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SPAN

Aug"'t1994

VOLUMEXXXV NUMBER8

The time has <fomefor me to say good-bye. My assignment in India has come to an end. Parting is not a new experience for me, of course; it has been an occupational requirement now for two decades. But it is never easy, and this one is proving more difficult than any I have faced heretofore.

Exactly one year ago in this space, I mentioned the deliberations on curriculum development that I and four colleagues undertook when we founded the dental school at the University of Kentucky in 1963. We quickly concluded that imparting skills and knowledge was not nearly enough. We had to prepare students for a lifetime ofleaming. They must understand that they would face many more questions than answers in their lives and that the search for understanding and enlightenment would never end. But search they must if they wanted to succeed and progress.

In trying to live my own life by that principle, I never have been so rewarded as I have been during these past three years in India. Whatever small contributions I have made to others-and I am immodest enough to think that I have made some--do not compare to the insights I have gained from this country's rich history of culture, tradition, and philosophy. India has opened my eyes to ways of thinking and looking at the world that I never dreamed existed, and prepared me for my next life far better than anything I could have imagined.

We all, in our various and sundry ways, strive for new knowledge, though the opportunities for some of us are better than for others. For inspiration, consider author James Michener, who in discussing for us this month the virtues that the computer holds for his craft, concludes, at the ripe age of87, that "No future development is too radical for me to contemplate." He himself has lived a full life of continuous learning and has passed on his knowledge through numerous books.

From the day 25 years ago when man took that "giant leap for mankind" and left his footprint on the moon-an event we commemorate in our leadoff article-our learning curve has been accelerating at a breathtaking pace. The communicative powers of electronic bulletin boards and a newly acquired environmental consciousness among corporations are just two examples we explore this month.

Although there have been countless earthshaking developments over the past quarter century, nothing has had the personal impact on my life that my experience in India has had. India has changed me profoundly, and for this I am profoundly grateful. I depart with thoughts and acquired wisdom that will serve me for the rest of my life. I also depart with a collection of photographs that I have taken of the marvelous sights and people I have encountered in India and elsewhere during the past three years. I have been so bold as to offer a small selection of them to the readers of SPAN this month as a testament of respect and admiration. Namaste.

-S.F.D.

2

7 8 12 16 17

The Eagle Has Landed

by Richard Wolkomir

Moon Memories Three Decades of Yatrik

by Javed Malick

Bulletin Boards: News From Cyberspace Disk-Drive Jive

A Review by Laurence A. Marschall

Mr. Megabook's Dream Machine

20

Turmoil and Triumph

22

A Different Path

26 31

Art in Industry

34

A Legend of Tamil Cinema

37

On the Lighter Side

byJamesMichener

A Review by P.M. Kamath

by Stephen F. Dachi

by Maureen Weiss

Management Turns Green

38 40

Drum Fever

41

Consider This Senora

44 46

by Jon Katz

by John C. Newman

by RClIldor Guy

Focus On ...

by Claudia Ricci

by Jacquelin Singh

Consider This, Senora-An Medical Camp

Excerpt

by Cynthia Taylor Young

Front cover: This collage by Nand Katyal shows man's first footprint on the moon juxtaposed with Indian newspapers' banner headlines of the historic lunar voyage 25 years ago.

Back cover: When Neil Armstrong photographed Edwin Aldrin walking on the moon, he captured his own image as well as that of the American flag and part of the lunar landing vehicle on Aldrin's helmet visor.

Publisher, Stephen F. Dachi; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Assistant Managing Editor, Swaraj Chauhan; Senior Editor.

Amrita Kumar; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistant, .

Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circularion Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Uelhi.

Photographs: Front cover inset-NASA. I-Avinash Pasricha. 2-6-NASA. 7-USIS. 8Avinash Pasricha. 9-USIS. 10-11 top-courtesy Yatrik; bOllom-Avinash Pasricha. 12-illustration by Hemant Bhamagar. 17-iIlustration by Gopi Gajwani. 21 right- Barry Fitzgerald.

22-25-Stephen F. Dachi. 26-27-courtesy the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. 28-30courtesy Kohler Company. 34-36-courtesy Randor Guy. 38 top-R.K. Sharma; bOllomAnupama Srinivasan. 39 bollom-M. Sreedhara Murthy. 40-courtesy National Association for Music Therapy, Washington. 41-Anacleto Rapping. 44-illustralion by Nand Katya!. 4647-Cynthia Taylor Young. Inside back cover top-School of Visual Arts, New York; bottom-courtesy Kohler Company. Back cover-NASA. Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841). on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Primed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad. Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarilyreflect the views or policies of the U.S. Govemmeill. Use 0JSPAN articles in other publications is encouraged.except whencopyrighted.Forpermission write to the Editor. PriceoJmagazine,one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 120(Rs. 110for students); single copy. Rs. 12.

he machine that brought human beings to the moon did not look like an eagle. It resembled a leggy metal arachnid. Nonetheless, the Apollo 11lunar module, Eagle, transported across 400,000 kilometers of void by the command module, Columbia, and then released, performed like a noble bird as it touched down in the Sea of Tranquility.

Some 500million Earthlings watched the event on television. Many more listened over radio. Millions felt lumps in their throats, for the moon had proven fearsome.

From lunar orbit, command module pilot Michael Collins-as he would record later in his book Liftoff-looks down upon this new world and shudders: "The moon I have known all my life, that two-dimensional, small, yellow disk in the sky, has gone away somewhere, to be replaced by the most awesome sphere I hilVeever seen. To begin with, it is huge, completely filling our windows. Second, it is three-dimensional. Its belly bulges out toward us in such a pronounced fashion that I feel I can almost reach out and touch it. The sun is behind it and its light cascades around the moon's rim."

Collins became for a while the loneliest man in the universe. He and his two fellow astronauts had traveled together to lunar orbit in Columbia. Then Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin crawled into the attached Eagle and separated from the mother ship.

Collins was left to orbit the moon alone.

Through his window, he watched the Eagle maneuvering in space, its spindly legs jutting from a lumpy body, "the weirdest looking contraption I have ever seen in the sky." In Liftoff, he admits fibbing a little over the radio: "I think you've got a fine looking flyingmachine there, Eagle, despite the fact you're upside down."

Nobody knew what would happen.

Would the descending Eagle sink into deep lunar dust and disappear? Would space-suited human beings lurch uncontrollably in the moon's low gravity?

Could they withstand 118-degree Celsius sunlight? Would Eagle successfully leave the moon and rendezvous with the speeding mother ship?

Now the time arrived. Michael Collins gazed down at the moon, "this withered

1f

sun-seared peach pit," and thought about blue Earth. He told himself: ''I'd just like to get our job done and get out of here."

At 4,800 kilometers per hour, Eagle descended to 12,000 meters. Abruptly, as Armstrong and Aldrin lay on their backs, red alarms flashed. The onboard computer, controlling the Eagle, was overloaded with data, and approaching an electronic nervous breakdown. Mission Control in Houston, Texas, had 30 seconds to decide-abort the landing? Or could computers in Texas take over some work from Eagle's system?

"GO, GO, GO, GO," came the instructions over the radio. At 1,200 meters, Eagle pointed its legs down, swinging Armstrong and Aldrin upright. Finally, out their window, they saw the Sea of Tranquility. The previous lunar mission, the manned Apollo 10, had photographed this region in minute detail.

Armstrong had memorized all landmarks leading to the chosen landing site. But now through his window he saw only unfamiliar boulders and craters. Eagle had edged off track into terra incognita.

They were too low to go back up. But Armstrong saw no flat place to land. He seized control from the computer to fly the Eagle himself.

Armstrong's heart rate, normally 77 beats per minute, climbed to 156. He dropped the craft at just a foot per second, scanning the rubble on all sides for a spot to touch down. He had limited fuel.

He saw a flat place that he later described as only "the size of a big house lot."

"Houston, we uh ...," Armstrong started to say over the radio, then switched to official lingo: "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

Mission Control responded: "Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground.

You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot."

Millions of television watchers breathed again, too. For now, the astronauts were safe among jagged crests bathed in white Earthshine. Armstrong was about to take "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Propelling him to that moment was what another astronaut, Eugene Cernan, later

called the "culmination of a vision," a technological vision, energized by politics and Cold War competition. As Cernan pointed out, it was not just an adventure for a few test pilots.

*

*

*

At its apex, the Apollo project employed 400,000 Americans. It involved 20,000 industrial firms and it cost American taxpayers $24,000 million. It also cost three lives. On January 27, 1967, as astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee tested a spacecraft on a Florida launchpad, fire erupted. All three died. Still, the Apollo program filled a national psychological need.

World War II left America strong, confident of its uprightness. But then came the Cold War, which soon had a sideline-the "space race." To America's astonishment, the Soviets were winning.

On August 3, 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched the first intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. Two months later, the Soviets orbited the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The following month they launched a dog, Laika, or "Little Lemon," into space.

Soviet rockets produced 450,000 kilograms of thrust, as opposed to 33,750 kilograms of thrust generated by the U.S. Redstone, designed by German-born rocket engineer Wernher von Braun.

Meanwhile, America's own first attempt to orbit a satellite ended when the rocket exploded on liftoff. "It was a bleak day, a terrible day," former Johnson Space Center Director Christopher Columbus Kraft later remembered.

Under political pressure, in the summer of 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. signed into existence the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). And on December 17, 1958exactly 55 years after Orville Wright's first flight-NASA began an effort to achieve manned spaceflight, called Project Mercury. Looking back, Collins calls Mercury the start of "one of the greatest and most successful engineering ventures of all time."

The Mercury capsule didn't look like much. It was a metal canister, just large enough to hold a human being-"about

the same size as a coffin," in the words of Collins. NASA advisers seriously recommended seeking an astronaut with no legs, who would need less room. But NASA merely required that astronauts be no taller than 180 centimeters. The first seven astronauts were embarrassed because the "pilot" of the computer-controlled Mercury actually did little more than Laika, the U.S.S.R. space dog. Even more humiliating, before NASA entrusted a human being to Mercury, the capsules carried chimpanzees into space.

Airplane test pilots derisively called their astronaut brethren "spam in a can."

But there was method to NASA's process. For one thing, the U.S. space program operated in full view of the press.

Catastrophes would be instantly visible to the world. And each Mercury launch would answer questions that would lead to improving subsequent flights.

Could man survive a ride on an ICBM? How rough would the ride be? And what about the "pogo effect," in which the rocket's stack of three stages shakes vertically during liftoff? Would the capsule protect the rider during reentry into the atmosphere? And how hot would it get inside the capsule?

The space program was not solely technological. As journalist Joseph Trento puts it in Prescription for Disaster, a history of the space program, "it would

serve as a popular framework on which to improve our educational and technical capabilities:" On April 28, 1961, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson gave President John F. Kennedy a report that broached the idea of going to the moon.

"To reach the moon is a risk," the report observed, "but it is a risk we must take. Failure to go into space is even riskier ....One can predict with confidence that failure to master space means being second best in every aspect. In the crucial areas of our Cold War world, in the eyes of the world, first in space is first, period.

Second in space is second in everything."

As the Soviets continued to rack up successes--eosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space-President Kennedy told Congress: "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, oflanding a man on the moon and return,ing him safely to Earth."

Von Braun's group developed a rocket to reckon with, the Saturn I. It stood 17 stories tall and generated 585,000 kilograms of thrust. On February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. "The impact was overwhelming on the mood of the c~untry," said Kraft. NASA told von Braun to start work on a moon rocket, the Saturn C- V. It would be 30 stories tall, generate the power of 600 Boeing 707s taking off at the same time, and carry 45 tons

Moon rocks, like the one shown at left, became extremely popular artifacts in museums all over the world, including India. Right: The orbiting command module took this photograph of the lunar module as itflew near the surface of the moon. Earth is seen in the background.

of payload to the moon.

Meanwhile, Project Mercury had proven that human beings could travel in space almost routinely. In fact, during the last Mercury flight, on May 16, 1963, Astronaut Gordon Cooper was so calm at the controls that, just before liftoff, he drifted off to sleep. Later, in orbit, he drifted off again.

After Mercury came Gemini, step two toward the moon. Gemini required expanding the Mercury capsule in order to carry two astronauts. It was a test bed for new devices that would be vital to Apollo lunar missions, including a docking collar so that two craft could link up in space, advanced computers and radar, and fuel cells (replacing batteries) that generate not only electricity but also drinking water.

Gemini would test astronauts' ability to leave their ship and do work in the void.

And, unlike Soviet capsules, Gemini could maneuver in space.

Every tiny detail had to be carefully engineered. The space suit in which astronauts would walk on the moon, for instance, needed a zipper that would hold in pressure. The engineers also had to

invent an internal tank that would allow space-suited astronauts to urinate. But they could do little to make the suits truly comfortable. Collins, a veteran spacesuit wearer, says that "once you were locked inside the suit, none of this gear could be adjusted, nor could an eye be rubbed, a nose blown, or an itch scratched."

Rockets, too, required minute adjustments. For instance, welds had to be perfect or leaking fuels could ignite. On the test stands, workers in protective clothing sometimes circled the tanks holding out brooms. If a broom burst into flames, it meant they had found a leak.

Special attention went into the lunar module. It was so delicate that a 'screwdriver dropped by a worker could pierce its pressure shell. Yet it had to separate from the command module, descend to the moon, and then-after the lunar exploration was finished-use its exhausted first stage as a launchpad and fire second-stage rockets to ascend back into space. After that, relying on advanced radars and precise computation, it would have to catch the command module speeding around the moon and reattach to it.

The Saturn C- V moon rocket alone contained three million parts. The Apollo command and service modules comprised two million parts; and the lunar module, one million. If any of those six million parts failed, the astronauts could die.

"The surface is fine and powdery," Neil Armstrong reported, as he took his first steps on the moon. "I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch. But I can see the footprints of my boots in the treads in the fine sandy particles. " About 19 minutes after Armstrong demonstrated that a human being could walk safely on the moon, Buzz Aldrin joined him on the surface. The two men set up a television camera, planted an American flag, collected soil and rock samples, and deployed a number of scientific experiments.

President Richard M. Nixon telephoned from the White House, noting, "This certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made." Dignitaries watching ranged from the Dalai Lama, flight pioneer Charles Lindbergh, and Queen Elizabeth to Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, who announced: "Nothing in show business will ever top what I saw on television today!" At Yankee Stadium in New York, 34,000 spectators applauded as umpires halted the baseball game to announce that the Eagle had landed. In Wollongong, Australia, a local judge brought in a television to watch the moon expedition during trials. Laplanders herding reindeer had transistor radios at their ears. A thousand Poles gathered in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to cheer the touchdown. Milanese police reported that crime dropped to one-third normal, apparently because criminals, too, were watching the moon expedition. The Indian Parliament gave Apollo a standing ovation.

In the end, of course, Armstrong and Aldrin successfully blasted off from the moon and rejoined Michael Collins in the command module. And all three explorers returned safely to Earth.

Five more Apollo crews¡ landed on t~e moon in the next two-and-a-half years.

Each expedition explored new territory, covered a bit more terrain, brought home more specimens. The final three expedition teams even hot-rodded across the moon in a motorized buggy, raising clouds of dust. Busy astronauts, jouncing in their white spacesuits, turned the moon into an alfresco laboratory, studded with devices to measure everything from the solar wind to lunar magnetism and moonquakes.

Scientists hoped rocks brought back from the moon would settle the issue of the moon's origin-did it condense from gases in space at about the same time as the Earth? Alternatively, was it an interstellar wanderer captured

by Earth's gravity? Or was it a broken-off chunk of Earth itself? It has turned out that the composition of the lunar rocks seems to favor none of the three theories. Where

did the moon come from? As Collins puts it, "frustrated scientists work on."

