May 1992

and

be 45,000

Council (ACE)

BnnJpn~ peoplÂŁ> com pulers IOR'ether

~[gIlJJÂŤ:;;~'ii"O@1NI

1I11!

credit recommcndalions.*

Wilh American on Education

new

NIIT does. With a curriculum of proven courses carefully designed and painstakingly tested; with teaching methods that make computer study a logical, step-by-step excercise to ensure faster and better learning; a caring faculty of computer professionals who don't just teach computers - but have real-life experience; and of course, a national placement network that helps you start out on an exciting career with a reputed organisation. (Not surprisingly the American Council on Education has established credit recommendations for NIIT career courses at over 1500 American Universities and Colleges.)

So why not invest an hour or two, and stop by at your nearest NIlT centre to discuss things with our Student Advisors. And collect your free copy of the booklet; 'Careers In Computers' .

And who knows where you'll be by 1993?

Nobody invests in you like

computer jobs each year. So there's really no better time to make an investment in studying computers. At NIIT -India's No. 1 Computer Education Institute.

Where scientifically designed quality computer education, and dedicated placement services come together to give you a future. A future as a computer professional.

There will

to career. That's what NIIT means to independent young people like the one here.

Because each year colleges in India produce 30 lakh graduates. And naturally not all of them can hope for careers immediately.

The smooth road from college

"A father doesn't take money from his child", he said, But I insisted, I wasn't a child anymore, And he wasn't taking the money.

I was returning it. With pride."

UTHREE YEARS AGO DAD PAID FOR MY STUDIES AT NIIT. LAST YEAR I INSISTED ON PAYING HIM BACKu.

Education Centres: Bombay Delhi Madras Bangalore CalcuWl Hyderabad Secunderabad Pune Agra Allahabad Ahmedabad Aurangabad Baroda Bhilai Bhopal BhubaneswarCalieut Chandigarh Cochin Coimballlre Cutl<lck Dehradun Durgapur Erode Gaiunaka Goa Guntor Gwalior Hubli IndoreJabalpurJamshedpur Jammu Kakinada Kanpur Kotl<lyam Lucknow Madurai Mangalore Meerut Mysore Nagpur Nashik Nellore Palna Pondicherry Raipur Tirupathi Trichy Trivandrum Udaipur Varanasi Viiayawada Vi zag Warangal Ranchi Rourkela Salem Siliguri Simla'Tirunelveli

A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

SPANMaY1992 AMERICAN

For several decades now, the "outside expert" has been a fixture of American-style politics and government.

Names such as Henry A. Kissinger, James R. Schlesinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski readily come to mind. At one time or another, almost all of them have also served on the "inside," holding top-level posts in one or more presidential administrations.

In the field of economic advice, Herbert Stein is one of the most familiar names. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers for President Richard Nixon and has been associated with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, for many years. In this issue Stein tells us what it is like to give economic advice to government officials. "It may seem a shocking thing to say," the renowned economist says, "but most of the economics that is usable for advising on public policy is at about the level of the introductory undergraduate course." Presumably, Presidents and top government officials have had a university-level economics course or two, so why would they need an economic adviser at all? As you will see, 'Stein has an answer to that and other questions.

When they aren't serving in government, policy advisers usually can be found in one of two places-a university or a think tank. James A. Smith's recently published book about the latter, The Idea Brokers, is reviewed this month by Bombay attorney A.G. Noorani, who brings extensive personal knowledge and perspective to his discussion of the role of think tanks in a democratic society.

I spent one of the best periods of my professional life at a think tank. In 1989-91 I was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. The CSIS is the number one think tank in the United States devoted exclusively to foreign affairs. It was founded in 1962 in affiliation with Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. It broke away from Georgetown in 1986, and today operates independently with a $10 million budget.

I found CSIS to be a marvelous environment in which to conduct research, write, and interact with experts from many different fields. It is the think tank of choice for top executives of multinational corporations who want a nongovernmental briefing on the economic environment in various countries and regions of the world. At CSIS I had the opportunity to brief dozens of corporate executives about the global economy and on business and investment opportunities in Latin America, where I had last served overseas. I was immensely challenged and stimulated by the experience. Which is why world trade and economics is one of the general subjects that I have enjoyed talking about and exchanging views on in my travels around India.

2 6

WOMEN TODAY

A Turning Point

by Nancy Gibbs

To Each Her Own

by Wendy Cole

10

The Second Thoughts of Gloria Steinem

12 14

Male inDependence

20 23 26 30

At the Y

by Anees lung

by Lekha J. Shankar

A Poem of One's Own

by Mary Jo Salter

Think Tanks and Democracy

by A.G. Noorani

What Do Economic Advisers Do?

by Herbert Stein

On the Lighter Side

31

A Conversation With Ambassador Hussain

33

From Madras to Hollywood-Daring to be Different An Interview

With Radha Bharadwa} by Malini Seshadri

36 Architectural Guru

An Interview With Eduard Sekler by Gerald McCue

38 40

by Peter Jaret

Focus On ...

Disease Detectives

46 Lenscape Front cover: Barbara Harris, the first .woman bishop in the history of the Episcopal Church, is among many American women who are making it to the top of male-dominated professions. See SPAN's special packet on "American Women Today" from pages 2-19.

Publisher. Stephen F. Dachi; Editor, Guy E. Olson

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; Ass(Jciale Art irector, Kanti Roy; Artist. Hemant Bhatnagar; Produclion A.ssistanl. Sanjay Po hriyal; CirC",;!ation Manager. D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Managing

Editor.

Photographs: Front cover-© 1990 Steve Liss, Time magazine. 2-3-Kci1neth E. While.

6 top-© 1990 Pam Francis; bottom-© Tony Tomsic. 7 top-Claudio Edinger, Gamma Liaison; bottom-© 1990 Steve Liss, Time magazine. 9 (clockwise from top leftl-© 1990 Gwendolen Gates, ONYX; © 1990 Emmy Etra; © 1990 George ~ange; James Keyser, © 1990 Time magazine. IQ-Rick Bard 1991. 14-© Jerry Bauer. 2022-Jonathan Aitkin except 20 left courtesy Young Men's Hebrew Association and 20 bottom by Donal Holway, CourtesyYMHA. 33-Usha Kris. 35-© 1990 Imagine Films and Universal City Studios, Inc. 37-Avinash Pasricha except center photo by R.K. Sharma. 40, 43-Stuart Franklin; 42-Matthew Naythons; AI! pictures © National Geographic Society. ' I~

Published by the United States Information

Servi<e. American

Center,

24 Kasturb-.

Ga.

hi Marg.

New Delhi

1I0001

PrinteJat thomson Pres, (lndia) Limited. Faridabad.

Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarHy reflect the views at policies of rhelt.S. Ooven-.ment..

Use of SPAN arti<:les in other publications is <!!Courage<!. e,,,-ept when COPl'figh Far p'"mission write to th.e Editor, Prh.:e afmagazine. one year's subscription (12 lSSues) Rs. 6O~single <.'Opy. Rs. 6

(phone:

331684/),

on behalf of the American

Embassy.

New DelhI.

AMERICAN

WOMEN

TODAY

ATurninl Point

by NANCY GIBBS

Inheritors of a feminist revolution that has largely been won, young women coming of age today are striding confidently

ahead. Yet, in

the twilight of the century, the author says, "women find themselves at a critical juncture, a moment, perhaps, for reflection and evaluation."

A

generation from now, if all the dreams of reformers have come true ... , [such issues as] equal pay, child care, abortion, rape, and domestic violence will no longer be cast as "women's issues." They will be viewed as economic issues, family issues, ethical issues, of equal resonance to men and women. A woman heading a huge corporation will not make headlines by virtue of her gender. Half [of] the presidential candidates may be women-and nobody will notice.

But what will it take to get there from here? As the century fades, women find themselves at a critical juncture, a moment, perhaps, for reflection and evaluation. The cozy, limited roles of the past are still clearly remembered, sometimes fondly. The future looms with so many choices that the freedom it promises can be frightening.

[Some well-publicized events of the past couple of years have] richly sketched the dizzying choices of roles and values facing the next generation of American women and men. When [First Lady] Barbara Bush, [a celebrated wife and mother, was chosen as commencement speaker at Wellesley, a women's college near Boston, it] sparked a national debate among the young about what it means to be a successful woman. That debate was further fueled by the announcement by TV newswoman Connie Chung that she would abandon the fast track at CBS in a lastditch drive for motherhood at age 44. Meanwhile, male role models are also in flux. [Peter Lynch, a highly successful Wall

Street investment counselor, quit managing] his $13,000 million mutual fund to do good deeds and have more time with his family. What generation in history has enjoyed such liberty to write the rules as it goes along? Over the past 30 years, all that was orthodox has become negotiable.

Young Americans inherit a revolution that has largely been won. One measure of the success of the women's movement is the ease with which it is taken for granted. Few daughters remember the barriers their mothers faced when applying for scholarships, jobs, and loans-even for a divorce. Today's young adults dismiss old gender stereotypes and limitations. They expect equal opportunities but want more than mere equality. It is their dream that they will be the ones to strike a healthy balance at last between their public and private lives-between the lure of fame and glory, and a love of home and hearth.

If there is a theme among those coming of age today ... , it is that gender differences are often better celebrated than suppressed. Young women do not want to slip unnoticed into a man's world; they want that world to change and benefit from what women bring to it. The changes are spreading. Eager to achieve their goals without sacrificing their natures, women in business are junking the boxy suits and one-of-the-boys manner that always seemed less a style than a disguise. In psychology the old view that autonomy is the hallmark of mental health is being revamped. A sense of "connectedness" to others is now being viewed as a healthy trait rather than a symptom of "dependent personality disorder."

In politics women candidates are finding that issues they emphasize may carry more weight than ever with voters tired of the guns-not-butter budgets of the 1980s.

In many ways the 16 million or so American women between the ages of 18 and 24 are the generation that social scientists have been waiting for. They were born between 1968 and 1974, a tiny but explosive glimpse of history in which the women's movement took hold. Studies of women's changing expectations have found that during those years the proportion of young women who planned to be housewives plunged from two-thirds to less than a quarter-an astounding shift in attitude in the flick of an apron. Child rearing became less a preoccupation than an improvisation, housework less an obsession than a chore. Young daughters watched as their mothers learned new roles, while their fathers all too often clung to old ones. They were the first generation to see almost half of all marriages end in divorce.

Disheartened by their mothers' guilt during the 1970s [over choosing to pursue careers] and their older sisters' exhaustion hauling baby and briefcase through the career traffic of the 1980s, today's young women have their own ideas about redefining the feminine mystique. When asked to sketch their futures, college students say they want good careers, good marriages, and two or three kids, and they don't want their

children to be raised by strangers. Young people don't want to lie, as their mothers did, when a baby's illness keeps them from work: They expect the boss to understand. Mommy tracks, daddy tracks, dropping out, slowing down, starting over, going private-all are options entertained by a generation that views its yuppie predecessors with alarm. The next generation of parents may be less likely to argue over who has to leave work early to pick up the kids and more likely to clash over who gets to take parental leave.

Wild optimism is youth's prerogative, but older women shudder slightly at the giddy expectations of today's highschool and college students. At times their hope borders on hubris, with its assumption that the secrets that eluded their predecessors will be revealed to them. "In the 1950s women were family-oriented," says Sheryl Hatch, 20, a broadcasting major at the American University in Washington, D.C. "In the¡ 1970s they were career-oriented. In the 1990s we want balance. I think I can do both."

It is not that older women begrudge the young their hopes; rather they recognize how many choices will still be dictated not by social convention but by economic realities. The earning power of young families fell steadily during the 1980s, so that two incomes are a necessity, not a luxury, and a precarious economy promises only more pain. When factories cut back, women are often the first to be laid off. As Washington battles its deficits, cutting away at food, health, and child-care programs, it is poor women who ... feel the hardest pinch.

'hose

prospects are not all lost on young people There ;5

plenty of room for realism between their dreams and their fears.

A Time poll of 505 men and women ages 18 to 24 ... found that four out of five believed it was difficult to juggle work and family, and that too much pressure was placed on women to bear the burdens. But among those with the education to enter the professions, the response often comes in the form of demands. "What's different between these women and my generation," says Leslie Wolfe, 46, executive director of the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., "is that they say, 'I don't want to work 70 hours a week, but I want to be vice president, and you have to change.' We kept our mouths shut and followed the rules. They want different rules."

And if the economy cooperates, they may just pull it off, with some help from demographics. This baby-bust generation is about one-third smaller than the baby boomers who came before, which means that employers competing for skilled workers will be drawing from a smaller pool. Today's young people hope that that fact, combined with some corporate consciousness-raising about the importance of families, will give them bargaining power for longer vacations, more gen-

erous parental leaves, and more flexible working conditions.

Employers who listen carefully will hear the shift of priorities. [While many college students are nervous about their economic prospects, they] are equally wary of the fast lane. "We have a fear of being like the generation before us, which lost itself," says Julia Parsons, 24, a second-year law student at Georgetown University Law Center. "I don't want to find myself at 35 with no family. It's a big fear." Big enough, it seems, to account for a marked shift away from 1980s-st'yle workaholism. The Time poll found that 51 percent put having a long and happy marriage and raising well-adjusted children ahead of career success (29 percent).

Men are often just as eager as women to escape the pressure of traditional roles. "The women's movement has been a positive force," says Scott Mabry, a 22-year-old [graduate of Ohio's Kenyon College at Gambier]. "Men have a new appreciation of women as people, more than just sex objects, wives, mothers." Time's poll found that 86 percent of young men were looking for spouses who are ambitious and hardworking; an astonishing 48 percent expressed interest in staying home with their children. "I don't mind being the first one to stay home," says Ernesto Fuentes, a high-school student in Los Angeles's working-class Echo Park district. "The girl can succeed. It's cool with me." (See "Male inDependence," page 12.)

For their part, many women fully expect to do their share as breadwinners, though not necessarily out of personal choice so much as financial need. "Of course we will work," says Kimberly Heimert, 21, of Germantown, Tennessee, a senior at the American University in Washington, D.C. "What are we going to do? Stay at home? When I get married, I expect to contribute 50 percent of my family's income."

When asked how family life will fit into their ambitious plans, young people wax creative. Many want to be independent contractors, working at home at their own hours. Some talk of "sequencing": Rather than interrupting a career to stay home with children, they plan to marry early, have children quickly, and think about work later. "I'll get into my career afterward," says Sheri Davis, 21, a senior at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "I'm not willing to have children and put them in day care. I've babysat for years and taken kids to day-care centers. They just hang on my legs and cry. I can't do that." Other women claim to be searching for the perfect equalopportunity mate. Melissa Zipnick, 26, a kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles, saw her own working mom wear herself out "catering" to her father and brother. "I intend to be married to someone who will share all the responsibilities," she says.

But such demands and expectations are accompanied by a nagging sense of obstacles. The fear of divorce, for instance, hangs heavily over young men and women. Nearly threequarters of those in the Time poll said that having a good marriage today is difficult or very difficult. More than half

would not choose marriages like their parents', and 85 percent think they are even more likely to see their marriages end in divorce than did their parents' generation. "A lot of my friends' parents are divorced," says Georgetown's Parsons. "In most cases it happened when the mother was trying to decide whether to stay home or go to work. And the women were left so vulnerable." Careers become a form of insurance. "I don't want to depend on anybody," says Kellie Moore, 19, a University of Southern California junior who plans to get a business degree.

"I have friends who have already set up their own credit structure because they watched their mothers try to set one up after a divorce."

Given

th;s eomhinaHonor goals and rem, young women

would appear to be disciples of feminism, embracing the movement as a means of sorting out social change. But while the goals are applauded by three-quarters of young people, the feminist label is viewed with disdain and alarm .... Some young people reject the movement on principle: "The whole women's movement is pushing the career women," says Kathy Smith, 19, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, "and making light of being a homemaker."

Others feel that the battle belonged to a different generation, without realizing that the very existence of a debate about family leave, abortion, [flexible work hours], and affirmative action is the fruit of an ongoing revolution. Minority women seem to be the group least likely to abandon the feminist label, perhaps because they are most aware of how many critical battles remain to be fought. In fact, argues Stephanie Ratiste, 18, a black freshman at Princeton University in New Jersey, "minority women are almost a separate women's movement.. ..you're very alone. You get a lot less support."

Here, then, is a goal for the women's movement: The education of the next generation of daughters in a better understanding of their inheritance, their opportunities, and their obligations. And there are lessons to learn in return.

Speaking of the new generation, Leslie Wolfe of the Center for Women Policy Studies says, "I think they are more savvy than we were, about sexism, about discrimination, about balancing work and family, about sex." They may be wiser, too, about seizing fresh opportunities without losing sight of tradition.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin once wrote of a women's dream: "The special heritage of values and priorities that have been traditionally associated with women as wives and mothers can be seen as sources of strength to create an enlarged vision of society." A society so enlarged and strengthened will make more room for everyone's dreams.

D

ToEach Her Own Combining talent and drive, perseverance and grit, more and more women are today making it to the top of professions once considered to be the exclusive domain of men. Here are eight noteworthy examples.

The mayor of Houston, Texas, admitted to having some "trepidation" about appointing Elizabeth Watson as the chief of police. "I was concerned about the support she would get. I had a little experience along those lines myself," said Kathryn Whitmire, who also happens to be the city's first female mayor. But [soon] after becoming the first U.S. woman to head a big-city [police] force, Watson, 43, has shown she can hack it. She took over a department reeling from low morale caused by widespread staff reductions and paltry salaries and quickly won [a six percent raise for the force]. Lauded as a hard worker who came up through the ranks, Watson will never forget being handed a dress pattern and told to sew her own uniform as a rookie cop 20 years ago. She went on to serve with distinction in practically every division from auto theft to the [special weapons and tactics] team and insists that macho behavior in the depaqment never bothered her. "Look where I am now. Heck, obviously I haven't been too put-upon," says Watson.

Most successful people who want to give something back to their community settle for contributing money to a museum or joining the board of the town library. When Marge Schott decided to fulfill her civic duty, she invested in the local baseball team: The Cincinnati Reds. Schott, who had taken over her late husband's [General Motors car] dealership, bought the club in 1984 for an estimated $11 million, and has become one of the game's highest profile owners. "It's really more than a 24-houra-day job," says Schott, 64. Nonetheless, she has managed to turn around the fortunes of the red-hot team, which lost $4 million the year before she came aboard. Attendance has jumped 85 percent during her tenure .... An intrepid cost cutter, she canceled Riverfront Stadium fireworks displays and signs all checks for th~ team herself. "Daddy always taught us it wasn't right to waste money," says the chain-smoking Schott.

Ever since her stint as a gun smuggler for the Zionist underground movement in Europe during World War II, Mathilde Krim has not flinched at taking bold action. Over the past decade the New York City-based virologist has concentrated on fighting AIDS. Although her involvement began in the lab, where she studied the effectiveness of the protein interferon in treating an AIDS-related cancer, these days Krim, 66, works mostly in the public arena as a fund-raiser and lobbyist.

Her mission: To replace ignorance with knowledge and compassion. As the wife of movie mogul Arthur Krim, she has also enlisted the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand. "I use my contacts because it's my duty," says Krim, who so far has raised $40 million for research. After all, she adds, the way wealthy societies deal with AIDS "will measure to what extent they have the right to call themselves civilized."

"There seem to be fresh winds blowing across the church. Things thought to be impossible a short time ago are coming to be," preached Barbara Harris in the fall of 1988. She was referring to her own imminent consecration as the first woman bishop in the history of the Episcopal Church. But traditionalists weren't upset just about Harris's sex. She also happened to be a black, non-college-educated divorcee with some fairly radical beliefs. While [she was] still a laywoman, Harris led the procession at the 1974 protest ritual in which her church's first women priests were illicitly ordained. Continuing to rail against the church for its racism, sexism, and homophobia, Harris, who used to work as the top public-relations executive at Sun Oil, had become a champion of the downtrodden and disparaged.

