Bears players. A video version sold more than 170,000 copies. Half the proceeds went to charity. The Patriots were too busy preparing for the game to respond with their own song, so Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn and other notables recorded "Patriots Fans Are We." The two playoff games leading to the 1986 championship match helped fill Chicago hotels and¡ restaurants. The Chicago Park District, owner of Soldier Field, where the Bears play,

a

football player. "I guess I can say I was afraid for Jeris White. I was afraid of becoming enraptured, the way so many others bathe themselves in a false sense of reality. I knew that if I was to come out whole, I had to keep a separate identity, Jeris White, the person."

For 15 years and three Super Bowls, Jack Reynolds was almost as much a coach as a player for the San Francisco 4gers. "I liked the strategy, the military part," he says. "Right flank, left flank, the offenses, the defenses deploying their troops. It's a war. It's a con game too."

Con game or not, it is, as Time noted, "a ritual fascination that envelops mjl\ions not attracted to the sport in the slightest.. ..

Clearly, observing the feast of football has become a national, cultural and conversational imperative."

"There's nothing in life that can compare with the Super Bowl," says "Mean" Joe Greene, a former player and the recipient of four Super Bowl rings. "That's the carrot that hangs in front of your nose every season. That's what carries you through 20 games. The Super Bowl is a happening~the excitement, the intensity. For weeks before, the air is thick with it. Then, the game. The atmosphere in the stadium before the kickoff is unbelievable. It almost takes your breath away. The thrill never wears off." Adds Greene, "If you have been there once, it makes you want to go that much more the next year. I still get angry when I think about the ones I have missed. It is as though someone came along all those years and stole my Christmas."

collected $220,000 for each game plus an $85,000 share of concessions and parking.

Patriots games normally mean little to Boston businesses, since they are played at Foxboro, 40 kilometers away. But the bowl game brought a badly needed financial boost to the team, which had lost some $6.2 million over the past five years. Its 61,000-seat stadi'um was sold out for only four of eight regularseason games. Owner William Sullivan was trying to sell the team, and a Super Bowl victory [the Patriots lost] could have added an estimated $15 million to the $100 million expected price for the team, its stadium, a race track and adjoining land.

Bears players hoped the big game would mean bigger paychecks. With an average annual salary of $171,000, Chicago ranked 24th in payout of the 28 National Football League teams. Star defensive end Richard Dent for 11 while threatened not to play in the Super Bowl unless the Bears hiked his $90,000 pay. Players like to point out that things haven't changed from the days more than two decades ago when coach Ditka, then a player, complained that the Bears management threw "nickels around like they were manhole covers."

Biggest winner of all in the 1986 Super Bowl economic bonanza was New Orleans. As many as 80,000 visitors spent $100 million on 25,000 hotel rooms, meals and, of course, the game itself.

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Software

by Satellite

by MALINI SESHADRI

Texas Instruments, a world leader in the field of electronics, recently set up an Indian subsidiary in Bangalore to develop software for applications in defense, medicine and industry exclusively for export to its headquarters in Dallas, Texas.

Jack Kilby, a tall, quiet midwestern American from Kansas, missed getting into MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) by three points on the entrance test and spent the next ten years working for a manufacturer of electronic parts. Then, in May 1958, he was offered-and accepted-a job with Texas Instruments (TI), the company that had developed the first commercially viable silicon transistor four years earlier and was now working on miniaturization. Kilby, too new to have a vacation that summer, was left practically alone in the laboratory while almost everyone else went on holiday for two weeks. By the time his boss returned, Kilby had developed the idea for making the world's first integrated circuit (IC).

As a recent Time-Life publication reported it, "The device was not elegant. Its five components were isolated electrically from one another mainly by shaping them into L's, U's and other configurations. The tiny wires linking the components to one another and to the power supply were simply soldered on, and the whole thing was held together by wax. But it worked."

Texas Instruments announced the birth of the IC in January 1959by demonstrating its use in a computer it built for the U.S. Air Force. TI's new minicomputer, which used 587 ICs, not only had the same capacity as the Air Force's old, unwieldy computer which it replaced but it also occupied only 1/150 of the space.

Founded in 1930 as a manufacturer of instruments used in oil exploration, TI is today an International leader in electronics as well. Headquarters is in Dallas, Texas, but its 77,000 employees can be found in 50 plants in 17 countries around the world, including India. n has always been at the cutting edge of the superfastdeveloping field of electronics. Worldwide, the company holds more than 5,000 patents, many of them landmark developments in the electronics industry. For instance, apart from the first ever IC, the company gave the world the logic arrays in 1972, the singlechip microprocessor in 1973,the hand-held electronic calculator in 1974, the first LCD (liquid crystal display) watch in 1976, the single-chip microcomputer in 1978, the speech-synthesis integrated circuit in 1980 and the first personal computer-based

A software specialist (top) works at her console at the Texas Instruments' Bangalorefacility.

Tllndia has a satellite link with Dallas through its Earth station and dish antenna (above).

speech recognition system in 1984-a string of successes.

The pioneering effort now continues in India at Texas Instruments (India) Private Limited, in Bangalore. Situated on the sixth floor of a high-rise building in the heart of the city, the company communicates with Dallas and its other sister organizations throughout the world through an appropriately high-tech satellite link facilitated by a dedicated Earth station in the building, and a dish antenna on the roof. The first completed software package from the Indian company was beamed back to Dallas in June 1987;an accolade for the parent company and its Indian offspring.

TI Bangalore is wholly owned by Texas Instruments, Inc., and its entire output of software is exported back to Dallas. The Bangalore company is only the second computer software unit set up by TI outside the United States. The other is in Bedford, England. All other overseas operations of Texas Instruments are involved in hardware production.

As the 1980s began, competition in the worldwide computer market heated up-. Prices fell dramatically, even as production costs went up. Top computer professionals were wooed and won faster than they could be produced. All computer and electronics companies felt the squeeze and many fell by the wayside. Obsolescence was the dreaded word in an industry where a new innovation

was announced virtually everyday; yesterday's new model became tomorrow's old hat.

TI was also buffeted by this extraordinary high tide in computer electronics. The company responded by relying on its proven strengths-excellence in the higher reaches of technology and the nurturing of more than sufficient research and development muscle to keep it there. Thus TI phased out some of its lower-tech lines to concentrate on higher-tech areas such as the design and production of integrated circuits for a variety of complex applications. Simultaneously, it began to look eastward for new locations to set up software-production facilities.

Meanwhile, India was gearing up to enter the age of computer electronics and close the technological gap. Dr. G.R. Mohan Rao, TI's , senior vice-president in Dallas, was in 1 an excellent position to point out to his company's decision-makers the inherent advantages of choosing India as the location for its proposed software manufacturing facility. As many other U.S.-based companies have also discovered, the wealth of technical manpower available in India is an enormous plus point. It also helps that negotiations and communications can be carried on in the English language without interpreters. But why Bangalore in particular?

"Well," says Charlie Simon, chief executive of the new operation, "Bangalore has all the infrastructure we were looking for. It is the unofficial 'electronics city' of India, and there is a pool of qualified professionals available. In fact many of oUf software professionals have been recruited right here on the campus of the Indian Institute of Science. Others come mostly from the Indian Institutes of Technology."

There are 50 of these young men and women (soon expected to increase to 75). Their average age is about 25, which is not surprising, since no other profession in the world has thrown up so many "whiz kids" at so fast a rate as the computer industry! The confidence and enthusiasm of these young people is almost palpable.

In its short life so far, TI Bangalore seems to have generated an ethos that combines an easy informality with a disciplined approach to work. The work space is divided into cubicles, functional yet tasteful in a pleasing gray blue. Each work section bristles with compu'ter terminals, and small teams of computer scientists sit together to unravel complex programming problems by pooling their expertise. Says Ashok Kumar Bareja, software manager, "The main job consists of describing the problem, and breaking it up into its components. Thereafter, the programming and testing follow."

TI's specialty is computer-aided design (CAD) of very largescaleintegrated circuits for a variety of sophisticated applications in defense, medicine and industry. The bulk of the work in TI Bangalore, therefore, is in the generation of automated design on software.

