September 1990

Kim Scott, an American artist who recently spent six months in India, says that her interest in this country began when she was just nine. "The first prize I received in art," says Scott, "was for a work made from photographs ofIndian village women that I had altered with gold paint and baubles."

Born in Sacramento, California, in 1953,Scott, who inherited her interest in art from her artist mother, received her bachelor's and master's degrees in art from Sacramento State University. She has participated in more than 30 shows in her home city. "India Moon," her exhibition at the Village Gallery in Delhi earlier this year, displayed her creations in copper. An interesting aspect of her art is her putting herself in different situations: In the work shown above she is an Indian woman; in another she is Mona Lisa. For the portrait shown here Scott worked a thin copper sheet in low relief. The color glowing through the "cut out" eyes comes from the paper painted with gouache and pasted on the back. Among Scott's current projects is Mail Art; she wants to have exhibitions in Sacramento and in Indian cities through works exchanged by mail. She made a start with some Sacramento-to-Delhi mail art exhibits (left) at her Delhi show.

Back home now, Scott is holding slide shows and exhibitions of her own work in India and also that of contemporary Indian artists.

A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

This year marks the 25th anniversary of a relentless American campaign against smoking, the benevolent effects of which are increasingly visible in the decline of deaths from smoking-related diseases.

For years U.S. health officials had expressed concern about¡smoking, but the public spirit oflive and let smoke frustrated all attempts to tar cigarettes as a hazard rather than a nuisance. However, that all changed in 1964when the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report that clearly and directly linked smoking to cancer. As a result, beginning in 1965, the Surgeon General, the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, municipalities, businesses and concerned citizens joined together in a vigorous campaign to clear the air.

Laws were passed making it mandatory for tobacco companies to print warning labels on cigarette packages-a practice now followed by a number of countries, including India. Cigarette advertising was banned from television and radio and a variety of statutes were promulgated throughout the United States, prohibiting or strictly limiting smoking in stores, restaurants, theaters, hospitals, offices, museums, banks, buses, trains and domestic flights. While some American businesses have completely banned smoking, others limit the habit to certain designated areas. Many corporations now offer incentives to nonsmokers and bonuses to smokers who quit.

In 1986,smokers received yet another blow, when the new Surgeon General released a report on the effects of passive, or involuntary, smoking. The report revealed that pregnant women who smoke are more likely to miscarry, while children of heavy smokers suffer more bronchitis, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses. Around the same time, a study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences established that nonsmoking spouses of smokers face a 25 percent greater risk of contracting lung cancer than do spouses of nonsmokers.

These findings further galvanized nonsmokers, many of whom had until then restricted their protests to displaying polite or helpful signs such as "Thank You For Not Smoking" or "If You Smoke, Don't Exhale" in their offices and homes. They became more vocal and assertive. Nonsmokers began accosting smokers in restaurants and other public places, insisting that they "stop polluting our air." Not long ago Time magazine quoted an artist saying, in indignation, "It's hell to be a smoker these days because we all have to be so sensitive to nonsmokers. I'm constantly changing seats to enjoy a cigarette after dinner in a restaurant."

Peer pressure to give up smoking is also intense. Says an office secretary, whose companions threatened to throw her cigarettes overboard on a sailing trip, "People make you feel like you've got some filthy habit." Most nonsmokers would agree that is exactly what it is.

Perhaps the most telling blow to smokers in America comes from their children. "My kids have been on my case for years," confides a lawyer in the Time article. His daughters once gave him a shadow box that contained a cigarette, a skull and crossbones, and a little Superman figure with the caption "You're a super dad if you don't smoke."

Notwithstanding the protests and indignation of die-hard smokers, the campaign against smoking has had a very positive effect: The number of American adult smokers has precipitously declined from about 40 (lercent in 1965 to 28 percent now. As the antismoking laws become more stringent, the enforcement more effective and the public more intolerant, embattled smokers may realize the futility and hazards of smoking, and finally muster the willpower to say good-bye to their "coffin nails."

-L.J.B.

SPAN 2 The Greening of America

by Trip Gabriel

8 Vocational Training-Preparing for Life 11 Linking Fortunes for Global Prosperity

by Philip Kotler and Nikhilesh Dholakia

16 Let's Invent Something

20

On the Lighter Side

21 26 28 32

Sister Islands Under the Sun

by Philip Kopper

Focus On ...

Directing Miller in Madras

by Geeta Doctor

A Temperament for Writing An Interview With Geoffrey Ward by Vijaya Ghose

36 Getting Serious About Service

by Cheryl! Aimee Barron

39 At Texas Medical Center-The

Indian Touch

by S.D. Saxena

42 Reconsidering James Baldwin by Darshan Singh Maini 45 Celebrating Special Talent by Barry Fitzgerald 48 The Poetry of Katha Pollitt Front cover: On Martha's Vineyard, Massachusett's lush island, a volunteer preserves the luster on a brass tank in a lighthouse lens at the Dukes County Historical Society. The Vineyard and the neighboring island of Nantucket are popular summer resorts, luring visitors back again and again. See story on pages 21-25.

Back cover: Nand Katyal's painting captures the mood ofKatha Pollitt's poetry ... "these swirls swept on to paper ..." See also page 48 and inside back cover. (These paintings were made long before Katyal had read Pollitt's poetry, but the words and the works of art have a commonality of spirit.)

Publisher, Leonard J. Baldyga; Editor, Warren W. McCurdy Managing Editor, Himadri Dhanda; Associate Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, Y.P. Pandhi; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services; American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover-Gail Mooney. Inside front cover tOjT-Avinash Pasricha. 2Ted Spiegel/Black Star. 3 tOjT-California Energy Company; bottom-Tulane University.

7-Barry Fitzgerald. 8-IQ-Lynn Johnson. 12-14-Avinash Pasricha. 16-17-<:ourtesy Drew Wilson. 18-<:ourtesy of the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan. 21-25Gail Mooney. 27-Amiya K. Saha. 28-31-Raghavendra Rao. 32 left-Jotinder J.P. Takhar; top right-Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 33 top left-Cline Dinst, Washington, D.C. 39-41-<:ourtesy S.D. Saxena. 43-sketch by Hemant Bhatnagar. 4547-Barry Fitzgerald.

Published by the United States Infonnation Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316~1), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad.

Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price o/magazine. one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs, 30; single copy, Rs. 5,

Left: Colorado lake water is analyzed in an acid-rain study. Right: In its effort to keep the environment clean, the California Energy Company has set up a geothermal plant that generates power by tapping natural steam from an underground reservoir.

Facing page, below: As part of their curriculum, student attorneys from the Tulane Law School's Environmental Law Clinic in New Orleans, Louisiana, visit a landfill in the company of residents living nearby to learn firsthand how landfills cause pollution.

THE GREENING OF

The U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, last amended in 1977, is America's most sweeping environmental law. However, over the years it has grown feeble, as pollution far exceeded forecasts. In June last year, President George Bush, who campaigned as the "environment President," sent a far more stringent bill, aimed at cleaning the nation's air, to the U.S. Congress.

In this article, the author gives an account of the closed-door strategies, battles, compromises that ensued between the pro- and anti-environmental lobbyists preceding the bill's introduction.

Since the article was written, the U.S. Senate passed the bill on April 3, 1990, and the House of Representatives on May 23. It now awaits ajoint Senate-House conference to work out a single version of the clean-air bill for President Bush to sign into law.

he environmentalists gath- has had this President's ear like no other ered in the East Room of the chief in the agency's 20 years. Most reWhite House on June 12, cently, this was evident at the Paris eco1989, thought they had died nomic summit: President Bush, alone and gone to heaven. After among the seven world leaders, brought his eight years of receiving the chief environmental adviser. For one meetbrushoff from the previous U.S. Admin- ing, a limousine whisked the two to the istration, treated like rabble outside the Louvre pyramid, where the EPA Admingate, the Sierra Club and its ilk were on the istrator, a polyglot, interpreted for Presiguest list to hear the new President unveil dent Bush in environmental talks with his proposals to fight air pollution. As Fran<;ois Mitterrand.

President George Bush ticked off his initiaMonths earlier, it would have seemed tives-most notably, to act on the long- farfetched for the 50-year-old Reilly to be delayed devastation of acid rain-the an intimate of the powerful. He came to environmentalists understood themselves government after 15 years as president of to be witnessing the greening of the presi- the Washington-based Conservation dency. "The logjam has been broken," Foundation, a think tank with a reputation Fred Krupp, executive director of the for not ruffling feathers.

Environmental Defense Fund, said later.

As the first professional conservationist President Bush hit "a grand slam," said the to head the EPA since Russell Train, durNational Wildlife Federation President, ing the Ford years, he carries with him all Jay D. Hair. the pent-up hopes and visions of a reThe mood that morning was ceremonial, nascent environmental movement. A steady stream of issues has put the EPA on befitting the occasion. But it contrasted with the pyrotechnics that had lit up other front pages for months and kept Reilly so White House chambers, the Roosevelt busy he has sometimes taken home three Room and the Cabinet Room, in previous briefcases at night.

If a tough clean-air bill is "a litmus test" weeks, when the Administration engaged in an internal debate over the environ- for him, as Reilly once told the President, it mental line the President should take. is also a litmus test for Reilly himself. When At seven Cabinet-level meetings, three of Reilly was named chief of EPA, in January them run by President Bush, William K. 1989, conservationists generally hailed his Reilly, Administrator of the U.S. Environ- appointment, but some wondered ifhe had mental Protection Agency (EPA), cru- real fire in his belly. In the U.S. environsaded for strong anti-air-pollution mental movement, he was a cautious modmeasures that would, in effect, sock it to erate. At Reilly's confirmation hearing, American industry. Several of the Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairPresident's Cabinet members and depart- man of the liberal environmental protection ment heads favored doing much less. When subcommittee, wondered whether Reilly the shouting subsided, the President ig- would "conciliate, mediate and negotiate nored his more senior advisers and signed away our environmental laws." on to Reilly's proposals, amendments to Reilly is America's top environmental the Clean Air Act of 1970. And Reilly, a cop. There is no swagger or flamboyance in political newcomer who says that during his manner; he cultivates a statesmanlike the battle he felt as though he were having image. In conversation, he is a generous his "brains beat in," exulted: "We got a anecdotalist, but his speech is rarely earthy program that adds 50 percent or maybe or direct; often it sounds like boilerplate more to what the country lays out on from speeches he has given. pollution control every year. And, by Several colleagues note that Reilly's lowheaven, that is a strong measure of key style has served him well in the noisy presidential commitment." environmental field. Business lobbyists Pale and thin, with a soft voice and come to see him expecting a zealot, but find courtly manners, the head of the non- an administrator in a conservative suit with Cabinet EPA-a regulatory body that en- a dapper pocket hankie. He acts exceedforces antipollution laws, including the ingly nice-and they are disarmed. "I've Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the seen that happen with auto executives and Superfund, for the cleanup of toxic oil guys," says William Rosenberg, head of wastes-has emerged from a position of the EPA air-pollution office. "There's no traditional inconsequence to become a key question where he stands, and yet he says it policy shaper in the United States. Reilly in such a pleasant way you don't feel you

T

want to kill the guy when he's done."

Over the months since his appointment, Reilly has discovered that to survive in big government, he has had to reconcile his fundamental civility with the need to be a tough advocate. It was barely eight weeks into his tenure that his credibility and President Bush's claim that "I am an environmentalist" were almost irreparably damaged over a single issue-the March 24, 1989, wreck of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska's scenic Prince William Sound.

Public opinion polls in the United States pummeled the President for not acting decisively for two weeks, not until crude oil had reached two national parks and the projected death toll-2,000 otters and 33,000 birds-had stunned conservationists. The President chose a passive approach in part because of advice he was given by Reilly and others that Exxon could handle the cleanup.

The Monday after the Friday disaster, a concerned Reilly had called the White House and said, "I think I'd better get up there." After two days in Alaska, Reilly returned and reported to the President.

"My position was that it's an incredible catastrophe," says Reilly. "It breaks your heart to look at the impact of it."

Yet he did not press President Bush to federalize the cleanup. Not until a week later, when Exxon's efforts had proved inadequate and public pressure was mounting, did the President assign the U.S. Coast Guard to a limited role. The Bush Administration's response was "tardy and derelict," says Senator Baucus. "I think the Administration should have jumped in full force and directed Exxon to clean up."

Reilly didn't urge early federal action, according to aides, because he believed Exxon officials who told him they could manage the 42-million-liter spill, the worst in America's history. When it came to flying in dozens of oil-skimming boats and kilometers of containment booms, Reilly thought a huge corporation could act more decisively than government, with less taxpayer expense. Furthermore, Reilly says Alaska Governor Steve Cowper told him a federal presence was not needed. "Our position as we brought it back was a position that was very widely held up there at the time," he asserts.

Surprisingly, though environmentalists and members of the U.S. Congress have scorched Presidenl Bush for his dilatory response, they have not included the EPA Administrator in their criticism. It may be

the environmentalists are unwilling to alienate the best ally they have in the Bush Administration. Or they may simply recognize in Reilly's caution the hallmark of a career in which he has regularly broken ranks with the more emotional and populist wing of the U.S. environmental lobby.

Reilly has been a card-carrying Green most of his professional life, but he did not come by his sympathies as a backpacker or member of an organic-farming commune.

Rather, he was an academic. Having grown up in Fall River, Massachusetts, he got a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia University, after receiving a B.A. from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. He worked on land-use issues for the President's Council on Environmental Quality, under President Richard Nixon.

In the mid-1970s, at the Conservation Foundation, Reilly began a program called Business and the Environment, which brought together American industry and conservation groups to forge a consensus on polarizing issues. The concept was controversial with most environmentalists, who thought that sitting down with polluters was selling out the cause. Reilly argued the game had changed-that after the sweepinglaws of the early 1970s, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, it was necessary to involve people who ran the polluting plants to bring about change.

The idea of escorting corporate America to the table to talk politely about pollution appealed to establishment philanthropies like the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations, which underwrote Reilly's work. In fact, the Conservation Foundation, which in 1985 became affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund, has become the very nexus for a strand of environmentalism that has run through do-gooding elements of the American establishment since 1916, when the Rockefellers and others gave the land that would become Acadia National Park.

On its "very classy board," as one officer termed it, are New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean; Anne Bass, the Texas socialite; Joseph F. Cullman 3rd, a retired chief executive officer of Philip Morris; and-most interesting, perhaps, in light of Reilly's advice on the Alaska oil spill-top officersof Exxon Chemical.

With all its potential clout, the foundation has rarely been politically active. It has been called "the Vatican of the environmental movement" for its conservative, measured reports. "I would say they have had surprisingly little effect in the areas I've

worked in," says Richard Ayres of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is known as the "shadow EPA" because it helped draft nearly all the antipollution laws in the United States. "I've never seen anything they did that was really relevant to policy change."

Gordon Binder, Reilly's chief of staff and formerly a top aide at the Conservation Foundation, rebuts that: "I don't buy for a moment the criticism that because we weren't out there litigating or arguing on the Capitol Hill that we weren't making a difference. We had a different role." In 1988, the foundation sponsored a forum on protecting ecologically vital wetlands in the United States. It sat down oil and timber executives with wildlife defenders, and together they called for no "net loss of the nation's remaining wetlands." The position found its way onto presidential candidate Bush's official agenda.

The essence of Reilly's predicament is this: By instinct a moderate, in the context of the Bush Administration he is an outand-out zealot. On pollution matters, most of President Bush's men still carry a torch for the Reagan years, when new environmental regulations were blocked on the ground they would stall America's economic engine.

"In an Administration that believes in free-market ideology," Reilly says, picking words carefully in his top-floor office of the shabby EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., "the guy who speaks for the environment has got to do so very clearly, because there won't be anybody else delivering the message."

The hint of belligerence in his tone reflects the long battle over the President's clean-air bill. The proenvironmental position the President announced in June 1989 may have looked like an Administration consensus; but as a reconstruction of the White House infighting illustrates, no consensus ever existed.

For years, an alliance of antiregulatory conservatives and defenders of economic interests, from automakers to coal miners, has frustrated attempts to strengthen the Clean Air Act. Last amended in 1977, the act is America's most sweeping environmental law, but over the years it has grown feeble, as pollution far exceeded expectations.

Smog, which reached the highest levels in a decade during the torrid 1988 summer, is the ultimate symbol of the law's failure.

Partly as a result, the environment rose up

as a belated campaign issue in the presidential election in 1988. Candidate Bush promised to clear the air.

At first, Reilly hoped to deliver to President Bush a list of amendments to the Clean Air Act that represented the collected wisdom of the Domestic Policy Council, a Cabinet-level group that threshes out the President's proposals to the U.S. Congress. But in mid-April 1989, at a meeting of all the major players except President Bush, Reilly. unveiled his blueprint for a consensus-and trespassed into a minefield.

According to officials present, Richard G. Darman, the powerful director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who was chairman of the meeting, flagellated the blueprint as too costly to industry and demanded that the working group that drafted the proposals come up with much broader options, reflecting cheaper measures. In particular, Darman criticized a plan to reduce by half acid rain, which devastates life in lakes and streams and is suspected of damaging forests, mostly in the Northeast and Canada. Invoking an OMB predecessor, Darman recalled that David Stockman had dismissed a "preposterous proposal" on acid rain in 1983 with the quip that every fish saved might as well be solid gold. And now, Darman continued, here comes Reilly with a proposal that would cost twice as much.

"That's because there are half as many fish," Reilly replied.

There was laughter. But Darman's acerbic critique, in keeping with his reputation for abrasiveness, was a major setback. "It was an uncompromising attack, basically, on the proposal to spend any money at all on acid rain, as nearly as one could follow it," recalls Reilly.