"I would bring a sensitivity to the needs of different kinds of people, including minorities, women, the incarcerated, the poor, and other marginalized groups," said the Philadelphia native shortly before her narrow victory in an acrimonious election as assistant bishop. Since her precedent-shattering achievement, however, 62-year-old Harris has managed to quiet even her harshest detractors.

Refusing to become an "international Anglican gadfly," she says her priority is to carry out her Boston-area pastoral and sacramental duties.

What does America's space program have in common with a soprano saxophone? Quite a lot, when the instrument is played by Jane Ira Bloom, 37, ajazz virtuoso who was the first musician commissioned to create a work for NASA's art program. Witnessing a Discovery shuttle launch close up inspired her to compose a four-part suite titled Rediscovery, which premiered at Cape Canaveral [in 1990]. [Bloom has long been] fascinated by the links between music and motion. [She] has ... composed scores for the ... Pilobolus Dance Theater and the repertory theater at Yale [University], where she earned a master's in saxophone in 1977. She uses a synthesizer, controlled by foot pedals, to amplify her ethereal solos into swirls of sound that evoke the Doppler effect, the drop in pitch that occurs when a train rushes by with its horn blaring. Bloom has six times been cited in Down Beat's annual critics' poll as [having] talent deserving [of] wider recognition. As to why she first took up the notoriously cranky instrument, she has a winning answer: "It looked so shiny."

With three major highly touted theatrical productions to her credit, Martha Clarke, 48, is indisputably at the top of her profession. The problem is that no one, including the Manhattan-based choreographer-director herself, can easily describe what that profession is. "If I knew what I was doing, I wouldn't do it," says the avant-garde artist, paraphrasing her idol Samuel Beckett. Her productions are ... an evocative blend of dance, music, words, and light, but to her latest piece, Endangered Species, she brings something entirely new: Live animals, including Flora, a baby elephant, and Clarke's own horse, Mr. Grey. She maintains that they are being used as "sentient creatures" rather than beasts of burden or embarrassed icons. Finishing the work, which focuses on mankind's domination of nature, has given the former modern dancer little chance to use the $285,000 MacArthur fellowship that she won in July [1990]. Says Clarke: "When the call came, I was so busy I had my assistant take a message."

While getting the money was nice, in her business the real reward doesn't come until opening night.

She is the first female chief of the 108,000-member Cherokee nation, the second-largest U.S. tribe after the Navajos. But it took the men a while to come around after her 1987 election. "I've run into more discrimination as a woman than as an [American] Indian," says Mankiller, 46, whose unusual last name was inherited from an l8thcentury warrior ancestor. She has likened her job to "running a small country, a medium-size corporation, and being a social worker." With an annual budget of $52 million, the Oklahoma-based tribe operates industries, health clinics, and cultural programs employing about 1,700 people. In July [1990], while recovering from a kidney transplant, Mankiller signed an unprecedented agreement with the U.S. government that gives the tribe direct control of $6.\ million in federal funding. Mankiller, who attended college in California before returning to Oklahoma \6 years ago, is more optimistic than ever about her fundamental goal: Seeing [American] Indians solve their own economic problems.

Before Josie Natori married, her father told husband-to-be Ken that there were "two things that you have to know in this family. One, that my wife is the commander in chief and, two, that my mother-in-law is the supreme commander in chief." Natori, 45, must rank as at least a five-star general. Merrill Lynch's first female investment banker, Natori rose to vice president of the company before leaving in 1977 to create her own firm. She started small, working in her New York City apartment, designing and selling fine lingerie. In a pinch, she even packed the orders herself. Today Natori Co. has splashy headquarters in midtown Manhattan, a boutique in Paris, and sales of more than $25 million annually. Surrounded by models showing off her pricey fashions, Natori has lost none of her enthusiasm. She is on many boards, including the Committee of 200, a group of women entrepreneurs who head multi-million-dollar companies. She keeps close ties to her native Philippines, and helped raise relief funds after [the 1990] earthquake. "I play many roles," she says. ''I'm head of this business, a wife, a daughter with family obligations, and mother of a l7-yearold son. I have a lot of jobs, but each has been by my own choice."

Four years ago, as business was rapidly expanding, the president talked a top Wall Street executive into leaving his post to become her company's chairman. His name: Ken Natori.

0

AMERICAN

WOMEN

TODAY

The Second Thoughts She probably

is the world's

book, Revolution

most famous

feminist. And in her new

from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem,

has paused to take stock of her life. She recounts childhood

spent caring for her ill mother after her father had

abandoned

the family. She graduated

the oppressed schedules

women of America.

to becoming

In that capacity

life. The book-which

brush with a luxurious candid

assessment

Some feminists

includes

insecure,

of her brief

a real estate tycoon-is

a she

Steinem of abandoning

their cause,

it as "an exercise in squishy

from the new-age

But others have praised it for its honesty.

Anees Jung-noted, on Indian women-visited her impressions

element of a

has received a mixed reception

critics. One critic characterized thumb-sucking."

the self-

and tired.

have accused

and her book, a best-seller,

W

her hectic

an account

lifestyle while dating

for all

of her life. When she faced herself squarely,

says she felt "plain,"

"played

caretaker

left her with no time for herself or for building

esteem that she now realizes is the most important person's

Gloria Steinem

the years of her

among

other things, for her evocative

prose

Steinem in New York lat~ last year. Here are

of the woman

who, as one American

a pivotal role in remaking

our nation's

writer noted,

mores."

hen she opened the door of her town house I recognized the face but not the expression, She was Gloria Steinem all right but not the one I had met in the 1970s. The gold of her long hair had lost its sheen, her eyes were softer, her manner less hurried. The dashing feminist of the 1960s seemed a warm, mellow, and gentle woman. She let me into her study cum workroom-a familiar environment composed of books, some paintings and prints, mementoes of her wide travels, including a few from India and Nepal.

Nothing about the room shrieked for attention except the telephone. She attended to each call with ease, returned and sat back, ready to receive. I did most of the talking. She listened. In her attention I sensed a concern, a spirit of sharing, a reaching out. It seemed as if she knew what was inside me.

That's how Gloria had felt years ago when a small grayhaired woman had touched her shoulder with a gnarled hand at a meeting in Detroit and said: "Ijust want you to know that you are the inside of me." Quoting that comment in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions Gloria writes how all reward came together for her in that one moment. "Remembering now that woman's touch and words I still feel the tears behind my eyes." Talking with her about women in distant

corners of India, brave women exploring the outer edges of human possibility, I felt much the same. It was like meeting an old friend who understood not only your "inside" but linked it so well to the "outside."

India was not unfamiliar to her. As a student at Miranda House in Delhi in the late 1950s she had traveled through the country and experienced its many levels. She had even written a small book for the Department of Tourism. She smiled remembering her encounters with Indian bureaucracy. Living in India had brought home to her the staggering truth that the standard of living on which most of the world lived was a norm inconceivable in America. Hoping to write about it Gloria had kept a diary as she had walked through some of the villages, encountering some caste riots, with nothing but a cup, a sari, and a comb. Returning home she had tried to sell some of that writing as well as the guidebook designed to lure Westerners into traveling beyond the Taj Mahal. "But I was unknown and the time was too early," she looks back. "Even the Beatles had not yet discovered India."

In the India that she had known and the one where I now lived much had happened and much had changed I told her.

Sharing notes, it seemed, as if we were sharing one territory.

01 Gloria Sieinem "Women of every race," said Gloria, "are the only discriminated group with no territory, no country of their own, not even a neighborhood. In a patriarchy a poor man's house may be his castle but even a rich woman's body is not her own." Somewhere in our lives each of us needs a free place, a little psychic territory, stressed Gloria. In India, she remembered, that place is traditionally the village well where women congregate and talk, outside the circle of home and family. Today that space is also the handicraft cooperative, the mahila mandai, a social network, or a professional group. "Without this source of confirmation and mutual support women may not have the confidence to use the rights they already have, much less the strength to demand them."

Little did I realize sitting cocooned in her study whilst a city roared outside that this home had come to her after years of living out of unpacked boxes in bare apartments. "She was nearly eligible for a senior citizen's discount before she bought her first sofa," reports Time magazine profiling her blues in its issue of January 20, 1992. At 57, Gloria has finally got a home that reflects so well who she is. It is a brownstone, simply and unostentatiously furnished-several rooms, a paved courtyard, a very narrow spiral staircase that leads up to her own private territory-a large room with an old-fashioned canopy bed, easy chairs by a window, more books. I see no kitchen. Like many overscheduled women in New York, Gloria too orders her meals from the many take-away restaurants that provide quick service. She knows of many good ones, suggests that I visit Jezebel for Cajun food, Josephine for ambience (both restaurants owned by black women), and Sounds of Brazil for great music.

I am flattered when she invites me to stay in her guest room, which is free except when her adopted daughter is in New York staying with her. She happens to be the daughter of Alice Walker whose book The Color Purple stays finely etched even in Indian minds. Her story of Celia who writes her life story in the guise ofletters to God had seemed to me like the poems Muslim women write mourning the martyred imams of Karbala. Evoking the epic tragedy, they seek a perspective for their own. As did the long suppressed black woman in America's deep South.

Hearing Gloria talk about black women I hear distant echoes.

The words of Alice Walker ring with an immediacy that seems intimate: "If you are silent for a long time people just arrive in your mind. It makes you believe the world was created in silence." Gloria shared with Alice work, parties, marches fot more than a decade, and now a daughter.

Friendships, I gather, matter a great deal to Gloria. "I am continually moved to discover I have sisters." Among them is Jezebel, a black woman with a biblical face who runs the restaurant, named after herself, in New York's Broadway

. district. Gloria is a regular patron. It was at Jezebel's where we were first meant to meet along with Carmen Robinson, another of her close friends who is incidentally the sister of Mort Zuckerman, the real estate demi-billionaire who wooed Gloria in the 1980s, shocking her friends. Though she parted from this most unlikely beau her friendship with Carmen remained. "I had to suppress the thought that his weekend house cost more than several years' worth of funds for the entire women's movement in the country-and maybe a couple of other countries besides," she writes.

In her latest book Revolution from Within: A Book of SelfEsteem, Gloria bemoans that lack of self-esteem is the basic hang-up for women who deny it to others and to themselves.

And this is the major enemy of sisterhood. "Since very few of us grew up with mothers who were allowed to be powerful in the world, we often feel motherless," she writes, stressing the need for networking among women. "Perhaps in the freedom and support of groups run by and for women we are becoming each other's mothers. If so, it's a need that also crosses boundaries."

Talking of her own mother in perhaps the most poignant tribute entitled "Ruth's Song: (Because she could not sing it)" she reminisces about all those lonely years she spent with her ailing mother who was either a patient in a sanatorium, a state hospital, or living in a ramshackled farmhouse on the edge of a major highway. Hearing her mother she would often ask: "But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take the job? Why didn't you marry the other-man?" And her motheFwould insist that it did not matter as she had her. "If I'd left you never would have been born," she would say. Sadly Gloria admits that she never had the courage to tell her: "But you might have been born instead!"

As we sit through the twilight talking about mothers, daughters, and sisters I sense none of the subdued agony that was so much a part of her life. Seeing her in such repose I find it difficult to believe that she has been through breast surgery for a malignant tumor and that she is into recovery programs that include hypnosis and meditation. And that horrible dream that haunted her for years has disappeared-a dream where she saw herself fighting with people trying to hurt her, a dream that she describes as "a classic scenario of anger, humiliation, and powerlessness." Sometime in the 1980s she stopped having that dream. "Thinking of that woman in Detroit I realize that I associate its disappearance with her words. They crystallize in one moment what women can do and are doing. We are offering each other a new and compassionate kind of power."

D About the Author: Anees lung, noted writer-columnist and author o{ Unveiling India, is based in Nell' Delhi. Her new book, "Night o{the Nell' Moon: Mothers and Daughters in Indian Islam," is due to be published hy Penguin India this year,

Once upon a time women in the U.S. Foreign Service had to give up their jobs when they married.

That archaic practice was eliminated two decades ago, and the number of women in the profession has grown significantly.

Male inDependence

This growth

has led to an interesting recent trend overseas-women foreign service officers with dependent spouses.

Currently eight families fall into that category at the U.S. Embassy ill New Delhi. Three of them are profiled here.

Esther Klein, embassy personnel officer, says the overseas experiences of dependent males "have been as good or as bad as female dependent spouses. It finally comes down to a question of attitude." Most of the men seem to have adjusted to this reversal of traditional roles with aplomb and good humor. As spoof and symbol of a new order, they recently announced

the formation

of the Association of Dependent American Male Spouses, or ADAMS. with the motto: "We're just part of the household effects."

Leanne Hogie and Michael Hendricks discussing a point on the court. Susan Domowitz and David McAllister at play with Benjamin. Andrea J. Yates and Bob Blumberg in the office.

No Preconceived Notions Andrea J. Yates is deputy director of the Office of Technology Development and Enterprise at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She has a PhD in entomology and agricultural ecology from the University of Georgia in Athens. Her husband, Robert (Bob) Blumberg, has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and a master's in business administration from the University of Georgia. They met on a blind date in 1973 and married five months later.

In 1974 they went to Swaziland as Peace Corps volunteers. At the conclusion of their assignment they visited India on their way home in 1977 and fell in love with the country. When USAID assigned Andrea to India in 1989, Bob agreed to give up his job with the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. He previously had worked for an electric utility company in Georgia.

Bob admits that he had anxieties about giving up a full-time jobbut was eager for the opportunity to live abroad once again. For such an arrangement to work, he feels it is necessary that the dependent spouse not have any "preconceived notions whatever" about finding a job overseas.

Fortunately, he has kept busy. On the strength of his computer skills and engineering background, he has been able to pick up several consultancy jobs on computer-related projects with United Nations and foreign agencies. Most recently, he has been working as an adviser to USAID on energy and computer matters. Bob drolly notes that it's essentially a full-time job and "has been eating into my free time."

Andrea and Bob emphasize that to succeed in an arrangement such For as theirs, couples must be open and flexible and understanding. instance, Andrea says it does not bother her that at many social gatherings in India, "everyone presumes that Bob is the direct hire USAID employee, and I am his accompanying wife." Bob asks, "Why should there be a blanket assumption in a relationship that it is only the husband who should earn?"

Three Priorities ''I'm quite happy doing 'wifely' duties like shopping and managing the home," says Michael Hendricks. Since accompanying his wife Leanne Hogie to New Delhi almost two years ago, Michael has been handling many of the couple's domestic chores as well as taking consulting assignments from international organizations to evaluate development programs for disadvantaged people. He has a PhD in research methods from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and previously had his own consulting company in Washington, D.C. Michael and Leanne married just ten days before she took up her assignment in the summer of 1990 as agricultural attache, responsible for India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. She has a master's degree in agricultural economics from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and previous overseas experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica and doing research work in Mexico. She was working on European trade policy issues in Washington, D.C., but "lobbied hard" for an assignment to India because of the vital importance of agricultural production here and the wide range of agricultural crops she would be able to examine. She has not been disappointed. She has enjoyed her numerous field trips to farming regions of the three countries to prepare agricultural surveys and analyses.

Michael's earlier consulting projects had taken him to different

parts of the world, including India, so he had a pretty good idea of what he was getting into when he agreed to accompany her on this assignment. "I had three priorities-Leanne, India, and my profession, in that order," he explains. "I am making half of what I did in the United States," Michael says of his occasional consulting. "However, you can't place a dollar value on these life experiences."

Leanne says she feels no guilt about Michael having to take a temporary break from his company. "He's capable of making decisions and sticking to them," she says. In her job Leanne says she misses having many female peers "with whom I can discuss the unique problems and frustrations that every job entails. Fortunately, Mike is around as a good sounding board," she says.

"She's the financial supporter. and I am the emotional supporter," Michael says of their current arrangement. "We might take turns and change places the next time. Who knows?" At this time he says he would gladly accompany Leanne to another post "because I have the advantage of being able to continue with my business whenever I get back to the U.S."

Sense of Identity Susan Domowitz, David McAllister, and son Benjamin will depart India this summer for Washington.

D.C.. and eventually Rabat.

Morocco, where Susan will take up her second post as an information officer for the U.S. Information Service. And David, for the second time, will find himself in the role of house husband, setting up home. seeing that Benjamin is looked after, scouting shops. and, when time permits, looking for a job with the U.S. Embassy or an international organization.

"You have to be flexible, open-minded, and have a strong sense of identity to live a life like this," says David. "It takes a very special husband," responds Susan.

Susan, a Peace Corps volunteer in the Ivory Coa~t from 1973 to 1975, was working on a PhD in African Folklore Studies at the University of Indiana in Bloomington when she met and married David. He was working as a carpenter restoring homes at the time, though he had a degree in accounting from Ohio State University in Columbus. In 1987-88 several things happened: She gave birth to Benjamin, received her degree, and was accepted into the foreign service. David gave up his job, and they moved to Washington, D.C.. where Susan began foreign service training and David cared for Benjamin.

"We had decided that Benjamin would not go to a day-care center. that one parent would always be home," Susan says. David and Susan say they come from very family-conscious backgrounds, and that their move overseas was hard for their own parents. who especially missed Benjamin.

In New Delhi, with Susan working long hours and sometimes traveling, David says he had "to adjust to the community of wives and ask about good ayahs, shops for kids clothes, and so on."

When the family became settled, David began looking for employment. After some time he was able to parlay his training in accounting into a job with the embassy's budget and fiscal office.

David also took and passed the entrance examination for the U.S. Foreign Service with the thought of establishing a career parallel to that of Susan's. Many husbands and wives have done just that; the foreign service refers to them as "tandem couples." But, on reflection, David decided he did not want to pursue that course.

"Maybe once Benjamin is older, I'll take the exam again," he says.

For the time being, he is quite content to be a dependent spouse on the road to Morocco.

D

A Poem 01 One's Own went to look for your new book at the store," a friend remarked some months ago, "and I couldn't find it in the poetry section. So I asked the guy behind the desk. 'Mary Jo Salter?' he said. 'Oh, she's in the women's section.'''

My first reaction on hearing this was, I admit, something not much less extreme than rage. The women's section? Why should my book of poems be placed next to Our Bodies. Ourselves or Nell' Guide to Breas(feeding or Women Workers in China? All worthy books-but not poetry. Poetry is what I write, and the heroes I have kept in mind while writing it have included not only Dickinson and Moore and Bishop but Shakespeare and Auden and Frost. A stranger who for some reason had wanted to sample my poems, and who like me felt that poetry was essentially genderless, might not have checked the women's section, and would have walked out of the bookstore empty-handed.

But this image of empty-handedness made me reconsider.

The women's section in bookstores has become big business, which is more than you can say for the poetry section. Most Americans, most Europeans-most book buyers, I suppose, around the world-live in towns and cities where the poetry section at the local bookstore either doesn't exist or is too small to warrant a label. Who was I, then, to complain that my book of poems was taking up space in the women's section?

Shouldn't I be glad to be misappropriated anywhere the wellmeaning bookstore clerk should care to put me-the sports section, the gardening section, thrillers, knitting manuals, comics, calendars?

And besides, "ain't I a woman?" Had there been an American literature section in the bookstore, I would have been honored and delighted if a book of mine found a home there. I accept that I am an American and that everything I write partakes in some way-although usually in an indirect and unconscious way-of my Americanness. Do I bristle at being placed in the women's section because I am displeased withor, worse, ashamed of-being a woman?

Displeased? I think every woman of the late 20th century is at least partly displeased with the practical experience of being female, to the extent that she realizes that the women's move-

I

ment, and her own personal movement toward self-determination, are far from over. The continuing oppression of women around the globe is scandalous, and needs no confirming statistics from me. Ashamed? I hardly think so. But pride in being a woman, or in being an American, or in being a person with white skin-pride in any accident of birth with which our own talents have had and can have little to do-seems to me a foolhardy, blinkered excuse for a virtue. At its worst, such pride is nothing more exalted than bigotry. Better to say that one accepts, profits by, takes the knocks from, revels in being a woman than that one is proud of it; and better still to say that one enjoys being a poet who is a woman.