Technologically, the space program changed the world. It boosted the development of computers, electronics, and new materials. Satellites have altered communications, navigation, weather forecasting and our ability to study Earth, whether ecologically, geologically, or archaeologically.

Yet Apollo's chief impact may be on human thinking.

People around the world now say: "If we can put a man on the moon .... " As Kraft noted, Apollo showed that "we can do anything we set our mind to do."

Looking back at Earth as he orbited the sterile moon, Collins experienced an insight many others have since been able to share via photographs-that of the blue home planet swimming in blackness.

"From my window now it looks fragile somehow," Collins noted. "I wish I had some way of protecting it, of keeping it pristine." Earth looked clean from space, but he knew it was not. "The boundary line between a blue and white planet, and one that is gray and tan, is fragile," he said. "I cry that the technology that produced this marvelous machine we call Columbia leaves in its wake the detritus of a century of industrial abuse. It need not be that way. We can use technology to cleanse, to repair, to maintain--even as we build, as we spiral out into the universe." Apollo had another effect on human thinking. "Never did I hear, 'Well, you Americans finally did it,'" Collins says. "Always it was 'we,' we human beings drawn together for one fleeting moment, watching two of us walk the alien surface."

Apollo ITs moon walkers, Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan, thus far the last human beings to travel to the moon, left a plaque that sums up what may be the fundamental significance of the Apollo program: "Here man completed his first exploration of the moon, December 1972 A.D. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind." 0 About the Author: Richard Wo/komir is a freelance writer based in Washington. D.C.

Moon â&#x20AC;˘ Memories â&#x20AC;˘

I was in London with my troupe on a dance tour. We kept awake that July night in 1969 in our hotel room glued to the television. Watching the unbelievable event I experienced, in classical dance parlance, adbhut rasa. Back in Delhi, I choreographed a famous composition, Chandrambhaja Manasa (Meditate on the Moon, 0 Mind!), and performed it for the visiting U.S. President Richard M. Nixon at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. For a long time we were indeed moonstruck!

Practically anyone who .was alive at the time remembers that first moon landing. SPAN asked a select few to share their reminiscences.

Since my childhood, I have always considered the moon a more romantic creation than even the stars. No longer. It is now as realistic, even if still mysterious, as the rest of the cosmos. Whatever may be achieved by the exploration of space, in terms of knowledge as well as the practical uses of it, humanity must also retain its poetic vision of all existence. That is why I shall continue to look up at the moon in a romantic state of mind.

- YAMINI KRISHNAM\J RTHY Bharatanatyam

dancer

I was in Delhi and we followed the news of the moon landing breathlessly. I can still remember the thrill and Neil Armstrong's famous words. This event represented the dawn of the global age, a seminal moment in human evolution. It was a logical corollary to Gagarin breaking the Earth barrier. former

Union

Ambassador

Cabinet

Minister

to the United

and States

It was the most remarkable event of the century from the technical and scientific angle. Later I met Neil Armstrong at Bombay. But the moon landing event made a more profound impact on me than seeing the astronaut in person.

-DR.

The full import of what we had heard on the radio did not sink in until I saw a film of the actual landing in college. Over a sea of heads (and a forest of elbows) I saw the padded-up figure of Armstrong looking like a cross between a polar bear and Santa Claus, stepping down the ladder gingerly to take that small/giant step.

There was no TV in Madras then, but the radio broadcast of the event thrilled us. Later we were a bit disappointed when moon rock was displayed in an exhibition in Madras.

We had imagined that it would glow!

-VITHAL

C. NADKARNI

GUY

When, 25 years ago, I joyfully broke the news to a close relation over the phone, the startling response was: "It can't be. It is an exclusive abode of the gods." But it was on the TV, I countered. "Trick photography," he retorted. Till today he remains unconvinced. Even science needs faith!

-PROFESSOR

P. LAL

I was thrilled. My thoughts immediately went to perhaps an even greater achievement-the firing of the rocket by the two astronauts to get into the moon's orbit to rejoin Columbia. It was the total success of the mission that was remarkable.

-DR.

R. SUBRAMANIUM

It was an unforgettable moment. Later, when I had the opportunity to hold the lunar rock samples and carry out experiments, my life was transformed. I felt I had gone to the moon myself!

-V.S.

-v. NALLATHAMBI I was in Delhi. My mind raced back to what H.G. Wells had written decades earlierThe First Men on the Moon. On my way to office, I saw a huge Air India billboard depicting Armstrong being greeted by the airline's Maharaja mascot on the moon: "Capt. Armstrong, I presume." It was indeed a memorable day.

-C.V.

GOPALAKRISHNAN

RAJA RAMANNA

-RANDOR

I remained glued to my GE two-band radio set at the bachelor police officers' mess in Kingsway Camp in Delhi through the entire broadcast of the moon landing by the Voice of America. I got goose pimples. The nursery rhyme in Hindi on the moon, Chanda mama dur ke, dahi pakore ... , came to my mind. Although it was the monsoon season, the sky that night was clear.

Instinctively, I rushed out and waved to the moon. Somehow the universe had shrunk and, looking into the future, the romance surrounding the moon seemed to have been somewhat lost.

I provided on Voice of America a running commentary on the moon landing to millions of Tamil listeners in the world. I was then in Washington, D.C., sitting in front of a TV. When Armstrong landed on the moon, I was holding the microphone and could see my hands trembling. Even my voice quivered with excitement.

VENKATAVARADAN

I was in Germany. My landlady promised to wake me up to see the historic TV coverage. However, she forgot and I slept through the spectacular event! When the program was repeated we enjoyed every moment of it. In fact, I became the center of attention, answering queries. Thus, this unique American effort enabled me, an Indian scientist, to interact with my German friends on a landmark (or moonmark?) event. I shall never forget that day.

-DR.

N.V.C. SWAMY

I still remember the remark made by one of my professors at lIT, Kharagpur, to a latecomer to class on the day of the moon landing: "You are late. Do you know the man who went all the way to the moon arrived three hours ahead of schedule?"

-NAGESH

HEGDE

A moon rock exhibit, which toured major Indian cities, was a big draw.

nthe context of Delhi's theater history, Yatrik's 30th invited by Noonan to play Lincoln. Roshan Seth, just out of anniversary this year is a significant event. For the city has university, had already impressed Delhi's theatergoers as a talented actor. He played Lincoln's brother-in-law and friend, not quite provided the kind of support essential for the development of a regular, vibrant, and varied stage. Unlike Ninian Edwards. Joy Michael, one of the moving spirits behind Bombay and Calcutta, which possess a tradition of urban the Unity, played Mary Todd, who became Lincoln's wife. theater, going back at least to the early 19th century, Delhi Sushma Seth, who had recently returned from the United States hardly had any theater of its own until India's independence where she had studied theater, was given the role of Ann Rutledge, Lincoln's first love. in 1947. It was only during the 1950s and 1960s that small theater groups emerged.

Noonan directed the play himself and first produced it on the These were usually small, amateur groups. Although some of back lawn of the US IS offices at Bahawalpur House, which them provided excellent entertainment and are still rememnow houses the National School of Drama and some government offices. The production was skillfully mounted on a bare, bered as early examples of good theater, they could not last beyond a decade or so. In the subsequent years, new groups. three-level stage with the players sitting on either side of it, from came into existence but they too found it difficult to survive where they made their entries in the tradition of folk theater.

The show was a tremendous success. For more than a year, beyond a few years. Thus, a perpetual turnover of groups became a regular feature of Delhi's theater scene. Even today, the production toured different universities and colleges in small groups find it hard to keep themselves going, dogged as North India. Everywhere, it was received with great enthusiasm. Such excellence, critics said, had never they constantly are by the absence of adequate funding, lack of proper rehearsal space, and been witnessed on Delhi's stage before. constant migration of actors to the more luThe success of Abe Lincoln inspired Noonan to era tive fields of cinema and television. Exorproduce a second play, Thornton Wilder's Our bitant costs of production and publicity and, Town, with more or less the same group of actors, above all, the absence of a steady theatergoing whom he had christened "The Lincoln Players." public in this sprawling metropolis compound This classic of American theater, which tells a their difficulties and make their survival wellsimple yet panoramic story of life as it is lived in nigh impossible. In such an environment, it is no the small town of New Haven, Connecticut, too small feat for Yatrik to have been able to sustain was received enthusiastically by audiences at itself for three decades. various North Indian campuses.

Yatrik's beginning is closely bound up with the Part of Noonan's extraordinary skill as a director lay in his ability to make theater a shared work of Tom A. Noonan, who was the cultural affairs officer at the United States Information experience.

His noninterfering approach to Tom Noonan played Service (USIS) in New Delhi during the early production promoted individual creativity. As a seminal role.

1960s. Noonan (who died of cardiac arrest some Monica Tanvir recalls, "Tom did not act the heavy director. He usually left us alone and people developed years later in Bombay) was an unusual foreign service officer. their roles on their own." Sushma Seth also remembers that He was a trained puppet maker. He was keen on theater and seems to have had some experience earlier of producing plays.

Noonan responded favorably to improvisation: "He liked us to During his term in New Delhi, Noonan made it a point to innovate and enjoy ourselves on stage because he felt that such make contact with the local theater groups. There were two freedom did not harm but rather enhanced the quality of our performance." Habib Tanvir adds: "Initially he made me listen English language drama group;; in the city at that time-the to Henry Fonda for an authentic American accent, but evenUnity Theatre and the Little Theatre Group-and Noonan soon got to know them quite well. He was even invited to direct tually allowed me to stick to my own type of English speech."

Obviously Noonan's project could not be a permanent one. plays for the Unity, and produced Jean Anouilh's historical The players knew this. But having experienced the pleasures of drama about Joan of Arc, The Lark, and William Saroyan's sustained and shared creativity, they were reluctant to lose the The CaFe Dll'ellers. bond that Abe Lincoln had created among them. "It was," It was perhaps the experience of working with local artistes according to Roshan Seth, "Joy's idea that we had gained a lot that gave Noonan the idea in 1963 of producing American plays from our association with Tom Noonan and that it would be a with Indian actors through the USIS. The first play that he pity to let everything go after Tom left." So they began thinking chose was Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Robert E. Sherwood's interesting study of Lincoln's early years and his reluctant in terms of starting a theater group of their own. start in politics.

During the summers of 1963 and 1964, some of these actors Noonan invited some of Delhi's most talented actors to pooled their personal resources and undertook independent tours participate in the production.

It was an impressive, mostly of Mussoorie, Dehradun, and Nainital where they staged Abe young cast. Habib Tanvir had recently returned to India from Lincoln, Samuel Taylor's Sabrina Fair, and Hotel Paradiso by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London when he was Georges Fedeau and Maurice Desvallieres (directed by Noonan).

I

Thin)' years afier the birth 0/ Ywrik./our 0/ its eight.lounding memhers,fiom le/i, Rati Banholomew, Kusum Haidar, Sushma Seth, and Joy Michael, take a trip down memory lane.

Sushma Seth, Joy Miclwel, and Monica Tanvir (leJt to right) in a scene from Our Town, and the Lincoln Players (a1 right) with Tom Noonan.

They traveled third class and did everything, such as setting up and dismantling the sets, themselves. The reward came at the end of these tours in the form of a small profit of Rs. 2,000.

It was with this money that Yatrik was formally launched in 1964. Its nucleus was a group of eight founding members, three men and five women, seven of whom were former Lincoln Players.

Their names-and talent-were already known to Delhi's theatergoers: Roshan Seth, Marcus Murch, Nigam Prakash, Joy Michael, Rati Bartholomew, Sushma Seth, Kusum Haidar, and Sneh Das. Michael was elected the director.

Yatrik announced that it would work as a bilingual repertory company, offering a new production every month during the season, with performances every weekend. Reading through old newspaper reports, it is clear that their announcement caused quite a stir among the city's theater buffs.

Yatrik wanted to open its first season with something unusual, something other than a run-of-the-mill, drawing-room comedy, something that would stimulate as well as entertain. It chose to make its debut with Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning play of 1947, All the King's Men. This interesting piece of dramatic writing, which deals with a political demagogue's rise to power, is remarkable particularly for the playwright's deft use of an episodic structure and the device of the narrator at a time when the Brechtian theory and practice of "epic" dramaturgy were not known in the United States.

The Old Assembly Hall on Mahadev Road in New Delhi had been rented by Yatrik for a nominal monthly amount. This small hall, which could seat only 120 people, had never before been used for performances of any kind. It did not have a proper stage, just a speaker's platform. To thisplatform, Yatrik added a wooden forestage, one foot lower, that projec.ted into the auditorium. It reminded some of the Elizabethan open stage, allowing for greater intimacy with the audience as well as for considerable variations in performance style.

All the King's Men, directed by Marcus Murch, was immensely successful with audiences and critics. "If the performance is any indication," wrote The Times of India critic, "Yatrik has a promising future." A prominent weekly, Thought (now defunct), called it "a triumph of devotion."

Yatrik continued to work from the Old Assembly Hall throughout that season, presenting a new play every month, alternately in Hindi and English. It was an impressive repertory of plays by Gogol, Shaw, Ionesco, Albee, Shaffer, Wilder, and Beckett. Each production was a success and Yatrik, as a professional bilingual reper-

tory company, seemed to have nearly arrived.

Yatrik's success continued for almost a decade. It had to change venues several times during this period (for example, the Defence Pavilion auditorium at Pragati Maidan and Sri Ram Centre), but it persevered in its commitment to the ideal of a serious repertory theater group. It staged masterpieces of modern and classical drama from all over the world, from Sophocles to Shakespeare, from Moliere to Ibsen, Chekhov, and Miller.

By offering theater on a regular basis, Yatrik gradually built up a steady audience and sustained it for many long years. To publicize a production, young Yatrik members often went door to door in different areas of the city. To attract people from the Old Delhi areas to its Hindi productions in Defence Pavilion, it arranged a special bus service.

With the excellence and regularity of its productions, Yatrik had come to be widely recognized as the city's premier theater group. Although the original founders had broken up (leaving only Joy Michael to hold the fort), Yatrik had managed to attract many new actors and directors of considerable talent.

Young graduates from the National School of Drama (NSD) often used it as an effective platform from where to launch their professional careers. Moreover, many of the established names from contemporary cinema and theater-whether it was Ebrahim Alkazi or B.V. Karanth-worked with the group.

However, by the mid-1970s, a struggle for survival began.

Yatrik's ambitious plan of merging with Shiel a Bharat Ram's Indian National Theatre to establish a Centre of Performing Arts at what is today the Sri Ram Centre, had fallen through.

Moreover, under Alkazi's stewardship, NSD was fast emerging as a premier institution in India. It had also started its own, fully subsidized repertory company. Television and cinema were meanwhile encroaching upon the resources of the theater. A new class of "freelance" actors, who did not want to commit themselves to any specific group, was fast emerging. The spectacular success of some of the early NSD graduates in the film world was making young actors, directors, and writers turn away from the stage.

There was also a proliferation of new, mainly Hindi language groups with a predilection for topical new scripts by Indian writers. In their wake, a new class of theatergoers outside of the city's Westernized, Englishspeaking cultural elite (which was Yatrik's main support) had begun to emerge.

In these difficult conditions, Yatrik lost Ashwin Mushran (leJt) and Surajit Nand)' in a scene from Six Degrees of Separation.

much of its early dynamism and vibrancy and often came dangerously close to extinction. What it did not lose was its commitment to meaningful theater and its will to survive.

