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SP~AUgU,tl995 VOLUME XXXVI NUMBER Alert readers-and there are many of you, if the number of letters we receive when we commit a factual or typographical error is any indication-may already have noticed from the masthead that SPAN has a new publisher. He is Ashley Wills, who recently arrived in New Delhi with his wife, Gina, a psychologist, and their teenage Zachary and Olivia, to take over the reins of the U.S. Information Service in India.

children,

Ashley Wills grew up in the southern states of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and a master's in economics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He joined the foreign service in 1972 and, in addition to assignments in Washington, has served in Romania, South Africa, Barbados, Grenada, and Yugoslavia. Most recently he was Counselor for Public Affairs in the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, Belgium.

About his new assignment, he says: "This is one ofthe jobs I have heard about all my career. I am very excited about being in India. I have always made it my business to find out as much as I can about the country where I am assigned, and I intend to travel around India to meet as many people as I can."

Wills will find a soul mate in Ambassador Frank G. Wisner, who has been doingjust that since his arrival in India a year ago. In an interview with us this month, the Ambassador reviews the strengthening ties between our

8

2 Unraveling the Universe

by Michael D. Lemonickand 1. Madeleine Nash

8 An Extraterrestrial Looking Glass 12 From Pseudo-Event to Virtual Reality

1 7 On the Lighter Side 18 BigEarin the Workplace byJustinMartin

21 The Ohio State Fair 28 Expectations and Realizations 34 Time for Your Medicine byWilliam1.M.Hrushesky

38 Focus On ...

40 Juxtapositions byPaulSmith 44 Chandralekha-Poised for an Encore Front cover: Corn on the cob isjust one of numerous delights for visitors to the annual Ohio State Fair.

two countries and says, "I think that we're all fortunate, those of us who are associated with the development of the Indo-U.S. relationship at this time."

The element oftime is a theme that runs through a couple of our articles this month. William J .M. Hrushesky reports that our body clocks, or circadian rhythms, determine to a large extent just how receptive we will be to one drug or another.

This has led to the development of"chronotherapy," giving medication at carefully selected times of the day and night.

Publisher, E. Ashley Wills; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Associate Editors, Arun Bhanot, Prakash Chandra; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rashmi Goel, Ashok Kumar; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal;' Contributing Designers, Gopi Gajwani, Suhas Nimbalkar; Staff Designer, 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.

Man's fascination with the cosmos is timeless, and so is the debate over its age. The Hubble Space Telescope and other high-tech tools are providing startling new images and data about the universe, fueling expectations "that a scientific revolution may be close at hand," Michael D.

Photographs: Front cover-Kenneth E. White. I-Avinash Pasricha. 2-3, 5 center, 8NASA. II-eourtesy Marc Postman. 21-27-Kenneth E. White. 28-33, 38 top-Avinash Pasricha. 38 bottom-Today Magazines, Ocala. 39-Mehrtash Olson. 41-42-© Paul Smith. 44, 46-Sadanand Menon; 45 top-Eugene Mitchell; center right-Bennett and Pleasant; bottom-Ruth Harston. 46-47-Sadanand Menon except 47 left center by Abdullah Khandani and bottom right by Dashrath Patel. 48-© Paul Smith.

Lemonick and J. Madeleine Nash report. Such developments, however, haven't cooled the often heated disagreements between those scientists whose calculations over the age of the universe differ by many billions of years.

Erratum: The copyright line for "The Boy From the Burma Hump" by Robert James Waller in the July 1995 issue should have read as "Reproduced by permission of Hodder Headline Pic, London."

Which brings to mind a quote from the 19th-century transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau: "A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance."

Published by the United States Infonnation Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalfofthe American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press(lndia) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies ofthe U.S. Government. No porto/this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission

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UNRAVELING THE UNIVERSE The age of the heavens bears directly on every cosmic mystery-from the origin of the universe to its eventual fate. The Hubble Space Telescope has found evidence that indicates the universe is much younger than scientists thought it to be. This article examines the latest findings and the debate raging over theln.

This Hubble-produced image of the M100 spiral galaxy reveals Cepheids, a rare class of pulsating stars embedded in the galaxy S spiral arms that serve as cosmic distance mileposts.

Od Lauer is starting to feel more than a little fed up with his fellow astronomers. Not long ago, Lauer and his close friend and collaborator Marc Postman, of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, Maryland, announced the results of a telescopic study they had been working on for more than a year. The young scientists reached the astonishing conclusion that rather. than expanding outward in a stately fashion like the rest of the universe, a collection of many thousands of galaxies, including our own and spanning a billion Iightyears or so, may be speeding en masse toward a point somewhere in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

Yet rather than try to assimilate this new finding, most of their colleagues are proclaiming that it must be a mistake. No one can explain what Lauer and Postman might have done wrong, despite strenuous efforts to do so. The analysis is incorrect, they say, simply because it doesn't fit in with any existing theory of how the cosmos works. "Listen," fumes Lauer, who is stationed at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories in Tucson, Arizona, "we knew this was a shocking result. That's why we spent over a year trying to debunk it ourselves before we went public. If anyone can present a good argument why it's wrong, we'll listen."

Allan Sandage is angry at his astronomical brethren too, but his beef is just the opposite of Lauer's. The Carnegie Observatories astronomer has spent much of his nearly 40year career trying to measure the age of the universe; it's a task he inherited from his mentor Edwin Hubble, the legendary scientist who discovered that the universe is expanding and that galaxies exist beyond the Milky Way. For decades, Sandage's results have suggested that the cosmos is IS billion to 20 billion years old or thereabouts. That fits beautifully with cosmological theories-but almost nobody believes him anymore. Instead they're listening to a young whippersnapper named Wendy Freedman, who happens to work just down the hall from Sandage· at the Carnegie's center in Pasadena, California. Freedman and a group of colleagues have lately used the Hubble Space Telescope to peg the age at somewhere between eight billion and 12 billion years-which would make the cosmos two billion years younger than some of the stars it contains.

"Our opponents," says Sandage bitterly, "are so wonderfully kind. They say we don't have anything to stand on."

Tension between theory and observation is part of the normal course of science. It keeps both sides honest, and, at those rare times in history when the two lock horns irreconcilably, it can lead to nothing less than a full-fledged scientific revolution. Without such clashes, in fact, we would still believe that the sun orbits Earth and that disease is caused by evil spirits.

But what's happening these days in cosmology-the study of the universe-verges on the bizarre. Astronomers have come up with one theory-busting discovery after another, hinting that a scientific revolution may be close at hand. At stake are answers to some of the most fundamen-

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tal questions facing humanity: What is the origin of the universe? What is it made of? And what is its ultimate destiny?

Nobody can say what the turmoil means-whether the intellectual edifice of modern cosmology is tottering on the edge of collapse or merely feeling growing pains as it works out a few kinks. "If you ask me," says astrophysicist Michael Turner of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, "either we're close to a breakthrough, or we're at our wits' end."

Weird Data, Weird Theories The bewildering discoveries by Lauer, Postman, Freedman, and company are only the latest in a barrage of bafflements that stargazers have had to absorb lately. Over the past few years, astronomers have uncovered the existence of the Great Wall, a huge conglomeration of galaxies stretching across 500 million light-years of space; the Great Attractor, a mysterious concentration of mass hauling much of the local universe off in the direction of the constellations Hydra and Centaurus; Great Voids, where few galaxies can be found; and galaxies caught in the throes of formation a mere billion years after the Big Bang, when they should not yet exist. "If we really trust the data," exclaims Stanford University astrophysicist Andrei Linde, "then we are in disaster, and we must do something absolutely crazy."

That's a big "if." Observes David Schramm, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chicago: "Whenever you're at the forefront of science, one-third of the observational results always turn out to be wrong." But this hasn't stopped the theorists froJ.11doing crazy things anyway; they've proposed one mind-stretching idea after another to explain what's going on.

One of these was inflation theory, which says the universe expanded like a balloon on amphetamines before the cosmos was one second old. Then there was cold dark matter, hypothetical subatomic particles that may account for 99 percent of the mass of the universe and may relegate ordinary atoms-and the stars, planets, and people they make up--to the status of a cosmic afterthought. Another notion described distortions in the very fabric of space and time, going by the name cosmic strings and cosmic textures. And lately theorists have revived an old idea known as hot dark matter, and an even older one called the cosmological constant. The latter is a kind of cosmic antigravity that gives the expanding universe an extra outward push; it was first conceived by Albert Einstein himself, who then rejected it as "the greatest blunder of my life."

Each of these ideas is still floating around, championed by its own corps of diehards.

In fairness, it must be acknowledged that cosmologists have had very little information to go on, at least until very recently. The distant galaxies that bear witness to the universe's origin, .evolution, and structure are excruciatingly

If Freedman is right and Sandage is wrong, then the controversy about the age of the universe won't go away without some fundamental change in the way astronomers understand the cosmos. faint, and it takes every bit of skill observers have to tease out their secrets. It hasn't been until the past decade, in fact, that astronomers have had powerful telescopes like the Hubble (see page 8) out in space and the Keck atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea, ultrafast supercomputers, and supersensitive electronic light detectors to give them the data they hunger for. In a very real sense, cosmology has only lately crossed the dividing line from theology into true science.

Cosmologists can now say with some confidence that the universe started out in a very hot and very dense state somewhere between eight billion and 25 billion years ago, and that it has been expanding outward ever since-the Big Bang in a nutshell. They believe galaxies are strewn around the cosmos not randomly but according to a pattern that includes some patches with lots of galaxies and others with very few. They believe the universe is pervaded by mysterious dark matter, whose gravity has dominated cosmic history from the start.

But beyond that, things get murky. The experts don't know for sure how old or how big the universe is. They don't know what most of it is made of. They don't know in any detail how it began or how it will end. And, beyond the local cosmic neighborhood, they don't know much about what it looks like. Each of these questions is now under study; each bears directly on the others; and each could yield within the next few years to the intellectual and instrumental firepower now being brought to bear on it.

Assuming, that is, that the universe cooperates.

The Age Crisis "You can't be older than your ma," quips Christopher Impey of the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory.

Sounds obvious, maybe, but if Freedman and her colleagues are right about their space-telescope observations, it would seem that the universe has not caught on to this bit of common sense. The most straightforward interpretation of their data implies that the cosmos is 12 billion years old, max. But experts insist that the oldest stars in the Milky Way have been around for at least 14 billion years. "They could quite easily be several billion years older than that," says Yale University's Pierre Demarque.

Demarque and his fellow stellar astronomers make a good case. The life and death of stars is something the scientists think they understand pretty well. They know about the nuclear reactions that power starshine; they know about what chemical elements the stars contain, and in what proportions; and they have created detailed, accurate computer simulations of stellar life cycles. When they say 14 billion years, it probably pays to listen.

But it also pays to listen to Freedman. She is a highly respected observational astronomer, and so are the 13 others

on her space-telescope team. Moreover, theirs is only the latest in a series of measurements that point to a relatively young universe. Just a month before these results appeared in the journal Nalure, two other sets of astronomers came out with their own young-universe observations. And while a handful of studies have emerged over the past few years arguing instead for an older cosmos, many more have converged on a younger age. The Freedman team's observations are considered by far the most definitive because they are based on the Hubble Space Telescope's extraordinary clear vision.

Moreover, the concept that underlies their calculations is utterly straightforward. Astronomers have known since Edwin Hubble's heyday in the 1920s that you need only two pieces of information to deduce the age of the universehow fast the galaxies are flying apart and how far away they are. The ratio of these two numbers tells you how fast the cosmos is expanding (a rate known as the Hubble Constant; it's expressed, for those who insist on the proper tern1inology, in units of kilometers per second of recessional speed per megaparsec of distance). A simple calculation then tells you how long it's been sincetthe expansion started. "There are these two loopholes, though," notes University of Oklahoma astrophysicist David Branch. "What's the right distance, and what's the right speed?"