And yet, and yet. (Whenever we take up the slippery question of gender, there must be another "and yet. ") Though pride may be a sin, or even just a snag, the exercising of a special sympathy with your own kind is one of many enlightenments to be wished for. The more I have thought about my indignation at being put in the women's section, the more I have realized that in certain ways I had put myself in the women's poetry section long ago.

Why, for instance, had I adopted Emily Dickinson as a sort of combination muse, mother, and teacher? For the past five or six years I have read her every week if not every day, written both poetry and prose about her, taught courses devoted to her.

Of course, one must admire the originality and the precision that she brought to her craft, and her use of that craft to articulate the great abstractions of Life, Love, Death, Immortality. But having underscored that these sexless skills are the stuff of Dickinson's greatness, I must in all honesty confess that what first attracted me to her was the example she provided as a woman poet.

"I never had a mother," Dickinson remarked in a rare meeting with her literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In a letter she told him, "My Mother does not care for thought." Much has been written-indeed, too much with too little evidence has been written-about Dickinson's frustration with her mother's failure not only to think but to love and to communicate. But it does seem fair to remark that Dickinson sought a thinking female "role model," as we call it today, and took solace from the spiritual motherhood of certain women writers of her time.

The author, who recently published her second collection of poems, Unfinished Painting, tries to answer a question that has often vexed her: What, if anything, is a "woman poet"?

Although her poems are more inqebted to the Bible and Shakespeare than to any other sources, and although she turned to men for literary advice and help early in her career, it's important to remember that the writers whose portraits she hung on her bedroom walls included Emily Bronte and George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Ellen Moers's thoroughly researched and fascinating book, Literary Women (1976), illustrates Dickinson's reading preferences even more forcefully. "The real hidden scandal of Emily Dickinson's life," Moers wrote, is not the romances upon which biographers try vainly to speculate. but her embarrassing ignorance of American literature. She knew Emerson's poetry well. and perhaps a little Thoreau and Hawthorne: but she pretended. at least. not to have read a line of Whitman. no Holmes. no Poe. no Irving: and none of the colonial New England poets. Instead she read and re-read every AngloAmerican woman writer of her time: Helen Hunt Jackson and Lydia Maria Craik and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Rebecca Harding Davis and Francesca Alexander and Mathilde Mackarness and everything that George Eliot and Mrs. Browning and all the Brontes wrote. ""Mrs. Hunt's poems:' Dickinson wrote in an astonishing letter of 1871. ""are stronger than any written by women since Mrs. Browning. with the exception of Mrs. Lewes:'

Moers's reading list is a little misleading-Dickinson was versed in a great deal of male British literature-but her main point is a fertile one. Did it harm Dickinson in any way, one wonders, to read Mathilde Mackarness, whoever she was, instead of Walt Whitman? Apparently not-at least if you believe that "genius knows itself," as Adrienne Rich wrote in a fine essay on Dickinson. "[She] chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed. It was ...a seclusion which included a wide range of people, of reading and correspondence. " Dickinson's judgment on that reading may differ quite broadly from our own. But if, like many people on both sides of the Atlantic, she overrated Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work, who can blame her? Elizabeth Barrett was already a successful poet before she met Robert Browning in her late thirties, and after marrying him she was so little inclined to "retire" from poetry tha t she wen t on to wri te A urora Leigh, one of the bestselling, most ambitious, most feminist, and longest poems in the English language. One can imagine the vicarious thrill that Dickinson, who was only 30 when Barrett Browning died and

just embarking on the most prolific period of her own career, must have felt on picking up Aurora Leigh and testing its published heft in her hands. Love of other authors is one of the essential pore-opening experiences that enables authorship. If Emily Dickinson had greater love for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or even Mathilde Mackarness, than for Edgar Allan Poe or Herman Melville, and if that love helped her, in a world hostile both to women and to poets, to become a great poet, why on earth should we wish to fix what already worked?

And yet, and yet. To accept Dickinson's freedom to read and to love any writers who suit her is quite different, I think, from promoting those writers to Dickinson's league, simply by virtue of their sex. Two decades ago Tillie Olsen wrote that if we are to gauge contemporary writers' achievement by "appearance in 20th-century literature courses, required reading lists, textbooks, quality anthologies, the year's best," and so on, only one woman is cited for every 12 men. This is an infuriating practice, and in recent years much has been done to retire it. But the process of allotting "equal time" to men and women has been a less sullied business in fiction than in poetry, for the novel is a genre at which women have excelled since its inception.

Men and women argue disinterestedly about whether Jane Austen was the greatest English novelist--or perhaps it was George Eliot. In the genre of poetry, women writing in English must pay our respects to Shakespeare, and to Milton, and to Chaucer, and a long list of others just a notch below them. Until recent times the writing of poetry was mostly the province of the learned, which in itself isn't a bad thing. The problem is that the learned, of course, were men. Thankful as we are to Virginia Woolf for making us see that if Shakespeare had had a sister, educational and social and psychological conditions would never have allowed her to become Shakespeare, so to speak, the fact remains that we have, as yet, no woman Shakespeare in English.

Male poets have had a double-barreled power behind them.

The female muse inspired them; the male literary tradition, a tradition of accomplishment, gave them fathers both to revere and to try to usurp. Women have had a less accomplished literary tradition, though it grows more accomplished every century; and women writers may sometimes be seen deifying other women writers as a way, I suspect, of making them serve as both muse and tradition. Certainly, we don't have to accept the views of Eliot and Yeats and a host of others who align maleness with accomplishment and femaleness with inspiration. We may want to perform some violence upon the longdead Pound when he writes, "Poetry speaks phallic direction."

We may want to throttle Stevens for titling an essay "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet" and for composing this sentence in all complacent pride: "The centuries have a way of being male."

Irritating as it remains that male experience has for millennia been assumed to be normative, and female experience exceptional, we may, perhaps, forgive our male poets for finding inspiration in the female principle. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact, and as any poet, male

or female, will tell you, a poem's first moment of inspiration is a sensation almost indistinguishable from that of falling in love.

A heightened awareness of the reality of another person is the beginning of love; and that love is the beginning of a heightened awareness of the larger universe. Lovers may walk into doors or lose their wallets or forget their dentist appointments, but it is no accident that for their honeymoon they choose to go somewhere beautiful, and that, more often than not, they see the natural world better than the loner. The world of the lover is suffused with the magic of connection, with links that go beyond wordslinks that the poet must therefore attempt to forge with words, for the poet is, as Shakespeare reminded us, a lunatic. hen that poet is a man, it is not surprising if, heterosexual or homosexual, he associates inspiration with femaleness, for what it really represents is otherness. Joseph Brodsky makes the leap that "the principle of rhyme," in particular, "enables one to sense that proximity between seemingly disparate entities." Rhyme is, in fact-as I've heard Brodsky remark in the classroom-a form of love. When the poet is a woman, is her muse usually male? In one way, yes, it would appear so: Historically, most women's poetry has consisted of heterosexual love poetry. As deeply and as essentially as the woman poet learns from male writers, however, Dickinson's reading list suggests that the presence of any female "tradition"-however wobbly and uneven it iswill sometimes serve her as the most necessary muse of all. The male muse may not demand enough of us; for what men have usually wanted of us, their coy mistresses, is our bodies rather than our minds.

The woman writer rarely has been able to find-or even imagine-a man who admired her enough to scold her, as Philip Sydney's muse scolded him, "Fool, look in thy heart and write." The tradition of accomplished women, then, may have to serve both as the exacting muse and the all-accepting mother.

If we never had a mother, we adopt one.

The time is overdue to admit that there is something of a vacuum in women's poetry, and that we abhor it. For a woman to concede this is not disloyal to her sex; it's the first step in the creation of an environment in which women artists of the future will flourish. But what can be done about the fact that the list of beloved women poets is not anywhere near so long as the list of beloved poets who were born male?

The most liberating response to the problem was the one Elizabeth Bishop chose. As her admirer James Merrill writes, "Lowell called her one of the four best women poets ever-a wreath that can hardly have pleased Miss Bishop, who kept her work from appearing in the many recent 'women's anthologies.' Better, from her point of view, to be one of the 40, one of the 40,000 best poets, and have done with it." And he adds, "Iff raise the issue at all, it's to dissociate her from these shopworn polarities." For the working poet, moved by the sexless sunset or the sex-indeterminate beetle, the polarities are indeed shopworn, but perhaps as readers we may pursue the

W

issue an inch further. For one thing that we can do about these two unequal lists is to read women poets of the past who have never been much read, let alone famous, and to discover whether or not they deserve to be.

Emily Dickinson, after all, would never have become one of the most revered poets in the world had her sister Lavinia not rescued her poems from the obscurity of a dresser drawer; and had her editor Mabel Loomis Todd not painstakingly, over years, transcribed nearly illegible scraps onto a bizarre typewriter that looked more like an astrolabe or an instrument of torture. Helen Hunt Jackson, that once celebrated, now nearly forgotten poet whose work Dickinson herself so admired, was another "sister" in this story, for she alone fully understood Dickinson's gifts while she was still alive. Jackson wrote to Dickinson urging her to publish: "You are a great poet-and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud," her letter went. "When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy." That has to be one of the most moving moments in American literary history.

And yet, and yet. Another reason so many of us are devoted to Dickinson is that we love the romance of her story. Not the lover's sort of romance, but the writer's. Dickinson suffered greatly in her love life, but she has to be one of the luckiest and unlikeliest great writers who ever lived. She chose to live in isolation, which meant she was saved from corruption at the hands of the literary crowd; no husband ever patted her head dismissively, no child ever interrupted her, and when her life was finished a team of disciples ensured her earthly immortality. Ifwe do the necessary and difficult work of reappraising the literary "canon," and if we add some new names, new women's names, to the reading l!st, we will nonetheless have to settle for discoveries less dramatic than Lavinia Dickinson's, and we can't expect them to appear with a regular, democratic frequency.

For the fact is that we can't have it both ways. We can't simultaneously espouse Woolf's line that women haven't until recently been allowed the depth of education and the scope of experience to become Shakespeare, while also claiming that we really have an abundance of Shakespeares or even Woolfs, if anybody would just take the time to read us. Women's studies courses have mushroomed all over this country, with reading lists that combine established authors, forgotten authors, and women who never even thought of themselves as authorsfarmers and factory workers and housewives whose letters and diaries carry a historical interest long after the deaths of the women themselves. This sort of social history can be fascinating, but I think it would be a great mistake to include it all under the heading of Literature in order to boast that women's output has been just as voluminous as men's.

But what is all this rating and counting and classifying of authors about anyway? If we set up one writer in competition. against another, if we tally up writers of Type A against those of Type B, aren't we giving in to what some feminists tell us is the adversarial, aggressive mentality of patriarchal culture? We may think of Matthew Arnold's view of the function of

criticism-"to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought"-and squirm in our chairs: Who's to say what is best, who's to say what is relevant?

Theoretically, these questions are of some interest. Practically speaking, most of us who are habitual, seasoned readers of poetry already have an answer. While acknowledging our profound differences of taste, we never doubt that there are good poems and terrible poems, and that the good ones are the only ones we have time for.

What else can be done about the fact that the list of the best women poets is not as long as the men's list? In addition to looking closely for unjustly neglected women, one might question whether some men poets have been overrated. I think, for some reason, of poets whose names contain double WsWilliam Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams-and while I would be sorry to throw out the entire oeuvre of any of them, I confess that each of these estimable poets has at times bored me nearly to tears. It would do us no harm to be more judicious not only about poets but about poems, and to vow not to swallow a poet's whole menu unless all of it tastes good.

The problem with taking men poets down a peg, however, is that it's awfully hard to do so with discernment. The zeal to undo, and immediately, the centuries of neglect, condescension, and downright abuse endured by women poets-or lady poets, or poetesses, as they were once called-has resulted in the devaluation of some very great poets who were born male and (far worse) in the devaluation of poetry itself.

T

he big question, now, has to be asked: What is poetry?

All sorts of definitions lodge in the mind. Dickinson said she knew it was poetry if she felt as if the top of her head were taken off, Moore said poetry was imaginary gardens with real toads in them, Pound insisted it had to be written at least as well as prose, Wordsworth claimed that it happened when emotion was recollected in tranquillity. Eliot took issue with Wordsworth: "Emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula," he wrote. " ... Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

When defining a vast object, often the best manner of proceeding is to catalog what it isn't. And yet we acknowledge the truth of each of these definitions--even, or perhaps especially, Stevens's assertion that no definition is possible. We accept that perhaps the closest thing to a definition of poetry is the aggregate of all definitions, suspended impossibly in the mind like the complex, conflicting, personal, impersonal, harmonious beauty of a poem itself. In any case, I hope .we know that poetry is nothing less than anyone of these writers would have it.

What do all these definitions have to do with the battle of the sexes? One wishes that the question were entirely irrelevant. But

along with the recent resurgence of interest in traditional and innovative verse forms among younger poets-a movement dubbed the New Formalism-a conflicting movement, or at least a bizarre set of assumptions, has taken shape. It contends that the formal tradition of English poetry-with its sonnets and rhymes royal and sestinas and villanelles, and even all the nameless nonce forms such as Herbert or Hardy devised for use in a single poem-is a male tradition, and thus must be rejected by women poets who want to find their own voices. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write that Eliot's concept of poetry as an "escape from emotion" has helped to construct "an implicitly masculine aesthetic of hard, abstract, learned verse that is opposed to the aesthetic of soft, effusive, personal verse supposedly written by women and the Romantics."

One clings to that "supposedly"-to the notion that here is a division having less to do with innate character than social stereotype. And yet certain other feminists have unwittingly permitted themselves, and the rest of us women, to be pigeonholed. For them, the male poet who wrote in form stands, roughly speaking, for tranquillity, and the new woman poet who is honestly to address her subject matter stands for emotion. How can we fail to notice that when we divide poetry's function in half like this, we're left not with two groups of poems but with no real poems at all?

In this connection, consider a passage from Writing a Woman's Life, a recent book by Carolyn Heilbrun, in which she reflects on the difficulty women have in resolving their relationships with their fathers. Heilbrun quotes Maxine Kumin as remarking that a poem about her father was the hardest she ever wrote, and then editorializes that Kumin "wrote it originally in syllabics and rhyme, using these as a defense between her and the material of the poem." She adds that Kumin herself emphasized, "That's how terrified I was of writing it." Now, I don't know what proportion of blame Heilbrun and Kumin should each be assigned for this passage, but this is shameful stuff. What a suffocating prescription it is-that we must not only come to terms with our fathers, but must do so without benefit of meter or rhyme!

I suppose that Marianne Moore's penchant for syllabics is one reason that she is not widely taken up by women who believe in the legitimacy of "women's poetry." Another reason might be that she tends to write about animals, when she is supposed to write about her father. Well, we can always hope that her father was something of an animal, in which case Moore is all right. Yet we will not be able to argue away the claims for meter and rhyme so easily. Not all poets are interested in formal meters or rhyme, of course; and some of this century's best poems are free-form creations. But most of these have been written with some idea of form, some attention to a measurable music, and with an unreckonable indebtedness to the formal masters of the past.

Are we really ready to throw out Shakespeare and Milton for using their meters as a "defense," in Heilbrun's terms, between themselves and their material? The imaginary garden of poetry

may be wilder looking than it used to be, but it is still a garden.

And even if you or I choose not to plant a garden in neat rows, we will not be able to quash the garden-planting impulse in everybody else.

Ironically enough, what I-who would champion formal poetry-am arguing for is freedom. Freedom to write about our fathers or not, to write in meter or not. Freedom to think of ourselves as Women Poets, in capitals, or in lowercase, or as Poets, in capitals, who hardly ever think about being women.

When subject matter reigns supreme in poetry, the next step is to prescribe the subject matter. And a short step from there is prescribing the proper feelings about the subject matter.

Heilbrun offers, again unwittingly, a cautionary passage: "What does it mean unambiguously to be a woman?" she asks, and answers that historically it has meant "to put a man at the center of one's life and to allow to occur only what honors his prime position." So far, so good; it's in the next sentence that I get scared. "Occasionally, women have put God or Christ in the place of a man," she adds, and remarks either scornfully or sorrowfully, "the results are the same: one's own desires and quests are always secondary."

N

Ow undoubtedly, to many of us the Judeo-Christian tradition has seemed to offer women a bad deal. Suffice it'to say that the adoration of Mary and the greatness of the women saints may never entirely erase for women a consciousness of the ways we have been wronged in both Old Testament and New. Tillie Olsen has set forth some of these wrongs in telegraphic style: "Religion when all believed. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children. May the wife's womb never cease from bearing. Neither was the man created for the woman but the woman for the man. Let the woman learn in silence and in all subjection. Contrary to biological birth fact: Adam's rib. The Jewish male morning prayer: Thank God I was not born a woman."

When we women are reminded of our place in the JudeoChristian hierarchy-and I'd guess that many of us daily spend a good deal of subconscious energy trying to forget itHeilbrun's implicit suggestion that women writers, or women in general, must dethrone God or Christ looks pretty inviting. The real point, however, is that our personal desires and quests are always secondary, whether we are Christians or atheists. Is there a mature adult who honestly believes that he or she comes first? Even more to the point, has there ever been a mature, great poet of any stripe who did not seek access to something greater than him- or herself?

And what if our desire is God? If that form of desire is to be disallowed, then the achievement of all sorts of women writers who put themselves second after God-writers from the 12thcentury Heloise to the 20th-century Flannery O'Connordissolves into nothingness. And a good chunk of English poetry, particularly of the 17th century-the devotional poetry of the dean of St. Paul's, John Donne, and the country parson George Herbert-dissolves away, too.

Such misgivings must be at the bottom of my discomfort at having my book of poems assigned to the women's section of the bookstore. My books, however modest, represent an effort to speak not only of being a woman, and not only to women.

Joyce Carol Oates, in a brief essay titled "The (Woman) Writer," puts the word "woman" in parentheses, and this, it seems to me, strikes precisely the right note. We cannot excise the word, or excise it all the time, since all women writers begin as women. But if we hope to play the resounding chords of human experience, and even extrahuman experience. the word "writer" will have to be the tonic key in which we do it.

And yet, and yet. We have arrived at a resounding chord, and now must acknowledge that it is dissonant. For the means by which most men writers throughout history have discovered how to speak selflessly of the broadly human, the universal. the spiritual is through selfishly shutting themselves off from domestic distractions. True, male writers have had to pay the bills with hack work that threatened to kill high art altogether.

But women writers have had not only plenty of bread winning to do, but the childbearing and the child-raising and the laundry and the potato-peeling too. Woolf put this memorably over half a century ago: She said she had to kill the Angel of the House before it killed her.

Woolf belonged to a subspecies of woman writer-the fiction writer-that has generally had much better luck than the poet in juggling the thousand tasks of women. Some fiction writers actually make money at their work, which frees at least a little time for the next story. Poets generally make no money. and thus they make no time. And that is a serious problem, for although the poet is apt to write at shorter length than the fiction writer, she evidently needs more uninterrupted time. She can accommodate herself less to daily social distractions. partly because she is usually not writing about society to the degree the novelist is, partly because a poet, if worth her salt, is writing with a more concentrated attentiveness to language.

In any case, though fiction-writing is never easy. it is apparently easier if you don't have children. Most women writers of fiction in history have been childless, and it is only now that we can amass a long list of distinguished women fiction writers and remark with nothing less than joy at how many are mothers: Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Hortense Calisher, Edna O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Joan Didion, Alison Lurie, Muriel Spark, Alice M umo, etc., etc. The list of the best women poets in our language, by contrast, is a nearly unbroken catalog of childlessness: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who had one child, late), Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Mew, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop. May Swenson, etc., etc. If we take comfort in remembering that Sylvia Plath was a mother, it is not for long: We know what happened to her.

Since childbearing is the experience that may most radically distinguish the lives of women from the lives of men, and since women writers who want to be mothers ought to be able to make this choice with no more than the usual amount of terror. I take

As Emily Dickinson would not come down, I'm sorry, but I've felt the need to climb the worn steps to her room, winding up the stair as if into her inner ear.