Faced with financial and other difficulties, it could have changed its orientation and courted commercial success through escapist entertainment. Instead, it explored new areas of theatrical activity, such as the community theater, theater-ineducation, etc. For example, sometime back Yatrik produced an excellent street play on communal harmony under the direction of Avijit Dutt. The group's future plans include a theater workshop with the inmates of Tihar Jail in Delhi.

Alongside these new ventures, Yatrik continues to work in the conventional theater although its dream of becoming a professional repertory company has long been abandoned. Its latest play, Six Degrees of Separation, was presented at the American Center in New Delhi in June. One of the most interesting scripts to come out of the United States in recent years, it is written by John Guare, who attained fame as playwright with House of Blue Leaves, after which he made the film Atlantic City. Highly acclaimed in 1990 off-Broadway, Six Degrees was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Prize for the Best Play in 1990-91.

Six Degrees is fashioned from a real-life, elaborate hoax played by a smart young man on some wealthy Upper East Side families.

A black youth, Paul, who appears to have been hurt in a mugging, finds shelter in the Fifth Avenue apartment of Flan and Ouissa Kittredge, wealthy art dealers, by claiming to be the son of Sidney Poi tier and a college mate of the Kittredges' children at Harvard.

He holds them and their rich South African friend, Geoffrey, in thrall by his seemingly knowledgeable and articulate conversation on a variety of lofty subjects and by promising them roles in a movie that he says his father is making. He loses their sympathy and is thrown out of the house, however, when they find him in bed with a homosexual hooker.

A whole range of issues is raised through this story, from the spiritual emptiness and emotional hunger of, to quote an American critic, "the life in the fast lane to nowhere" to various types of alienation that afflict individuals and divide the world into classes, races, generations, and genders. The title is derived from a pseudo-scientific theory (articulated in the play) that suggests that everybody in the world is separated from everybody else by no more than six shared acquaintances.

Yatrik's choice of Guare, like its choice of Brien Friel and Athol Fugard in the recent past, is evidence of its unwavering commitment to serious and meaningful drama.

Looking back at Yatrik's history, Joy Michael notes that "there has been a lot of frustration, disillusionment, but then there has also been tremendous satisfaction, an exciting sense of fulfillment. When you see a playas challenging as Six Degrees, you feel the effort was worthwhile."

D About the Author: Javed Malick teaches English at the S.C. T.B. Khalsa

College, Delhi University, The Economic Times.

and is also a freelance

theater critic for

Roshan Seth Remembers In the late 1950s and early I960s, we only had amateur theater groups in Delhi. These groups worked very informally and lacked the rigor and discipline of a professional theater troupe. We always rehearsed on somebody's lawns, or in a room with the telephone ringing, with servants and visitors constantly in and out.

Everything changed when a USIS official, Tom Noonan, Seth, one of/he founders decided to produce American of Yall'ik, in a scene plays with Indian actors and from All the King's Men. take them around the country.

Recruiting from the Unity and the Little Theatre Group, Tom got together a group of young actors. He provided what these groups could not-impersonal space where we could work in a concentrated fashion.

We rehearsed in a small auditorium in the USIS building. It was not a grand theater hall but at least a room with a stage. And it was air-conditioned, which meant that we could wqrk in any weather, including summer, and be able to concentrate. For the first time we began to feel truly like a theater troupe.

Working with us, I think Tom realized that there was enough talent around and that all it needed was molding. That was Tom's great insight. He knew all about theater. He was our Stanislavsky, our director stroke mentor stroke teacher. He was also a very nice man, very warm, very friendly, and with a sense of humor. He could be very serious too.

So Tom Noonan went on to produce Abe Lincoln and Our TOlrn during the next year under the USIS sponsorship. Abe Lincoln was also the genesis of Yatrik. The group itself was a sentimental residue of what Tom left us. Joy wanted a way to consolidate the experience and to carryon the work. The idea was right but we needed a Tom Noonan and a funding source.

Yatrik did survive and for several years we were in the forefront of Delhi's theater. But the idea of a seed company lasted a very short time. Out of the eight people who formed its nucleus, Nigam gave up quite early because he was more interested in the foreign service. I went off to England and stayed on there for several years. Marcus continued for a time but went on to other things and died early.

Kusum married and went off. Sushma and Sneh also left. Given the conditions of Yatrik's existence, people were bound to leave.

And yet, in many ways, it was the experience of working with Tom Noonan and Yatrik which helped me decide to take up acting as a profession. When I went to England in 1964, I did not go to live there. I went only to train and had every intention of coming back to Yatrik.

Yatrik's main achievement has been to keep its name afloat for 30 odd years. This is in fact Joy's achievement. While everybody else has come and gone, she has held on to Yatrik.

0

T IT]

he brilliant teenage misfits known as hackers have been stereotyped for nearly a generation as loners, saboteurs, thieves, and vandals. They spend countless hours in messy bedrooms experimenting with primitive, homemade, or bootlegged equipment, driven by a sometimes reckless sense of exploration and a fiercely improbable belief that information should be free and without boundaries or proprietors. "A hacker is a pioneer," wrote St. Jude in a recent issue of Mondo 2000, "traversing packet-switched networks, outdials, and trunks all over the physical world."

Hackers have been featured in movies like WarGames and Sneakers and novels like Neuromancer and Snow Crash. The battles these Davids have waged against such Goliaths as the [major telephone companies], the FBI, and credit-rating companies like TRW have occasionally even made it onto the evening news or front pages. But as it turns out, hacking was not the most enduring thing they were doing. By using modems to connect computers to telephones and by writing software to collect, store, and respond to commands and messages, they created a new communications medium, one already washing over us in great waves via thousands of electronic communities called bulletin-board systems (BBS's).

A small number of Americans know bulletin boards quite well. The most fre' quent users seem to be mostly white, educated, and middle class. Older users and their children subscribe to large mainstream systems like Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, and America OnLine. Younger and more political users tap into smaller, hipper boards like the WELL, ECHO, and MindVox. There are literally thousands of even smaller, more individualistic, often working-class BBS's in between-like Rusty n Edie's BBS, in Youngstown, Ohio ("The Friendliest BBS in the World").

Reprinted

by permission

Rolling Stone. Distributed

Rolling SlOne. Copyright Š 1993,

by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

from

This new medium still doesn't really even have a name. The news media portray it as an adolescent cultural fad, like early rock and roll or the first days of MTV. They might simply call it news.

This is the purest journalistic medium since smoke signals. Digital news is news at its most elemental and uncorrupted, and it is no fad. Only a few years old, digital news is already in use by more than 11 million people across the United States and many more beyond. It is the first medium the whole planet can be connected to at once.

"The important trend," messaged Michael Newman, also known as the Noominator, on the WELL, "is technology abetting the grassroots distribution of information rather than the informa-

tion being the domain ofhuge institutions to dole out according to their agendas.

The 'many-to-many' model is going to eat the 'few-to-many' model alive."

The Noominator is right on the button.

For generations, the leading newspapers, networks, and newsmagazines have served as America's information gatekeepers, deciding which of the many millions of news stories will move through the gate and out into the country.

Armed with relatively inexpensive new technology, millions of Americans are now finding that they don't need the gatekeepers anymore. For the first time, they're free to pick and choose their own stories and share their own responses.

They tap into electronic wire services at will, call up expanded versions of news

stories that interest them, then tell one another directly of their political aspirations or cultural passions.

The bulletin boards not only carry news and forge communities, they shape values and public opinion without help from the gatekeepers-those who have always told us what information was important and what we should think about it. The shift in control is already evident in the journalistic confusion that results when talk radio and TV force [a candidate] from a cabinet nomination or make a contender of Ross Perot, when a President ignores the White House press corps to communicate through town meetings and children's TV shows or when the public revolts against the media's agenda in favor of news of Amy Fisher or Michael Jackson.

Via bulletin boards, the process will go several steps further, leapfrogging Larry King and Oprah just as they supplanted newspapers and network news.

Out of sight of much of the country's political and media establishment, bulletin boards are continually transmitting information, opinions, and arguments.

Users log on with ID's and passwords and are guided through the BBS by answering questions and typing options on their keyboards ("go news," "see medicine conf," or "reply mail"). They can access updated news and information or call up directories of ongoing conferences and services. They can join in open discussions, register for private conferences, or simply read. Each user has his or her own file to hold messages and retrieve information. Conversations can be transmitted openly or privately.

The bigger systems like CompuServe and Prodigy evoke the feeling of a big, straight, newspaper. CompuServe offers its subscribers Associated Press world and national news, sports and business reports, weather forecasts, movie reviews, and full-text articles from 500 newspaper libraries, as well as professional information exchanges for doctors, computer specialists, engineers, journalists, and

educators, among others.

As much information as Prodigy contains, and despite its scores of messaging boards, its overriding ethic is profit; it sells everything from travel plans and silverware to cars. Every function is accompanied by an ad at the bottom of the screen. The system is part news service, part electronic mall.

And like the mainstream press, Prodigy is wary of discussion that grows too frank.

I I

magine a world where anyone l,.,II1lIIII __ 1' can have instant, unfettered access to information from anywhere -that's the promise of the purest journalistic medium since smoke signals.

"Please remember to direct your opinions toward the organization you support rather than at other members," cautions one Prodigy manager. "Personal insults or attacks stifle the wide-ranging, open discussion most of our members enjoy."

On smaller boards like the WELL or ECHO, users can sign on to a score of cultural, political, or scientific conferences on topics ranging from movies to Buddhism to aging. There are no cautions about frank exchanges; users battle one another freely and enthusiastically, sometimes even personally.

Plains-states farmers trade weather, price, and livestock information on agricultural boards; graphic artists trade computer-animation programs; psychologists alert one another to new research

and treatment techniques; parents look for summer camps. There's a conference on wildlife and dozens for those who want to trade information about virtual reality (see SPAN, May 1993) and other computer technology.

On the WELL, a San Franciscan who had moved to New York asked her friends back home about the fate of former coworkers whose computer company had just been taken over. Word was flashed back: They had been fired. A woman who had moved from New York City to Birmingham, Alabama, asked on Prodigy if anyone could relay the headlines of a black weekly in Manhattan. She wanted to know if the killer of a former neighbor had been convicted. He had. A woman with AIDS asked on CompuServe how other AIDS sufferers cope. They told her in a hundred moving messages, anyone of which would have made a poignant newspaper feature. "I never imagined how much they hated us, how they would let us die like this," responded a gay man dying of AIDS. "I am so grateful to know all of you so well, none of whom I will ever see." A young woman asked on ECHO if anyone in New York City knew of a gentle dentist. Hackers in legal trouble with the Secret Service appealed for-and received-money, legal information, and support.

For newcomers, bulletin boards can be both humbling and electrifying. Consuming the traditional news media is a detached process of reading or watching.

Papers and magazines can be picked up or put down, TV turned on or off.

Bulletin boards are the complete opposite. This kind of news isn't passive; it consumes back. Newcomers are welcomed, introduced, often queried, corrected or challenged. Imagine a newspaper reading you, asking you what you know, how you feel about the stories in it.

For journalists, such interaction means surrendering control and sharing power, things that journalists are trained not to do. Although individual reporters might struggle to hear from and respond to

readers and viewers, journalism is not user-friendly. Its institutional structure is hostile to people who want to communicate with its practitioners or argue about its content. Reporters rarely answer directly to consumers and constituents in the way they expect politicians to. Most media organizations believe they know better than their constituents what's good and proper for them. And journalists aren't supposed to express personal feelings.

That's why Time's Philip Elmer-Dewitt is an electronic journalistic hero. In January 1993 he logged on to the WELL and bravely announced that the magazine's next cover would feature a story-written by him and other staffers-about cyberpunks. Refusing to hide behind voice mail or the letters page, he logged on to the WELL for days before and after the story appeared, facing the highly knowledgeable subjects of his story, taking their questions and explaining how the piece was reported, written, and edited.

This degree of accountability is almost unheard of in mainstream journalism.

As distinctive and diverse as the thousands of bulletin boards are, this new medium is converging into one fantabulistic electronic river-the Internet. The Internet is the ultimate global BBS. It exists well beyond the predictions and imagination of novelists and sci-fi writers, a runaway child of the Space Age and the Cold War. In 1969, the U.S. Congress authorized the Defense Department to finance a military-industrial-academic computer network. Originally designed to pool research to fight the Cold War, the Internet is now open to any government, university, research institute, company, or individual who has a PC and modem.

The Internet has become much more than the world's largest computer network, linking more than 8,000 separate computer networks and up to ten million

people worldwide. It's the primary highway for e-mail, the burgeoning worldwide electronic postal service, as well as twoway mobile electronic radio mail. Nobody can even calculate just how much information is on it, what its boundaries are, or who will eventually control it. It contains entire scientific and academic archives, complex networks from aeronautics and African wildlife to the CIA World Factbook. Companies share data

between different offices, and hundreds of libraries in dozens of countries are putting their catalogs on it.

Computer consultants estimate that the Internet is doubling in use each year, threatening to overwhelm its informal and unregulated structure. Vinton Cerf, a codesigner of the Internet and president of the nonprofit Internet Society, says there will be more than 100 million Internet users by the year 2000. "This kind of reaching out from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world, at your fingertips, has got to change the way we think about our world," he said recently.

"It will become critical for everyone to be connected. Anyone who doesn't will essentially be isolated from the world."

The Internet is the censor's biggest chal-

lenge and the tyrant's worst nightmare. It is a living monument to the hackers' dreams of information flowing freely and without intervention. Unbeknown to their governments, people in China, Iraq, and Iran, among other countries, are freely communicating with people all over the world. "When it's more intricate than the U.S. road system and it's all over the world, how can you police it?" asks Michael Dertouzos, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's laboratory for computer science. "There are so many networks and subnetworks on the Internet, nobody knows who's on it."

No information medium has ever been permitted to be as unfettered as digital news is right now, and the battle over how unfettered it will remain is well under way.

Vice President AI Gore talks of a fiber-optic data highway linking digital information to schools, businesses, and government. [Phone companies) are lobbying to control the lucrative phone lines over which digital news is delivered (phone companies can -and do-put small BBS's out of business instantly by charging commercial rates or raising existing ones). The Secret Service and the FBI are pushing for laws that require digital news transmissions to be accessible to their investigators. Hightech companies are rushing to market software and equipment.

Arrayed against this army of special interests is a fragmented medium composed of a few large and already corporate entities like the Sears-IBM owned Prodigy-less interested in access and political issues than sales and revenuesand tens of thousands of smaller, diverse, and more fragmented ones.

Newspapers and broadcasters and communications companies have powerful lobbies. Digital news has one-the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Four years ago, partly in response to a series of sweep-

ing government raids on hackers across the United States, sometime Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow and software wizard Mitchell Kapor created the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF~see "Civilizing Cyberspace," SPAN, March 1994) to fight to keep computer-based communications media free of government and corporate control and to define the civil liberties of digital-communications users.

EFF is now lobbying Congress to create an Integrated Services Digital Network, which would ensure that communications in text, video, voice, and graphic media continue to be available at low cost to the greatest number of people using existing telephone lines. In effect, the EFF has proposed that the government mandate that digital communications be open to broad numbers of people by linking different technologies together into one widely accessible communications network.

If the government does, in fact, create an open road of information, most Americans will soon be able to get on it. The technology is becoming simpler by the month, and it will only get easier and cheaper. As soon as somebody puts a modem and computer in a homesize box and hooks it up to the tube, especially to multichannel cable TV, digital news is likely to explode. Americans embrace almost anything they can access via TV and zapper.