These loopholes are big enough to drive the Starship Enlelprise through. It's terrifically hard to measure how far away galaxies are. If they came in a standard brightness, like 100-watt light bulbs, the astronomers could just figure that a dimmer galaxy was more distant than a bright one.

Unfortunately, they don't. Hubble himself didn't realize this and triggered an earlier "age crisis" in the 1940s when he announced that the universe was two billion years old.

Geologists already knew that Earth was older than that.

Astronomy's most reliable light bulb, or, to use the preferred and quainter term, standard candle, is a type of star J called a Cepheid variable, whose inherent brightness can be easily calculated. But Cepheids can't be spotted more than a few galaxies away. And these nearby galaxies are virtually useless in filling in the other half of the equation-the expansion rate. Reason: In a universe that's expanding overall, neighboring galaxies are flying apart much more slowly than distantly spaced ones. Nearby galaxies are also subject to their neighbors' gravity. The Andromeda galaxy, for example, is being pulled closer to the Milky Way, despite the overall cosmic expansion.

Since accurate distances can be measured only nearby, while useful galaxies are found only deep in space, astronomers do the best they can to bridge the gap. They use the close galaxies to estimate distances to the faraway ones. But the method is inexact, which is why they haven't

been able to agree on what the age actually is.

It's also why the Hubble Space Telescope was explicitly designed, at least in part, to find Cepheidvariable stars at greater distances than ground-based telescopes could.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and DAVID SCHRAMM, on the recent discoveries in its scientific advisers figastronomy, says, ured that the deeper they "Whenever you're at could go into the universe the forefront of science, before they had to switch one-third of the from more to less accurate observational results always ways of gauging distance, turn out to be wrong." the better. The Hubble's misshapen mirror delayed things for a while, but shortly after the spectacularly successful repair mission in December 1993, Freedman and her team focused the space telescope on a faraway galaxy called MIOO. "We could see right away that we'd be able to find Cepheids," she recalls.

The observations were moved to the head of the Hubble schedule, and, by July 1994, Freedman was looking at a pattern on her computer screen that was as familiar as the face of an old friend. "Boom!" she remembers. "All ofa sudden there was this glorious Cepheid light curve, as beautiful as any that have ever been measured." By the end of the observing run,.

Freedman and her colleagues found 19 more, enough to peg M IOD'sdistance at some 56 million light-years from Earth.

That still isn't far enough out to give a direct measure of the Hubble-the cosmic rate of expansion. But M I00 is part of a huge group of galaxies known as the Virgo cluster. The M I00 calculation gave the astronomers the distance to Virgo, and they used that number in turn to estimate the distance to the Coma cluster of galaxies, about five times as far away. Coma, finally, is far enough out that it's a reliable indicator of the Hubble Constant. Based on Freedman's analysis, the Constant comes in at 80, indicating a universe between eight billion and 12 billion years old.

While most astronomers take these numbers very seriously-along with the cosmic paradox they implySandage, Freedman's grumpy colleague down the hall, is having none of it. He doesn't quibble with her measurement of the dista!lce to M 100, but insists that the analysis breaks down after that. Like most astronomers, Sandage has his favorite method of gauging the relative distance of galaxies.

He finds a type of supernova-an exploding star-and compares supernova brightnesses from one galaxy to another. He claims, as he has done for more than 20 years, that the Hubble Constant is lower, which means the age of the universe goes up considerably. Says Oklahoma's David Branch, his close collaborator: "We're· very happy to be in this contro-

versy because we think we're right."

But most astronomers don't-partly because just about everyone else gets different results, partly because they suspect Sandage is guilty of a cardinal sin of science: Having a preferred answer in mind before making observations.

Freedman is the first to admit her team's age figures could be off 20 percent in either direction. The reason: No one knows whether MIOO lies inside the Virgo cluster or whether it is more in the foreground or background. Astronomers have to check out other galaxies in the area before they are sure that M I00 fairly measures the distance of the cluster as a whole. They're also checking galaxies outside Virgo, and while Freedman won't say what they have found so far, she told Time that the results are "consistent" with the preliminary figures.

If she's right and Sandage is wrong, as many cosmic handicappers are betting, then the age crisis won't go away without some fundamental change in the way astronomers understand the cosmos. That means at least some scientists will have to give up their cherished beliefs about how stars work or how the universe is organized or what it's made of--or maybe even all of the above.

High on the list of concepts that astronomical theorists would hate to lose is cosmic inflation. It sounds nutty, but the universe actually makes a lot more sense if you assume that just after it was born all of space went into overdrive, exploding outward for the briefest fraction of a second. Inflation explains, among other things, such mysteries as why the universe looks pretty much the same in all directions and how a peanut-butter-smooth distribution of matter in the young cosmos evolved into today's lumpy distribution, with clusters of galaxies surrounded by empty space.

Inflation theory doesn't just explain things; it makes predictions. Chief among them-the blackness of space is only seemingly empty. In fact, it probably abounds with vast amounts of matter-matter that cannot be directly detected because it doesn't shine. If this theory is correct, then there must be precisely enough of this dark matter so that gravity will forever slow the expansion of the universe without ever quite stopping it, balancing space on a gravitational knifeedge between eternal growth and eventual collapse.

Dark matter is more than merely theoretical. The first hint that the cosmos contains more than meets the eye came back in the 1930s, when Caltech (California Institute of Technology) astronomer Fritz Zwicky pointed his telescope at the Coma cluster of galaxies and realized that it shouldn't exist. Individual galaxies in the cluster were orbiting each other so fast that they should long since have flovm out into deep space-unless gravity from some unseen matter was keeping them together.

Nobody took Zwicky too seriously; the idea was crazy, first of all, and besides, the measurements of orbital speeds (Continued on page 10)

he Hubble Space Telescope (see SPAN, June 1990), man's most powerful tool for looking at the universe, orbits the Earth once every 95 minutes from a distance of 600 kilometers. The 12,000-kilogram instrument, about the size of a railroad tank car, was launched on April 24, 1990, by the space shuttle Discovery to much publicity and great anticipation.

However, two months later scientists detected a serious flaw in the curvature of Hubble's primary mirror. The defective mirror caused starlight to spread and produce fuzzy halos of light (called spherical aberration by astronomers).

The somewhat myopic Hubble nevertheless made several remarkable discoveries during the first three years of its operation, unhindered as it was by Earth's obscuring atmosphere.

In December 1993, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sent a repair team of astronauts on an II-day mission aboard the space shuttle Endeavour to correct the defect. The orbiting telescope was caught and anchored in the shuttle's open cargo bay. Four astronauts worked in pairs on alternate days, and made a series of five

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arduous spacewalks-a U.S. spacewalking record for one mission. They installed new optics, solar panels, and other equipment on the Hubble.

They also fine-tuned the telescope's system of gyros, momentum wheels, and star trackers that keep the Hubble pointed to within 7/1 ,000ths of an arcsecond (1/1,600th of a degree)-the equivalent of locking onto a one-rupee clJin in Delhi from Sri nagar, more than 650 kilometers away.

Among its important discoveries, Hubble has: • Found evidence of a massive black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy NGC 4261, 45 million light-years away in the Virgo constellation. (A lightyear is the distance travcled by light in one year-approximately 9,404,800,000,000 kilometers.) This provides strong support for the existence of gravitationally collapsed objects which were predicted 80 years ago by Einstein in his general theory of relativity.

• Validated a critical aspect of the Big Bang theory: That the chemical helium was widespread in the early universe.

The telescope has found helium far out in space and astronomers bel ieve this is an important constituent of a tenu-

ous plasma that fills intergalactic spaces-the long soughtafter intergalactic medium.

• Measured accurately the distance to the M I00 galaxy in the Virgo cluster (see accompanying story).

• Provided the most detailed images of the spectacular impacts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter, in July 1994. The images, taken in red Iight, showed the comet's train of 21 icy fragments stretched across 1.1 million kilometers of space, and included all the nuclei.

• Sent back the first images ever seen of large-scale surface features on Saturn's giant moon, Titan. These images will be used to identify prospective landing sites on Titan for future space probes from Earth.

• Helped astronomers confirm the existence of oxygen in the atmosphere of Europa, a Jovian satellite.

• Observed great pancakeshaped disks of dust-raw material for planet formationswirling around at least half of the stars in the Orion Nebula (a region only 1,500 light-years away from Earth where new stars are born).

• Discovered a new quasar in Cygnus A galaxy-a mere 600 million light-years away,

I. The space shllttle Endeavour thunders skYlVard Fom Kennedy Space Centel; Florida, on its historic mission to repair Hubble, December 1993

3. A suspected black hole lurks in this 300 light-year-lVide disk at the core of galaxy NGC 4261.

The disk S· 60-degree tilt gives a clear view of its bright hub.

6. The Cygnus Loop, moving from left to right across the field of view. Ionized oxygen and sulfur cause the blue and red emissions, and hydrogen the green.

2. The Hubble is suspended in space by shuttle DiscovelY S remote manipulator .Iystem after deploying part of its solar panels and antennae.

4. Astronaut F StOlY Musgrave (bottom of Fame) makes the final spacelValk Fom EndeavoUl: The Hubble telescope is shown over Earth with the Australian landn.1Gssclearly visible.

7. An infant star~less than a mi//ion years old-in the Orion Nebula. Planets will possibly form from the silhouetted dark disk.

5. The Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 photographed lVith Hubble S Wide Field Planetmy Camera-II.

the equivalent of Earth's cosmic backyard when compared to quasars billions of lightyears away.

• Taken the best photos yet of the Cygnus Loop, a supernova explosion's expanding blast wave, 2,500 light-years away.

Hubble offers astronomers an unprecedented look at fine structure within these shock fronts.

Scientists at NASA say that the improved Hubble shows details of distant galaxies ten times clearer than when it operated with a defective mirror. It has also speeded up the exposure of images fourfold.

James Crocker of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, says, "Any time we've seen a tenfold increase in resolution, it has produced a revolution in astronomy." The resolution from the telescope is now so good that it can detect from a distance of 10,000 kilometers two fireflies placed ten feet apart.

A few years ago, the astrophysicists Eric J. Chaisson and George B. Field had written in an article on the new generation of powerful telescopes: "In all of history, there have been only two periods in which our perception of the universe has been so revolutionized within a single lifetime. The first occurred nearly four centuries ago at the time of Galileo. The second is now under way." Now that Hubble can utilize its full capability, scientists hope its celestial discoveries will shed light on the origin-and the ultimate destiny---{)f the universe.

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As astronomers search for answers, the clash of egos and the confusion of conflicting claims about the universe may be taken as signs that science is alive and well and likely on the cusp of a major new insight. were difficult to make and prone to error. Nor did anybody take Vera Rubin seriously when in 1970 she and a colleague at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., discovered that some galaxies were rotating too fast on their own axes-again, evidence of extra gravity from unseen matter.

Not until a little more than a decade ago was dark matter finally accepted as a huge problem rather than a nagging anomaly. Observation after observation showed that galaxies moved as if they were embedded in clouds of invisible matter containing ten times as much mass as was accounted for by visible gas and stars. Clusters of galaxies behaved as if there was 30 times as much dark matter as visible matter exerting its gravitational pull. To satisfy inflation theory, the ratio would have to be even greater: 100 times as much dark matter as visible.