Interaction between TI's professionals around the world is

continuous. For instance, communication between engineering and software professionals in the United States and India is carried out through a high-speed computer network. TI India's dedicated Earth station has been set up with a direct link (via satellite) to TI's operation in England, which can then connect to TI offices around the world.

But it is not only via telecommunication networks that the Bangalore company's young computer professionals interact with their counterparts in America. "Most of our employees have spent up to six months in the parent company in Dallas," says Simon.

"We want them to understand and absorb our company's range of activities and our way of doing things. This personal experience can be very important, since they will be staying continuously in touch with their counterparts halfway around the world."

Ashok Bareja's face lights up at the recollection of his own rewarding training session with Texas Instruments in Dallas.

"Originally I was skeptical about the type of projects we would be set to work on. I had thought perhaps we would not be into the really high-tech areas. But my doubts were allayed in Dallas. We were exposed to the whole range oftheir activities, and here too we are participating in crucial, complex and very high-tech design problems. The job satisfaction is high, very high and there is a virtually limitless opportunity to learn."

Surely this factor-the opportunity for its young scientists to learn-has played an important part in the Government ofIndia's decision to allow a foreign company to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary company in India. By and large, under the terms of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), foreign inputs into Indian industry are permitted either as outright purchase of knowhow or equity participation by the foreign company up to 40 percent of the paid-up capital. Exceptions are made very selectively, only in very high-tech areas, and only for companies that export their entire output.

TI Bangalore estimates exports of about $3 million per year in the first few years. Expansion of operations will increase this figure substantially, and the entire amount represents an outright foreign exchange earning for India.

And what abo)lt TI's point of view?Has its experiment of setting up a software unit in India paid off? "At this time we feel encouraged," says Simon. "In another two years or so, we will know for sure. Anyway we are convinced that this Asia Pacific region will see one of the highest growth rates in electronics over the next 20 to 25 years." By then, the frontiers of computer design and technology will probably have been pushed back further than we can now imagine; robotics, artificial intelligence, office and industrial automation, medical electronics-all these will most likely have advanced beyond recognition. The chances (and the indications) are that Texas Instruments will continue its traditipn of staying right at that cutting edge, making things happen, chalking up even more firsts, piling up the patents.

TI's Indian employees represent a nucleus of high-tech talent that will be. available to help catalyze the much needed computronics revolution. By making a departure from the more common "me-too" type of technology cloning to the more creative and participative type .of technology transfer, TI's Bangalore venture represents a unique example of cooperation for mutual advantage; an example that can be emulated many times over in a country like India with its advanced technological base.

0

ON

THE LIGHTER SIDE

Eas)' on -this h;/j".!\eep

those reins tght...Hey! Watch tlY;t cactus COYnin'up! ..

"How many times have I told you not to write on the wall?"

• "Very well, Kingsley-you may take an extra day off to recoverfrom your vacation."

Reprinted

by permission of The Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BFL and MS Inc. © 1987.

The Next Leap in Computers Using 65,536 small processors in parallel, an American company called Thinking Machines has taught a computer to learn from experience.

It is early morning in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and W. Daniel Hillis, the 31-year-old founding scientist of Thinking Machines Corporation, is staring wearily at a blank video display screen. He enters a few commands on a keyboard and an image of black and white lines resembling a dart board appears on the screen. As Hillis punches the keys, a sleek, black, 1.5-meter glasslike cube in a room down the hall-a computer designed by Hillis and known as the Connection Machine-is punctuated by thousands of tiny red lights that flash frantically in no discernible pattern. Yet in this apparent randomness may lie the future of computing. "Last night, the machine actually learned," Hillis says."It learned by itself, without my ever telling it whether it was right or wrong."

Hillis and a colleague had spent a long night programming the Connection Machine to unscramble slightly distorted line images that had been fed into it. The process is a primitive example of something called visual adaptation, which humans do very well.

"If I slipped a crazy pair of glasses on you that distorted your vision," says Hillis, "you would learn to see normally." But most computers, unlike people, can do only what is programmed into them; as a general rule, they do not learn from experience.

That night, the Connection Machine was an exception. After receiving a distorted image, the computer displayed what it thought the real image looked like. Unlike a chess-playing computer, which does not get better from game to game, the Connection Machine had improved each time. By the end of the night, when the program was working properly, it was able to undo the distortion completely in only three minutes.

The Connection Machine is the most dramatic example of an emerging breed of computer, called parallel processors, that is beginning to transform computer science. Traditional computers, evenpowerful ones, rely on a single processor, the computational enginewhere the calculating takes place. No matter how complex the task, conventional computers attack it the same way, one tiny step at a time. A massive supercomputer and a desktop personal computer differ essentially only in the speed with which they execute each step of a program and move on to the next step.

Instead of advancing in a straightforward, step-by-step manner, parallel processors divide a problem into parts and employ many processors to attack those parts simultaneously. The Connection Machine, for example, harnesses the collective wisdom of 65,536 small processors, all working in concert to solve a problem.

Parallel processing promises to speed up computing beyond the

limits imposed on traditional computers by their architecture.

Tasks such as understanding human speech or predicting the behavior of subatomic particles that today, using supercomputers, may take hours, even days, to accomplish, may take fractions of a second, using relatively inexpensive parallel processors.

The harnessing of groups of processors working toward a single goal may, in fact, make possible "real-time" computing, the solution of complex problems virtually simultaneously with the input of the data. Real-time parallel processing may be the computational key to the creation of artificial intelligence, and conceivably to such functions as the control of America's Strategic Defense Initiative (SOl) program, which will require the nearinstantaneous recognition, tracking and destruction of enemy nuclear warheads by a myriad of space-based weapons.

Research and development efforts in parallel processing have been driven not only by the technology's perceived importance to America's defense, but by fears of foreign competition. In 1980, Japan announced its "fifth generation" project, a ten-year, $1,000 million national commitment to build an advanced computer that can converse easily with people and interact with its environment.

Parallel processing, the Japanese said, was central to this effort.

Partly in response, the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the Strategic Computing Program. The agency has already spent $30 million on parallel processing, and its total outlay may exceed $100 million.

DARPA gave Thinking Machines $4.7 million in seed money.

Some 100 projects to build "multiheaded" computers have been undertaken at American companies and universities-the University of Illinois, the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT -Hillis's alma mater) prominent among them. The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), the computer giant, is"also spending tens of millions of dollars on parallel-processing research.

There is wide agreement that fundamental breakthroughs in computing depend on the development of parallel-processing technology, but efforts differ significantly. In linking together an extremely large number of very weak processors to create the Connection Machine, Hillis was influenced by the architecture of the human brain. "The brain has a great many things-neuronsworking in parallel," he explains.

Other scientists question Hillis's approach, and maintain that

"Last night, the machine actually learned.

It learned by itself, without my ever telling it whether it was right or wrong." greater computing speed will be achieved by combining far fewer but more potent processors. "I think anything that can be done by 64,000 pipsq ueaks can be done faster by 640 powerful processors," says a scientist at IBM, who prefers anonymity.

But while IBM is still developing its machines, the three-yearold Thinking Machines Corporation has already built and delivered a $1 million, scaled-down version of the Connection Machine, with 16,384 processors, to its first commercial customer, the Perkin-Elmer Corporation.

Thinking Machines' success in building the world's first "massively parallel processor" has quieted those who once suspected Hillis of being more hype than substance. "It sounded so vague, but it works," says Tom Kraay, a Perkin-Elmer scientist. Adds Stephen L. Squires, a program manager for DARPA's information science and technology office, "The Connection Machine opens up entirely new fields of study, things you could never dream of doing before."