There isn't much evidence that the news media really get or grasp the scope of the change digitally transmitted information presents or the new opportunities it offers advertisers as well as consumers. Almost nowhere in all of print journalism's breathless hype over Barry Diller's suddenly trendy QVC homeshopping channel is there a mention of the dreadful implications that digital shopping will have on newspaper publishing. Is there anything TV can't sell faster and more effectively than newspapers?

Incredibly, it was less than two years ago, a half-century after the rise of TV, that Knight Ridder established the newspaper industry's first-ever R&D center~

the Knight Ridder Information Design Lab in Boulder, Colorado. The lab is exploring futuristic delivery systems such as a clipboardlike device that presents news as an interactive digital computer file delivered over cable or telephone.

As the universal model of news fragments into scores of smaller print, computer, and screen communities, will Americans share any common agenda at all? Or will there be journalistic and civic

A

s

bulletin boards become l..a__ ~ commonplace, it will become critical for everyone to be connected to them. Anyone who doesn't will essentially be isolated from the world.

anarchy, countless disembodied voices passing their messages back and forth in endless electronic arguments, the value and accuracy of one indistinguishable from the other? Can political leaders talk to enough people at the same time to create any kind of consensus? Who will have and control access to this world?

In almost every major breaking story of the past few years~the Gulf War, the Los Angeles riots, the World Trade Center bombing, the Branch Davidian killings in Texas~news is transmitted to us so quickly we can't absorb, evaluate, or digest it. The speed of transmission~the medium itself~is often as important as the events unfolding. Nobody gets there before us, nobody knows more than we do, nobody filters anything on our behalf.

Deprived of its historic role as a filter and gatekeeper, what will journalism's central role become? Journalism has functioned for generations as a national information wellhead, culling a few stories from the millions, shaping issues and our reactions to them. The wellhead is beginning to come apart, threatening an anarchic void. The challenge is to figure out who's credible and who isn't, whom to depend on for information quickly. The information we receive will not come much longer in the form of evening newscasts or daily papers plopped on our lawns each morning.

What seems more likely is that what we now know as the news media will fuse with new communications technologies or finally be forced into radical editorial changes. Or that some bulletin boards will join with cable broadcasts in establishing themselves¡ as new kinds of news organizations~ perhaps where editors, reporters, and columnists interact with consumers as Time's Elmer-Dewitt did on the WELL. In the next decade, the fate of both kinds of news media~new and old~will be up for grabs. The early hackers will be planting their widening bottoms in leather chairs in front of their interactive entertainment and information centers, trolling for movies and ordering up elaborate menus of news and information. If there's any truth or justice in the surviving media, America's most prestigious communications schools will commission statues for their lawns and libraries that might look something like this: An Apple TIC sits on a wooden desk hard by an unmade bed littered with dirty clothes. A gangling teenager wearing jeans, sneakers, and a frayed sweatshirt is slouched over the keyboard, reaching for a bronzed and timeless slice of pizza.

Implanted in the statue behind the computer screen, a thin, white cursor flashes eternally.

0 About the Author: Jon Katz is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine.

tJts A Review by LAURENCE

tJRtVE

A. MARSCHALL

Computer users are everywhere, but hackers are a breed apart. They remember their network addresses better than their postal ones, dream in programming language (C and LISP are preferred), and would find it just as easy to balance their checkbooks in octal as they do in the decimal system. They would rather spend a month glued to a terminal than a Sunday afternoon in front of the television. And contrary to popular belief, they do not spend most of their time figuring out how to break in to other people's machines. (Hackers call such intruders crackers and generally consider them a troublesome, if ingenious, lot.) True hackers are programming gurus, inventors, visionaries. They are, in effect, the wizards who put magic into the programs we nonhackers take for granted, from word processors and spreadsheets to telephone exchanges and air-traffic-control systems.

Hackers trace their history back to the "Iron Age"-the era, several decades ago, when programs were punched on oblong cards and the computers themselves were room-filling dinosaurs connected by cables so thick they were called bit hoses. The users of these user-unfriendly beasts were hackers out of necessity, and a flourishing subculture rapidly developed around the academic communities in Berkeley and Palo Alto in California and Cambridge in Massachusetts. Since 1975 the hacker community in the United States has kept a record of its arcane language in a file named JARGON, stored on. machines at Stanford University in California and the' Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. For the unlucky souls who cannot access it directly, Eric Raymond* (known on the electronic mail network as eric@snark.thyrsus.com and to the outside world as a computer consultant) has spiffed up the JARGON file, deleting some of its obsolete references and leavening the mix with a few choice kilobytes of hacker folklore.

The JARGON printout is a megadelight, especially for the arcane but picturesque lingo hackers apply in their craft.

Words such as byte, bug, and crash have entered the general lexicon. But there is plenty of material from the more specialized stuff: A good program evokes such terms as â&#x20AC;˘ The New Hacker's Diclionary, Press; 433 pp.; $10.95

This article is reprinted subscriptions Copyright

by permission

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are $18.00 per year. Write to The Sciences,

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elegant and cuspy, denoting grace and economy of design, whereas crufty, blecherous, and barfulous are reserved for programs that stand out as badly constructed or limited in power.

Hackers view ordinary computer users (lusers) with amusement, but they reserve the utmost disdain for the marketroids and suits who work for such computer giants as IBM. To become a hacker, especially a wizardly one, it seems necessary to enter the larval stage, during which the fledgling neglects food, sleep, and personal hygiene in favor of a "monomaniacal concentration" on programming. As revealed by their language, the hacker's aesthetic favors cleverness over power, humor over pomposity, candor over hype (or bogosity). Hackers may seem a bit asocial, but it's difficult not to find their chatter endearing.

Because it has accreted over time, The New Hacker's Dictionary affords a glimpse of just how rapidly computing has changed and how much it has remained the same. One wonderful story appears under the entry walking drives. The old, massive disk-drive units contained huge magnetic platters that spun at high speeds; a room full of them looked like a Laundromat in which all the washing machines were rumbling simultaneously through their spin cycles. If a drive developed a bent rotor or a worn bearing, the misalignment would cause the machine to lurch several millimeters across the floor each time it was asked to retrieve data. One peripatetic drive unit, so the story goes, rebelled against the continual human badgering by jamming itself firmly against the only door of the computer room, thus holding its programmers at bay until a hole was cut through an adjacent wall. According to legend, some hackers even learned the sequence of disk-access commands that would make the drives "walk" in a specific direction-after which, with a carefree inventiveness that still characterizes the true hacker, they held disk-drive races into the wee hours of the morning.

0 About the Reviewer: Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, teaches physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

1992 issue. Individual New York,

NY 10021.

or Sciences.

+

Mr. Megabool<'s

Dream Machine At 87, with scores of published works to his credit and his own private best-seller list, one of America's most famous authors envisions a high-tech muse of Shakespearean scope and Promethean

A

s

power.

the author of 40 books, some rather long and each requiring extensive rewriting, I have learned the hard way about preparing a manuscript for the publisher. Since I never mastered the standard typewriter keyboard, I've had to write millions of words with two fingers on an old-style manual typewriter.

Though primitive, I'm not stupid. Once my hand-typed version is in reasonably good condition, with pen-and-ink corrections on almost every line, I turn it over to some wizard of the modern word processor so that we can do the fine editing on the miracle machine. I am a firm advocate of the "do as I say, not as I do" school of instruction. r tell the students I teach each year that if they don't master the computer, they will never have the kind of writing experience I've had, because no newspaper, magazine, publisher, or word user will hire them. The clacking of antediluvian typewriter types like me is doomed to the way of the dodo's squawk! rndeed, I submitted one of my recent books on a floppy disk, a procedure quickly becoming obligatory. With one of my very long books, we turned my carefully prepared manuscript over to a scanner which, with no human help or intervention, converted all my typed words into electrical impulses in the size and typeface I wanted.

"I am convinced that in the distant future, no matter what forms we use for distribution of the book's successors, the man or woman who can write a coherent narrative will find a secure place. Writers and thinkers are essential to the welfare of the world."

As a result of my training, and because I am an enthusiastic supporter of the word processor, I have developed certain strong beliefs about what kind of even remachine the professional writer will want-or quire-during the next five years. Along with the microchip and graphics advancements thrust upon us in the coming years, we must consider how the very practice of writing will change with technological advances. We also must ponder what the definition of a "book" will be to future generations.

I shall therefore describe the ancillary services writers will expect, and I shall not be deterred by the obvious complaint: "But today our machines don't have storage capabilities to accommodate the monstrous amount of data you require." As an official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, I worked on the computers required by the space age, and I've no doubt the storage capabilities they have will be available to anyone with a PC in the very near future.

What I want at my right elbow is a system that will provide instant access to those incredibly valuable writing aids that I now keep in an unmanageable jumble of big, heavy books. Preferably, these data should be contained in one interlocking series of disks or a network which I can access while working on the manuscript, which will remain in the basic software, and which I can consult at the flick of a mouse or, better yet, a voice command. The data must be available without interrupting my writing or requiring me to insert new disks or a series of new disks.

My needs vary from word definitions and synonyms to biblical tenets to what is the quickest route through New Mexico.

Dictionaries and thesaurus. I am presupposing that my writer, whatever his or her age, is in the profession for the long haul, say till age 80. I'm 87 and still require the information I shall cite. A major lifelong investment would have to be one of the fine American master dictionaries or the Oxford English Dictionary, a masterwork of erudition. It must contain the maximum number of words, say 550,000. Granted, this is more knowledge about words than one will ever use, but they are of crucial importance when one really wants to know.

Word selection is also a basic need. I know of few

professional writers intelligent enough to effectively use any thesaurus based upon the original Roger's. A workable one should be in alphabetical form, structured after Rodale's Synonym Finder. Because it requires no index, it can afford to duplicate references back and forth. Thus, with the entry of get into your computer, you find 28 families of synonyms as varied as receive, obtain, sense, and get back at. But the principal entries contain the most-of ten-used words like obtain, acquire, and procure.

These needs should be combined into one alphabetical system where each word in the dictionary of a half-million words is accompanied by as many as 40 synonyms when needed or as few as ten when the subject can be so handled.

Almanacs, encyclopedias, plus the Good Book. A must for any serious writer is the classic Encyclopedia Britannica (28 volumes). Specialized volumes such as the Encyclopedia of Universal History, a good biographical dictionary, and even a rhyming dictionary also should be in any writer's virtual library.

Books of facts, books of lists, and other reference materials are treasure troves of commonly needed data.

With the advanced memory capabilities of my ideal machine, two usual obstacles to research will be eliminated. First, finding an obscure historical remnant won't take hours of dusting off out-of-print tomes buried in library basements. Instead, it will be recalled with the effort of a few well-selected search terms at your keyboard. Second, recent data such as census breakdowns or economic percentages, now clogged in bureaucratic number-crunching and printing delays that might take months or years to release, will be publicly available immediately, with databases updated daily.

Ifa writer deals with the great themes of human living, he or she will require frequent consultation with classic literature such as The Iliad, a collection of Shakespeare, and the Bible. These, too, should be retrievable by search terms resembling the oft-thought question, "What was that saying?"

Atlases. The basic geography of an atlas remains the same and its use for accurate reference is always essential.

Detail must be succinct, and the gamut of the environment-from altitude to geographical composition-must

be addressed. Other maps for handy contemporary reference to new states and alignments must also be available. But the mere map rarely tells the whole story. Printed words are necessary to fill out the picture. A volume like Webster's New Geographical Dictionary fills out the charts with yet more figures and facts.

Prophets of multimedia technology have already concocted ingenious references where these materials won't appear simply in glowing agate but as moving, threedimensional, digital images with full audio support. Many of these materials can now be found within the burgeoning CD-ROM market. Microsoft, for instance, offers a package called Bookshelf, which has eight reference volumes but involves the use of disks and becomes dated in the same way your first edition of Webster's fades into antiquity.

The real flood of information will occur, however, with the establishment of international information networks that can access not only the aforementioned volumes but an infinite amount of material from the world's greatest information brokers.

I'm awed by a statistic I heard recently from an expert in compressing, storing, and recalling the heart of what we today call a book: "With laser compression we can store the entire Bible on a chip the size of your thumbnail, store it in a minute space, recall it at will, and bring it before a camera and transmit it in readable form from the central library to the kitchen of your farm in Vermont."

I'm interested in this problem of the future because I brood constantly about the destiny of the book, a cultural artifact to which I have devoted my life. I am aware that radical new developments in accumulating, processing, and sharing information (the nonfiction book) and transcendent visions of past, present, and future (the novel in its grand form) make the future of the printed book as we know it extremely tenuous. Before long, the creative work that now appears in book form may well appear in some other form radically different from what we can now imagine.

Consider my case. When I started, paperback books did not exist. When they burst upon the market, I paid little

attention to them, for at the retail price of25 cents a copy, I received for each one sold three-fourths of a penny, less ten percent to my agent, or $0.00675-a profit so small that I ignored it. If! sold a million copies, which no one ever did, I received $6,750. Now, paperback rights

~\jl

drive the market and provide enormous sums to top writers.

That situation is being duplicated by talking books. Some years ago, they contributed little to the writer. Today, their rewards can be impressive. How -== will the distribution of information that never reaches hard copy or some similar physical manifestation be sold? Who can guess? But I'm certain new forms of distribution will arise.

With networking and multimedia, the way we collect information and communicate will be completely transformed. With the advent of voice-recognized computing, where dictation and conversation take place between human and machine, even the perdurable keyboard might go the way of the mirpeograph and manual typewriter.

No future development is too radical for me to contemplate, and I hope that my publishers are thinking far ahead. If they are not, they'll go under.

I am equally convinced that in the distant future, no matter what forms we use for the distribution of the book's successors, the man or woman who can compile or write a coherent narrative will find a secure place. Writers and thinkers are essential to the welfare of the world.

They preserve racial and national memories. They help establish norms of behavior and belief. They accord praise and identify blame. They instruct, caution, and, in their lighter moments, amuse, mystify, or terrify. They are needed in society, and I cannot visualize any modern culture operating without them.

It is for that reason, in these vital days when the future of the book itself is so uncertain, that I want our electronic geniuses to provide the learning and operating tools that writers of the future will need to keep their talents and insights functioning. At 87, I cannot expect to profit from the devices I am calling for, but I want them to be available 0 for those who will in due course take my place.

I

residentJohn F. Kennedy used to tell his aides that a mistake in domestic policy would cost a few lives, but a mistake in foreign policy could cost the survival ofthe entire world. The same thought was expressed by the eminent Harvard political scientist, Karl W. Deutsch, when he wrote: "If civilization is killed within the next 30 years, it will not be killed by famine or plague but by foreign policy and international relations."

The fountainhead of American foreign policy is the President.

President Richard M. Nixon once said: "I've always thought this country could run itself domestically-without a President; all you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy." Nixon's assertion could of course have been based on his personal interest, practical experience, and involvement in foreign affairs. But even Ronald Reagan, who came to the White House primarily on a domestic policy agenda, said: "Foreign policy comes from the Oval Office and with the help of a fine Secretary of State."

After an uneasy 18-month relationship with Secretary Alexander M. Haig, Jr., President Reagan replaced him with George P. Shultz for the remaining six-and-a-half years of his presidency. In his memoirs, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1993), Shultz lucidly discusses the world-shaking events that took place during his tenure and his role in those events.