Leaving aside theory, the challenge of identifYing and understanding the stuff that makes up most of the universe has become one of the most irresistible-and frustrating--quests in science. For more than a decade, the campaign has proceeded on two fronts-attempts to directly observe the missing matter, and attempts to identifY it via computer simulations. Those who do the latter assume that dark matter is made of a given particle or substance, then create a computer model of the cosmos based on that assumption, let it evolve in cyberspace, and see if the result looks like the real universe.

An early theory was that the missing matter is composed of commonplace particles called neutrinos. One problem with this is that dark matter is massive, and no one knows if neutrinos have mass. Even if they have, in computer simulations they do a poor job of making a recognizable universe. Cold dark matter was another possibility ("cold," in physics jargon, means slow-moving; neutrinos, by contrast, are "hot"). Also known as WIMPS, for weakly interacting massive particles, these are purely hypothetical particles derived from speculative theories. They perform somewhat better in computer models, but WIMPS can't account for such newly discovered features of the cosmos as Great Walls, Great Voids, and Great Attractors.

Physicists hoping to observe dark matter directly have searched for objects both large and subatomic. On the theory that the dark stuff is made of some as yet undiscovered particle, they have built all manner of sensitive detectors.

On the chance that it is composed of very dim stars or large planet-like objects (known collectively as MACHOS, or massive compact halo objects), they have studied stars for telltale flickers that might indicate a MACHO has passed by.

Physicists and astronomers have looked for all of the above and more, but results have been inconclusive. WIMP searches are barely getting under way; MACHO hunts have turned up disappointingly few flickers at the outer edges of

the Milky Way (but surprisingly many toward the galaxy's core). The latest teaser came in February when news leaked out that researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory had seen evidence for what could be a slightly massive neutrino.

If it's true, the finding is of literally cosmic significance: There are so many neutrinos in the universe that they alone could account for some 20 percent of the dark matter that inflation theory requires. Just add in another 80 percent worth of WIMPS and you've got it, says Joel Primack of the University of Califomia, Santa Cruz. With this recipe, Primack has used supercomputers to produce synthetic universes that look al.Inost identical to the data gathered by real-life astronomical observers. But some theorists think Primack is grasping too quickly at a "discovery" that is still controversial.

Neutrinos with mass might help solve the dark-matter problem and thus provide support for the inflation theory.

But in some ways that would just make the crisis in cosmology worse. The more dark matter there is in the universe, the harder it is to explain the new findings made by Freedman's group about the age of the cosmos. When they say the universe is between eight billion and 12 billion years old, their vagueness reflects uncertainty about how much matter the cosmos contains. If there's a lot, as inflation suggests, its gravity would be slowing down the universe's expansion, making the universe younger than it looks. If, on the other hand, there is relatively little matter, the slowing has been minimal, and 12 billion is more like it.

If inflation is correct, then, the age crisis is as bad as it can possibly be. No amount of theory adjustment can bring stars down to eight bi IIion years of age. So if Freedman's initial attempt to date the universe holds up, Primack and plenty of other theorists may have to begin prying themselves away from an idea they have held dear for more than a decade-unless they can think of some clever way out.

Einstein's

Biggest Blunder

Even at an optimum age of 12 billion years, the universe is too young to accommodate 14 billion-year-old stars, so even the radical step of abandoning the inflation theory might not be enough to resolve the age crisis. But there could be a solution that allows inflation to remain. All the theorists have to do is throw out another of their cherished beliefsthat Einstein was right when he repudiated his concept of a cosmological constant. Says Princeton physicist Jim Peebles: "People hate the cosmological constant. I used to hate it too. But it's something we might grow to love."

They might have to. The constant can be thought of as a kind of universe-wide repulsive force, a sort of antigravity.

Einstein thought that he needed it in his general relativity theory to balance the pernicious influence of gravity. With-

HOW IS THE COSMOS BUILT? Cluster of clusters

Cluster of galaxies As scientists look farther out into space, they see larger and larger structures. The largest structures that are being observed cannot be explained by any current theory.

out a cosmological constant, said the equations, the universe would have to be either contracting or expanding-which it didn't seem to be. It was only when Edwin Hubble discovered, a decade later, that it was indeed expanding that Einstein dropped the constant like a hot potato.

But particle physicists later found that a cosmological constant arose naturally from their own theories. And now cosmologists may need it to get out of the age crisis. If the constant has the right value, then cosmologists can keep inflation. The cosmos would have started out in a long period described by scientists as "loitering" or "coasting," providing stars and galaxies with ample time to form. "Then," says Sandra Faber, Primack's Santa Cruz colleague, "suddenly the cosmological constant would kick in, gunning the expansion, making it faster." Measuring a large Hubble Constant and an apparently low age today, in other words, wouldn't be a reliable indicator of what was going on earlier in the universe's lifetime. Theorists might hate Einstein's abandoned child, but, says John Huchra, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, "to an experimentalist it seems no more ad hoc than inflation."

At least there are some models of the cosmos-unpopular though they may be-that accommodate Freedman's age estimates. The same cannot be said for Lauer and Postman's detection of large-scale motions across the universe. Most scientists are betting that their observation is just plain wrong, but they haven't yet been able to pinpoint why. And both Lauer and Postman admit that the effect may wash out

as they collect more data from deeper in space.

If it holds up, though, the theorists will have to rethink their position in a hurry. One explanation for the observation would be that galaxies are being pulled toward a concentration of mass so huge that it would make the MARC POSTMAN and Great Attractor look like a close friend Tod Lauer have found a collection joke. Another might be that of many thousands of the Big Bang may have been galaxies, including our own lopsided, so that the universe Milky Way, that-rather has more energy and mass in than expanding outward in some sectors than in others. a stately fashion like the In that case, the anomalous rest of the universe-may motion is an illusion. be speeding toward a But both ideas are almost point in the direction of the Virgo constellation. impossible to reconcile with any known model of the universe. Admits Postman: "IfI'd been at the receiving end of this news, I'd be skeptical too. But the modus operandi of an observer is to rep0l1 what Nature is telling us." And that's tlUC whether or not the news conforms to the conventional wisdom.

Princeton University astrophysicist David Spergel offered a telling historical anecdote in an address to colleagues at the American Astronomical Society's January meeting in Tucson, Arizona. In the 19th century, it dawned on astronomers that the orbits of Uranus and Mercury weren't exactly what theory predicted. So they proposed the existence of as-yet-undiscovered planets whose gravity was causing the anomalies-sort of the Cold Dark Matter of the time. Sure enough, Neptune finally appeared in their telescopes. But the other planet, Vulcan, never did materialize.

In the end, said Spergel, it took the theory of general relativity to explain Mercury's odd behavior.

Which story is applicable today? Will a crucial new observation tie up the loose ends in cosmology? Or do theQt'ists n'eed a fundamentally new framework for understanding the universe? "I don't know," admits Spergel, noting that it's a lot easier to add bells and whistles like cosmic strings or a cosmological constant to existing theories than to come up with something as powerful as relativity.

As they search for answers, the noisy clash of egos and the confusion of conflicting claims may be taken as signs that science is alive and well and likely on the cusp ofa major new insight. Says astrophysicist John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton: "Every time we get slapped down, we can say, 'Thank you Mother Nature,' because it 0 means we're about to learn something important."

About the Authors: Michael D. Lemonick is a senior wriler and 1. Madeleine Nash is a conlributing editor/or Time magazine.

A Conversation

With Daniel

J. Boorstin

From Pseudo-Event to Virtual Reality Daniel J. Boorstin, 78, is one of America's most enduring and insightful thinkers. Librarian of Congress Emeritus and former director of the National Museum of History and Technology, Boorstin is a historian and author of such classics as The Discoverers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Americans, as well as The Creators, and Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. Another of his classics is The

Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, which among other things showed how the media created celebrities, whom Boorstin wittily defined as "people who are well-known for their well-knowness." A keen observer of technology, here he discusses its broader implications for human experience with Nathan Gardels, editor

of New Perspectives

Quarterly.

Question: in your i96i book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America you were Ihefirsllo alerl us 10 Ihe coming dominance of Ihe image, of Pres iden Is elecled and governing by PR, of Ihe crealion of a "Ihickel of unrealiiy" Ihal "befogs our experience" and which slands bef1,I'eenus and Ihe facls of life. On Ihe jronlispiece of The Image, you even ciled Max Frisch saying "Technology {is]lhe knack of arranging Ihe world so Ihal we don i have 10 experience if. " Young media Iheorisls of General ion X like Douglas Rushkoffhave fii/filled your wonJ~ wriling Ihallhe lelevised experience which media lechnologv has crealed is Ihe real Ihing. Olhers, like joul'l1alisl Carl Bemslein of Walergalefame, are saying Ihal America has become the Talk Show Nation drowning in Ihe trivia of an "idiot cullure. " Perhaps technological revolulions. too, have Iheir Thermidm: Has Ihe information Revoluliol1 Ihal was supposed 10 bring us an enlighlened global village produced instead an "idiol cullure?"

Daniel J. Boorstin: Let's leave aside disparaging and eulogistic cliches like "idiot culture" so that we can focus on what is imporReprinted from New PerspecliI'es for the Study of Democratic

Quarter!v. published by the Center

Institutions.

Copyright © 1994 New Perspectives.

tant: The broader implications of technology for human experience.

The first important thing is that media technology has a tendency to homogenize time and space. What is there is also hereat the same time. Or what was there can be here again on thc screen ifit was filmed. What we must consider when we are talking about the effect of technology on experience is what happens when the distinctions of time and space are erased.

One consequence of television is thus what I call diplopia, the double image; not knowing whether it is real or not, whether it is happening or not happening. That gives a kind of iridescence to experience. I am less willing to lament it than you are. The question is how to come to terms with it and make something of it if we can.

When people share experiences so broadly this can change, for example, the nature of discovery. When the American astronauts landed on the moon we were there, right there! We were Ihere. It gave us all a sense of discovery that no one but Columbus himself and his crew had when he landed in the New World.

Another consequence of television has been to offer us new avenues to community.

Democracies are very weak in ritual.

Ritual is something that brings people together in community; it is a symbol of community, of everyone being in it together, of having the same experience. Of course there is always religious ritual, but that is on the wane in our society. The low churches and the evangelical churches don't even pay attention to ritual.

So, there is a tendency for the media to fill in the gap. The poverty of rinlal in a democracy creates a lacuna into which technology can flow with its miniseries, talk shows, and other vapidities.

This ritualistic role of media was also evident in recent public events: The death and funeral of Richard Nixon, the death and funeral of Jackie Onassis, and the anniversary of D-Day. Americans in recent times have seldom felt so drawn together by the death of a President as they did by Richard Nixon's death. On TV, they watched all the other living Presidents attending the funeral together, they saw the expressions on their faces. It was a moment of community which the media created.

The ability to enjoy with our fellow countrymen the special qualities of Jackie Onassis was made possible through the reproduction of memorable television footage and photographs from decades past.

In such events you are more there when you are here; in your own home you have a better seat at the funerals or the D-Day re-

enactments than if you were actually present. Yet at the same time you are part of something bigger shared by the whole country.

A third consequence of television is what could be called "chronological myopia," the tendency to focus on the more recent.

The 50th anniversary of D-Day was made into a commemorative super event by the reenactment of the invasion; yet the 250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birthday, which was also supposed to be celebrated, passed with little notice. It was of so little interest that William Jefferson Clinton didn't bother to fill out the appointments to the commemoration commission until long past the anniversary.

The Jefferson anniversary was like trying to celebrate Christmas in July. The D-Day anniversary might have been the same if there hadn.'t been the graphic parachute drops or if the film The Longest Day had been about the American Revolution and not D-Day. Yet the importance of Jefferson to America cannot be overstated. His influence on America may even be deeper and more enduring than, I say tongue in cheek, the influence of Richard Nixon, even though Jefferson's funeral was not televised. That is what I mean by chronological myopia.