According to some Bush Administration officials, Reilly was simply naive in hoping to place a consensus option on the President's desk. What Reilly should have done, says one source who followed the early stages of the four-month process, was to be prepared from the outset with alternatives less inimical to industry: "Nobody in a Republican Administration is just going to sign onto an EPA option without seeing a bunch of others."

Darman, a Reagan holdover, and other White House conservatives are averse to the traditional "command and control" policies of the EPA. The agency wanted an across-the-board cut of ten million tons a year of sulfur dioxide, which is spewed

from tall smokestacks of coal-fired power plants, mostly in the Midwest. In the air, sulfur dioxide changes chemically and falls to earth as acid rain, often hundreds of kilometers away. A ten-mill ion-ton cut, the EPA believed, was "the magic number" needed to reduce acid rain by half. Darman eventually came out for a least-cost option that would cut seven or eight million tons.

Reilly believed ifhe split the difference with Darman, the Bush Administration bill would reek of compromise, cease to be credible and be "dead on arrival" in the U.S. Congress.

This was a watershed moment in Reilly's political education. He was forced to question whether conciliation with his Administration foes would get him anywhere.

"I sure got the feeling in making the rounds of the other agencies-Agriculture, Labor and all the rest of them-that it wasn't going to work if I tried to look for points of consensus with everybody," he says now.

Instead of looking for common ground, Reilly ordered the EPA to refine its research and sharpen its debating points.

Some positions were discarded, but on the whole Reilly became an outspoken advocate. "It was the real world," he says. "It was a clarification to me that getting this stuff out was going to be a bitch."

His most controversial proposal was to dampen Americans' love affair with gasoline-fueled automobiles, the chief cause of urban smog. The EPA made the suggestion that fully half the cars on the road in the dirtiest cities be required to run on "clean" fuels, such as methanol.

When Reilly laid this on the table at a Cabinet-level meeting in May 1989, W. Henson Moore, the Deputy Secretary of Energy, "went ballistic," according to one participant. Moore contended Reilly's program for natural-gas-based methanol would ruin the auto and petroleum industries. Reilly countered that the costs, which would be passed on to consumers, were much less than Moore claimed, and that poll after poll showed Americans were willing to pay for stronger environmental laws. "The Energy Department weighed in on what sounded to me like an oil-company line, just totally savaging the proposal," he says.

On June 5, 1989, at the final White House powwow on clean air, Reilly summarized his positions. Then Darman delivered his most damning blast. According to officials present, he argued that President

Bush should simply write off his pledge to be an environmental President: Bush could never make nature lovers a Republican constituency, Darman said coolly.

Environmentalists cannot be pleased.

Their expectations will rise and become excessive, and in the end the President would be trashed. It was better to recognize that and give up now, rather than after proposing to enact such expensive legislation.

President Bush took notes but said little through the 90-minute meeting. Then on Friday, June 9, 1989, he flew to Camp David to make his decisions, keeping even his closest advisers guessing. Reilly's best clue to the outcome came late that night, when he had a long talk with President Bush's Chief of Staff, John H. Sununu, who was to receive the final decision papers from the President by helicopter the next day, and Reilly realized Sununu agreed with him.

This was a surprise, for Darman and Sununu have formed an alliance as the two most powerful figures atop the President's staff. But on the matter of air pollution, Sununu, a former New Hampshire Governor, who has long favored controlling acid rain, a problem in his home state, broke with the budget director. Sununu ignored, as did the President, the advice to write off the environment on political grounds.

Of the clean-air options discussed in the Domestic Policy Council, President Bush chose the most stringent options-those advocated by the EPA-on most of the dozens of issues that were on the table. On acid rain, he proposed cutting ten million tons of sulfur dioxide annually, as well as two million tons of nitrous oxide, another cause of acid rain, by the year 2000.

To fight urban smog, the President asked the Congress to tighten standards for automobile emissions, gasoline volatility and small sources of noxious fumes, such as dry cleaners. He endorsed a scaled-back version of Reilly's clean-fuel program for cars that would, the President said, in language that has chilled Detroit, "reconcile the automobile and the environment." It would require automakers to manufacture alternative-fueled vehicles that eventually could represent 30 percent of the market in America's dirtiest cities.

Still, President Bush did not tell environmentalists everything they wanted to hear, which reflects Reilly's caution in never having argued for the wish list of the National Clean Air Coalition, an environ-

William K. Reilly, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency.

mental lobby. For instance, neither the President nor Reilly would touch raising the federal tax on gasoline, which is one way to cut auto use by favoring fuel conservation. To do so would violate President Bush's no-new-taxes pledge.

In the month between the announcement of goals and drafting detailed legislation, Reilly's opponents regrouped and diluted the bill's impact on industry. Reilly said the final draft the White House sent to the U.S. Congress was "faithful in every respect to the spirit and letter" of the original.

To the letter, maybe. But environmentalists angrily charge the spirit has been violated. In June 1989, for instance, President Bush promised to reduce automobile-tailpipe emissions of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, which are "cooked" by the sun to produce ozone. But a month later he said every new car need not show improvement. General Motors, say, could average the pollution of its entire output to meet the government standard, balancing emissions of a big Cadillac and a small Chevrolet., Environmentalists argue this would allow Detroit to produce some models that pollute more than they already do.

Overall, critics are skeptical that President Bush's bill will bring, as promised, all but three cities-New York, Los Angeles and Houston-into line with federal ozone standards by the year 2000. The deadline, they contend, will have to be extended, as it has been over and over since the 1970s.

Nevertheless, given the 12-year deadlock on this issue, the President had been widely expected to offer a weaker package, and the relative stringency of his proposed measures has disarmed many congressional Democrats. Now it is almost certain the President

The new U.S. clean-air bill sends a signal to the world on America's willingness to tackle a controversial problem as environmentalists increasingly are asking for world cooperation to fight pollution.

will sign a bill, palatable if not perfect to environmentalists, later this year.

The toughness of the clean-air bill matters, not only at home but abroad, where it sends a signal on America's willingness to tackle an expensive, controversial problem as environmentalists increasingly are asking for world cooperation to fight pollution. To many people, 1988 was "the year the Earth spoke back," a recognition of the emergence of a host of ills threatening Earth's life-sustaining capacity.

"The sense I've had over the last year is the environment is much less under control than we had thought," says Reilly. "This is a new generation of problems. They weren't there in the early 1970s."

The most notorious of these is global warming, or the greenhouse effect, which occurs primarily when carbon dioxide is pumped into the air by burning coal, oil and natural gas. Trapped in the upper atmosphere, molecules of carbon dioxide reflect heat like the panes of a greenhouse. Scientistsare divided over how much planetary temperatures could rise, but many predict that by the middle of the next century a surge in sea level could push the Atlantic kilometers inland, ocean currents could

change direction and the Earth's breadbaskets could become 1930s-style dust bowls.

Reilly, like most environmentalists, believes the threat must be addressed in a global treaty; it won't work if one country acts unilaterally while the rest of the world merrily burns fossil fuels. But the idea of a global treaty threatens many in the Bush Administration, who worry about the impact on industries such as energy and transportation. Although the U.S. Congress directed the President in 1987 to develop a global warming policy, virtually nothing has been done. In 1989,when the EPA produced a report on stabilizing global warming, the recommendations were instantly controversial. They included raising auto fuel efficiency to 17 kilometers per liter, replacing fossil fuels with wood grown on plantations and developing solar power.

Some of the most closely read paragraphs in the final communique of the 1989 Paris economic summit pertained to global warming. The seven leaders endorsed the efforts of a United Nations group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to draft an agreement similar to the 1985Vienna Convention for Protection of the Ozone Layer. Reilly welcomed this as a bold stroke, the first time such leaders had favored a greenhouse treaty. But environmentalists despaired that the seven leaders hadn't committed to specific goals.

"It's not exactly an action agenda," says David Wirth of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It would have been reasonable to identify, as an interim goal, reductions of 20 percent of carbon dioxide by the industrialized world by 2005."

Reilly's role as a Bush intimate in Paris

has more or less astonished his EPA troops.

Since President Nixon created the agency in 1970, it has, at best, existed on the margins of presidential awareness. Once, when Reilly sent the President a copy of a speech he had given, it came back from the Oval Office with a handwritten note in the margin. EPA staff members gushed: President Bush's two sentences were more presidential feedback than the agency received in eight years from President Ronald Reagan.

In declaring himself an environmentalist, appointing Reilly and heeding his advice, President Bush has shown that he is a Green. In the process, he has stolen the environmental issue from the Democrats.

Either way, the environment may reap the benefits. Politics undoubtedly plays a role, but it is also true that many of the decisions Bush and his EPA chief have made have caused American industry-a core Republican constituency-to howl.

And Reilly has used the power he has gained to shape an increasingly aggressive EPA. The agency announced a gradual ban on cancer-causing asbestos, which the Office of Management and Budget had sand.bagged for years. Reilly is also moving against toxic material in crop sprays, which has upset agribusiness.

Reilly has so far failed to bring a majority in the Bush Administration around to his view, and he may never win over many.

But Reilly has forged a consensus with the one player who matters most. "Reilly has an interesting role," says a White House staff member involved in environmental policy. "There are people in the Cabinet who don't trust him because they view him as an advocate for a particular point of view. But that is exactly the reason the President does trust him."

Reilly and the President, strangers a few months ago, have discovered a personal chemistry. Over private lunches they have shared an odd, but not wholly incompatible interest in the outdoors; Reilly is rooted in campaigns to save the whales, the President is in his love of hooking the big ones. The evening in June 1989 that President Bush first announced his clean-air bill, he telephoned Reilly from Wyoming, where he had flown to promote it. "He thanked me and congratulated me and was very modest about his own part in it, and very generous about mine," Reilly says.

"And he told me he caught six fish." 0 About the Author: Trip Gabriel is a New York City-based writer.

VOCATIONAL

â&#x20AC;˘

TRAINING

reparmg or Visitors to the Scarlet Oaks Vocational School, outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, are invariably impressed with the school's efforts to create realistic work situations for its students.

In its enormous kitchen, similar to a working kitchen at a large restaurant, student chefs and bakers prepare food. The beauticians' shop is set up complete with a waiting room. The automotive laboratory has a handful of students dismantling a diesel engine.

Harold Carr, superintendent of the Great Oaks Joint Vocational School District, which includes Scarlet Oaks and three other vocational schools, says that several of the school's visitors are local businesspersons and industrialists who invariably end their tour by hiring a graduate full-time or employing a student parttime. A local automotive dealer recently hired a senior student and \

spent $10,000 of his company's money to send him for advanced training in computer diagnostics.

Since Carr became superintendent of the vocational program for southwestern Ohio in 1975, its reputation and that of its graduates has risen. The program draws 20 percent of junior and senior high school students from 37 "home" high schools in 12 counties. "In the early days," Carr says, "vocational education was viewed with disdain around here. We needed the cooperation of industry, but we simply had to prove ourselves before we could ask them for any help."

With some significant changes in the program, Carr developed vocational schools that better prepared. graduates for vocations.

In 1978, Carr and his associates persuaded the home high schools, where the students were enrolled for academic courses, to allow

In training at southwestern Ohio's vocational schools (clockwise from facing page): A student training as a dental assistant shows a boy the proper way of brushing teeth; a cosmetology class in progress; fire fighting instructor John o 'Rourk teaches a novice rappelling; data processing instructor Patrick Miller watches as students work at creating a graphic de:sign on a personal computer; student chefs get experience at an after-school job to prepare them for a career.

the vocational schools to handle the students' academic curriculum. Then they recruited teachers who could prepare course work in math, science and English that directly related to what the students learn in their vocational programs. A welding student, for instance, who will have to deal with a steel pipe heated to 540 degrees Celsius, is taught about the coefficients of heat expansion in physics class as it applies to that work. "There is absolutely nothing any student can't learn once he realizes he needs to know it," says Carr.

Great Oaks students also are versed in the basic functions of a computer and CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and Red Cross first-aid techniques-additional skills valued by today's employers in the United States.

But the main accomplishment of the program may be the

change in the attitudes of the students who attend one of the four Great Oaks campuses. David Nellis, a science teacher at Scarlet Oaks, says that many of the students he teaches were shortchanged academically and socially in the home high schools, where emphasis is placed on instructing students destined for college.

The key to helping Great Oaks students focus seems to be the twoand-a-half hours a day they spend with their vocational teachers, developing a master-apprentice relationship.

"We know from employers that they want kids with skills, sure, but mainly they're interested in good work attitudes," says Pete Kaufman, the commercial baking instructor. "We spend a lot of time in every program on safety and good work habits. We have incentives. If a senior keeps a B or A average and his attendance is 95 percent, he can go on early placementget a job and still graduate."

To instill a sense of duty, the school's automotive laboratory rotates the responsibility of being foreman of the day among the students.

"It's important that they know from the start what it's like," explains Tom Wyatt, the Scarlet Oaks principal. "They won't be foremen right away once they're out in the real world, but they'll do better work if they know what a foreman's problems are."

The real-world attitude of Great Oaks does not stop with the students. Teachers go out to work in industry for a week or so each year to keep themselves aware of changes.

As busiriess began to take notice of the vocational program, a large group of people who work in American industries organized the Great Oaks Advisory Council to make sure that the schools are teaching what the job markets need. . Next to the Scarlet Oaks School, Great Oaks has created a Center for Employment Resources to facilitate the relationship between industry and students. The center assists students in choosing careers-for $85 the center administers a set of tests to find what a person is suited for-and finding jobs. For a companv Student carpenters (right) and mechanics (above) learn on the job.

opening a new position, the center can develop tests to find what type of person suits the position best and then help the company find suitably trained people.

The service is often visited by people interested in the schools' adult classes, where men and women learn new trades and, subsequently, start new careers. Adults can enroll in courses ranging from practical nursing to cosmetology to microcomputer accounting. Jim Combs, a retired Cincinnati policeman, runs a police academy that attracts recruits and veterans from local law enforcement agencies. Like the day school, the adult education program has found success by adapting its services to the needs of the community, whatever they are. Assistant Superintendent Rosemary Kolde explains, "When we found that people who wanted to retrain in one field or another would get off work at 2 a.m., we located instructors who would teach at those hours."

0

Linking Fortunes for Global Prosperity W

hat is the major problem facing the industrialized economies of Europe and North America?

Some observers see it as the growing competitive ascendancy of Japan in major world markets such as automobiles, electronics, office equipment and so on.

Others see it broadly as the growing competition from other Pacific rim areas, notably the Republic of Korea, the island of Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, and ultimately from India and the People's Republic of China-eountries with highly skilled labor pools and extremely low wages by Western standards.

The whole Pacific Basin is beginning to resemble one large "Japan," coming in with good quality products at low prices.

The problem appears to be one of growing competition between the established industrialized countries of the West and the newly industrialized countries of the Far East over their respective shares of world trade and production. Some people predict that the European share of the world's gross global product will fall, that the U.S. share will be stationary, and that the Far East's share will rise.

But this is a poor definition of the problem. It views the challenge as one of fighting for market share in a fixed-size market instead of finding ways to expand the total market so that everyone will gain. The real challenge is to find ways to create a positive-sum game out of world trade in which all parties win, to find new launching pads for major world economic growth.

Only two avenues of hope exist for a substantial and sustainable expansion of world economic growth. One is the emergence of new technology breakthroughs that meet substantial needs and require Reprinted with permission from Business in the Contemporary published

by Bentley College,

Waltham.

Massachusetts.

Š

World.

1989.

major investments. Industrialized economies in the past were lifted into successive waves of renewed economic growth when railroads, radios, automobiles, aircraft and computers emerged as major new investment frontiers. Today, further breakthroughs in high-technology industries, franchised service industries and so on hold out the hope of shaking the industrialized economies out of their economic doldrums, provided that markets for the output of such industries keep growing.

The other avenue of hope is that the advanced economies discover new and

Rather than fighting to increase their shares of the global markets, the industrialized countries should, in the view of the authors: help transform Third World countries into viable participants in the international economy, thereby creating gains for all involved.

substantial markets for their current products and services. Ironically, these markets exist, but only potentially. More than twothirds of the world's population lives in dire poverty, lacking even the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter, not to mention their desire for watches, bicycles, television sets, cameras, sewing machines and other products. There is no shortage of need in the world; there is only a shortage of the means to pay. The global poor do not have the jobs and the incomes that will enable them to buy the goods they want.

The hope lies in transforming these "near markets" into real markets. For this, the dormant economic potential of the developing world has to be energized.

One can argue that it is not worth bothering with the developing countries, which are still a marginal part of the world economy. Why waste efforts in building complex interdependence patterns with the developing world when lucrative markets exist in the United States, Europe and Japan? Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese management consultant and strategic thinker, makes this point by comparing the booming Sunbelt states in the United States with some developing countries: "Opportunities are great in booming states such as California, which is bigger than Brazil (in economic terms), and Texas, whose gross state product is bigger than the combined gross national product (GNP) of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations."

Ohmae argues that opportunities lie not in the developing world but in the "triad" of Japan, Europe and the United States, which "represents not only the major and fastest growing market for most products, but also an increasingly homogeneous one." This is quite true, but existing or luxury products are unlikely to propel the world economy into a new growth trajec-

tory. The triad markets are rich but mature; companies have to strain their creativity to find growth sources in these markets. In contrast, the unmet needs of the developing world present an ocean of opportunity. These markets are eager, presold, but strapped for cash.

