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A reader from Calcutta, Baruna Bhattacharyya, recently sent us a postcard to ask-"If I am not being far too inquisitive ... "-what the name SPAN stands for.

Baruna, too inquisitive you are not. People are always asking us about our name. In fact, it is a question I had myself when I arrived in New Delhi four years ago. I found the answer as I perused SPAN's first issue of November 1960: "This magazine is offered as a span from America to India ... from man to man, reaching across seas and centuries, reaching from old histories and new beginnings into the horizons oftomorrow ... a span of words and images to link our common hopes, our common pleasures and delights, our common goals and values." I don't think I can improve on that explanation, except perhaps to give a nod in the direction of 1990s' political correctness and add "woman to woman."

SPAN still strives to bridge common interests and concerns between India and America. One of the things our two countries share is a respect for religion. Our governments take great pains to ensure that our citizens are free to express their religious beliefs and tQ worship as they please. That first issue of SPAN carried an article about the Center for the Study of World Religions that had just be~n established at Harvard University. "Here T.K. Venkateswaran, a Brahmin from India, Sao Htun Hinat Win, a Buddhist scholar from Burma, Rabindra Bijay Sraman, a Buddhist monk from Pakistan, and Nobusada Nishitakatsuji, a Shinto priest from Japan, share the same classes with priests from the West," the article announced.

2 11 12

1994

Reflections on Religious Diversity

by Diana L. Eck

Scholars Examine the American Experience "We are neither closet Indophiles nor flag bearers of Pax Americana" An Interview With David Edwin Harrell by Murari Prasad

15 18 21 28 32 36

38

Call of the Wild

by Shoba Narayan

Voice of Native America

by Clyde Linsley

Campus Life The Grateful Graduate

by Kathleen Cox

The Making of Schindler's List First Lady of Lasers

by Michael J. Bandler

by Janet Kaye

Population and Politics

by Jim Anderson

4 1 Indian Birth Pangs 42· Focus On...

44

On the Lighter Side

45

Roy Lichtenstein

A major feature in this month's issue is about religious diversity, by Diana L. Eck, a scholar from that very same

Front cover: Cheerleaders at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., enthusiastically support the school's basketball team.

Harvard.

She acknowledges the apparent increase in religious extremism around the world, but asserts that interfaith dialogue and cooperation are also on the rise.

"We who make it our business to study religion cannot imagine a more interesting or demanding time to be about our work," she says.

This issue represents not only a span in subject matter but one in the magazine's leadership as well. Thomas A.

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; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Homan arrives in India this month to succeed Stephen F. Dachi as director of the U.S. Information Service (USIS) and publisher of SPAN. Homan, a native of Nebraska, is a graduate of the University of Maryland and served in the U.S. Navy before joining the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) in 1970 as a foreign service officer. His wife, Elizabeth Jones, is a foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department. They have a son and a daughter. Homan has served in Lebanon, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Germany, and Pakistan. For the past year and a half, he has been deputy director of the Office of North African, Near Eastern, and South Asian Affairs at USIA headquarters in Washington, D.C. As such, he followed closely USIS activities here in India and already knows what SPAN stands for.

-G.E.O.

Photographs: Front cover-© Robert Llewellyn. 2-3-Neal A. Vogel, Inspired Partnerships except 2 top by David Rigg Photography and 3 bottom left and center by A.S. Sidhu.

5-courtesy Council for a Parliament of World's Religions. 6 left-----<;ourtesy St. Sophia's Greek Orthodox Church; bottom-B. Fitzgerald. 7-B. Fitzgerald. 8-----<;ourtesy Crystal Cathedral. la-Jack Abraham. ll-Guy E. Olson. l2-Murari Prasad. l5-17-Shoba Narayan. 18-2O-Courtesy Lakota Times. 2l-© Robert Llewellyn. 22-© Scott Goldsmith/Harmony House. 23 top to bottom-© William Strode/Harmony House; © Steve Dunwell/Image Bank; © Chris Usher/Harmony House. 24 top to bottom-© Robert Llewellyn/Ithaca College; © Steve Dunwell/lmage Bank;. Wesleyan University. 25-© Steve DunwelljImage Bank. 26-© Brian Smith/Harmony House. 27 left, top to bottoril© Phil Schofield; © Brian Smith/Harmony House; Tommy L. Thompson; rightGraduation Foto. 28-AvinashPasricha. 30-31-'-CourtesyAmerican Business Information.

32-35-Universal Pictures. 36-Patricia Tryforos. 4 I-Joe Daniels. 42-0wen Cary 1994.

43-Jotinder J.P. Takhar. 45-47-----<;ourtesy Corcoran Gallery Art. 48-Nand Katyal.

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. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited.

Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Use oj SPAN articles in other publications isencouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price oj magazine, one yea(s subscription (12 issues) Rs. 120 (Rs. lID for students); single copy, Rs. 12.

The places of worship pictured here from the Chicago metropolitan area reflect the interreligious dialogue that took place in that city in 1893 at the first World's Parliament of Religions ...

Greater Chicago Hindu Temple

...and again last year in a centennial celebration of that precedent-setting event.

Today, interfaith relations have become a main street affair in almost every major city in America.

Reflections on Religious

by DIANA

L. ECK

Delegates to theftrst World's Parliament of Religions boldly proclaimed the "end of national religions" and resolved that their traditions would henceforth make war "not on each other, but on the giant evils that afflict mankind." The author asserts that vast global transformations and major new understandings derivedfrom the comparative study of religions have challenged-but not destroyed-that centuryold spirit of conciliation and cooperation.

S

everal worldwide interfaith organizations, including the World Conference on Religion and Peace, named 1993 the "Year ofInterreligious Understanding and Cooperation." The occasion was the centennial of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions, a landmark event that took place in Chicago in connection with the World's Columbian Exhibition.

There, for the first time in modern history, some would say for the first time ever, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, adherents of the Shinto and Zoroastrian traditions-all met together to speak of their faith. The gathering was planned and hosted by Protestant Christians. As the chairman of the Parliament, Presbyterian minister John Henry Barrows, observed, "It was felt to be wise and advantageous that the religions of the world, which are competing at so many points in all the continents, should be brought together not for contention but for loving conference, in one room."

The Parliament convened for 17 days of meetings and more than 200 presentations.

Thousands packed into the Art Institute of Chicago, hearing for the first time the voices of Hindus, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians. India's eloquent Swami Vivekananda spoke of Hinduism as the religion that has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance and described the diversity of religions as "the same light coming through different colors." Together, the assembly recited the Lord's Prayer as a universal prayer, and Rabbi Emil Hirsch of Chicago proclaimed, "The day of national religions is past. The God of the universe speaks to all mankind!" At the closing session, Chicago lawyer Charles Bonney, one of the Parliament's chief visionaries, declared, "Henceforth the religions of the world will make war, not on each other, but on the giant evils that afflict mankind."

Today one reads these words with considerable skepticism.

On the surface at least, most people see little evidence of a cooperative religious alliance against the ills of the world.

Indeed, the past 100 years have provided ample evidence that religions are still powerful producers of symbolic weaponry for the strife of humankind. In the late 20th century, religious rhetoric and the communal power of religious identity have been employed in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Sri Lanka, India, and in the competition between Muslims and Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. As 1993 began, communal violence returned to India, sparked by the controversy over a 16th-century mosque said to stand on the ruins of an ancient Hindu temple honoring Lord Rama. "Ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, the flaring of anti-Semitism in Europe, the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York-all were replete with religious overtones and undertones. The fear of losing ground to the "other" or to "secularism" seems to lodge equally in the hearts of majorities and minorities, and fanning that fear is the strategy of religious communalists the world over. In the 1990s the politics of identity is reshaping the globe, with religion forming an important part of ever more narrowly construed ethnic and national identities.

So what about the Year ofInterreligious Understanding and Cooperation? Was it the pipe dream of those who never read the newspapers, or was there also another, more hopeful story to be told? After all, extremism captures public attention in a way that cooperation and understanding do not. When a mosque is destroyed in Ayodhya or a Hindu temple is toppled in Lahore, the news reports do not mention the Friendship Circles of Hindus and Muslims who work tirelessly for interreligious harmony in Kanpur or the peace brigades of Bombay.

When fearful citizens of Milton, Massachusetts, protest plans for a new mosque, we are more likely to hear about it than when a spirit of cooperation prevails, as it did in Sharon, Massachusetts, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews from all over New England gathered to break ground for a new Islamic Center. Extremism and contention constitute news; cooperation seldom does.

Yet a careful observer of the religious world today would have to conclude that if religious extremism and religious chauvinism has had an upswing in the late 20th century, so has interreligious dialogue and cooperation. The last two decades have seen the genesis of countless interfaith activities. There are local efforts-interfaith councils in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Syracuse, New York. There are Christian-Buddhist dialogues on nonviolence, on humanity's relation to nature, and on the meaning of Christian "God" language and Buddhist "Emptiness" language. There

Diversity are interfaith forums on AIDS, refugees, and the environment. And today, 101 years after the Chicago Parliament, there are five major international interreligious organizations-the International Association for Religious Freedom, the Temple of Understanding, the World Congress of Faiths, the World Conference on Religion and Peace, and the Global Forum.

Are we then at the beginning of a new era of religious extremism, chauvinism, and fundamentalism, or one of religious pluralism based on the recognition of inter de pendence and the necessity of interreligious cooperation? While the georeligious world today is too complex to assert that either of these two powerful currents predominates, one can safely say that fundamentalism and pluralism pose the two challenges that people of all religious traditions face.

Both fundamentalism and pluralism are responses to modernity, with its religious diversity and competing values. Fundamentalists reaffirm the exclusive certainties of their own traditions, with a heightened sense of the boundaries of belonging that separate "us" from "them."

Pluralists, without giving up the distinctiveness of their own tradition, engage the other in the mutual education and, Delegates to the World's Parliameni of Religions of 1893 (top) and 1993 rejiected a wide diversity potentially, the mutual transformation of of religious traditions and beliefs as well as a common goal of understanding and cooperation. dialogue. To the fundamentalist, the borders of religious certainty are tightly guarded; to the pluralist, launched at the University of Chicago's Divinity School with the borders are good fences where one meets the neighbor. To the cooperation of the American Academy of Arts and Scimany fundamentalists, secularism, seen as the denial of reences, has spent several years organizing scholars to assess the ligious claims, is the enemy; to pluralists, secularism, seen as the movements that might be termed fundamentalisms-those separation of government from the domination of a single Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, and even Hindu movereligion, is the essential concomitant of religious diversity and ments that are characterized by certain family resemblances: the protection of religious freedom.

A hostility toward modernity and secularism, an insistence Both movements fire compelling reminders to those of us in upon the exclusivity of truth claims, and a clear sense of universities that the history of religions, as the comparative the boundaries that set the community apart. More recently study of religions is sometimes called, is not over but is and more modestly, the Pluralism Project, an undertaking of happening before our very eyes. We who make it our business Harvard University's Committee on the Study of Religion, has to study religion cannot imagine a more interesting or demandengaged student researchers throughout the United States to ing time to be about our work. The Fundamentalism Project, map the virtually unknown terrain of America's new religious

landscape with its immigrant and indigenous Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh communities. It is also studying the emerging mediating institutions, such as interfaith councils, and asking how religious diversity is reshaping the meaning of American pluralism.

To understand the unfolding history of religions, scholars have to study the new forms of religious exclusivism and pluralism. At present, the greatest religious tensions are not those between anyone religion and another; they are the tensions between the fundamentalist and the pluralist in each and every religious tradition.

At the Parliament of 1893, neither fundamentalism nor pluralism in their modern forms were much in the air. But there were hints of the kind of exclusivism that would rise again in so many religious traditions in the late 20th century. The Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid II, refused an invitation to attend; whether from active disapproval or sheer lack of interest is unclear. The Archbishop of Canterbury declined to attend because, as he put it, "the Christian religion is the only true religion." The Reverend E.J. Eitel, a Hong Kong missionary, wrote accusing the organizers of "playing fast and loose with the truth and coquetting with false religions." The headline in the Chicago Tribune on September 16, 1893, would have confirmed his suspicions: "Wells of Truth Outside."

It underlined the realization, to some a blasphemy, that there was indeed religious truth outside the Christian tradition.

Despite these rebuffs, the prevailing spirit of the Parliament was a kind of welcoming universalism or inclusivism on the part of the Western and largely Christian hosts. The spirit of universalism was very popular in the late 19th century. As Oxford University professor Max Muller put it, "The living kernel of religion can be found, I believe, in almost every creed, however much the husk may vary. And think what that means! It means that above and beneath and behind all religions there is one eternal, one universal religion." Some version of this affirmation was integral to the worldview of the Unitarian movement, the Theosophists, the Swedenborgians, and the reformed Hindu movements of the 19th century such as the Brahmo Samaj. One of the goals of the Parliament was to "unite all religions against irreligion."

For many of those at the Parliament, however, the universal gathering-in of the religions was nothing more than an extension of the vision of a united Christendom. Chairman Barrows addressed the assembly as children of One God and asked, "Why should not Christians be glad to learn what God has wrought through Buddha and Zoroaster-through the sages of China, and the prophets of India and the prophet of Islam?"

The God of whom all were children and who spoke through the Buddha, however, was clearly understood to be the God most

of the Christian audience already knew and whom was addressed in the Lord's Prayer. While Barrows truly believed that all were there as members of a Parliament of Religions over which flies no sectarian flag, it is clear that his very conception of the universal was but a larger and more expansive Christianity.

General knowledge of the world's religious traditions was scant 100 years ago. One of the planners of the 1893 Parliament called it "the first school of comparative religions wherein devout men of all faiths may speak for themselves without hindrance, without criticism, and without compromise and tell what they believe and why they believe it." And they did. When the Sri Lankan Buddhist reformer Dharmapala asked the assembly, "How many of you have read the life of the Buddha?," only five raised a hand. "Five only!" he scolded.

"Four hundred and seventy-five millions of people accept our religion oflove and hope. You call yourselves a nation-a great nation-and yet you do not know the history of this great teacher. How dare you judge us!"

The comparative study of religion was relatively new as an academic subject in the late 19th century. Studying one's own religious tradition was one thing, but the attempt to enter into the disciplined study of another faith, to understand a worldview and transcendent vision one does not share, was something new in the academic world. And beyond the study of another particular tradition was the attempt to discern what religion is as a human phenomenon.

At the time of the Parliament, only a handful of American universities attempted such study at all. Today there are nearly 1,000 four-year colleges and universities, public and private, with departments of religious studies. To some extent the genesis of academic interest in the religions of the world, especially in the United States, can be traced to the Parliament.

Six European scholars of religion, including F. Max Muller, c.P. Thiele, ¡and J. Estlin Carpenter, sent messages to the Parliament. Muller even sent a second letter, regretting deeply that he had been unable to come and referring to the Parliament as "one of the most memorable events in the history of the world." Muller (1823-1900) is often seen as a father of com parative religion, which he referred to as the "science of religion."

He set an early standard for this study when he said, "He who knows one, knows none." Muller used language as an analogy, arguing that it is only by becoming fluent in another language that one is able to gain some perspective on the peculiarities and distinctiveness of one's own and thus gain a more general sense of the structure and workings of language.

In the 19th century, it was common in the West to speak of Judaism and Christianity as revealed religion and the others as natural religion. However, emerging philological scholarship challenged this distinction. Muller, a scholar of the religions of India and translator of the Rig Veda, was the major force

behind the publication of the series called "The Sacred Books of the East," which brought major sacred texts of the "Eastern" religious traditions into English translation. Muller's colleague at Oxford, J. Estlin Carpenter, wrote to the Parliament of the significance of this for the future of religion: Philology has put the key of language into our hands.