AI'!, as she once said, is a House Ihal Iries 10 be haunled, and as I stand on the landing where she curled in shadow to listen to the piano and soaring voice of Mabel Todd

(her editor years laterwho graciously accepted a poem and glass of sherry in place of the vision of her face), this has become that House.

No trespass can erase what she once made of itthe gate she opened, desperate to escape, and just as quickly shut: I Ihink I "'as held in check by some invisible agel1/... When she wrote Again-!lis voice is (f/ Ihe door-

here is the door she meant.

Her room, probably Spartan even when lived in, now holds but few fabled artifacts: a snow-white coverlet; a "sleigh bed," narrow as a wooden shoe; a snipped

lily of a dress, limp in the closet; a faded hatbox; a wicker basket she'd lower, something like Rapunzel, full of gingerbread.

Or so our guide has said. Yet devoted to the genuine as she was-first jasmine of the season, hummingbird and snakeI doubt she would have taken umbrage when learned men in Cambridge spirited off her writing table to higher education. A double (its surface little more than two feet square, and where poems commensurately small were scrawled on backs of envelopes) sits convincingly beneath the tall window onto Main Street.

To shul our eyes is Travel,

and that table may as well be anywhere as here.

She'd have held close whatever house she was born in, as a squirrel clutches its acorn; but with a need not wholly fed by fear.

At twenty-four, moving back to her birthplace, she'd perhaps transposed the thought: To travel, shut the eyes.

I supposed "'e Irae going as heavenly bodies did-

10

make a "rransit."

for she was truly half-surprised by carriages and .cartons.

It was as if

the dearth of excellent mother-poets to be very disturbing indeed.

I want to disbelieve what the statistics seem to tell us. They seem to be telling me, in any case, that the physical and emotional energy I put into my children is teaching me selflessness every day, and tha t if I don't learn to be selfish soon I will lack both the time and the assertiveness of spirit to have even a chance at writing the best poems I am capable of. Meanwhile, of course, I want to transcend the sense of self altogether, as Donne and Herbert hoped to do. The paradox simply will not go away.

Yet I hope there's a more cheerful way of looking at these conflicts and paradoxes. Women in our time understand them better than any generation of women in history. If no great English poem has yet been written about childbirth, maybe one of us will be the one to juggle the paradoxes just long enough to achieve it. And we will not address ourselves only to "women's subjects," either. We will see the word "woman" in italics in some poems, and in parentheses in others, and we

she'd lived always in that other life, unseen, in her upper story; Touch Shakespeare(or

me,

she wrote to Mabel in Europe, thinking her close enough.

Why had anyone expressed the hope to see Emily, who'd compare in letters her unmet friends to Peter's Christ: "whom having not seen, ye love"?

Finding nothing and no time impalpable, she'd call attention to the Biblical "house not made with hands" for all who'd listen. Wasn't that her home as much as this was? Fame, a lower form of Immortality, in the intervening century has unpacked her cradle to restore its place, steps from her deathbed.

There is no first. or last. in Forever ...

To the west, across the field. from another window, lives the family at the Evergreens, whom Emily saw little more than I can: Austin and loved sister-in-law Sue. I would have come out of Eden 10 open the Door for you ...

but she hadn't had to.

Drumming down the stair, my ears fill with the spirals of a fly a poem let in, and won't be shown the way: as if that buzzing, when she died, were here still amplified.

won't read it at all in others. If artistic freedom means anything, it means that every poet, and every poem by every poet, is unique. And it means that we will sometimes (or often) speak in the bold voice too little heard yet from women, the voice that dares to serve as arbiter of taste and ethics, analyst of politics and religion, champion of the purity of art-the voice that won't die of mortification if somebody else disagrees. This is the voice that the 31-year-old Emily Dickinson, writing in 1862, had already mastered: I reckon-when I count at. allFirst-Poets-then the sunThen Summer-Then the Heaven of GodAnd then-the List is doneBut-looking back-the First so seems To Comprehend the WholeThe Others look a needless ShowSo I write-Poets-AlI-

For more than 100 years, the 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association (popularly known as the 92nd Street Y) has been providing New Yorkers of all faiths, ages, and races a range of activities and facilities not available to them at any other single site. Combining the communal and the cultural, the Y offers living quarters to some 400 young residents, a 30,000-volume library, sports facilities, music and dance classes, a nursery school, an afterschool prcgram for teenagers, adult education, a senior citizens center, and a stunning range of cultural presentations.

"I don't like to put it that way, but we go virtually from the cradle to the grave,"

says Sol Adler, executive director of the Y since 1988. "We have over 1,000 programs a year."

The Y was started in 1874 by a group of prosperous German Jews who had settled in New York and wanted to acclimate other European Jews arriving in America by exposing them to popular culture. The 1930s saw the Y emerging as a prime cultural hub with the establishment of the Poetry Center, which has become a respected platform for literary figures from around the world. Dylan Thomas rose to international fame from here. Others who have read their works at the Y include Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Gunter Grass, and the late Isaac Bashevis Singer.

1. Entrance to the 92nd Street Y in upper East Side Manhattan in New York City.

2. Children participate in "Playhouse 92," a drama class for young people.

3. The Y's resident orchestra, the New York Chamber Symphony, performs at the center's 922-seat Kaufmann Concert Hall.

4. A martial arts class for children draws an enthusiastic response.

5. Famous writers and poets, such as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel here, give readings regularly at the Y's Poetry Center.

6. A dance and movement class for young adults.

7. A music, movement, and play class for mothers and babies is a popular part of the Parenting Center.

1. Two well-equipped gymnasiums are part of the Y's Health and Fitness Center.

2. Marion Meade, author of Dorothy Parker, at the center's Biographer's Brunch series.

3. Hidehiko Takada teaches Japanese cooking.

4. An instructor gives a helping hand in the gymnastics class.

The Y was also for many years the center for modern dance in America, sponsoring . recitals by Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, and Alvin Ailey. For music lovers the Y is a mecca, presenting luminaries such as Isaac Stern as well as "the Mozarts and Beethovens of the 21 st century," to quote Adler.

While these cultural attractions draw capacity audiences in the evenings, in the daytime a totally different kind of crowd pours into the building to partake of the V's multifarious offerings, which include teaching and guidance centers for parenting, health and fitness, music, dance, art, and a class called "What Do I Say After I Say 'Hello'?" for young people who have difficulty overcoming shyness.

The Y also organizes walking tours of New York, trips to other cities in America, and an international travel program.

Commenting on the V's ever-expanding charter Adler says, "People are astounded to see what goes on heresometimes I'm surprised myself."

D

THINK TANKS AND

DEMOCRACY A uniquely American creation that is becoming popular in democratic societies including India, think tanks perform an important function in public life through proffering counsel and expertise on various domestic andforeign issues. A recent book examines these organizations-what they do, how they influence policy, and the clout they wield.

rince,

therefore, ought always to take counsel, bllt only when he wishes, not when others wish; on the contrary he ought to discourage absolutely attempts to advise him unless he asks it, but he ought to be a great asker, and a patient hearer of the truth about those things of which he has inquired." These sage words by Niccolo " Machiavelli in his classic The Prince, written nearly five centuries ago, reflect the undying truth that knowledge must be harnessed to power not only for the public good but for the sheer survival of power itself.

Even in the era of the absolute monarch, the adviser had an honored place at the royal court. That exalted position was not lost when the democratic order overtook absolutism. Some of the great Presidents of America and Prime Ministers of Britain and India each had an eminence grise whose influence was envied by members of the cabinet and the senior bureaucracy.

In democracies the adviser from outside raises problems that do not arise elsewhere. They affect the accountability of the elected leader to his people and the orderly working of the constitutional system. Yet, so complex is modern government and so deeply felt is the need for expertise, that even the sternest constitutionalist now no longer objects to expert advice from outside. On the contrary, such counsel has been institutionalized in that uniquely American institution, the think tank.

There are now more than 1,200 think tanks in the United States and about 100 in Washington, D.C., alone, apart from thousands of university-based research institutes.

The example has proved highly infectious. Think tanks have sprouted in Britain and Japan. India has a good few of them. To name just three, the Centre for Policy Research and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, both in New Delhi, are highly regarded in India and abroad. The Centre for Research on New

International Economic Order in Madras has won high repute.

Interestingly, in an article on "The Changing World of Think Tanks," a senior fellow at one of the oldest and most respected of them, R. Kent Weaver of the Rrookings Institution, wrote in the September 1989 issue of PS, journal of the American Political Science Association, that "there is no accurate count of think tanks in the United States, or even an accepted definition of what a think tank is."

That was not the only ground for his lament. He went on to describe a far more important reason for it: "The increase in the number of think tanks in recent years does not necessarily mean that the influence of think tanks has increased. Indeed, precisely the opposite may have occurred. When there were just a few think tanks on the scene, with strong reputations for objectivity in research, their views carried a high degree of authority. Now there are many voices clamoring to be heard. Moreover, these organizations vary widely in their standards, and claims, about objectivity. In this new environment, it is difficult for either the public or policymakers to know the difference between sound, reliable research and propagandizing.

And it is easier for policymakers to find some think tank study to support their current views, no matter what they may be."

Now, in a new book, James Allen Smith explains how that had come to pass. The Idea Brokers (The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc.) does a lot more than describe the growth and working of think tanks or define what that institution is. It bears out the claim made tacitly in the subtitle, Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite, and traces the rise of this elite with commendable thoroughness.

Smith's qualifications are impressive. He taught history and served on the staff of one of the oldest policy research foundations in the United States, the Twentieth Century Fund. He has read widely, interviewed some 150 people, and drawn on his extensive knowledge of history and English literature. Above all, he has reflected seriously on the quality of debates on public issues that democracy demands and on the need to attain that quality.

The result is more than a factual account of think tanks. An appendix provides data on the more famous among them, from policy research bodies like the Brookings Institution and politically neutral ones like the Russell Sage Foundation, to those that have distinct orientations like the conservative Heritage Foundation, the business-oriented American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, and the liberal Institute for Policy Studies.

Smith places the think tank in the wider framework of the role of the adviser to elected officials and analyses incisively the issues this symbiotic relationship raises. The man in power who makes policy needs expertise. The expert yearns for a taste of power.

Modern intellectual life is highly organized. The unaffiliated expert no longer exists. His services belong to universities, consulting foundations, and, of course, think tanks. "The story of the policy elite is as much the story of these institutions and their growth as it is of individuals," Smith writes. In describing

the performance of think tanks, especially the ones that advocate certain policies, Smith provides an important facet of the recent history of ideas in the United States.

The history of policy experts and their role in American life is comprised of three distinct but intertwined threads. One is the attempt around the mid-19th century to create a "social" science. The social scientist used his academic expertise to influence policy and gain political influence.

Another strand has been the decision-maker's use of academics on research commissions. The think tank is an offshoot of these two. The term was borrowed from World War II military jargon "for a secure room where policies and strategies could be discussed. " ot till the 1960s, however, did the popular lexicon recognize the term "think tank." Like Topsy, it simply grew. Unlike her, it assumed varied forms.

Some are essentially research bodies, others are unabashedly advocacy institutions hovering perilously close to lobbying. Most draw their wherewithal from the philanthropic contributions of foundations and corporations.

Even at the best of times the adviser has to be careful how he phrases his advice. Democratic leaders are as human as monarchs. Francis Bacon spoke of the "inseparable conjunction of counsel with Kings." He was known to lace his advice with rich doses of flattery. Others have found different ways of securing acceptance of their advice. The problem has endured for centuries.

"Truth speaks to power in many different tones of voice," Smith says. "The philosopher and cloistered intellectual, free of the ambition to serve a leader directly, can speak with an authority that does not need to bend the truth to justify pressing political ends or personal ambitions. To the philosopher or scientist, the search for truth is central; political power is merely incidental. The policy expert and adviser, however, if they aspire to be of use, must speak to power in a political and bureaucratic context; and they must speak a useful truth. Their claims to speak the truth must always be viewed in light of their relationship with power. Although the insights of some scholars have been seized upon by those in power and have inadvertently drawn the scholars into political controversy, the policy elite comprises those who address policies in explicit terms and who intend to use their knowledge in the policy arena."

But in this process is not the truth trimmed, as it were, to suit the susceptibilities of men in power? Far worse than that has happened. The adviser trims the truth, not to ensure that the core of his advice is accepted for the public good, but that he himself becomes acceptable and acquires a small share of power. Knowledge is not linked to the needs of power but to those of personal ambition.

It is not the least of this book's many qualities that not once does it overlook the moral aspect: "Few intellectuals and experts are so free of Faustian pride that they do not secretly believe they are better qualified to execute policy than are the elected or

N

appointed officials they advise.

Thus, it is not surprising that the relationship between the expert and the leader has often been problematic, raising questions about who is really ruling whom ... .In our time, one must ask whether the experts as a class have used mystifying jargon and an array of bewildering models and specialized tools to interpose themselves between the citizenry and their elected leaders."

That is an important question. Is democracy the richer for think tanks? They cater to the needs of governments, political parties, and interest groups. But do they serve the needs of the people to be informed and enlightened disinterestedly?

Woodrow Wilson was a rare political animal-an authentic intellectual who won power. As Democratic presidential candidate in 1912, he uttered a warning about government by experts which Smith quotes at the very beginning: "God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who ... understand the job? Because if we don't understand the job, then we are not a free people. We ought to resign our free institutions and go to school to somebody and find out what it is we are about."

If the idiom seems quaint or the picture overdrawn, one should remember that what Wilson distrusted was not advice.

What Wilson denounced was the shadowy adviserwho usurped the authority of the people's elected representative. Or, what comes to nearly the same thing, the adviser who intimidates the men in power by facts or seduces them with ideas and leads them up the garden path to the destination he has chosen for them. That is nothing but a subversion of democratic government.

Think tanks pose this danger, Smith argues. no less than did the eminence grise of old. The American tradition of pragmatism and distrust of men of ideas is ancient. Even the Founding Fathers were not spared ridicule. The intellectual won respectability only in this century, not without help from successive American Presidents. Smith traces in meticulous detail how each contributed in his own way.

Woodrow Wilson himself sought counsel from experts during World War I. "Economists and statisticians served on the staffs of the War Industries Board and its component agencies; sociologists and psychologists worked to evaluate, train, and organize the troops; historians, geographers, and linguists helped formulate propaganda campaigns to spur homefront morale and to demoralize the enemy; and some 150 social scientists worked quietly in New York in what was mysteriously named 'The Inquiry,' preparing for the postwar peace conference. Many of the experts sailed with Wilson to France, though he disbanded most of the wartime agencies. and as soon as the war ended, he sent them back to their campuses, research

institutes, and business-research bureaus."

Herbert Hoover got experts to serve on his ad hoc commissions. Franklin D. Roosevelt, relying mainly on three Columbia University professors-Raymond Moley, Adolf A. Berle, and Rexford G. Tugwell-formed his famous Brains Trust early in his first presidential campaign.

The trend continued. To Harry Truman goes the credit for establishing two institutions within the administrative system which intellectuals could serve as consultants if not, indeed, as members as George F. Kennan, Louis J. Halle, and Henry A. Kissinger did. One was the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, which has been emulated in many countries including India. Its story is yet to be told. The other was the National Security Council (see SPAN, February 1991). A similar body was set up in India last year.

John F. Kennedy attracted intellectuals by his personal charm and readiness to listen. John Kenneth Galbraith shed his reservations and worked for him with evident enthusiasm. There was no sharp ideological conflict. Republicans such as C. Douglas Dillon and Robert S. McNamara served in Kennedy's cabinet.

O

utside this charmed circle, think tanks prospered.

One that deserves particular notice because of its high profile in America and fame abroad is the Hudson Institute set up by the legendary Herman Kahn, the Strangelovian strategist who reveled in thinking the unthinkable about nuclear warfare.

This writer recalls a hot summer afternoon when Kahn lectured to the Harvard Seminar convened by Henry A. Kissinger. The subject was the ladder of escalation of warfare and the treatment was, to say the least, abstruse. The contrast between the two personalities came out sharply with Kissinger's pointed question: "Herman, you have met our leaders. Do you think they will be able to follow the rungs of that ladder?" Kahn had no answer. Few were surprised that the Hudson Institute lost donors and came to grief.

But it is in the era of Ronald Reagan that the activist think tank came to the fore, and the "ideas industry" flourished. As Richard Reeves argued in the article "The Reagan Detour," "'Reaganism' was at least as much the triumph of conservative intellectuals" as it was a "spectacular personal triumph."

Veteran political commentators began to assess the role that conservative think tanks such as the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and, of course, the Heritage Foundation had played in Reagan's electoral victory in 1980.

Ironically, it was this politician-far removed from the realm of intellectual speculation all his life-who emphasized that "ideas do have consequences, rhetoric is policy, and words are action."

Smith expresses reservations about the growth of advocacy think tanks: "Political ideas have become commodities to be sold, and 'experts' are often those who gain the most routine access to the media. The promotion of ideas is, often, the promotion of the spokesmen for them, elevating people to the 'quote circuit,' as one

journalist terms it. Consequently, a number of policy research institutions now devote considerable energy to the publication of press handbooks and directories of experts."

Experience in government led Kissinger to acquire the same distrust for experts as he always had for bureaucrats. He finds them obstructive and irrelevant. Smith's criticism is far more deadly in its aim: "It has become barely possible to draw the line between the politically disinterested scholar-more accurately, the scholar wrestling honestly with the biases and preconceptions that inevitably cloud any research effort-and the intellectual advocate who earnestly marshals evidence to bolster an unshakeable political position. All research begins to look like advocacy, all experts begin to look like hired guns, and all think tanks seem to use their institutional resources to advance a point of view.

The experts, far from limiting debate and innovation, have created an environment in which so many arguments contend that no consensus is possible. Their never-ending controversies leave even closely attentive citizens in despair of ever coming to agreement on the most important issues."

He questions their competence as well. In 1989, a year that saw the collapse of communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and ferment in the [former] Soviet Union and China, "the experts were tried and found lacking."

But the fundamental flaw, in Smith's view, is that think tanks aim at serving governments and legislators rather than their masters, the people. "The expert class has interposed itself between the average citizen and the deliberations of government, often confusing and overcomplicating straightforward issues with its arcane vocabularies and giving politicians a way to duck their obligations by leaving politically difficult problems to expert commissions and study groups."

Eighty years after he voiced them, Woodrow Wilson's fears seem to have come true. But think tanks are here to stay. One cannot do to them what Shakespeare wished to do to lawyers: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI).

Smith sketches a perfectly sensible and preeminently democratic approach toward them in a passage of compelling eloquence and rich insights: "The relationship between knowledge and politics is one that demands constant scrutiny and reflection. It summons us to ask, again and again, what we really need to know to govern ourselves well. It demands that we test our theoretical knowledge by confronting real choices and their consequences.

It requires us to use knowledge not as an intimidating bludgeon, but as a tool of education and persuasion, honestly exploring first premises and accepting the uncertainties of evidence. Above all, it compels us to admit that political wisdom is different from knowledge of the physical world and that social science can neither replace politics nor relieve us of the responsibility for making value-laden choices.

Finally, it calls for a healthy egalitarian scepticism of the authority of experts."

0 About the Author: A.G. Noorani. afrequent contributor to SPAN, Bombay-based lawyer and constitutional expert.

is a

What Do Economic Advisers Do? If economists don't know very much, as the author claims, then why do we need them?

Because politicians making economic policy know even less about economics.

I have now had over 52 years' experience as [a Washingtonbased] adviser on economic policy. I believe that I have played that role longer than any other adviser who is now even slightly active and probably even longer than all the rest. From this vantage point, I would like to offer some thoughts on what people serving in this capacity do. But I must warn that my observations are personal and that one might get different views from other people with Washington experience. I should also say that of my 52 years in Washington, only 13 were in the government, so you should not identify my views with an inside-the-government perspective.

I will start with a description of the Economics Industry as I see it, to show where the part in which I have worked fits into the whole. The industry has three main parts-raw-material production, teaching, and advising.