Ohmae's triad, in fact, represents precisely the kind of interdependence that needs to be built on a world scale. The dynamism of the triad in the 1950s and 1960s can be traced to American reconstruction aid, investments and technology flows. Today, the preconditions for such interdependent dynamics are found in the developing countries, especially those with a large and diversified manufacturing base.

Ohmae's comparisons of the U.S. Sunbelt states with the developing countries must be viewed in the context of other eyeopening comparisons. The gross state product of Brazil's Sao Paulo province is larger than that of many countries; India's manufacturing base is large enough to make it the tenth largest industrial power in the world. Moreover, the industrial sectors of the developing countries are growing at about twice the rate of the triad countries.

Business enterprises need frontiers to expand and grow. In the past several centuries, European enterprises sought colonies in Asia and Africa as frontiers. American businesses had an internal frontier in the form of the westward surge of the settlers.

A frontier is an economic arena where the limits to growth are distant and often invisible. It is where growth strategies are tested and refined. A frontier has a promise, but the rewards go only to the venturesome and the persistent.

There are two kinds of economic frontiers-the resource frontier and the market frontier. Technological ingenuity and economic statesmanship are often directed at the resource frontier. Space, the seas, the Earth's poles and the Earth's crust are being explored, and negotiators from industrialized countries are attempting to carve out territories for their respective countries in these new resource frontiers.

But comparatively little attention is paid to the development of the market frontier.

Trade development efforts are driven by balance of payment considerations rather than by economic development considerations. The focus is on discovering or fighting for existing markets, not on creating new ones.

In the contemporary world, the market frontier is opened up through foreign

trade, investment and economic partnerships. Frontiers zoned off by archaic colonial arrangements no longer exist. The frontiers of today are the less developed countries (LDCs); they are open to responsible pro development multinational firms, but closed to exploitative firms.

Today's frontier is human. It can be "exploited," but then there will be a backlash. Strategies that engender dependence do not work well anymore. The frontier is characterized by the aspirations and dreams of consumers in underdeveloped areas seeking a better life. But these consumers lack purchasing power. When Western firms employ familiar selling techniques, the LDC frontier appears harsh and unyielding. The large market appears to dissolve into a tantalizing mirage. But the market and the needs are real. Its potential can be actualized by providing income, not merely sales pitches. This requires opening market opportunities in the developed world for LDC firms, and multinationals must help to provide those opportunities.

Global business partnerships are a step beyond global "sourcing." In sourcing, Western firms look at the manufacturing capabilities and costs of selected LDCs. Make-or:buy decisions are made on a global scale. In the partnership strategy, the market potential of an LDC is as important as its manufacturing capability.

Such partnerships grow through the creation of markets on both sides. The international product life cycle is replaced by an international product life spiral. There is a constant volley of value-adding activities.

Each side develops the other.

Infant industries have enjoyed protection in all sovereign countries since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

To expect LDCs to withdraw protection for their immature industries is unrealistic.

But protection of markets does not preclude creation of new efforts. The whole idea behind global marketing partnerships is to actualize the potential of markets.

The faster the markets of LDCs develop, the less reason for protective walls. The opportunities for developed nations' multinationals lie not in competing with LDC firms for the LDC markets but in supplying to LDC firms, in entering into joint ventures with LDC firms, and in using LDC firms as supply sources. The real opportunities lie in interdependence. This is clearly evident in the trade among triad nations. The more LDCs are developed,

the more their trade resembles the triadic trade.

In the world economy today, we find global economic stagnation. In the industrialized countries, the booming growth rates of the 1960s were cut nearly in half in the 1970s and 1980s. The developing countries are not doing well either. The growth rates of the low-income countries as a whole have been constant, and the growth rates of middle-income countries have declined slightly in the 1970s and 1980s. The countries of the industrialized world trade mostly with one another and consume a disproportionate amount of the world's resources and goods. The developing countries consume most of their own domestic production and sell their surpluses (typically, raw materials) to the industrialized world at unfavorable world prices. As a result, the industrialized world has excess productive capacity and a slow growth rate; the developing economies have excess consumer needs that they cannot satisfy and a widening income gap vis-a-vis the industrialized countries. Some of the deve~ loping countries are actually experiencing declining real income per capita from their already low levels. Even some of the highincome industrialized economies have slid into a stagnant or slow growth situation in the past two decades.

There are at least three compelling reasons why the industrialized countries have a major stake in the fortunes of the developing countries. First, lack of economic progress in the developing countries will threaten their political stability and may change the balance of global political power. Second, developing countries are saddled with huge and growing external debt that they increasingly are unable to finance unless they can increase their export earnings. Unless the West buys more from these countries, it will face mounting interest and principal losses. Third, the developing countries represent tremendous markets for ordinary consumer goods, as well as for low to medium technologies.

They provide the major hope for the West's

Transfers of industrial technology from developed to developing countries, coupled with local engineering and managerial skills, can aid less developed countries in diversifying their manufacturing bases.

market expansion and employment, provided the two worlds can be linked more effectively.

In principle, there is an obvious strategic solution. Ways must be found to link the fortunes of the industrialized and developing cQuntries more positively and synergistically. If the industrialized countries could find a viable way to meet the material needs of the developing countries and earn a reasonable return in the process, the economic world would be launched into an unprecedented growth orbit. Both groups must see each other as new frontiers. Thus, the United States must not see the problem only as one of finding ways to sell more goods to developing countries; this can work only if LDCs can find ways to sell more goods to the United States. The U.S. mission should be to help developing countries grow rich. As their per capita GNP grows, they will need more goods from the West and willhave the purchasing power to pay for them. Thus, the United States must help countries market more of their goods to the United States and elsewhere.

This, of course, raises vehement objections from many in the West that would be hurt by the increased import of cheaper clothing, footwear, tools and so on from the developing countries. Governments in the industrialized countries would have to face the wrath of domestic industries that would be sacrificed in order to create export opportunities and growing incomes in the developing countries. Furthermore, this means that for a country like the United States, imports initially would rise relative to exports and thus worsen the already considerable U.S. trade deficit.

The strategic solution is appealing in principle, but implementing it poses formidable challenges. Industrialized economies must slowly withdraw support from those industries that have lost their comparative advantage. They must also accept a growing trade deficit until the developing countries begin buying more advanced goods. The strategic solution resembles pump priming, that is, trying to get the waters of economic development flowing in the developing countries by making deep start-up investments.

The new mission of the industrialized countries contrasts to three previous stages in the relationship between developed and developing countries. The first and oldest relationship was the colonialism of the 19th century, in which European powers established political and military control over some weaker countries and took out their raw materials, added value to them in their European homeland and sold them at much higher prices in world markets. This exploitative relationship created employment and wealth for colonial powers, not industrial growth in the weaker countries, and it was resented by the "newly industrializing countries" ofthe era-the United States, Germany and Japan. Under pressure from these countries and because of resistance in the weaker countries, cracks began appearing in the colonial system.

After World War I, colonialism began to fall apart, and foreign aid became more fashionable. Countries offered aid to other countries and established economic hegemony over them. The United States and European powers gave aid money to several nations, knowing that a substantial percentage of the aid would be used to buy goods and services from donor countries.

The post-World War II period saw a repeat of this pattern, with the United States establishing the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps and other programs to help both devastated industrialized nations and less developed countries get on their feet.

The distinguishing quality of the postWorld War II period was the beginning of a strong interest in economic development.

Whereas the 1930s were dominated by depression economics, particularly by Keynesian business cycle models, the 1950s marked the beginning of serious research into the problems of development economics.

The key point of the economists at this time was that developing countries would not be able to achieve rapid industrializa-

tion through a "bootstrapping" operation; they would need massive doses of foreign aid to succeed. This was another version of the Keynesian model of economic recovery, now applied globally, holding that countries could achieve recovery or "takeoff" through substantial injections of exogenous funds. Of course, foreign aid cannot go on forever, and, ifit is to work, it must lead to improved trade. The assumption was and is that developing countries would build up their economies and eventually become profitable trading partners.

The "foreign aid" model worked well for some countries-Japan, the island of Taiwan and the Republic of Korea being the most notable examples-but failed to work for many others. Much aid money never reached the intended recipients or was misspent. As aid programs failed to meet either donor country or recipient country objectives, their importance began to decline.

Economic difficulties in the industrialized countries starting in the 1970s eroded public support for foreign aid programs. The result was some decline followed by a stagnation in the level of foreign aid.

Not only did most developing countries not take off during the heyday of foreign aid programs, but many saw real income per capita slip when the Mideast oil crisis struck in 1973. Their resources were strained by the task of merely maintaining their economies, let alone building them.

The only things that grew in the LDCs were prices, unemployment and debt. And now the industrialized economies have a new relationship with the developing economies, that of debt financing. The debt burden of non oil developing countries has greatly increased in recent years. In nine major debtor nations, including oil-rich Mexico, Venezuela and export-driven Korea, debt as a percentage of GNP has climbed to an unbearable 40 percent or more. The upshot of the debt burden has been increasing pressure on developing countries to expand and diversify exports.

Historically, the role of the industrialized economies has shifted from a colonial model, to a foreign aid model, to a debt financing model. In the colonial model, the driving forces were the European monarchies and the mercantilist trading companies sponsored by them. In the aid model, the driving forces have been foreign aid agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank. Their role is somewhat diminished since the 1960s, but a redefined

and revitalized role for aid agencies is distinctly needed. The driving forces behind the debt model have been the commercial banks. Many U.S. and European banks are already overextended. The vulnerability of the world banking system to major defaults has become all too obvious, and major new commercial loans to developing countries are unlikely. With existing loans reaching their feasible limits, the question arises: What next?

What can be done to create mutually beneficial trade patterns between the developed and developing world? Unless the fortunes of the two worlds can be linked, each will stagnate in its own domain.

Clearly, ways must be found for developing countries to pay for the goods they need.

This reflects the whole problem of economic development efforts that after 40 years have seen only a few LDCs raise per capita GNP. One can draw two opposite conclusions from this lack of progress. One holds that LDCs are so destitute of infrastructure, resources and human skills that they will not improve for generations, if ever. The opposite position is that economic growth has not occurred in most LDCs because it was mismanaged, not because it was unattainable. According to this view, the fault lies in the overly bureaucratic style of directing, operating and funding development projects.

A World Bank study provides some evidence that overreliance on the public sector is to blame. In this study, the World Bank researchers compared countries that

In the contemporary world, the market frontier is opened up through foreign trade, investment and economic partnerships. The frontiers of today are the less developed countries; they are open to responsible prodevelopment firms, but closed to exploitative ones.

were in the same underdeveloped state in 1962 but that had achieved substantially different growth profiles by 1982. For example, Korea and Ghana in 1962 had roughly the same low per capita income ($491 and $490 respectively), the same percentage of people engaged in agriculture (66 percent, 64 percent) and the same dependence on primary-product exports (90 percent, 86 percent). Yet 20 years later, the average Korean enjoyed an income that was five times larger than that of the average Ghanaian. Korea's current exports consist of 90 percent manufactured goods, whereas Ghana has only a rudimentary industry working at 25 percent below capacity, exports that account for only two percent of GNP, and a very small private sector.

The performance difference between Korea and Ghana was just one pair chosen out of 17countries in the study. Most of the fast-growing economies were in Asia, and the slow- or nongrowing countries were in Africa. The main difference between the faster-growing LDCs and the slower-growing LDCs was the degree to which the economies relied on the private sector. The fast-growing LDCs adopted favorable policies toward free markets, private savings and personal initiative; the slow-growing economies relied on inflated bureaucracies to manage most enterprises and discouraged the private sector. The World Bank concluded that economic growth strongly correlated with real growth of domestic credit to the private sector and the percentage of private sector credit to total domestic credit. The implication is that the pri vate sector uses its financial resources better than the government and public enterprises.

Aid organizations-both multilateral and bilateral-generally have been less concerned with promoting private sector growth than with assisting the development of an effective public sector. That emphasis, in our view, is misplaced. Aid agencies must take a more balanced ap-

proach. Aid created an "international welfare dependency," with many Third World countries expecting to rely on continuous infusions of aid rather than on indigenous development. Since the mid-1980s many Third World countries have begun to rely more on private capital and have sold off many state-owned farms or businesses to private groups or workers.

Given the growing interest in private capital solutions to the economic development process, we want to look at particular ways in which private capital can contribute to breaking the global economic stalemate. Six arrangements deserve particular attention.

First, there is barter/countertrade, one of the oldest ideas in commercial history.

Somewhere between ten and 20 percent of the world's trade is conducted on a nonmonetary basis, and the volume is rapidly growing. Among Eastern European economies, more than 40 percent of their trade is conducted this way. In an increasing number of developing countries, a foreign firm cannot obtain orders unless it considers various countertrade arrangements, including counterpurchases, buy backs, offsets, swaps and other deals.

Admittedly, countertrade is not simple.

The parties to a countertrade assume certain costs and risks not found in outright cash purchases: The costs of identifying potential trading partners and negotiating acceptable terms with them; the risks that the received products will not measure up to the promised quality and that expensive negotiations or court action may be necessary to settle any dispute; the risk that any profit is likely to be thin or less certain; and the uncertainty because trading partners do not know how to report profits since each country's income tax authorities have set up different rules. Yet with all its shortcomings, countertrade is something that multinational companies must master, or they will lose out to those companies willing to countertrade.

The second gap-closing measure is to improve the performance of the major international development banks and assistance agencies. These agencies have to revise their loan criteria and requirements.

Some years ago, the World Bank drifted into making "soft" loans to support projects of dubious economic value. The funds typically were turned over to central governments rather than to project sponsors. The borrowing governments were not pressured to change their economic poli-

cies, which heightened inflation.

Recently, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund established tougher policies and demands for economic reforms if client governments '.tanted further loans. While this has brought fiscal discipline to lending, it has also caused some social unrest in the developing countries, where externally imposed austerity has aggravated already troubled economies.

What is needed is a major redefinition of the role of development banks and assistance agencies. Such banks and agencies have to combine the roles of venture capitalists, commercial lenders and social lenders (or donors) in one institution.

Development is a multifaceted business and has to be approached as such.

As for commercial loans for start-up projects, the development banks must begin making loans directly to project applicants, bypassing government bureaucracies. Projects should be appraised carefully for their multiplier effect on the economy and the integrity of their sponsors. Even equity positions can be sought in high-risk but potentially high-return ventures. The key is to encourage high-growth, high-multiplier projects without treading on the recipient country's sovereignty.

Another approach is to raise funds (loans and gifts) from major multinational firms that see it in their interest to build the economies of specific developing countries.

One plan envisioned having 50 major European multinationals "pool" funds to be loaned out in a few select LDCs to support such high multiplier projects as dams, roads, irrigation projects and factories. Lending capital to developing countries is always a high-risk venture. Often a local government guarantee is a prerequisite for private lending to flourish. A coordinated guarantee and insurance program between local governments, international insurance agencies and private organizations needs to be developed for this approach to work better.

A fourth linking solution involves a consortium of firms pooling their resources to invest in a specific project. Thus, private foreign capital would act as a strategic partner of existing firms in the area. Strategic partnerships can also be created between companies in developed countries and developing countries to carry out projects in third countries, and they can be structured to bypass developed country intermediaries. Some developing countries

prefer awarding contracts to other developing countries for construction and infrastructure development. They feel that developing countries are more experienced in similar problems. Many desirable projects exist in various LDCs that lack financing from the World Bank or other development assistance agencies. The solution is to forge strategic partnerships between private firms and banks to finance projects and to participate to an appropriate degree in their benefits.

A fifth solution involves private company assistance. Some companies, by their sheer size and interests, have become major agents of economic development in certain regions and countries. For example, Sears, Roebuck & Company opened retail department stores many years ago in Mexico, and it financed local entrepreneurs so they could produce and supply many items that Sears wanted to sell in Mexico. This stimulated Mexican economic growth.

Today, many large U.S., European and Japanese companies are becoming agents of economic development in developing countries through joint investments and service turnkey contracts in which, for example, a contractor not only builds a cement factory but also hires and trains workers, finds export markets and suggests how the cement could be used to build needed roads that would improve the country's transportation system. Essentially, these foreign companies are acting as economic development consultants and suppliers. Their contributions to the host countries become so comprehensive that they frequently become the preferred supplier to those countries. Foreign multinationals that try to play too strong a role in a developing country may encounter strong local opposition from some politicians and government bureaucrats. But if the foreign multinational has a reputation as a good corporate citizen, opposition is less likely.

Finally, in today's globalized economy, transfer of technology and marketing expertise has become easy. LDCs can acquire the technology they need for industrial development, and LDC producers can tie up with a rapidly globalizing network of advertising and distribution services. Local engineering expertise and managerial skills are also fast becoming available in many LDCs. What the LDCs often lack is the expertise to make large quantities of products at consistently high quality.

What is needed are industrial extension

services with a global reach. Companies that specialize in large industrial projects worldwide have always appreciated the need for disseminating technical skills. The factories and offices of multinationals in less developed countries can become industrial extension centers-in the pattern of the agricultural extension centers of land-grant universities that dot the U.S. Midwest. Just as agricultural extension centers have made the Midwest the world's granary through the transfer of information on farming techniques, so can the industrial . extension centers make the LDCs world-class manufacturers through transfer of manufacturing techniques.

Such centers could cover the ancillary and supplier firms in their local neighborhoods and even unrelated and competing firms.

The diffusion of industrial skills in LDCs will give a significant boost to LDC markets, and the multinationals helping in such diffusion can gain through selling as well as procuring in these markets. In the long run, LDC firms will emerge as international competitors. But over the short term, developed countries' multinationals will find new markets in LDCs for their continually increasing new expertise and can create new partnership opportunities with LDC firms. The idea of industrial extension centers can be combined with the idea of the private capital consortiums to multiply the reach of and to diversify the services of such extension centers.