Isn't the worry precisely that community lVi!!be anchored mainly in the vapidities oj Oprah, Donahue, Geraldo, and tabloid TV that consistently jill the ahwaves and cables? Isn't that shared experience closer to voyeurism than a voyage oj discovery?

Boorstin: Naturally, I don't applaud that. It is clear that another tendency of media technology is that it expands to fill all available time. And in all that available time when we are waiting at the airport or sitting bored on a long flight or home from school or work, people expect more drama, excitement, and titillation than human nature in reality is capable of inventing. People seem to expect a kind of utopi'a of eternal amusement. But that is an extravagant expectation.

People want that iridescence of the image, that glow of gilded experience, 24 hours a day. Real life is just not that dramatic around the clock. Humankind is not capable of inventing as much novelty as we have come to crave. So, trivia, the weird, the strange, and the extreme fill in the space.

So, is it the technology which creates the demandjor which novel trivia as well as great cultural invention is the supply, or the other way around?

Boorstin: In my book The Creators I observe that it is a characteristic of Western culture to put a special value on novelty. The Judeo-Christian religion worships a Creator God. Its sacred documents affirm that man was made in the image of the Creator. So some divinity is given to the act of novelty.

That is not the case in the great Eastern religions like Hinduism or Buddhism.

There is no Creator God in the first place. There is no sense in those cultures that the ability to create something better is celebrated in the artist. Certainly, great works of art have been created in the East, but they have not had the imprimatur of novelty.

So technology is a symbol, a symptom, and a consequence of the civilizational motive of the search for the new. Patents and copyrights are the way of protecting the benefits that people get from novelty.

Technology creates endless possibilities for novelty. There are four kingdoms on Earth-animal, vegetable, mineral, and, now, a new one, the kingdom of the machine, where the laws of the other kingdoms don't apply.

The idea of species, a dominant idea in Western culture based on biological thought for most of Western history, was the idea of something that was identifiably discrete and fixed with distinctive characteristics. That is how Aristotle used the concept. And that is why it was very hard for Western Christian thinkers to believe that it was possible for any species to become extinct, or for a new species to come into being.

When the machine kingdom alTived on the scene it entirely changed the "fixedness" of the idea of species. Machines are not permanently fixed in their original state. They can interbreed! You can quite readily crossbreed the radio and the cellular phone with the automobile in a way you can't cross a cat and a dog.

Every technology is something that can be interbred, so there is no end to the novelty that can be created. As a result, there is a fluidity that never before existed.

A natural species reacts to its environment. The machine species creates environment. The ability of the automobile to survive depends on its ability to bring forth highways. It changes the temperature in the atmosphere with its exhaust.

My book The Image deals with only one aspect of the consequences of technology on experience, the relation of mankind to what is out there.

Let me return to your point about diplopia and the double image, about the confilsion between what is real and what is not. For the generatiol1 which greH!up slvimming in the soup ojthe image since mom and dadjirst put them infront ojthe tube so they could take a breathe/; the media has virtually become the real thing, the primQ/Y realm oj experience.

On the other hand, without direct experience oj an event some just don't believe it is real. Speaking oj the American landing on the moon, I remember at the time that many in the Soviet Union claimed it was merely a Hollywood contrivance.

Boorstin: In many Muslim countries today people still deny that the moon landing took place.

For someone ojmy age, born in 1952, and certainly those who are younge/; the

vance has not been tested. The information highway is the route being built for the flow offacts that are significant because of their obsolescence.

Knowledge, however, is organized. It is structured. What cannot be related or is not relevant is discarded. The obvious force which has made information displace knowledge is the reduction of the time that lapses between when someone notices something, communicates it, and when it is received by somebody else.

In the case of television you have an instantaneous reporting all over the world. The news reporters often haven't even been able to learn how to pronounce the names of the places they are reporting on, for example Bosnia-Herzegovina or Tadjikistan. They often don't know if it is a prime minister or a promontory they are describing.

The multiplication of bytes of information, the shecr momentum, makes it inevitable that people will be flooded by the miscellaneous. The information highway will become an expressway, accelerating this momentum even more.

The invention of new machines spawns more new data than it does knowledge. This reverses the situation from earlier times, for example in the Middle Ages. There was then a scarcity of information, of data, about the heavens because they didn't have even a telescope. So there was a tendency for meaning to outrun information. Absent the invention of machines that could provide that information, people invented meaning about what went on there.

They had to. Otherwise they had no structure for experience.

Now, with the multiplication of machines, of cameras, ultraviolet, infrared, and all the other means to collect data from the heavens, there is a tendency for inforn1ation to outrun meaning. We accumulate data. The Voyager 2 spacecraft traveled 7,087,213,920 kilometers during 12 years to "brush the treetops of Neptune and hurtle past Triton," as science writer Stephen Hall put it, to send back data for which we had no clue as to its meaning.

That is why I call this "the age of negative discovery"-we are forever discovering the new areas of our ignorance. That is what our technology enables us to do. This, I suppose, is what it means to be human: To have more questions than answers.

Be that as it may, this dynamic of technology to create more data than meaning makes it all the more important for us to take refuge inJforms of communication where there is a time lapse between when information is noted, communicated, and then received.

The flood of pseudo-events and the avalanche of trivia created by the media technology are the counterparts to this (>,The book remains ·)~!.;l overwhelming deluge of data that outstrips meaning. The vulgarities and absurdities of ::'.the great source of so much television are only another sympcivili~ation be~.auSe)~;~~ tom of this general dynamic.

common references are of TV series or events like I Love Lucy or Leave it to Beaver or the first time the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan or any number of Disney movie "classics." Hasn i this predominance of the media transformed experience?

Boorstin: It is easy to be glib when talking about reality. Isn't any experience itself an aspect of reality?

Again, let us look at the longer course of history. The first transformation of experience came with speech and then with writing.

Writing was an enormous transformation of experience: It was possible to get a message from someone who was dead! That had not happened before writing.

Then, of course, the advent of the book made it possible to enlarge people's experience, making it possible to share an experience that you had not actually lived yourself. The reason so many medieval teachers were hostile to the book was that it destroyed their monopoly over the access to knowledge. The book created a whole new category of experience.

People would read Dickens and weep over Oliver Twist. Was that experience or not experience? And, after all, the Judeo-Christian religion, like Islam, depends on The Book. Don't we call that experience? Is that unreal?

Now I'm not talking about particular TV programs, but about technology. When we talk about technology, including "virtual reality" about which there is so much pro and con debate today, we should keep in mind the larger picture: Technology enlarges and changes experience by homogenizing the dimensions of time and space. That is the way we should think about it. That is the basic point.

Yet it is impol1ant not to imply that technology is the only source of enlarging experience. The literary form which James Joyce invented in Ulysses was a whole new take on consciousness.

The invention of biography as a literary form did not depend on technology; it was an act ofim::l.gination in ways of seeing. By definition we can't know the categories of future novelty; otherwise there wouldn't be any novelty.

When people worry about the vapidity of some TV programs and the tabloid trash, we must keep in mind that such material is a function of the limits of human invention. We are only capable of generating so much novelty, and apparently not enough to fill all the time that must be programmed on 'round-the-clock TV. With the explosion of cable channels, fiber-optic networks, satellites, and the coming information hig/l1m.\', aren ( we headed for a deluge of data and trivia that will overwhelm our culture? And what are the consequences?

Boorstin: The tendency is for information to displace knowledge. That is because inforn1ation consists of fragments of experience unrelated to each other and characterized by their recentness. Therefore, the reporting of them has not given anybody an opportunity to organize them. Their rele-

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To affirm the book today is to affitm the cerned that Oprah will drive out Othello? endurance of civilization against the msh Boorstin: It is tme that television has of immediacy. Ifwe do that, I have confiopened the floodgates of trivia, data, and dence that in the long mn there will be a pseudo-events. But why must there be l~;,: Totalitarian survival of the Great Books and the Great equilibrium? To talk somehow of balancing ~ocieties are prone;:~ Ideas and Great People that have made these things is what totalitarian societies try ~,)(;:' to exaggerate Western civilization what it is. to do in their efforts to limit choice. In the ",,'it,·. . .,., Soviet Union they limited access to reading ~;~\:_t~~ir. virtues. Free;, Hemy Kissinger has made the point rooms and censored outside works by not ~?(;:$OCletlesexaggerat that contemporary political leadership, translating them. They decided what were particularly in the foreign policy area, is good books and bad books. :;.:',>. theirvice~. . too easily swayed by the images that Someone once said that the Library of flash across the CNN hOllrZJl update.

Congress was the world's greatest collecAbsent a longer-range concept, a strattion of bad books. To me that was just egy, that will see the interests of state through the emotional bumps another way of saying it is the world's greatest collection of books of starving Somalis or Haitian boat people, they make decisions because a free society is one that does not presume to allow the based upon public opinion pressure. government or the librarian or some cultural monitor to decide The media feeds this. "Was Clinton standing as tall in his perwhat are the good books. Even the most vicious ideas must have formance on the windswept shores of Normandy as Reagan?" they their place in the record of human follies. ask. "Who won the Oscar for commemorating D-Day?" I believe in quest. Man is going in search. If you believe in freeBoorstin: The media often complicates the capacity for judgment dom you believe that there is a creative chaos in the world and that by elevating the peripheral to the prominent. But leadership is not a free society is one in which people are at liberty to wander; it is the same as responding to television. Leadership is the quality of one in which there is the opportunity to be vagrant. deciding where we must focus and what we must pay attention to.

The only answer to the concerns people have about trashy TV is to rise above that and realize that 24-hour titillation is an extravHow has our image-dominated culture most changed since you agant expectation. wrote The Image 34 years ago?

In this sense, the antidote to the image is the book. It is the Boorstin: I would say that what is most different is the multirefuge from the flood of trivia. The book remains the great source plication of points of access, of moments and times of access, to of civilization because of its durability. A book judges our experithe viewer or receiver of information; the 'round-the-clock homogences not by the momentary appeal of events, but by their continenization of space and time, the radio in your ear, the Walkman. uing relevance. There is almost a direct relationship. between the There is a greater self-generating momentum now which has nothamount of time that elapses between when a work of knowledgc is ing to do with need. It is this need for the unnecessary that has created and communicated and when it is received and its value. become so widespread.

The more instantaneous a work, the less likely it is to have an To multiply its product without regard to the need for the prodenduring value. uct is in the nature of technology. While natural selection governed The book couldn't be further from those forms of entertainment the survival of the species according to necessity, it can be said that that thrive on their evanescence. A TV series always needs a new "artificial selection" governs the machine kingdom according to episode. the freedom of creative forces. Each elaboration of technology The broadcast image thrives on obsolescence. Who would spawns other elaborations and the pace accelerates. The viability watch the nightly news two days later? And who wants yesterday's of the machine depends on its capacity to create its own need and newspaper? Books thrive on the test of time. Indeed, publishers to bring forth the environment that makes it necessary. still thrive on their backlists. The book is so dispersed and diffused that it would be hard to destroy it, or abolish its form.

A final comment?

In any case, to believe that a newer technology will abolish an Boorstin: Human progress springs from a soul which cannot be older one is what I call the "displacive fallacy." encompassed, from a quest that cannot be contained. This requires Obituaries of the book that abound today are not only premature, but foolish. Similarly, television has not replaced radio. Decades a tolerance of the puzzling consequences of technology, of the unexpected that awaits us. after TV was invented, there are radios in every' car and we even put them in our ears when we jog. Further, to cite another example, Totalitarian societies are prone to exaggerate their vil1ues. Free societies exaggerate their vices. It is always safer to exaggerate our the rise of investigative journalism in the print media can be seen vices. That is the self-insuring quality of a free society. The ultias a by-product of the preemption of spot news by television and mate test of our democracy will be our power to allow the progress radio. That left an unforeseen niche for the print media. of paradox in science and technology as we defer to common sense New technologies don't abolish old ones; they further define, or in our society.