But before we turn to these important events, it is perhaps relevant to explain the "institutional tensions" that forced Haig from office. Shultz writes: "I had heard and read that Haig's resignation was the result of clashes with the White House staff over both style and substance. He wanted to run things himself, but others wanted in-including Ronald Reagan. Haig's bristling manner did not suit the Meese-Baker-Deaver circle, and bureaucratic turf battles were constantly being waged between the White House and the State Department."

Shultz's own role-perception as Secretary of State contrasted with that of Haig. He knew that Haig's "instinct for command had apparently generated many of his problems." For his part, he was willing to "project confidence without arrogance, to be my own man while supporting the President, to speak candidly and substantively without presuming expertise where my background was scanty." He considered "public service as something special, more an opportunity and a privilege than an obligation." He had served in cabinet positions earlier in the Nixon Administration.

The events covered by Shultz's memoirs are indicative of the global reach of American fon:;ign policy. From the beginning, Secretary Shultz had to deal with crises like the Israeli intervention in Lebanon, the shifting ofthe PLO headquarters from Lebanon to Tunisia, the Siberian Pipeline dispute with the West European allies, and the Iran-Iraq War, to mention only a few. They all demanded attention and skillful handling.

What stands out as the most significant accomplishment in the management of international relations by Shultz is best expressed in the words of one of the book's chapters, "Realistic Reengagement with the Soviets." President Reagan initially had

P

Turmoil and Triumph A Review by P.M. KAMATH

The author reviews the recently published memoirs of George P. Shultz, who was Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration for six-and-a-half years. refused to hold any summit meeting with the Soviet leaders. In retrospect, it was justified in view of the quick turnover in the Kremlin leadership. Reagan saw in a little more than four years three Soviet leaders die in office-Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko--before young and dynamic Mikhail Gorbachev assumed political power in Moscow.

With Gorbachev as the new leader, it seemed possible for the United States to push ahead new ideas on arms control, human rights, and resolution of regional conflicts.

However, the task was made difficult by hardliners at home and abroad. The intelligence community and Soviet specialists in other parts of the government would tell Shultz "that the Soviet Union would never change no matter how bad their internal economic and social problems were." But Shultz-the professor that he wasturned the Kremlin into a classroom and drilled into Gorbachev these words: "The successful societies are open societies." Gorbachev had decided to focus his attention on domestic reforms; thus, glasnost and perestroika became watchwords of the Gorbachev era.

Beginning with the first summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in Geneva in November 1985, and then the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, the two leaders were able to' agree in principle on the INF (intermediate-range nuclear forces) treaty to destroy all medium-range nuclear weapons.

They signed the historic treaty at their Washington summit in December 1987. It became a turning point in u.S.-Soviet relations, and Shultz proudly records: "I had done the unthinkable-get the United States and Soviet Union on the road to a working relationship." At the Moscow summit in May 1988, U.S.Soviet relations were further strengthened by the ratification of the INF treaty; by Soviet willingness to improve human rights, to resolve regional conflicts, mainly in Afghanistan and Angola, and to move ahead on reducing strategic long-range nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, relations within the Reagan Administration were not always smooth. Ironically, some of the institutional conflicts

Clockwise from far left: Official portrait of Secretary of State George P. Shultz (1982); with President Ronald Reagan; welcoming Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia in Washington in 1985; with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during her trip to the United States in 1982; offering condolences in New Delhi¡ to P. V. Narasimha Rao, then Union Home Minister, after Mrs. Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984.

that had characterized the Haig period began to appear once again. A case in point is the secret policy pursued by the White House's National Security Council (NSC) staff of trading weapons for hostages with Iran.

These developments not only forced Shultz to offer to resign on the ~ ground of policy differences, they threatened to destroy the Reagan presidency itself.

The catastrophe was averted by Reagan's willingness to change course on Iran policy. This change occurred when the investigations carried out by Attorney General Edwin Meese established irrefutably that proceeds from the sale of weapons to the Iranian government were used to support the Contra rebels fighting against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. In a section titled "Setback," Shultz discusses in detail how the arms-for-hostages policy came to be pursued, first by National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and later by his successor, John Poindexter.

Shultz protested that the policy violated America's declared goals of opposing international terrorism anywhere and of opposing arms sales to Iran, which was declared to be a terrorist state. Because of Iran-Contra, as the affair came to be called, public trust in President Reagan dropped to 14 percent, the lowest level of his presidency.

In foreign-policy making, intelligence plays a vital role.

However, Shultz exhibited a positive skepticism about the intelligence information he was receiving from CIA Director William Casey. For instance, whenever he met a foreign

_/' LI

dignitary to Shultz about to wrong." provided

ei ther in the United States or abroad, the CIA provided a "supposedly advance notice" of what the visitor was tell him. Such notices invariably "turned out to be quite Elsewhere in the book Shultz says that intelligence

by Casey was "nothing better than Reuters reports .... "

The Reagan Administration deserves credit for introducing a positive note in Indo-U.S. relations by inviting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to visit Washington in July 1982. Although this visi t figures only peripherally in this 1, 184-pagevolume, Shultz devotes three pages to Indira Gandhi's funeral on November 3, 1984, which he attended as head of the U.S. delegation.

Rajiv Gandhi's visit to the United States in June 1985 gets more space. The issue highlighted by Shultz in the context of the young Indian Prime Minister's visit is the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan. This was "an issue that was exacerbating IndoPakistani tensions .... The Indians thought Moscow might be ready to act quickly to get out of their Afghan quagmire .... The Indians were ready to undertake a new diplomatic initiative with the Soviets, arguing for a change in Moscow's policy and removal of their troops from Afghanistan."

In sum, Turmoil and Triumph provides ample primary source material on the Reagan Administration's foreign policy issues for students and analysts who wish to examine them. The volume also serves as an empirical warning to policy makers that taking shortcuts for expediency could land them in a political quagmire from which they may be unable to extricate themselves. If President Reagan survived the aftereffects ofIran-Contra, part of the credit must go to George Shultz who at the right moment could tell him: "Mr. President, you are going wrong."

0 About the Reviewer: P.M. Kamath is a professor in the department of civics and politics at the University of Bombay.

A Different Path Those of us who spend our lives in public service,

the professions.

organized

private

carefully

cultivated

sector

or the

all develop

a

persona,

a

public

Text and Photographs by STEPHEN F. DACHI

ings that can only be gleaned from our all

and my camera on a different path. I have

too rare" truly private moments.

referred

But my three years in India have set me

Through graphic

to my exhibits Cultures," travails

as a "Journey

and my own photo-

as a quest

for deeper

type of invisible mask we wear like a

understanding

mantle, to convey the image of how we

search for identity.

want the world to see and know us. Many

moments, I think most of us would admit

a renowned

to the same thing: That we spend a good

artist

or intrepid

journal-

and, in a broader sense, a In our more candid

words

part of our lives in that search, even if for

and pictures about the rich and famous,

the outside world we bravely cling to our

trying to expose "the

public persona that ostensibly

ist has spent

mask," paint

years

to uncover the intimate

those carefully

fashioning

man behind

the "real portrait,

guarded

the

proclaims

person,"

who we think we really are. Be that as it

or reveal

may, when I set out to travel here in India

innermost

feel-

and began to discover its incredibly

rich

and profound trigued

civilization,

by something

I became in-

very different:

I

view, and one that requires limitless re-

the Indian

serves of fortitude,

precious gift of which their owners were

endurance,

wanted to discover not the Indian version

and, yes, even heroism.

of the "man behind the mask,"

women

but an-

other species of the more universal Homo

around

sapiens, the man without a mask.

around

There are countless and women around the ordinary

millions

of men

the world who lead

lives of people who neither

without India,

These men and

a mask and

courage,

can

indeed

be seen

everywhere

quite unaware: The gift of insight into the common yet priceless values of humanity that we all share.

the world, in towns and villages

and all along the roads

spirit. Those eyes gave me a

and highways,

One day while traveling through a village, a young man jumped up and down in

being daily passed by all of us with nary a

front of me demanding

glance or the slightest

picture.

notice.

When

I

"Why?"

that I take his

I asked.

After

all he

have nor need a public persona, people

looked into their eyes, through the lenses

would never see the photo when it was

whose lives are consumed

of my mind and those of my camera,

I

developed.

"So there be a record of my

serenity, and

existence,"

he replied. It seems that the

by the never

ending struggle to meet their basic needs

discovered

and those of their family, an epic struggle

dignity that I soon learned to value and

search for identity unites all of us, whether

that takes place largely away from public

treasure as the pure, undiluted essence of

we live with or without a mask.

there a beauty,

0

--.L ..

_

---...-----~--

ART IN

INDUSTRY

What are artists doing on the factory floor of a company that produces plumbing fixtures? Creating art no doubt, but in the bargain also turning one of life's duller routines into an 'aesthetic experience, Left: Wayne Potratz assembles cast-iron pieces.

Above left: Ceramic feet, untitled, by David Phelps. Right: "Carousel Horse" by Poe Dismuke.

A

rt and industry are not, contrary to their traditional reputations, incongruous.

Kohler Company, located in Kohler, Wisconsin, has known this since 1974, when, in celebration of its centennial, it started its Arts/Industry residential program as a four-week residency.

Run in tandem with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the program now annually sponsors about 15 artists-inresidence to work for, on average, fourmonth stints in the Kohler factories alongside of Kohler workers. The artists, who come from all over the United States, are selected on the basis of the quality of their work, the feasibility of their proposals, the potential impact of the residency on their art, their technical skills, and their ability to work with Kohler employees.

The company, one of America's largest producers of plumbing fixtures, gives artists studio space, free materials, full run of the equipment, and technical assistance in its factories. The facilities, which are open 24 hours a day, include a pottery and enamel shop, and brass and iron foundries. Because of the prohibitive costs of foundries and other equipment, the program provides many artists with their only chance to experiment on a large scale with many of the materials, especially metals. Kohler also provides artists with housing and a weekly stipend to cover basic living costs.

In return, artists are required to spend one day of each month of their residency teaching art education to different community groups. They are also asked to give one work each to Kohler and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. The artists are allowed to keep all the other work they produce during their residency.

According to Ruth Kohler, director of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the main beneficiaries of the program,

Left: Among the Artist Editions series in the Personalities Collection of Kohler Company is "Loon," Christel-Anthony Tucholke's interpretaTion of the water bird's bold markings.

besides the artists, are the factory workers. "At first the factory employees were very leery-they thought that artists were flaky and not serious about work. So when we chose our first artist, Jack Earl, we deliberately looked for one with very strong, down-to-earth art and with an outgoing personality. Earl helped to develop the rapport between the workers and artists that is the core of the program.

When Earl returned five years ago for a retrospective of his work, one of the first things he did was go straight to the pottery foundry to see everyone; it was amazing how many remembered him after nearly 15 years."

As a result of their friendships with the artists and because they see art produced from beginning to end, the factory workers find art less remote and more approachable.

In fact, says Kohler, some employees critique the

"Pick Wicker" (top) consists of repeated rectangular shapes; and "Solstice" (above) features striking geometric patterns that evoke a sense of rhythm and movement.

artists' work.

"Traditionally factory workers don't participate in any form of art activity, and are not encouraged to do so," says Kohler. "But since the program began, workers and their families have become involved in the arts center-attending lectures, sending their children to art classes, going on trips to museums. Many of them have developed extensive art collections from the work of resident artists. The workers become very involved in the artists' work, often criticizing the art in progress. Artists like to acknowledge that by making personal gifts of their work.

One even cast an iron voodoo gopher for a worker who had been complaining of gopher damage in his lawn and garden."

"Northern Lights" by William Meed was inspired by nature and natural occurrences.

The factory workers, according to Kohler, also just enjoy having the artists around: "They view them as free entertainment on the job."

Artists depend on the factory workers for technical advice, although the artists are expected to work on their own and master the equipment. "Before rapport can come, the artists must gain the respect of the workers by learning the technical side of their art," says Kohler. Being forced to understand and plan for the technical requirements of bringing a concept to fruition is a broadening experience for the artists.

Yet it is the artists' focus on the conceptual that makes them question limitations set by the materials and the process, and in turn force workers to examine their own assumptions about how things can be done. "The artists and workers learn to respect each other's perspective and work," explains Kohler. "Creating a ceramic sink and a ceramic sculpture require technical skills and hard workthey just use the skills differently.

What makes for a good sink and what makes for interesting art is often completely different."

Although Ruth Kohler wishes that there was a closer daily working relationship between the program's artists and the company's engineers and designers, the Arts/Industry program has left its mark on the products made by the factory workers. The artists' experimentation with decorating toilets, bathtubs, and sinks with marbleized glazes, colored clays, and decals has led to Kohler's Artist Editions product line. The line began in 1985 as an offshoot of the Arts/Industry program, using designs made by artists in the program. Today it is a full product division consisting of four separate collections of bath products, one of which-the Personalities line-still uses designs made by resident artists. Other designs are created by the corporate design staff.

Kohler believes that the program could be reproduced in any manufacturing company, but cautions that its success depends on strong administrative support. "It's hard for artists and workers to speak each other's language, yet the key to the value and success of this program is the relationship between the artists and the factory workers. A company could not just give an artist some money and free use of its factory; there needs to be an intermediary-in this case the John Michael Kohler Arts Center-to provide administrative support and, more importantly, to act as a translator between the two sides to help them work together."

0 About the Author: Maureen Weiss is an assistant editor of Across the Board.

American companies increasingly are discovering that integrating environmental issues into their business operations benefits the bottom line and society.

Management Turns Green Over the past two decades, corporations largely have viewed environmental compliance as another cost of doing business. The consequences of being fined, sued, or boycotted provided the primary incentive for companies in America to comply with environmental regulations and to take measures to reduce the ecological impact of their products and processes. During the past few years, corporations dramatically have shifted attitudes about the environment. Seeing carrots as well as sticks, they are modifying products, packaging, and practices to appeal to a growing market of environmentally conscious consumers.

Regulation still is an important motivator in industries ranging from automotive to energy. Yet, in many cases today-whether from fear of consumers, courts, or activists, or from enlightened self-interest-many corporations are ahead of environmental regulation. Companies large and small, in businesses as diverse as chemicals, consumer goods, and restaurants, are reducing toxic emissions, reformulating products, and redesigning packages to be environmentally friendly, beyond the letter of the law. Anyone who doubts this dramatic shift need look no further than the pages of corporations' annual reports: • Eastman Kodak devoted a special four-page section to environmental initiatives, discussing efforts ranging from using recycled paperboard in its yellow film boxes to developing cleaner water-based chemistry for photo processing solutions .

• Phillips Petroleum featured environmental issues prominently in the headlines, text, and photos of two Copyright

©

1992 by the ·Society

USA Today magazine.

November

for the Advancement

1992.

of Education.

Reprinted

from

sections: Technology, covering subjects such as reformulated gasolines, reduced emissions from production facilities, and modified refineries to produce low-sulfur diesel fuel; and Corporate Responsibility, stressing recycling efforts and elimination of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from plant sites.

• Borden devoted a special section to safeguarding the environment, citing the firm's efforts to design new food-service plants that minimize wash water and recover potato-starch (turning a former waste stream into a profitable product) and to use and mark food packaging to encourage recycling.

In fact, in most corporate annual reports, it is unusual for the environment not to be mentioned. However, many ecological programs remain negatively driven; costs of environmental compliance are skyrocketing; and there is general disagreement on how to move effectively from a reactive to -----proactive mode in environmental Wouldn"t ,t bp me •• somponp found a management. to k~p cht>mlc,,1 w •••.•t•. from pollutmq?

In 1991, Booz, Allen & Hamil-----ton conducted a survey of 220

I

If

Wd)'

t

l1li

senior managers in major corporations to gauge their opinions and actions related to environmental management. The shift in opinion so evident in the marketplace was confirmed in the executive suite: More than 80 percent indicated environmental issues are "extremely important" to their company today. Just two years earlier, less than one-third made that statement.