Many economists are at work producing raw economics in the form of papers. These papers flow into the Journal Mill, where they tumble about and grate against each other. This process is largely an exercise for economists to develop their skills; also, the ability to produce a paper has a certain symbolic value in the industry. Much of the raw economics is ejected from the mill as waste, having served its purpose as a practice demonstration; some remains in the mill for a long time as pure, refined economics; some of the refined product is siphoned off in small streams, adding to the stocks of teachable economics and advisable economics.

Teachable economics is made available to students, some of whom will participate later in producing raw material and in teaching, some will retain what they have learned as part of their education, and some will forget everything. I shall have nothing further to say about this part of the industry.

Advisable economics is used for giving advice to people who are going to do things other than produce teaching economics.

Most of the stock of advisable economics is quite old: Much of it is about 200 years old, largely the contributions of Adam Smith; some of it is about 50 years old, attributable to John Maynard Keynes; and there have been some accretions to the stock in the past generation. This stock does not include much of what is in the Journal Mill and is only slowly replenished from it.

The stock of advisable economics consists, in my opinion, of a few elemental concepts and propositions. There are a few Reprinted

by permission

The American

Enterprise

from The Aml'fican Enterprise.

Institute

Copyright

for Public Policy Research.

CD 1991 by

general ideas about microorganization, supply and demand curves and their elasticities, and the significance of an economy that is organized in this way. There are a few basic propositions about the macroeconomy-mainly identities derived from the equality of income, output, and expenditure-with various notions about what the most important and stable relationships are. There is a theory of economic growth and factors that determine growth.¡ It may seem a shocking thing to say, but most of the economics that is usable for advising on public policy .is at about the level of the introductory undergraduate course. I do not think this statement is mainly a confession of my own limitations and failure to understand what is going on in the Journal Mill, a failure shared with others who have been primarily engaged in public policy advising in Washington.

It is true that the people who have been mainly concerned with public policy advising have not been those at the forefront of the advance of economics or those who are the regular authors of journal papers. This has not always been the case; the change has taken place over the last 30 to 50 years. Before then, a substantial proportion of the writing in journals and a greater number of the papers given at meetings of the economic societies were by Washington practitioners. The gap between the writers and the practitioners has widened. Note that 48 members of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, three chairmen and about ten members of the Federal Reserve Board, and about five cabinet members were economists. Only one of these, James Tobin, has received a Nobel Prize in economics. (Of course, some of the younger ones may yet do so.)

But the simple fact is that the most sophisticated economists,

the ones who are abreast of the latestjoumal articles, use only the most elementary principles when they advise officials about economic policy. The first thing that happens when a Nobel Prize winner in economics is announced is that the press gets to him and asks him what we should do about the budget, or about the trade deficit, or about the possibility of a recession. The answer he gives is not related to the advanced theories for which he got the prize but is the same answer that could be given by a student who has had the sophomore course or at most the junior course-an A student, to be sure, but a novice nonetheless.

Of many examples, this one comes readily to mind: In the fall of 1971 when the economy was very weak, President Nixon announced a program for cutting government expenditures and taxes equally. He presented it as a policy for stimulating the economy. At once there came a reply from Professor Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate, that equal reductions in taxes and expenditures would not stimulate but would depress the economy. This was, of course, an application of the balanced-budget theorem straight out of the elementary textbook. But if Samuelson had been writing a journal article, he would have pointed out that much depended on the nature of both the taxes and the expenditures and that without knowing more he could not predict the outcome. In this case, the advisers within the government were a little more sophisticated than the most advanced of economic theorists.

The leaders of our profession, the producers of new theories of increasing complexity and delicacy, lead at least two lives: They are scientists, and they are policy advisers-as witnesses before congressional committees, members of advisory panels, or authors of op-ed pieces in the newspapers. In this second life, they leave most of their scientific apparatus behind them and rely like everyone else on the elementary principles plus the usual mixture of hunches, anecdotes, politics, and rhetoric.

Why is this flow of journal-writing so little used and, I believe, of so little utility in formulating advice on public policy? There are several reasons, one of which is that establishing the truth of any proposition in economics is difficult. It is not generally possible to use the experimental method, and the history is always ambiguous. Ideas in economics deserve confidence only after they have been chewed over for a long time and been exposed to whatever tests may be available. For an economic adviser to rely on the latest, still-undigested ideas from. the journals would be as irresponsible as for a medical doctor to tryon his patients the latest ideas from the medical journals before they have even been tried on mice.

Another reason is that much of the writing in journals is timeless and placeless, and it is abstract not only from actual facts but also from potentially measurable variables. An interesting reflection of this condition is contained in The New Pa/grave: A Dictionary of Economics. probably the best representation we have of the current state of economic knowledge. In the preface, the editors say: "[It deals in economics] mainly in its theoretical and applied aspects rather than in

descriptive and institutional detail. The latter becomes outdated within a very few years, depreciating too rapidly for a publication meant for a longer shelflife than that." In writing a review of The Pa/grave Dictionary. I said, "Thus, the article 'Profit and Profit Theory' does not contain a single number for what profits are or ever have been, in the United States or any other country, or any reference to any source that might provide such a number."

In the article on economic laws in The Pa/grave Dictionary. the author, Stefano Zamagni, says: "Since no scientific law, in the natural scientific sense, has been established in economics on which economists can base predictions, what are used ... to explain or to predict are tendencies or patterns expressed in empirical or historical generalizations of less than universal validity, restricted by local and temporal limits."

To the Washington policy adviser, the local and temporal limits are all-important, and they may be very narrow. He must arrive at conclusions relevant to these limits, but he gets little help from the body of economics in the Journal Mill. Generally, he must roll his own conclusions from his own observations and experience.

A third factor limiting the usefulness to the policy adviser of much current economic writing is that he needs to convey the lesson to someone else, either an official or the general public.

The audience will only accept the lesson if it understands it. If a nuclear physicist advises the secretary of energy, the secretary will not feel that he needs to understand how the physicist reached his conclusion.

But economists do not have this privilege. If an economist tells the secretary of the treasury something, the secretary will want to be shown why it is true.

Thus, even if the adviser himself understands current writing in economics, he will not be able to use it unless he can explain it in a way that commands confidence. That rules out much "scientific" writing in economics.

In saying that most of the economics used by economic policy advisers is in the elementary course, I am not belittling all the work and study that goes on beyond the elementary level.

From the standpoint of economic policy advice, that work and study is mainly a way of mastering what is in the elementary course. It is practice in thinking like an economist, which means being able to keep several variables in mind at once, looking for indirect effects and recognizing the difference between the long run and the short.

A person who has learned the French that is taught in the first-year French course can read, write, and speak French. He has learned the grammatical rules, some vocabulary, and where to find more when he needs it. But he cannot really read, write, and speak French in every situation he may encounter, and he cannot think in French, until he has had much more study and practice. Economics is similar. What is taught in the elementary course will go a long way if you have learned it, but you don't have mastery until you have. lived with it for some time.

I saw the value of this when I was at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). We always had on our staff a few young

economists, associate or assistant professors from one place or another who were spending a year or two in Washington. One of their functions was to make sure that we were not missing anything that might be useful from the recent flow of academic economics. But their main contribution was not their knowledge of advanced economics but their mastery of the basic concepts of elementary economics. When a new problem arose-like the energy problem or the law of the sea problemthey could combine these old concepts with new data and generate a useful product.

Elementary economics may seem to outsiders a trivial contribution to the decision-making process, but it is not.

However general, simple, even obvious and tautological the proportion of elementary economics may seem, the fact is that few noneconomists are accustomed to it or would arrive at it without the advice of economists.

In the preface to a recent book of mine called Washington Bedtime Stories. I summed up two main lessons of 50 years as a Washington economist: • Economists do not know very much.

• Other people, including the politicians who make economic policy, know even less about economics than economists do.

So the Washington economic policy adviser operates with a little stock of basic ideas that I call advisable economics, a stock that is slowly replenished by an inflow of ideas from the Journal Mill. But this stock of basic ideas is only part of the material that the adviser works with and that enters into his product. Six other elements enter into it as well: 1. Knowledge of the institutions in the field of his concern. The policy adviser has a body of knowledge about some of the institutions involved in making and implementing policy. If he is an adviser at the Federal Reserve, for example, he knows a great deal about how the Federal Reserve System and the banking system work. Most of this knowledge he has probably acquired on the job. I am impressed with what most Washington economists know about their particular subjects.

2. A body of relevant statistical information. The policy adviser has familiarity with a certain body of statistical data that he is unlikely to acquire in the academic world. This means knowing not only what is purported to be measured and what the numbers are but also something about the reliability and stability of the estimates and the reasonably predictable changes in the numbers. My own education in this field began with learning about national income statistics, which did not exist in anything like their present form when I was a graduate student. My ability to manipulate this body of data was enhanced by the experience of working for some time with Edward Denison, one: of the pioneers of growth accounting.

Incidentally, I learned from Denison one of the most important and least understood facts about economics, which is that the difference between two percent and three percent is not one percent but 50 percent.

Later, when I was at the Council of Economic Advisers, I acquired familiarity with a much broader range of statistics.

This was partly because we wrote a memo to the President almost daily about the economic statistics being reported that day, explaining their significance. I was assisted in understanding these statistics by a staff that had spent many years with them. This is an important thing to note. Within the government, and in a few private settings, giving economic advice is a team project. What the chairman of the CEA says, for example, reflects the effort, especially in creating the data inputs, of many experts, not only on his own staff but also from other branches of the government.

3. A set of ideas about how government works. In addition to some stock of institutional and statistical knowledge, the policy adviser operates with a few notions or basic attitudes about government. He must take account of how governments will operate in certain economic policy regimes. For example, if I am in favor of a tax increase and Milton Friedman is opposed, the difference between us is not as much about economic effects as it is about political effects. Professor Friedman believes Parkinson's Law that expenditures rise to equal revenues. I do not, at least not dollar for dollar. But Parkinson's Law is not a proposition in economics, although most of the efforts to test it empirically have been made by economists. The division of opinion among economists between relying on rules for policy or relying on the discretion of policymakers also rela tes more to ideas about how government works than to ideas about how the economy works. Even more generally, there is disagreement among economists about the extent to which one can reasonably rely on rationality in making economic policy.

These are matters em which political science, if there were such a science, could provide guidance for economists. But political scientists have assured me that there is none to give. So economists have had to reach their own conclusions on the basis of what some would call casual empiricism.

4. Several kinds of political calculus. Political calculations of another more immediate kind, as distinguished from theories about how governments work, also enter into the process by which economists arrive at advice. I find three kinds of this political calculus: • The political feasibility of implementing a proposed policy.

• The political effect of proposing the policy on the person being advised.

• The political effect of the advice on the adviser.

The economic adviser is an amateur on the first and second of these matters and possibly also on the third. This need not prevent him from expressing opinions about them, especially since there are no certified expert professionals in this field. But his amateur status does impose certain requirements on him in different contexts. If he is advising the public at large, through op-ed pieces [in newspapers], for example, he should not

conceal certain options because they are politically unacceptable. After all, one purpose of his talking to the public is to change what is politically acceptable.

If he is advising a politician, he may give his principal his ideas of the political feasibility or consequences of a policy, but he should not allow this to be confused with the ideas that arise out of his economics. (In fact, there is little danger of this, because the politician will know how much or little weight to give to the political ideas of his economists.)

The role of the adviser's calculus of his own gains and losses in the advisory process is a perplexing and interesting one. We have recently seen the rise of a school of economics that explains all public policy as the consequence of decisionmakers' self-maximizing behavior. Presumably, this theory should hold fOI economic advisers as well. There was a time in my career when I planned the annual meetings of the Southern Economic Association, and on one occasion I arranged for a session at which leading public-choice economists in the government would speak on the question, "What Do PublicChoice Economists Maximize When They Are in the Government?" They came and spoke, all right, but only about what other people were maximizing, not about what they themselves were maximizing.

In my observation, people who accept the role of economic adviser calculate their own interests in doing so. But I also believe that having accepted this role they then live up to their responsibility to their principal, which is to give him the advice that is in the principal's interest, not necessarily in their own. I am aware that in both the private sector and the public sector there are people who put their own interests over their responsibilities. There have been people who awarded procurement contracts with an eye to their possible future employment with the contractor. But I have never heard any suspicion of this about economic advisers. Of course, an adviser may serve a private interest in less pecuniary ways: To curry favor with his principal, to show loyalty to some team or school, to differentiate himself from competitors, or simply to show off. But my observation is that people in positions of serious responsibility behave responsibly.

This is probably a good time to explain what responsible economic advice is like. One might imagine an economic adviser to be like the mad scientist in his laboratory, cooking up the ideal prescription and giving it to his principal. It is really not like that at all. Any responsible economist recognizes that in most cases there is no objective and certain way to determine the ideal policy. Instead, there are several options for which some reasonable case can be made and for which respectable economists do make a case. The adviser may have a preference among these options-he usually does-but it is not his business to make the decision for his principal. His business is to inform his principal of the eligible options and what can be said for and against each.

5. Judgment. I concluded when I was at the CEA that the highest product and best test of an adviser was the options

paper. It is not an easy thing to produce; it requires ability to understand other people's arguments and a high degree of objectivity to present them fairly.

No one, however diligent, could possibly include in his advice all possible options and all possible arguments for and against each. The adviser has to make some selection of what he considers the most eligible options and the most weighty arguments. He will have no scientific, objective basis for doing this, so he has to depend finally on something called "judgment," which also goes under the name "common sense."

6. Communications skills. Finally, the adviser must communicate his advice, his presentation of the options, to someone who will in turn decide what to do with it. The advice, however cogent, will not be useful unless it can be understood.

So we have the picture of the adviser using his judgment to select the most eligible options revealed by his advisable economics, his statistical and institutional knowledge, his view of how government works, and his political calculus and then communicating these options and the relevant arguments to his principal.

Advising, of course, is a two-sided process. It requires an adviser and an advisee-that is, the principal, the one who is advised. The nature and quality of the advice depends very much on the advisee. Harry Truman is quoted as saying that he wanted a one-armed economist who couldn't say "on the one hand, and on the other hand." But a person who thinks that way cannot get good economic advice, because the essence of the matter is uncertainty and the need to consider different possibilities. I had the impression when I served on President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board that there were subjects on which he could not be advised, such as the desirability of raising taxes, although it may be that in more private sessions he might have been willing to listen to talk on those subjects. To get good advice, an advisee must want it.

I feel that I have been fortunate in the advisees with whom I have worked, especially Richard Nixon. He wanted to hear from his advisers, and not only from the highest-ranking ones.

He wanted to have competing views presented to him. He understood the fallibility of economics, did not complain about its errors, and appreciated its insights. Without any background in economic theory, he had a quick grasp of arguments' and a retentive memory for data.

He did not, of course, always follow the options preferred by his economic advisers. But that is not a good test of an advisory relationship. What the advisee should expect is a clear, objective evaluation of the options, and what the adviser should expect in return is that the advisee will listen. Beyond that, the advisee must make the decisions, and the adviser must recognize that there are more things in heaven and earth_than his economics.

0 About the Author: Herbert Stein is a senior fellaH' at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is a revised edition of The Fiscal Revolution

in America.

ON

THE

LIGHTER

SIDE

HA,M8URGE:R & SHAKE

t 2 2.5

"[ just heard some interesting news.

The world is going to the dogs."

~)~V1~

----

Reprinted from The Saturday £~'ening Post

English

~lPROGRAM [

,OK;EO;·'.,.ERICA

SCHEDULE

ce

1985.

(0630-0830) 21550. 17740. 15250, 15160, 11705, 7205. 7115; (0930-1130) 15205. 7200; (0930-1230) 11965, 7170.6140.6040,5995; (1030-1230) 3980; (1100-1230) 6060; (1130-1230) 11805.7325,6095; (1930-2330) 15395.9645.7125;(1930-0330)15205;(2030-2330)15260;(2030-0330)9700;(2200-2230)17735,15245;(22000330) 6040; (2230-0330) 9760: (2330-0130) 3980.

SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY (0530-0630)

11780, 9635, 7105. 6010; (2130-2230)

Bangia

(0700-0800)

21475, 17780, 15210; (2130-2230)

Urdu

(0630-0700)

11780, 9705, 9540, 7105, 6010; (1900-2000)

Time: 1ST.

n A l\. T S£.lll"'l

ORDER FORM

To: SPAN Magazine Subscription Post Box 213, New Delhi 110001

15125. 11865, 9680. 7280.

15185, 11735, 9590.

21520, 17875, 15125, 11710.

Service,

Please send the next 12 Issues of SPAN for Rs. 60 to: Name

In case of a change in your address, please fill out the form below; also attach the address label from a recent SPAN envelope. Since fourto six weeks are needed to process a change of address, please let us know about any change promptly.

Present Position/ Designation Address

Name Present Position/

I enclose payment of Rs. 60 in favor of SPAN magazine by A/C Payee 0 Bank Draft 0 Postal Order 0 Money Order (receipt enclosed)

0 Cheque 0 (Add Rs. 5 on outstation cheque, please.)

Address

Designation

A Conversation

With

Ambassador Hussain As of this month, Dr. Abid Hussain has been in Washington, D.C., for two years as India's Ambassador to the United States. The world has seen immense changes during this period and relations between India and the United States have improved significantly. There is increasingly a convergence of views on various global issues.

To "get his opinion on the relationship between our countries and prospects for the future," Connie Howard, director of Video Services at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) recently conducted a video interview with Ambassador Hussain. Collaborating with her was P.R. "Jake" Karmarkar, a coordinator of science subjects at the University of Poona (UP).

Howard has been a frequent visitor to India in recent years under an exchange program between IUP and UP. In cooperation with the Educational Media Resource Centre of the UP, she and Karmarkar have jointly produced several video documentaries on various facets ofIndian life (see SPAN, March 1989).

Last year, Howard produced by herself a video film on the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. She says, "So few people ever set foot into an embassy and have little idea of just what functions it performs. I felt it would be very useful educationally to take a look behind the scenes at the people and activities of an embassy."

During the making of "A Day in the Life of the Embassy ofIndia," which will be shown in India and the United States later this year, Howard met Ambassador Hussain who. she says, has the "talent for ... making instant friends of former strangers." Soon after she completed the video, Karmarkar visited her in America and they decided that "this time our joint video effort would be produced here in the United States." The result: "A Conversation With Dr. Abid Hussain-India's Ambassador to the U.S.A.," which also will be released in the two countries.

What follows is an abridged and adapted version of their video interview.

CONNIE HOWARD: Are there presently any major obstacles to a good relationship between India and the United States?

AMBASSADOR ABID HUSSAIN: No, Connie. I would say there are no major obstacles at all. On the contrary, the climate has been so good that we can playa good game on an even

ground. The more I look at recent developments I find that there are reasons to be more optimistic than ever before about relations between America and India.

P.R. "JAKE" KARMARKAR: Dr. Hussain, you have been ambassador for almost two years. Do you think some major changes have taken place in our relations during your tenure?

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: Very much, Jake. You see, if you take the political issues you find that one of the sensitive issues for India was Kashmir. I am happy to tell you that what I have found is a greater appreciation for India's stand on Kashmir. I have found that the U.S. State Department and the White House and the Hill have appreciated the legal position that India holds on this question. Nobody has now questioned the accession of Kashmir to India. The emphasis that used to be placed sometime earlier on the U.N. resolutions on Kashmir has now been given up and what America wants is exactly what we have been saying for quite sometime-that the question should be decided on the basis and within the framework of the Simla agreement. This is a great move forward. I consider this to be a political gain.

In the Gulf crisis, we did find that there were differences of opinion between us and the Americans. But as events ripened up, we found that both of our countries were on the same side and we supported the United Nations' resolutions under which America was taking its stand on the Gulf crisis. If you take the questions relating to nonalignment and others, I again find that after the end of the Cold War there has been greater warmth between us and America than ever before. So, when you look at the political scene and see how the two countries are coming closer, one's heart gladdens at these particular developments.

When Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, President Bush along with his entire cabinet, which was on that day assembled in the White House, came and spent about 25 minutes here in our embassy, which is a rare thing. When some people asked him "Do you think that after this assassination India will get destabilized and there will be chaos in the subcontinent?"