We recognize that these solutions cannot be generalized to all the developing countries. Some solutions presume that the country already has an existing skill or resource base and has reached a certain level of development. In some LDCs, aid or lending models may be more appropriate.

The important step, nevertheless, is to start a fresh dialogue on the role of new private initiative programs that focus the resources of the industrial countries on meeting the urgent needs of the developing world. 0 About the Authors: Philip Kotler, the author of Marketing Management, is the S.c. Johnson &

Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. His contributions to marketing strategy and education have been acknowledged with several awards. Nikhilesh Dholakia is professor of marketing at the University of Rhode Island and co-founder of NOMAD (Network of Marketing and Development), which links researchers concerned with marketing and development in different countries.

Let's Invent Something Thomas Alva Edison is alive and well-in the person of Drew Wilson; the 64-year-old actor and former art teacher has been impersonating the great American inventor for the past seven years. Four times a week, Wilson dons a vintage seersucker suit, like the one Edison wore, parts his shock of white hair on the left side as the inventor did and brings Edison's scientific theories and inventions to the stage in classrooms, management training centers and even prisons around the United States.

Wilson's performances combine spirited stories, brightly colored pictures and hand-operated electrical generators to inspire students to use their own creativity to invent something. "Creativity," he says, "is a very fragile flower that needs encouragement. Parents are not doing enough encouraging today, so children aren't taking risks."

Says Louisa Sheldon, an education consultant, "Science is usually dry and boring and the children hate it, but when Wilson steps on the stage and assumes the role of Edisc:m, sparks fly. I first saw him perform at a science conference in 1988.He made me laugh and he made me think. That's what learning is about."

Wilson, who retired as a vocational art teacher in 1983, came up with his Edison act partly because of his physical resemblance to the inventor-"I looked in the mirror and discovered that I look more like Edison than anyone else"but more because of his belief that the philosophy of the man responsible for the electric bulb, the phonograph, the microphone, the film projector and 1,089 other inventions is very relevant in today's world. "Edison represented the spirit of small-town America that still lives among the dreamers who were taught that anything is possible," says Wilson. "He had 1,093 patents to his credit-a record yet to be bettered. But how many of us know that Edison failed 8,999 times before he succeeded in getting the light bulb right? That's what strikes me most about the man; he didn't let his failures dampen his inventive spirit."

Recapitulating the early failures and downright mischievousness of Edison, who died in October 1931at the age of84, helps to humanize the inventor, Wilson says. "When I portray him as just another human being, who had his

problems and certainly his failings, tbe mavericks in my audiences begin to see a kindred spirit. As the accounts of failure begin to meld into stories of success, I begin to see the kids' expressions change. They get the 'ifhe can fail and still do it, why can't I do it?' look in their eyes. So my message really is-never quit, never give up. Or, as Edison himself put it, 'Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.' " Says Sheldon in agreement, "There's so much emphasis on regurgitation of information these days. It's important to teach kids that there is no right answer and that it's okay to make mistakes. No one is perfect, not even Thomas Edison."

The measure of success that Wilson has achieved in sparking children's interest in science is reflected in the hundreds of letters he receives not only from teachers, who express surprise that some of their silent, sullen students had come to life at the prospect of creating something that is uniquely their own, but from children as well. Recently, Wilson received the following letter from a fourth grade student-they often address him as Mr. Edison-who had been inspired to invent something after attending his show.

Dear Mr. Edison: My sister is vision-impaired. Blind and vision-impaired people sometimes trip or fall on stairs because they don't know where the steps end and the floor begins. My invention is raised arrows on the hand railing above the last step before the floor. The vision-impaired people can feel the raised arrow and know that it is the last step. If all stair railings had raised arrows it could help prevent falls and injuries.

Among the many other inventive ideas that Wilson has received from children are: A magnetized double brush that washes the inside and outside of windows at the same time; a combination dishwasher and cupboard that puts the dishes away after they are washed; jet booster shoes or shoes with inner springs for faster running; and a coat hanger with an extra long neck to help short people hang their coats.

"I'm often amazed at the vision children seem to have for' many of today's problems," Wilson says. "For many kids,

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SHOOT-TRASH Wilen you tllrow away trash and miss tile can It picks It up.

DISPOSABLE BOOT Stretclles to lit any size shoe.

Here is a step-by-step way to be an inventor by Drew Wilson.

YoU

Drew Wilson in Thomas Edison's lab in Menlo Park, California, with the actual equipment used to invent the electric light bulb.

being a winner is a brand-new casting. Students with poor language skills, learning difficulties or just a bad case of frustration find the freewheeling challenge to invent something their chance to bask in the sunshine of individual attention usually reserved for the 'good' students."

The children who send him inventive ideas receive a Great Idea Award, with their names printed in calligraphy on the certificate. "The certificates are not merely symbolic; they are important," says Wilson. "They are a testimony to their creativity. It was this kind of creativity that led Thomas Alva Edison to become the world's greatest inventor."

Schoolchildren are not the only people who are inspired by Wilson's 45-minute one-man shows, called Mr. Edison's Invention Factory.

Adults too find his presentations absorbing. "Everyone is impressed with his program. It doesn't matter who he is performing for, preschooler or corporate executive, Wilson gets them right in the palm of his hand-and they react on cue," says an executive who has had Wilson perform for his company managers on various occasions.

Wilson, who has been active in community theater, appeared on TV shows and acted in a few. movies, says, "As an actor, I have played a number of different roles-lawyer, husband, drunkard and even God-but it is my Edison act that I have loved and enjoyed the most. I'm going to keep this act going for as long as I can. It's sheer fun, joy." He adds, "I honestly believe reaching out to kids is as close to immortality as I'm going to get. Who knows some of these kids may someday become another Thomas Alva Edison?"

0

could be an inventoe. All you need is a good idea and enough stick-to-it-iveness to make it work. Lots of inventors started when they were very young.

Back in 1873, a 15-year-old boy, who lived in Farmington, Maine, got a pair of ice skates for his birthday. He loved to skate but his ears got so cold that he could only stay out for a few minutes. He would skate a while then run inside to warm his ears. This running in and out made him mad. It also made him think! He got an idea. He bent two pieces of wire into loops a bit bigger than his ears. Then he asked his grandmother to cut and sew bits of wool cloth around the wire loops. He put them over his ears and went back out to ice skate. This time, his ears didn't get cold and he could skate for hours. Pretty soon, other ice skaters offered to pay him to make ear covers for them. First thing he knew, he had so many orders that he had to invent a machine to make the ear covers faster.

By the time he was 18, he had a factory making ear muffs for the whole world. And Chester Greenwood ended up a very rich man.

The secret of Greenwood's success is that he saw the need for something and made an attempt to fill that need. That's what inventing is all about. Somebody once said that "Necessity is the mother of invention." If that's so, then "work" is the father.

Everyday we see the need for something that does a job better. For instance, we try to pull a single napkin out of a napkin holder and a whole bunch of napkins comes tumbling out. Can't somebody invent a better napkin holder?

Most young people don't like to mow the grass. (That goes for most old people, too.) Maybe somebody will get mad enough to invent grass that grows just tall enough to look good and then stops growing. What I'm really saying is: FIND A NEED AND THEN INVENT SOMETHING TO FILL THAT NEED!

Where do you begin?

1. Look around your home. What do you see that doesn't do its job right? Don't start with something big. Try something small. Maybe there's something that needs a lid or a cover. Maybe there's a container of something that's hard to get into or hard to get things out of. Most nail boxes spill out more nails than you need. Most closets are full of junk that gets in the way when you're looking for what you want.

Figure out a way to organize closets and you could end up a millionaire!

2. Look around your school classroom. Ask your teacher

if there's anything to invent there, such as a better way to clean blackboards or erasers. Maybe the way things are stored could be improved. Maybe even the stuff in your desk could be put into a cardboard box that has special places for special things. Sometimes signs are needed that show how things should be used or how they should not be used. If you're a pretty good artist, you could make signs that do a better job.

3. You could invent a game. You could invent a toy. You could invent a model of something made out of paper and tape or glue and a lot of imagination. Lots of things can be reinvented. Sometimes all you need to do is make it lighter, or smaller, or simpler and-Zap!-you've got a new invention.

(A) Pencil, (B) Piece of paper, (C) An idea.

Nearly all inventions start with a picture. It doesn't have to be great art. It just has to show how the invention will look. Later on, you may need some cardboard or wood or glue or nails or a hammer or just about anything. But start by drawing what you want to invent. You may have to show what it looks like from the top and the sides and even the bottom.

Be sure you know the size of your invention before you start building it. Henry Ford built his first car in a brick shed that had a door too small to get his car through it. He had to get a sledge hammer and knock down a wall to get the car out. You'll need a ruler or a yardstick or a tape measure.

(Too bad Ford didn't think of that.)

You'll discover what you need as you go along. But please remember that the best kind of invention is one that follows the KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid!

How will you know if your invention will work?

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Gazette and they're in some public libraries.

This makes it easy for somebody to copy most of your idea and change just enough to make it a bit different. This has happened in the past and usually the original inventor sues the copycat in court. This takes more money and more time.

There is a way to prove that an invention is yours and it doesn't cost a lot of money. In America, some people call it: "The Post Office Patent." The way it works is this: You make drawings gnd write a full description of how your invention is made and how it works. You may need an adult to help you with this, especially this next part. Have an adult take you and your drawings and description to a Notary Public. Then seal it up in front of the Notary, put your address on it and mail it to yourself. When it arrives, do not open it. Keep it in a safe place. If you ever need to prove when you made your invention the postmark on the envelope, plus the dates and signatures and seals of the Notary, will be your proof.

When should you start? .

Answer: Test it. Test it again. Keep on testing it.

Don't wait until your whole invention is all together before you test. Each part should be tested before you put the parts together. Let other people try it out, too.

It may work for you but not anyone else. What you need is an invention that works for everybody who might buy it or use it.

Should you get a patent?

A patent in the United States is a piece of paper that you get from the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. It says that you own your own invention and nobody can make it without your permission for however long your patent lasts. Some only last three-and-a-half years. The longest is 17 years. Patents cost a lot of money and take a long time to get. When you do get a patent the Patent Office puts a fuil description of your patent in a magazine called The Official Gazette. Anyone can buy a copy of this

Two things to think about.

Most good inventions save energy. To be really good, they must also be safe. If you can find a way to save electricity (which is a kind of energy) or if you can find a way to make your home or school safer, you are on your way to being a great inventor. You can start by looking around your home and your classroom to see if electricity is being used wisely and in a safe manner. If you aren't sure, find out from someone who knows.

0 Teacher's Note: The above directions are intended to motivate individual thought and action. They have been classroom-tested in America on students in grades two through eight. They have proven most successful when they are reviewed by the teacher and students in a brainstorming session before individual projects are begun.

Parent's Note: If your youngster shows a sudden interest in doing something inventive, we recommend that you encourage your young genius: Who knows, this might be the beginning of a future career.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Reprinted

with permission

from The Saturday

Evening

a division of BFL and MS, Inc. Š 1987.

1

A 1'A Hl..y 'ALE' ]

"Once upon a time, the income tax office audited a nice, middle-income couple who had filed their returns jointly, and awarded them a $4.5 million refund. The couple, upon hearing this, lived happily ever after."

Post Society,

Popular holiday resorts, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are endowed with identical enchantments-sands .asking, surf for riding, blue waters for sailing, nature for pondering and social heights for climbing.

Two islands, shaped out of gravel and sands by the same glacier, lie less than 20 kilometers apart off the coast of Massachusetts.

Both have become summer resorts; both lure visitors back again and again-some families for generations-with the kind of seasonal pull that summons the wildebeest across the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and the swallow back to Capistrano in California.

Very much alike, the islands resemble sisters who encourage the false impression that one is simply "pretty" and the other "shy."

Martha's Vineyard: lush, gregarious, lusty-260 kilometers with as many moods. Nantucket: only half as big and twice as stark, "a mere hillock, and elbow of sand," Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick-remote, dramatic, stylized in a designer-denim way.

Few Americans know both well. Indeed, each island has perennial "summer people" who have never set foot on the other island. These champions tirelessly promote their favorite personal isle, but not very loudly, lest too many newcomers be tempted to come, as some dinner guests of ours recently proved.

"I'll tell you about traffic jams," boasted one of them, a Above: Time and nature lend Nantucket's Brant Point Light a rustic patina.

Brant Point itself is a residential area where tourists can rent cottages.

for

Nantucketer. "Going into town for groceries takes half a day. We don't have a single traffic light."

"That's because your island is only 22 kilometers long. Ours has four blinkers," bragged the Vineyard's loyalist. "We have three towns where you can shop and get stuck in traffic so long the salad stuff wilts."

"You want to talk fresh produce? We've got the biggest cranberry bog in Christendom ...."

"We have poison ivy beds that are as big as truck farms...."

"Nantucket mosquitoes are so big, we use them as bait for striped bass."

"Vineyard bass are so big they ignore your mosquitoes. Oops, does that sound too positive?"

As for me, having first visited one island nearly 40 years ago and the other 20, my loyalties are divided. I seek Martha's Vineyard for my past and its beaches, and Nantucket for its past and beaches.

Others have their own reasons.

The fact remains that the islands have identical enchantments to pursue or resist-sands for basking, surf for riding or fishing, blue waters for sailing, cottages for reading, moonlight for romancing, nature for pondering, social heights for climbing. In silhouette on a chart the islands even look like related denizens of the deep:

Nantucket shaped like a cluinsy young whale, tail raised, thrashing westward; the Vineyard an old marlin swimming east, its fin notched, its bill broken.

The last time my family went, Nantucket town (located at the whale's blowhole) was abustle, as jammed with cars, bikes, mopeds and pedestrians as an English village on market day. The island's few farmers were offering fresh vegetables in a minibazaar halfway up the hill from the refurbished harbor with its boutiques and restaurants. Even the marina was filled with sleek sloops, glitzy yachts and powerful sportfishing boats-everything from a scull for one daring oarsman to a three-masted schooner flying Canada's maple leaf.

Despite previous visits, my wife, Mary, the kids, and I were soon agreeably lost, wandering byways like Easy Street and Independence Lane. These maze the town-running a few blocks before changing names-and cross at odd angles. Main Street appears much as it did a century ago, except for cars moving at a snail's pace in deference to the cobblestones that still nearly shake the tans off drivers. It runs uphill past apothecaries, haberdasheries and such to the landmark Pacific Natiomil Bank, built in 1818.

Then the street passes between the "two Greeks" and "three bricks," stately Greek Revival dwellings built during the glory days when whaling made Nantucket rich.

Though the island is now flush on summer trade, it has known a checkered prosperity. Settled by families fleeing Puritan persecution in 1659, Nantucket had become the whaling capital of North America by the 1790s. A half century later the wealth was declining as ships went to other ports and whale oil was replaced by other, cheaper fuels. In those hard times there was no money to rebuild, renew, or expand. As an architectural historian said to me, "Poverty is a great friend of preservation."

Prosperity began to return only late in the 1800s, when vacationers started to appear in great numbers. Each year a few more families became summer people, who raced yachts, played tennis and nurtured their island ties.

In all this history lies one difference from Martha's Vineyard. A palpable sense of the past pervades Nantucket. In the town, protected by the Historic District Commission, are some 800 structures, many of which have been occupied more or less continuously for more than 200 years. A handful, like the plain gray-clapboard house Nathaniel Macy built in 1723, and William Hadwen's white-pillared Greek Revival mansion of 121 years later, have been restored and furnished in antique style and opened to the public by the Nantucket Historical Association. Many of the other buildings in the historic center now serve as residences and shops. Some have been recycled as bed-and-breakfast inns.

In years past I have gladly missed the last ferry and found homey lodging in one of the 100 guesthouses that offer everything from the creaky comfort of antique four-poster beds to the sort of bare-bones hospitality that Melville's Ishmael and Queequeg found at the Try Pots inn.

Of course, larger establishments like the White Elephant, India House and Ships Inn offer other amenities, such as restaurants with gourmet dining. The Jared Coffin House opened in 1847, two years after Coffin built the imposing mansion in an unsuccessful effort to please his wife. Her dissatisfaction has been the traveler's gain ever since, a luxurious inn with vehemently genteel decor.

Less venerable was the cottage my family and I rented at Brant Point (a residential neighborhood ahead of the whale's blowhole).

The two-story box, built in this century with a living room tacked

on in this decade, was furnished in that ever popular style, Yardsale Antique. Like many dwellings on the island, ours had a name-Tandem.

We hadn't finished unloading the car before our new neighbors came to inspect-toddlers from next door, a pair of ring-necked pheasants, a cottontail rabbit. Mary's teenage boys, Chris and Andrew, were debating whether to play golf or go jogging when the family's youngest member reminded us all why we had traveled 12 hours by car and three by ferry: "Mommy-Daddy, go to the beach." At age three, our son Tim knew the island's raison d'etre.

Nantucket has 130 kilometers of beaches. Within strolling distance of our cottage was well-named Children's Beach, hard by Steamboat Wharf. Also nearby was Jetties Beach, the island's busiest, whose concessioners handle everything from soft drinks to sailboards. Along the island's entire north side (that is, the whale's back), the beaches slope gently into shallow Nantucket Sound; most days the waves there couldn't capsize a floating saucer.

Looking for more adventure, we headed instead for the south shore, where the ocean beats the whale's underside with a giant masseur's fingers of tireless waves. Continuing along sand roads barely passable to our front-wheel-drive wagon, we followed a "shortcut" through grassy dunelands dotted with new houses until we reached the hamlet of Madaket on the whale's lip.