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Helping to create cinematic history is just one of the many achievements which have studded the 50-year record of L&Is Construction Group.

L&T has been involved in major construction projects in India and abroad. We have constructed plants for core sector industries: built roads. highways and bridges using innovative techniques: set up structures that have become public landmarks Yes. all of them have been milestones on the long road from the 'Bridge on the River Kwai

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A good way to improve an organization is to hire an ombudsman to listen to complaints, which is what more and more American corporations are doing. mbudsmen have been around for as long as human beings have been faced with problems, questions, and disputes.

The term itself, though, is of slightly more recent coinage.

It's from Old Norse, and means "people's representative." And in practice, use of the title dates to 1809, when SwedeT\ established an ombudsman as a government post to serve the needs of the public. Other Scandinavian countries followed suitFinland in 1919, Denmark in 1955, and Norway in 1962. New Zealand also established an ombudsman in 1962.

Over the years, the ombudsman has spread to other institutions: To universities, where ombudsmen receive complaints from students and faculty members; to newspapers, where ombudsmen deal with questions trom readers; and to hospitals, where ombudsmen address the concerns of patients.

More recently, it has been adopted by a number of corporations. Mary P. Rowe, the ombudsman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, estimates that roughly 500 North Amelican corporations have someone acting as an ombudsman.

As this relatively low number indicates, however, the concept hasn't exactly caught fire in the corporate world. The main rea-

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son, according to Rowe, is "because in your traditional hierarchical organization the idea of a 'designated neutral' is too strange for words." From management's standpoint, she says, there's a widespread sentiment that "we don't want to hire an inhouse advocate who's going to be working against us." And where the work force is concerned, there is skepticism about whether a person hired by management is really going to look out for its interests.

But in upcoming years, says Rowe, the idea of placing someone in a designated neutral's position will become increasingly compelling for corporations. Especially, she says, as they become flatter in structure and their work force becomes more diverse.

"Lately, there's been more and more emphasis on listening to employees' problems and grievances," says Rowe. She adds that this is in keeping with a basic tenet of total quality management as practiced by the Japanesethat a complaint provides an opportunity to improve an organization.

With this in mind, the corporate ombudsman's intended role is as a "big ear," says Andrew Singer, editor of Elhikos. a New York-based publication that examines ethical issues in business. That means an ombudsman must be prepared to listen impartially to

claims of nepotism, health and safety concerns, ethical quandaries, and retirement and pension issues, to name a few. "The scope is as broad as the problems within an organization," says Bob Morrissey, corporate ombudsman at United Technologies Corporation. "Over the years, anything that can trouble people has come to my attention."

For precisely this reason, some of America's largest corporations are finding that appointing an ombudsman falls in line nicely with such goals for the 1990s as increased employee participation, renewed emphasis on ethics, heightened awareness of sexual harassment, and finding alternative means of resolving disputes.

A key component of any total quality program is encouraging employees to talk about problems in the workplace and suggest solutions. But according to James T. Ziegenfuss, an associate professor of management and health-care systems at Pennsylvania State University at Han-isburg, while managements pay lip service to the notion, all too often employees who bring forward problems are perceived as whiners and malcontents. What ensues is a rift between em-

ployees and management with the result that channels of communication dry up. This is unfortunate, he says, because many times these complainers are a company's very best employees, the ones who want to do something to make their workplace better.

An ombudsman-as impartial listeneris perfectly situated to receive the problems and suggestions of a company's work force.

That's certainly been Morrissey's experience. When the ombudsman program was established at United Technologies, he says, there was "a. worry about being overrun with frivolous complaints-personality attacks, not enough shrimp in the cafeteria shrimp salad, that sort of thing." But Morrissey has found that employees use the ombudsman to advance the system. As a testament to this, he cites the very first questIon he received when he opened his doors in 1986: "Why are we selling jet engines to China?" In fact, Morrissey's records show that fewer than a quarter of the complaints he receives are of a personal nature.

An ombudsman can also be a valuable resource for top management. The biggest problem many executives face is getting information on what's going on within their organizations, says Larry B. Hill, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma and author of several books on ombudsmen. "From the standpoint of senior executives, this is a very useful tool," he says, "even though by bringing various problems to the fore, the ombudsman may sometimes seem like a pain in the butt."

Typically, an ombudsman reports directly to the chief executive officer (CEO) and meets frequently with board members, senior executives, and department heads on an informal, face-to-face basis. Most ombudsmen also produce bimonthly or quarterly written reports to keep top management apprised of the main issues raised by employees. As Ziegenfuss puts it: "Here's a really easy way for senior executives to get data on what concerns the work force."

To be effective, though, the ombudsman should not be viewed as a quick fix. "Companies should not just establish one as a public-relations gimmick," says Hill. "They have to go whole hog, giving the position status, perks, visibility, and a sufficient budget." Most important, the ombudsman must

have the cooperation of top management.

David T. Nassef, corporate ombudsman for Pitney Bowes Inc., says he has "a straight line to the general counsel and a dotted line-a very strong dotted line-to the chairman." Because of this, he says, he is able to go where he needs to go within the company, unencumbered by bureaucracy and organizational chalts. "If you don't have that fi'eedom, it will never work," says Nassef. "Having an ombudsman without direct access to the chairman or CEO is just wasting time, effort, and money."

Of course, it's also vital to the integrity of the job that ombudsmen ke~p the names of the employees they meet with confidential.

Usually ombudsmen simply maintain aggregate statistics on the incidence of certain kinds of questions and complaints. They also keep track of outcomes, so in most cases they have a good fix on whether problems are being adequately resolved. In addition, their records may reveal whether complaints are being settled one way or another, such as in management's favor, too often.

In recent years, greater emphasis has been put on ethical business conduct. This is especially true in the U.S. defense industry, which was rocked by contract scandals in the mid-1980s. In response, 24 defense companies got together in 198'6 and hammered out the Defense Industry Initiatives on Business Ethics and Conduct. To reiterate their support for the initiatives, a number of the signers, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, General Dynamics Corporation, and Martin Marietta Corporation among them, have established ombudsmen.

Textron Inc., one of the original signers (the number has since grown to more than 50), established an ombudsman position in its Bell Helicopter division in 1987. The company hired Dan Kile, a retired Army colonel whose last position had been as the Army's chief trial attorney.

Kile says he receives about 650 contacts a year, many of them through a telephone hotline dubbed BellLine. Roughly 80 percent, he says, are employees requesting information and interpretation of the rules.

"Is it okay to do some freelance work for

XYZ Company?" or "Can 1 accept an invitation to go to a supplier's product display?"

The other 20 percent are people calling to report that someone is violating the rulesstealing, falsifying time sheets, cutting corners on safety guidelines.

The crux of his job, says Kile, is to create a heightened awareness of Bell Helicopter's standards. "Companies lose integrity when employees don't know the standards. And standards have to be communicated."

The U.S. financial world faced its own share of scandal during the 1980s. One of many to grab headlines was the Martin Siegel insider trading affair, which resulted in a $25 million fine for General Electric Company, the parent company of Kidder Peabody & Company. Following its settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kidder decided to establish an ombudsman. In 1987, it became the first Wall Street finTI to appoint someone to that position.

In Kidder's case, though, the ombudsman was hired on an outside consulting basis. The firm went with Sam Scott Miller, a partner in the New York law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. In 1991, Miller became ombudsman for Charles Schwab Corporation as well.

Why an outside ombudsman? "Both companies felt that employees would feel more comfortable calling me than calling someone on the inside," says Miller. "It's desirable to have someone with a little distance and perceived independence." Miller calls Schwab an "interesting experiment," because it has an office of the ombudsman, consisting of two insiders and an outside ombudsman. The insiders deal with company policy-pension questions, discrimination, and the like. Miller handles questions dealing with ethics and regulation of the financial markets. Miller also provides Kidder and Schwab with a depth of technical knowledge that might be difficult to find in an insider. His expertise is in broker-dealer regulation and trading practices, which he calls a "fairly arcane subject."

Of course, being the "big ear" for highly technical questions involving large amounts of money puts Miller in a very sensitive position. As one might suspect, locating problems early on is a key concern. "In the securities industry," he says,

Most ombudsmen produce bimonthly or quarterly written reports to keep top management apprised of the main issues raised by employees. "if"you have an illegal activity that's going on, the earlier you can identify it and stop it, the lower the cost is in terms of civil liability and regulatory concern."

According to Miller, there's a good chance that other American financial firms will soon follow Kidder and Schwab's lead in hiring an ombudsman. A major impetus, he says, is the U.S. Sentencing Commission's new Criminal Sentencing Guidelines.

Although the title ombudsman is never mentioned explicitly, he says, it is clear in the guidelines that merely having an ombudsman-like structure in place can help to substantially mitigate a penalty if a company is found in violation of the rules.

An ombudsman is also ideally situated to deal with sexual harassment in the workplace. With sexual harassment, even more so than with other complaints, people want desperately to remain anonymous to their fellow workers. And given the delicate nature of the issue, an ombudsman's role as impartial listener can be very reassuring to those involved.

"The typical complainant can't eat, can't sleep, can't make love--ean only think about quitting," says Mary Rowe, who is also an adjunct professor of management at MIT's Sloan School of Management. But most complainants certainly don't want to have to quit, and don't really want to take any kind of formal action, she says. They just want the problem to go away. The ombudsman'sjob is to listen, she says, and then to provide the complainant with options.

Given the air of "he said, she said" that often surrounds the issue, though, this can be an especially daunting task. "With sexual harassment complaints in particular," says Rowe, "you can have the eerie experi-

ence of having two people stipulate exactly the same facts, but disagree completely as to what those facts mean." Rowe gives the example ofa female employee who is facing unwanted sexual advances from her male supervisor: "She goes into the ombudsman's office and says, 'My boss is being totally sexually obnoxious. The other evening I worked late and when no one was around, he cornered me near my desk, and tried to kiss me, kept putting his hands all over me.'

"With the permission of the female employee, the ombudsman then talks to the supervisor: 'Hey, I thought she was just being coy,' the supervisor says. 'Aren't men supposed to pursue women fervently?

Besides, she never said no.'

"So now the ombudsman goes back to the female employee and asks, 'Did you ever say no to this guy?' And she answers, 'Of course I didn't say no to him. Are you crazy? He's my boss! But how could he have missed my signals? I've been wearing turtlenecks since the day I started working for him. He tells me dirty jokes and I ignore them. When I stay late and he offers me a ride home I always say no. Every time he asks me on a date I always decline.' " In such cases, a search for the truth can devolve into an endless cycle of accusations and counteraccusations. To avoid this, Rowe says, the ombudsman may suggest that the complainant draft a letter to the offender.

Even if the letter is never sent, she says, "it helps a person deal with their feelings and helps recover the evidence." Of course, if the complainant so desires, the letter can either be sent to the alleged offender or be used as a framework for a face-to-face discussion between the complainant and the accused. "In a surprising number of cases," says Rowe, "this is all that's needed to bring the problem to an end."

Other options are also available. If an employee requests it, the ombudsman can discreetly arrange for a human resources officer or a supervisor to be present for an informal discussion with the alleged offender. Or the ombudsman can offer what Rowe calls a "generic" approach. For instance, the ombudsman can suggest that the appropriate department head institute a sexual harassment training program or discuss company policy at the next dep3l1ment

meeting. A generic approach can even take a form as simple as posting the company's sexual harassment policy in visible spots around the office. "Often such indirect approaches achieve the desired result," says Rowe.