Shrine after shrine in the world's great temple has been entered; the songs of praise, the commands of law, the litanies of penitence, have been fetched from the tombs of the Nile, or the mounds of Mesopotamia, or the sanctuaries of the Ganges. The Bible of humanity has been recorded. What will it teach us? I desire to suggest to this Congress that it bring home the need of a conception of revelation unconfined to any particular religion, but capable of application in diverse modes to all.

The "key oflanguage" did indeed make available to Western readers sources that could roughly be called scripture-the A vesta of the Zoroastrian tradition, the Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads of the Hindu tradition. It also made possible the historical and critical study of the Bible. Both would eventually provoke the antagonism of 20th-century Protestant fundamentalism.

Just as the spirit of universalism dominated the Parliament and the religious outlook of the late 19th century, so did it dominate the emerging study of religion. Muller's sense that "above and beneath and behind all religions there is one eternal, one universal religion" generated a spirit of reification-something called religion and various boundaried enti ties called the religions. The other side of the visionary hope for an emerging universal religion was the strong impulse in the wake of Darwin to discover the origins of religion-in the primordial response to nature, as Muller contended, or in what E.B. Tylor called animism, or in Emile Durkheim's description of totemism as the germ of that "eminently collective thing" called religion, or in Freud's primordial struggle of the sons against the fathers, or in Jung's "myth-forming structural elements" of the unconscious psyche he called archetypes.

Naming the religions gave Muller paus\::. Confucianism seemed to be known in Chinese as "the Teaching," Taoism as "the Way." None seemed to have a name for itself or a word for religion. Nonetheless, describing these teachings and ways as the great religions became commonplace. For example, in his Ten Great Religions (1871), Harvard professor James Freeman Clarke discusses ten religious "systems" such as Brahmanism, Buddhism, and the religion of ancient Rome, all described as ethnic religions, and compares each with Christianity, which, by contrast, is not ethnic but catholic or universal in nature, and therefore holding promise of becoming the "religion of all races."

The power of definition and representation, so much a part of the Orientalist enterprise lately criticized by Edward Said, was wielded by early scholars of comparative religion in both

Europe and America. During the 19th century the names emerged for the first time with "isms" tagging the reificationsHinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism. The idea that a Chinese merchant might "belong" to three of these "religions" at once did not seem to discourage this way of thinking, which was, in fact, in need of considerable amendment. Long before the deconstructionist phase of recent intellectual history, the Buddha's revolution in thinking in the sixth century B.C. pointed to the ways in which human beings continually ascribe solidity and fixity to what is inherently dynamic by affixing nouns or names. Yet the comparative study of religion has produced countless books dedicating a chapter to each of the world religions, each a species of a common genus called religion.

As the 20th century moved toward middle age, scholars began to challenge this way of thinking about religion. Wilfred Cantwell Smith deserves credit for insisting on a dynamic understanding of religion, a word that he suggests might well be abandoned as a noun in favor of the cumulative "religious tradition" (The Meaning and End of Religion, 1962). Religious traditions are historical, constantly changing in relation to one another and in response to each era. They are not fixed systems or circumscribed entities but dynamic, cumulative historical traditions, more like rivers than monuments; they are not best understood by uncovering their origins. As Smith puts it, "Time's arrow is pointed the other way." What has emerged in the course of the history of religious traditions-from Bach to Barth, from the Delhi Sultanate to the Dalai Lama-is certainly as significant as what can be discerned of their beginnings. And the ways in which they have diverged are¡¡ as significant as their similarities.

The language employed to speak of religious life posed another problem. A century ago, scholars would commonly write of the creeds, scriptures, revelation, worship, and ways of salvation of various religious traditions without stopping to investigate the adequacy of such categories of thought, all derived primarily from Christian experience. For example, the ideaJthat a religion should have a creed, a concise set of beliefs, was so taken for granted that one could speak of people of many races, languages, and creeds as if creed were simply another locution for religion. Having delimited Hinduism, British missionaries and civil servants were concerned to find out what Hindus believe. It simply did not occur to most observers 100 years ago that the very notion of creed as a significant religious category was distinctly Christian. Of course, one could compare the Jewish shema or the Islamic shahada as formulas of central affirmations, but what a Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain believes is not a direct or even very fruitful entry into the understanding of these traditions, which are orthopraxies--eorrect practices-more than orthodoxies.

During the 20th century, the school loosely called the phenomenology of religion, following the Dutch scholars W.B.

Kristenson and Gerardus van der Leeuw, focused attention not on historical religious traditions but on religious phenomena as they appear across traditions and times. They proposed typologies and categories of understanding that, in their view, did not give special place to the language of a single religious tradition. The phenomenologists moved away from the tacitly Christian theological presuppositions of earlier scholars to observe what was termed epoche, a bracketing of one's own judgment and presuppositions in order to examine groups of phenomena-types, patterns, and morphologies--of human religious life. Rather than speak of "God" or the "gods," van der Leeuw used the category of "power," Rudolph Otto spoke of "the holy," and Mircea Eliade spoke of "the sacred."

Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade did much to shape this stream of religious studies in North America, breaking in his own way from a concern with origins and the world religions to a concern with homo religiosus and the encounter with the sacred, which Eliade saw as a "universal dimension" of human experience. He called his approach a "new humanism," aiming to "decipher and explicate every kind of encounter of man with the sacred, from prehistory to our day."

The sacred "shows itself" in hierophanies, or appearances, which bear striking resemblance to one another across cultures and history. The study of myths, symbols, and rituals reveals deep forms and patterns of religiousness-the yearning for the center, the axis mundi; the nostalgia for the time-of-beginnings, illus tempus.

But with the ongoing contributions of scholars steeped in the study of the traditions of Japan or India, for example, the problem of such an enterprise became clear: This interpretive language-whether scripture, prayer, and sacrifice, or myth, symbol, and ritual-also comes out of particular Western traditions of experience. The very terms bear the categories and codes of the West and cannot be used as if their semantic resonances were germane to the whole of human experience.

What exactly is the sacred in India? Is this universal dimension to be discovered in the concern with what is pure (pavitra) or in the concern with what is auspicious (mangala)? Is ritual a useful term? Perhaps, but not without the scholar's conscious reflection on terms with similar and yet very different semantic range-the Chinese Ii with its dimensions of propriety and order, the Sanskrit dharma with its resonances of cosmic order and ethics, or the Sanskrit kriya coming from the word family that signifies action. Is mysticism a valid way of thinking about a particular stream of religious experience? Perhaps, but not without pointed reflection upon which stream.

From the standpoint of Indian religious traditions, is bhakti, the devotional tradition of love, mysticism? Or is yoga, the tradition of what one might call spiritual discipline, mysticism? And again, is worship a good way to describe the purpose of a Hindu's visit to a tem-

pie, when the Hindu would use the term darshan, "seeing," to speak of that experience?

The question of whose language and forms of representation are to be employed as categories is much discussed today. The scholarly world is global, and the task of hermeneutics is increasingly a task of mutual interpretation. The point, however, is not to decide that the language of either the insider or the outsider has priority but to recognize that it is the very task of the comparative study of religion to bring these into dialogue so that they may inform each other.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith has been at the forefront of those rethinking the categories of interpretation. He uses the term faith, for example, to refer to the personal affective quality of engagement through which a person appropriates a particular religious tradition, but he does so only after a careful study of the historical and contemporary meanings of both faith and belief in the West and after a rigorous study of the Hindu term sraddha, with its sense of setting one's heart, and the Muslim understanding of iman, self-commitment. In both traditions, as in early Christianity, faith is something one does rather than something one has (Faith and Belief. 1979). Smith does not propose giving up the use of generic concepts or of Western scholarly vocabulary, but rather insists that the interpretive language of the study of religion come in for more rigorous analysis, that it not be unthinkingly used but self-consciously developed out of the overlapping and diverging semantic terrain of comparative studies.

Miriam Levering and the other authors of a recent work, Rethinking Scripture (1989), for example, begin not by analyzing the term scripture but by considering the meanings of canon, classic, sacred text, and word from the perspectives of many religious traditions. The act of comparison is essentially dialogical, and so is the development of the language of comparative study. If universals are to be found, they cannot be propounded or assumed but must be won from the dialogue of the particulars.

The Parliament of 1893 obviously lacked the benefits of the current rethinking of the language of comparison. But the spirit of the Parliament did anticipate another kind of dialogical dimension in the comparative study of religion. As the Parliament's chairman put it, those for whom the various traditions are vibrant and meaningful should speak for themselves. The view implicit here, while not spelled out, was that one could not understand a religious tradition from textual study alone. Worshippers' voices are also important to disciplined understanding. In the course of the past century both the philological tools of the textual scholars and the anthropological tools of the field-worker have become indispensable. Scriptures take on meaning in relation to a community of people, and scholars of living religious traditions cannot work as if those adherents have no voices and do not read what scholars say about them. Religious traditions are not fixed in amber and passed intact from generation to generation but are changing historical movements, constantly appropriated and

reformulated by the people for whom they are meaningful and who speak for themselves.

One fascinating irony of the ongoing history of religions is the emergence among some Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and others of explicitly more rigidified formulations of their own traditions. For example, the fluid and polyphonic Hindu tradition has developed forms that are more creedal and systematized, such as the World Hindu Organization's formulation of Hindutva, "Hinduness," or the Northern California Hindu Businessman's Association's publication of "Ten Commandments of Hinduism." No longer is Hinduism simply the representation of Orientalists and their 19th-century Indian respondents; it is also the articulation of communalist Hindus in India and of Hindus in diaspora seeking a simplified form of explaining who they are and what they believe. For Western scholars now to call Hinduism a false construction is a kind of neo-Orientalism, denying the legitimacy of the continuing development of the Hindu tradition that has, in this century, begun to produce a reification called Hinduism. The new systems of 20th-century religious chauvinism are as much a part of the history of religions as new forms of 20th-century pluralism.

Teaching comparative religion in 20th-century North America poses the challenge of dialogical study pointedly. Today the world of scholars and interpreters of religion is multireligious and international. In addition, because of new immigration in the United States, the classroom is multireligious, with a wide range of observance and nonobservance, of religious literacy and illiteracy. The habit of speaking about the other as exotic must perforce be broken, for the "other" is among us. We are other to one another.

The religious demography of the West has changed radically during the past century, and especially the past quarter century, making the questions of the World's Parliament of 1893 increasingly the questions of every city council today. When the delegates from Asia came to the Parliament, they traveled halfway around the world by boat. Vivekananda, coming from Calcutta, arrived in Chicago too early fot the Parliament, ran out of money after ten days, and by chance met a woman from Boston who put up the young Hindu at her farm iri the Boston area for several weeks. He quickly became the toast of the North Shore, where scarcely anyone had met a Hindu before. In 1893, one could have counted the number of Hindus in this country on the fingers of one hand. A century ago, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains lived in Asia; Muslims, in the wide stretch of the Islamic world from Indonesia to Morocco.

Today, however, the religious landscape of the United States alone displays the diversity of traditions that were present at the World's Parliament. Had Vivekananda come to last year's centennial celebration of the Parliament, he would have been welcomed by a Hindu host committee in the Chicago area (a group that organized a fund-raising dinner that netted $45,000

for the centennial gathering). Had he traveled to Boston he would have found tens of thousands of Indian immigrantsengineers, doctors, and businesspeople-and he would have been greeted at Bengali picnics, Tamil festivals, and Hindu summer family camps. He would have visited the Sri Lakshmi temple in Boston, consecrated in 1991 with the waters of the Ganges mingled with the waters of the Mississippi and the Missouri.

At the time of the Parliament, the Statue of Liberty raised her torchbearing arm of refuge in New York harbor, facing the Atlantic. In San Francisco, however, at least after the railways were built by using cheap Chinese labor, the language of welcome for the tired and the poor was replaced by the language of exclusion. The first Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and revised regularly for several decades, gradually dilating to include other Asians. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Bhagat Thind, a Sikh who had settled in California and married an American woman, could be stripped of his naturalized U.S. citizenship because he was a Hindu, by which the court meant his race, not his religion. Such was the disposition of America toward Asia. At the Parliament, a Buddhist delegate from Japan called attention to the "No Japanese" signs posted at establishments on the West Coast. "If such be Christian ethics," he declared, "we are perfectly satisfied to remain heathen."

Since the Immigration Act of 1965, however, immigrants from throughout the world have entered the United States in greater numbers than ever before. According to the 1990 census, the "Asian and Pacific Islander" population is by far the fastest growing, having increased more than sevenfold since 1965. This group includes Hindus, Muslims, Jains, and Sikhs from South Asia, Christians and Muslims from the Philippines, and Buddhists and Christians from Southeast and East Asia. From refugees to voluntary immigrants, from unskilled workers to highly trained professionals, these newcomers have changed the cultural and religious landscape of the United States.

A century ago, the monks in the Japanese temple of Engakuji tried to dissuade their leader, Soyen Shaku, from attending the Parliament, arguing that it would not be fitting for a Zen monk to set foot in such an uncivilized land as America. He insisted, however. (The young monk who drafted his letter of acceptance in English was D.T. Suzuki, later to become the greatest translator of the Zen tradition to the West.) Were Soyen Shaku to arrive in San Francisco today, he would find headquartered in a multistory office building the Buddhist Churches of America. He would find not only immigrant Buddhist communities from Japan, China, and Vietnam but a multitude of Euro-American Buddhists, including roshis, or teachers, initiated by Asian mentors. He would find American Buddhist newspapers and magazines, feminist Zen sitting groups, and a Zen AIDS Hospice Project.

In 1893, the Sultan of Turkey declined to send delegates from the Muslim world to Chicago. Today, the United States is part

of the Muslim world. Even if a conservative estimate of three to five million is used, Muslims outnumber Episcopalians in the United States. Within a short time there will surely be more Muslims than Jews. In June 1991, Imam Siraj Wahaj of Brooklyn opened a session of the U.S. Congress with Islamic prayers, the first imam ever to do so. On Labor Day weekend each year, more than 5,000 American Muslims attend the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America.

There they discuss American public schools and American politics. The youth network organizes summer camps and Islamic leadership workshops. The Islamic Medical Association discusses ethical issues in medical practice.

The symbolic diversity of the 1893 Parliament has today become the reality of its host city. Chicago's yellow pages list dozens of entries under the headings "Churches: Buddhist" and "Churches: Islamic." The M uslims of Chicago say there are more than 70 mosques in the metropolitan area and nearly half a million Muslims. The suburbs of Lemont and Aurora boast two impressive Hindu temples-both built from the ground up by Hindu temple architects cooperating with American engineers and contractors. There are 50 Buddhist temples in the Midwest Buddhist Our Saviour's Lutheran Association. There are Jain temChurch, Milwaukee, Wisconsin pies and Sikh gurdwaras, a Zoroastrian temple, and a Baha'i temple.

The interreligious encounter that was engineered by visionaries in Chicago in 1893 is today an American main street affair.

A parliament of sorts could be duplicated in almost every major American city. There are five mosques in Oklahoma City (none, incidentally, with a sign saying it is a mosque) along with four Hindu temples, one Sikh gurdwara, two Vietnamese Buddhist temples, and one Thai Buddhist temple. And Oklahoma City is far from unusual. Denver has II Buddhist temples serving its immigrant Asian population, including an older Japanese Jodo Shinshu temple, and more recently Thai, Cambodian, Korean, and Laotian temples have been established as well as six Vietnamese Buddhist temples. Denver also has three mosques, two Sikh gurdwaras, two Hindu temples, and a Taoist temple. All of this new diversity burgeoned in the years between 1970 and 1990.