Madaket offered breakers tall enough for strong-swimming Andrew to bodysurf and for 90-centimeter Tim to learn the price of playing tag with 120-centimeter waves. Later on, at the end of a dirt road near a golf course, we found an ideal place for swimmers of every size and strength. The ocean tossed up waves that invited bodysurfing (though signs warned of the undertow). And less than a Frisbee's toss from the high tide line lay Miacomet Pond, where Tim splashed happily in the shallows.

On another day we biked the straight and level path to the old fishing village of Siasconset (pronounced Sconset). At a beach as busy as acity park, the pretty, savvy lifeguard warned swimmers to stay near shore when she read the arrival of dangerous currents in the colors of the water. So we walked north past gentle cliffs toward Sankaty Head, Quidnet, Squam-primeval names allwithout ever reaching the end of the land.

At sunrise next morning the older boys and I went to fish at impressively empty Great Point (the tip of the whale's tail). The skies were gray and threatening, but Jeffrey Irion, one of the surffishing guides, promised the rain would help our cause.

Chris and Andrew soon landed half a dozen bluefish, while Jeff fortified me with coffee and assured me my luck must change.

Finally a star-crossed blue struck my lure, took it back to the swash, spat out the hook, but then thrashed landward, as the wave drained away beneath it. I grabbed the brave explorer by the tail and tossed it inland, as Jeff said, "That fish just committed suicide.".

Nantucket, like its sister island, offers everyone something: For readers, a first-class bookstore (Mitchell's Book Corner, versus the Vineyard's Bunch of Grapes); for celebrity hounds a gaggle of notables (novelist Peter Benchley here, as opposed to the Vineyard's Beverly Sills and Walter Cronkite); for nature-watchers, well-publicized flora and fauna hikes; for culture addicts, varied concerts, plays and lectures. If Nantucket lacks a worthy newspaper, it has an edge for the epicure, rivaling some major cities in fine seafood restaurants.

Most of the in-town dining rooms are quite sedate-lowceilinged rooms with white-clothed tables in antique (or reproduction) buildings. Well-meaning waiters assure you that all the

ATLANTIC

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q~A~ ~ N.ANTUO<ET ISLAND

seafood came out of local water just last night--even the bay scallops, which can only be caught commercially in winter. So brick-walled Arno's on Main Street was a happy surprise, a family place alive with gentle laughter and the recorded sound of string quartets. Here five of us dined deliciously on mesquite-grilled shrimp, lobster ravioli, fresh yellowfin tuna and filet mignon. The friendly waitress invited us back to the island when the scallops were fresh, but she noted that in winter "the wind blows so hard I've thought I was on my way to Oz." Summer or winter, about one-third of Nantucket remains an undeveloped patchwork of natural dunes, marshes, moors and forests that support as many as 300 bird species. At the head of the harbor we saw a pair of soaring ospreys, fish hawks recently lured back to the island to nest on man made aeries. On the moors we stumbled on a patch of feathers that marked a hawk's kill.

One crystal day we saw the blue Atlantic stretch to where the sky was rolling cloudy gray lint into a full-blown nor'easter. When that storm hit shore, Tandem offered what beach cottages everywhere offer: Jigsaw puzzles with almost every piece; damp, warped copies of last year's best-sellers; board games; chowder recipes tacked beside the stove with scribbled huzzahs; and, most important, hours to spend in such gentle pastimes.

At the end of the week, when the ferry stopped en route to the mainland, ours was the only car to disembark at Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket's bigger sister island. Time generally has a different meaning on the Vineyard, marked by the closing of the summer homes each fall.

Indeed, summer people tend to tell time, not by numbered anni Domini, but by named years, such as "The Year Chris Stayed Home," or "The Year of the Drawbridge," when the older boys learned to leap from a high span into a speedboat channel. (That was also almost "The Year of the Parental Heart Attack.")

In "The Year of the Barbecues" we cooked out nearly every night-hot dogs around a bonfire on South Beach, lobsters on the rocky shore of Vineyard Sound. That was the same year that, on the way home, strangers avoided us as far as the New Jersey Turnpike. Speeding for the ferry after the last barbecue, I hadn't been able to avoid an animal crossing the road. That became "The Year We Hit the Skunk."

Martha's Vineyard seems more complex than Nantucket, which-after all-is an island, a county and a town all at once. Only part of a county, Martha's Vineyard comprises six towns, each of which strenuously guards its prerogatives to issue liquor licenses, clamming permits and stickers that let a car park on a beachside lot. While Nantucket gets about 500,000 visitors in a year, on a summer day the Vineyard has a peak population of about 80,00o-with some visitors there for just that day, which they spend on a tour bus or at three-kilometer-long State Beach below Oak Bluffs (on the leading edge of the marlin's fin). Those numbers doubtless have augmented the degree to which private Vineyard beaches are jealously protected. Though the grapevine reports armed guards brandishing weapons, I have yet to see them tote anything more lethal than a walkie-talkie to summon town police who arrest trespassers regularly. Other beaches, owned by town, county, or conservation groups, are open to the public, especially to people willing to go early or walk far. Intentionally small parking lots prevent overcrowding.

If Nantucket is mystical, the Vineyard is magical, a place of eccentricity and serendipity. Bya reed-fringed pond that's always agaggle with waterfowl, I encountered an official highway sign that cautioned "DUCK CROSSING." Turning down that curving road one noon, I gawked at Superman, or at least the actor who made him famous, driving a jeep hell-for-leather.

I was also surprised to encounter, in a Mexican restaurant, a waitress who turned out to be my mother's favorite Yankee cousin's second wife's first daughter. Small world, an island.

If Nantucket owes some of its antique charm to the hard times that left its buildings unchanged, on the Vineyard "wealth is one of the great preservers," says Augustus Ben David II. A native and the Massachusetts Audubon Society's on-island man, he points to the huge Hornblower property. That remains "one of the most viable wildlife tracts in New England," virtually an entire ecosystem now belonging to a single owner. Similarly, the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary overlooking Sengekontacket Pond was the gift of a philanthropist who saved a 140-hectare farm from being broken up by developers.

Ben David (who was also behind the osprey's return to Nantucket) restored the Vineyard fish hawk population from two pairs in 1971 to nearly 46 now, by planting nesting platforms atop tall poles in open marshes and meadows. Of 66 poles, only four stand on public land, evidence, in David's words, that "the future of Vineyard wildlife is in the hands of private landowners." Nonetheless, he fears his island "is the victim of its own beauty." Its popularity has fueled alarming growth and brought many changes in his lifetime-and mine.

When I first visited here four decades ago, we lived in a barn so newly converted that it had only cold running water. That was in Chilmark. And during that summer, shamelessly, innocently and perfectly legally, two pals and I dug fossil shells out of multicolored cliffs that were only a short hitchhike from home, doubtless hastening the erosion of the cliffs.

Now nearby Gay Head is protected as a natural landmark.

Budding paleontologists and everyone else may swim here, walk the rock-strewn shore and lie in the sun until their eyes bug out.

But no one may dig in the cliffs near the cluster of American Indian curio stands that recall the island's original culture. The view from the stubby lighthouse on the bluff 52 meters above sea level remains a highlight of an island so large that you can forget you are on an island at all.

My boyhood friends used to row across the Menemsha Pond inlet to a nesting ground and watch herring gull chicks hatch. That activity too has long since been frowned on and, indeed, today the place has become a parklike beach too busy for birds to nest there.

Menemsha itself, however, is a fishing village that sportsmen and commercial fishermen alike still call home port, a neat harbor of crystal water flushed and filled twice daily by swift tides. Every day trawlers lie at the dock, and local swordfishermen sell their catch to wholesalers.

Their wares prompt what passes for a burning question among vacationers: Should we buy dinner or catch it? When the tide runs out of Menemsha Pond and bonito lurk off the jetties, a score of anglers man these rows of huge rocks. The most serious or patient of them have spent an hour dipping a small hook baited with bread to catch mackerel minnows for bonito bait.

"If! don't bring home a fish," a man from Boston told me, "my wife has nothing to fix for dinner, but I've worked up enough appetite to make the effort of going out worthwhile."

During our stay on the Vineyard, we often made weighty decisions about the day's activity on even flimsier grounds-like how the wind blew or the phase of the moon. When low tide and an east wind came together at Lobsterville Beach, Andrew and I dived there for conch to make seviche. A high wind promising rain after breakfast sent Tim and me to watch Fred Fisher milk his cows at Nip 'n' Tuck Farm.

Perfect beach days sent us off to two of the island's finest strands: Katama, part of the South Beach, has been both built and buffeted by the open Atlantic. In recent years it has been connected by a spit of land to Chappaquiddick, whose lovely beaches

Clockwisefrom above: Visitors at Nantucket's Whaling Museum hear seagoing legends and lores such as one of a battle waged with a leviathanfrom this whaleboat; relics from the island's golden age of whaling can also be seen at Frank F. Sylvia Antiques whose displays include scrimshaw-engraved whalebone or ivory-and wooden ship models made by whalers during their long months at sea; riders hit the trail as morning warms Nantucket's 1,618 hectares of moorland.

mostly face Nantucket Sound. Chappaquiddick, served by two three-car ferries, is protected by its very insularity. Only as many people go there as can get there.

Once or twice a week the Vineyard Gazette steered me somewhere I had missed, like the sanctuary at Cedar Tree Neck for a guided ramble with Susan B. Whiting, free-lance naturalist and descendant of one of the island's founding settlers. Walking fast and talking faster, she led us through woods past ponds and beaches. Susan seemed to have a good word for every species, whether a rufous-sided towhee ("the national bird of Martha's Vineyard") or a toadstool that is "as pretty as it is poisonous."

Rain meant everyone went into Edgartown, where the boys went to the movies, Mary browsed the boutiques and I learned that the Old Whaling Church, built in 1843,was saved to become a performing arts center, thanks to the Martha's Vineyard Historical Preservation Society.

The community of oak bluffs has a character and complexity all its own. Its main street, Circuit Avenue, resembles saloon strips the world over (only shorter and tamer); its harbor attracts streamlined yachts and its south side boasts one of the oldest black resorts in the land.

But we found the soul of Oak Bluffs on the grounds of the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association, which launched the Vineyard's career as a summer island. The camp opened in 1835 as a place where Methodists held meetings and attendees lived in tents pitched on platforms that in time became frame cottages. Eventually the area became a permanent enclave within a town, a grouping of miniature 19th-century houses decorated with gingerbread and carpenter's doodads.

For years we had somehow missed the camp's Illumination Night, an annual tradition not advertised much in advance. But at last we made it. The sun set and full August night descended on the little town until-on signal-dozens of little lanterns were lighted on a few hundred little porches. My son thought we had found the way to never-never land or better. It was hard to tell him otherwise, because heading home we detoured through downtown to the "Flying Horses," said to be the oldest operating carousel in the United States.

For all their differences, the sister islands share some family traits-their manner of speaking, for instance. Each island's idiom defines an islander as someone born there. People born anywhere else are off-islanders. Thus, it is said, when a pregnant islander took a holiday excursion to Cape Cod and delivered prematurely, she gave birth to an off-islander. In fact, residents of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard alike divide the world into just two places: Island and Off-Island. After so many summer sojourns, I almost think that's the way it is.

0 About the Author: Philip Kopper is the editor of DialWET A, the public broadcasting magazine for Washington, D.C.

Shiva Subramanya (right)

An Indian American nuclear physicist and communications expert recently became the first South Asian to win the Medal of Merit, America's top defense award. Shiva Subramanya, who received the medal from retired General John Wickham at a glittering ceremony attended by more than 1,000 guests in Washington, D.C., was honored for his defense-related classified work in the area of communications for the U.S. military. Important U.S. newspapers such as the Washington Post described Subramanya's achievement as "impressive" and "a stunning accomplishment."

A project manager with the Defense and Space Systems Group at TRW, a major defense contractor in the United States, Subramanya had earlier won the Meritorious Service Award of the U.S.Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

Over a career spanning more than 25 years in America, he has successfully assisted the U.S. Department of Defense in several sensitive military applications of solid-state electronics.

Born in Chikmagalur, Karnataka, in 1933, Subramanya took his MSc degree in physics and electronics from Karnataka University.

In the 1950s and early 1960s he was associated with the Indian telecommunications industry, the atomic energy establishment and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay. In 1962 he went to the United States and earned his PhD in physics and an MBA and PhD in management. In fact, over the years he

"We shall overcome" proclaims a bright board at the National Institute for the Orthopaedically Handicapped (NIOH) in Calcutta. And that was the spirit of the participants-some of whom were in wheelchairs and on crutchesat the recent workshop on Management Training of Total Rehabilitation of the Disabled organized by NIOH. The workshop, which was sponsored by the US. Agency for International Development, was inaugurated by Ronald Lorton, U.S. Consul General in Calcutta.

The participants were people involved in the rehabilitation of the handicapped--doctors, vocational counselors and administrators from government and nongovernment agencies. I attended the workshop as a media professional who also happens to be handicapped.

Several eminent personalities who have pioneered the cause of rehabilitation of the disabled in India related their experiences. I was privileged to share the floor with Lal Advani who is often described as India's Helen Keller (whom, incidentally, he met when she visited India in the 1950s). Himself sightless, Advani has been an inspiration to us all not just by his determination and success in not allowing his disability to rule his life but also in his work for the handicapped in India.

He fathered the concept of the four National Institutes for the Handicapped at Bombay, Calcutta, Dehra Dun and Secunderabad.

The workshop also highlighted the close ties and shared experiences between India and America in this field.

-Sanjay

receives

the U.S. Armed Forces'

Medal of

Merit, from General

(retd.)

John A. Wickham,

Jr.

has received more than ten degrees and diplomas in eight branches of pure and applied science, and has published 150 technical papers. He also holds four patents in the area of solidstate electronics.

Subramanya has been the national president of the Indian Professional Forum, an organization of scientists and engineers of Indian origin in the United States. He has also been actively associated with a number of charities in the United States and India.

Subramanya declines to elaborate on his work because, as he explains, "It is all classified and even my family does not know what exactly I am doing." But he is effusive in articulating his appreciation for the two countries that have made him what he is today. "I owe my success in the United States to my co-workers at the U.S. Department of Defense and in the aerospace industry," he says. "I love this country and admire what it stands for. Similarly," he continues, "India gave me birth and all the basic human values and decency that I cherish. I owe her my admiration and respect."

Badshah (Buddy to his buddies) Mukhopadhyay was made a U.S. national scholar earlier this year, an honor that goes to the brightest students in the United States A few months before that young Mukhopadhyay was the center of media attention for the way he conducted himself as a "Chief Justice" at the federal mock-government program, Boys' Nation, organized by the American Legion in Washington, D.C. Presiding over the mock Supreme Court, the 19-year-old from Concord, California, reviewed legislation to revamp the income tax code

Bhatnagar

and the welfare system and cosponsored legislation to increase funding for impoverished children.

Interestingly, Mukhopadhyay was earlier almost disqualified from Boys' Nation on the ground that he wasn't an American citizen. But the judges allowed him after he persuasively argued the eligibility rule that participants must be citizens and/or permanent residents. Impressed by his arguments, Ken Graedel, an American. Legion member, told him, "Buddy, you ought to be a lawyer."

Mukhopadhyay, however, is interested in becoming a surgeon. His ultimate aim is "to save enough money and build a world-class hospital in Calcutta." Asked about the secret of his success, the teenager said, "I am not superior in any way.

But I work harder and I am more enthusiastic about learning."

-Arup De

~'"

Frank Karam's Indian Odyssey India has been a part of 32-year-old Frank Korom's life so much that it is little wonder he can understand Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. This American scholar of folklore is a PhD candidate at the department of folklore in the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently in India as a Fulbright grantee affiliated to Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. Co-author (with Peter Claus) of Folklorists and Indian Folklore and co-editor (with Arjun Appadorai and Margaret Mills) of Knowledge, Performance and Transmission in South Asian Folklore Tradition, Koram has also translated a meclieval Bengali narrative, Oharmamangal, about the rural deity, Dharma, into English.

Korom first came to India in 1977 in the course of an overland journey that had earlier taken him to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was not the first of Korom's travels to see the world, however.

Son of a Hungarian father and a German mother, he was born 13-S Ferencz Josef Korom in a village in Serbia, near the YugoslavHungarian frontier. When he was four, the family emigrated to the United States and Ferencz became Frank. His travels began soon after he completed high school in 1975.Korom saw much of Europe before returning to America to try his hand at various jobs. When he had saved enough money, he took off to see the world again.

Korom's first trip to India had a magnetic effect on him. He wanted to see more of this country whose religion and philosophy had always interested him. Equipped with a tent and a stove, he roamed the land before continuing his overland journey. Back home in 1978, he wrote folk songs based on his travels and, having exhausted all his savings, started working as a clerk. He also attended night school, studying music, Eastern religions and comparative ethics. With his interest now more focused, Korom started studying cultural anthropology, ancient history and religion at a community college in Pennsylvania and later at the University of Colorado, earning a double degree in anthropology and religion. He also began studying Hindi at the University of Wisconsin, where he met and fell in love with an Indian American, Sagaree Sengupta.

In 1982, Korom got a scholarship from the University of Colorado to do an advanced course in Hindi at Varanasi. While in India, he also began studying Urdu. On his return to Americaand after getting his degree from Colorado-he joined the University of Pennsylvania for his master's degree in folklore, but abandoned that when he got a scholarship for further studies in

Rescuing Indians in Liberia Ever since fighting intensified in Liberia between government and rebel troops, the U.S. government has been helping evacuate foreigners, including Indians. On August 16, U.S.mili-

tary helicopters ferried about 360 refugees, 345 of them Indian, from Liberia to neighboring Sierra Leone. The refugees were airlifted from the American Embassy compound in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, to four U.S. warships offshore and then taken to Freetown,

Urdu in Pakistan. From Lahore, he paid a brief visit to India-to get married to Sagaree in Delhi.