Despite the numbers that cite environmental issues as extremely important, only a handful (seven percent) claim to be "very comfortable" that the environmental risks their company faces are well understood and that a comprehensive management strategy is in place to deal with them. These leaders integrate environmental concerns throughout the company, manage their environmental policies higher and more centrally in the organization, and visibly demonstrate their ecological achievements to the marketplace and community.

Virtually all executives responding to the survey said they must manage risk better in the near future. Because the environmental function historically has been dealt with on a reactive basis (for example, figuring out how to comply with regulations), moving toward a more innovative environmental management posture that supports strategic objectives requires a major shift in emphasis and the direct involvement of top management. The corporations represented are large (91 percent have sales over $500 million, with 36 percent over $5,000 million); global (84 percent have plants in more than five countries); and diverse--consumer goods, chemicals, electronics, automotive services, natural resources, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing predominated, with more than IS different industries included. Most had formal environmental programs and published policies, but these efforts were relatively new. Seventy-five percent had established them since 1989.

"Negative" concerns-such as avoiding fines, lawsuits, or adverse publicity-motivate such policy development in most companies. The leaders (the seven-percent minority), by contrast, say their programs are driven by opportunities that environmental trends can create for competitive advantage, and much less by bad press and lawsuits.

Not only do companies usually focus their environmental programs on negative concerns, they tend to be reactive in nature, concentrating on achieving compliance, cleaning up abandoned sites, and minimizing known liabilities. Most have a hard time dealing with the longer-term strategic issues that the environmental movement is creating. Nevertheless, respondents recognize the need for future improvement and say they are heading in the right direction.

Respondents believe that all major business activities are affected by environmental issues, with operations (manufacturing and distribution) being influenced most

Surveys indicate that environmental concerns have become a significant factor with people in their buying decisions. greatly. This would be expected because operating measures-waste generation, disposal, and minimization; energy reduction; recycling; compliance; and permittinghave been the focus of regulators. Reacting to this high level of impact, 90 percent say their corporations have incorporated formal mechanisms to consider environmental issues in manufacturing and distribution.

Reducing costs. Environmental management is expensive, disproportionately so in some industries. The surveyed companies indicate they spend an average of two percent of sales on environmental expenditures. Effective programs cut the cost of compliance and benefit the. bottom line through reduced operating outlays, improved operations effectiveness, lower cost for waste disposal, and smaller expenditures for advertising and public relations because of their improved reputation.

Many managers see important parallels between quality control and sound environmental management.

A key part of this orientation is lowering environmental costs throughout the.product life cycle. These range from waste management and disposal expenses related to manufacturing and assembly to those involved in product use or disposal of packaging.

Bayer, the German chemicals company, expects to lower the amount it spends on environmental protection (today approximately 20 percent of manufacturing costs) by adopting an environmental quality orientation throughout the production process-for example, by instituting quality controls on raw materials and adopting waste minimization programs. Procter & Gamble has created concentrated detergents to reduce packaging; BMW is building a special plant for the design and manufacture of a recyclable car; and New England Electric has cut demand growth for electricity by onethird through aggressive conservation efforts.

Identifying profit opportunities. In addition to reducing

costs, companies see profitable opportunities to launch ecologically sound products. Many are redesigning lines to offer goods with lower environmental impact.

A number of surveys indicate that environmental concerns have become a significant factor in buying decisions. While traditional characteristics such as price and convenience are most important, a majority stated they would be more likely to purchase environmentally friendly products, such as a less-polluting formula of gasoline.

Beyond redesigning current products, significant business opportunities exist outside of many companies' core product lines. Solid and hazardous waste management and air and water pollution control technologies have an average growth rate of 21 percent in the United States alone. Companies in the energy, chemicals, and architecture and engineering industries have recognized this trend. Amoco, DuPont, Exxon, Rhone Poulenc, Sandoz, Stone & Webster, and CRS Sirrine, to name a few, actively are pursuing environmental services ventures.

Public relations impact. The proliferation of environmental themes in companies' annual reports is no accident. As evidenced by the fast food industry (McDonald's, in particular), the environment has The desert been the theme for 1990s thato~Stffied ",th watet advertising. Advertising Age now carries a regular column on "Green Marketing." Special events, newsletters, and media exposure on ecological themes have proliferated.

Since public opinIOn plays such a strong role in shaping environmental opportunities, corporations need to develop and execute a publicity strategy to promote their products and services and mitigate risk concerns. Those that establish a sound communications and outreach program stand to gain improved relations with consumers, regulators, environmentalists, and the public at large.

Clearly, publicizing of environmental achievement is a two-edged sword. Unless corporations have effective environmental management programs to back them up, public relations will be nothing more than window dressing. Today's consumers and environmental activists are far too savvy to be fooled.

No passing trend, the environmental era is here to stay.

However, the novelty value of such activities and claims

likely will fade as ecological management becomes an integral and expected part of doing business. Companies that succeed over time will be those establishing effective programs that promot~ a shift from opportunistic to strategic management of environmental issues.

There is no magic formula. Every company has unique products, processes, competitive position, and corporate culture that must be taken into consideration.

However, the basic structure and benefits of a successful corporate environmental program are consistent. Because the opportunities and risks are moving targets, companies need to strive constantly to improve the effectiveness of their environmental programs to reap the rewards.

Two corporate mandates emerged from Booz, Allen's analysis of the survey: Companies need to integrate ecological issues into total business operations and better manage their exposure to risk; and they must capitalize better on environmentally driven opportunities, both within their basic product lines and, where it builds from core business strengths, in new segments in the broader environmental services industry.

Environmental programs often are compared to total quality management, which relies on integration of that philosophy across all levels of the corporation. Similarly, environmental management must become a valued belief within the corporate culture. This largely will determine the success or failure of such a program.

The critical components of a comprehensive environmental management program include senior-level support and resource commitl!1ent; information management and communication; regulatory knowledge and tracking; organizational links between environmental managemen~ and business operations; a decision-making and planning process that addresses environmental issues; employee awareness and training; risk assessment and management; and an opportunity assessment and action plan.

Environmental management can be viewed in a similar manner to financial management. Some companies include extensive checks and balances and encourage the highest ethical standards in financial matters. Others establish different priorities-short-term profits, new product deadlines-and tolerate less rigor in compliance matters. If a corporate 'culture allows spotty ecological compliance, it invites substantial environmental risk.

Ultimately, an environmental program will succeed only if responsibility is ingrained in the corporate culture and championed from the top down, so individuals-from board members to plant operators-feel accountable for their actions.

0 About the Author: John C. Newman is senior vice president, Booz, Allen & H ami/ton, a management and technology consulting firm based in Bethesda, Maryland.

Ellis R. Dungan directs the leader of a tribal dance group on the set

ofPonrnudi, produced by Modern Theatres studio, Salem, in 1949. The hero of the film is tied to the grotesque animal figure in the background.

ELLIS R. DUNGAN

A legend of Tamil Cinema

I

n1935 two American youths in their twenties landed in the city of Bombay in search of fame and fortune. One of them, Ellis R. Dungan, hit the bull's-eye.

By the time he left India, 15 years later, he was a living legend. His recent return visit to Madras provided an opportunity to review his extraordinary contribution to Tamil films.

Dungan was born into a middle-class American family of Irish descent in Ohio 83 years ago. As a young boy he toured parts of Europe on his bicycle, taking pictures with his box camera and winning prizes. Back home, he joined the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, to study cinematography. It was at USC that Dungan came to know a fellow student, Mani Lal Tandon, who had made a name for himself as a successful Tamil filmmaker. Tandon invited Dungan and his friend, Michael Omalev, to join him in building. a movie studio in Bombay.

The two Americans reached Bombay, burning with zeal and a spirit of adventure.

Tandon was at the time in Calcutta, making a film. Much to the Americans' shock, they heard from him over the phone that the movie studio project had been shelved! To soften the blow, Tandon invited them to Calcutta and they went, hoping that something would turn up.

It did, for Dungan.

A Coimbatore-based film producer, A.N. Maruthacha-

The legendary director in a state of repose (left) during his recent visit to Madras and in a role switch (above), taking guidance from author Guy during the shooting of hisfilm on Dungan.

lam Chettiar, planned to film a well-known play, Pathi Bhakthi, written by the noted Tamil playwright Krishnaswami Pavalar and rewritten

by Kandaswami Mudaliar.

The play had been a huge success with Mudaliar's actor son M.K. Radha as hero. Unfortunately, as Chettiar discovered, the play's producers had already launched a film, dropping Radha and engaging another actor for the lead role. Chettiar was disappointed and approached Mudaliar for advice.

Mudaliar, who was annoyed that his son had been overlooked, came up with a brilliant alternative. Thiruthuraipundi Subramania Srinivasan (better known as S.S. Vasan, the legendary Indian movie moghul) had written a novel in Tamil with a story line that was similar to Pathi Bhakthi. Chettiar and Mudaliar met Vasan and purchased the movie rights for Rs. 200.

(That was how Vasan entered the movies.)

Chettiar was all set to commence production. He requested his friend Tandon to direct the film. Tandon, who was busy, proposed Dungan for the job. An American who knew no Tamil directing a Tamil movie? Chettiar was understandably reluctant until Tandon mentioned that Dungan was a Hollywoodtrained technician. Hollywood! The name worked like

magic. Chettiar signed Dungan up and the film, Sathi Leelavathi, released in 1936, was not only a success, it created film history.

Sathi Leelavathi introduced many newcomers to cinema who went on to reach incredible heights of fame.

Apart from Radha and Vasan, there were T.S. Balaiah, one of the finest character actors ofIndian cinema; N.S. Krishnan, comedian par excellence; and M.G. Ramachandran, a phenomenon of Indian cinema, the idol of masses, and later political leader and chief minister of Tamil Nadu.

The success of Sathi Leelavathi brought more movIes for Dungan. Seemanthini, Ambikapathi, Chinthamani, and Iru Sahodarargal all won him acclaim. The film that Dungan enjoyed making the most was Ambikapathi. The story has parallels with Romeo and Juliet. Dungan incorporated some scenes from the Shakespeare play into the film. Dungan's writer, Elangovan, had some of the play's passages translated and written into the script.

Indeed, Elangovan's star rose with this film, and for the first time dialogue became an important feature of Tamil films.

Dungan invested the romantic sequences in Ambikapathi with an erotic undercurrent. The love scenes between the hero, M .K. Thiagaraja Bhagavathar, and the heroine, M.R. Santhanalakshmi, set fire to male and female hearts of moviegoers

Dungan, born in Ohio and educated at the University of Southern California, knew no Tamil.

Yet he became one of Tamil cinema's greatest directors. How did he do it? in 1937!The hero carrying the heroine and setting her down in bed to lean over her ...bringing his lips tantalizingly close to hers ...winking at his sweetheart. ..all these and more were unknown to the Tamil cinema of the day. Indeed, after Ambikapathi, the hero winking at the heroine became the done thing in Tamil movies!

Dungan was now a sought after director, but he chose his projects carefully.

The year 1940witnessed the release of two of his films, Kalamegam and Sakuntalai.

Kalamegam made news with the cinematic debut of celebrated nadaswaram player T.N. Rajaratnam Pillai in the lead role. Pillai was no actor and his love for alcohol created problems for Dungan.

"Often Rajaratnam came late to the sets by two hours, and sometimes he was roaring drunk! And quite a few times he never showed up! When sober he was very nice and friendly, and we got on well," Dungan recalls today.

Dungan made the film with his usual artistry and technical finesse, but Kalamegam bombed at the box office and Rajaratnam never thought of movies again.

Sakuntalai, however, was a huge success and hailed as a classic of Indian cinema. The heroine was M.S. Subbulakshmi, the internationally known Carnatic singer. The legendary personality had loads of charm and charisma, and her mere presence was so electrifying that it elevated the movie to ethereal heights.

Lending support was the hero G.N. Balasubramaniam, another legend of Carnatic music. Fifty-four years later Sakuntalai still remains the favorite movie of millions of Tamilians.

Dungan's other film featuring M.S. Subbulakshmi, Meera (1945), also attained the status of classic. The tale of Meera Bai, the Rajput queen and devotee of Lord Krishna, captivated Indian hearts. Dungan shot the film on some of the actual locations where Meera Bai had trodden centuries ago in quest of salvation.

Dungan and his talented cameraman, Jiten Bannerjee, conducted several tests to shoot close-ups of M.S. Subbulakshmi. Making a mold of her face, they took a series of shots varying the camera angles, lighting, and lenses.

Individual frames were viewed with a slide-projector (then known as the magic lantern!) and used as guides' during shooting. Not surprisingly, the close-ups of the heroine were stunningly beautiful.

In 1950, Dungan's Ponmudi and M anthiri Kumari were released. Ponmudi created a controversy because of the intimate love sequences between the hero, Narasimha Bharathi, and the heroine, Madhuri Devi. Many called the scenes vulgar, even obscene. "While men enjoyed the sequences, in many movie houses I saw women turning their faces away and covering them with their saris! I, an American, was accused of

polluting Indian people by such immoral scenes!" Dungan chuckled.

M anthiri Kumari was a raving success. Written by M. Karunanidhi, the film told a tale of lovelorn princesses, power-hungry priests, people who were sons of priests by day and bandits by night, and eccentric kings. It had a rapier-sharp, repartee-rich, satire-drenched dialogue with contemporary political innuendos. Interestingly, Manthiri Kumari was perceived as a political film which led to its cult status. Even after almost 45 years it is still revived with success.

I

ungan did not know Tamil. Yet he had no difficulty in making Tamil movies. How did he do it? For one, he insisted that every word written or spoken in Tamil be translated into English. However, as Dungan himself says, "In a visual medium, action is most important and it has no language. I concentrated on acting and by noticing the expressions and emotion I could follow the dialogue too. Ignorance of Tamil never posed problems for me." His longtime assistant director, the late M.K.R. Nambiar, told this writer years ago: "Even though Dungan did not know Tamil he had a knack of following the dialogue. If an actor fluffed a line Dungan would be the first person to point out the mistake, long before any of us did. He had some kind of sixth sense about dialogue."

Also to Dungan's credit were the technical innovations introduced by him to Tamil cinema. Before his arrival, camera trollies were fitted with automobile tires and pushed along the bare studio floor. If the floor had bumps or potholes, the camera shook and so did the picture! Dungan changed all that. He had a two-seater Dodge car on which he placed the camera for moving shots.

That was the first time a "camera car" was used in South India.

Dungan left India soon after he made M anthiri Kumari though he returned intermittently to work as technical adviser and associate producer on American and British projects like Harry Black and the Tiger, Tarzan Goes to India, and others.

He also produced several episodes based on Indian jungle life for American television networks, and documentaries and telefilms on the environment.

Dungan came to Madras a few months ago in search of locations for a forthcoming American production, The Little Cobra. Gary Mass, a Chicago-based stunt director, will produce and direct the movie with Dungan's technical advice and assistance. Wark in India is expected to start later this year.

0 About the Author: Randor Guy is a Madras-based writer, filmmaker, and film historian who is currently working on a book on Ellis R. Dungan.

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FOCUS

An EllÂŁf9etic Secretary "We didn't expect this many agreements," remarked U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary in Washington after her week-long trip to India last month with a large delegation of leaders from American business and nongovernmental organizations.

The secretary arrived in India on July 8. Her hectic schedule included meetings with Prime Minister PY Narasimha Rao and a number of ministers and

leading businessmen.