These changes are not unique to the United States. Today's unprecedented economic and political migration of peoplesthe United Nations has recently estimated that two percent of the world's population now lives outside its country of origin-has changed the map of the world. Hindus live in Leicester, Buddhists in Boston, and Muslims in Heidelberg.

The new immigration has produced a spate of neonativist movements in North America and Europe, but it has also pro-

duced a whole range of new religious, cultural, and intellectual encounters. It has brought interfaith relations from the international to the local scene. It has drawn attention to the stereotypes which, for many, constitute the extent of their knowledge of other religious traditions. And it has heightened the significance of religious literacy as a basic component of education.

The interaction of peoples and traditions in the 20th century has produced much that is new-distinctively Balinese or South Indian forms of Christianity, distinctively North American Hindu communities, marriages between Christians and Muslims, Jews for Jesus, neopagan environmentalist movements, and many forms of religious syncretism. The wide variety of religious life in the 20th century seems, to some, to threaten and blur the boundaries of identity-which is one reason for the resurgence of religious exclusivism and fundamentalism.

The universalism so dominant 100 years ago is now challenged by fundamentalists and pluralists alike, though for different reasons. For the fundamentalist, the very idea that all religions have a common kernel and core undermines the particularity of one's own faith and reduces those welldefended boundaries to mere husks. For the pluralist, universalism poses a more covert problem. As the Parliament so clearly demonstrated, and as the early phases of the comparative study of religion confirmed, the universal is usually some body's particular writ large. Pluralism, however, is a distinctively different perspective. The pluralist does not expect or desire the emergence of a universal religion, a kind of religious Esperanto. Nor does the pluralist seek a common essence in all religions, though much that is common may be discovered. The commitment of the pluralist is rather to engage the diversity, in the mutually transformative process of understanding, rather than to obliterate it.

Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities (1983), investigates the ways in which nations envision themselves. Even when citizens do not know one another, "in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." The imagined community of religious traditions is even more deeply rooted than that of the nation-state. Religious communalism, both national and intern'ational, is a powerful force i~ today's world, but one might suggest that religious exclusivism or chauvinism that depends for its survival upon the isolation of one people from another is bound, finally, to fail. In the late 20th century, the old imagined communities are in the process of tumultuous change. East and West are no more. We speak of the "former Soviet Union" and the "former Yugoslavia."

"Christendom" and. "the Islamic world" have no identifiable geographical borders. There are Sikh mayors in Britain and Muslim mayors in Texas. The Buddha would smile at the collapse of our reifications.

Recently, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington spoke of the new geopolitical reality of "the West and the rest" and proposed that "civilizational identity" will have a major role in the coming political realignment. He contends that the Confucian, Islamic, and Hindu worlds will be forces

to reckon with. But where exactly are these worlds? With mosques in every major Western city and a thriving panoply of Asian-American subcultures, it is difficult to know what he means. It is precisely the interpenetration and proximity of ancient civilizations and cultures that is the hallmark of the late 20th century.

Finding new forms of imagined communities-national and international, religious and interreligious-is one of the more challenging tasks of our time. The worlds of technology, business, and communications have put concerted effort into the imagining of transnational networks of activity and loyalty, for better or for worse. Even the political and military implications of our global situation have received attention. Yet the careful construction of forms of interreligious communication and cooperation that

might be considered part of the basic infrastructure of the world of the 20th century lags behind. And in academia, the comparative study of religion, still in its infancy in many parts of the world, is just beginning to develop the dynamic and dialogical models adequate to the interpretive task. The centennial of the World's Parliament ofRe1igions, however, gave evidence of a radically new multireligious social reality-in Chicago and throughout the world. The move in the past century from idealized Protestant universalism to the difficult dialogue of real pluralism is a step in the right direction.

0 About the Author: Diana L. Eck, professor of compararive religion and Indian studies at Harvard University, is the author of Banaras: Ci ty of Light and Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras.

Scholars Examine the American Experience A four-day conference at the American Studies Research Centre (ASRC) in Hyderabad in April' on "The American Religious Heritage in Encounter with the World" attracted more than 20 scholars from Algeria, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand as well as from India and the United States.

"American history is much more complicated than anyone outside America usually believes," ASRC director David E. Harrell said at the conference opening, "and American religion itself is very complicated.

What we would like to do at this conference is get diverse views on the American experience and the way that the American experience speaks to other cultures."

Formal presentations and discussions revolved around the subjects of religious pluralism, church-state relations, fundamentalism, and problem areas in religious thought.

Harrell, a leading authority on American religion (see page 12), was joined by two other American luminaries in the field-Edwin S. Gaustad, retired chairman of the history department at the University of California in Riverside, and Charles E. Curran, professor of human values at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Gaustad, in a lecture on American religion from 1607-1800, said, "The most dramatic thing about the U.S. Constitution and religion

are the Constitution's silences." He noted that the Constitution "creates a secular, civil state that is a point of contention in America to this day .... The only thing that the Constitution says on religion is that there shall be no religious test given to a person serving in government." The theme of government and religion was a common thread that wove through many of the conference sessions.

Harrell surveyed the history of Protestantism in America, noting the emergence in the 19th century of several distinctly American groups such as the Disciples of Christ, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Seventhday Adventists, and the Holiness Movement.

He asserted that America remains a deeply religious country; polls have shown that it has the second highest rate of church membership (after Ireland) among predominantly Christian countries, and that 90 to 95 percent of its citizens say they believe in God. Curran, an ordained priest who in a widely publicized incident was forced out of his tenured position at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., eight years ago because his views on sexual issues were at variance with the position of the Vatican, discussed the significant role that religion has played in social change in America. Civil rights a,nd abortion are two prominent examples where the views and actions of religious groups have been, and are still being, brought

to bear. Curran predicted that the politically charged ethical issues of capital punishment, euthanasia, and the use of heroic, costly hightech methods to preserve life would be the most divisive social issues in America during the next ten years. He noted that the left and the right ironically accuse each other of viol ating separation of church and state provisions when it suits their political purposes.

"We need a new criterion," he said. "When is it proper for the church to influence society in the light of separation of church and state?"

Other presentations of note included papers on religious pluralism by Rita Gupta, professor of comparative religion and head of the department of philosophy and religion at VisvaBharati in West Bengal; on religious and political pluralism within an Islamic environment by Nurcholish Madjid, senior researcher at the Indonesian Institute for Sciences in Jakarta; American Unitarianism and the Bramho Samaj in the 19th century by Nikhiles Guha of the department of history at the University of Kalyani in West Bengal; a study of an Ch ar Ies E . Curran American-style evangelical preacher in Tamil Nadu by Thomas Edmunds, head of the department of history and politics at Lutheran College in Porayar, Tamil Nadu; and an interpretative analysis of church-state relations in America by Kousar J. Azam of the department of political science at Osmania University in Hyderabad.

--G.E.O.

"We are neither closet Indophiles nor flag bearers of Pax Americana" The new director of the American Studies Research Centre talks about the state of American studies, the value of cultural exchange to Indo-U.S. relations, the organization's regionalization program, and a pending financial crisis.

David Edwin Harrell, Jr., 64, came to the American Studies Research Centre (ASRC) in Hyderabad in late 1993 to serve as director and Fulbright visiting professor. ASRC began in the 1960s with a modest collection of books in a room of the Osmania University Library. Today it is a fully autonomous research center with a regional orientation and the largest American studies library (more than 150,000 items) in Asia, housed in a spacious building on the Osmania campus alongside its own 60-bed hostel. Since his arrival, Harrell has been devoting considerable energy to enhancing the scope and quality of ASRC's services throughout Asia and Africa. He has visited Sri Lanka, Egypt, and China to participate in American studies programs. In February 1994, he organized a research guides workshop and a seminar on "Race, Gender, and Class in American Society and Culture" at Lucknow University. In March he went to Tribhuvan University in Nepal to explore the possibilities of ASRC-backed research programs there. In April he organized a conference at ASRC on America's religious experience (see page 11).

Harrell is no stranger to India. During 1976-77 he was a senior Fulbright lecturer at the University of Allahabad. He currently is

on leave from Auburn University in Alabama, where he has been Daniel F. Breeden Eminent Scholar in the Humanities since 1990. Harrell has written six books on religious history, among them A Social History of the Disciples of Christ (1966) and Pat Robertson: A Personal, Religious and Political Portrait (1987), and contributed more than 40 articles to prominent internationaljournals.

In addition, he has been editor of Varieties of Southern Evangelicalism and coeditor with Warren F. Kimball of the Minorities in Modern America series brought out by the Indiana University Press. He has often appeared on major television networks such as the BBC, CBS, and CNN to comment on religious news and personalities in America.

Staff and scholars are worried about sustaining ASRC's activities when one of the sources of its support, the United States India Fund, popularly known as the rupee fund, dries up in a few years.

The rupee fund is made up of money that India paid to the United States Embassy over many years for food it received under America's PL-480 agricultural commodities program. Harrell discussed this and other issues related to ASRC and Indo-U.S. ties in general during a wide-ranging interview.

MURARI PRASAD: What is your assessment of the current status of American studies in India?

DA VID EDWIN HARRELL: From one perspective, it is strong. About 4,000 to 5,000 Indian members of the American Studies Research Centre are evidence of the very large academic community of Americanists in this country. Of course, it is difficult to ignore America because of its political power and prestige; on the other hand, interest in American studies in India reflects an active, dynamic, intellectual academic community in India. Organized programs in American studies are weak in India with little visibility in Indian universities. In the United States, most major universities have a variety of area studies programs. While ASRC and IAAS (Indian Association for American Studies) are important facilitators of American studies, at the university level programs are few and far between. In India, disciplinary boundaries are jealously guarded, restricting the growth of area studies programs.

Both India and the United States need better understanding of each other's culture. I regret that many Americans have almost no understanding of India. I am equally concerned about the distorted reporting about America that is too common in India.

What are the problems and prospects of American studies in general?

The major problem in establishing American studies programs is linguistic.

India, with its large English-speaking population, is well positioned to become the center of American studies in Asia.

There are many compelling reasonsintellectual, political, and cultural-why Indians should want to be conversant with American culture. But there are many problems.

American scholars studying Indian history and culture continually find funding to visit India to do research. It is not so easy for Indian Americanists to visit the United States.

Of oourse, ASRC is a valuable resource for Indians, but most need to go to America. More opportunities need to be created for them.

Are you satisfied with the role of funding agencies and support facilities in promoting American studies?

Yes and no. The U.S. government has spent large amounts of money in India since the rupee fund was established in 1987. The USIS program in India is one of the largest in the world and ASRC is one of the two largest American studies libraries located outside of the United States. The Fulbright program has funded hundreds ofIndian and American scholars to teach or do research abroad.

The rupee fund is running out in 1997, and the future is clouded. Acquisitions for ASRC's library have been crippled by devaluations of the Indian rupee. The Centre's allocation of funds comes mainly III rupees, but books and periodicals must be purchased in U.S. dollars. What will happen when the rupee fund is exhausted? One would hope that the D..S. Congress will fund all cultural programs at the present level, but I am not optimistic about that prospect in a political atmosphere that calls for more and more attention to domestic issues. As the relative economic status of America continues to decline, Congress is unlikely

to sustain all of the programs born of the rupee fund. All of us probably need to downsize our expectations. Such realities cast a long shadow over all Indo-American cultural exchange programs. There is a possibility that ASRC could cease to exist in its present form. 1 don't think that will happen. But we must honestly face the real threat.

What is the government-level backup in sustaining such programs through institutions like the ASRC? ASRC is an Indian membership organization with an independent bilateral board. But it is funded almost entirely by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) in Washington, D.C., the parent organization of USIS offices abroad. We host scholars from scores of other countries in Asia and Africa. They are supported by a special regionalization grant from the USIA. While USIA funding is critical to the survival of the Centre, the independence of ASRC is viewed as an indispensable asset by everyone involved. There is a misconception in many quarters that ASRC is an "outfit" founded to sell America. Nothing could be further from the truth.

No academic associated with the Centre is told how to do his or her research or how to interpret it. We are neither closet Indophiles nor flag bearers of Pax Americana. ASRC is a facility created by Indian and American academics supported by USIA, to aid the academic study of American politics and culture throughout Asia and Africa.

Is Indian interest in America matched by American interest in India?

No, it is not. Mutual interests are quite disproportionate.

My reading of Indian newspapers reveals a profound imbalance and the reasons bear some exploration. America's power in the 20th century, and its enormous cultural in-

All cultures are not being Americanized, but something approaching a hegemonic world culture does seem to be in the making.

f1uence, fuels an insatiable appetite for information about the U.S. It also makes the U.S. a good whipping boy for a particular political agenda. India is still painfully conscious of its colonial past. An ancient culture,. India is a young nation beset with insecurities and extremely sensitive to any intended or unintended insult. On the other hand, Americans are woefully uninformed about South Asia.

As Indian immigrants become an increasingly visible and influential minority in the U.S., there will surely be a rising interest in Indian culture and politics. But that day has not yet arrived.

Does cultural exchange have any bearing on Indo- US. political relations?

Yes, certainly. Many influential American policymakers have been Fulbright scholars and many important foreign politicians have visited the U.S. as Fulbright scholars. Fulbright alumni can and do play important roles in promoting intercultural understanding. The options of intellectual leaders certainly influence political relations, helping nations to better understand each other.

How do you look at the prospect of Indocultural ties following the liberalization of the Indian economy and the influx of us. corporate groups?

While there are forces in the modern world tending toward disintegration,

us.

I am convinced that we are being drawn into a global village. All cultures are not being Americanized, but something approaching a hegemonic world culture does seem to be in the making. I think India and America are moving together. The ongoing economic liberalization in India should unleash a dynamic surge in trade. [In the past three years, America, India's largest trading partner, has committed more than $2,000 million in investments.] It seems inevitable that both countries will become more and more important to each other. I do not believe that this growing economic partnership will be one-sided. In America, Indians are the highest-income ethnic group. Indians are exceptional entrepreneurs, well educated, and hard working, and they will do well in the world market.

In spite of this optimistic scenario there are nagging irritants that put Indo-US. relations in a periodic jam.

Is it incidental, or is there a lack of sufficient societal consensus behind bilateral relations?

It reflects the mindset of Indians and Americans. In many ways the elements of disharmony are far less important than those of harmony. The problem is that the points of disharmony between our two countries are viewed as peripheral by most Americans, but they are central to

Indians. The United States has quite serious problems with many nations. Placed in that perspective, India and America are doing fine; most Americans like India.

The "periodic jams," as you put it, occur because Indians are oversensitive and Americans are undersensitive.

Most of these things can be talked out.

Of course, the global interests of India and the United States do not always coincide perfectly.

Most Americans understand that we cannot arbitrarily solve all world problems. On the other hand, the world would become a very dangerous place were the U.S., and other major powers, to settle into a sullen isolationism. It is unthinkable that Americans would cling to the crusading conception of a "chosen nation" in the fuzzy political contours of our time. But the concept of global responsibility cannot be abandoned. The media like a good fight and so mino.r confrontations are often given more attention than they deserve. The American media are as culpable as the Indian media. While public attention is drawn to the sparks of a minor spat, powerful forces are driving the two countries together. I say again that this momentum is sufficient to overcome minor disagreements.

Could you give an overview of the future nexus between Indian Americanists and American Indianists?

The world is getting smaller. If present trends continue, our economic and cultural relations will become stronger.

If India completes its task of building a strong, secular, democratic nation, and I think it will, it will be a dominating influence in the 20th century, worthy of the attention and respect of the rest of the world.