In 1985, after getting his master's degree in folklore, Korom worked at the Folk Life Center of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., while studying for his PhD. He had just completed his course work for his doctorate when he received an invitation from the Ford Foundation to co-teach a month-long workshop on folklore at the Regional Resources Centre for Folk Performing Arts at Udipi, Karnataka, in early 1988. Korom stayed on in India for several months, participating in similar workshops in other cities. A fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies for a course in advanced Bengali took him to Calcutta.

Last year too he was in India to take part in some more folklore workshops. This year he is here for a research project on Oharmamangal at Visva-Bharati.

Korom is happy about the growing awareness of the importance of folklore all over the world. "It can help answer questions about culture and society that other disciplines can't.

And India, because of its rich history and folklore, is bound to become one of the major research centers for folklorists," he says.

-Charles

Sierra Leone's capital.

The Indians, mainly businessmen and their families, had not joined the earlier exodus of the 7,500-strong Indian community of Liberia who had left following the outbreak of civil war in June. As the situation deteriorated, India approached

Newton

the U.S. government for help in evacuating the stranded Indians. Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Hari Kishore Singh gave the Lok Sabha details of the arrangements and the coordination between the governments of India and America in the matter.

Directing Miller in Mailras

T

he recent Madras Players production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons under the direction of off Off-Broadway American director Anita Khanzadian marked her fourth visit to India-and further demonstrated her belief in the universality of drama. During her )983 visit (see SPAN, October 1983) under the auspices of the U.S. Information Service (USrS), Khanzadian directed four playsThornton Wilder's Our Town and Sylvia Plath's all-woman play A Difficult Borning in Madras, and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story and Brian Friel's American Welcome in Calcutta. All these plays depict an intensity of human relationships transcending national barriers. "When you strip away all the external habits, customs and traditions of various peoples around the world," Khanzadian believes, "what you are really left with is the basic aspirations that people have. I don't think people's needs are really different anywhere." All My Sons, according to her, is a perfect example of this "commonali ty."

Khanzadian-who recently received acclaim in America for her presentation of As Is-William M. Hoffman's play on AIDS-says she found it "very stimulating" to get an opportunity to work on an old play such as All My Sons because "in New York City it would be quite difficult to do such a revival."

Khanzadian continues, "As I started working on the play, I was amazed to find how contemporary it is. You don't feel the span of four decades since it was wri tten."

American director Anita Khanzadian (above) was recently in Madras to direct Arthur Miller's All My Sons for a local group. Facing page, above: P.c. Ramakrishna (as Joe Keller) and Bridie McElroy (as Ann Deever) in a scene from the play; below (from leji to right): McElroy, Vishalam Ekambaram (as Kate Keller), Ramakrishna and Aryama Sundaram (as Chris Keller) share one of the play's rare happy momenlS.

Madras Players selected the play, she points out, "because they felt that it speaks directly to the r ndian situation."

Khanzadian agrees. "It is an Indian play.

For instance, the relationship between the father and the son and the importance of the family are relevant to India."

It is important to keep in mind the year that the play was written-1947, which is also the year when Miller received tbe New' York Drama Critics Award. Two years later he won the Pulitzer Prize for Death of a Salesman, a classic play of modern times.

It was a new age of reason, dominated by the logic of scientific progress, tempered by the findings of Freud, Marx and Oppen-

heimer, and forged by the experience of World War II into a fresh catechism of ideas. "The fortress which All My Sons lays siege to," said Miller himself, "is the fortress of unrelatedness."

The fortress is in the Keller backyard that forms the arena for the action. All My Sons is set in small-town America. The Keller home is located in a placid community. The setting, as created in the Madras Players presentation, is realistic, following the suggestions given by Miller of a comfortable family house, flanked by neighbors who wander in and out as they like. A small trellised area to the side indicates the patio or arbor where the family sits during the day. At the opposite side can be seen a small apple tree that has met a violent end.

The sets by Richard Meyer and Mithran Devanesan suggest the transparent envelope of the characters' lives as they move through the open frames of the "rooms," apparently unaware that they can be seen before they go through a swing door onto the porch. Devanesan, who a)so planned the lighting, uses a blue-green effect at times, accentuating the shadows of leaves rustling against the white house at night. In those moments the backyard becomes a sacred grove once more, a setting for a mythic struggle when the cycle of life demands the death by sacrifice of the old King of the Wood.

Joe Keller is not only the patriarch of the family but an important man in the community too because of his wealth. Even

his former partner's son, George, who has come to attack him, remarks that the Keller company is as big as General Motors.

Even though the neighbors walk in casually on that Sunday morning-Sue, the doctor's wife, to pluck a handful of parsley; Frank to talk to Kate Keller about a horoscope he is drawing up for her son, Larry, who has been reported missing in action for the .past three years-the inexorable effect is to confer a certain aura of grandeur to the Kellers.

Chris Keller, the surviving son and heir to the Keller fortune, is anointed by the luster of other people's expectations of him. He has the capacity to burn more brightly than the people around him. Chris talks with the sudden intensity of vision the war gave him; when a comrade would selflessly bring him a last pair of dry socks, he realized that the only reason for the madness of dying in the war was that each soldier had stopped thinking only of himself. To use Miller's metaphor in the baldest sense, what is needed is to destroy the fortress of unrelatedness and let humanity in. Miller allows Chris to say it more poetically, "They didn't die. They killed themselves for each other. I mean exactly; a little more selfishness and they'd have been

Yatrik and the U.S. Information Service (USIS) will present Arthur Miller's All My Sons, under Joy Michael's direction, at the SJ"lri Ram Centre in New Delhi for five days-November 14, 15, 16,23 and 24.

Yatrik, which celebrated its silver jubilee last year, has mounted several American works since its inception, including The Crucible (another well-known Miller play), All the King's Men, Desire Under the Elms, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Cactus Flower, Don't Drink the Water, Play it Again Sam and Black Comedy.

In fact, the group itself was born from an idea mooted by an American who was a popular figure in Delhi's theater circles in the early 1960s- Tom A. Noonan, the cultural affairs officer of USIS from 1962-65. In 1963, Noonan invited a gro~p of young Delhi actors and actresses to perform Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois under his direction. The play toured several colleges and universities in north India. "Little did we realize when we first embarked on this joint

here today. And I got an idea watching them go down. Everything was being destroyed, see, but it seemed to me that one new thing was made. A kind of-responsibility. Man for man. You understand me?

To show that, to bring that onto the Earth again like some kind of a monument and everyone would feel it standing there, behind him and it would make a difference to him .... And then I came home and it was incredible. There was no meaning in it here, the whole thing to them was a kind of a bus accident."

The play teeters between these two extremes, the high moral purpose of Chris trying to come to terms with his father's bus stop mentality. It unfolds like one of those accordion-pleated nursery books, with the figure of Joe Keller at the center.

He reacts only with mild concern at the news that Chris (played by Aryama Sundaram) has brought Ann Deever (Bridie McElroy) to the house so that he can ask her to marry him. Besides being the fiancee of Chris's brother Larry-whose death has not been accepted by Kate-Ann is also the daughter of Joe's former partner Steve, who has been sent to jail for having caused the death of 21 pilots by supplying 21 defective vital parts of an airplane.

venture that herein lay the seeds of a future repertory company," one of the actors reminisced recently in a Yatrik brochure.

The success of the tour, Noonan's encouragement and the enthusiasm of the young artists convinced them that starting a professional theater company did not have to remain "a mere daydream."

In 1964 Yatrik was founded as a bilingual repertory company. The founder members were Joy Michael (who continues to lead the group today), Roshan Seth, Marcus Murch, Sushma Mehra (now Seth), Kusum Haider, Nigam Prakash, Rati Bartholomew and Sneih Dass. As Yatrik spread its wings, it attracted the capital's top theatrical talent.

Some of India's leading performers of theater, television and film have earned their colors at Yatrik. Said Rati Bartholomew, former head of the department of English at the University of Delhi's Indraprastha College, in her silver jubilee message: "In the 1960s we were the world. Glad to see the flag still flying."

D

Joe himself had stood trial for the crime but extricated himself by claiming that he had fallen sick on the day the parts were superficially patched up and shipped out.

Joe believes that he has acted in the best interests of himself and the family. This portrayal of Joe represents Miller's attack on the archetypal American dream, the Calvinist work ethic of hard toil and success even at the cost of others. But here, under Indian conditions, the focus is on the family drama, the son confronting his father for his crimes.

There is a slight sense of unease in the air as Chris and Ann arrive. An apple tree planted in memory of Larry has been blown down during a storm in the night. Both father and son are worried about Kate's reaction. As she walks in through the house like a somnambulist, they listen to her melodramatic description of her dream of Larry falling through the clouds reaching out to her. Miller's treatment of women seems to be of secondary importance, but under Khanzadian's direction and Vishalam Ekambaram's powerful interpretation, Kate Keller becomes a force of nature.

Another marvelous bit of acting comes from Wayne Hanrahan in the role of Ann's brother, George, who arrives in the Keller household all set to persuade Ann not to marry into the family that has destroyed so much of their lives. He has met his father in jail and is convinced of his Innocence. Joe stands his ground.

It takes a letter from Larry that Ann has brought with her to prove to Kate that Larry is really dead, for all the pieces to fall into place. As Joe Keller reads of the shock and the shame that Larry felt when he heard of the culpability of the Keller name in the death of his fellow pilots and which led him to take his life, the full force of what he has done hits Joe. The realization leads him to speak the lines that give the play its title " ...But I think to him they were all my sons ...."

Valiant though his performance is, P.c.

Ramakrishna, as he plays Joe Keller going off into the house to shoot himself, does not display the utter ruin of an old man who knows that he has failed to live up to his self-made goals. He looks as though he has bumbled out at the wrong bus stop.

Yet the play manages to save itselfat the very last moment owing to the scintillating performance given by Ekambaram. As she hears the shot and watches Chris stumble out of the house utterly crushed at the tragic consequences tha t his conscience has wrought, she touches him with the strength of a mother and utters the one word, "Live." It is both a strangled cry and a hoarse command that has in it the spurt of blood that cuts him loose once and for all, an individual on his own. The old order is dead. Long live the new order.

"I think what makes the play so interesting," says Ramakrishna, "is the fact that nothing is in black and white. There are so many shades of gray in between. It asks the questions but does not necessarily give you the answers. I think that's a good thing, because you keep thinking about it afterward. One of the main reasons we chose it is that audiences here in Madras

specially like a good story line."

Says Khanzadian, "The play starts so innocuously it's almost boring. But underneath the surface, a lot is happening that comes out into the open as the play unfolds from its simple sleepy beginning. Miller is, above all, a very truthful playwright. You can't read two lines of his without discovering an underlying reason for them.

"I think All My Sons is a very timely play," she continues, "because today we have the same problems with the environment, the same questions about technology that are raised in the play. We all must have concerns that go beyond our backyard.

The world is much smaller now. Miller's questions about the responsibility of the individual to himself, to his community and to society are the great moral issues of our time. He states them with great compassion and empathy in this play."

During rehearsals Khanzadian is relentless as she attempts to make her cast understand Miller's passion and the nuances of the character each is to play. "I'm not done

yet with discovering this play," she says, as she probes a reason out of an actor for a particular stress, action or reaction. At the point where Kate Keller is finally confronted with the knowledge that Larry is dead, Khanzadian tells Ekambaram of how her own mother reacted on hearing of her son's death. "You couldn't touch her.

She was so entirely wrapped up in her grief.

We didn't dare go up to her." And Khanzadian herself momentarily contracts into a rigid frame of grief.

She is an intensely physical director, moving in to have intimate private chats with an actor or actress after a particularly emotional scene. Each of the performers says that the experience of working with Khanzadian has been the most liberating part of the whole venture. Khanzadian brings her own experience as an actress to her direction. She started her career in theater more than three decades ago as an actress and then switched to direction for which she has won several awards.

Khanzadian's interaction with India and the Madras Players began in the 1970s when she came here as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach English at a school in Madras. Her interest in thea ter resulted in her directing some plays during this period, including Peter Schaffer's The Black Comedy for the Madras Players.

Khanzadian has some interesting observations to make about her process of training, which is based on the Stanislavsky method. She says that her aim is to make an artist more aware of herself or himself through a process of self-discovery during the course of learning the text. They arrive at an understanding of a character, through an exploration of themselves. "I don't teach them anything they don't know already," Khanzadian says. "I just make it possible for them to recognize it." She explains that the only difference in working with professionals is that they already know how to look for the subtext, the message that is buried behind the lines.

"Performing is a physical act. It's not something that takes place only in the intellect. It's something that takes place out there on the stage, that's half the game. We use everything we need to do to make that happen."

Khanzadian has been "making that happen" for more than three decades. 0 About the Author: Geela Doctor is a Madrasbased an critic and writer.

GETTNG SEROUS As corporate strategy, American companies are laying special emphasis on customer service to stay ahead of their competitors, "Great warriors have always tried to pick their time and place for a battle," says William H. Davidow, a venture capitalist in Menlo Park, California. "If they were businessmen today, Patton, Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander the Great all would have chosen to stand their ground on service."

There is a tide in the affairs of corporations. In the 1960s, the commanding officers of companies all over America hailed increased productivity as the answer to competition; in the 1970s, marketing was the rallying cry. Today, with 82 percent of the gross national product (GNP) and 76 percent of America's jobs dependent on the service sector, the new obsession is customer service.

The signs are everywhere. Business publications-including a book, Total Cus·tomer Service: The Ultimate Weapon, by Davidow-focus on service. Companies From The New York Times Maga::;ne. Copyright © 1989 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

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beef up the service side of their in-house training programs. Macy's ads and posters in California carry photographs of salespeople hailed for their "willingness to 'go that extra mile' in helping customers."

General Electric (GE) provides a toll-free telephone line, available 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, for consumers with questions about GE products. And a new breed of American consultant emerges, dedicated to teaching the tricks of the service trade to managers and frontline workers alike.

In 1973, when Kenneth B. Johnston and his wife, Shannon, founded Kaset Inc., a service-oriented training company in Tampa, Florida, they were pioneers. "We plodded along alone for years," he says.

That changed in 1982 with the publication of In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. In the book, and in his lectures around the United States, Peters emphasized the importance of service, sparking what Johnston calls "the golden age of customer service." Soon the Tom Peters Group and other consulting and training firms were adding service programs to their offerings, and small specialized training companies began proliferating.

"It was Peters who got this whole thing rolling," says Karen Dunn, the 28-year-old chief executive officer of the Sterling Consulting Group, of Sausalito, Califor-

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nia. Among her numerous clients is the Claris Corporation, a software subsidiary of Apple Computer, based in Santa Clara, California.

This day, Dunn is pacing energetically at the front of a gleaming white Claris meeting room. "In every industry," she tells a group of technical support people, "there is core service and there is peripheral service.

A lot of airlines say, 'Here are some peanuts and Cokes,' but they see their job as getting you to your destination-alive!" The class laughs, and Dunn laughs with them. She is upbeat, enthusiastic. "That's the core service. But the way you do your job is what gives you the service advantage."

Dunn asks Steve Moore to play the role of a customer. They take chairs facing away from each other.

Moore: Ring, ring.

Dunn (in an uninflected voice): Hello, this is Claris Technical Support.

Moore: Uh, I'm calling about...

Dunn (interrupting): Customer ID number?

Moore: 1234701.

Dunn (sounding bored): What's the problem?

Moore: Well, I'm having trouble getting a printout from my screen and ...

Dunn (wearily): Have you read the manual?

Moore: Yes, I have, but. ..

Dunn: Are you sitting at the system?

by their institution.)

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Name Present Position/ Designation Address

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O.K., tell me what you've tried already.

When Moore gives her a brief account, Dunn replies mechanically, "Uh-huh.

O.K., I'll suggest options X and Y as alternatives.

Feel free to call back if they don't work."

The exercise over, Dunn asks Moore for hisimpression of her attitude. "Right," she says."Cold, and the last thing on my mind was your problem. Terrible. Too many people," she says, "treat customers as interruptions."

They try again. This time, Dunn apologizes for the protocol of asking for an identification number. Then she goes straight to a discussion of the most likely causeof his difficulty.

So far, so good. But what if Moore had been a hostile or irate customer? That's what gives customer-contact jobs their place among the top ten most stressful occupations, along with police work and air-trafficcontrol, according to the American Institute of Stress in Yonkers, New York. Claris had seen the number of distressedcallers nearly double after the company introduced complex new software in December 1987.

"When customers call in," Dunn says, "the only control you have is over your own thoughts. If you can shift your thoughtsto what the customers need, if you can listen carefully, you not only diffuse their anger but you experience less stress, becausenow you have a degree of control."

There is a murmur of appreciation.

"If the customer is angry," Dunn says, "speak softly. If they seem disoriented, speak slowly." She demonstrates the technique in another role-playing exchange.

"Pacing them, at least at the start," she points out, "gives them the feeling at a subconscious level that you are really connecting."

Says Brian Lawley, a technical support specialist, seven months after the training: "I've gotten a 19tbetter at not being defen-

sive or angry when they just want to let off steam. I don't feel so frustrated anymore, or get as down or depressed. I have energy left at the end of the day."