American and Indian firms signed 11 agreements to explore cooperation in the production of conventional and renewable sources of energy.

In addition, O'Leary signed at least half a dozen agreements with Indian ministers for government-to-government programs to explore energy production and conservation projects. O'Leary and Prime

Anupama Srinivasan, a 19-year-old Harvard University student who recently took up photography, exhibited her black and white photographs of Boston and New York at New Delhi's Rabindra Bhavan last month.

Srinivasan, who is majoring in applied mathematics, took photography as an elective subject last year. Students were assigned to shoot a series of photos on a theme of their own choosing. They developed their films themselves and discussed each other's work. "My course at Harvard taught me to perceiveto look beyond the obvious," Srinivasan said, "and to understand photography as a way of expression."

In the exhibit titled "Perceptions," Srinivasan seems to be preoccupied by the concrete jungle aspect of big city life. She displays sensitivity and insight beyond her years.

Interestingly, Srinivasan does not own a camera. The university provided her with a Pentax k-1000, and she shot more than 40 rolls of film for the 25-frame exhibition at New Delhi.

-Kumud Mohan

Minister Rao agreed to the formation of a U.S.-Indian subcommission on sustainable energy development. In that connection an Indian delegation is expected to visit the United States in six months.

O'Leary presented the keynote address at the Indo-U.s Energy Summit on cooperation for sustainable development and visited a village (see photo) to acquaint herself with the issue of women and energy and to see the performance of biogas stoves. She made a side trip to Agra before going on to more meetings in Bombay and Delhi A major purpose of the trip was to help U.S. businesses tap what is seen as India's large energy technology market. The Clinton Administration believes that U.S. firms have a competitive edge in energy and environmental technologies.

O'Leary said that the potential market for energy technology in Asia totals an estimated $1,000,000 million.

At a press conference, O'Leary committed to return to India next year. Her visit was the first by a US. Cabinet official to India in many years.

CENTRE ,.. VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

~'O~Gtiola'tfaililf The U.S.-based Community Colleges for International Development (comprising 50 colleges across America) has been assisting a nonprofit agency in Madras to provide technical and vocational training to the illiterate and unemployed.

The Madras agency, the Centre for Vocational Education (CVE), was set up in 1990. It has established ties with five colleges in the city to offer training in varied fields-from auto electrical repairs and sewing, to care of the elderly. It also serves as a coordinator and resource center for other voluntary agencies providing similar vocational/technical training.

Experts from American colleges have helped in renovating the CVE complex which now has living, dining, and cooking facilities, guest suites for visiting educators and administrators,

offices, and modern classroom facilities.

This group effort among CVE, American colleges, and the five academic institutions in Madras began in 1992 under a five-year program through the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Jon R. Ryan, director of the Small Business Development Center at the Eastern Iowa Community College District in Davenport, was among the first group of American experts to work at CVE. Ryan has developed a special 40-hour small business curriculum and had it translated into Tamil. "The curriculum was designed to be very participatory," he says. "Students are expected, for example, to visit the competitors whom they would face when they open their own shops. They must conduct a market survey, actually seek potential customers, and practice sales skills."

Adrian J. Almeida, director of the CVE, says that thanks to the program, the Madras center will have a comprehensive computerized database of curricula for a whole range of vocational, technical, and life skills, as well as for listing trainees, trainers, and funding sources.

SANqEETHA The Earth Observation Satellite Company (EOSAT) at Norman, Oklahoma, has begun receiving Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellite data and marketing it worldwide through an international network of more than 100 distributors.

Norman is the first ground station outside India to receive remote sensing data from Indian satellites. Under an agreement signed with the National Remote Sensing Agency of India, the EOSAT can use the received data to assist American mining, oil, and natural gas companies as well as disasterrelief efforts.

The Norman ground station has been collecting and recording data since May 1992 from America's Landsat satellites, which played a key role in the early development of remote sensing activities in India.

EOSAT is the world's primary provider of earth satellite imagery for use in commercial, government, research, and

academic applications.

At the inauguration of the joint EOSAT/IRS service in Norman on June 21, Indian Ambassador Siddhartha Shankar Ray read a message from Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao calling the project "a testimony to the vast potential of cooperation that can be harnessed for the mutual benefit of our two countries."

Arturo Silvestrini, president and chief executive officer of EOSAT, said that IRS data is one of "the best sources of remote sensing information." He added that EOSAT would increase its number of ground stations to receive the IRS data.

Professor U.R. Rao, chairman of the governing body of National Remote Sensing Agency of India, and Secretary to the Department of Space, said the agreement with EOSAT provides "a great opportunity for India to share its knowledge and experience in using space technology with other countries."

RATNAI<AR

The Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, recently conferred the title of "Sangeetha Ratnakar" on Indian classical violinist, Lalgudi Jayaraman. The maestro's association with Cleveland began earlier this year when he was invited by the Cleveland Cultural Alliance to compose a ballet. In April, the three-hour ballet, Jaya, Jaya Dev, premiered at the city's Waetgen Auditorium and was acclaimed as a unique attempt in dancedrama.

Jaya, Jaya Dev has six episodes with Devi (Mother Goddess) as the theme, which is unusual because most Indian dance-dramas are based on Rama or Krishna. The episodes are titled after the different forms of DeviDakshayani, Uma, Ardhanari, Kali, Karumari, and Parvathi-and are connected with the aid of a sutradhar (storyteller) in the form of Nandikeswar (Lord Shiva's vehicle, the bull). The sutradhar gives a synopsis at the beginning of each episode. Another unusual aspect of Jaya, Jaya Dev is Lalgudi's combining of Carnatic and Hindustani music, and of Bharatanatyam with Odissi and Manipuri dance styles. But for all its innovatory aspects, Jaya, Jaya Dev meticulously adheres to traditional forms of dance and music. It is not in any way a contemporary piece. Nor is it inhibited in its expression of religious fervor.

After Cleveland, the troupe traveled to more than 20 locations in the United States and Canada, staging performances through June.

-Vasanthl Sankaranarayanan

Community drumming in

Takoma Park, Mmyland.

Drum Fever By day, Riva Rothman is a dataprocessing manager at Consolidated Edison Co. in New York. Dressed in silk blouses and conservative suits, she supervises the installation of computer networks for the utility. After-hours, though, she drums.

"Drumming provides balance in my life," said Rothman, who in four years has acquired more than 40 percussion instruments, which fill her one-bedroom apartment in an East Side high-rise. "It helps me to concentrate, it clears my head, and it connects me to rhythms of all kinds around me. The energies generated from drumming are very primal."

Rothman isn't alone in her passion for percussion.

Drum fever is sweeping across the United States as people discover the physical, psychological, and spiritual rewards in rhythm, even for those who can't read a note of music. In cities, suburbs, and small towns, people are forming community drum circles and are buying drums, drum recordings, and instructional videos. And they are forming what gleeful drum manufacturers call a "personal percussion market."

From The Nell' York Times. Copyright Company.

Reprinted

by permission.

Š

1993 byThe New York Times

"People want to buy drums that are small enough that they can throw them in a bag and carry them," said Dick Marcus, national sales manager for Remo Inc., a drum manufacturer in North Hollywood, California. "You'll see bankers drumming and you'll see freaks left over from the 1960s, too. It's like going to a Grateful Deadconcert[seeSPAN,July 1994]. You find everybody-from the Volkswagen to the Lexus crowd."

Indeed, drums are resonating in some of the most unlikely segments of society.

Nuns use drums to liven up religious retreats. Corporations like Apple Computer, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard hold drum circles to build team spirit among top managers. In hospitals, nursing homes, and centers for the elderly, music therapists use drums to ward off depression and loneliness among patients and as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

"Drumming is a form of nonverbal communication," said Al Bumanis, a spokesperson for the National Association for Music Therapy, whose members supervise drumming circles in nursing homes and adult day-care centers in Washington, D.C. "For people who've lost the ability to communicate, percussion creates a sense of

community that fosters communication when everything else is gone."

For professionals like Rothman, drumming offers not only a social outlet but also benefits similar to those that come from running, aerobics, yoga, or meditation. Focusing on rhythm seems to promote relaxation and help reduce anxiety and frustration.

"With a drum, I can release tension very quickly," said Keith Kirk, a geohydrologist in Golden, Colorado, who works for the U.S. Interior Department making sure coal mines comply with environmental regulations. "I have a lot of confrontation in my work, and I do a lot of computer modeling. I'm in my left brain' most of the day. When I come home in the evening, I pick up the drum. I can get into a very, very relaxed state very quickly."

Kirk became interested in drumming a few years ago when he attended ceremonies on Hopi and Navajo reservations.

Now he and his wife, Sarah, both drum, and they lead drumming circles in their community and in their church. Kirk teaches drumming, sells drums, and owns 30 of them. Even his nine-year-old son is a drummer. "I guess you could classify me as a drum addict," Kirk said.

Consider This Senora Harriet Doerr left college to marry and then accompany her husband to a remote Mexican village. Years later memories of the experiences she had and the people she met in Mexico became grist for two critically acclaimed novels about eternal human concerns.

uring a recent visit to my hometown-Pasadena in Southern California-I had occasion to meet a woman I had long admired and wondered about. The copy of Stones for Ibarra sitting on my shelf at home in New Delhi was dog-eared, testimony to her popularity as a novelist of skill and sensitivity among the many friends to whom I had loaned the book over the years. She wrote and published this first novel at the age of73, and it won The American Book Award in 1984. Now, at 83, she had come out with a second novel. When I discovered Consider This, Senora among the top ten best-sellers listed in the Sunday book review section of the Los Angeles Times, I vowed to get in touch with her.

After spending several hours in conversation with her, I came away with the conviction that Harriet Doerr would be remarkable even if she had never written a word.

Consider this: A young woman, halfway through college, drops everything to marry a fellow Stanford student several years older than herself, and to eventually go off to live with him in a remote village in Mexico, taking along their young child.

Consider that the hot, dusty village had no electricity, running water, or any of the other comforts she was used to. Consider the difficulties of adjusting to a simple adobe dwelling, reading by a kerosene lamp at night, and carrying on the business of everyday life in a language still foreign to her, while her husband looked after his family's mining business. The parallels to my own life-I first came to India from graduate school in Berkeley to live in a Punjab village-struck a familiar chord. And of course, the fact that we were both born and brought up in Pasadena provided further common ground for understanding.

"I suppose I thought at the time that I was making some kind of wifely sacrifice," Doerr recalls.

We are in her study in the mansion in Pasadena she has occupied for more than 50 years. She sits opposite me, leaning forward to make a point, a beautiful blue-eyed, white-haired woman in crisp, white cotton drill pants and blue-

D

and-white striped shirt.

"But after a year in Mexico," she goes on, "I realized that, far from making a sacrifice going there with my husband, I had been given something special, that he had, in fact, handed me a beautiful present as if gift wrapped."

She explains that the gift had to do with her learning the language (Spanish), ways, and world view of the people they lived among. Through 15 years of intermittent sojourns in rural Mexico, Doerr became friends with her neighbors and learned their attitudes, their strengths-all different from those of her own compatriots.

"When a fresh point of view was offered for my consideration, I often found truth and merit in it that moved me to agree," she says.

Doerr's two novels are not really about Mexicans and rural Mexico, nor are they about the clash of two disparate cultures sharing a common border; they're about the eternal human concerns of love, death, and personal relationships. Yet, she chooses to use Mexico as her vehicle.

"Why is that?" I ask.

"In a way," she says, "I was drawn to their mystical life, the superstitions, and how so much could be contained happily together-the old Aztec gods and the belief in Christianity."

She recalls an enclosed garden overlooking a lake. In a natural grotto in one corner, among grass and flowers, a statue of the Virgin Mary stood right beside an image of an Aztec god, in tranq uil coexistence. This reconciliation of opposites informs the inner lives of her North American expatriates as well as her Mexican characters-shopkeepers, priests, servant girls, petty officials, and landlords-enabling them to live "in the round" for us as layers of meaning peel away in the process. The result is a rare authenticity, one any author could aspire to when writing about a people and culture alien to his or her own.

Stones for Ibarra is an unsentimental, yet moving account of Richard and Sarah Everton, "two North Americans, a man and a woman, just over and under 40," who go to spend their lives in a Mexican village where they are the only foreigners.

Richard intends to reactivate a copper mine owned by his family; it is left to Sara to see him through what turns out to be the scant remains of his life. The telling of their deepening attachment and final letting go is the thread on which is strung a series of stories that largely concern their Mexicap neighbors. Their births, deaths, family crises, betrayals, and other events are viewed from the outside. In turn, these happenings add texture and depth to the tentative spiritual journey that the circumstances of Richard's fatal illness force the Evertons to make.

In her second novel, Consider This, Senora, Doerr again takes us to rural Mexico. This time a diverse group of North Americans and an elderly brother and sister from Europe come to occupy a subdivided, four-hectare estate on a mesa overlooking the village of Amapolas.

Each has bought a residential plot on which to build and to live out the exiles they have imposed on themselves. Each has personal reasons, whether it be to survive a failed marriage, pursue a Mexican lover, escape the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, forget a Jewish past lived among Nazis, or simply to return to die in peace and dignity amidst the well-loved, well-remembered surroundings of childhood. Again, it is the Mexicans who invite the expatriates to "consider this" (or that) alternative way of seeing and understanding as the outsiders grope toward (or simply stumble onto) self-knowledge.

It is interesting to note that in both books, the foreigners in the end leave their respective Mexican villages unchanged, as if their sojourn had not even taken place, while at the same time they. themselves go away changed persons.

When visiting the set where a crew was filming Stones for Ibarra for the Public Broadcasting Service several years ago, Doerr suddenly found herself drawn away from stars Glenn Close and Keith Carradine by the Mexican actors and actresses who thanked her for creating real characters for them to portray, not stereotypes.

Widowed in her mid-sixties, with two children now grown, Doerr returned to the academic life she had left behind decades earlier. She took liberal arts

courses at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and then returned to Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing.

"I loved life in the tiny apartment on the Palo Alto campus and going out with fellow students for coffee and conversation," she says. "It always surprised me to be included, considering the difference in our ages."

Doerr is a slow writer, by her own admission, and a chapter may take her months to complete on the word processor.

The shelves of her study where she works are filled with Edith Wharton, Flannery O'Conner, Hemingway, Updike, some classics. She does not work from an outline, but occasionally makes notes as she goes along. "It means a lot of rewriting," she

says, "but that's the way it goes."

"Memory is the source of imagination," Doerr declares. "At least for me."

She will recall a place, a setting, a happening, an impression. And the colors will become brighter, the incident more intense, the feelings more acute when imagination comes into play.

"It doesn't matter," she says, "whether what you remember is true. What is important is that it be vivid; experienced in retrospect more keenly than originally it was."

When asked how she sees herself in feminist terms (she has, after all, happily done what few women today would do: Rein in a giant talent while fulfilling the roles of wife and mother), she says, "I consider myself always to have been in-

dependent minded. If a new idea appealed to me, I took it up." She explains that exploitation of one person by another has always been abhorrent to her. "However, I personally never felt subservient or stepped upon by males-despite growing up among argumentative, intellectually aggressive brothers. Never felt put upon by husband or father."

As for the reined-in talent, Doerr feels writing came along at the correct time in her life and that age gives her insights and perspectives she didn't possess earlier, because she was too busy "living through life."

D About the Author: Jacquelin Singh is a Delhibased writer. She has authored several educational books and one novel for children.