Mr. Bush did not hesitate for a second. He shot back by saying.

"Nothing of that sort is going to happen. India is a stable country. It has a stable democracy. You will see it will get over this tragedy."

I am only recounting these particulars to give you a feel for why I believe that India and America are coming closer. Take

the areas of differences. Never before did the chiefs of the army, navy, and air force travel to each other's country the way it is happening now. It does not mean we are giving in to something or that America is demanding something of us, but that there is a recognition of each other's position and of the respect Americans are prepared to give our country. Take the area of technology. There again, you will find that the earlier American hesitancies to part with some of its technology in favor ofIndia are no longer there. As a matter of fact, when we discussed the question of supercomputers recently we found Americans very, very amiable. This surprised many people back home as to why they would open the doors and windows for us and allow us access to their technology.

Our relations are very positive and we are moving ahead.

But, to say there are no differences would be a lie. Certainly there are differences. There are speeches given on Capitol Hill that are critical of India. But when we go to the senators or the representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives and explain why there are certain misunderstandings, I have always found a responsive reaction from their side. They are more responsive than people think. To take someone's criticism as the voice of America is wrong. There are the Solarzes, the Moynihans, the Kennedys, and others-even persons in the White - House-who are very much interested in our development. They feel that the real test of democracy is in India and the real model of democracy for countries outside Europe is India.

HOWARD: This is an exciting time in India. There has been a great move toward modernization, industrialization, and modern technology. There is a new open-door policy. More and more multinatiohal corporations will now be doing business in India.

What is the chance of this making a difference in the rural areas?

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: The Indian economy is growing at a faster rate than most people realize. You'll be amazed to know that for the past, say, seven or eight years our rate of growth has been about five percent. Our grain production, which was not more than 50 million tons in the 1950s, is 180 million tons now. Our industry is growing at a rate of seven to eight percent and sometimes it reaches ten-percent. Our rate of savings is in the neighborhood of 18 to 20 percent. Sometimes even it goes up to 23 percent. When you have an economy growing at this particular rate, surely you are making a dent in the poverty in India, lifting the economy from the grass roots.

Today we have got 130 million people who are in the middle class. One hundred and thirty million really means the total population of France and England put together and a bit of Spain added to it. India is the tenth biggest industrial power on Earth. People don't realize that. Today, 96 percent of the country's investment in development is coming from India's ownsavmgs.

But old problems still need to be attended to in order that the rest of India also rises up. Population growth, for instance.

However much we increase the supply of goods and services, if

demand is going to rise higher than supply because of the increasing population then the gains are lost. So, when you talk of the new economic reforms, of linking our economy with the global economy, and of outsiders, including multinationals, coming into the country, they all become part and parcel of a bigger game in making the Indian economy grow faster. We have come out of the feeling that there is a hidden hand that is going to twist our economy and our independence and that we will become slaves to them.

Today India is a much more confident country than it ever was. We feel that we are on equal terms to negotiate. But, certainly, while making our choices we would like to choose those particular industries or investments and technologies that fit in with our own pattern of growth and our lifestyles and our culture. India would not like to give up its culture or heritage in its run for the 21st century. These new developments, new changes, which have been welcomed all over the world-by America, Germany, Japan, and others and by institutions like the IMF and the World Bank-dearly show that we are on the right path. We are supported by our allies and good friends and I'm sure hand in hand we are going to march into a new civilization that will really bring peace and prosperity not only to the people of India-rural and urban-but to the people of the world.

KARMARKAR: There has been a lot of talk about brain drain in developing countries. India is also part of that. What do you think of this brain drain in India and how is it going to affect India's development future?

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: I have always said that brain drain is better any day than brain in the drain! But, having said that, I would add that brains are needed in India as in other developing countries. However, to make the best use of those brains you must have a base for industry and a base for improvement of agriculture.

There are many Indians in America \\(ho want to go back. Rajiv Gandhi put it beautifully by saying "I find that these brains abroad are becoming the brain banks .... " So, therefore, let us not be taken over by these catch phrases of "poverty trap" or "brain drain." The real trap is in the mind. The real poverty is when the brain cannot find its expression and become creative. Whenever I meet our young Indians over here, I tell them: "Don't for heaven's sake think' that you are unpatriotic. Build yourself up. Become one of the outstanding persons in this country and then, if there is need for you back home and if you find that the two environments are congenial for your growth, I am sure you will choose India." I always say that these people may be out of India, but India is not out of them. It is in their heart.

HOWARD: So many changes are taking place in the world today with new countries constantly gaining independence and new demands being placed on funding sources like the World Bank and the IMF. Is there a concern that funding sources will be spread too thin and India won't get the loans that it needs?

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: No, I don't agree with that at

all. If people go to India it will only be when they are sure that their returns will be better and they will be accepted there as good partners in the development of the country. Our competition with Eastern European countries and others is very much in our favor because we already have a private sector that is vibrant and strong, a whole infrastructure of law, of culture, of language, and more. This makes it extremely congenial for outsiders, especially from America, to come to our country.

And, as I mentioned, India is, after all, on the takeoff.

KARMARKAR: Dr. Hussain, where do relations between the United States and India stand regarding ecology?

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: You see, I would like my friends to appreciate one thing. In the area of environment and ecology, India was the forerunner. Many, many years ago, Mrs. Indira Gandhi made it very clear as to how she believed the environment should be taken care of. Earth is not to be treated as just a passing phase, but as a permanent house for future generations. And, it is our duty to give them a world much cleaner, much neater, and much healthier than what we inherited.

Therefore, where these basic ideas are concerned we are absolutely one with our friends in America, Britain, Germany, Canada, and elsewhere. We are one with them in terms of ecological reforms. The problem comes with the question of sharing the cost of this work. We definitely feel that in our case the biggest ecological pollution problem is poverty itself, and we are trying to find a way of eradicating poverty from the country. So, the basis for a good environment is really created in that. When we think of cleaning up our industry, we need money, and we have got a shortage of money at this time. That is why we are saying let us share the cost in an equitable manner where the poor are not to carry the entire burden and the rich are going to gain the benefit. I'm certainly not suggesting that this should be converted into a war between the rich and the poor, because I don't believe that the best way of enriching the poor is by impoverishing the rich or the best way of giving strength to the weak is by weakening the strong. There must be an understanding and comparable sacrifices.

HOW ARD: Are there still any misconceptions that will interfere with what feels like a growing friendship between our countries?

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: I don't think so, but to think that the two good friends will not have any problems between them is to live in a perfect world. The world in which we live is not a perfect world and there will be problems. There are problems between brothers, between families, between communities, between the same countrymen. While there are many things on which we are together, marching hand in hand, there are certain areas where there are doubts and suspicions.

There are limitations of one accepting the limitations of the other because we have our sensitivities. Don't bother about them. Life is full of sunlight and shadows. Let's not be overpowered by the shadows. Let us see the light. And the best way of doing it is to face the realities of life.

0

Daring to be Ditterent An Interview With RADHA

by MALINI SESHADRI

BHARADWAJ

A year ago, a film by an unknown young Indian wood.

woman

opened

The writer-director

Bharadwaj

in Holly-

was Radha

(above) and the film, Closet

Land, marked her movie debut. It was not a box office success, and Bharadwaj

has

not won the international

ac-

recognition

corded to Mira Nair. But she has broken through the fiercely competitive Hollywood,

world of

and she has received critical

acclaim from serious film journals.

One reviewer wrote: "To have distilled the insights ...into a cohesive and absorbing film, and to have done it with strength and authority ... is no small feat." Another observed that the film "grabs at viewers' hearts and minds from the moment

the

theater goes dark."

Closet Land is set entirely in one room.

Its

two

woman-and

characters-a the

man

location

are

and

a

never

named.

The

children's

woman

is a writer

books. Harmless

the totalitarian

enough,

state suspects

that

of but her

writings are subversive, and an official is sent to interrogate

her. What follows is a

searing depiction of invasion of privacy, mental cruelty and torture, brutality

and

violence. There are no guns blazing away, no explosions,

no blood. Just sustained

menace. The film stars Madeleine and Alan Rickman,

Stowe

and the music is by

Phillip Glass and Richard Einhorn.

Radha Bharadwaj writing

plays and

is no newcomer scripts.

writing as a child in Madras,

to

She started where she

Could the 'fairy tale" refer to the fact that you are so untypical of the Hollywood filmmaker, that you came from faraway Madras?

Yes. I came from a faraway place like Madras, which most people in America hadn't heard of. I'm an ethnic female in a white male-dominated industry. Also, I came in not with a charming sex comedy, but with something that is dark and violent. I was given acceptance. The people who funded my film were Imagine Entertainment, which is a Hollywood heavyweight, and the people who distributed my film were Universal, another Hollywood heavyweight. So instead of making an obscure art film, I got to make a kind of splash, using the Hollywood powers-that-be.

spent the first two decades of her 32 years.

She has a master's

degree in film from

Temple University,

Philadelphia,

1989 won a Nicholls Screenwriting from the American

and in Award

Academy of Motion

Picture Arts and Sciences. On a recent visit to her home city, Bharadwaj spoke of her struggle to make Closet Land, of her concept of cinema, and of her plans for the future.

MALINI SESHADRI: The dominant point that emerges from all that has been written about you and your film Closet Land is that you pulled it off against great odds. In fact, one reviewer said: "Her own story might qualify as a fairy tale .... " What is your reaction to this?

RADHA BHARADW AJ: I would agree with the spirit of that comment, but I wouldn't agree with the actual term "fairy tale," because that seems to imply that somehow a toad got kissed and became a prince or something. I think whatever I got, I got because I worked and struggled. It wasn't just handed to me from on high. As for Closet Land, I think what the reviewers were trying to say is that it is a political, radical, philosophical kind of film, stylistically very different from what is contemporarily chic in Hollywood.

How did producers respond to your proposal to make a film?

I had struggled in Los Angeles for three years and I'd written six scripts. I think they are pretty good scripts, and producers who read them thought so too. But looking at me and hearing my accent, they said you don't belong, you can't ever fashion a film that would be acceptable to Western sensibilities. And the advice that was constantly given was: "Why don't you go out and do something that is expected of you?" In other words, you are a Third World female, there is a constituency for ethnic, exotic subjects.

So make a film about poverty in India, or bride-burning. I didn't want to do a movie like that.

What made you choose such a complex theme? Surely afluffy social drama would have been safer for a first effort?

Yes, that would have been the safe route. But Closet Land was a story that simply demanded to be told. I'd gotten nothing but rejections. I wanted to write and direct, and things weren't happening fast enough for my taste. So my husband and I decided that if nobody would fund us, we would see what we could do ourselves. My husband David is an attorney, and he had $40,000 in credit cards. There was this story that was fermenting inside me. It was a sort of combination of the

profound and the pragmatic. I put the two together and I said, "I am going to do a movie that will be a metaphor for violence and torture, and I am going to do it in one room with two people." Obviously this format was because of the financial constraint. But then I felt that in itself could be a challenge. Because, when you take a medium to its very extreme, that's when you really discover what it's capable of. It couldn't look like a radio play, it couldn't look like theater, but it had to explore what cinema was all about.

In a sense, an extreme experience like torture or abuse or violence is the best way to probe the depth of cinema, because cinema itself is about intimate emotions, and if you can place the audience in the same seat as that of the victim, how much more personal, how much more intimate one can get! One can really push cinema to its limits.

Were you also thinking of placing the viewer not only in the seat of the victim but also in the seat of the torturer?

You are absolutely on the right track.

That is why Closet Land became such dangerous territory. It is not a film about happenings in someone else's backyard, or in some country far away. It took you inward and made you look at your own capacity for violence. It cut too close to the bone. Some people couldn't take the pain of that movie. They would suddenly gasp and leave. I learned to realize that not too many people can stay with something that is so emotionally painful. Though Closet Land is about torture, not a drop of blood is drawn on the screen. All the violence that is inflicted on the woman is implied. Even though the whole setting is abstract and stylized, there was an enormous amount of psychological and emotional truth in the film.

You've said somewhere that you were strengthened in your resolve to become a filmmaker after reading a book about the making of Citizen Kane. You've also expressed your admiration of Errol Morris and Oliver Stone, and of directors like David Lean who could make big films on

Madeleine Stowe as the woman writer whose children's books are regarded as subversive literature and Alan Rickman as the government interrogator in Closet Land, directed by Radha Bharadwaj.

themes that are basically alien to them.

What sort of filmmaker do you yourself aspire to be?

Well, I think I have a' predilection toward dark things, and I am certainly fascinated by studying aspects of powerwhat makes people want to dominate other people, and what makes people accept that type of domination.

I like plots that are structured like chess games-moves and countermoves-in which lies and half-truths are told. The film I'm now making is a psychological thriller called Mind Games. It's about the relationship between a psychoanalyst and his patient, and their attempts to control and manipulate each other. I want to be given the same freedom that David Lean was given. He made A Passage to India, and he was not Indian. Richard Attenborough is not Indian, yet he made Gandhi. The freedom that is given to white males to do the story of their choice is what I want too.

But surely in these examples the difference is that the story, script, and screenplay were not theirs. They only directed the films. With Closet Land, you say you insisted on "total control," right up to the final cut. Would you be prepared to direct

someone else's scripts, or to have someone else direct your scripts?

No. I think I write like a dire~tor and direct like a writer. I think the two functions for me go hand in hand. I can't write a script unless it flows like a film in my head.

If the images stop, I can't write. I'm not a playwright writing dialogue. I write films.

By the same token, I can't be inspired to go through the hard labor of directing a film unless every word is mine.

Don't you think that will severely limit you?

If you notice, even directors who were not writers-Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford-somehow, in each case the directorial vision tends to make the whole body of their work look similar. Daphne du Maurier's The Birds went through Hitchcock's hands and came out as a typical Hitchcock film. Robert Bloch's Psycho went through his hands and came out as a Hitchcock film. Bloch was forgotten.

I think a strong personality puts its own stamp on a work. Each has his own palette of colors, and mine are the darker ones. So, hypothetically, even if I were to direct someone else's script the writer would probably say, "That's not what I wrote." In Hollywood this often happens. But there are writerdirectors. Woody Allen is one. Bergman is another. Not that I compare myself with them.

Do you think your "roots" and your "Indianness" have in any way touched your work as a filmmaker?

I think my Hinduism has had an influence. When I talk about Hinduism, I'm not talking about the rituals or the actual practice of the religion but more as a vast sea that allows dissent and debate. That is crucial to the way I think and live. In

Closet Land here is a woman who is a writer, and her fight is for the right to express her own opinions.

Hindu philosophy seeks to look inward, to find the nature of truth. This seems to have appealed to you.

Yes, and what particularly appeals to me are the Upanishads and the concept of Advaita. The road leads inward, and the links are made ... Atman to Paramatma.

Ultimately the lesson is that there is a oneness in creation. I think that has left its deep impress upon me.

So you think that your roots, instead of heing limiting, have actually heen liherating?

Exactly. In a personal sense, though, I've always felt rootless. When I was a student here in Madras, I came in for a lot of heat because I wanted to be a filmmaker. I felt that till I found a place where I was free to do my films, I couldn't call that home. Now I've found that in Los Angeles, but still I'm rootless. In a way I find this rootlessness itself quite liberating, because then the whole world is my home.

You'd like to he a sort of citizen of the world, and work on universal themes. What is your really hig dream?

I'd like to do the Mahabharata.

I just don't know how I'd go about it. ..whether with full costumes, sets, and so on, or taking the minimalist route like Peter Brook took in his stage version. I don't think the Brook version worked, because it was minimalist not only in style-it reduced the content to very simplistic truisms. I think the Mahabharata is such a profound and such a perfect work that it is daunting. But I would like to attempt it sometime. Also, I've written a couple of scripts set in India. India makes a strong visual statement that is interesting to explore. But I don't want to just play to the gallery. I want to show India as it is, and the Indian people as they are.

0 About the Interviewer: Malini Seshadri, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a M adrasbased free-lance \I'riter.

Architectural Guru An Interview With EDUARD SEKLER

by GERALD McCUE

Eduard Sekler is one of America's most renowned architectural scholars. After having taught at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design for more than three decades, he assumes emeritus status on the faculty this month. During a recent visit to India (en route to Nepal), Sekler met students and teachers of the Sushant School of Art and Architecture, in Gurgaon, Haryana, on the outskirts of New Delhi.

The school was the "'brainchild" of five well-known Indian architects-J.R. Bhalla, Satish Grover, c.P. Kukreja, Ranjit Sabikhi, and Mansinh Rana. It was built on land donated by the Ansals, Delhi-based real estate developers, who have also helped finance the project. The mud-brick art studio and the natural surroundings--eare has been taken to protect the environment-set the mood for the school's Indian approach. "'Our philosophy is asmita, pride in ourselves," says Rana, the dean of Sushant. "'But while emphasizing the Indian ethos, we do not ignore and reject the West." Rana himself is the perfect example of an East-West blend.

Although

his work is rooted in India (his major creations

include

Shantivana, Buddha Jayanti Park, Nehru Planetarium, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library at Teen Murti House-all in Delhi), he regards American architect Frank Lloyd Wright as his guru. Rana was a student at Bombay's J.J. School of Architecture when he read a book on architecture by Wright, and decided "'that I needed to reeducate myself." He wrote to Wright-and was promptly invited to study at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona. On his return to India, Rana

in

taught at the School of Architecture in Delhi (then called the Delhi Polytechnic) for several years before being appointed the Government of India's chief architect. Rana has still maintained contact with the Wright Foundation-he is the first international visiting faculty member and organizes workshops there every summer.

At Sushant, Rana ensures that students get to constantly interact with noted architects and artists. Sekler's visit to the school was especially significant given his distinguished stature as a professor.

He recently discussed his approach to teaching architecture interview with Gerald McCue, dean of Harvard's Graduate

in an School

of Design (GSD). !3elow are excerpts of their conversation.

GERALD McCUE: Your teaching has always been noted for the fact that you are close to the world of professional practice. You view the study of architectural history as a meaningful opportunity for designers to think more creatively and not just as a field of scholarly endeavor.

EDUARD SEKLER: I have always felt very strongly, ever since my student days, that architectural history, architectural practice, historic preservation, and architectural education are closely linked. I have always believed my training and practice as

an architect were as important a background for my teaching as my training in architectural history at the Warburg Institute [in London]. These experiences gave me a grasp of the reality of the built building .... Another aspect of my practice that impinges on my teaching is my exposure to the traditional ways of life and building in non-Western countries, particularly during my many visits to Nepal, as a UNESCO consultant for historic preservation. More than a quarter of a century ago, what I saw in Nepal-how a house was built in the traditional city of Bhaktapur, for instance-gave me a much better understanding of what an ancient or medieval European building site might have been like ....

I wrote a small piece at the very outset of my career, "'On the Spiritual in Architecture," and that remained a theme. So did the topic of one of the first talks I ever gave at the GSD, "'In Search of Architectural Principles." In a sense, all my later teaching has been a continuation of this original search, and a recognition that there is no point in discussing such principles in the abstract: They only make sense if linked to the architectural fact.

GM: Irs an interesting kind of modeL to think on the one hand of the rather explicit architectural principles and on the other of the spiritual side that always seems to evade one's grasp and needs redefining in each era.

ES: The great insight that I had, as a student of Rudolf Wittkower during my doctoral studies in London ... , was that there had been a great breakdown or change in the 17th century, when people lost once and forever that spiritual conviction that had motivated them all through the Middle Ages and even earlier. One could no longer believe that using certain proportions would put one's buildi-ng in harmony with the universe. So life for architects became much more complicated ever after, much more idiosyncratic and per-

sona!. That is now a widespread realization.

GM: But you have always shown through your own work, and argucd, that one can be very rational about architecture without losing sight of its spiritual quality.

ES: Yes ...if you lose this spiritual quality you have lost the core.

GM: But today's existential philosophy seems to undermine any kind of value system by which you can even discuss the topic.