A videotape, a quick fix to motivate your people, lasts for ten seconds," says Leonard Berry, the co-author of several books on service and the director of the Center for Retailing Studies at Texas A & M University. "The right consulting firm will have people who know about adult education, about what gets in the way and inhibits employee growth, about the mistakes that companies make. And they'll have a lot of skill in packaging and training materials.

To expect a company, even a large one, to have this background in their own training department is unrealistic."

Didactic teaching systems are ineffective, according to Theodore Levitt, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and editor of the Harvard Business Review. "They are too mechanistic," he explains. "These things are only learnable by tapping into the right things in people's lives."

Cathy Carlson, a 30-year-old technical support specialist at Claris, for instance, says that Dunn's examples "forced me to put myself in the shoes of the customer.

Seeing her demonstrate things in the role playing was more helpful than someone just saying, 'Be more empathetic.'''

Technical Assistance Research Programs, a Washington-based company commonly known as TARP, has conducted studies on consumer complaints forthe U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs and for private clients. Among its findings: Customers in New York complained 3.4 times as often as the national average; the higher the income level, the more likely the person was to complain. According to TARP President John A. Goodman, the studies showed: "If you recover well, you have better standing than if you had not messed up in the first place. You've got to plan for failureshotels overbook, airlines overbook. You've got to be able to recover."

Dunn's first large client was Letco Floor Coverings and Interiors, based in Phoenix, Arizona. "My colleagues and I were extremely skeptical of her ability to teach us anything," says Wendell Cook, Letco's executive vice-president. "We thought,

'We've been in this business for as long as she is old, and surely there are better ways to spend $5,000,''' the contract fee for 60 days' work. Many of Dunn's ideas were obvious, but, says Cook, "we had never made the space in our business minds for them."

British-born, 44-year-old Keith Bailey, sandy-haired and phlegmatic, formed Sterling with Dunn in 1985. They estimate their company will have revenues of $500,000 this year. Among their clients: TRW Real Estate Loan Services and Johnson Wax. Since June 1988 they have been working with the Bank of New England, which has merged 25 banks into eight, following a spate of acquisitions.

In May of 1988 the bank put together a high-level steering committee to determine the company's approach to customer service. The committee decided to put the bank's nearly 19,000 employees through Sterling's course.

"All banks look pretty much like plain vanilla," says Linda P. Burgess, a vicepresident of the bank. "We're looking at service as a way of differentiating ourselves. If service exceeds expectations, a customer will tell ten friends. That's what we're aiming for."

Consultants agree that training the foot soldiers is not enough. Dunn says, "If you only train frontline staff, they say, 'Yeah, I know this now, but what about my supervisor?''' Sterling has given a version of the seminar to 300 managers and senior executives. Another consultant, Ronald Zemke, the head of Minneapolis-based Performance Research Associates, was called in to advise senior executives at the bank on how to keep tabs on service. He suggested they emulate the First Union Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. First Union, he says, "shops itself three times a quarter." At different branches, an anonymous researcher conducts six transactions, then rates service performance. "The shoppers help them evaluate themselves," says Zemke, "and also have the ability to pass out spot rewards. A teller can walk out of the bank with $200."

Zemke emphasizes that managing service is very different from managing a production line. In manufacturing, he says, "You can produce your product, take it off line if it's not right and re-do it. In service,

you work in real time. The customer is, so to speak, always in your factory."

Florida-based Kaset has 90 employees and has specialized in working with utility companies. "Being regulated," Johnston says, "they had a strategic stake in improving their customer relations, which affects their ability to get rate increases."

One client was the Long Island Lighting Company, better known as Li1co. "Li1co was fighting Long Island over Shoreham," says Johnston, a reference to the controversy over the company's nuclear power station. Li1co was the target of a flood of customer complaints to the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC). In 1985, on the average, the PSC received more than 34 complaints per 100,000 Li1co customers per month. The following year, Li1co hired Kaset. By 1988, complaints to the PSC about billing errors, power outages and the like had dropped to six per 100,000 customers per¡ month. "Kaset taught us to be good listeners," says William J. Catacosinos, the chief executive officer of Li1co. "There were fringe benefits. Our employees said, 'This not only helped me with customers, but it helped me at home with my family and at work with

my co-workers.'"

That feels good.

Johnston points out that worker productivity actually increases with good service.

"It doesn't take any more time to be nice and to be understanding," he says. "In fact, it's faster. If you don't respond to the customers' upset, they escalate to get a reaction. But if you immediately go to, 'Oh, no'-if you are concerned-they will hear you and you can go about getting the problem solved."

These days Kaset is training workers at the Consolidated Edison Company of New York. According to the PSC, Consolidated Edison rates number one in the state in consumer complaints. The training program will take three years.

In October 1988, the Tom Peters Group introduced its T.P.G.-Learning Systems unit, which offers a two-day seminar for 30 employees at $583 a head. (Sterling's top fee is $100 per person for frontline employees and $150 for executives, and Kaset charges $20 to $70 per person.)

T.P.G.-Learning Systems teaches both frontline employees and executive-level personnel. It promotes good service as a strategy for increasing profits. "If the customer thinks you provide greater quality of

product or of service," says James M. Kouzes, the company's president, "your growth and market share will be greater and you can charge more for your product." One way to improve a company's level of service, says Kouzes, "is to listen to your customers, or the people who work with those customers. " In Japan, he says, the average employee submits 25 suggestions per year, while in the United States, the average is 0.14 per person a year. And in Japan, three times as many suggestions are followed.

"In other words," Kouzes says, "in the United States, by and large, there is no formal way to capture employee information." According to Zemke, "Right now we are learning that the Japanese can come over here and beat us at service. They are proving it in the hotel business."

What American companies do the consultants hold up as models of good service?

They all nominate Nordstrom, the Seattlebased department store chain. Not only do Nordstrom's salesclerks stand at the ready, but they have been known to send a shopper to a competitor's store if Nordstrom does not carry a product in the right size or color. For its part, Nordstrom is not resting on its laurels. According to Trisch Baldwin, a Nordstrom spokeswoman, "We feel we are trying to perfect our service."

In the view of Harvard's Theodore Levitt, service is a constantly moving target, given that customers' expectations are always on the rise. "Since the agents of delivery are human beings," he says, "it must constantly be worked at. Like marriage."

0 About the Author: Cheryll Aimee Barron is a writer based in Fall River Mills, California.

I slept And dreamt that life was all joy I awoke And saw that life was but service I served And understood that service was joy

The Indian Touch

In this article, the author, seen above with his wife, Keerti, whom he had taken for cancer treatment to the Texas Medical Center in Houston, pays tribute to some of the Indian medical professionals there. Although his wife died soon Gjter their return to India, "I had the satisfaction of knowing that she had received the best possible medical treatment,"

he says. A senior

official in the Indian Department Telecommunications

of

and aformer

lecturer in physics at the Rajasthan State University, Jaipur, S.D. Saxena has published articles on popular science in several magazines.

As I entered the world-famous Texas Medical Center's Methodist Hospital in Houston, I was surprised to see these words of Rabindranath Tagore engraved on a pyrex; sheet in the lobby. The lines elegantly sum up the motto of the Texas Medical Center (TMC) and coincidentally serve as an introduction to the many encounters with Indian doctors and medical professionals in store for any visitor to TMC's various hospitals. A conglomeration of distinguished hospitals and medical research centers in Houston, TMC has several Indian doctors and other health professionals on its staff.

But before getting down to talking about them, a word about TMC's standing in the world of medicine. One obvious indication of this is the fact that some of the world's most distinguished doctors serve here, including heart specialists Michael E. DeBakey and Denton Cooley. Among the hospitals and medical centers that form part ofTMC are St. Luke's Hospital, M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital and Research Center, Methodist Hospital, Dr. Cooley's Heart Research Center, the Neurological Research Center and Brown Hospital.

Forbes magazine has described TMC as "the largest [medical center] in the country, probably in the world." Every

year this $2,000 million, 88-hectare complex with 38 hospitals, schools and other institutions treats more than two million patients and spends $200 million in medical research. Its 55,000 employees are the largest private work force in the state of Texas.

While medical professional¡s vie with one another to become part of TMC, patients from all over the world come here in search of cure and care. I had taken my wife, Keerti-who was in an advanced stage of lung cancer-there in a last and desperate bid to save her life. Though she died soon after our return to India, I had the satisfaction of knowing that she had received the best possible medical treatment available anywhere.

1fT was impressed by the medical advances and the rushed pace of work at.

TMC-with helicopters frequently landing on the tower of one of the hospitals, bringing in patients in need of emergency cardiac surgery-I was touched by the warmth, compassion and concern of the doctors, attendants and nurses. But as an Indian, what most overwhelmed me was to see and meet a number of doctors from my countrysome of whom I profile below-making significant contributions to the gentle art of healing at the Texas Medical Center.

Mathur:

After receiving his medical degree from King George Medical College, Lucknow, in 1961, Dr. Virendra Mathur (seen above with his wife and son) went to the Harvard Medical School for further studies in clinical electrocardiology and noninvasive cardiology. A few years later, when the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) was set up in New Delhi, Mathur returned to India and worked under Dr. Suja Roy. For four-and-a-half years, Mathur, Roy and other cardiologists worked hard to establish one of the country's best cardiology centers at AIIMS. "We used to work almost 18 to 20 hours a day, getting up at 4:30 a.m. and working until 10:30 in the night," Mathur reminisces. "Dr. Roy was setting up not just a new institution but establishing a great tradition at AIIMS. I am proud of being associated with him."

After a few years at AIIMS, Mathur returned to Boston to pursue further studies in cardiology and to carry out research in related fields. He is currently the senior attending cardiologist at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital and senior cardiologist at the Texas Heart Institute. As a pivotal member of Dr. Denton Cooley's famous team of heart specialists, his reports and analyses about the cardiac condition of patients are the focal points in deciding the strategy for open-heart surgery. Says

Mathur, "There are very few cases in which Dr. Cooley overrules my observations and performs an operation, but those are the cases that prove his genius as one of the best heart surgeons in the world; he comes out successful in an almost impossible operation."

Mathur's own reputation makes him a much sought-after cardiologist in Houston and an equally sought-after consultant in India. During his vacation and seminarattending trips to India, he spends hours examining patients with complicated heart conditions.

Dr. Sewa Singh Legha: His name, Sewa,

means service, and Dr. Sewa Singh Legha (seen above right with his wife and children) has spent his professional life living up to it. An oncologist and professor of medicine at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Tumor Institute, Legha has spent years researching a cure for cancer. He has worked actively in the field of chemotherapy, tested many new drugs for cancer treatmentsuch as Hexamethylmelamine, Nafoxidine and Tamoxifin-and co-authored more than 150 research papers in this area.

Legha's success is especially surprising and laudable considering his background.

Born in the village of Madan Heri near

Chandigarh, he belongs to a family of farmers who wanted him to continue in the farming tradition. To them education was a waste of time-and deprived them of an extra hand in the fields. Legha recalls working in the fields in the midst of preparing for his medical examination.

The man most responsible for inspiring Legha to pursue higher studies was his village teacher, whom he remembers with gratitude even to this day. "He was the only one who encouraged me to go in for higher studies," says the doctor. "It was his prodding that made me go to Chandigarh for my High School Certificate examination."

Legha not only justified his teacher's faith by ranking second in the entire state of Punjab, but he went on to study medicine at Christian Medical College in Ludhiana, from where he received his MBBS in 1970.

Legha moved to the United States in 1971 and started working at the St. Francis General Hospital in Pittsburgh, P~nnsylvania. He served in several other hospitals before joining the pioneering group of medical oncologists at TMC's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in their attempts to find a cure for cancer.

Legha has endeared himself to his patients by his professional skills and his sincere commitment to their well-being.

His motto, framed on the walls of his office, could well be his way of telling his patients the meaning his own name has for him: "To Love the Sick."

Dr.MooIP. Nigam: Neurologist

Dr. Satish Gopal Jhingran: The Methodist

Hospital is, in some ways, TMC's most famous hospital-because it is where the "Texas Tornado" Michael DeBakey works at a never-tiring pace of 18 hours a day, including Saturdays. Dr. Satish Gopal Jhingran (seen above in his office) works here as director of the radioisotope laboratory. He is also an associate professor of nuclear medicine at TMC's Baylor College of Medicine.

After completing his medical education in Aligarh, Jhingran worked as a lecturer of internal medicine at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) from 1963 to 1968. He first visited the United States on a fellowship to study nuclear medicine-a field in which he later set up basic facilities at BHU and has continued pursuing.

Apart from publishing several research papers in nuclear medicine, Jhingran has been actively involved in the Southwestern chapter of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and has traveled all over the world, including China, as a representative of American medical professionals.

Dr. Bharat B. Agarwal: Professor

and chief of the cytokine research section of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. Bharat Agarwal (seen below with his son) has been given the significant task of setting up a new facility in the department of clinical immunology and biological therapy.

After completing his graduation from the University of Delhi, Agarwal went to Banaras Hindu University for his master's degree in- biochemistry and PhD (on brain colinestrase).

He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, for research in the field of immunology. After completing his postdoctoral work there, he joined the medical firm of Genetech, most famous for the outstanding work done by its team of researchers on the production of synthesized Interferon, a wonder drug for the treatment of cancer. Agarwal was among those who initiated research on immunological drugs at Genetech. He did pioneering work on the tumor narcosis factor to discover the body mechanism for fighting the growth of tumors.

Mool P. Nigam (seen below with his wife, Kamlesh), who spent his childhood in Delhi's historic Chandni Chowk, migrated to the United States in 1961 after receiving his degree from Lucknow's Christian Medical College. He joined the Boston Medical Center for higher studies. Neurological sciences were evolving during the early 1960s and Nigam's major area of research related to the main cause of mental retardation in children. Today he is regarded as one of Houston's top neurologists on the diseases of the brain.

Nigam, who has been living in Houston for the past eight years, is among the first few neurologists in the United States to set up a diagnostic facility of magnetic resonance imaging in his clinic.

Nigam's wife, Kamlesh, works as a medical volunteer at St. Luke's Hospital.

She has been a source of strength not just to patients but also to the families of those coming here for treatment from overseas who are ignorant about the American way of life.

Although the Nigams have made Houston their home, they are keen to set up facilities in India to help Indian patients suffering from neurological disorders.

In fact, I found this desire to "do something" for their motherland in every Indian doctor I met in Houston. Until they can bring those dreams to realization, they seem to be giving that little bit of special extra attention to the patients from back home. Or perhaps that is the way every patient under their care feels.

0

Reconsidering

Jatne~Rs~~~dwin In reconsidering James Baldwin after his death in 1987, the author argues that this foremost writer was forever trying to "contend with the problem of purity and authenticity in the black American voice which had been rendered inauthentic in the course of history."

Peoples, nations and communities seeking authentic voices to express the deepest urges and dreams of their corporate psyche have often to wait for generations to throw up a writer who may translate their nervous energies and their numinous gropings into art in an idiom of insight and authority. For such an artist to arrive, a whole continent of complex experience is needed, and a whole culture of ideas. For, the ripeness in art is a question both of personality and history. It is only when the two combine to a degree-where the one erupts with a shattering force and the other with a responsive echo-that a writer seizes the moment, as it were, and becomes the spiritual chronicler of his race.

And where such a race has been subjected to a singularly long, painful and agonizing ordeal of identity, as in the case of American blacks, the artist in question has to carry his credentials in the manner of a visionary. His work, then, is at once a lament, a cry and a song, signifying a breakthrough, a passage from darkness and despair to desperate courage and hope. The utterance and the address share something ofthe quality of vatic verse even when the medium is prose or fiction. That is, indeed, how James Baldwin, who died on November 29,1987, at the age of62 in his home in the south of France, strikes his contemporaries. An American voice of profound urgency and penetration is stilled, but the daring and the richness and the reach of the song abide.

That James Baldwin, risen out of the Harlem horrors to hoist a most moving discourse in American letters, was fully conscious of his "complex fate" as a black prodigy in a white world is clear from the signals we receive from his earlier writings. He knew soon enough that ifhe was not to wither away into a prodigious freak in the manner of some of the singers of his race, he had to invest his "aesthetic ministry" with awe and thunder and prophecy. And he also knew that an agony of that history and dimensions could not be fully consumed within the text or classical categories, and that a new rhetoric of rage would have to be created, as all great artists have done in their day, out of "the rag-and-bone" bibles of folklore and subculture, above all.

In a certain sense, the American black had to contend with the problem of purity and authenticity in his voice which was rendered inauthentic in the course of history. In the passage of time from the bush to the front door of white parlors, there had been a series of humiliating and traumatic experiences to subvert the very structure of black sensibility, and reduce it to a pitiful and grotesque

copy of the white colonial psyche. The loss oflanguage, above all, was the most grievous of all blows, for to lose one's language is to lose one's human estate. Thus, when a black writer of great courage and dignity such as Baldwin sat down to get the carbon of history out of his lungs and blood, he had to enact, in word and image, two tragedies-a tragedy of the corporate self harking back to the jungles of Africa, and of his own "persistent self' that both grieved over and exulted in its Americanness. In Baldwin's case, the nirvana of assertion turned him into a self-exiled artist for nearly four decades. But for all his labor and travail, he could not, in the end, achieve any kind of enduring truce between his warring selves; and in this double bind lay the complexity of his fate and, to my mind, the power of his song.

This explains why the black critics of radical thought and persuasion on the one hand, and the white extremists and ideologists on the other, are highly uncomfortable in his company, for in each camp he tends to stir up partisan passion to a pitch where even the refinements of art cannot soften the impact of his inconsolable truths. Baldwin holds up mocking mirrors to their darkened and distorted faces, and he earns their wrath. In a puny frame, uncharacteristic of the race he belonged to, there burnt such fierce passions-and the imagery of fire and flame is pervasive in his work-that to think of him is to think of a "Black Hamlet" contemplating the tragedy of his people in the fastnesses of his furious mind. And, unable to break out of that situation, taking recourse to what T.S. Eliot so characteristically called "the buffoonery of emotions" in relation to Shakespeare's Dane.