The soul of the old machine-the conventional, single-processor architecture-was developed in the I940s in the United States

by John von Neumann. In his design, the computer's processor is entirely distinct from its memory, which contains not only the data for a particular problem but instructions for manipulating that data. Chunks of data and instructions are shunted back and forth between the processor and the memory along one narrow electronic pathway, now referred to as the "von Neumann bottleneck. " Despite this architectural limitation, single-processor technology has been the basis for most of the major advances in computing. When, in the early 1970s, Seymour Cray, the reclusive founder of Cray Research, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, built a computer five to ten times faster than any machine that then existed, he did so by combining silicon chips to create one powerful 1.8-by-2. 7-meter processor.

Cray Research has built two-thirds of the 180 supercomputers in existence today. The Cray 2, which has four processors and adopts some extremely limited elements of parallelism, is currently the world's fastest computer, six to 12 times speedier than the original Cray. But supercomputers are expensive; the Cray 2 is 5,000 times faster than a simple microprocessor, but at $20 million, it is several hundred thousand times more expensive. This brute economic fact is one of the main reasons the American government, universities and many companies are pursuing parallel processing.

Technical considerations are also driving parallel-processing research. During the last four decades, single-processor computers have been speeded up by a factor of 1,000, chiefly shrinking the basic electronic components and packing them more closely together. Further dramatic enhancements in single-processor computers may not be possible, however, because the design is up against a fundamental physical limit: no signal in the circuitry can move faster than the speed of light.

Thus, because of the von Neumann bottleneck, single-processor computers embody a paradox. "If you try to make the machine smarter by giving it more information," explains Hillis, "you actually make it dumber, because it's much slower in accessing

that information."

Parallel processing "is a way out of the paradox," he says. "You can give the Connection Machine more information without slowing it down."

W. Daniel Hillis was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1956, the son of a physician who moved around the world studying hepatitis epidemics. The son tagged along, building zany contraptions everywhere he went. He made a solid-fuel rocket to send grasshoppers aloft. He turned a tin can and a rotisserie motor into a mobile robot. Even at MIT, where Hillis did both his undergraduate and graduate work, he continued to build wacky toys, such as a ticktack-toe-playing computer constructed entirely out of wooden Tinkertoys.

Before entering MIT in 1974, Hillis planned to major in neuroscience, but under the influence of Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, he decided to study computer science, thinking that it would provide insights into the workings of the human brain. The Connection Machine, in fact, is the outgrowth of a question that has intrigued Hillis since his freshman year at college: Why can't a machine be more like a man?

"There are all sorts of things that people can easily do that machines can't," says Hillis. "You can make a machine that is very good at putting a tiny pin into a tiny hole with a precise amount of force. Yet, in spite of that precision, the machine can't pick up a glass of water without spilling it."

A person's ability to perform a given task, reasoned Hillis, is dependent on his receiving a continual flow of sensory information relating to the task and by continually calculating and adjusting for that information.

"If you look at how we pick up a glass of water without spilling it, you see that it doesn't have anything to do with how precisely we position our hand or how precisely we apply a force," both of which can be programmed easily into a machine, explains Hillis.

"It has to do with our getting very good feedback from our fingers.

We can do this even with our eyes closed, by just feeling how well it's working out. And if it's not working out, we adjust our grip."

Hillis calls this rapid-fire feedback mechanism a "controlled hallucination." A person has a hypothesis, or hallucination, about the real world-for example, the position of the water glass.

Sensory feedback from the fingers causes the person to adjust the hypothesis; the fingers then provide additional feedback about the validity of the adjusted hypothesis; and so on, until the individual succeeds in picking up the glass.

Six years ago, while working on his master's thesis in electrical engineering, Hillis first tested his controlled-hallucination theory by building-under Minsky's guidance-a primitive feedback mechanism, made up of 256 tiny pressure sensors, into a robot fingertip. The machine was designed.to distinguish by touch six different fasteners-nuts, bolts, washers, dowel pins, cotter pins and setscrews. Six processors, each as powerful as an IBM personal computer, worked in parallel to provide the computational might behind the finger, each processor assessing data from the finger's pressure sensors and then guiding the robot through the task of identifying the object.

Based on its initial "feel" of an object, the finger would develop a hypothesis about what the object was and then test it continually before arriving at a conclusion. For example, it might guess that a circular object was a washer, and try to verify the notion by feeling for the hole in its center.

The robot finger was primitive; if it was given a ball of chewing gum, it would confidently identify the wad as one of the six

fasteners. But it worked well within its limited domain, demonstrating the viability of the controlled-hallucination theory. It also convinced Hillis that a tremendous amount of computing power would be necessary to create a machine that could perform other simple human tasks, and the only reasonable way to generate that power was through parallel processing.

Humans, Hillis realized, are able to assimilate an enormous amount of data instantly. Conventional machines cannot. No traditional computer, for example, can tell a dog from a cat. The human visual system processes an entire image at once, but conventional computers must analyze it point by point. All the points are stored in the computer's memory and must be extracted one at a time along the von Neumann bottleneck linking the memory and the processor. "It's kind of like scanning a picture by running a peephole over it," says Hillis.

In a massively parallel computer, all the points in an image could be analyzed virtually simultaneously by, in effect, assigning each to its own processor. What is more, Hillis believed that each of the individual processors in a massively parallel system can be very weak. Individual neurons in the human brain are a million times slower than a computer chip, yet the brain is still far faster than any machine in doing something as simple as distinguishing a man from a woman. The brain's blinding speed presumably stems from its having many more basic components than a machinesome 100,000 million neurons, give or take a factor of ten.

Hillis is the first to concede that the analogy between the brain and the Connection Machine cannot and should not be pushed too

Daniel Hillis's successful effort to link together thousands of weak computer processors in a parallel system is only one of many attempts to develop this new technology. Most of the companies involved, including the Intel Corporation, which is marketing a 128-processor version of Caltech's (California Institute of Techuology) so-called Cosmic Cube, are trying to develop parallel computers with fewer, more powerful processors than Hillis's Connection Machine.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is one of the companies following the "fewer-and-bigger" approach to parallel processing. And IBM, normally a secretive loner, is collaborating with at least eight universities whose researchers are pursuing different versions of this strategy. "We can't do it alone," says Gregory Pfister, the principal scientist on one of IBM's projects, "so our approach is to put out some water and fertilizer, try to get some flowers to grow, and see which one makes it."

At IBM itself, two flowers-known inside the company as "RP3" and

far. There are perhaps 100 million million individual connections between neurons in the brain. Indeed, the connections are so numerous and intertwined that neurobiologists have not yet succeeded in mapping a single complex human neuron, let alone all of them. In addition, the brain-machine analogy did nothing to help Hillis answer several fundamental questions about parallel processing: How many processors should be linked together? And how should they be connected so that they communicate efficiently and work in concert?

The Connection Machine began as Hillis's PhD thesis. Previous attempts at parallel processing had been hampered by what Minsky calls "the IIIiac IV mistake." The IIIiac IV was an early parallel processing computer built in the 1970s at the University of Illinois. Each of its 64 processors did exactly the same thing at the same time. Minsky thought the concept was flawed, and ~old Hillis that the processors should be able to operate independently. That way, Minsky believed, the system would be more flexible, and ultimately more powerful.

"About a month later," Minsky recalled, "Hillis came back to me and said, 'Well, I've decided to make the IIIiac IV mistake.'''

Hillis told Minsky that the problem was not that the processors did the same thing at the same time, but that they had no efficient way of talking to one another. Hillis saw that intraprocessor signals got stuck in traffic jams because the connecting wires between processors were laid out like a grid, slowing the computing process. He recognized that a richer connection scheme was required.

"GFII"-are expected to bloom soon.

The RP3 project is a 40-person effort to build a machine that contains 512 fairly powerful processors. Unlike the processors in the Connection Machine, they will not be restricted to performing the sam~ task at the same time, but can go their own separate ways.

The RP3 is being designed as a generalpurpose computer. But IBM's GFII parallel system, with 576 processors working in tandem, is being constructed for one specific purpose, to test a fundamental physical theory of the nature of matter, called quantum chromodynamics, which describes what subatomic particles are made of and how they interact.