ES: It comes down to a basically humanistic attitude-humanistic not in the historic sense but as concerned with the place of the human being in nature, in the cosmos. The cosmic experiences remain as very uplifting spiritual experiences, no matter how you account for them. Certain fundamental human gestures such as rites of passage and similar symbolic acts-that's what one has to build on.

I always tell my students that they have to ask themselves: How does what I design make the lives of the people who will use it better and happier') One ought not to forget that fundamental question because of all the other concerns that impinge.

GM: Tell me, when one has taught seemingly the same subject for many years, how can one see it freshly" For one of the characteristics we associa te with you is the fact that you bring a new enthusiasm, a way to rethink the materiaL each time you address it.

ES: It is important that I have taught the same course every second year. ..and that givcs enough of a distance. Very simply, you have to keep up in those two years with the various research that has been done. It may change what you have to say, sometimes quite profoundly.

If you don't do that, you become a hack with the same old story ....

And then, as you know, every generation of students brings new questions and a new attitude that resonates. If you don't hear that, again, you will not get across.

Also, as one changes oneself, one has more experiences, sees new

things, and is moved by something else that puts a new light on what one has studied. One's taste keeps changing; in my case, toward the archaic, for example .... In this sense, therefore, you never teach the same course. You talk about the same monuments, but in a slightly new light.

GM: You have the opportunity to travel often as well.

ES: That has been a great influence on me, I'm happy to say. I have reached the point where, with comparatively few exceptions, I lecture only about things that I have visited myself, sometimes with great trouble! You always find a place different-in scale, in color-from what you thought from the photographs and plans. It is the reality of the building that I try to get across to students, ideally, through a field trip, but since we can't go everywhere, I assign that famous exercise.

GM: 'Tell me about that exercise.

When I travel around the country and speak to our alumni they frequently mention this project they did for you.

ES: The students are asked to do a critical and analytical historic study of a building in the Boston region using primary source material. In other words, they have to go to the site and make sketches, take their own photographs.

Of course, they can use whatever is available; if plans exist, they're lucky. If not, they have to make measured drawings, as well as go through all the research processes that one would as an architect. I think what people enjoyed was the realization that this was not a purely academic exercise, it was something they would most likely be doing later in practice. In addition, they were assembling historic documentation, forming a critical judgment that would be useful. A number of those buildings are gone, but our records, which are in the Frances Loeb Library, remain. Sometimes they are the only records, and architects come to use this archive. D

~

Above: Students in the Sushant School studio. Left: Eduard Sekler (secondfrom le/t) and Mrs. Sekler with Dean M ansinh Rana (far left), c.P. Kukreja (center), and Ranjit Sabikhi. Below: Students make mud bricks (left) from the soil around the school; the entrance.

FOCUS The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., recently held an exhibition entitled "Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration" to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America in 1492 by Christopher Columbus (see SPAN, January 1992).

The exhibition surveyed the world's visual arts of the late 15th and early 16th centuries-a period when European explorers were creating new links among continents that changed cultural perceptions forever.

"The Age of Exploration," says the exhibit brochure, "was a period as celebrated for the achievements of its artists and ar¡tisans as for those of its explorers. The more than 600

paintings, works of sculpture, prints and drawings, maps, scientific instruments, and decorative arts from five continents in the exhibition reflect this remarkable period of history and artistic endeavor."

The exhibition had three sections. The first, "Europe and the Mediterranean World," focused on the Mediterranean Basin, the traditional center of European civilization and gateway to Asia. This section surveyed the cultures of Portugal, Spain, Italy, West Africa, and the Islamic world, conveying the major spiritual and intellectual currents of the age.

"Toward Cathay," the second section, presented the visual arts of the principal civilizations of eastern Asia, which in 1492 were "among the world's

Two Americans were recently honored by India. At a ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi last month, President R. Venkataraman honored Joseph Allen Stein, an American architect who has made India his home since 1952, with a Padma Shri (below left). And at the convocation of Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan in March, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao as chancellor of the university conferred "Deshikottama," an honorary D. Litt. degree, on Professor Edward C. Dimock, Jr., a longtime scholar of Indian literature and languages (below right).

Joseph Allen Stein, 80, has designed numerous well-known buildings in India. Among them are the India International Centre (IIC), Triveni Kala Sangam, American Embassy School (all in New Delhi), and the Sher-e-Kashmir International Convention Centre in Srinagar. All of his creations reflect his architectural philosophy that man must live in harmony with the Earth. For

Yashoda and Krishna, 15th century, copper, height 33.3 em., Kamataka.

Metropolitan Annenberg

Museum of Art, Purchase, Lita

Hazen

Charitable

Trust Gift, in Honor

of Cynthia and Leon Bernard Polsky, 1982.

oldest, wealthiest, and most advanced." The order in which these cultures appeared in the show-Japan, Korea, China, and India-followed the sea route west that Columbus had hoped to explore in 1492. "The great subcontinent of India," the brochure says, "hc:d long been a meeting place of cultures. In the

later 15th century, her venerable traditions were in flux. Much of the country was in Muslim hands as a result of invasions ....lslam's cultural heritage enriched and blended with indigenous traditions ...but Hindu art continued to flourish [which attests. to] the strength¡ and vitality of native artistic traditions."

"The Americas," the third section, presented artworks of societies that thrived in the New World in the 15th century and described the belief systems associated with them. This section depicted a rich mosaic of diverse cultures, ranging from the extensive empires of the Aztecs and the Incas to the smaller chiefdoms that prevailed in the West Indies, in the southeastern United States, and in Costa Rica and Colombia.

example, the IIC is ,modern in conception yet blends in quiet harmony with an old-world garden and the tombs of the Lodis.

A native of Nebraska, Stein studied under the world-famous architect Eliel Saarinen at the Cranbrook Academy of Arts and Architecture in Michigan. He worked for a while in San Francisco before he came to India in 1952 to join the architecture faculty of the Bengal Engineering College, Calcutta. In 1956 he shifted to Delhi and has been practicing there ever since.

Edward C. Dimock, Jr., who is a professor emeritus in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at Chicago University, first came to India many years ago to study the Bengali language and literature under Dr. Sukumar Sen of Calcutta University. Over the years, he became an authority on Bengali literature and persuaded many American students at his university to study Indian languages. He has published many works, and has translated numerous Bengali classics, including Mukundaram's Chandimanga/.

His Introduction to Bengali, with Somdev Bhattacharji and Suhas Chatterji, which was published in 1965, remains the standard text for foreign scholars of Bengali.

Born in Boston in 1929, Dimock is a past president of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AilS), which has its headquarters in New Delhi, and now is chairman of its Board of Trustees. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Taraknath Das Foundation Award in 1986. For his contributions to Indian scholarship, AilS brought out a volume of essays on Indian history and culture, Aspects of India, in 1986 in his honor.

On April 24, the United States Information Service (USIS) and the Rotary Club of Delhi Midtown joined together in a tree planting ceremony to mark the annual celebration of Arbor Day. The first of 1,000 saplings donated by USIS was planted at the Delhi Rotary Club Eye Hospital in Trilokpuri by Stephen F. Dachi, USIS director and publisher of SPAN, and Dr. R.K. Bali, president of the Rotary Club.

Arbor Day falls on the last Friday of April in the United States. The idea of designating one day each year for the public planting of trees originated in the state of Nebraska in 1872. The observance quickly spread throughout the nation, and became an international event. Over the years, its scope and purpose broadened.

From simple planting of trees, Arbor Day became an occasion for teaching schoolchildren the environmental importance of forestry.

Around the world, Rotary International, working with the International Society of Arboriculture, is actively promoting tree planting by its 25,000 clubs in some 170 countries. The Delhi chapter will plant the rest of the saplings donated by USIS at schools and industrial sites in the capital city area.

USIS donated the saplings in the spirit of Arbor Day and as a reflection of President Bush's call to improve the quality of the environment. In 1990, President Bush initiated an "America the Beautiful" program that, in addition to many other measures, calls for the planting of 1,000 million trees-30 million in urban areas and 970 million in rural areas-annually throughout the nation.

American critics sat up and took notice when her maiden feature film, Salaam Bombay!, was voted best first feature by a new director at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988 and was nominated for an Oscar as the Best Foreign Film that year (see SPAN, August 1989).

Now, Mira Nair has delighted the critics again with her stunningly successful movie, Mississippi Masa/a. The film, her first in English, recently opened to rave reviews in North America and Europe: "A sweetly pun:

gent new comedy" (Vincent Canby, The New York Times); "a seductively funny film" (Rita Kempley, Washington Post); "a powerfully affecting film about an interracial affair" (pT, RoIling Stone); and "a piquant love story about an Indian immi-

Since it was established in 1953 as a tribute to then U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the private, nonprofit Eisenhower Foundation has brought close to 1,000 distinguished foreign citizens to the United States under its Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship$.program.

The program, which aims to promote international understanding through the exchange of information, ideas, and perspectives, today operates in 97 countries, including India. In each country, a binational selection committee chooses Eisenhower Fellows from among emerging leaders who, in the opinion of the committee, are likely to play important roles in their country's future development. For example, former Indian Eisenhower Fellows range from a divisional superintendent of railways (in 1954) to dedicated environmentalist Bon ani Kakkar of Calcutta (1991). Kakkar, who is the chairperson of this year's Eiserihower Fellowships selection committee in India, calls the program, "one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. From the moment you arrive you are treated as a member of the 'Eisenhower community,' and every effort is made to give you the most rewarding personal and professional experience."

Eisenhower Fellows travel through America for ten to 12 weeks; their spouses may accompany them. They follow a closely scheduled and individually tailored program of professional consultations, visits, conferences, and social contacts. The Eisenhower Foundation covers all expenses for the Fellows and their spouses.

Kakkar says that the selection committee soon will begin the process of choosing an Eisenhower Fellow from India for a program to begin in March 1993. There are two broad fields on which recruitment of next year's Fellow will focus-"Urban Development and Environment" and "Economic Competitiveness."

Persons interested in applying for the program can receive further information and an application form by writing to: The U.S. Information Service, Exchanges Office-SP, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001.

Deadline for receipt of completed applications is June 15, 1992.

grant and a black American" (Janice C. Simpson, Time).

The idea for Mississippi Masa/a came from an article Nair read in The New Yorker magazine about an Indian immigrant family in Uganda forced by dictator Idi Amin to flee the country

Sharmila Tagare and Rashan Seth in

Mississippi Masala.

in 1972. For her film, the 34-yearold filmmaker, who divides her time between India and the United States, relocates the family in Mississippi, home to many Indian immigrants. The daughter of the family, Mina (played by Sarita Choudhury), falls in love with Demetrius (played by Academy Award winner Denzel Washington), a black American who owns a rug-cleaning business.

Their romance leads to a clash of cultures. Mina's lawyer father, Jay (Roshan Seth), and mother, Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore), disapprove of the relationship as do Demetrius's friends.

When several people living near Lyme. Connecticut. started complaining of mysterious rashes and swollen, painful joints. researchers started investigating the wooded areas there-and in other places where people had similar symptoms-for clues. They soon zeroed in on a tick-borne bacterium. The Centersfor Disease Control is still working on dependable tests for early diagnosis of "Lyme disease" and on a preventive vaccine.

Here researcher Sam Telford drags a blanket to snare infected ticks at Nantucket Island in Massachusetts.

Disease DetectivesbYPETERJARET The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, is headquarters for the world's most famous medical sleuths, who use the latest scientific technology to get to the root of epidemics, old and new. The author sets out "to explore the nature of today's epidemics as well as the scientists who chase them."

"We live in muck and filthe," they wrote to the London Times on July 3,1849, in a letter signed by 54 of that city's poor.

"We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place .... We all of us suffur, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us." Five years later, in 1854, cholera came with a vengeance.

A man waking in good health, it was said, could be dead by sundown. Within 230 meters of the intersection of Cambridge and Broad streets, more than 500 people died in little more than a week. Carts groaned under the weight of corpses carried away for mass burial. Those who could,

fled. Others locked themselves away in fear.

No one knew how or why contagions spread. Some blamed foul vapors. Others saw the work of divine retribution. Decades would pass before medical scientists accepted the idea that microbes too small to see were the cause of infection.

But a 41-year-old physician named John Snow believed he had found the source of the Broad Street contagion. On a map of London, Snow marked where victims died. Nearly all the deaths, he saw, had taken place near the Broad Street pump-one of many public water pumps in London.

But before he could be sure, Snow had to understand why ten deaths had occurred nearer another street pump. Amid the growing panic Snow visited the families of the deceased. Five of

the distant victims, he learned, regularly sent for water from the pump at Broad Street, preferring its taste. Three others were children who attended a school near Broad Street's pump.

That was all he needed. On September 7, Snow appeared before the vestry of St. James's Parish, meeting in solemn consultation on the causes of the epidemic. His request astonished them. He asked that the Broad Street pump handle be removed. It was. Within days the outbreak of cholera ended.

Although Snow did not discover cholera's cause-a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae-his methodical work helped establish modern epidemiology, "the art and science," as one of his present-day counterparts would put it, "of chasing epidemics."

Today the Broad Street pump [in London] is gone. In its place I find the John Snow pub. I've come here to inaugurate a journalistic adventure. I am setting out to explore the nature of today's epidemics as well as the scientists who chase them. I've taken a crash course in epidemiology at the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, headquarters for the world's most famous medical sleuths. My honorary diploma in hand, I'm ready to follow in the footsteps of John Snow. Even as I raise my glass in the pub that bears his name, the CDC receives word that his old enemy, cholera, has struck again, this time in the small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau.

"Stop! Zona Infectada Calera," warns the handwritten sign strung on surgical gauze across the courtyard ofSimao Mendes Hospital in Bissau, the nation's capital.

"Not very long ago this courtyard was crowded with cholera victims. Scores of new cases were arriving each day," says my companion, a young physician named Nathan Shaffer. He is an officer with the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a ~orps of CDC disease detectives-some 65 doctors, nurses,. and other experts in public health on call 24 hours a day for two years, ready at the first alarm to chase down an epidemic.

Vibrio cholerae infects the intestinal tract, releasing a toxin that causes severe diarrhea. Untreated, patients can become rapidly dehydrated and die. But drinking a simple solution of water, salts, and sugar usually heads off severe dehydration, giving the body a chance to eliminate the infection. So though the faces we pass in a cholera clinic are gaunt, these victims are safe. And the epidemic is ebbing.

Shaffer fills me in on his investigation. "Of course, I wondered about water-especially in a country that lacks even basic water sanitation. But the outbreaks didn't seem to be associated with particular wells. Here, you can see for yourself.. .."

He unfolds a map of Guinea-Bissau. Black marks indicate reported outbreaks of cholera. "The epidemic was spreading up and down the coast. Right away I suspected shellfish."

Like John Snow, Shaffer went door-to-door through the hot, dusty streets of Guinea-Bissau. "An epidemiologist, like any good detective, begins by asking questions," he tells me. "Who are the victims? What sets them apart from those who remain well? Where do they live, what do they eat and drink, when did they fall ill?"

Shaffer and I tour local markets, gathering shrimp and crabs

to be tested for cholera. But even if the specimens harbor the cholera bacteria, one mystery remains.

Shaffer points out three black marks on his map--places where cholera has flared up far inland. Contaminated shellfish could have been carried from the coast. But there is a more macabre possibility. The bacteria may have traveled in bodies carried home for traditional funeral rites. Washing the bodies and preparing funeral feasts, often in unsanitary conditions, relatives and friends of the dead could have spread the disease.

We set out for the village of Quinsana, where cholera had claimed more than 80 victims. There we learn that a dockworker named Ocanti Te fell sick after returning from the capital. He died two days later. So did his l5-year-old son.

Villagers gather in the shade of the dockworker's porch.

"Who cared for the sick man and his son?" Shaffer asks them. "Was a funeral feast held? How were the victims buried?"

We learn little. The government has banned traditional funerals, and the village leader forbids talk about the burial.

Shaffer is disappointed.

"An epidemiologist is part historian," he explains. "We depend on people's memories and their willingness to tell what happened." or the next three weeks Shaffer continues his investigation.

I visit him in Atlanta several months later, near the end of his EIS term, to discuss his findings. He has been seriously ill, not with cholera but with a rare parasitic infection he picked up in Guinea-Bissau-one risk of medical detective work.

But his persistence paid off. In another inland village where II had died, he proved his suspicion. The body of a dockworker had been smuggled home for burial. More than half the people who ate the funeral feast came down with cholera.

Shaffer adds a footnote. "When I went back through the data I gathered going door-to-door through the capital, I found an unexpected pattern. Families that possessed hand soap were far less likely to become infected than those without soap."

Could something as simple as soap have slowed the epidemic? Almost certainly. John Snow himself wrote that "nothing has been found to favour the extension of cholera more than want of personal cleanliness .... " "Strictly speaking, an epidemic is any unusual outbreak of illness," Lyle Conrad of the CDC tells me. As director of field operations for the division of epidemiology, he has seen plenty. "There are as many as 3,000 outbreaks each year in the United States alone. No one knows how many more occur around the world."

He shows me a list: Hepatitis in a Washington, D.C., day-care center; measles at a college in Colorado; an unexplained surge of tuberculosis in New York; Legionnaires' disease in Michigan.

Each year the CDC's laboratories receive hundreds of thousands of specimens-blood, tissue, puzzling microbes-illnesses in search of a diagnosis. Many are permanently stored here, part of a huge archive of maladies. Some are so deadly that scientists must don helmets and contamination-proof suits to enter the air lock of the maximum containment laboratory,

F

Nathan Shaffer of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service rushed to Guinea-Bissau in West Africa on hearing of a cholera epidemic there. In an attempt to determine its cause, Shaffer interviewed victims and collected specimens of suspected shellfish as well as blood samples (above) of locals who might have been infected by the bacteria.

A group of students at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, celebrate their recovery from measles, which had been "brought" to the campus by Lydia Scoville (forefront). Surprisingly most of those who caught the infection had been vaccinated, prompting CDC investigators to rush to the campus to trace what had gone wrong. The CDC has since recommended two childhood vaccinations instead of one.

where specimens of the killer microbes reside.

"The same new technologies that have revolutionized modern medicine have also given us amazing powers of detection," says Conrad. For instance, new instruments can search a single drop of blood for signs of dozens of diseases.

"But the science of epidemiology still owes much to John Snow," he adds. Maps remain crucial. A pen and paper often come in handier than the fastest computer. The epidemiologist's laboratory is still the human community.

In the 1970s that laboratory was the wooded areas near Lyme, Connecticut.

A young mother named Polly Murray was among the first to

notice. One by one her family had developed a baffling array of symptoms: Rashes, headaches, pain and stiffness in their joints.

"By the summer of 1975 my husband and two of the children were on crutches," she recounts. "Meanwhile, I kept hearing about other people, most of them children, with the same symptoms." Alarmed, she contacted state health authorities.

At the time, epidemiologist Allen Steere had just settled down at Yale University to pursue a fellowship in rheumatology-the study of arthritis-like diseases. "Juvenile arthritis is rare," Steere tells me. "And arthritis isn't known to be infectious. " But in the Lyme area he found 39 children and 12 adults with

swollen, painful joints. Along four rural roads, one in every ten children was affected. "I was astonished," he recalls. "It seemed almost certain that we were looking at a new disease."

But what was it? And how was it spreading?

All of the victims lived near wooded areas. Many first noticed their symptoms in summer or fall. Summer is insect time, and the woods around Lyme are a perfect breeding ground. Steere began to wonder if an insect could be transmitting the illness. hen he interviewed his patients, some mentioned an unusual bull's-eye rash that appeared weeks before their symptoms began. It was similar to a rash reported in Europe, thought to be caused by a tick bite.

"In 1977, one of my patients who happened to be an ecologist actually brought me the tick that had bitten him," Steere remembers. That tick was Ixodes dammini. And where it occurred-mostly on the east side of the Connecticut Riverpeople were getting sick. To the west, where the tick was much rarer, the puzzling illness was far less prevalent.

In 1981, while studying tick-borne diseases with pathologist Jorge Benach, entomologist Willy Burgdorfer discovered that I. dammini was infected with a corkscrew-shaped bacterium called a spirochete.