0 About the Interviewer: Murari Prasad Teaches English aT D.S. College, KaTihar in Bihar.

Journal entry: Here I am in the wilderness! And all I can think of is how good a spicy Indian meal is going to taste when I get back. My shoulders ache. In fact every muscle in my body aches-including some I didn't know existed.

How did I get myself into this? It sounded so innocuous when they invited me¡ to join them for a weekend hike.

Hiking meant walking, right? I could do that. Across beautiful pastures, up hill and down dale, stopping frequently for a rest or a picnic meal. Piece of cake!

Wrong! There I was trudging up an almost perpendicular slope, my cotton skirt no match for the vegetation scratching my legs. My sandals were woefully inadequate for gripping the rocks and gravel on the trail. Last night we slept "under the stars" as they romantically put it. I woke up around midnight, feeling something touch my feet. My scream pierced the silence and chased away whatever it was.

Call 01 the ild Text and Photographs

by SHOBA NARAYAN

The author found it strange that Americans would give up their material comforts for such a painful, exhausting, and dirty activity as hiking. But now she understands why.

I spent the rest of the night stiff with fear, imagining scorpions and snakes crawling over my sleeping bag. At dawn, it rained! I'm never going to do this again. Never!

My American friends are crazy. They spend so much money, time, and effort to experience something that my grandmother experiences every day in our ancestral village in Tamil Nadu. Grandma would love to live in an American home-with televisions, telephones, running water every hour of the day, uninterrupted electricity, carpets, furnishings .... And Americans, who have all that, venture out on weekends to cook on a pot over firewood, use a pit as the toilet, and live in the wilderness without running water or electricity. It's a crazy world.

Enough complaining! I have to do something about my shoes and clothes. Maybe I'll visit one of those outdoorequipment shops when I get back. If I get back!

Americans are taking to the outdoors in droves. Outdoor recreation is spawning a multimillion-dollar industry.

There are chain stores and mail-order companies that sell specialized equipment for hiking, mountaineering, rafting, skydiving, bungee-jumping, you name it.

One can easily spend several hundred dollars for a set of hiking gear. This includes warm clothes, rain gear, a good pair of boots, a backpack, a sleeping bag, and cooking equipment.

Boots are crucial. They come in three grades: Heavy-weight for long expeditions, which include carrying a backpack of about 20-30 kilograms; medium-weight boots for trips of

three to four days carrying a backpack of about 15-20 kilograms; and light-weight boots for weekend or one-day hikes.

The cost of a pair of boots runs between $75 and $200 depending on the weight.

Sleeping bags range from $150 to $500 in cost. Some are stuffed with goose feathers, others with synthetic fibers. Goosedown bags are exceptionally warm, but they become useless if they get wet because they take a long time to dry out. Many hikers, therefore, prefer the synthetic bags.

Backpacks come in two basic models. One has the metal frame outside the cloth pack. This design is good for hiking long distances because it allows the air to circulate between bag and back, and the sweat to evaporate. The other design places the frame inside the bag. This is better for balance and stability, and is preferred for mountain climbing, ice climbing, and other situations that require pack and climber to be molded together.

A good backpack can cost $300 or more.

Tents are optional. Most rugged hikers prefer to just carry tarps that they tie to trees, since they are much lighter to carry than tents, and cheaper as well. A good tent runs to about $200 while a tarp costs $40! Many hikers choose to sleep under the stars to get the full wilderness experience.

Throw in a cooking stove, warm clothes, helmet, ropesclearly, exploring the wilderness can be an expensive proposition.

Journal entry: We are hiking through the Appalachians. These mountains, which run north-south along the eastern United States, are smaller than their western counterparts, but the hiking nevertheless is difficult. The maple trees are changing color; it is a perfect day to be outside. Like many American families we have encountered on the trail today, we are car-camping; we have driven to a campsite maintained by the U.S. Park Service, and pitched our tent on an assigned plot. Nearby are a metal charcoal stove, showers, toilets, and even a small store for such essentials as kerosene, matches, firewood, mosquito repellent medicine, and snacks. This is a good way to combine a wilderness-getaway with the comforts of civilization. Someday, perhaps, we'll hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail.

The Appalachian Mountain Trail starts in Georgia and runs 3,380 kilometers north ending at the 1,606-meter-high Mount Katahdin in Maine. Serious backpackers start in Georgia and walk the entire length of the trail without touching civilization.

Supplies are air-dropped to them by helicopter. Along the way they can sleep in huts maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club, a venerable organization that pioneered recreational

hiking and outdoor living on the East Coast.

Most Americans, however, car-camp. They pack up their kids, pets, and equipment into the car, and head out to a state national park with enough food to last the weekend. TheSe parks usually charge a nominal fee ($10-20) for camping overnight. Families, often with friends or other relatives, set up huge tents-one for sleep, one for meals-and spend the evening talking, playing games, eating, and singing. The next day, they might go fishing, or take the children on short hikes. It is a way to expose the children to nature without sacrificing the luxuries of civilization.

Journal entry: For the past week, we have been hiking across the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I am dirty and sweaty. I have been wearing the same clothes every day, haven't had a bath for a week. My hair is matted from not seeing a comb, and on some days I don't even brush my teeth. I feel wonderful! Makes me question the day-to-day duties that society and civilization make us perform. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, does a bath really matter?

'J I've become a convert, I guess. Since that first disastrous hike a year ago, I've contracted "hiking fever."

Like that woman I met on top on Mount Cadillac in Maine. When I asked her why she hiked, she replied: "To experience the heavenly taste of a soggy tomato sandwich with day-old melted cheese on top of a mountain, I suppose."

As crazy as it sounds, I know exactly what she means.

After hours of walking and climbing, with every muscle crying out for a massage, you emerge hot and sweaty, onto this clearing. As a light breeze curls your hair, your eyes drink in miles and miles of spectacular sea and land views in all directions. It's heaven!

Someday I want to do a real hiking expedition with one of the many Outward Bound Schools in the United States.

For newcomers, joining such a club is a good way to meet people who have similar interests.

Journal entry: Here I am on a solitary hike through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. The landscape reminds me of India. I am getting incredibly homesick. To make myself feel better, I decide to write a list of suggestions for all my friends and relatives back home. I mean, if you think about it, India is the perfect place for backpacking and hiking. You don't need too much equipment, you don't even need boots because the weather is dry for many months of the year. During the summers you can even do without a sleeping bag because it is so warm. Come to think of it, a good pair of shoes and a water bottle are all you need.

Map and compass are consulted during a stop in the trail (left).

The author pitches tent in the Blue Mountains of West Virginia.

Outward Bound, headquartered in New York, is the largest adventure-based program in the world, with more than 50 years of experience in outdoor education. It has schools all across the United States including Maine, Colorado, Oregon, California, North Carolina, and Florida. The National Outdoor Leadership School, based in Wyoming, offers semester-long courses. So does Prescott College, based in Arizona. These schools stress learning by doing. A semester course might include taking a 23-day rafting trip down the Colorado River (see SPAN, July 1994), which boasts three-meter waves, or a 43-day mountaineering expedition. Students learn to read maps, track animals, plan expeditions, and survive in the wilderness. Other less intensive programs are burgeoning all over the country. Alpine Adventures, based in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, offers courses in rock climbing, ice climbing, and cross-country skiing. Northern Outdoors, based in Maine, offers courses in horseback riding, mountain biking, white-water rafting, all in a resort setting.

Backroads, a travel company based in California, takes groups on bicycling trips all over the United States, making provisions for hot showers and tasty meals along the way. The western states, particularly Colorado and California, boast more outdoor-adventure programs than anywhere else in the country.

But every region capitalizes on its natural resources for outdoor enthusiasts.

On a smaller scale, communities have their own outdoor clubs that organize nature trips, hikes, camps, and lectures.

Robert James Waller, whose book The Bridges of Madison County was on The New York Times best-seller list for the last year, calls South India one of the most "magical" places in the world. Faye Peterson, an adventurer from Australia who has hiked all over the world, said, "Only on the mountains and forests of India did I experience raw fear. It is really wild out there, not like the gentle slopes and forests of Europe." Many hiking groups in the United States are making Nepal and the Himalayas a regular destination. South India remains a secret known only to serious hikers.

Journal entry: We are hiking with a group through the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. The Cascades are breathtaking. There are many volcanoes here: Mount St. Helens, which erupted in 1980; Mount Hood, the tallest mountain in the state at 3,426 meters; Mount Rainier in Washington State, which at 4,393 meters is the second tallest mountain on the West Coast. The mountains are awesome in their majestic power. Yet they have the most delicate of vegetation: Alpine wildflowers of every color imaginable, so tiny, yet so sturdy to be growing and flourishing in this harsh, inhospitable environment.

Hiking alone becomes a matter of endurance after a while. It's all about putting one foot in front of another; you have only yourself for support and motivation. Hiking with a group is different. You have people to pep you up, urge you on, pull you through the hard parts. But the constant company can also wear you down. Like when we watched this spectacularly beautiful sunset yesterday from Mount Hood. It was a magical time for me. But the people in the group were talking loudly, oblivious to the intense beauty and quiet all around. And all of a sudden, I wished I were alone. To be energized by the power of creation.

0 About the Author: Shoba Narayan, who lives in Stamford, wrote about summer camps in our June 1993 issue.

Connecticut,

VOICE OF

NATIVE AMERICA I .

I

by CLYDE LINSLEY

When Tim Giago became frustrated with mainstream media coverage of American Indian affairs, he founded his own newspaper, now a highly respected weekly. very Monday evening, in Rapid City, South Dakota, a web-offset press begins turning out the week's edition of The Lakota Times, the United States' largest American Indian newspaper.

The following day, copies of the newspaper are hand-delivered to homes in Rapid City and on the nearby Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian Reservations, inhabited by many of the Lakota-speaking Sioux Indians who comprise the paper's primary readership.

By Wednesday, about 50 copies have been delivered to K's Qwik Stop, a small convenience store and service station in Wagner, South Dakota, a town of about 1,500 people, located more than 480 kilometers from Rapid City. Soon after it arrives, American Indian customers begin showing up to buy the latest edition.

"A very small percentage of the papers is sold to the white population, but our Native Americans wait for it," says Qwik Stop proprietor Richard Kafka.

Kafka considers the paper good for business. "The Lakota Times brings in people who might not otherwise come to the store."

One copy of the paper also makes its way to Bemidji, Minnesota, where it is read eagerly by Roger Jourdain.

Jourdain is not Sioux; he is former chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, whose small reservation is located near Bemidji. Jourdain, nevertheless,

E

reads the paper every week.

"It's the only newspaper we have that covers [American] Indian activities on a national basis," he says. "It's very credible, in my estimation. Far better than our local newspaper.

The national newspapers invariably will twist the facts around, and The Lakota Times is the only newspaper that's keeping them honest.

It's the best newspaper we've had since I've been around.

"Now that they have a news correspondent in Washington, D.C., we hope we'll get better news out of the government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs," says Jourdain. (The Bureau of Indian Affairs is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior.)

Inadequate Coverage Since its founding in 1980 by 59-yearold Tim Giago, a native Oglala Lakota, The Lakota Times has esta blished itself as a popular-and highly respected-voice for the frequently frustrated aspirations of American Indians. At the time of its founding, Giago was working as a reporter for The Rapid City Journal.

"One of the reasons I started the Times was that I felt the paper I was working for wasn't giving Indian affairs the coverage that I felt it deserved," says Giago. "They were covering the easy stories, which involved going down to the courthouse and covering the criminal stories."

Tim Giago in front of his office in South Dakota, Managing Editor Konnie LeMay makes up a page in the composing room, and Jackie PaLmier sets type at a computer.

Giago felt the traditional coverage of Indian affairs left the newspaper's non-Indian readers with an inaccurate picture of Indians and left American Indians without adequate coverage of the issues of most concern to them. With $4,000 borrowed from a friend, Giago established a newspaper that would redress the imbalance.

Today, 14 years later, The Lakota Times is the largest American Indian newspaper in the United States, with a paid weekly circulation of more than 12,000. About 45 percent of the newspaper's copies are delivered locally by

newspaper carriers. The rest are mailed to subscribers in all 50 U.S. states and in 14 other countries.

"On the reservations we have a lot of people who are very poor," says Giago.

"So our paper gets passed around a lot.

We estimate our paper changes hands at least five times.

"So on some of the reservations our circulation reaches a certain peak and stays there, but the readership is actually much greater. On any given week we probably have 60,000 readers."

Still, the paper reaches its chosen audience better than any other medium, which has made it popular with advertisers who hope to sell to that audience. This has, in turn, made The Lakota Times very successful. A typical edition may consist of24 pages, of which 50 to 60 percent will be advertising.

The paper also boasts a number of national advertising accounts, which are typically the most difficult accounts for a local newspaper to acquire. National advertisers-such as national retailers and producers of major consumer prod-

ucts~an reach consumers relatively inexpensively through television and national magazines, so they tend to buy space in local newspapers only when they need to reach a segment of the market that cannot be reached by some other means.

Giago estimates that 90 percent of the paper's revenues come from advertising, rather than from single copy and subscription sales.

"The independent newspaper has to survive, and you have to be a business in order to survive," Giago says. "We survive because we brought the merchants the message that, if you advertise in our newspaper, you'll have an opportunity to make money.

"Our readers are very loyal. They consider this to be their newspaper. That has been a big plus to us: Our readers will frequent the establishments that advertise in our pages."

The paper inspires loyalty because it reports news that its readers cannot obtain elsewhere, and because The Lakota Times isn't afraid to speak with a

strong editorial voice.

When the United States government announced plans to renovate the famous Mount Rushmore National Memorial near Rapid City, it sent announcement ceremony invitations to Giago and to the nine Sioux tribal chairmen. The memorial, carved by sculptor Gutzon Borglum, features the likenesses of four of the best-known and most revered U.S. Presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The shrine is visited by thousands of tourists every year.

To the Sioux, however, the memorial is a galling reminder of what they consider the perfidy of the U.S. government in its dealings with American Indians. All four of the enshrined Presidents engaged in dealings that Indians consider dishonest.

Moreover, the shrine is located in South Dakota's Black Hills, on land the U.S. government had deeded to the Sioux "forever" in 1868, only to take back less than a decade later when gold was discovered there.

The Sioux took their case to court, and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 ordered the government to pay the Sioux nation $17 million in compensation.

Compounded with interest, the sum now totals more than $300 million and sits in a special trust account.

No matter; the Sioux haven't touched the money. They want the land back.

Neither Giago nor the tribal chairmen attended the ceremony, although the event was covered by a Lakota Times reporter. Giago wrote editorials and published a scathing editorial cartoon that illustrated what he considered the hypocrisy of the monument.

Giago also has written scathingly about the common practice of naming amateur and professional athletic teams after American Indians, thus perpetuating derogatory stereotypes.

The professional Cleveland Indians baseball team, with its cartoon American Indian symbol, and the Washington Redskins American football team, whose fans often don buckskin, feathers, and war paint and dance in their seats, are two of the stereotypes that irritate him.

The symbols date from an earlier era of American history, when whites generally considered American Indians to be barbarians. Although that opinion is no longer held, the names have become wrapped in tradition in the minds of many sports fans. American Indians, not surprisingly, find the names offensive.

"I write a syndicated column that appears in about 25 newspapers," says Giago.

"I wrote a column on the subject, and I also wrote a column in Newsweek. I got some really hate-filled letters from the Washington area after it appeared. There are some really thick-headed people out there."