Using quantum chromodynamics to predict the mass of a stationary proton, for example, calls for roughly 300,000 million million calculations, a problem that would tie up a Cray I supercomputer for 100 years and an IBM personal computer for at least 600,000 years. IBM's G F II parallel processor should take only one year to solve this problem. The result, when compared with the actual measured

mass of a proton, may afford the first precise test of the theory.

The GFII substitutes brute power for the Connection Machine's relatively weak processors. But its communications architecture is not as elegant. Each of the 576 processors can communicate with any other through a powerful network called the Memphis switch; all messages, even traffic between adjacent processors, must be routed through this central switchjust as, in the early days of the Federal Express, a commercial U.S. mail service, all overnight packages had to be routed through the city of Memphis, Tennessee.

Nevertheless, the Memphis switch is capable of handling the equivalent of three million pages of The New Yor.k Times Magazine per second.

Like the 65,536 processors in the Connection Machine, the processors in GFII all execu te the same instructions at the same time. But each processor can multiply a seven-digit number by a seven-digit number in 60 trillionths of a second, 3,000 times the speed of an individual Connection Machine processor, and the kind of numbercrunching power needed to compute the mass of a subatomic particle.

-P.H.

No computer can tell a dog from a cat. The human visual system processes an entire image at once, but conventional computers analyze point by point.

Hillis and his co-workers at Thinking Machines settled on a three-dimensional architecture in which 65,536 processors (the number 2 raised to the 16th power) can be connected' as if they form a l6-dimensional cube: each processor is directly connected to 16 others, but is also never more than 16 steps away from any other processor in the computer. The method of transmitting messages between processors is novel. Hillis describes this communications system as being "halfway between the way the postal system works and the wayan old-fashioned telephone system works."

In the postal system, there are innumerable routes a letter can take. If a mail plane following a given path is full, explains Hillis, "they can hold your letter and send it on the next plane," even one taking a different route. But if you want to have a continuous channel of communication, you must send many letters. In the telephone system, the advantages and disadvantages are reversed.

"When you and I are talking on the phone, there's a wire allocated to us" for as long as we need it, says Hillis. "But when we're not talking, that wire is still there, using up resources."

The Connection Machine takes the best from both. "It's as if I mailed you a letter with a piece of string attached to it leading to another letter and a string from that letter leading to a third letter and so on," says Hillis. "Then we could have a constant stream of communication, as in the phone system." But if a given path must be relinquished for other messages, "we could cut one of the strings, and send the remaining letters by a different route," as in the postal system.

It is easy to imagine the benefit of having many processors each following a different instruction toward the solution of a single problem, but Hillis's insight was to understand that certain tasks could be accomplished by having tens of thousands of processors performing the same basic function at a given time, and then communicating effectively with one another.

For example, in the relatively mundane but critical field of database searching, the Connection Machine may turn out to be the Evelyn Wood [a speed-reading teacher] of the computer world.

When scanning thousands of articles for a single key word, a conventional machine would go through them one by one. The Connection Machine can read all of the articles at once, because each article is, in effect, assigned to an individual processor, with each processor executing the same instruction: "scan."

Critics say that Hillis's approach is viable only for problems in which the data can be distributed easily among tens of thousands of processors, and in which the functions the processors perform are relatively simple ones, like scanning for a key word or analyzing a point in an image. "It's a very interesting machine and it's starting to be used, but it has relatively limited applications," says Charles L. Seitz, a professor of computer science at the California Institute of Technology and the developer of the Cosmic Cube, a parallel computer that links 64 powerful processors that can do different things at the same time.

But Hillis and his co-workers are beginning to apply the Connection Machine to important problems that even they did not initially believe susceptible to solution.

One of the most exciting potential applications for the Connec-

tion Machine is in simulating air flows, perhaps even modeling the flow of air over a proposed design of an airplane wing. Computer science is not yet at the point at which aeronautical engineers can simulate the design of a wing, let alone a new aircraft, on a supercomputer and conclude with confidence that it will work.

There is no substitute for building and testing a full-scale prototype.

Stephen Wolfram, a chunky, bespectacled 27-year-old physicist who is a MacArthur Foundation "genius award" winner and a corporate fellow at Thinking Machines, has been developing a program to apply the Connection Machine to airflow problems.

Wolfram's program does not concentrate on the complex mathematics of air-flow problems, which describes the aggregate behavior of air particles, but focuses on the movements of the individual particles of air. Wolfram has been programming the Connection Machine so that each of its processors is, in effect, assigned to one particle. If the model proves successful, an aeronautical engineer could watch air particles charging into one another, ricocheting around and bombarding a proposed aircraft's wing, all on the screen of his terminal.

Wolfram's and Hillis's ideas about the potential uses for the Connection Machine may sound to some overly optimistic, but Thinking Machines' first customer is already using its new massively parallel processor. Perkin-Elmer has installed its 16,384processor version of the Connection Machine at its subsidiary, MRJ, Inc., which does work for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Department.

The company is using it to solve what Tom Kraay, chief scientist at MRJ's Advanced Development Center, terms "an important military problem" whose solution has proved elusive: given the position of enemy radar and a destination, what flight path should a pilot take to minimize the chance of being detected? "This problem comes up a lot," said Kraay. In this situation, each processor is assigned to a different point in space, speeding up the mathematical calculations that must be made.

In addition, MRJ is using the Connection Machine to explore problems relating to SDI. The program will require the tracking of tens of th~usands of incoming missiles in real time; by effectively assigning each processor to a warhead, it might be possible to identify the order in which the missiles would reach American soil, and hence the order in which they must be destroyed.

Kraay is enthusiastic about the Connection Machine. "No matter what problem I constructed, it ran faster," he says. "It's remarkable how much mileage you can get from massive parallelism by splitting up a problem's data so that small chunks are assigned to each processor."

Minsky, a corporate fellow at the Thinking Machines, plans to use it to understand how people think, modeling the human brain by having each processor simulate groups of nerve cells.

Hillis looks forward to the day when a version of the Connection Machine will power a home robot as obedient and versatile as C3PO [a robot] in the movie Star Wars. "It will do everything you would want it to do," says Hillis.

But though his vision is expansive, Hillis realizes he is up against formidable obstacles. "How do you have a machine know something?" he asks. "How do you have it learn things?"

0 About the Author: Paul Hoffman, former executive editor of Science Digest, now writes for Smithsonian, The New York Times and other American publications.

A Caring Council Every year social workers from several countries, including India, work for a few weeks in American welfare institutions in unique project designed to share experiences, so that the handicapped and others in need may be better looked after.

a

The smiling faces in the picture above share the usual anonymity of those in large group photographs. They belong to the 175 professional social workers, youth workers and teachers of handicapped children from 73 countries who took part in the 1986 Council of International Programs (CIP) and who are being photographed against the backdrop of the United Nations' lobby in New York-as similar groups have been

photographed for the past 30 years.

As our eyes pan the group, what we get is an impression not so much of individuals, but of people, united for a moment in time by the click of the camera shutter. We zoom in closer and see that they are, for the most part, high-spirited young people and that each is an individual different from the others. Our glance roves from figure to figure, taking in the varied national dresses

and the subtle shadings of the human complexion that range from blond to black.

Then we go back again to the long shot.

The exercise provides a kind of optical illusion, where the crowd magically changes into individuals and back again as our eyes change focus. And there in the front row (left) is a sari-clad figure that students and staff at Springdales School in New Delhi would instantly recognize as

Uma Agarwal, the head of their social work department. All at once we are on individual human terms.

The CIP. experience has been called a Peace Corps in reverse, a miniworld, a look into the future. "It is all of these," Agarwal says, and most of the other 250 Indian social workers who have taken part in the CIP since 1960, the first year of India's inclusion in the program, would agree.

They, along with their counterparts from dozens of other countries all over the world, have given of their time and expertise, without pay, to human service organizations in the United States while at the same time receiving the benefit of a variety of educational programs and of living with Americans who volunteer to welcome participants into their homes as family members. A valuable spin-off is the chance the experience provides to meet people from a number of countries with similar professional backgrounds and common enthusiasms.