The 1990s are likely to be characterized by a search for alternative-as in less expensive-means of resolving disputes. Once again, the ombudsman is a natural choice.

Faced with a serious problem, says Rowe, "an employee usually feels rage or fear-a huge barrier to getting sensible ideas." In fact, she says, most employees mull over just four basic ideas-quit, put up with it, take it to court, or "act out" (engage in sabotage or vandalism). "The company doesn't like any of these," she quips. What an ombudsman can do, Rowe says, is "invent options that respect the rights and interests of everyone involved."

An ombudsman is also, in Andrew Singer's words, a "safety valve." Having one gives a company first crack at solving its Internal problems. All too often, he says, employees go outside the company-to television, newspapers, legislators, or regulators.

"These employees become classic whistleblowers," says Singer. "And the first time that top managers might know about a problem is when they read about it in the paper."

No doubt, the issues that face ombudsmen today will become even morc pressing in the years ahead. "With Workforce 2000 comes the most diverse group of workers the United States has ever seen," says Nassef. "That will mean more of every kind of workplace conflict-sexual harassment, racial discrimination, you name it." Also, he says, employees are much more infonned about issues such as ethics, safety, and the environment than they were even 20 years ago. In this climate, Nassef says, top management needs to search for processes that will allow employees to voice their concerns comfortably. Having an ombudsman, he says, is an effective way for a company to say, "You have every right to go outside, but give us a shot at fixing the probD lem internally first."

About the Author: Justin Martin is associate edifor of Across the Board magazine.

or more than a century, Ohioans have converged on Columbus, the state capital, in August to visit the Ohio State Fair. Close to one million people attend the annual event which celebrates the contributions of Ohio farm families to agriculture and the state's economy.

Located in America's agricultural heartland, Ohio has some 74,000 farms. They average 80 hectares in size. The chief crop is corn, but Ohio is also a leading producer of soybeans, dairy products, beef cattle, hogs, and chickens. Total farm income is $3,500 million annually.

The Ohio State Fair gives farmers the opportunity to take stock of their accomplishments, often by submitting their animals to the judge's eye to determine the best of class. Their wives compete for handicraft, cooking, and best vegetable prizes. And their sons and daughters-the future farmers of America-show off the results of their husbandry when given a calf or a sow to raise. The steers, hogs, lambs, chickens, and other farm animals that win prizes are auctioned off in the "Sale of Champions," and bring enormous prices. The proceeds go for scholarships for upcoming young farmers.

The fairgrounds cover 145 hectares and contain some 20 large exhibition and performance buildings, which are

F

used throughout the year for other events. One pavilion houses "Agriculture on Parade," where visitors can see, firsthand, the equipment and livestock that Ohio farmers use to produce food, fiber, and feed, and how equipment and livestock handling has changed over the years.

Another exhibit is devoted to the "Ohio Proud" campaign.

It identifies products grown in Ohio from among the thousands of items on sale in supermarkets in the hopes that consumers will buy homegrown products when given a choice.

'Fairgoers who get their fill of farming displays can head for the midway to flip, twist, or turn on 70 ridesincluding the traditional Ferris wheel-or play games of chance. There's plenty to eat-ribs, grilled corn on the cob, bratwurst, candied apples, and other typical midway food. A new food pavilion was opened last year that features Ohio foods, with demonstrations in how to cook them. The daily schedule is full of such contests as horseshoe pitching, tractor pulls, motocross racing, cheerleading, boxing, bricklaying, and, of course, a beauty queen pageant. "It's doubtful that anyone can do or see it all even by coming to the fair everyone of its 17 days, but it's fun trying," said a fairgoer.

Facing page: Produce Fom a family Sfarm is neatly labeled for display.

Family members pose with their prize- winning yearling merino sheep, famed for their extremely fine wool.

Smoked ribs and sausage are a favorite fare with fail-goers.

Above left: A couple has fun posing for a whimsical photo outside the daily barn exhibition hall.

Owner gives his Holstein calves a wash before presenting them in a cattle-judging contest.

Kids love getting their faces painted at the fair.

The petting zoo is a big draw for people of all ages.

A salesman, one of many vendors hawking products on the midway, demonstrates a woodworking machine.

Future farmers compete by directing their sows to the commands of a judge.

Ohio Department of Natural Resources holds several fun-filled programs aimed at educatingfairgoers on the importance of conserving wildlife, wetlands, and woodlands. Here, a log rolling competition on an artificial pond will conclude in a thorough drenching for one or both contestants.

Far left: A troupe called "The Wise Guys" ropes members of the audience into its skits about the old west.

Leisurely elephant rides attract whole families.

Rides on the Ferris wheel have been delighting youngsters for more than a century.

A typical game at the midwayhook a yellow duck and win a stuffed animal.

Climbing the rope ladder to win a stuffed animal is an irresistible challenge to boys; most falloff.

Those seeking greater excitement than the Ferris wheel find it on the giant slide.

With crowds, lights, and constant motion, the midway comes alive at night.

INDO-U.S. RELATIONS

Expectations and Realizations Since he arrived in New Delhi in July 1994, Ambassador Frank G. Wisner has been at the center of one of the most active andfruitful periods in the history of Indo-U.S. relations. He has been particularly energetic in promoting commercial ties between our two countries and forthcoming in explaining U.s. policy on a wide variety of issues.

Ambassador Wisner previously held assignments as under secretmy of defense for policy, under secretmy of state for international security affairs, and as ambassador to the Philippines, Egypt, and Zambia.

Diplomacy is a profession to which he was practically born. His father was a foreign service officer, and Wisner spent a good deal of his youth in the politically charged atmosphere of Washington, D. C. "I made up my mind at age 12 that I wanted to be a diplomat, " he says. "I never changed my mind or thought differently, eVeJ:I have never had a day in my official service in the United States government that I would not go back and live over again. " On July 6 the Ambassador took an hour out of his very busy schedule-the session was interrupted by telephone calls with the Prime Minister:S Office, the MinistJy of External Affairs, the State Department in Washington, and an Indian state governor-to review with us some of the accomplishments of the past year.

Here are extended exceJpts:

Question: Mr. Ambassador, when you testified before the Senate on your nomination to be ambassador to India, you said, "We cannot afford to let our differences define our relationship." Looking back on the past year, have you achieved that goal?

Ambassador Wisner: We have taken an important step toward that goal. It has been our hope in the course of the year to broaden the relationship, recognize its strategic significance, identify a wider range of mutual interests-precisely so that the whole will be much greater than the sum of the parts and no difference or differences will impede this relationship. We have differences with lots of people around the world with whom we share very deep and fundamental principles and engagements of national interests.

That's where our relationship with India ought to be and I believe IS now.

Certainly on the economic front, there are a lot of mutual interests. What is your view today of Indiil's economic reform effort?

I'm encouraged by the course that the Indian economic reform effort has taken. It is now entering its fifth year. It is not just a set of decisions that cabinet ministers make in Delhi, it's decisions that are shared now increasingly by state ministers, many of whom are now visiting the United States. Reform has become a fact of life in the business community, with major Indian business firms having concluded that an open economy is in their interest. And, I think, broadly among intellectuals and thinking Indians, the prospect of having a growing dynamic Indian economy is recognized as in people's interests.

India has got to achieve at least a six-and-a-halfpercent rate of growth if it is to be able to alleviate poverty. While fundamentals of the economy are strong, it has not yet achieved that rate, so more work in opening the economy and holding down government

spending is required to put India on a kind of growth track that will get at the persistent core problems of poverty inside of India.

The visits to India of several American cabinet officials, not to mention the First Lady, have raised a lot of expectations in terms of investment and cooperation in many fields. Are those expectations being realized?

There are expectations on both sides, because they deal with the realities of a relationship that is not only economic and commercial, but has a defense and security component. It also reaches into the environment and touches on international political matters. It's a very broad relationship. All of us have expectations that by working together we, the United States and India, would hope to work with other great nations of the world, who can make some contribution to global peace and stability. It's going to take a while; this is not going to happen anytime soon. The world is going through some very, very profound changes.

In terms of direct benefits to India in capital arriving, there has, of course, been a major turnaround in international capital markets.

They are prepared to provide capital, but they can only do so inasmuch as India's own doors are open.

You are now looking at really the first couple of big power projects, and they are not even well rooted. The Enron experience sends its own troublesome signals to the international capital markets. Telecom hasn't really opened. Roads are just a glimmer in the eye. Approvals are slow in coming. So the big spending that can run a hundred billion dollars in infrastructure hasn't started. The money hasn't come in.

Infrastructure is required if there is going to be a sustained expansion of industry. Industry, in my judgment, will come the more there is infrastructure to support it. So, we are seeing the first line of engagement on the industry side. More will come as the economy opens and the infrastructure makes it possible.

What kind of reaction have you been getting from the American business community to the Enron* controversy?

American businessmen are concerned, and rightly so. I believe the greatest element of risk in this matter is capital. Capital is shy.

Capital is not available in endless amounts on the international market. Capital only flows if there is confidence. The Enron company is a good company. We have looked carefully at the arrangements they have arrived at. We have no reason to question either the company or the arrangements they have entered into.

While the state has the right fully to review the case and satisfy itself that it's sound public policy, at the same time getting it settled quickly is truly in everybody's interest. To get the uncertainty out of the market, I hope that very soon we are going to see this matter come to a conclusion. I am confident as well that Enron would take any reasonable number of steps that would be appropriate to their *The Maharashtra government's just as this issue went to press.

decision to cancel the Enron agreement

came

The Enron e~1Je"iencesends its own troublesome signals to the international calli tal markets. economic logic to solve any problems that the state might have.

But let's assume, in the worst case, that Enron didn't go through.

I do not believe that other American investment is going to leave India or new investment is not going to come. There may be a lot more shyness about getting involved in power, and without power it's pretty hard to see how you are going to make the rest of the economy run.

I can even tell you that a great many power companies will line upJlO say we'll build you this and we'll build you that in the absence of Enron. But the question is: Will there be capital? Will bankers and financial markets put their capital at risk in a country where the contractual basis of the arrangement is seen, for whatever reason, not to be respected? It's going to be complicated unless, obviously, it can be proved that the company is made up of a buneh of crooks engaged in outrageous behavior. If the final decision seems to be whimsical, capital is going to be shy about going to that market.

You recently visited Kashmir. Would you like to share your views on the valley's problems?

The first thing that strikes you when you get to Kashmir is the enormous beauty and the enormity of the tragedy. Your second

which can be a part of the political process, but afterward. And confidence needs to be built. Certain economic and human rights steps could be taken that would enhance the prospects for peace.

So what the situation calls for is a political settlement. To get there you have got to have a process and the sooner one gets going, the better it is for the world at large, for India and Pakistan in particular, and the valley most of all.

But there hasn't been a solution all these years. Do you think there can be one that is a win-win situation for everyone?

Oh, I can imagine a number of outcomes for the problem in Kashmir, but I never thought that was the main problem. I thought that the issue was how to get started-not where you end-and to have the political will to get started, on the part of everyone. That remains still to this day to be proven. There is reason to be encouraged, but the window is very narrow.

There's been a noticeable increase in Indo-U.S. security relations this past year. Where do the interests of our countries lie there?

I believe that given the fact that the Kaslnnho situation has tlnoeeparts to it-the Indian, the Pakistani, and the people themselves who live lip therl-~all of them have to be engaged. impression is that there is truly a yearning for peace. People have had enough of the suffering and the violence that all of us feel for them. Third, that given a choice between more violence and a political solution, which really are the two choices, the overwhelming majority of people in the valley would rather go for a political settlement.