"The Lyme disease spirochete has probably been infecting ticks for a long time," contends Andrew Spielman, the Harvard University entomologist who first described l. dammini. A recent study noted that museum specimens of ticks collected on Long Island in the 1940s were infected. Since then tick populations in the Northeast have increased dramatically, triggering the epidemic.

Why are there more ticks? Many of the forests that had been felled in the region have returned. And deer populations, especially in the past few decades, have exploded. So have the numbers of I. dammini, which feed on deer.

Deer themselves do not become ill. But when a tick bite infects a human host, the result can be devastating disease, including crippling arthritis and memory loss. In 1990, more than 7,000 new cases of Lyme disease were reported. Efforts to find a vaccine are under way, but th.e infection continues to frighten much of the country each summer.

Each fall the CDC epidemiologists brace themselves for one of nature's most reliable epidemics-influenza.

"Believe me, we have every reason to be afraid of this virus," warns Alan Kendal, head of the CDC's influenza branch. "Every year it claims thousands of lives in the United States. When a new strain appears, hundreds of thousands of people may die around the world."

Periodically, devastating global epidemics develop. During the 1918-19 pandemic, flu killed at least 20 million people. "We don't know what made that flu so deadly," Kendal admits.

"And there is always the chance that another one will strike."

Influenza viruses constantly evolve. And spread fast. A new strain emerging in Asia can circle the globe within months.

Vaccines can protect, but a vaccine must be created for each

W

Legs bared as a bait, CDC medical entomologist Jerome Freier sucks an Asian tiger mosquito into a hand-powered vacuum near New Orleans. Importedfrom eastern Asia by accident in 1985 (in a cargo of used tires), this insect has now established itself in 17 U.S. states. It can infect human beings with serious tropiC(~1diseases but has not been known to do so yet in the United States.

strain. That means spotting mutations early.

"For flu hunters China is the most fertile ground," Kendal tells me. "Virtually all new strains arise there. Pigs and ducks, common on Chinese farms, harbor the virus. Perhaps they serve as mixing vessels for new strains."

Mutations may enable animal viruses to infect human beings. Not just flu but also such diseases as tuberculosis and measles may have originated in animals.

"The sooner we spot a new strain of influenza, the sooner we can prepare a vaccine against it," says Kendal.

He describes a flu-hunting mission to China he is planning for December. "Want to come along?" he asks.

Such a strange safari is irresistible, and a few months later we are touring the country in search of the latest virus. To our chagrin we can find none. In Beijing and Xian, to the west, we are told that 1987 is an unusually light year for flu. But the CDC has already reported the first outbreak of influenza back homeamong a group of American tourists returning from China!

Persistent, we head to China's largest city, Shanghai. Our taxi ferries us through its crowded streets, past the bustling harbor filled with ships from around the world. We pass farmers with carts of produce from the countryside. So many people. So many comings and goings. So many opportunities to catch the flu.

We reach the Shanghai Hygiene and Anti-Epidemic Center, housed in a dilapidated building of European design-a reminder of this city's past. It is not heated, and for several very cold hours, while we warm our hands around cups of tea, Kendal tells the Chinese scientists that he hopes to procure freeze-drying equipment for them. That way they could mail specimens back to Atlanta, eliminating the need for trips such as this. He proposes an exchange with the CDC, to train students in genetic analysis techniques. Eventually their labs might simply telefax a sheet of paper with information about the genetic structure of new viral strains. Still, for now we need live viruses.

We tour overcrowded laboratories, wearing down jackets beneath our medical gowns. I am convinced we will go home empty-handed. The meetings are finished. We are getting ready to leave, when Huang Yu Shun, deputy director of the center, holds out a shiny stainless-steel canister. Kendal opens it to find just what we came for: A dozen glass tubes filled with flu specimens from local hospitals.

A month later, back at the CDC, the viruses have been analyzed. We have caught a new strain: A/Shanghai/I 1/87. It has been transformed into a map of sorts.

Microbiologist Nancy Cox points to a sheet marked by rows of numbers and strange codes-Asn, Phe, Gly, Leu, Ser, amino acids that make up the proteins of a virus.

"Because the unique identity of a virus is determined by the specific order of amino acids in its proteins," Cox explains, "we can use maps like these to compare different viral strains. And when a new strain like A/Shanghaijll/87 appears, we can alter the current vaccine to protect against it."

What would John Snow have made of such a map? A simple street plan of London had helped him track down cholera. Now molecular epidemiologists are using genetic maps to extend the search for patterns deep into the building blocks of life itself.

And disease detectives have stretched the boundaries of epidemiology in other directions, taking on new illnesses like heart disease and cancer, diseases that may develop over a lifetime.

"The whole point of Framingham was to begin when people were healthy," physician William Castelli tells me at the Framingham Heart Study clinic. In 1948, epidemiologists descended on Framingham, Massachusetts, population 28,000.

Some 5,000 volunteers were recruited for the initial study.

Every two years since then they have undergone physicals and answered dozens of questions. "As our subjects developed heart disease, as some inevitably did, we began to understand what factors put people at risk."

Indeed, much of what we know about the risks of heart disease-high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, cigarette smoking, lack of exercise-has been learned here.

But ending the epidemic of heart disease, says Castelli, won't be easy. "The causes of chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease are complex, rooted in how we live. It would be nice to think that all we have to do is locate the pump and remove the handle. But our job is much tougher."

Nowhere is the challenge greater than in an epidemic that runs wild through the streets of the nation's inner cities. One Saturday night in an emergency room at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital, I witness its toll.

Just after II o'clock the call comes. An ambulance is on its way, carrying a black male, 18, shot through the back.

I watch from the corner of the operating room while doctors and nurses try to save him, connecting intravenous tubes, transfusing blood, probing the wound. ''I'm not getting a pressure on him," someone says.

The flow of blood can't be stemmed. The bullet has torn his heart. Forty minutes later Edward Smith is dead.

A

black male born in the United States today has a one-in27 chance of being murdered," CDC epidemiologist Mark Rosenberg tells me. He shakes his head in outrage.

"One in 27. And most of those victims will be young."

Traditionally, violence has been a matter for the police, not medical sleuths" But Rosenberg believes classic methods of disease detection can help curb violence. "If we can find a pattern," he says, "we can find ways to intervene. Kids who are at risk can learn to stop arguments before they escalate into violence. Public-health people can begin to recognize behaviors that lead to spouse abuse. Communities can learn to spot the warning signs of teenage suicide."

Rosenberg is no dreamer. He knows the causes of violence and suicide-poverty, drugs, hopelessness-run deep. "But it wasn't long ago that smallpox was considered a fact of life in most parts of the world, something that people simply accepted," he reminds me. "We've eradicated smallpox, wiped it off the face of the Earth. Today people think violence is a fact of life. I don't believe we have to accept that."

In truth smallpox remains, sequestered in two labs-one in Atlanta, the other in Moscow. Scientists still debate whether to exterminate these last viruses or preserve them for study.

But there is no doubt that the end of smallpox represents one of the greatest triumphs in public health. Indeed, until this past decade, it seemed as if most infectious diseases were being tamed, at least in the developed world. Until 1981-when we first realized that a new, appallingly destructive disease was silently spreading. That disease was AIDS.

"Classic epidemiology was all we had to go on," recalls James Curran, who directed the CDC's first investigations in the early 1980s and now leads the agency's continuing battle against AIDS. "Week by week the reports came in of a bewildering array of puzzling infections. An unusual and often deadly form of pneumonia. Skin cancer so rare that most physicians had never seen it."

Epidemiologists quickly traced the disease to sexual contact.

Then the first hemophiliac with AIDS was diagnosed, and it became clear that contaminated blood could also transmit the illness. Soon an infant was born to an infected mother, proving the disease could spread from mother to child. Researchers also realized that it could lurk in the bloodstream for years before producing any symptoms.

In July 1981, Curran and his staff reviewed local medical records for rare cancers and infections going back to 1976.

"Nothing showed up in 1976 or 1977," he remembers. "Then in .

1978 we began to find isolated cases of the symptoms we are seeing now. No one knew what to make of them back then.

Now we know we were looking at the birth of a new disease."

Recently medical detectives have tracked AIDS surprisingly deeper into the past. At the Manchester Royal Infirmary in England, British physician Trevor Stretton still recalls vividly the 25-year-old sailor who appeared in the clinic in 1959. "He was feverish, losing weight, wasting away," says Stretton, who was himself a young physician in training at the time. "Sores covered his skin. Nothing we could do seemed to help. He died before our eyes. We hadn't the slightest-idea why."

The customary autopsy was performed. Tissue samples from different organs were preserved in blocks of paraffin "and stored-but not forgotten. The unsolved case haunted Stretton and his colleagues.

Then in the early 1980s young men in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles began to sicken and die-wracked with fever, gasping for breath, bodies often covered with strange sores.

Could the sailor, Stretton wondered, have died of AIDS? No one dreamed AIDS was afoot in the 1950s. If so, could it be proved? No blood samples had been saved. Pathologist George Williams, who performed the original autopsy, located the tissue specimens. But when virologists at nearby University of Manchester examined them, they found no sign of the AIDS virus.

And there the case might have ended. But in the 1980s American scientists developed a disease detection technique of extraordinary sensitivity. Called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), it allows researchers to detect a mere fragment of a virus lurking within tissue and then make millions of copies to analyze. Using PCR, the Manchester virologists identified the AIDS virus in four of the six tissue specimens. Thus, three decades after he had helplessly watched the young sailor die, Stretton was able to make his diagnosis; The CDC estimates that by 1991, 165,000 Americans had contracted AIDS. Nearly 100,000 have died-far more lives than the nation lost in the Vietnam War. Researchers estimate¡ that more than a million Americans and at least ten million

people worldwide are infected with the virus. Most will develop the disease.

1989, n the CDC began random and anonymous testing of blood samples from 26 hospitals around the United States.

One out of every 75 patients was found to be infected with the AIDS virus.

Some areas of the nation are harder hit than others. In one New Jersey hospital one in every four men admitted between the ages of 25 and 44 years old is infected.

And AIDS continues to spread. Based on a military study, the CDC estimates that as many as 40,000 adolescents and young adults become infected each year. It also reports that some 2,000 babies were born in 1989 carrying the virus.

What spawned AIDS? I put that question to Max Essex, director of the Harvard AIDS Institute and one of the world's leading experts on the origins of the AIDS virus. "One possibility is that AIDS has been around for a long time, hidden away in some remote human community," he explains. "Then, as travel and contact increased, the virus began to spread. But I think .there's a more likely explanation."

The AIDS virus, called human immunodeficiency virus: or HIV, may have existed for centuries in African monkeys and apes. "African chimpanzees can be infected with HIV, but they don't develop the disease," Essex tells me. "That suggests that chimpanzees have developed protective immunity."

Then, perhaps as recently as 40 years ago, this virus crossed from monkey into man. Was there a small genetic change in the virus? Or was there simply more contact between monkeys and people as human populations encroached on jungle areas?

"When a new disease infects a previously unexposed population, the impact is often devastating," says Essex. "Smallpox, carried to the New World by European explorers, decimated the native peoples.

"But it never pays to kill off your host, even for a virus.

Evolution favors a truce. Viruses become less virulent. Hosts eventually develop immunity. Explosive epidemics are often just the first stage in the evolution of a new disease. Eventually AIDS too will probably evolve into a milder, even harmless disease," says Essex. "But that will require centuries."

Long before then, some researchers worry, new diseases, perhaps even deadlier than AIDS, will emerge. "An epidemic is an experiment of nature," explains virus expert Stephen Morse of Rockefeller University. "Like all living things, viruses and bacteria are constantly evolving. At the same time, human communities are changing, creating new ways for diseases to spread."

Morse believes we may be inadvertently creating ideal conditions for new epidemics. Rapidly increasing human populations provide a fertile breeding ground for microbes. And as the planet becomes more crowded, the distances that separate us seem smaller. "Today it takes a matter of hours to travel by plane from Sierra Leone to New York," Morse points out. "In the rush to get from here to there, we're opening up unprece(Text continued on page 48)

I

dented highways for viral traffic."

In some cases, literal highways. "The recent completion of a major road through the Amazon rain forest of Brazil led to outbreaks of malaria in the region," he says. "In Kenya, AIDS almost certainly traveled the Mombasa-Nairobi highway."

Commerce too provides routes for new disease agents. In 1985, used tires imported into Houston, Texas, from eastern Asia carried larvae of the Asian tiger mosquito. Virtually unknown in America until then, this mosquito can be a dangerous vector for serious tropical diseases-including dengue fever, which kills as many as 5,000 children worldwide each year. Today the Asian tiger mosquito has established itself in 17 U.S. states.

Ironically, even lifesaving medical technologies pose a threat.

Blood transfusions have provided an unforeseen path for viruses, spreading both hepatitis and AIDS. But perhaps most worrisome, says Morse, is disruptive environmental change. "We know already that deforestation and sweeping agricultural changes can unleash epidemics.

Major outbreaks of Rift Valley fever followed the construction of the Aswan High Dam-most likely because breeding grounds were created for mosquitoes, which spread the disease.

In Brazil the introduction of cacao farming coincided with epidemics of Oropouche fever-a disease linked to a biting insect that thrives in discarded hulls." ill the destruction of tropical rain forests release viruses that have long remained isolated? Will the sweeping changes predicted because of global warming alter animal habitats in ways that encourage the spread of new lethal diseases?

"Isolated outbreaks of exotic diseases are constantly occurring," says Morse. Eight years ago, for instance, a mysterious epidemic of a swiftly fatal hemorrhagic fever killed a dozen children in rural Brazil. Other isolated outbreaks have followed. Researchers linked the disease to a common bacterium long known to cause conjunctivitis, a mild eye infection.

A slight evolutionary mutation, they suspect, has transformed it into a killer. If the disease should reach densely populated Sao Paulo, it could prove disastrous. _ "Ebola fever, swine flu, Marburg fever, Rocio encephalitisthese are all deadly diseases that have appeared and then, for no reason, disappeared again," says Morse. "Anyone of them, given the right circumstances, could break out and ignite global epidemics. That's the lesson of AIDS." Such lessons will have little meaning to a small boy I'll call Jerome. Jerome is a Christmas baby, born December 25, 1985.

But he has had few blessings. He began life infected with AIDS. Most of his short life will be spent here on the 17th floor of Harlem Hospital Center. Except for a few halting words, he has never learned to speak, and probably never will. His fingers have become clubbed, a sign that his lungs are not taking in enough oxygen. His doctor tells me that he probably won't see another Christmas.

AIDS continues to spread fast among intravenous drug

W

users. The epidemic of crack cocaine, which encourages prostitution and indiscriminate sexual behavior, has worsened the situation. Inadequate medical care in America's inner cities allows other sexually transmitted diseases to go untreated, fostering an environment that may also speed the spread of AIDS. Warns Phyllis Kanki, a researcher with the Harvard AIDS Institute, "We are creating the conditions of poorest Africa right here in our own backyards."

What is there to feel but despair?

For Michael Talbert, however, despair is a waste of time. I meet him one afternoon in Steve Swanson's senior English class at San Francisco's Riordan High School, six weeks before graduation. Today these students will learn a lesson as important as any they will take into the world.

Talbert, 37, has come to tell them about AIDS-which will eventually claim his life.

They seem wary at first, embarrassed. Talbert tells them that it has been three years since he was diagnosed with AIDS. "My hobby then was weight lifting," he says. "I was pressing 350 pounds (about 160 kilograms)."

The kids look startled. Talbert's body is so frail that he sometimes needs a cane to walk.

"I always thought bad things happened to other people.

Other people got mono. Other people's girlfriends got pregnant. Then I got mono. My girlfriend got pregnant."

The kids laugh. He has touched a nerve.

"That's what I thought about AIDS too," he says quietly.

Later the students ask questions. "How do you think you got AIDS?" "Most likely through sexual contact," Talbert answers. "What did your friends say when you told them?" "Some of them were very caring. Some of them were afraid," he replies.

"Back when I -got infected, people didn't know how to protect themselves," he says. "We didn't have a chance. You do. You don't have to let this happen to you."

In his small, determined way, I realize, Talbert is removing the pump handle.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson of AIDS. For if this devastating disease has taught us that epidemics will always threaten, it has also shown us that we are not helpless. Day by day, knowledge about AIDS is winning out over ignorance.

Fear is giving way to compassion. Medications are slowing the disease's progress. Hopes for a vaccine grow. Moreover, in recent months intensive research has identified 13 ways the AIDS virus may be vulnerable to medical counterattack.

And around the world there are people like Michael Talbert.

"If I can keep just one of these kids from becoming infected," he tells me after class, exhausted by the effort of speaking, "I've made a difference. I've won one small victory against this terrible virus."

0 Michael Talbert died just prior to the original publication of the article in the January 1991 issue of National Geographic.-Editor

About the Author: Peter Jaret is a free-lance medical writer based in

Petaluma. Ca/(fornia.

Stone gorges mass together like the concrete canyons of a city; a rocky outcrop rises flame-like above the placid blue stillness of a lake; a chink admits light into the depths of a cavern, investing it with mystery.

Seen through the lens of photographer Ashvin Mehta, aspects of nature often take on an unreal quality. Many, indeed, reach the level of abstractions.

Mehta achieves his effects by the uniqueness of his vision and by his unusual combination of elements. The visual image triggers off

PHOTOGRAP~!!~cape

aSSOciatIOns, sometimes far removed from the scene before him. He delights in reproducing the texture of rock or sand or sea, and he sees light-as well as the absence of it-as subjects.

These landscapes are among hundreds taken during Mehta's 13,OOO-kilometer odyssey through America. They will form part of his book "The Primeval Landscape," to be published shortly. Mehta already has to his credit four published works, and he has held exhibitions of his photographs in cities around the world.

In the introduction to Mehta's Gifts of Solitude, the eminent American photocritic Judith Mara Gutman observed: "Mehta's photographs personify something beyond and grander than themselves. They share, with scientists and creative thinkers everywhere, a search for some supreme, if not yet identified, order." And this view is reinforced by Mehta himself when he says, "In my photography, I celebrate the Gods, and through them, sing of Him who has neither age nor form."

0

â&#x20AC;˘ THE UNITED

Applications Executive

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR'S POSITION STATES EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION IN INDIA (USEFjl)

are invited from Indian and American Director's

Foundation

position

at the

United

in India (USEF /1), a non-profit

entity responsible

for administering

change Program"

in India. Candidates

experience as a senior administrator

citizens for the

States

Educational

bi-national

educational

the "Fulbright

Academic

Ex-

must have at least ten years

plus a degree from, or teaching

experience in, an American university if Indian or an Indian university if American.

The Executive

Director's

posItIOn requires

dynamic

management

(fiscal and personnel) capabilities, strong oral and written communication skills. An understanding educational

systems

organizations

of Indian and American

is essential.

Experience

in

is preferable. Teaching/research

sciences, arts and humanities

societies and

multi-fbi-lateral

experience in the social

is desirable.

Duties will include, but not be limited to, the complete administration of the New Delhi headquarters Bombay,

Calcutta

approximately

and Madras.

national

Total staff at all four locations

forty-five. Applicants

ing with Indian and American Applicants

and three regional offices located in must be effective when interact-

government

must be able to give direction

exchange program

is

compatible

officials and academics. in implementing

an inter-

with the changing

needs of

both countries; ensuring that USEF/I fulfills the legislative intent and purposes of the bilateral agreement. Job functions are divid'ed equally between administration

and public relations.

Extensive travel within

India; abroad, required.

A five year renewable contract beginning between August and November of this year; salary negotiable.

Apply in confidence

1992 to: The Chairman. USEF/I Board c/o American Center (USIS) 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001, India

by May 15,

...J

<iN

>-a>

(/)~ oU)

"-::: O~

~ , "'~ ",...J

000 U)

"'0 -'.(:J

Z

w

.

a: a:

G-Xll HANDLOOM EMPORIUM MANOR SHOPPING PLAZA SOurn: EXTENSION-I NEW DEUll-110049 INDIA 1tFN: (011)462-3208,462-5099,61-7050