On their return to India, these professionals have become leaders in the top schools of social work, they have staffed rural social service centers and served as executives in organizations like the YMCA and YWCA. Some are working in units such as the Child Marriage Prevention Centre in Ahmedabad, in departments of extension in agriculture, in the psychiatric departments of hospitals and, now, many are becoming involved with social problems concerning women and the aged.

Shubha Kulkarni, for instance, a 1985 participant in the CIP, carries on her work among the neglected children of prostitutes in Bombay's Kamathipura district, reaching out to them with health and educational services. M. Natarajan of the Centre for the Welfare of the Aged, in Madras, employs highly innovative means in helping the aged help themselves. He is currently on a CIP grant.

Many of these social workers have observed that living and working in the United States as professionals under the CIP gave them added self-confidence and About the Author: Jacquelin Singh, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a Delhi-basedfree-lance writer. She has written several educational books and one novel for children.

the desire to initiate new ways of tackling old problems on their return. At the same time their commitment to projects already under way has deepened.

"The family living experience, especially, was fantastic," Agarwal says. "I was in America for four months and stayed with four different families. At first I didn't know how to operate some of the electrical gadgets." But she learned quickly. She also discovered that the American way ofmaking a stranger feel at home was to treat him or her like a member of the family, without any of the special pampering Indian hosts lavish on an outsider in their midst. She initially felt puzzled by this seemingly casual attitude, but finally recognized it as the ultimate form of acceptance.

Anju Chatterjee likewise recalls living with American families as a great experience. She heads the Crisis Intervention Centre at Sanjivini, a mental health counseling group in New Delhi. "Before going to the United States in 1984," Chatterjee says, "I had an image of the American stereotype before me. But after living with them I found that they are just like us! They talk about the same things, have the same concerns. On the human level there are more similarities than differences."

For Alka Narang, who also went to America on a four-month grant in 1984, the trip was a learning experience both personally and professionally. "They made good use of me," she says, referring to the county Special Education Service Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where she was assigned for fieldwork "Although the schools were closed for the summer, our group planned all the activities for the special education services for that county to be used the following school year. We also managed a summer school for children with learning disabilities. " Narang heads the social welfare department at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, one of the very few schools in Delhi that attempts to put mentally handicapped children into the mainstream of regular classrooms for at least part,of the school day. Before her work experience in Cleveland, Narang felt uncertain about how she and her colleagues were handling the job in India because of the lack of facilities, the paucity of literature and the absence of an infra-

structure for formal training methods.

"Here we work without models, empirically," she says. "I wondered if we were doing the right things." She returned to India reassured. "We are doing the same things, but without models, and we manage."

Narang points out that special-education teachers in the United States have lots of prescribed techniques and materials to help them deal with specific problems.

Moreover, they are trained to do highly specialized jobs, like working only with children who have reading disabilities, or only with those who have trouble with math. In India, on the other hand, teachers of special education need to be multipurpose workers. This requires a lot of creativity and improvization. Besides, in the absence of degree courses in special education in India, teachers in this field literally have to learn their craft on the job. In fact, Narang finds that one of the biggest challenges in her work is finding experienced teachers. Her own job typifies the multipurpose nature of social work in a school setting. She has to deal with case work, with the counseling of students and parents, with special education for the mentally handicapped and with a program for gifted students.

Uma Agarwal too finds her workload heavy and her tasks more varied at Springdales School than what she encountered in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she worked in the Center for Family Services, a counseling agency. "The workload there was tremendous," she says, "and clients had to wait five or six weeks for an appointment. The atmosphere here at Springdales is not so supercharged and the school environment is different from that of the St. Paul counseling center. I use the teachers and the senior students a lot," she says.

With the help of her students she is currently engaged in 14projects going on in the community-in blind schools, hospitals and in the slums. Agarwal also does career counseling and is involved with the problems of employee welfare, fund-raising, a creche for teachers' children, and even with arranging blood donations, if necessary. Another aspect of her job is to make children from low-income families, who are on scholarships at Springdales,

"By being allowed to help others, I am helping myself."

Anju Chatterjee, head of the Crisis Intervention Centre at Sanjivini, Delhi, counsels a visitor.

feel at home in a school that primarily has affluent children.

In spite of the differences in the work setting, Agarwal finds that Indian and American children confront virtually the same types of problems. But the approach to solving them is different. "In India, it's more family-oriented," she explains. "In the United States problems are dealt with ill a very individual, child-based procedure."

Anju Chatterjee went from her job at Sanjivini to work in a mental health clinic near Scranton, Pennsylvania. "It was a good experience for me," she says. "It was the first time I worked away from my own organization. " In Delhi, the Crisis Intervention Centre that she heads basically offers befriending and supportive services to people who are caught up in desperate interpersonal situations and have tried various avenues of help without success. "In India, people tend to hold on to their problems longer than they do in the United States and try to resolve their difficulties within the family

instead of seeking help from outsiders," she says. However, the problems themselves do not differ much from country to country.

"I was able to adapt very well to conditions where I worked in the United States because of my experience at Sanjivini. I was actively involved, like all the other therapists, from Day One," she says.

Chatterjee, who describes herself as always having been by nature a "caretaker," finds it extremely rewarding to help people become more aware of themselves and their potential. "Just listening to others puts me in touch with different undiscovered areas of myself. By being allowed to help others, I'm helping myself."

Uma Agarwal, who became interested in social work early and did volunteer work at Mother Teresa's home for orphaned children in Delhi while still in school, puts it another way, "I feel needed. There is a lot of personal satisfaction in that."

Long after their return home to India, the link between friends and professional associates forged during the CIP experience continues to grow. For some, like Anju Chatterjee, it has led to a subsequent longer visit to the United States for specialized training. "Going as a CIP grantee gave me the confidence to try it on my own next time, and in 1986 I simply applied for a year-long training course in Minnesota and was accepted." During her second trip, she visited one of the families she had stayed with in Pennsylvania during the CIP tour.

They threw a party for her and the other families she had lived with in that area. "It was marvelous to see all of them again," she says.

The CIP alumni network took formal shape in 1960 with the creation of the Council of International Fellowship (CIF) that today has 30 national branches, including India. CIF-India get-togethers take place every two years, and in 1981 Bombay hosted 250 international and Indian delegates during a week-long conference that addressed itself to policies and programs for the handicapped. In a reversal of the CIP circumstances, CIF-India organizes yearly programs in India for social workers, youth leaders and specialeducation teachers from foreign countries.

Professionals from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands,

West Germany and the United States have so far taken part in the nine- to 12-week programs that give them exposure to various social work agencies in the country and experience in an agency setting for one month besides a taste of family living with Indian volunteer hosts. Last year IS participants from various countries visited Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune for placements in hospitals, specialeducation centers, institutions for the mentally ill, family counseling and adoption centers, and homes for the destitute.

According to Katy Gandevia, chairperson of CIF -India, alumni meet once a year under the organization's auspices. Fortnightly educational seminars, workshops and lectures that focus on current issues in social work in India also engage the CIFIndia's energies. Looking ahead, Gandevia says the organization anticipates setting up an interstate program for social workers from all over India so that they can get together to exchange ideas on strategies, evaluation techniques and methodologies.

Gandevia, who is currently a lecturer in medical and psychiatric social work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay, says that when she went to the United States under the CIP in 1978, "I was working as a psychiatric social worker with a voluntary organization.

Subsequently I took up my present assignment. I attribute this change from the field to academics mainly to the thirst for knowledge I sharpened when I was in the CIP program." She is currently working on her PhD. The CIP began in 1956 as the fulfillment of a dream of Henry B. Ollendorff. He had arrived in the United States in 1936, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, and was determined to work for a world free of hatred and intolerance. He conceived of the uniq ue idea of bringing together professionals in the human-service fields from all over the world in purposeful relationships.

Today the CIP is a private, nonprofit organization that offers a four- or 12month program each year, supported by funds from the United States and foreign governments, by American families who volunteer their hospitality, by university affiliates and a variety of other American private-sector organizations. It is adminis-

Right: CIFIndia chairperson Kat)' Gandevia (right) welcomes CIP president Kate Katzki during her 1986 visit to India.