It doesn't mean they all agree on the nature of this settlement, or who should be on top when the settlement is over, but they agree on a political settlement. I believe that given the fact that the Kashmir situation has three parts to it-the Indian, the Pakistani, and the people themselves who live up there-all of them have to be engaged. And the people of the valley have simply got to be engaged because it's their lives and not expect other people to settle it for them.

The United States is not going to be mediating. There is no formal standing for such. But also there is no consensus on which one could base a settlement. So some broadly based political process, it strikes me from my observations, is required. A strategy on the part of the Government of India needs to be spelled out. Kashmiris have to talk to Kashmiris. Kashmiris have to talk to the Indian government. Not only now through an election,

I believe that the United States and India have some congruent interests in this region and more broadly in the world at large. The peace in Asia has been pretty substantial now for the best part of 25 years. The peace assumes that there is a balance, an equilibrium. Peace exists better if there is an equilibrium of force. Relationships between the United States and key nations in the Pacific, the United States and China, the Russians, and the Indians-they are the elements of that strategic balance. We have an interest, and India has an interest, in seeing that the United States stays involved.

Second, there are a great many issues worldwide that need to get settled in this troubled post-Cold War period, and peacekeeping is part of the answer. I'd Iike to think that we and the Indian side would be doing more peacekeeping. That means we have to understand situations, exchange intelligence, figure out where the threats are coming from, and deploy also political ideas, political intervention-whether it's in the Middle East, Central Asia, or Afghanistan. India and the United States have to reach into all of those areas and need to engage with each other in the problems. So there is a lot of logic for a deeply strengthened Indian-American defense relationship. The minute that Defense Secretary William 1.

Perry signed with Minister of State for Defence M. Mallikarjun was a good starting point. The defense relationship with India has gotten off to a sound start, but it's going to take more work.

You just said that peace exists better when there is an equilibrium of force. Many Indians feel that to have such an equilibrium of force in this region, India needs to develop its Prithvi and Agni missile programs. And they feel as well that the United States is exerting all kinds of pressure on India not to go ahead. Would you like to comment?

going to be the interesting questions as people approach New York in the 50th year. The agendas are just getting sorted out now; it's a bit premature.

I don't think 1 can comment on exactly where India will come out on any given set of issues. I don't feel there is going to be a lot of antagonism over UN reform between the United States and India.

We have had specific conversations: The kinds of ideas we think would help in reform of UN peacekeeping-lndia has developed absolutely the same set of ideas. So there is no natural conflict.

Now, are there other issues on the General Assembly floor where India takes one view and America takes the other? If that's the case, 1 would like to see those views be a little bit less divergent than has possibly been the case in the past. But I don't believe that the United States and India are wrestling it out on the General Assembly floor in New York. I don't have that sense of stridency.

We recog ••ize I••dia ••eeds a stro ••g ••atio ••al defe ••s•...

--t ••ere"s ••0 issue t"moe -a ••d t"at as an emergi ••g gl!°eat powmo" its defe ••se i••terests reac" out quite fur.

I don't think the United States can make decisions for a sovereign nation like India, and I wouldn't pretend that is the case right now. I would prefer to argue that we have a sense of what will stabilize the situation in South Asia. We are talking to the lndian side about it. We recognize India needs a strong national defensethere's no issue there-and that as an emerging great power, its defense interests reach out quite far.

But, I believe there are a lot of things we can do together, work on together. The nuclear field is one that particularly strikes me. never cottoned up to the notion of the We have a difference-India NPT -but that hasn't precluded us talking through fissile material cutoff bans, ending nuclear testing. So I think there are ways to work together, even where there are points of disagreement.

You mentioned peacekeeping. The United States and India have both participated in and supported UN peacekeeping initiatives. This year is the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. Often in that forum India and the United States have been on the opposite sides of issues. What do you see for the future of the UN in general, and for the future of Indo-U.S. relations in that body in particular?

The major issue right now is going to be the reform of the UN, getting old UN institutions up to speed, making sure they are relevant to the next century as they have been relevant in the postwar period, of getting the budget down to a level that the international community can afford. Making the UN in other ways more effective with a smaller budget and a streamlined structure. These are

Do you see a time when the United States can support an Indian bid to be a permanent member of the Security Council?

There aren't any arguments against expanding the Security Council from the American side. In fact, we have already rolled the ball on that-with the German and Japanese candidacies. This is not an American decision. There has to be a new consensus in the international community about the expansion of the Security Council: How will it happen? When will it take place? Will there be vetos? Will there not be vetos? How will the new members be selected-whether they represent regional blocs or some othcr set of criteria?

My own view is it's going to take years, literally years, for a consensus to emerge over what will be required to expand the Security Council. ln the meantime, I've never known anyone, and not a great nation like India, to sit on her hands in the world waiting to be a member of the Security Council. India has a lot of friends and can take action, and should, and the international community is going to take note because it's India that's asking. . No right thinking Indian condones the dehumanizing practice of child labor in this country. Yet, there's a feeling here that the rich nations are twisting arms, issuing commands, to get India to end it, and not recognizing that the root of the problem is in the population explosion, with its concomitant ills of poverty, illiteracy, etc. How do you see it?

Well, the United States government is not sending India any commands. People who are most offended by child labor in India are Indians. They are working hard on it, and that's exactly right.

It's a major issue in the National Human Rights Commission.

Now, are there people who are concerned about, don't want anything that goes on in the United States to encourage orcondo/lt' the industrial use of small children? It's und~\'S\o.\\~o.\)\~. ~ have been a couple of moves at legislation on Capitol Hill; none of

relationship with India is a bipartisan or a nonpartisan matter. India has good friends in both parties, and there is nothing that has happened since this new Congress came in to lead us to believe that the relationship would be a matter of partisan debate. On the Indian side, as I have moved across this country, I have seen people from the BJP on one extreme to the communists on the other, and I haven't had anybody question two facts: That a stronger relationship with the United States is welcome and that this country has set her sights on economic reform in opening to a market economy.

One sometimes hears the sentiment here that the American people are a friendly lot, but the American government is difficult to deal with. How do you respond to that?

I think one of the "eal •.• ile •••••• as

A•••ericans face in the world is that we have enor •••ous re:lch. Even when we don~ think we aI'e afft.-~ting othe.· peoples"lives., we "e:tlly do. those passed, by the way. I think there should be no question in my country's mind that at the level of principles, India is very committed-to her constitution, to her traditions. This is a principled nation. But it's also a nation of 900 million people with lots and lots of problems, and tackling everyone, getting on top of them, is not an easy matter. We are less than a third of India's population.

Our hands are plenty full. We can't get on top of crime and drugs and many things like that that elude us in solutions.

I think a little humility would recognize that all problems are not solved immediately. Some are only managed, some you chip away at. But in the field of human rights in general we have been able to make a point that the United States wants to be a partner with India, not a critic of India, and the finest celebration of this new atmosphere was the visit of Justice Ranganath Misra, chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, to the United States. The word I have from Washington is that such was the impression he made about the National Human Rights Commission on the Americans that they are saying: This model ought to be emulated in other countries around the world.

The past year has brought political changes. The United States has a Republican Congress for the first time in 40 years.

India has seen political power change hands in several of its state elections. Will these have any bearing on Indo-U.S. relations?

Well, I am not certain I can convince everybody that the American government is a wonderful institution. Many Americans would share that sentiment. I think one of the real dilemmas Americans face in the world is that we have enormous reach. Even when we don't think we are affecting other peoples' lives, we really do.

It was brought home to me with the recent agreement between Doordarshan and CNN-that American-prepared and heavily American focused news is now on television sets in every Indian town and many, many of India's homes. It's unbelievable. And from that American products, American styles have affected many, many aspects of Indian life, and this can't be without some questions asked as to where is India going. We ask ourselves the question: Where is America going?

I happen to think that this country is rooted in very, very ancient traditions, very strong views that are going to help Indians protect themselves, their values and their families-principles offaith that are going to make India continue to be a great culture and a great nation. I don't think Indians have anything to fear from Americans.

In fact, there is the possibility of a very constructive partnership.

That's what I am working for and I think it's a reality.

In Washington people are talking about reinventing government, but in New Delhi you seem to have reinvented the Ambassador's job, going by the friends you have made among people of all kinds of political hues and ideologies.

That's a very thoughtful remark to make. I don't think it's my achievements. I rather think that we're all fortunate, those of us who are associated with the development of the Indo-U.S. relationship at this time. New ways of looking at India, new ways of looking at America, is where people's minds are at.

And those of us who are lucky to be here to try to fashion and shape it, give it explanation and content, are a privileged people. I'm very privileged to be in India. I'm privileged particularly to be here at a time when I think we are in the process of building something that has the possibility of long duration in the American interest and in the Indian interest.

D

In sickness, as in health, rhythm is a critical factor. Effective treatments must work with the body's clocks, not against them.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

-MARCUS

AURELIUS, second century AD

n1729 the French astronomer Jean-Jacques de Mairan tested a phenomenon that had intrigued observers since ancient times: The leaves of certain plants regularly open in the daytime and then close at night. It had long been assumed that such activity was cued by the alternating sunlight and darkness. But de Mairan, using Kalanchoe blossfeldiana, a plant with small red flowers, made a startling discovery: The leaves and petals adhered faithfully to their routine even when kept in the dark. The implication was clear: Something other than the fluctuations of light was causing Kalal1choe to open and close on a daily basis.

De Mairan's experiment was the earliest recorded exercise in what is now known as chronobiology (from the Greek chrol1os, meaning time), the study of rhythmic temporal patterns in biological phenomena. Like the movements of Kalal1choe, many such patterns follow roughly a 24-hour schedule; hence they are referred to as circadian (Latin for about a day) rhythms. As de Mairan's work was the first to suggest, circadian rhythms are widely held to be endogenous, or innate, to living systems, governed by shadowy physiological mechanisms known as biological clocks. Indeed, in the past two-and-a-half centuries endogenous timekeeping rhythms have been demonstrated in yeasts and nucleated unicells and at all levels of biological organization--eell, tissue, and organ-as well as in the human body as a whole.

Ponder for a moment a few of the ways the time of day has been observed to govern people's lives: In the morning, on awakening, one's pulse rate and blood pressure rise sharply, a trend that may be linked to the high frequency of heart attack and stroke at that time of day. Body temperatures also rise during the day and, with the pulse and blood pressure, fall off sharply at night. One's tolerance for alcohol peaks at around five o'clock in the afternoon.

The secretion of countless hormones, essential for the control of life's processes, ebbs and flows with faithful circadian regularity.

The number of white blood cells in the immune system also fluc-

I

This arlicle is reprinted by permission or The Sciences and is rrom the July/August 1994 issue. Individual subscriptions are $18.00 per year. Write to The Sciences. 2 East 63rd Street. New York. NY 10021. Copyright © 1994 The New York Academy or Sciences.

tuates widely and regularly, with a normal variation of as much as 50 percent in a day. The daily pattern of sleep and activity is so much a part of what it means to be human that it is scarcely noticed, except perhaps by insomniacs and narcoleptics. The time the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman called the Hour of the Wolf-the gloomy hour "between night and dawn"is the most likely time to be born or to die.

Why do all living organisms do virtually everything cyclically? Daily cycles oflife, as well as seasonal and monthly ones, arose, quite simply, because life evolved on this planet. The waxing and waning of light, heat, and electromagnetic and gravitational forces caused rhythmic changes both in the availability of energy and in the physical medium in which evolution was unfolding. But even more basic than the happenstance of geophysical location to evolution, the rhythmic organization of temporal processes maximizes the stability of living things and ensures that they not waste precious energy.