Sioux History When European settlers arrived in the Americas, they found a continent already settled by hundreds of individual tribes and nations. Although Native Indian cultures varied considerably, the best known societies were probably those of the Plains Indians, which included the sprawling Sioux nation. The Sioux occupied a vast territory of roughly 1.25 million square kilometers, ranging from what is now Minnesota to present-day Wyoming, from east to west, and from Montana to Nebraska from north to south.

Most American Indian nations resisted white encroachment on their territories, and the Sioux were among the last to be subjugated. Many of the Indian names most familiar to students of U.S. history-Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Spotted Tail among them-are the names of Sioux warriors who, led the continuing resistance.

Through a succession of treaties, which were made and then broken in one of the most shameful aspects of U.S. history, the Sioux were eventually herded into smaller and smaller enclaves to make room for new settlers. Effective resistance was finally ended in 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek on what is now the Pine Ridge Reservation.

There, a number of unarmed Sioux-including many women and children-were killed by U.S. soldiers, and the survivors carted away.

The Pine Ridge Reservation, the largest

of the Sioux reservations, covers approximately 13,000 square kilometers, but it is a mere fraction of the territory the Sioux once occupied. Although U.S. law considers all officially recognized tribes to be sovereign nations, in practice they are often treated as wards of the state. Deprived of their nomadic life and isolated from mainstream U.S. society, their affairs supervised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, health care provided by the Indian Health Service (of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), American Indians find their lives ordered and directed to a great extent from Washington.

Recently, in order to provide better information to his readers, Giago took the big step of hiring a Washington-based correspondent, a young Kiowa/Onondaga Indian named Bunty Anquoe.

"It was time [to open a Washington bureau]," says Giago. "Indians are very low priority to the national media."

The move stems partly from Giago's frustration in not obtaining adequate coverage from wire services and other sources. Giago says that at a recent hearing on an Indian-related issue, representatives of 15 tribes showed up to testify, but they were placed last on the agenda, after a number of U.S. Senators and other official speakers. By the time they were given their chance to speak, the national media had left the hearing.

"Nobody was left but our writer," Giago says. "These are the things that have been happening for some time."

There are advantages to having a correspondent on the scene who understands Indian interests and aspirations, he says. "No one can look at things through our eyes," Giago says. "My reporter asks questions that a white reporter wouldn't even think of asking."

"There hasn't been any national communications device for [American] Indians in this country," says Anquoe. "We want to inform tribes about the issues that affect all people in Indian country and educate non-Indians about the concerns of Tndian tribes."

0 About the Author: Clyde Linsley is a Washington-based freelance writer.

Most of the colleges and universities in the United States reopen this month after summer vacations. America has more than 3,600 institutions of higher learning with a total full-time enrollment of about eight million students, including nearly half a million foreign students-some 25,000 from India-who are drawn by the diversity and excellence of America's educational system. In addition, there are approximately 6.8 million part-time students.

Although trends change-concern for social improvement and racial understanding is up, money-making down; the health professions have replaced business as the most popular career-

choice area-the campus scene in America remains remarkably similar from decade to decade. Academic activities are, of course, the center of university life. But learning is not confined to classrooms and textbooks. Dormitories, social clubs, professional and service organizations, student government, and competitive athletics all provide opportunities for developing knowledge, skills, and personal bonds that will serve the student well in the world beyond the halls of academe. This photo essay captures many of the traditional facets of the carnival of life on the American campus.

0

CAMPUS LIFE

Clockwise, from left: An undergraduate business class at Carnegie- Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; high-rise dorms at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana; students move furniture into their dormitory at Harvard University in Cambridge; and a glimpse of dorm life at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

CAMPUS LIFE

Clockwise, from bottom left: Working on a student newspaper at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut; browsing through the messages on a bulletin board at Harvard; getting hands-on training at the campus television station at New York's Ithaca College; and exam time at Harvard.

CAMPUS LIFE

Opposite page: Dance-a-thon at the University of Miami in Florida. Clockwise, from bottom left: A friendly game of tug-of-war at Davidson College in North Carolina; pinning on a boutonniere before going out to a formal party at Providence College in Rhode Island; reading on a motorbike at Washington State University in Pullman; and, finally, the crowning momentgraduation-at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

!

Vinod Gupta (opposite page) of Nebraska recently donated $2 million to establish a business school at his alma mater-the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. In this photo he is seen with President Shankar Dayal Sharma who unveiled the school's foundation stone on July 16.

The Grateful Graduate

by KATHLEEN

cox

Vinod Gupta is a modern-day Horatio Alger who emerged from a small village in Uttar Pradesh, achieved a mediocre academic record, and then turned a clever idea into a fortune with a net worth of $110 million. Gupta, who turned 48 this past July 4 (American Independence Day), is also a U.S. citizen who hasn't forgotten his Indian roots, nor his family, nor a single friend, it seems. Nor have they forgotten him.

When I met Gupta at the Oberoi Hotel in Delhi, he was wearing a sports shirt and casual chinos; he loathes a suit and tie. He was talking into his cordless phone, and his voice exuded self-confidence. His eyes were so alert that it was hard to believe he had arrived less than ten hours ago from his home in Omaha, Nebraska, and that he had already been out jogging in the heat. But then success and high energy usually go together. People kept calling all morning.

There were last minute arrangements to make. This was no ordinary vacation trip to India.

About five years ago, Gupta decided that it was time to pay back the debts he believes he owes to each educational institution he attended.

One of these schools is the Indian Institute of Technology (lIT) at Kharagpur. In 1991, he gave lIT $2 million to create the Vinod Gupta School of Management and model it after the School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

nology. The scheduled unveiling of its foundation stone by President Shankar Dayal Sharma had now brought Gupta back to India.

Gupta has also donated money for a new science block at his former village school near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. He gave money for school buses and set up a scholarship fund for the 60 best students each year and an annual monetary citation for the best all-around teacher. In America, he donated $2 million to establish a curriculum for small business management at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, another alma mater.

He gave the university an additional $500,000 to set up a scholarship fund for minority students who want to enter its science or engineering schools.

Gupta's generosity is manifest in many ways.OnJuly 16, thedaybftheunveiling, Indian Air Force One flew President Sharma from Delhi to Kalaikunde Air Force Base, where a helicopter then took him to lIT at Kharagpur. Gupta declined an invitation to accompany the President, insisting that this singular honor belonged to his mother and father. Instead, a day earlier, he invited many of his other 200 guests, some of whom were childhood friends and family from his village, to accompany him from Delhi to Calcutta by plane. Many of them had never flown on a plane. They spent the night in a five-star hotel, and con-

tinued on to Kharagpur a festive spirit by train.

*

*

the next day in

*

As a student at Kharagpur, Gupta admits he did just enough work to squeak by. His unscholarly behavior often left him grounded on the campus during school vacations, but he made the most of a bad situation. He became friendly with a visiting professor from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Bill Splinter.

When Splinter returned to Nebraska, he sent a letter to his young friend at lIT. "I was shocked," said Gupta. ''I'd been awarded a full scholarship so that I could get a masters in agricultural engineering. Bill told me that grades were not the main criteria."

Gupta's family borrowed money for the plane ticket. With $58 in his pocket and one suitcase of clothes, he flew to Nebraska in the summer of 1967. Coming from a village with no running water, no phones, no electricity, no paved roads, Gupta was impressed by Lincoln. "It even had a map so I could find my way around. Lincoln was a beautiful place-a sleepy little town."

After Gupta received his degree, he spent another two years getting his MBA at Lincoln. Then in 1971 he moved to Omaha, the state capital, and worked as a marketing research analyst with the Commodore Corporation, which manufactured mobile homes in 18 plants around

the country. Gupta's task was to evaluate Commodore's more successful competition. Sales managers also wanted a list of mobile home dealers in their territory so that they could improve their sales.

Gupta tried to get this information from the brokerage house of Dun and Bradstreet, but its list was expensive and obsolete. That's when he thought of the yellow pages, the special telephone directories of businesses and business services that were revised and published annually

by American Telephone and Telegraph (A T &T). By checking under the alphabeticallisting for mobile home dealers, he figured he could create the list himself.

The idea was brilliant, but its implementation proved to be more complicated than he had imagined. When Gupta called AT&T and requested a copy of each of the books, the operator laughed and said he was crazy. There are 4,800 of these fat yellow books, she informed him. Crazy or not, Gupta persisted.

Two months later, a truck arrived at Commodore and dumped so many boxes that no one could get through the door of the receptionist's office. "The vice president of marketing told me that he wanted them out of the room by 4 p.m., so I moved them to my garage."

With the help of another employee, Gupta sorted the books by state. Commodore told them that they could work on their own time and the company would consider buying from them the list

they were intending to produce. When they completed the list, Gupta gave Commodore two options: Pay $9,000 for exclusive rights to it, or receive it free of charge and permit Gupta and his partner to sell it to Commodore's competitors. Commodore, which seemed destined to make unwise decisions, took the second option. The two men invested $100 of their own money and contacted the competition.

"Within two weeks, we received checks for $13,000," Gupta said. "That's when I realized that preparing mailing lists could be a great business."

Gupta hired two part-time employees and launched American Business Information (ABI). By the end of the company's first year, ABI made $22,000 in profit creating lists from the information available in telephone books. These lists became cost-saving marketing tools for American small businesses that needed sales prospect information but lacked the financial or employee resources to find comprehensive leads.

Gupta continued to work for Commodore, but by 1973, as ABI profits increased, the mobile home maker was in serious trouble. "The company received their free list," Gupta said, "but they couldn't solve their problems. I told the president that Commodore had to improve its profitability and product line. He was livid. In November, business was so bad they laid me off.

The timing was perfect."

Gupta now put all his energy into ABI and compiled more and more lists. ABI expanded quickly. While it is now a large company with 660 employees, it continues its winning strategy by targeting its products at small businesses. From the original $100 investment, the company's current market value is $190 million. ABI also went public in 1992.

Gupta believes ABI's growth is a result of his philosophy: Identify the customer's needs and offer solutions backed with first-class service.

"Our competitors are watching us," he insisted. "Tomorrow my company can be decimated if we don't keep up with the changes in

the information technology. It's a rapid growth industry-similar to the automotive industry in the 1940s."

Today, ABI's information coverage extends to businesses in Canada and involves a thorough search and verification of all data. ABI employees pour through yellow pages and business white pages, company annual reports, government publications, business magazines, newsletters, and newspapers. They make 14 million calls a year to II million businesses to double check their information, which now includes credit ratings. Customers can buy mailing lists with yellow page headings that cover abattoirs to zoos. Other lists are based on the U.S. Government's Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) Coding System, such as Wholesale Trade-Durable Goods and Wholesale Trade-Nondurable Goods.

There are lists of businesses ranked by employee size or sales volume; of businesses according to geographic location; of key executives; of brands, franchises, or professions, and of new businesses.

ABI provides such information in numerous formats: Mailing labels; 3x5-inch cards; CD-ROM disks; on-line computer databases; instant telephone access for customers who need business information when they're on the road.

Before we left Delhi for Calcutta and the unveiling at Kharagpur, I asked Gupta what the objective was behind the curriculum for small business management that he has established at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

"Many students dream of creating a small business," he said, "but they're unaware of the special demands-the financial requirements, discipline, cost controls.

When you set up a small business, you need to wear different hats. Not everyone can do this. Students will be able to learn the keys to success before they invest their life savings. Seventy-three percent of start-up small businesses [in the United States] fold in three years, and 93 percent of them ultimately fail. It isn't a dream come true for everyone. I was lucky."

When we reached Calcutta, I discovered that many of Gupta's guests also felt

lots of savvy! When he won his scholarship to Nebraska, he came running to me, waving the letter. He wanted to celebrate.

Since we were both broke and I was one year his senior, I sold his bike so we could have a good time. I got him a rental to use for the rest of the year." Khurana laughed and glanced at his friend. "But that guy created solid bonds with everyone he met at IfT. When I went to Canada, Vinod drove all the way up to Toronto to see me.

He's a true friend."

Air India Captain T.P. Chopra, who had been stationed at the Kalaikunde Air Force Base near lIT, seconded this assessment. He said that Gupta and his fellow students frequently came to visit. "They were looking for food and liquor. We were looking for company.

I never thought that he would be successful until he started his business. Then I saw he had initiative and leadership acumen. But I never doubted his compassion."

The former Secretary of Tourism for the Government of India, Billou Goswami, who met Gupta in 1965, related this anecdote: "Last November Vinod and some of his American friends came with me to Corbett's.

Just by chance, we visited a small school for about 30 children of mahouts. It was right in the core of the park, and tigers and elephants were on visiting terms with the students. The school was okay, but these seven guys pooled together a lakh to upgrade the facilities. It was totally spontaneous-a fabulous gesture."

When we arrived at Kharagpur, it was hot and the air was heavy with humidity.

A t 10:45 a .m. we filed into lIT's S.N. Bose Auditorium. Gupta wore a dress shirt and tie under a borrowed, wool suit jacket.

Disguising his discomfort, he chatted American Business with many of the 500 people who filled lnformalion provides the wood-paneled room-dignitaries, ina number of structors, students, and, of course, his produCls-cuSlomerpersonal guests. prospeCl lists, Gupta then took his place on the dais mailing labels. with the director of TIT, K.L. Chopra, business directories. and the chairman of its Board of Govand related items ernors, L.M. Thapar. He beamed as his on diskefles. parent~ came into the room and were magnetic tapl'.l.

CD-ROM. or tllrou!{11 ushered to their special seats of honor. A a cO/llputer I/('(I\¡ork. hush preceded the entry of President

they were equally lucky. Everyone appreciated Gupta's loyalty and kindness; and everyone had a story to tell. Veena, a relative from the village, insisted her cousin was a "naughty" young boy. "He would pull my hair and run off with my dupalla; but I am proud of him and I want God to give him more success." She looked at her cousin, still dressed casually in a T-shirt and slacks. "Oh, he was also fond of photography."

This trait was in evidence. Every two minutes, their host snapped another picture.

Early the next morning a train took us from the Howrah Station through palmshrouded villages surrounded by rice paddies to Kharagpur.

While Gupta continued to click away with his camera, I spoke with several of his friends.

Jassie Khurana, now a resident of Toronto, Canada, was the first student Gupta met at IIT. Since education figured so prominently in Gupta's sense of charity, I asked Khurana ifhis friend was ever serious about his studies. "Are you kidding? He was a lousy student; but he had

Sharma who was escorted to the dais followed by the West Bengal Governor, K.V. Raghunath Reddy. A group of TIT students led the assembly in the singing of the national anthem.

When Gupta spoke, his voice wavered.

He said that when he heard the Indian national anthem after a hiatus of 27 years, he remembered every word. "It gave me goose bumps. I am a citizen of the United States, but I have not forgotten my roots."

He paused as if to soak in the moment's importance before he continued. "I came to TIT from a tiny village and I discovered a different India: Students spoke different languages, had different cultures, even ate different foods, but I realized that we were all Indians. IfT changed me and that's why we former students must go into a partnership with the government to fulfill today's educational needs. It's essential for engineers to have a background in management and it's just as essential for managers to have an understanding of technology. I also want to thank my adopted country, the USA, for providing me with the opportunities and the wealth that make this gift possible."

In his address, President Sharma summed up the significance of the gift and the person: "I hope that its realization will serve as an inspiration to others in different parts of the world who are interested in seeing this nation develop, and who realize that the greatness of India should be the pride of every Indian wherever he is."

On the flight back to Delhi, I sat with another guest from the village, Gupta's elementary-school teacher, S.c. Jain. I asked him about his former student. Jain smiled. "He didn't give any promise. He was an ordinary child." He watched Gupta, comfortable again in a T-shirt and shorts, taking pictures of his friends. "But he cherishes old values. Many have left for greener pastures, but he has allowed us all to graze along with him. He's a pucca patriot- a gem of a man."