Le/i: Springdales School's Uma Agarwal (Ie/i) discusses a project with a nurse at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, one of the Delhi institutions where her students help out. Below: A lka N arang (left), a/the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, one ofthefew schools in the capital that mainstreams the mentally handicapped, shares some relaxed moments with her students.

tered in India by the U.S. Educational Foundation for India (USEFI).

Over the years the basic goals first articulated by Ollendorff have remained unchanged: To increase professional knowledge, to provide a realistic and positive image of American life and to promote world peace through personal contact among participants and with Americans.

Uma Agarwal articulates the goals achieved on the individual level: "I keep up my friendships through letters with people I worked with and lived with in the United States. Aside from agency work and family living, being part of an international group was a fantastic learning experience. There were 21 of us from 15 countries in Minnesota. The problems they handle professionally are so similar to ours. Only the social environment is different. It was a miniworld."

Summing up, Agarwal says that seeing what is happening in the West, one can get a glimpse of what will happen in India and other countries of the Third World in a few years. "Trends already under way there are beginning to be seen here. It was like looking into the future."

0

Thomas Eakins Neglected and misunderstood during his lifetime, Thomas Eakins is today celebrated as one of America's greatest realistic artists.

1. The Pathetic Song, 1881; oil on canvas, 114.5 x 82.5 em.

(The Lady at the piano is Mrs. Eakins.)

3. Dr. D. Hayes Agnew: Study, 1889; oil on canvas,

2. Walt Whitman, 1887-88; oil on canvas, 76 x 61 em.

4. Self-Portrait. available .)

124.5x80cm.

(Details not

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) died virtually unsung after a lifetime of teaching and painting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Today, he is widely recognized as a great American artist whose relentless realism bears the mark of genius. His more than 300 paintings, of which he sold only 20 during his entire life, are now worth millions of dollars.

Eakins's artistic vision differed sharply from that of his contemporaries. They painted what the public had come to expect-romanticized landscapes and flattering portraits. Eakins studied for four years in Paris and Madrid and began his career in 1870 with detailed studies of professional rowers, then much admired, on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River.

Eakins next turned his attention to another heroic figure-the surgeon. Anesthesia had then recently come into use, and it gave surgeons time to perform complex operations, often before gatherings ofmedical students who paid to attend. One of the foremost surgeons in the United States, Samuel Gross, practiced in Philadelphia at the Jefferson Medical College. Eakins depicted Gross in .his surgical amphitheater excising a diseased piece of bone. The result was a dark but dramatic painting highlighted by shiny blood on the surgeon's hand, an artistic touch with which nearly everyone found fault. For years The Portrait of Doctor Gross hung in a .college stairwell, neglected by everyone except mischievous students who nicked it with their scalpels. It hangs today in its own gallery at the Jefferson Medical College, and trustees recently refused an offer from .theNational Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to buy it for $1.5 million.

Eakins joined the faculty at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1876 and later became director of instruction there. He insisted on strenu-

ous courses in mathematics and anatomy, including the dissection of human cadavers; and promoted the use of nude models in figure classes, a practice that scandalized conservative Philadelphians and eventually led to his resignation in 1886. In his own work, Eakins used the infant art of photography to study his subjects. A series of photographs of horses trotting produced May Morning in the Park, the first known time in art history that such motion was accurately captured by an artist's hand.

Eakins's great portraiture period came at the end of his career. The painting of his wife Susan hangs in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Abram Lerner, founding director of the Hirshhorn, was once asked which painting he would rescue first if the museum were on fire. This, he said, indicating the Eakins.

1. The Gross Clinic,

1875; oil on canvas, 244 x 198 em.

2. Professor Henry A. Rowland, 1897; oil on

canvas, 209.5

x

3. Self-Portrait,

136.5 em.

1902;

oil on canvas, 76 x63.5 em.

4. Mrs. Thomas Eakins,

circa 1900; oil on canvas, 51 x 40.5 em.

5. The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog, circa 1886; oil on canvas, 76 x 58.5 em.

The world's during

"forgotten

the recent

four-day

people"

were the focus

Indo-U.S.

symposium

of attention

on community

mental health at Bangalore. Frank J Sullivan, acting director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who headed the 14-member American delegation to the symposium, said it highlighted the two countries' "common commitment to better care and treatment The National

Institute of Design's first Charles Eames Memorial

for the mentally

ill."

The symposium, fourth in a series begun in 1983, was organized as part of the Indo-U.s Subcommission on Science and Technol-

Award (see SPAN August 1987) was presented to Kamladevi Chattopadhyay last month in recognition of her contribution to reviving Indian culture and aesthetics. The award, which honors

ogy. It is one of the continuing activities following an agreement in 1982 between the American Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA) in Bethesda and the Indian

the American designer whose recommendations led to the founding of the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad in 1961, will be presented every two years to an individual who has "substantially contributed to design thinking and practice, and to the ideals of service, dignity and love held out to the design profession" by Charles Eames.

National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bangalore, for the exchange of scientific information between

Chattopadhyay

was honored

for initiating

a socioeconomic

revolution by setting up cooperatives of craftsmen and for educating the world about the Indian ethos. Accepting the award, the 84year-old recipient said, "Turmoils and sufferings around may be assuaged or melted by a right design, for the eye can penetrate the innermost in man and the deepest anguish can be expressed on any material." The veteran social worker and writer has earlier been honored with the Padma Bhushan, the Watumull Foundation Award, and the Magsaysay International Award.

Dr. Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut trai nee selected by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, sits in the space shuttle simulator at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. One of 15 candidates chosen recently from 2,000 qualified applicants, the 30year-old resident of Los Angeles, California, has been working as a physician with a local health organization.

Jemison graduated from Stanford University, California, with

majors in chemical engineering and Afro-American studies and from Cornell University Medical School

in New York.

the two institutes, organizing symposia on mental health, and developing mutually beneficial collaborative research projects.

The earlier three symposia have dealt with schizophrenia, affectivedisorders, and alcohol and drug abuse.

In assessing and discussing the different phases and approaches of community mental health activities in India and the United States, the 1987 symposium focused on the role of professionals, paraprofessionals, self-help groups and families.

The symposium delegates visited NIMHANS' community mental health care center in Sakalawara village a few kilometers from Bangalore; a primary health center in Solur (above), 45 kilometers from Bangal.ore, that provides integrated mental health services for about some

100,000 people; a 20-bed halfway home in Bangalore; and other urban home care/rehabilitation centers. At Solur,

medical officer Dr. Saradamma told them about the initial the center faced in explaining the concept of medical mental health to villagers who attribute all forms of mental supernatural causes. "Now the situation has changed,"

problems care for illness to she said.

"In 1985 the Indian Council of Medical Research and NIMHANS started the 'Mental Health in Primary Health Care' project here.

During their routine home visits our workers have identified 500 mentally ill people, most of whom are now being treated.".

After the field visits, David Mechanic, director of the Institute of Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, New Jersey, said, "I am really impressed by the way India is using its resources despite constraints like lack of funds and professionals.

It made me realize how much we waste in America. The Indian planning process is much more deliberative and rational."

"Some of the experiments going on in India, particularly the family treatment program, are much more advanced than what we are doing. I am taking home some of these methods," said Steven Wolin, clinical professor at the Center for Family Research, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

the winter it is cold because we cannot get sunlight. I thought ii we put a giant mirror in space,

Ever since the first energy crunch in 1973 when the Orga-

we could get sunlight all round the year and prod uce electricity from it."

nization of Petroleum Exporting Countries greatly raised the price of petroleum, scientists around the world have looked at the sun as an alternative

Pennsylvania's Merck company has developed a drug (in-

is that display

Sachin Patel, a student at the St. Rose of Lima School in

Smithsonian Washington,

Schulenburg, Texas.