AN EXCERPT FROM HARRIET DOERR'S

Consider This, Senora Seventy-nine-year-old widow Ursula Bowles has spent a happy childhood in Mexico and arrives in Amapolas to die-but first to make peace with her middle-aged daughter Fran, who has her own separate house on the mesa. The old woman, survivor of one marriage and one love, is disturbed by her daughter's lack of judgment in her

choice of men, but avoids confrontation on this issue.

The following scene-a party at Sue Ames'-another sojourner on the mesa-takes place soon ajier the widow Bowles' arrival in the village and brings together most of the disparate inhabitants, Mexican and North American, who people the novel.

T

course, was Paco, who crossed the room in seven quick steps to kiss her hand.

Sue had lit lamps and filled her house with branches of bright leaves. As though a stage designer had planned it, the women's dresses reflected these colors, chrome, umber, and, in Ursula's case, pomegranate red. At the revolving center of this kaleidoscope, Patricio, in a new white shirt, was pouring champagne into the glasses of Ursula and Frances Bowles, and of course into Sue's own.

All four men, including Padre Miguel, lifted theirs.

A toast to gender, Ursula supposed, offered in unison by these disparate men, each one alien in some important respect to every other. She glanced at Paco, whose arm

he rain, which a month ago had seemingly left off for the season, started again the night of the dinner party and turned dirt roads to mire. I am too tired to go, the widow Bowles told herself as she picked her way along the rough lane, an umbrella in one hand, a bottle of brandy in the other.

But when she walked into Sue's sala and three men immediately rose, followed soon after by a fourth, her spirits lifted. Of these men, she had already met Don Enrique, of the hacienda, Bud Loomis, co-owner of the land, and the young priest, Padre Miguel. The stranger, of

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,~,'The'wido'~ab)Vles'~u:f;;>,~(merged from the kitchen, ,a '" d phtter pf ,1,nle~mah'scharmib:~lght~f{~d'~hicken in her hands. And UrsiH "tched'all' fout ~en ,:" ,'<::d+ ,~:}lair:'ae9;lJis~~O~~?~tlilel~~s look,yp, as though they we~e,::htfP' ~n she li'ac~:f~~.r~d, ..~'{;;:;),~,,'"r<sud;g:!'nly Sbme l~aves q~d tWitched. ,', ced a doi~r :~:tldl~~liL:~potl~~~,/,:A~rag'facia, given ?1o,ney and fre~\ own the en her table;''llowsatah0ue'eno''f,1,a Luz, had bought2an emerald,g heir m6ltiple flic g. Directly opposite \vas,the ,:'!\vhichthe' proportion's of her bo~~ owles, with the peir tq the broken hacieiujaat,ber ;pleness, and its inevitable dffect u~g. ~J\ ',_ A,'VUrsula, with her stF'i!:iglitback and smool~'white -:fined. Skintight, low-c!lt"pre,post~to{" ',":¥air,deIighted Don Enriqi}e.,She reminded him',.Ofh~w~:}~ltagracia in it, aged the,ci)i1d.{year§i' :i)fl';.~" ,,~g.~R ~e w.gulg want t.o remember his mother, if she had di~d Be~au~e of the dress; \gra;c~\Va~/~~ye( s~W';)trs'~la in hej;., seventies instead of at twenty-six. t '~:t'spoke 5f Goya»:<;> 'the pr.i~st,{i " '. /j:it;:'-,,[.[}t1'(~, ':.'l?ad~eMigl,le(imfolded iJ,isnapkin at the widow's left..';~·'i "I mis~her ~iSits,"she'tbld;him. ,iSometimes I evefu~s~, He' had expec,tedto be asked to 'bless the food, but the ~:the'-goat.The iubstitute child." She paused toloo~inNthe;> hostess had said ~othing,' He decided ,:to thank' God padre's face, which remained unmoved and calm. Hehadii;': anyway and was, about tdbow his head when Altagracia forgotten the incident, she supposed, and went on only to say,,{i.~' ~~~~";"',~'~$:<,,

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"I was wrong to let her sit so close to the edge of the bluff."

"None of us can invent the way to change God's will," said Padre Miguel.

At the head of the table, Fran Bowles leaned across Paco to talk to Sue. "Absolutely watertight," Ursula heard her say. "Not a leak anywhere." At that, as though challenged, a flash of lightning whitened the faces of the dinner guests, and thunder rolled and reverberated above them. A downpour followed.

To this accompaniment, Bud Loomis, who had long sat silent opposite Fran, broke in to say he had a red-hot prospect for a sale of land. English people, or Canadian, he said. Or Australian, maybe. Then Don Enrique announced with some ceremony that in January the restoration of the hacienda would begin.

"I intend to reconstruct the chapel," he told the dinner guests, upon which Sue and Fran, two agnostics, both said, "Good."

Patricio, unsurprised by his sister's emergence from the chrysalis, continued to circle the table, pouring wine, while Altagracia, lithe and gleaming, hair unbound, lips sealed, changed plates.

All at once Bud Loomis, without waiting for fruit and pastries, looked at his watch, said he had to get going-he had a deal to close-and left.

Ursula, eating grapes, watched her daughter and Sue from the foot of the table. She saw that, of the two, Frances must be ten years older. But wiser? she asked herself. Which of them is wiser? I must explain love to Frances, the widow told herself. Somehow find the words to tell her what love is, what it truly and actually is.

Paco, sitting between the two younger women, was allowing his gaze to rest first on one, then the other. It was now that Ursula Bowles, a reluctant witness, detected a change in his response when he turned to Sue-a q uickening, a recognition.

My God, she said to herself. He is abandoning Frances already.

Two hours later the widow Bowles stood on her terrace under a full moon. All around her, newly rooted saplings dripped, as did the eaves of her house and the flowerpots she had hung on its walls. A heavy mist rose from the lake, a lighter one from the graveyard.

After the party Padre Miguel had escorted her to her door and paused there with a question.

"Are you not afraid to live alone?" he had asked, meaning, Are you not afraid to die alone?, and she had shaken her head.

The priest carried a flashlight, and when he saw the extravagance of flowers from the market in a pail next to Ursula's door, he commented, "So many."

"Yes," said the widow, without attempting to explain Patricio's mistake. "Tomorrow I'll take them down to Goya's grave," and a moment later she watched the

padre's robed, athletic figure disappear on the winding trail that led to the burial ground, the soccer field, and, eventually, his own narrow quarters behind the church.

Ursula, standing on the terrace in her pomegranate red dress, searched for lights in the village of Amapolas and at last glimpsed one through the swinging doors of the cantina. All the houses were dark and, quite possibly, not only without lamplight but boarded up against the moon, as well.

It was then that she discerned through the mist a number of animals cropping weeds in the graveyard.

Cows, she supposed, or goats. She stared into the dark as if the specter of Goy a's animal might appear among them.

Oh, love! the widow cried out silently. Who's to say what it is? It's like the verb for hope and wait. It has no single meaning. She shivered in a sudden gust of wind and, deploying all her inner forces, willed her dead husband back to life here and now, on a stormy November night in the middle of Mexico, at the edge of a garden with a view, and she very nearly succeeded. But even if she had brought him back, she would have forgotten her questions. She would have stood without moving, without breathing, struck dumb, waiting for him to touch her.

Alone and cold in the moonlight, Ursula stepped carefully to the outer edge of her terrace, as though the debris of love, like Don Enrique's broken hand-cut stones, might be lying about her everywhere.

She spoke out loud to the dark. "I might as well measure sky," she said. "I might as well weigh air."

Then, with the moon still high, she began to witness a shift of scene. She saw through the mist a changing landscape beyond the lake of Amapolas, a vast plain where exiled goats ran off to the four compass points. She saw children in tireless pursuit. She saw a whole horizon of dangerous curves.

The widow Bowles shook her head to dispel the fantasy. Below her the shapes of animals, tethered and untethered, moved among the graves.

As soon as Patricio arrived in the morning, Ursula called him to her front door. She had found a round straw basket deep enough to hide the pail, and together they lifted in the flowers once destined for the cemetery.

"Please take them to my daughter," the widow told Patricio, and watched his sure-footed progress with his swaying burden through her garden and out the gate.

Soon after that, Frances stopped Sue Ames and Altagracia as they passed with a casserole and part of a cake bound for the table of the widow Bowles.

"You must come in," she said, and with Paco at her side, led them to the place where the flowers smoldered and kindled and blazed against a bare white wall.

Fran Bowles spoke in Spanish so that all would understand.

"From my mother," she said. "Imagine."

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t 8:30 on a sunny winter morning this year, hundreds of farmers, shepherds, priests, women, and children lined up in rows that snaked along the clean, white corridors of the Bidada village hospital in Kutch, the westernmost part of Gujarat. They had come to Bidada to seek free medical care provided by American and Indian volunteers at the 20th annual Shree Bidada Sarvodaya Trust eye, dental, medical and surgical camp.

Indian American doctors, businessmen, housewives and students, most of whom were originally from Kutch or other parts

Medical Camp A growing number of Indian American doctors, businesspeople, housewives, and students

have been donating their time, skills, and resources to the Sarvodaya Trust's annual medical camp, which provides free treatment to thousands of villagers in Kutch, Gujarat.

Villagers (above and right top) line up to register on the first day of the 20th annual eye, dental, medical, and surgical camp held earlier this year at the Shree Bidada Sarvodaya

Trust Health Centre (top). Dhanbai of Sumrasar village (right center), who lost part of her nose due to an infection caused by a nose ring, waits to be examined by a plastic surgeon.

of Gujarat, have been coming to this small village for the past four winters to donate their time and resources to one of the largest rural medical camps in India. This past winter, 16 of the 100 volunteer doctors and 30 of the 130 administrative volunteers were Americans.

The achievements of the Sarvodaya camp are inspiring. From its humble beginnings as an eye camp which provided simple cataract removal operations for 1,000 people in 1979, the project now examines and treats more than 17,000 needy people each year in 17 medical categories, among them plastic surgery,

cancer, polio, urology, rheumatic heart disease, asthma, skin disease, cardiology, and gynecology.

Liladhar Gada, a trustee of the Sarvodaya Trust and chief coordinator of the annual camps, says, "With the generous input of time and resources from our American colleagues, we have more money with which to serve more patients, and we have added several disciplines, such as urology and endocrinology. We are also indebted to the American doctors for bringing sophisticated medical equipment and instruments which are not available in India."

As a cardiologist (right) examines a young girl for rheumatic heart disease, three others (left) wait for their turn.

Most of them come at their own expense during their vacation times. But one, Vijay Chheda, has become so committed to the camp that he spends half of each year in India to promote and organize the American participation.

Chheda is also a major donor and fundraiser, and a member of the board of trustees of the Sarvodaya Trust.

Like most of the other American volunteers, Chheda is a Jain and was born in a village in Kutch. Although his family left the village when Chheda was only seven years old, he has retained strong cultural and emotional ties to his home

state. He became a U.S. citizen and established a successful pharmaceutical business in Los Angeles. But now Chheda devotes almost all of his time and energy to the medical camp.

"Even though their lives have taken them halfway around the world," Chheda says of the Indian American volunteers, "they still feel an irresistible pull bringing them back to their motherland.

And while many of them have been very successful in the United States, they feel a sense of responsibility for their fellow Kutchis who are not as fortunate."

A good example is Dr. Chandra Haria, an otolaryngologist and head and neck surgeon from Cleveland, Ohio, who was born in Bidada. He returns with his family each winter to volunteer at the camp.

"This camp attracts us because of the infrastructure," explains Haria. "It is so well organized. Patients are registered, given color-coded files according to their illness, diagnosed by a doctor, and given medicines. Those in need are operated on right here at the camp. It's amazing that these facilities are available in such a remote, rural area. We find it very exciting and rewarding to be here."

Dr. Ashish Mehta, pediatric ophthalmologist from Berkeley, California, volunteered for two days at the camp.

"Giving my time to this camp is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done," he said. "When you see these village children with such terrible eye infections and diseases and no proper medical attention, it's really unforgettable." Mehta's father, Dr. Manibhai Mehta, an American urologist, also works at the camp each year.

This year, in addition to their own expertise, the Mehtas brought $16,000 worth of much-needed supplies from the United States, including lenses, sutures, urology equipment, antibiotics, and operating instruments.

Manish Vira, a young American student volunteer, assisted two cardiac doctors in a hut in Zarapara, a remote village where a satellite clinic was set up for children with rheumatic heart disease.

(In addition to the main camp, satellite clinics for eye, ear, nose, and throat, and rheumatic heart patients are held

in villages throughout the area.)

"My parents were originally from Daivpur, a small village not far from here," said Vira, a sophomore premed student at Rice University in Houston, Texas. "This is my first time in Kutch, and I'm thrilled to be here. I wanted to see my homeland and to help out at this camp, which I'd heard so much about," he added.

Vira's parents, who run a hotel business in New Orleans, donate money to the camp through an organization called JAfNA, an alliance of the Jain community in America.

T

he pace of the l4-day camp was exhausting. On the first day alone, scheduled for ear, nose, and throat patients, doctors examined more than 1,000 persons, and recommended 63 of them for immediate surgery. Over the next two days, two surgeons performed intricate microsurgeries around the clock, reconstructing ear drums and ossicles and restoring hearing to dozens of people.

During the plastic surgery session, 68 patients were examined and 15 operations were performed on babies with severe cleft palates, burn victims, and a woman whose jaw had disintegrated due to an untreated tooth infection.

Perhaps the most frenetic session was the one devoted to eye problems, during which more than 4,900 patients were examined and 418 operated upon for removal of cataracts.

At the end of the two weeks, 17,307 patients had been examined and treated free of charge, and 665 on-site operations had been carried out. While these figures represent an impressive accomplishment, it was only the beginning. Once the camp was over and the American volunteers had left, arrangements were made with Bombay hospitals for major surgery on patients who could not be operated upon at the camp. About 250 such operations were scheduled for this year.

The operations are fully sponsored by the Sarvodaya Trust, which organizes and oversees the patients' travel and hospital stay and pays all expenses, when necessary.

A dedicated staff of volunteer doctors and administrators

in Bombay does all the work.

In addition, the Trust has been holding regular follow-up camps and clinics to check on the progress of the patients. For instance, in February a follow-up eye camp was held in Bidada for the 418 patients who had eye surgery. This month a follow-up camp is being held for the patients who underwent ear, nose, or throat operations. Patients needing further treatment or equipment, such as hearing aids, prescription eyeglasses, calipers, crutches, or wheelchairs, are provided these free of cost.

"It is critical that we check up on these patients throughout the year," explained Gada. "Kutch has an extremely high illiteracy rate, so we have to keep in touch to ensure that they are taking their medicine and following our post-operation instructions. Education and building trust are essential to our success."

The Indian Americans are beginning to participate in the educational as well as the treatment programs.

Dr. Pravin Kapadia, an allergy and asthma specialist from Los Angeles, delivered lectures to local doctors in Kutch's two main cities, Bhuj and Mandvi, on the latest treatment and medicine in his field.

"This is the kind of involvement we need from Americans," said Gada, who believes that the Trust must commit more resources to education, prevention, and research. For example, preliminary research by the Trust shows that the rate of rheumatic heart disease in children in Kutch is ten times the national average.

"We have started a prevention program, but I think a study of this phenomenon would make an excellent research project for an American doctor, and' would help us understand the problem and better plan its prevention," said Gada.

"Severe poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and unhygienic conditions make our task extremely difficult. I hope our American colleagues will help us and as we continue to grow, this will become a truly IndoAmerican cooperative project."

0 About the Author: Cynthia Taylor Young, a

Bombay-based freelance journalist, writes on business, travel, culture, and the arts.