0 About the Author: Kathleen Cox, a former columnist j(lr The Village Voice in New York, is based in Nell' Delhi where she serves as the South Asian editor/in' the lravel book FODOR's.

With Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg-the most commercially successful moviemaker in Hollywood history-has moved his craft, and his mindset, into dramatically different, darker realms. This visually striking, intellectually compelling film has been the talk of the industry since its U.S. release.

Late in Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's astonishing, Academy Award winning movie that delineates one aspect of the Holocaust, there is a moment that in microcosm defines the place of this film within the director's 20-year-plus career.

The scene is a Nazi concentration camp in Poland during World War II. A group of women inmates has just emerged alive from the showers that at other, more tragic times during the war have sprayed lethal gas-killing millions. On this occasion, though, all that rained down on them was water. The still-beleaguered women are animated, tentatively hopeful as they dress. Suddenly, in the background, we glimpse scores of children being marched to waiting trucks. They innocently clamber aboard, as if on their way to a picnic.

The women observe what is happening, and in a flash realize

its significance-impending doom for the youngsters. Agonized, the adults run screaming and wailing toward the nowdeparting lorries. But it's too late.

For the first time in a career of movie projects whose themes often have revolved around the rescue of children from one form of natural or otherworldly peril or another, director Spielberg, in part, has focused his art, his vision, and his emotion on a group of children who could not be rescued.

With Schindler's List, Spielberg, now well into middle age at 46, has left behind-at least for the time being-the aliens and killer sharks, the spaceships and the pirates at the center of such movies as Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Hook. He has discovered a much more horrific menace with a wider reach, one that imperiled humankind's future. In reflecting on the genocide in the maw of World War II and delineating the evil, he has found in its midst a curious semblance of goodness, albeit an enigmatic one.

Chance Meeting About a dozen years ago, Australian novelist Thomas Keneally ventured into a Beverly Hills, California, luggage store In this scene from the film, Schindler welcomes his workers to the safety of his new factory at Brimlitz.

to have a suitcase repaired. In the course of conversation with the owner, Leopold Page, he heard from Page a remarkable story-the epic of his rescue from Nazi hands by a GermanCzech factory owner and businessman, Oskar Schindler.

Schindler, he learned, was a hedonist-a gambler and a womanizer-as well as a war profiteer. Yet the plight of Jews in Europe, which Schindler witnessed up-close in Poland, struck some type of chord within him. Brazen and imaginative, he conceived a way to rescue some ofthem-I,200, in fact-before war's end.

Keneally knew a good story when he heard it. Before long, he had completed a novel, Schindler's List, based on the facts first told by Page (who had changed his name from the original Poldek Pfefferberg), which Keneally corroborated and supplemented with further research. On publication in 1982, the book was well-received in the United States and overseas; Spielberg, having been alerted to it, optioned the work for filming.

However, for nearly a decade, all that happened was a considerable amount of screenwriting activity, none of which fully satisfied Spielberg. Finally, a writer named Steven Zaillian produced a script to which Spielberg could relate.

Spielberg took the draft to the top executives at Universal Studios, along with his conditions: That the cast be selected without any attention to star quotients; that the movie's length equal the time needed to tell the complete story; and that the film be shot in black-and-white (the director likened it to "truth serum"). Studio executives agreed.

"The movie simply needed my clout to get it made," Spielberg said recently in an interview. The statement appears immodest, but it reflects a truism in Hollywood: Create a movie that brings in $200 million, give or take a few million, and you can shoot your fantasy project-whatever it might be. In the case of this director-the most successful moviemaker in the history of the industry-he had many chits to call in in the form of past hits, and on the horizon was the 1993 blockbuster, Jurassic Park, which would surpass the $I,OOO-millionmark, making it the highest-grossing motion picture ever.

Growth of a Filmmaker An intriguing story lurks in the shadows of Spielberg's own life. The young boy, given a camera as a gift, begins making home movies in his backyard, using his three younger sisters as the cast. He parlays the experience into more ambitious film projects as a teenager and eventually wins some awards. While attending California State University in Long Beach, he talks his way onto the Universal Studios lot, becomes acquainted with an executive, who signs the young filmmaker to a contract.

From early studio assignments--such as Duel, a taut, chilling 1971televisionmovie about a highway commuter who is pursued by a truck with an unseen driver-he advanced to features, winning his stars in 1975with the filmadaptation of Peter Benchley'sJaws, a novel about a killer shark that terrorizes a New England resort community. The movie was his first box-officesensation.

In the years that followed, Spielberg delved mostly into the

On location in Poland, Steven Spielberg directs Liam Neeson who played Schindler.

realm of fantasy-from the science-fiction sphere to the goodguys/bad-guys real world featuring the heroics of his fictional creation, an archaeologist, pre-World War II vintage, named Indiana Jones. Many other movies produced by him but directed by proteges he nurtured (Chris Columbus and Robert Zemeckis among them) also fell into this fantasy world; the Poltergeist and Back to the Future series, plus the animated hit Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, are examples.

The popularity and prestige of his movies notwithstanding, the young director failed to gain entry into the only circle that counts in Hollywood-that of the prizewinner. His movies filled studio coffers and won critics' kudos for their breathtaking use of all phases of the medium, but they were relegated to the sidelines when awards seasons came. The lingering ingenuousness of filmdom's newest fabulist, it was believed, meant that Spielberg was locked into a mode, suggesting that recognition might only come when-if ever-he would break out of it.

He began, therefore, to intersperse his "Saturday afternoon serial" adventures with other projects. He adapted Alice Walker's The Color Purple, a trenchant novel about a young girl's tribulations growing up in the South, and British writer J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, a memoir of Ballard's wartime detention by the Japanese as a youth in China. These movies and others mirrored Spielberg's prodigious struggle to be accepted as a serious moviemaker. Yet even in these instances, the fact that he fashioned relatively blissful wrap-ups-and survivals-fortified the view that a Spielberg movie invariably would be drenched in romanticism and would demand a happy ending.

Lurking throughout that period, in the recesses of his creative consciousness, was the Keneally novel. His strong feelings for the project were fueled by the appeal of the story itself, as well as by his links to his own Jewish heritage and history. The travails of his coreligionists and others during World War II are part of his being (members of his family perished in the Holocaust). And so, as he coped with the human and mechanized denizens of Jurassic Park, his dinosaur saga, he began to shape the shooting of Schindler's List.

Setting the Scene The movie, which won high praise from critics and audiences at its initial U.S. showings in December 1993, opens with a traditional Jewish Sabbath candle-lighting ceremony. As the

warm reddish-yellow flame rises, it suddenly pales into untinted wisps of smoke, and the story of Oskar Schindler unfolds.

Spielberg begins by setting the scene as it was in Poland between the Nazi invasion in September 1939 and 1941-when the German forces began sweeping the country's Jews into confined, mile-square ghettos in the big cities, including Krakow, where Schindler's experiences occurred. Polish-American cameraman Janusz Kaminski's fluid black-and-white cinematography, moving back and forth between hand-held documentary-style camerawork (often by Spielberg himself) and sharply focused imagery (such as a stark glimpse of blood oozing in an expanding arc across the snow after the arbitrary, point-blank summary execution of an elderly Jew), documents the widening menace. As we follow Krakow's Jews from ghetto to labor camp to Auschwitz, the systematic horrors are unveiled.

Schindler (portrayed by Irish actor Liam Neeson}-a striking, gregarious man, one of the Nazis' favorite bon vivants and a party member-is introduced within his customary milieu, the cabaret and club life. Smoking casually, quaffing cognac, bedding down women adulterously, he supported the Nazis because they were most likely to facilitate his primary goal-to expand his financial holdings.

Having arranged to take over an enamel-works factory confiscated from Jews, he brought in slave laborers-nonsalaried ghetto inhabitants-to manufacture cookware and other everyday utensils for German soldiers at the front.

Before long, his workforce and the rest of Krakow's Jews were transferred to the Plaszow forced-labor camp, which was under the control of a sadistic Nazi officer, Amon Goeth (played by British stage actor Ralph Fiennes-pronounced Rafe Fines). Paunchy, methodical Goeth personified what social philosopher Hannah Arendt has called "the banality of evil" (an example being his capricious sniping with a high-powered rifle from his hilltop aerie, agonizingly shown), yet Schindler befriended him as a means to an end. Goeth agreed to let Schindler relocate his plantwhich now was to produce artillery shells-to Plaszow as a "sub-camp" of sorts.

But then the order went out for the relocation of the Jews from Plaszow to Auschwitz. For reasons still subject to debate after half a century, something-perhaps one act of cruelty, one dehumanizing moment-triggered an awakening of Schindler's conscience. Guided by his chief bookkeeper, a Jew named Itzhak Stern (played by British actor Ben Kingsley, star of Gandhi) who was to survive the war, the entrepreneur devised a scheme to rescue his Jewish laborers by purchasing their services from the Germans with his war profits, and transfer the entire factory to a safe haven in his Czechoslovakian homeland.

Goodness? Perhaps. But was his purpose to rescue Jews or to protect himself in the likely event of a Nazi defeat? This is the enigma of the man.

In any event, as he proceeded, advised by Stern, he made sure

the list of Schindlerjuden-Schindler's

Jews-was as lengthy as

he could make it. (Three hundred women on the roster mistakenly were dispatched to Auschwitz, but he saved them as well.)

And as his mission changed, so did that of his enterprise.

Indeed, his factory, by his own design, produced no usable munitions at all.

If, in the aftermath of the war, Schindler was lost on history's landscape, he remained ever-present in the lives of "his" Jews.

They provided him and his wife with housing and other needs, and kept in touch until his death in 1974. Today, a coda to the movie informs us, the Schindlerjuden and their extended families total 4,OOo-more than the number of Jews still remaining in all of Poland, once a center of Jewish culture and religion.

Uncompromising History Spielberg's treatment of this vast subject, played out on a broad, multidimensional canvas, is awesome. He recounts the story-<iarker than anything he has ever imagined-in fascinating detail, on the original sites in Krakow, including Schindler's actual factory and apartment. This is history, depicted intelligently, passionately, and uncompromisingly-with the savagery intact. Spielberg has been criticized-albeit by a decided few-for centering his Holocaust movie on a Nazi, even a "good" Nazi. Yet the fact is that the victims of this genocide stand, collectively, as a character, to which limitless attention is paid, compassionately, in the course of the film.

In visual terms, Schindler's List surpasses most of the movies released in the past several years. Except for a few fleeting seconds when Spielberg blends in color images, he dared to shoot the movie in black-and-white-a medium that had been all but forsaken since the mid-1960s. Seeking to provide audiences with an accessible and familiar texture that complemented themes and settings that for many would be inaccessible and unfamiliar, he opted for the use of hand-held equipment rather than crane shots wherever he could. A master at staging crowd sequences (the terror-stricken sunbathers in Jaws and the teeming hordes fleeing the Japanese in Empire of the Sun), he put the art to good use in chronicling the liquidation of the ghetto and other sequences.

To his great relief, yet testifying to his fundamental craftsmanship, it all came together-story, performances, imagery, design, mesmerizing lighting, and the evocative and restrained John Williams score, featuring the haunting violin solos of Itzhak Perlman. The movie, though painful and disturbing, is, ultimately, both stimulating and highly accessible. It has won several critics' awards, the prestigious Golden Globe of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and seven Academy Awards, including one for "best film."

In one of many meetings with his large cast, Spielberg offered a personal perspective. "We are not making a film-we're making a document," he said. That unadorned statement underscores the profundity of the resulting motion picture.

0 About tbe Autbor'

Washington,

Michael

J. Bandler.

a SPAN

correspondent

D.C., regularly covers art and culture.

based in

First Lady of Lasers Elsa Garmire was determined to avoid the boredom she saw among the women of her mother's generation, so she hitched her star to a laser beam and seems never to have known a dull moment.

Lasers ...Star Wars ...Magic Light Machines .... These are "words that evoke dreams in children, scientists, and engineers alike," Elsa Garmire wrote in 1989.

Garmire, 54, professor of electrical engineering and physics since 1981 and director of the Center for Laser Studies at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles since 1984, has long been fascinated by lasers.

"For many years since its invention in 1958," she continued, "the laser has been called 'the solution looking for a problem.'

Now, more than 25 years later, the laser has indeed solved many problems."

Lasers weld (detached retinas or pot handles), cut cloth, remove skin cancers.

They process information, monitor the movement of Earth due to earthquakes, and measure vast distances, such as that between Earth and the moon.

Their potential is boundless. "Lasers today," Garmire wrote, "are in the position of electronics in the late 1950s. Who can envisage their uses in 30 more years?"

Garmire is one of only 21 women in the 1,564-member National Academy of Engineering. Last year she became president of the 11,000-member Optical Society of America-only the second woman to hold the title in the 77-year-old organization.

Reprinted

with permission

Copyright

Š

from

1992 University

use

Trojan Family.

of Southern

California.

Garmire's educational credentials are as stellar as her professional achievements. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University's Radcliffe College in 1961 and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965. Her mentor at MIT, Charles Townes, shared the Nobel Prize in physics with two Soviet scientists in 1964 for his development of the laser.

Known for years as the "First Lady of Lasers," Garmire thinks she acquired the title for her efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to marry art and technology.

She was a founder of the firm that created the Laserium light show at Griffith Park Observatory. And she worked with such luminaries as painter Robert Rauschen-

berg and Bell Laboratories' scientist/ artist Billy Kluver.

In 1970 Mademoiselle honored Garmire, then a research fellow in electrical engineering at Caltech, as one of the magazine's women of the year. Of those days Garmire says, "There was a lot of glamour. I had a gold lame jumpsuit that I wore to all the art events I was involved in." She says this sitting at an overflowing desk in her decidedly unglamorous office in the basement of USe's Denney Research Center. Behind her, colorful, patterned photos of her laser artwork are lined up on the wall. She left the art world in the early 1970s when, she says, "big money" entered the arena, transforming ebullient fun into serious business.

When her first husband received an offer to teach physics at Caltech, she became a postdoctoral research assistant there, staying for nine years before corning to USe. As a graduate student at MIT, she had been a pioneer in nonlinear optics; at Caltech, in integrated optics. At USC, she again became a pioneer, this time in optical bistability-the effort to create opticallogical circuits for optical computers.

Today, Garmire divides her time between research and teaching. At USe's Keck Photonics Laboratory, she is exploring ways of making integrated circuits that will work for optics in the same way electronic circuits work with electronics. As director of the Center for Laser Studies, she coordinates the work of researchers from the departments of electrical engineering, physics, aerospace engineering, and chemical engineering.

She teaches a graduate optics class on campus, but additional students view it from a variety of sites via the School of Engineering's Interactive Instructional Television Network. They can call in questions that are heard in the classroom and answered during class. A courier service sees that assignments are sent out and handed in on time.

Television "affects your teaching very strongly," Garmire says. "You feel much more on stage when you know there are people you can't see. We get so many visual cues from people, and when you don't see them, you don't know what they're thinking."

Garmire also teaches a strictly on-campus lasers and optics course, a combination oflecture/discussion and lab work. She was able to get much of the lab equipment with a major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), as part of a program to encourage students in an area that is "so very important for the future." Optics is important, she explains, because it "is becoming a complement to electronics." Its use for long-distance telephone calls, compact disk (CD) players, and data storage "will improve communications systems, sensing systems, and storage as well."

Such advances take many years to progress from concept to common usage.

"Everyone wants to know how it [laser

and optic technology] is going to change my life tomorrow," Garmire says. "Well, ifit were going to change your life tomorrow, it would be an industry. We're working on the things that will change your life 20 years from now."