Late last year, Patel entered the Invent America contest, and

it shows an orbiting Earth station with a giant parabolic mirror that reflects sunlight to a solar furnace. In the furnace,

his project, "Solar Energy From Space," which envisions a gi-

above) that reduces blood levelsof certain forms of choles-

ant satellite with a mirror that would continuously reflect sun-

terol by up to 39 percent, by inhibiting the activity of an enzymevital to the liver's manufac-

light to Earth, has been adjudged the best. He received

in Mevacor

ture of cholesterol.

More than the award, perhaps the bigger honor for Patel

source of energy. Now there is a scientist who seven-year-old has entered the race. He is

tablets,

troduced

Of cou rse, his father, Narendra R. Patel, helped the

the award earlier this year from Vice President George Bush.

The US government has released $25 million, as accelerated disbursement from its USAID funds already committed for India, to help this country meet some of the foreign exchange requirements stemming from the 1987 drought.

Above, All)bassador John Gunther Dean (left) hands over the funds to tne Indian Secretary of Finance, S. Venkitaramanan.

This is expected to be followed by a similar disbursement of up to $100 million by March this year.

steam turbine

his model at the

Institution in D.C. Made of toys,

is produced that

is now on prestigious

to feed

generates

a

ele-

ctricity, the inventor explained.

Patel got the idea for his project while playing with a mirror one day. Talking like a real pro, he said, "I realized that in

Forty-year-old Naomi Judd (right) and her 22-year-old daughter Wynonna recently won the American Country Music Association's award for the best new country act. Said Peo-

young scientist with the necessary reading and research.

"Parents do participate in a way in these contests

through

helping children understand the concepts," said the senior Patel

who

restaurant

runs

a motel

and

in Flatonia,

Texas.

"Yet it is a remarkable feat for a seven-year-old to achieve."

Said Patel's

Phyllis science

achievement

Vanghouse, teacher, "His

has spurred

and

inspired other students at the school. They too have started thinking, 'We also want a piece of this action.' "

pie magazine: "Wynonna's bluesy lead vocals and Naomi's deep alto harmonies blend into an acoustic, almost spare mixture of bluegrass, ditional

folk."

rock and tra-

International Essay Contest More than 1,200 foreign students in the United States have participated in the Scholarship Essay Competition for International Students, organized by International Underwriters/ Brokers, Inc., since its inception in 1982. Thefirst prize in the last two competitions went to Indian students whose essays are reproduced here.

"In what ways have your study and living experiences in the United States changed your perspective on your own country?"

Essay topic for 1985-86

Diganta Mijumder Thanksgiving is over.

The turkey has been eaten, the wines consumed, the toasts made and perhaps forgotten. In three days we head back for college and the last weeks of the fall semester.

All is quiet at the farm I'm spending the vacation in. My host family has retired for the night. Through the window in the study and the light snow falling outside, I can see the immense grain elevator, the darkened barn and the majestic combine harvester, resting as it has been since the end of the harvesting season in late October. As I watch, an odd question keeps running through my head: How different would life be on a farm back in India?

City slicker that I am, I have to admit that I don't really know.

But I'm pretty sure that things would be very different. No Indian farmer would have the kind of electric typewriter I'm writing this essay on; most of them can't even read. Chances are he would not have heard of a combine harvester. There would be no heating and cooling systems, no thoughts of hygiene, and certainly no entertaining of a student from abroad.

This thought sparks off a series of others. Unlike many other students I have met, I had no thoughts of returning [to India] when I first arrived [in the United States]. I had been moderately successful as a journalist back in Calcutta; now, I told myself, I was going to make it big in America.

America! The land of opportunity, where anyone with enough grit and talent can see his dream fulfilled, where tradition counts

for nothing and ambition and innovation mean everything.

I saw the others-those who thought they had come only for advanced education-undergo a drastic change in their thinking within a few months of their arrival. Their lips curl up with disdain when they think of, for instance, farms without computers and combine harvesters, of cities and towns unable to control their growth, or a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy trapped inside an archaic system of government.

I have never considered myself remotely patriotic or idealistic. the more I But the more I see of America, the more I love it-and realize the vastness of the potential back home, and the ease with which India can achieve the stature that has so far eluded it.

In the II months that I have been here, I have become so convinced of this that I have switched my emphasis from print journalism to development communication.

This program will prove worthless to me if I choose to stay on here-one way of ensuring that I return [to India].

I still get a little embarrassed when explaining this sudden burst of nationalistic pride. But there is also no problem coming up with examples to back up my conviction.

Take technology, for instance. After coming to the States and visiting a number of cities and universities, I was staggered by the number ofII)dians who have made it big here in the fields of, say, mechanical engineering or computer science. And those numbers just go on rising.

But this is not really a brain drain. These people, brilliant though they are, represent just the tip of the iceberg; there are millions more back home who will do as well or better if given the opportunity.

Obviously, there has to be a major overhaul of the educational system: Closer ties between universities and private corporations to ensure satisfactory future employment, governmental incentives for deserving students, and most of all a systematic ~valuation, and speedy remedying, of the many defects that exist in the institutions at present. Again obviously, the government has to orchestrate these changes, and while working as a journalist I covered Indian politics long enough not to confuse optimism with na¡ivete. But I still believe that such changes can and will be brought about in the not-too-distant future.

Then again, I can't help but grimace when I remember such uniquely Indian phenomena as power cuts: many parts of Calcutta, for instance, go without power for several hours a day, every day, and smaller towns are hit even harder. Living in the States has brought such memories into sharp focus, usually in a critical light.

Every time I find someone has left a room with the radio or TV still

playing, I have to forcibly check the urge to remind him of the electricity he is wasting. What I do instead is wonder how India, so rich in natural and human resources, could ever have reached this sorry state. If only those resources were tapped-and they will be, they have to be.

Why is it that my views are at such variance with so many others? Why is it that I'm so optimistic about the future? Or is it that a few short months in the States have made me forget how things really are back home: that electricity and telephones are a luxury, that a large percentage of the population lives below the poverty line, that only companies and not individuals can afford cars, that the caste system is so ingrained that it will take centuries to erode, that such frightening phenomena as dowry and bride burning are still a painful reality?

The truth is, I have not forgotten. I do not envision a utopia just around the corner. Living in the States has not made me forget how bad things are, merely made me see how much better they can be.

Integral to understanding India is understanding its value system. I know a lot of people who will hate me for this, but I have to say it: despite its immense poverty-stricken populace and tiny but powerful rich elite, India is really one gargantuan middle class. And the society as a whole, whether rich or poor, urban or rural, embodies and flaunts a middle-class morality which serves to cripple the economy.

In this scheme of things, history, family and tradition mean everything, and any consideration of the future must bow before them. Age brings with it wisdom, hence the advice-of the elderly must always be heeded, and to hell with how much things have changed from their day. The woman's place is at home, dusting the bookshelves and buying the groceries, getting dinner ready for the man of the house. Perish the thought that anyone should ever dream of changingjobs, especially to one in another city. And God forbid that any son should ever leave home after graduating and try to make it on his own.

Skeptical though r am of such values, I'm not entirely sure that looking to the West is the answer. Affluence brings with it its own brand of hell, and many of the characteristics of success that I find here, long taken for granted, shock me to the core. Retirement homes for the elderly, away from their families? A 47 percent divorce rate? Ten-year-old children delivering newspapers on early winter mornings? A sky-high rate of teenage crime, usually caused by drug addiction?

Does India have to do away with all its values to make the transition to today from the day before yesterday? Can it make such a change? Or is there something in this "blend of continuity and change" that the present government keeps talking about? If so, what doses of each should there be in the mixture?

I do not know. Sitting in a farm in the rural Midwest, stomach full of turkey and head mellowed by wine, 1can only marvel at the staggering differences between the two cultures, and wonder how a synthesis can ever be wrought. There is so much that each can learn from the other.

No, living in the States has not made me wallow in selfcontentment, looking on with disgust at the mess that India is now in. Nor has it made me hate the material indulgences I now enjoy, and long for the simple pleasures back home.

What the States has made me do is take a long, hard look at my country, and ask the kind of questions I have raised in this essay.