However, Baldwin's art is such a unique blend of energy and artifice, of vision and voice that there is no feeling of-defeated thought or intellectual stasis in his agonized musings. On the contrary, here passionate thought assumes nearly all the virtues of action and engagement.

And this is the dominant impression of Baldwin's fiction and autobiographies and essays, all forged out of an "impassion'd clay," and all answerable to an imperious imagination that would not let him rest, as it were. In his very first novel, Go, Tell It On the Mountain (1953), a strong, evangelical strain is visible, and we find that his mindset precludes evasions, soft options and self-deceptions. As we watch through flashbacks the burgeoning consciousness ofa 17-year-old Harlem boy, brought up on a Christian kitsch culture and institutionalized church hypocrisies, we see him

struggling to come up for air from the dark ghettos ofthe human heart to the open spaces of perceived truths and direct responses. For the story of John Grimes, an emblematic surrogate for Baldwin himself, is really an expanding metaphor for the symbolic fate of the blacksin America. He is a foil to white America, a foundling of fate in search of his God. In his next novel, Giovanni's Room (1957),

one of the muted themes of the earlier book-the tyranny, terror and tragedyof sex-now becomes so obsessive and central as to push the ethnic issue to the background. However, it is well to remember at the outset that black sexuality including homoeroticism had always a racial dimension in Baldwin's work, and it became eventually a disturbing trope for the entire black-white imbroglio covering various aspects of the politics of power. The story, told once again in the firstperson and in flashback scenes, Baldwin's preferred mode of narration, is that of a white youth, David, whose broken home in Brooklyn compels him to seek an enduring relationship with an Italian boy, Giovanni, in Paris, that city of sin and enticement and eternal charm. The two lovers, each a psychic outlaw, begin to forge a lovers' chain whose power has a frightening sincerity and an explosive authenticity in the midst of so much muck, cant and cynicism.And when finally Giovanni, whom David has betrayed, goesto the gallows, the survivor remains to face a feckless future and a harrowing conscience. Clearly, Baldwin's own life is somewhereentangled in this story of transferred identities also, and when insome later books he emerges as a "guru" of the "gays," setting up an elaborate coda of carnal aesthetic, and an ethic of eroticism, he could well look back upon Giovanni's Room as a book of initiation that led him into the mysteries and miseries of a love that could not be named, or sung, or even mourned, in daylight.

With Another Country (1962), Baldwin's controversial and outstanding novel, racial, sexual and societal strains converge to form a grand metaphor of appetite and aggrandizement, and the

pattern lasts till the end.

The title itself suggests a land of alienation where the moral imperialism of the white race, and the spiritual squalor and spoliation of the blacks have combined to create a geography of vicious bodies and parts.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968)

was written in response to the challenge of the black radicals of the 1960s, and is, therefore, more directly political than Baldwin's other novels.

The hero, Leo Proudhammer, a celebrated black actor, is almost a self-portrait, and his story is conceived in terms of the need to commit oneself to the uttermost in defense of one's racial identity and integrity. And yet his soulful passion for his white woman is a commitment to a private paradise of love, a vision that cuts across color and class and country. It's not a very successful book, and the critics tend to see his politics, despite the idiom of doom and apocalypse, as basically conservative.

Baldwin's essays and autobiographical writings constitute a collateral exercise of immense beauty and power, and they carry the signature of his spirit in an open and direct discourse. Since they do not have the comfort of the novel's dramatic ironies and ambiguities, they stand out as a distinct genre in his oeuvre. And, it has been argued that Baldwin is essentially a great essayist like George Orwell and that his fiction battens on the power of his prose. In Notes of a Native Son and in Nobody Knows My Name, he explores various aspects and facets of the racial problem against the background of his Harlem days, and he brings to bear on the subject the full force of his embattled and besieged imagination. As one conscious of his role in history, he swears, he would be a writer to reckon with, come "God, Satan and Mississippi." However, itis as an "exile" in Paris that he discovers his true, inescapable Americanness.

"I left America," Baldwin writes, "because 1doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem," but it was there that "1 was released from the illusion that I hated America." One's

"James Baldwin is easily the most eloquent and the most disturbing artist of distinction to have appeared in the history of black American literature."

country and one's language are the two imperishable realities of life, he finds. He was an American to the roots of his being, and all his battles were to be fought in the context of his American heritage of insult and injury, of despair and desperation, of hope and freedom. The dream of African lions and black nobility was too distant, too thin a vision to engage his muses. America was the turf of his imagination and though he demanded a "reciprocal allegiance," even his negations and voids and wildernesses had to operate within his American experience. For Baldwin, the black and the white in America constitute an eternal bonding, as also the limits of being. As he puts it, "In a way, the Negro tells us where the bottom is: because he is there." This is an echo of the epigraph from Whitman in Giovanni's Room, "I am the man, I suffered, I was there."

It is in The Fire Next Time (1963) that Baldwin's visionary prose finally becomes an instrument of protest on a grand scale. There is a touch of nobility in his anger, and a touch of splendor in his song.

And he mourns deeply the unearned, unenviable fate of the American black: "Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and Earth are shaken to the foundations." And, if he has become a self-mocker and a cartoonist's delight, it is because his consciousness too is a white creation, a consciousness that has turned viciously to mock the history of its race. In a long essay, "Down at the Cross: Letter From a Region in My Mind," he observes that the black is but the negative, despised and destructive side of the white man's own hated self, and that is why it has become a metaphysical category in American thought.

At times, Baldwin's spiritual fury is so great that his swollen imagination carries everything before it--God and Christianity and Humanism, and what have you. On such occasions, his artistic impulse seems to desert him, and he throws up his hands before the eternal tragedy of color, a tragedy as ineluctable as the tragedy of sex. However, Baldwin concludes this celebrated song both on a note of hope and a note of warning: "In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other if we are really to become a nation-if we are really, that is, to achieve one identity, one maturity, as men and women." But, if the Americans fail to create a corporate conscience, and the promise of America remains out of the reach of a large section of its own slighted sons and daughters, there would be unimaginable horrors in store for that fair land: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign/No more water, the fire next time!" The Fire Next Time is, at bottom, a book of intellectual epiphanies that flashed upon him in an urgent engagement of the moral imagination.

Yet, in a series of TV documentaries entitled "American Masters," the one on James Baldwin called The Price of the Ticket reveals, in snippets of life and dialogue, a man curiously soft-

spoken and serene, carrying the burden of black history over his lean and drooping shoulders in strange contrast to the storm of passions and utterances in his work. Asked by an interviewer if The Fire Next Time was "a grenade tossed into the white world," he replied that he hadn't thought of the book that way, though, to be sure, "the racial nightmare" was at the back of his mind.

In some of his later prose writings such as No Name in the Street (1972), Baldwin slides into a despairing cynicism, and repudiates both his God and his country, but till the end his muses continued to feed ravenously on the American "bread of bitterness," and sustain his imagination of pity and terror. The only other black writer to have achieved immense international repute was, of course, Richard Wright, but Baldwin's uneasy relationship with the older novelist basically reflected "the anxiety of influence," to use Harold Bloom's theory of poetry and art. Thus, to slay the "pater" figure was to achieve the passage to maturity. Baldwin attacked Wright from the position of the radical blacks, but, in his own turn, he was later to face a similar charge. Elridge Cleaver, for instance, saw a strong "racial death wish" in Baldwin, and regarded him as a tortured, twisted artist seeking to become "a white man in a black body." Similarly, some white critics like Irving Howe, who admired him at one time for his courage to realize the complexity of his situation and reject "black stereotypes," saw in the later Baldwin a "self-indulgent writer" who sought to create a dubious "racial metaphysic" and added to "the cliches of the ages," what he calls, "the cant of the moment."

These judgments notwithstanding, James Baldwin is easily the most eloquent and the most disturbing artist of distinction to have appeared in the history of black literature. His prose style, which draws its energies, among others, from the King James version of the Bible, black spirituals, Shakespeare and, oddly enough, Henry James, alone is rich and evocative enough to make him one of the masters in the great American tradition. For this order of prose subsumes great currents of human thought and great poetries of the human spirit in its effort to reach down to the roots of events and attitudes, and to (each up to the horizons of new dreams.

When his end came as a consequence of cancer, in a letter written from the brink, as it were, Baldwin said to his white assistant at Amherst: "I see some face on the wall ..." and that was the night his doctor said he would go. And he went. Not "raging" into the darkness but with a wistful smile on his lips. Baldwin's last words were: "The day'll come when you'll trust me....We'll become better than we are."

0 About the Author: Darshan Singh Maini. a former professor of English literature at Punjabi University, Patiala, is afrequent contributor to SPAN. He is currently in the United Statesfor a second stint as a visiting professor in the department of English at New York University.

O

n an outdoor stage within sight of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., a group of young girls from Sri Lanka (right) danced to the beat of a drum. A day later, a 16-year-old Indian girl performed a Kathak dance to the accompaniment of a tabla and harmonium at the same place.

Entranced by their performances, office workers on their lunch breaks, tourists and others hurrying past the Freedom Plaza stopped, and as the dancers' nimble feet stepped in perfect rhythm with the rising crescendo of drumbeats, they burst iQto spontaneous applause. It was indeed satisfying for Sri Lanka's ESCO Oriental Dance Ensemble and India's Nirupama Kaul to be greeted with such tumultuous applause, for the audience didn't know that the artists were deaf.

These artists were part of more than 1,000 participants from the United States and 57 countries around the world in a week-long international festival of dance, drama, music, painting, writing, workshops and symposiums, organized last year by Very Special Arts (VSA) to commemorate its 15th anniversary. What was special about the festival was that all the participants were victims of some physical or mental disability. A fitting tribute to the human spirit, the festival set out to prove that disability does not mean inability.

An educational affiliate of Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, VSA was founded in 1974by Jean Kennedy Smith, sister of late President John F. Kennedy, to initiate and coordinate quality arts programs for physically and mentally handicapped children, youth and adults in the United States. VSA now embraces more than one million special Americans who participate through the organization's affiliates in 16,000 communities throughout the country. Worldwide, as well, VSA is growing steadily; it has chapters in more than 50 countries, including India.

Activities promoted by VSA include programs for young and elderly playwrights, performing arts for the visually impaired and programs meant to remove limitations that might discourage handicapped participation. VSA educational programs range from one designed to improve disabled children's development

Celebrating Special Talent

through early childhood art to one that helps handicapped high school students make the transition to employment. Another of its projects brings dance, drama and music to hospitals.

With more than a hundred scheduled activities at musuems, parks and theaters throughout the city, most of them free, the festival in Washington was highly visible to the public, fitting in with VSA's emphasis on bringing disabled people into society's mainstream. However, VSA's chief executive officer, Eugene C. Maillard, was quick to point out that the organization's "basic purpose is not to make people performers. We're using the arts to enhance basic skills and help build independence and self-esteem in participants and to reduce the isolation that disabilities often impose on people who have them."

As the week progressed, festivalgoers took part in activities ranging from workshops on mouthbrush painting and wheelchair dancing to symposiums on arts education, computer technology, Japanese flower design, employment and portrayal of disability in theater and film. The festival was structured so that enjoyment of such attractions as mime, dance and music could be alternated with visits to art exhibits and a display of products designed for use by people with disabilities.

After an evening punctuated by fireworks over the Potomac River, the festivities were capped by two busy "family days," which provided the participants from around the world a unique opportunity to meet and exchange ideas. The week-long festival climaxed with a gala performance in the Kennedy Center Concert Hal1 during which the Very Special Artists joined celebrity performers to tape a network television program carrying VSA's

Festival scenes.

LeftJrom top to bottom: Phongsak Muenchanai, a blind singer from Thailand, receives a bouquet; Grammy Award winner Lamont Dozier at the piano holds a workshop on music writing; and Peruvian folk dancers give a performance.

Right, above: Michael Naranjo, a blind artist from New Mexico, uses his sculptor's touch to help West Virginian Marsha Springston, also blind, to experience his art. Right: Visitors to an IBM display in the Kennedy Center try out a musical training computer program.

message-and com'mitment-to an even wider audience.

Among those who helped heighten public awareness of VSA was President George Bush, who welcomed festival participants at a gathering on the South Lawn of the White House. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and singer Kenny Rogers performed, but the audience responded most warmly to a rendition of "We Are the World" by blind teenager Phongsak Muenchanai, a former beggar from the streets of Bangkok, Thailand, who sings in eight languages. He received a hearty hug from President Bush.

Marsalis also moderated "Pianos of the World," a concert featuring Very Special pianists, and featured among the internationally renowned artists who led "Master Artist Workshops," which were designed to enable art students and educators working with handicapped persons on the local level to learn from distinguished artists and educators. Among the other participants in the workshops were pop painter Hiro Yamagata; New York Shakespeare Festival producer Joseph Papp; mime Lorene Yarnell; and the Broadway musical writers of Singin' in the Rain and Peter Pan Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

Grammy Award-winning songwriter Lamont Dozier held a session on music writing, drawing on a 30-year career marked by the sale of more than 600 million records.

Thrilled at the festival's success, founder Jean Kennedy Smith said, "The event provided a rare and beautiful opportunity for people with special needs to reveal their truest expressions." D Barry Fitzgerald is the chief photographer of the U.S. Information Agency in Washington, D.C.

About the Author:

Clockwise from left: Helen Mittman of the District of Columbia Association for Retarded Citizens applauds a performance; artists make a chalk mural on a pavement; and an abstract dance by Spain's Psico Ballet suggests humanity's common ties.

"Our real poems are already in us and all we can do is dig."-Jonathan

The Poetry of Katha Pollitt

Galassi

You knew the odds on failure from the start, that morning you first saw, or thought you saw, beneath the heartstruck plains of a second-rate country the outline of buried cities. A thousand to one you'd turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap of a poor Near Eastern backwater: a few chipped beads, splinters of glass and pottery, broken tablets whose secret lore, laboriously deciphered, would prove to be only a collection of ancient grocery lists.

Still the train moved away from the station without you.

How many lives ago was that? How many choices?

Now that you've got your bushelful of shards do you say, give me back my years or wrap yourself in the distant glitter of desert stars, telling yourself it was foolish after all to have dreamed of uncovering some fluent vessel, the bronze head of a god?

Pack up your fragments. Let the simoom flatten the digging site. Now come the passionate midnights in the museum basement when out of that random rubble you'll invent the dusty market smelling of sheep and spices, streets, palmy gardens, courtyards set with wells to which, in the blue of evening, one by one, come strong veiled women, bearing their perfect jars.

Katha Pollitt,

a contemporary

American

poet, was born in New York City and studied at Radcliffe College in Cambridge,

Mas-

, sachusetts, and Columbia University in New York. Her works, which have won a number

0/ poetry

awards, have been published in the

most prestigious

literary

magazines

and

journals both in the United States and Europe. This selection/rom

her first volume of

poems, Antarctic Traveller, gives afl.avor of her poetic suppleness, insight, simplicity and beauty, and her sureness of form.

From Antarctic Tra~'eller.by Katha Pollitt. Copyright by-Katha Pollitt. Reprinted

by permission

_ 1981

of Alfred A. Knopf.

Inc.

They won't come to you. These nights, you could sit for a year on the dock behind Arthur's Gift Shop and General Store before you'd spot with your flashlight a single silk-backed bather nosing the trash fish dumped off the lobster boats, l.ured to your human light from the night-black water.

Those visits, if they ever took place, ended long ago, though the fishermen did no harm to the silver-furred luck-bearing ones who kept the cold caves we left and the waves no squall spills the green-glass fullness ofand even half-believed the old tales: how they floated this drowner, nudged that skiff off rocks.

We bore them, perhaps. Or simply, their minds are elsewhere.

At any rate no girl has married their king in centuries, no sailor learned any secret from them worth shipwreck.

And yet, as the holiday ferry smacks its smart salt-stiffened flags in the wind we lean like children over the side: to lee gleams the craggy castle to which they've withdrawn.

Huge, simple, sleek as Maillol bronzes, they sprawl in the sun, or powerfully dive and surface jewelled with spray

ILLUSTRATED WITH PAINTINGS BY NAND

KATYAL

then lumber with heavy grace back up to their mates.

They are historyless, at peace. As our boat chuffs by, the wind floats back fish stench and a gabble of barks, sharp cries that remind you of nothing but gulls or the creaking of rope.

They are no Sirens, we only weekend trippers.

Whatever their language, they are not speaking to us.

Those speckled trout we glimpsed in a pool last year you'd take for an image of love: it too should be graceful, elusive, tacit, moving surely among half-lights of mingled dim and clear, forced to no course, of no fixed residence, its only end its own swift elegance.

What would you say if you saw what I saw the other day: that pool heat-choked and fevered where sick blue bubbled green scum and blistered water lily?

A white like a rolled-back eye or fish's belly I thought I saw far out-but doubtless you prefer to think our trout had left together to seek a place with less inclement weather.

"An anecdote has it that Tesshu painted orchids almost every day with a kind of religious fervor."-Museum catalogue At the foot of a rock, bamboo and orchids, small furled flowers that hold themselves aloof from the mist that is everywhere.

You have left newspapers, indolent quarrels over Sunday-morning coffee to come to the museum with your lover and admire these swirls swept onto paper by an old monk in less than ten minutes six hundred years ago depicting the orchid, which signifies the virtues of the noble man: reticence, calm, clarity of mind.