Garrnire's senior and first-year graduate students create their own lab experiments to grasp the concepts that their professor articulates. Such autonomy "initially comes as a bit of a shock" to them, says teaching assistant, Rahul Asthana.

"They're used to being handed something.

But they soon become excited when they realize they can do what they want.

"Generally," Asthana says, "when I come to a class, I open the door and let people in. But when I come to this class, many of the students have already let themselves in and have been working for hours. They really want to do this."

Garrnire works with about 14 PhD students and challenges them with a simple question. "Is it true?" she asks her students.

"Are you willing to stake your PhD and my reputation on this? Because you are."

Science at its best should be truth, Garrnire says. And "facts" and "truth," she adds, are not synonymous. "The world is constantly changing, and what I knew as facts 20 years ago might be irrelevant today.

"The only thing I can teach is how to think and how to learn and how to grow, how to analyze and prioritize information.

But the actual facts I'm teaching them are irrelevant. They just happen on the palette we're using to paint the picture."

In the Mademoiselle profile in 1970, Garrnire called herself "a scientist in a man's world." That's still largely the way the world remains, she says, and understanding that "helps explain why you get treated the way you do. There are times when I'm treated extra nice; there are times when I'm treated extra lousy. Most of those times have some relevance to my rninorityness."

Because of her experience, Garmire says, "I've gone out of my way to find such people and to offer a little more support." As a result, about 30 percent of the people who have worked for her are women and minorities. The norm in engineering in the United States, she says, is between five and ten percent.

She believes that drawing these groups into the profession is essential to its survival. "There is serious concern that there will not be enough engineers in the year 2000," she says. "If we're talking about the future of our country, we have to make sure we have people who are capable of designing high-tech systems that will keep us in the forefront on an international scale.

"So we have a real need to make sure we're training the new class of engineers.

And a number of people, including those at the National Science Foundation, believe these engineers will be found among women and minority groups .... " To promote engineering as a career, the NSF provides money for a program that enables Garmire to hire up to ten undergraduates to work with her graduate students in the laboratory during the summer.

"They learn what engineering is really like, to motivate them to hang in there and go on to graduate school," she says.

What motivated her?

"I started out with only one desire in the world and that was not to be bored," says Garrnire. "Being a product of the 1950s, I saw my mother's generation being really bored with their lives and I was very afraid of that. I realized the other day, I'm just so unbelievably exhausted running around 80 hours a week. At least I got my wish! I guess I was a whole lot more competitive and aggressive than I ever knew."

Does she see herself as being, like her mentor ChariesTownes, the recipient ofa Nobel Prize someday? "I'm incredibly more successful than I ever thought I would be," she says, recalling her early expectations for her career, but she doesn't see herself as a Nobel contender.

"To win the Nobel Prize, you really have to be absolutely the best in the world in something. And if you decide, like I did, that you're going to have kids [two daughters now in their twenties] and go camping with them and travel around the world with your husband [Robert Russell, an electrical engineer, to whom she has been married since 1979], you're not going to make it to the Nobel Prize. At least I'm not."

0 About the Author: Janet Kaye writes for Trojan Family.

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A ghost hovers over this month's United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt. It is the specter of Thomas Malthus and his apocalyptic formula stating that humankind increases geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16) while the food supply increases arithmetically (2, 3,4,5).

The corollary, in Malthus's 200-yearold "Essay on the Principle of Population," is that if people don't limit their offspring, famine, wars, or disease will kill off the excess population. He's talking about us.

So far Malthus appears to have been wrong globally.

Modern agricultural methods have kept food production a step ahead of the growing number of mouths, improvements in health care have kept disease at bay, and even the catastrophe of World War II didn't halt the rise in world population. However, there are parts of the world, mainly in Africa, where his prediction is dead on.

Moreover, by the year 2050, some estimates indicate that 12.5 billion people will inhabit Earth, compared to the 5.6 billion who share it today. As the Union of Concerned Scientists put it: "The Earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for the growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the Earth's limits."

Neo-Malthusian disciples, including the Clinton Administration, believe that when the factors of environmental degradation and shrinking water resources are added to the equation, the

The author focuses on the "combatants" and their likely strategies at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo this month. only way to cut consumption is to limit the increase in the number of consumers.

Representing the opposite side in the philosophic-a I argument are the Cornucopians, who see human beings as a resource, not a drain, whose ingenuity increases as the competition for res9urces becomes more keen. They will find a way to survive and prosper as they have in the past.

Between those two polar positions are shadings and variations of other political persuasions, including: The Developing World Caucus: This group believes you can't talk about population control without simultaneously considering development assistance from the richer countries.

An official of the Washington-based Population Action International (PAl) says, "For the developing nations, population control is a sideshow. For us it's the main

event." As described by Fazlur Rahman, who at the U.N. preparatory meeting represented Bangladesh, the world's most densely populated nation, "One-fifth of the world lives in absolute poverty. For those people, concepts such as gender equality, empowerment of women, and reproductive rights are not meaningful without basic living standards."

The Vatican: Its view is formally backed by a small coalition of Latin American countries, with allies from the Muslim world. The Vatican is willing to talk about population control, family spacing, and migration, as long as the discussion doesn't encompass contraception-and abortion is explicitly banned. That is a nonstarter, since the vast majority of the other delegations, including the United States, believes that legal, safe abortion-if only as a last, undesirable resort-must be available to women. Some Muslim factions oppose anything that interferes with the traditional role of women in the family, which partially coincides with the Vatican view.

The Libertarians: Allies of the Cornucopians, they believe that if there is a problem, it is in the intrusion of government into the most intimate of human relations-procreation.

If only government would stay out, people could work things out themselves.

The Feminists: This group, not all of whom are women, argues that contraception is a human right since it gives women freedom over their own destiny.

They believe that there is a direct relationship between such things as girls staying

longer in school and having fewer children. This school argues that a vital part of population control is adolescent sexual education, including access to contraceptives. The argument is weakened by the lack of a clear correlation between availability of contraceptives and a drop in the birth rate in all locales. As the age of sexual maturity decreases and the number of young people increases, one-fifth of the world's population soon will be sexually active teenagers: That's one billion kids capable of having kids.

All these combatants meet in a battlefield where statistics are two-edged swords. For example, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 10,000 new human beings are born every hour. The same Bureau of Census profile says 6,000 people die every hour, but the mix of births and deaths in western Europe is not what economists would hope for. The traditional population pyramid, which looks like a triangle for the developing world (many children at the base, dwindling to a few elders at the apex), looks totally different for western Europe. It resembles a 1960s necktie. It is uniformly skinny from childhood to dotage, meaning there are more people receiving pensions than there are teenagers joining the workforce.

In such a world where figures can be variously interpreted, where the same cause does not produce the same effect in every country, there is one indisputable point: World population is increasing, mainly due to longer lifespans and in spite of civil wars and fatal diseases, such as AIDS. What is different about the arguments

in this decade's conference, compared to those in 1974 and 1984, is that the United States-the largest aid donor on population issues, with $585 million in the current budget request-has changed its policy in the past two years. Since the United States represents about 25 percent of the world's national spending on population issues and has an ice-breaker effect on other nations, such as Japan, which has increased its contributions tenfold in response to the Americans' lead, that represents a seismic shift. Abortions, under that new formula, should be safe, legal, and rare, a sharp turn from the Reagan Administration, which adopted the Vatican view of opposing abortions and certainly not financing them with U.S. taxpayer money.

In the broad terms of the political argument, that would make the present U.S. administration neo-Malthusian, while the Reagan Administration, slightly modified by the Bush years, was made up of Cornucopians, who believe that more people are preferable to supporting government-funded abortions.

The State Department, with its new Bureau of Global Affairs under former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth, is setting the policy, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under Brian Atwood, is carrying that policy out.

"First of all, the terminology is enormously important," notes Wirth. "The language we are using is population stabilization, not population control.

Nobody wants to be controlled.

Nobody wants the government telling them what they should do.

"In the Cairo conference, our goals are threefold: To mobilize resources from the developed community, so that countries that wish to embark on population programs will have the means with which to do so; to define family planning programs very broadly to include not only traditional rep~oductive health information and means but also child survival, education of women, responsibilities of men and women's access to the full range of reproductive health-care services. We know those programs work. Also, we are beginning to work on delivery mechanisms as increased resources become available from international financial institutions, such as the World Bank ....

Those resources can be well-packaged and used. Those are our three goals."

The opening statements at April's preparatory meeting for the Cairo conference suggest that the attempts to reach a bland consensus will not succeed. Wirth says only ten percent of the draft final document is bracketed (unsettled issues are enclosed by brackets to be dealt with later), but those matters are explosive-abortion and contraception. Like theology, the argument involves moral and ethical issues that are unlikely to be easily resolved.

The final document at Cairo will be adopted by consensus, giving each of the 189 countries a theoretical veto over the final product. But there is an escape clause that permits two-thirds of the countries to require a vote on a contentious, unsettled issue. Abortion is one of these. It is assumed that the Vatican would prefer not to have a show-down

vote, since its position, according to U.S. State Department vote counters, is only supported directly by four small countries, such as Benin and Cote d'Ivoire.

But Wirth, who notes that President Clinton's belief on abortion is that it be "safe, legal, and rare," is confident an agreement can be brokered with the Vatican.

The argument about freedom of choice in abortions and other issues treads into another mine field, human rights, best exemplified by China's position. The Chinese statement in the preparatory conference was contradictory, and suggests that an internal debate about population control, like so many other things, is still unsettled between the pragmatists and the ideologues. One sentence stated that the "formulation and implementation of population policies is the sovereign right of each nation." But another sentence in the same statement read: "Coercion in family planning programs, whether physical, economic, or psychological, is a breach of human rights and can never be acceptable; all individuals have the basic right to choose when and if they will have children."

That appeared to confirm that China, with its 1.2 billion people, is selectively moving away from its 1979 official "one child per couple" policy and is permitting some couples, especially in rural areas, to have two and three children without economic penalty or forced abortion.

Other countries also see the population issue through the lens of their people's own experiences and problems. Peru's delegation wanted drug trafficking and terrorism to be included in the final document because those factors "had worsened the situation of great portions of the population."

The delegate from Croatia thought it should include an issue of great importance to her country--ethnic cleansing.

For activist organizations such as the PAl, population is the starting point for a whole series of policies, including guarding the environment, conserving water, and giving women equal access to education.

They see Haiti as a frightening glimpse of the future of overpopulation, a country

that has crashed because too many people caused degradation of the land. ' Strategists, such as some of the contributors to a new Brookings study, "Global Enlargement," believe population growth is one of ~he key dynamic factors that the United States-seen as the only feasible superpower capable of dealing with destabilizing security threats-will face in the unsettled post-Cold War world. Other factors involve the uncontrollable spread of military and information technology.

If the pattern of recent American economic statistics can be applied globally, the richest one percent of the world's population is getting richer by about the same amount that the poorest 20 per-

One-fifth of the world's population soon will be sexually active teenagers: That's one billion kids capable of having kids. cent saw their incomes decline. The poor are not only getting poorer, but also more numerous, a prophecy seen by the Brookings study as an explosive formula for disaster.

Some of the 23 U.S. delegates to Cairo hope to see the world population conference produce more than just a consensus document that could be largely ignored.

Some participants want to see the meeting c~mclude with a pledging document that encourages nations to commit themselves to certain levels of population stabilization funding. The State Department believes that has already occurred, with the Japanese pledging $3,000 million over seven years for population projects and related issues. Others, like the European Union, are also signing on. .

One of the differences between this year's conference and the previous ones is

that women, led by the formidable feminist Bella Abzug, are a majority in the 23member American delegation; and the secretary-general of the conference is a woman. Another difference is that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will be given a greater share of the responsibility for making policy and carrying it out.

Those of opposing views, however they differ, agree that people tend to have fewer children when they are materially better off and have more education, which is a point on the side of the developing nations caucus and why the word "development" is part of the conference title.

However, even a lower birth rate is not a universal cause for celebration. In places like western Europe and Japan, where the fertility rate has dropped well below the replacement rate of two children per family, citizens see their future threatened for a different reason. Since people are living longer, there will be fewer and fewer people of working age to pay the bills for the rising number of pensioners. Germany, for example, sees a serious fiscal crisis that may finally kill its long-established social welfare system, which is the basis of its stable politics. In a crowded place like central Europe, it is seen as a Hobson's choice: Either have more children and add to your living costs in an expensive economy, or don't have children and contribute to the dissolution of your pension.

Economists have been dealing with the same dilemma since Thomas Malthus's day.

Another scholar, William Forster Lloyd, wrote about the "tragedy of the commons."

In theoretical terms he talked of the universal benefit in preserving the unmanaged common resource (such as the "common" pastureland in an English township). But at a certain point, when demands increase faster than the existing resources, he noted, the individual self-interest is served by a "help yourself first" attitude.

So it is with population. Excess humanity may be a general problem, but even in overcrowded cities, there are individual benefits to having a big family.

0 About the Author: Jim Anderson, a correspondent for DPA, the German Press Agency, has covered the U.S. State Departmentfor 25 years.

Indian Birth Pangs At the dawn of the 20th century, in 1901, undivided India's population stood at 238 million. Now, at the century's twilight, it is four times that-900 million. At its present growth rate, India will have, according to some conservative estimates, 1,400 million people by the year 2025.

"Although India has made some modest gains in family planning over the years, population remains one of the country's most critical problems," says John Rogosch, an expert on health and family planning at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in New Delhi. "The momentum of population growth, because of the past high fertility, is so great that even under the extremely optimistic assumption that India achieves a very low fertility rate soon, the country's population will continue to grow for another generation before it stabilizes."

Based on its own experience in family planning, and on the experience of other countries, India, Rogosch says, now needs to design bold, imaginative strategies aimed at bringing down the current birthrate of 28 (per 1,000 of the population) to about 20 in the next ten to IS years and to serve women's broader reproductive health needs.

Rogosch has worked on family planning programs in Indonesia and Thailand, which have dramatically reduced fertility rates. He says most children are born to mothers who are between the ages of 18 and 3Q-"what we call the high fertility age group. So if you want to have an impact on fertility rates, that must be the major group you must serve, and I emphasize serve. That's what these countries did, and they had a very pragmatic, open approach. They provided a wide range of IUDs, condoms, and later quality spacing contraceptives-pills, injectable contraceptives-that focused on the needs of young couples.

They also provided sterilization, but in the early years of their programs it was not very popular. Sterilization does have some impact on reducing the total number of births, but most people who go in for sterilization are the people who already have the children they want."

The states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala have achieved dramatic declines in birthrates. Their fertility rates are at, or close to, the levels in industrialized countries. Meanwhile, the fertility rate in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan stands at about five children per couple, considerably above the national average of 3.5. These states account for more than 40 percent of all births in the country.

"Uttar Pradesh," says Rogosch, "is the largest state in terms of population, about 145 million, one-sixth of the nation, so ifany impact on population growth is to be made, immediate attention needs to be focused on U.P. and its neighbors. Ifwe can make an impact in Uttar Pradesh and in these other Hindi belt states, it will have an impact on the overall growth rate in the country.

"We hope," Rogosch continues, "through our ten-year project, Innovations in Family Planning Services Project, that the Indian government started in UP. in 1992, will bring down the fertility rate in the state

and be a model for other Hindi belt states. USAID is actively associated with the project, in collaboration with the Government of India and the state government. In family fact, this is the largest single USAID-supported planning project in the world."