Of course, there are no immediate answers. But I now realize that the questions must be asked-only then will there be answers. 0

"Leaders in the 21st century must be prepared to address in detail such diverse issues as energy, the global environment, economic matters ana the development of space, in an increasingly interdependent world. Give your views on how education can best be adapted to help meet these challenges."

Essay topic for 1986-87

Samir Dayal Our leaders are made in our own image. And the forge is not the polling booth or the scene of a military coup, but the classrooms of educational establishments. It is of the essence, then, to ask how education can be adapted to meet the challenges of molding leaders for the 21st century. But our ~ra has fissured the image of leadership: there is the technological face and the human. The duty devolving on future leaders, therefore, will be twofold-keeping abreast of information on major issues, and enabling us to confront freshly our humanity in an age which threatens it.

Modern instances of successful leadership abound. One cannot be blind to impressive excursions into the cosmic and the microscopic, witness the exploration ofVenus's moons from as close as 29,000 kilometers and the probes into the AIDS virus. The human mind is now the "last frontier" of investigation, and even here there are signs of intrepid leadership-in psychoanalysis, brain surgery, cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Curiously, however, these human adventures are perceived as technological advancements; in the ocean of technological particulars, the human individual's importance seems to have withered.

There is a truism that our "role models"-one thinks of celluloid figures of the cinema-have become devitalIzed, less inspired. One might expect our leaders, embodying modern values in more distilled form, to have suffered even greater attrition.

Indeed, we no longer expect "greatness" or Renaissance omniscience from them: the endlessly reticulated and interlinked information about major issues is already impossible for any leader to master. But is this impossible mastery of issues the essential task of the leader?

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the notion of

leadership is at a cnSlS, and that the crisis is an effect of the spiraling growth of information in technological society. The advocacy of curbing growth is a regressive prescription; although growth can be malignant, it is inevitable. Far from arguing that there is no need of managing the resultant complex of information, I would consider it the first burden of the leader, But entirely neglecting the human ramifications of growth would vitiate leadership further.

Technology can become dehumanizing. This face of technology has met the gaze of humanist observers (Charles Dickens, Ortega y Gasset and George Orwell are but three luminous examples), but it can easily be obscured by technology's appurtenances-advertising being principal. To the unclouded gaze, it is increasingly clear that human concerns no longer direct modern history; the individual is instead determined by technological exigencies. Today, the measure of a leader is the currency of postindustrial economics: energy, the global environment and space. This measure threatens to discount humanity. But the dignity of humanity must be kept from disappearing like a ghost from a machine.

There is also a reverse danger in eroding the human dimension of leadership. What else guarantees the leaders' responsibility to those they lead? Competence in technological information will be expected from leaders whose thumbs hover above fateful red buttons-buttons that could send ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) hurtling toward an apocalypse unimagined in any sacred book. But the danger of allowing leaders to talk in technocratic jargon about this decision is real, because, as Orwell warned, we can let ourselves be tricked into forgetting that the decision is not "economic" or "political" but human-in the nuclear apocalypse it is human beings who will burn and vaporize.

Consider, alternatively, a less sensational example of the human exigencies of leadership in an increasingly technological era. One of today's thorniest issues is energy. Leaders will be expected to arrange fuel for engines of the next century-fuel that does not deplete fossil reserves, radioactively pollute our environment, or jeopardize the economy. Yet these will not be the only cautions.

Efficiency is the watchword of industrial and "postindustrial" societies; in its pursuit, it is deceptively easy to capitulate to mechanical expediency.' Leaders will have to be prepared to address in detail the conflicting exigencies of technology and humanity. To ask less of leaders will be asking too little. And to ask so much tomorrow from those not educated today to manage these naturally divergent exigencies would be asking too much.

Never has it been more true that leaders are not born but made.

The making, or education, of the future's leaders is a challenge.

Those who answer the challenge must beware of becoming modern relatives of the Dickensian pedagogical horrors, Thomas Gradgrind and Mr. McChoakumchild.

These unhappy gentlemen erred in grinding only hard information into the heads of their pupils, choking their essential humanity. The gruel of mere information is a starvation diet. Education ought to provide students finer, more nutritious sustenance.

To use a different metaphor, the increasingly sophisticated machine could become a Frankenstein monster, brutalizing its creators. But there is neither room nor time for paralysis or nostalgia about preindustrial harmony, real or imagined. The beast is afoot. It must serve us, even if it cannot be domesticated.

First, however, the nature of the beast must be understood, and that is the domain of education.

Ifmodern education is to meet the challenges effectively, it must

attend to the large issues in their minute particularity while grounding them in the even larger issue of what it means to be human and social. The importance of education cannot be exaggerated: the alternative is confusion, ignorance, darkness. Education must above all aspire to the condition Matthew Arnold called "sweetness and light." Like Cardinal Newman, he upheld education as learning with humanity.

What grows from the human mind depends on the cultivation of the soil of intelligence. What we produce or consume, and the governments we elect, will depend on our education. World markets will shuffle not only stocks, bonds and coin, but ideas, agreements and the ethical imperatives. Forests and lakes will be healthy or unhealthy according to the priorities of the captains of industry. Our Earth will be a free or fearful citizen of the universe according to our leaders' decisions on space development. In a word, education, broadly conceived, will decide whether leaders will lead us into the temptation of forgetting our humanity in subservience to industrial efficiency, or deliver us from that evil.

Education, I have argued, must be adapted to the double challenge of training leaders to meet the exigencies of technology and humanity. Ampitious the project may be; impossible it is not.

The increasing diversity and interdependence of information have directed education toward increasing specializa~ion-and, unfortunately, divisiveness. Science is divided from nonscience, and all disciplines are factionalized. This atomization, a direct result of the information explosion, can fuel explosion, but proper management of communication among all the disciplines can transform conflict into constructive collaboration.

This collaboration is something education could profitably concentrate.

Nor does educational management of communication have to begin at advanced levels: even the eclectic and polymorphous curiosity of young children can be turned to advantage. Specialization may come later; and while a particular student may become a leader by virtue of his superior, specialized knowledge and wisdom, he must be encouraged to consult leaders in other fields for their assessments. Networking and delegation will be indispensable in the information-flooded world of the next century, as today's ~tudents will find-and not only those who become leaders.

One ought to speak, therefore, not only of the education of leaders, but of general education. Exclusive concern for the education of leaders would be divisively elitist, overcautiouseven meaningless. We never really know beforehand who the leaders are going to be. Even if we identified "the gifted few" we could not neglect the unpromising many. A general education would not only improve the common lot (illiteracy can only hurt) but spur leaders to excellence in whatever they seriously undertake. A general education is good for the polity.

Education must adapt itself to the role of facilitator, providing channels for interdisciplinary sharing of inforP.1ation and opinions, always with a view to the human dimension. Rather than emulating the iron-minded and rust-hearted Gradgrind, future educators must be open-minded and humane-hearted.

Like Socrates and other teachers of the past, they should be examples and therefore "leaders" of the future's leaders.

The problems of the world might then see their solution in human rather than in the exclusively economic or political terms.

More importantly, leaders in an increasingly industrialized and interdependent world might still find a way to be truly leaders of humanity.

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•••• A MEETING OF MINDS took place December 7 in Washington, D.C., when, at their summit meeting, President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, universally acclaimed as the most important document to come into existence since World War II. President Reagan termed the summit, which attracted worldwide interest, "a clear success."

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Above: General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet officials (right) meet with American leaders of the U.S. Congress at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. Seated around the table, from left, are: Senators Robert Dole and Robert Byrd; Representatives Jim Wright, Thomas Foley, Robert Michel, Tony Coelho and Trent Lott; Anatoli Dobrynin, Central Committee Secretary for Foreign Affairs; Eduard Shevardnadze, Foreign Minister; Mikhail Gorbachev; Alexander Yakovlev, Central Committee Secretary for Propaganda; Vladimir Kamentsev, Chairman, Foreign Economic Commission; and Yuri Dubinin, Ambassador to the United States.

Left: President and Mrs. Reagan with General Secretary and Mrs. Gorbachev outside the South Portico of the White House prior to a dinner honoring the Soviet visitors.