Rogosch says the USAID project has introduced several unique features, one of which is the creation of an autonomous society-the State Innovations in Family Planning Services Agency. ''Though it's true that the government is a major provider of family planning services, it is also crucial to bring in the complementary resources of the nongovernment sector. Therefore, in Uttar Pradesh we felt that a society flexibility, in reach, would be far more effective-in and in capability-in implementing the program and gaining participation by all sectors."

In a recent USAID-supported National Family Health Survey, says Rogosch, "we discovered that 30-40 percent of the married women didn't want another child now or ever, but they were not practicing family planning. So there is clearly an 'unmet need.' In other words, there are a lot of people who might want services but either don't know about them or have no access to them. The society's objective is to make services more client-oriented-to make sure people are aware of services as well as have access to them. Moreover, the society can better organizations, coordinate support to cooperatives, nongovernmental private-sector groups, and other grassroots organizations in bringing quality spacing contraceptives to the people. We hope in another twothree years, the impact of the project will be felt."

Among other things, the project will support distribution of family planning information and contraceptives at the village level; train doctors, nurses, and midwives in family planning methods, products, and counseling; and provide research, data, and analysis to help manage and monitor project activities.

In addition, USAID is supporting several other projects in India aimed at improving nutrition and health of young children and their mothers.

Rogosch believes that India's economic reforms will also have a positive impact in the field of health and family planning.

Experience in countries around the world has shown that birthrates drop as health and economic conditions improve. U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who heads the U.S. delegation to Cairo for the International Conference on Population and Development, emphasized this in a major address last month to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., when he said: "Where once there was disagreement about whether family planning or economic progress was a prerequisite to progress in either area, there is now a broad recognition that both are important in their own right, but that they work best when pursued together."

-K.G.

FOCUS

AI' ===~=

ON TOUR

The Artists Repertory Theatre (ART) has been performing Edward Albee's 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Three Tall Women during its current visit to India which began on August 28 in Madras. Albee is best known for his 1962 play Who's Afraid

of Virginia

Above: Members of the Artists Repertory Theatrefrom left, Allen Nause, Raissa Fleming, Duffy Epstein, JoAnn Johnson, Beth Harper, and Vana O'Brien-are seen performing in Journey Through American Comedy.

Left O'Brien, Johnson, and Fleming in Three Tall Women.

Woolf?

has been described by Albee as an "exorcism" in which the playwright tries to understand his mother, who adopted him when he was two weeks old, only to kick him out of her home when he was 18 and later disinherit him. A critic said: "Out of the simplest and most familiar material-a woman of 90-plus years coping with the infirmities and confusions of the moment and looking back on a life of gothic excessAlbee fashions a spellbinder."

ART is also staging Journey Three Tall Women

Through

American

Comedy,

described as a "rousing look at the battle of sexes." It features poems, play excerpts, stories,

limericks, and song lyrics.

Other Indian cities where ART, on a world tour, was scheduled to perform were Bangalore (September 1-2), Bombay (September 3-6), Delhi (September 68), and Calcutta (September 1012). The group also was to lead

discussions and workshops, including "Theatresports," improvised theater games for directors and actors.

Founded in 1982 and based in Portland, Oregon, ART is a nonprofit theater company dedicated to producing inno-

IS1:JANI9 "In a world of growing racial tensions," writes Anita Nahal Arya in her book, Hawaii: An Ethnic Synthesis, "one tries hard to seek some respite ...Hawaii at once comes to mind. There are few places in the world which offer a unique paradigm of race relations and cultural synthesis than this American state."

Arya, a senior assistant professor at Delhi's Sri Venkateswara College, traces the story of the amalgamation of different races that over the centuries have made the Hawaiian Islands their home. She also explains the process behind Hawaii becoming the 50th state of the United States in 1959.

Populated initially by Polynesians, Hawaii offers traces of at least half a dozen ethnic groups that have since contributed to its success. Arya examines how Hawaii

vative, socially relevant plays.

The company staged three plays in India in 1991-Driving Miss Daisy, Love Letters, and The World

of Carl

Sandburg.

The current tour has been sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency.

SA6A has come to acquire its present economic and political stability.

Arya is said to be the first and only student to have done an M.Phil in American studies at the University of Delhi. Her book is the result of that research. She did her BA Honors and MA in American history.

Arya has traveled to the United States a number of times, mostly with her father, Chaman Nahal, a visiting professor of English at several American universities, including Princeton. In 1992, she received a field trip grant from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, to collect information in the United States for her PhD thesis, "Eisenhower's Policy Towards Egypt."

She has also written a book of poems and published articles in various newspapers and journals.

HAWAII

AN ETHNIC SYNTHESIS

LEGAL Officials liament

of the

will

visit

year under

Parnext

Phase

Indo-U.S.

Two of the

parliamentary

exchange

project

islative

There

visits

legislative

Phase

staff

to study leg-

processes.

be reciprocal can

Indian America

by Ameri-

staff

Three

will

of the

during program

later in 1995

VISIT The

Madras

Association brought page

Indian and American

to help

legislative

staffers to identify problems find solutions

through

consultations,

and

regular

and to foster

an 84to com-

the visit of

U.S jurists

and

law-

in

this

(seen

photo

The project is intended

out

book

memorate yers

Bar

has just

in front of the Supreme

this year The volume a seminar

on "Protection

"This publication

Court in New Delhi) to its city earlier

is composed

primarily

of Human

of papers presented

at

Rights in India."

is a token of our respect and fraternal greetings to

the members of the judiciary

and the bar in the United States," said M.

fu-

Ravindran,

funded

ex-

included

two associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Ruth Bader

changes between American

and

Ginsburg

and Antonin Scalia (second and third from left in front row);

ture independently Indian legislatures.

Supported

by the U.S. Con-

gress, the sentative

Institute

for

Government,

U.S. Information

Repreand

four chief judges

of the U.S. federal courts

istrative

to the U.S. chief justice;

assistant

welcome

address

the

general

the

incorporated

Agency,

project is also aimed at assisting officials involved in implementing last year's Indian

president, Madras Bar Association.

Parliamentary

Initiative (IPI). The IPI established a committee system to review bills

at the conference,

of Tamil

American

Nadu,

Constitution.

excellent opportunity working

noted

of appeals;

the

Indian

principle

"This visit by the U.S. delegation to learn about the procedure

in Delhi, Calcutta,

22-February

and

Bombay,

5 visit, which also included the Americans

get bill was

submitted

sultation,

and

committee

review.

The

staff comprises

liamentary,

Indian

IPI par-

Administra-

tive Service, and other civil service employees.

The project year

with

(Phase team

the

One) that

in July this

two-week of

an

U.S.

as well as leading members of the bar. In addition, Dayal Sharma state dinner meeting

and Prime Minister

in their honor.

with Prime Minister

Robb Jones, called

of

Repre-

for the Congressional

in

India that

thropic-minded

two

Davidson,

Tatas, have agreed

of govern-

at the Univerin College

team met with officials

staff, gave presentations U.S. Congressional system, Indian

and

studied

parliamentary

tee system.

Park. and on the

committee the

new

commit-

Watumulls

some Fulbright Beginning school

year,

and

study

Indian

and India,

the

to help fund

of the

success"

and

the

the

J. Watumull

grants

1994-95

with USEFI for

two American

school of

year,

Bombay

jointly

for

riods ranging The

nowned

for

stu-

education.

gar-

four

Indian

United

dowment

Trusts

USEFI

to

States Tatas

The

are

support

J.N. Tata

has sponsored

tion in 1892

study for

pe-

from two to nine their

2,600 scholars

will travel

scholars

professionals the

1995-96

Tata

and

months.

operation

the

the

sponsor

grants in

with

two

originally

have a major

ment manufacturing

Hawaii.

Starting

and

with

dents. The Watumulls, from

fam-

fellowships.

Fund will cosponsor yearly

in Honolulu,

an-

philan-

industrial

ilies,

the

Foun-

(USEFI)

Research Service; and Roger H.

parliamentary

to the chief justice

GRANTS

The U.S. Educational nounces

The American

on the interrelationship

exchanges.

STUDY

William

in the legislative

sity of Maryland

a

private

investment. assistant

since

refor En-

some

its incep-

}>

'U Z OJ

0.

CD

CD

CD

Q.

visit

nior specialist

professor

Rao attended

a separate

Court, said the trip was "an unqualified

for follow-up

dation

ment and politics

during

Rao focused

administrative

President Shankar

p.v. Narasimha

Discussions

between law reform and foreign

sentatives; Walter J. Oleszek, seprocess

They met many General of India,

senior officials in the Ministry of Law and the Solicitor General's office,

parliamentarian

House

stops

American

included

Holmes Brown, of the

with many of India's top legal officials.

U.S. Supreme began

an

held substantive

discussions

con-

affords

of the courts in the United States," he said.

During their January

judges of the Supreme Court of India, the Attorney

no time for examination,

in the

and methods and

Earlier, each

to Par-

has

is included

17 ministries.

liament as a whole, with little or

In his

advocate

Constitution

that

and budget requests from India's bud-

the admin-

and five lawyers.

K. Subramanian,

that

every human-rights

visitors

The American

(f) (f)

(f)

::J

3

<t>

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"They say behind every successful man there's a woman. Here's a picture of my wife."

ANPWHY l'XACTt-r ARE we AUSMIU'5

ABOUT lHl'3!

J Know How You Must Feel, Brad!,

1963, is a good example of how Lichtenstein made use of the Benday dot, a commercial printing technique, to replace light and shadow in drawing, and appropriated the basic formula of the comic strip for his purposes.

A retrospective of works by America's premier Pop artist was on view recently at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, before moving on to showings in Los Angeles and Montreal.

Roy Lichtenstein The spontaneous response to Roy Lichtenstein's art, not only 30 years ago when he first shook the art world with his anarchic style, but right down to the retrospective, was articulated by Diane Waldman, deputy director of the Guggenheim and curator of the exhibition: "The idea of taking all of the artiness out of art was something that caught people off guard."

Lichtenstein's outrageous use of the commercial Benday dot and the comic strip initially brought him more notoriety than anything else. At some point derision turned to tentative praise and finally to the acknowledgment of a powerful visual syntax that mirrored the American psyche with greater irony and wit than Americans were comfortable with. Or would ever be, perhaps. Which is what gives Lichtenstein his edge today and what sustains the excitement in his work as he continues to reveal, in his own distinctive way, the real world-from its trash to its innocence. Only now do people seem to understand what he meant when he told art critic Gene Swenson as far back as 1963 that his ambition was to make a painting that was so despicable that no one would hang it. Even in his trademark lampooning of the classics Lichtenstein seemed to be saying, according to The New Yorker art critic, Adam Gopnik, that "what was missing from American painting was missing from American life."

Born in Manhattan, New York, in 1923, Lichtenstein grew up in a happy middle-class home. At the age of 14 he began

attending Saturday morning art classes. He interrupted his university studies to serve two years in the U.S. Army and received a master offine arts degree from Ohio State University in Columbus in 1949. He worked at a series of odd jobs such as art teacher, engineering draftsman, architecturalmodel maker, and display-window decorator. In 1962, he had his first solo show.

One of Lichtenstein's earliest works was derived from newspaper ads, blown-up panels, Benday dots, and comic figures from "Girl's Romances" and "All American Men of War." Okay, Hot-Shot! in 1963 came from a strip published in G.I. Combat. The picture's dramatic impact was intensified by a burst of gunfire containing the exclamation "VOOMP!" In a I974 parody of Matisse's Still Life With "Dance" Lichtenstein inserted into the painting a comic-strip blast of musical notes and a kitsch flask. He found in them, to quote Robert Hughes in Time, "beauty and a sort of wry pathos." Huge versions of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes, Cubist images dissected and combined with his own-just about anything could be turned by him into a Lichtenstein.

What, in essence, is a Lichtenstein? It is, in the artist's own words, "anti-contemplative, anti-nuance, anti-getting-awayfrom-the-tyranny-of-the-rectangle, anti-movement and -light, anti-mystery, anti-paint-quaIity, anti-Zen, and anti- all of those 0 brilliant ideas of preceding movements."

Final Study for "Artist's Studio, Look Mickey," 1973. This drawing reflects a lingering fascination with the cartoon and comic strip images that a decade earlier had propelled Lichtenstein into the center of controversy in the art world.

Final Study for "Forest Scene," 1980.

Lichtenstein dabbled in Primitivism in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This mosaic-like drawing is also a throwback to the artist's Cubist tendencies of the early 1970s.

Scudyfor POP. 1966.

Lichtenstein used cutand-pasted printed paper and felt tip pen on paper for this work, which was featured as a cover of Newsweek magazine. It gave visual expression to the manner in which Pop Art, to which Lichtenstein was a prime contributor, burst onto the fine arts scene.

Final Study for "Mural With Blue Brushstroke."

1985. This is a summation of the artist's career as it features segments harking back to several major periods in his work.

At times, reading here In the library, I'm given a glimpse Of those condemned to death Centuries ago, And their executioners.

I see each pale face before me The way a judge Pronouncing a sentence would, Marvelling at the thought That I do not exist yet.

With eyes closed I can hear The evening birds.

Soon they will be quiet And the final night on earth Will commence In the fullness of its sorrow.

How vast, dark, and impenetrable Are the early-morning skies Of those led to their death In a world from which I'm entirely absent, Where I can still watch Someone's slumped back, Someone who is walking away from me With his hands tied, His graying head still on his shoulders, Someone who In what little remains of his life Knows in some vague way about me, And thinks of me as God, As Devil.

Reprinted by permission; copyright Š 1993 Charles Simic. Originally

in The New Yorker.

Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He studied at the University of Chicago and New York University.

Since 1973, he has been associate professor of English at the Uni-

versity of New Hampshire in Durham. He has published 19 books of verse, served as editor and/or translator for more than 20 other volumes, and has won numerous awards, among them a MacArthur fellowship in 1984

and a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Critics have compared his poetry to that of Mark Strand, W.S. Merwin, and Sylvia Plath. Though his early work concentrated, in the words of one reviewer, "ar6und the ghostly, disembodied objects

of an unpeopled universe ...sirnic's universe has gradually acquired a sprinkling of human occupants, and in recent years, the poetry has seemed to reach out to such characters in gestures of genuine, if somewhat muted, empathy."

YOUR WINDOW ON AMERICA

[6, NE.WYORItER

NATIONAL

THE

I

GEOGRAPHIC

[f9~TQffEII I

HARPERs J

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Wouldn't

it be wonderful if

every new born baby was wanted?

At Parivar Seva Sanstha we are working relentlessly towards this goal.

Every year thousands of women receive counselling on family planning methods and services. Our nationwide network of Marie Stopes Clinics provide IUDs, oral contraceptive pills, condoms and sterilisation. We also perform high quality abortions. and service

g(J~ ~

projects in the field of family planning

"~?

Our educational

and maternal child health care, include projects for adolescents, rural communities and industrial workers.

Marie Stopes also markets Bliss and SaWall condoms and an oral contraceptive pill, Ecroz.

But with 1800 babies born every hour. we need to do much~ much more.

Unfortunately, as a pioneering, non-profit organisation our commitment alone is not enough.

We need your contribution to sustain us.

So that one day, every new born baby is greeted with a "happy birth day".

If you share our concern please send your contribution payable to:

PARIVAR SEVA SANSTHA (Affiliated to Marie.

International, UK) Defence Colony Market New Delhi - 110024 Tel.: 4617712, 4619024 Fax:·0 11-4620785 .

Stopes

•

MARIE ~>TOPE5 LONDON

(All contributions made to Parivar Seva Sanstha are eligiblefor tax exemption u/s BOG of Income Tax Act, 1964.)

~b/lp ~ II

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