Life's absolute need for stability requires continuous readjustment to external and internal dynamic requirements. The adjustment can be pictured as cyclical: A phase of activation or production; then an assessment of stability; a "midcourse correction," based on feedback from the outcome of the activity in the first phase of the cycle; and a return to the beginning of the cycle. A second cycle of activity then begins at the optimum time if it would promote stability. If stability is already optimum, the first phase of the new cycle begins with minimal or nonexistent productive activity.

The breakdown of such cyclical temporal ordering has lethal consequences for the organism.

One of the most important and practical applications of the emerging understanding of the role of cycles in biology is the treatment of disease. The abnormalities associated with virtually every disease-from allergy, arthritis, and asthma to cardiovascular disease and cancer-are themselves organized cyclically and,

in particular, along circadian lines. The treatment of such illnesses according to daily rhythms is commonly referred to as chronotherapy. '~ Only recently has ~ the medical community integrated chronotherapy into the development and delivery of pharmaceuticals. Circadian variations in symptoms and in the ability of certain tissues to absorb certain drugs help determine whether a given treatment will be successful or dangerously toxic. A growing body of evidence suggests that therapy could be improved and toxicity reduced by administering drugs at carefully selected times of day. A brief survey of the cases in which chronotherapy is most effective will suggest how much has been learned, and how much remains to be done. he drugs used to control allergy symptoms~among them, antihistamines and decongestants~represent one of the largest and most profitable pharmaceutical markets in the world. A great deal of effort, time, and money has been spent developing such drugs, with an eye toward diminishing their sedative or stimulatory side effects. It does not take a genius, however, to realize that antihistamines, which generally act as sedatives, are better taken in the evening, and that decongestants, which exert a stimulatory effect, should be used during the day and be avoided at night. Aside from that kind of logical treatment, other, less obvious and even surprising circadian differences in drug absorption, excretion, metabolism, and effectiveness have recently become clear.

Allergic reactions are cued by the overzealous response of the body's primordial defense against invasion, the inflammatory reaction. When a person is exposed to an allergen, be it dust, pollen, or a particular food, the bloodstream sends a crowd of circulating white blood cells to the site of contact. There they proceed to react with and engulf the foreign agent. Some of those

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white cells, the basophils, release histamines, chemicals that increase local blood flow; cause leaks in small blood vessels; and spark a flood of more white cells. The result is swelling, pain and itchiness, burning and redness. That response can serve as the takeoff point for either allergy or exaggerated inflammation.

Inflammation can also trigger an aberrant immune response against normal tissues.

Both the immune system and the inflammatory response are orchestrated primarily by circadian rhythms in the release and action of glucocorticoids, steroid hormones made in the adrenal gland. Glucocorticoids, cortisol above all, promote the manufacture of glucose out of protein and fat stored in the body. Their intense release, along with the release ofadrenaline, is part of the flight-or-fight response to times of heightened, short-term stress (a mugging, say, or a job interview). Glucocorticoids also regulate and, if present in excess, depress the immune system, which may explain why people are more susceptible to illness when they are under stress~and why the hormones, cortisol especially, turn out to be valuable in reducing the redness, pain, and burning of inflammation.

COJ1isoi concentration in the blood is highest in the morning, around five or six o'clock; as expected, the inflammatory reaction is weakest at that time. But in the evening, when the blood concentration of cortisol is lowest, inflammatory activity is at its strongest.

The daily waxing and waning of cortisol concentration has broad implications for the timing of virtually any anti-inflammatory agent.

That profoundly stable rhythm may also be responsible, at least in part, for the circadian coordination of all the body's defense networks and even the daily pattern of cell division~in other words, for the renewal of almost all bodily tissues. rthritis, an all too common inflammatory disease of the joints, also runs on a biological clock. The condition comes in two major varieties. In rheumatoid arthritis a disordered immune system attacks components of the joint. Nonrheumatic arthritis includes a wide range of degenerative diseases.

Some of them are associated with the formation of crystal deposits in the joints; others are set off by wear and tear, trauma or infection. Various forms of rheumatoid arthritis affect millions of people, whereas nonrheumatic al1hritis to some extent affects most people who live past the age of 40.

For generations physicians have differentiated between the two kinds of arthritis according to the circadian patterns of their symptoms. In rheumatoid arthritis the joints are most stiff, swollen, hot, and painful when one arises; they "work themselves out" as the day progresses. In contrast, in nonrheumatic arthritis, such as osteoarthritis, the redness, pain, and swelling build throughout the day and get relieved only by a good night's rest. By timing the medication and optimizing the relation between dose and time of day, one can better control the symptoms and reduce the side effects of drugs.

Arthritis is often treated with NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), among which are aspirin and ibuprofen. Depending

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Most oncologists give little thought to the time of day when a drug is given: Generally the deciding factor is convenience for the medical staff. on the release characteristics of the specific preparation, NSAIDs can best be taken at one time of day or another. An NSAID taken in the evening that hits its peak of release within four to ten hours after ingestion would best treat rheumatic diseases. A once-a-day preparation taken at bedtime for osteoarthritis, however, should peak the following afternoon, between 14 and 20 hours later.

In addition to symptom patterns, many other considerations relate to the construction of an optimized pill--one that, taken at a certain time of day, provides the highest levels of its active ingredient when it is needed and the lowest levels when it is least needed and most damaging. The absorption of a standard drug preparation in the gut also depends on when the drug is taken. Sodium salicylate, for instance, which is prescribed for osteoarthritis, is absorbed relatively slowly in the morning; ketoprofen, prescribed for the same condition, is absorbed quickly in the morning.

Sometimes NSAIDs are not enough. For the most severe cases of rheumatoid arthritis, physicians typically prescribe steroids.

Because steroids are hormones that occur naturally in the body, their side effects-including weight gain, thinning bones, diabetes, mania, high blood pressure, suppression of the adrenal gland, and increased risk of infection--ean be diminished if the hormones' usual circadian rhythms are mimicked, taking advantage of the body's capacity to neutralize their toxic effects. The patient takes most of each day's dose on arising or takes a larger morning dose every other day. erhaps the most prominently circadian of all diseases is asthma, which affects one of every 20 people worldwide.

Asthma is a contraction of the smooth muscle surrounding the airways that makes it excruciatingly difficult to breathe. The great majority of asthma attacks take place between two and six o'clock in the morning. That circadian pattern is caused by the cooccurrence of many normal physiological processes.

Airway size and breathing patterns change rhythmically throughout the day in healthy people as well as in asthmatics. Generally the airways are open widest during the day. There is a rhythmic reduction in the airflow after midnight, and particularly between the critical hours of two and six in the morning. Those normal fluctuations can become extreme in response to both internal and external stimuli: Allergens in the sleeping room, the supine posture and mucus retention during sleep, the cooling of the airway caused by breathing through the mouth, and circadian patterns in muscle and sympathetic nervous tone and in the circulation of cortisol, histamine, and the hormone epinephrine.

The so-called chronopathology of asthma suggests that drug treatments should be designed to anticipate the temporal onset of

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an attack. One of the most successful kinds of chronotherapy yet developed is the bronchodilator preparation for nocturnal asthma. Many such drugs are on the market, each one absorbed, metabolized, and excreted differently, depending on when it is ingested. The optimal once-a-day bronchodilator must make its active ingredient most available between the critical hours of two and six in the morning. Thus an evening dose should delay delivery for between four and six hours, and a morning dose should do so for between 16 and 18 hours. nly recently has it come to be understood that cardiovascular disease, the number-one killer of adults in the United States, is heavily influenced by circadian rhythms in pulse rate, blood pressure, the tendency of blood to clot, the interactions between blood cells and the walls of the blood vessels, an,d important interactions in the part of the nervous system that controls involuntary functions.

Consider angina pectoris, a chest pain caused when the heart muscle does not get enough oxygen. Oxygen is carried to the heart by the blood through the coronary arteries. A partial blockage of those arteries may prevent some area of the heart muscle from getting enough blood, an ongoing condition known as myocardial ischemia, ischemia can be silent or it can manifest itself as angina.

The timing of ischemia during the day makes it clear that getting oxygen to the heal1 muscle is quite sensitive to circadian rhythms, and so those rhythms are potentially highly relevant to coronary artery disease. Several large studies have shown that ischemia is much more frequent and severe in the four to six hours after people arise in the morning than it is at other times of day. Whatever its precise cause, that finding has obvious implications for the development of anti-anginal-drug delivery systems.

Several large studies have demonstrated that myocardial infarctions-heart attacks-strike twice as often in the morning as they do during the rest of the day. Like angina, heart attacks result from a lack of blood, and hence of oxygen, in the heart muscle. The condition can arise from a variety of problems inside the blood vessels, and one of the most significant of those problems is high blood pressure, or hypertension.

Blood pressure, as I noted earlier, is strongly circadian; thus transient hypertension in response to daily stresses may not be as ominous as blood pressure that is abnormally elevated at a time of day when it is usually much lower. The main problem with hypertension is that it gives an unhealthy battering to the walls of the blood vessels. That raises the odds that the vessels will be damaged, giving rise to a blood clot and causing a heart attack or a stroke.

Another threat to the blood vessels is intensified shear stressthe pulling or tearing force exerted on the vessel wall by the flow of blood cells. Shear stress relates in complicated ways to blood pressure, to the rate of blood flow, and to the diameter of the blood vessel. The most prominent increase in shear stress takes place, again, when one gets up in the morning. When one stands upright after lying down for a long while, the nervous system

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cues an increase

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well as a constriction of the blood vessels. The shear stress and change in blood pressure ultimately damage the vessel walls.

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third important factor in the evolution of heart disease is an unfortunate side effect of the body's mechanisms for controlling bleeding. When a small wound opens in the skin, the blood cells known as platelets clump together at the site of the injury. But blood vessels damaged by hypertension or shear stress also appear wounded to the platelets, and so large numbers of platelets can aggregate inside the blood vessels and eventually set off a chain reaction that can block the passage of the blood.

Platelets tend to be stickier in the morning than they are at other times of day; hence it is safer to shave in the morning than it is at night. The tendency is associated with increased levels of catecholamines, stress hormones released when a person assumes an upright posture. Any drug that might suppress the morning surge in stress hormones to clump together.

should reduce the tendency of arterial platelets Also, drugs that directly interfere with platelet

function should be given in such a way that most of their activity takes place in the morning.

Another imp0l1ant factor in the control of bleeding is fibrinogen, the main clotting protein in the blood. The concentrations of fibrinogen in blood plasma peak in the morning and then plunge into an evening trough. In normal circumstances blood clots are constantly dissolved by fibrinolysis, a process whereby the crucial clotting proteins are absorbed by the body. Fibrinolytic activity has a prominent circadian rhythm, with a morning trough and a nocturnal peak-which helps account for the inverse pattern of fibrinogen concentration.

Any strategy for interrupting the cascade of events leading to a heart attack would do well to account for all the foregoing circadian dynamics. In the morning the heart's need for oxygen should be decreased; small doses of anticoagulants should be prescribed; blockers of the effects of stress hormones must be administered to counteract the tendency of damaged blood vessels feeding the heart muscle to contract and thereby decrease the flow of oxygen; and blood pressure, which tends to leap after one awakens, must be modulated. ancer, in its various forms, will be responsible for 600,000 deaths this year in the United States alone, making it second only to heart disease in frequency I and lethality. A number of natural cycles govern the delicate balance between a person and an incipient or established cancer-seasonal cycles, fertility cycles, and circadian cycles. Breast cancer tumors grow more rapidly, and are most likely to be discovered, in spring; the opposite is true in fall, and growth in winter and summer

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In men

the discovery of two main kinds of testicular cancer peaks at different times, one in early winter and the other in late summer. As for fertility cycles, recent studies have confirmed that the cure of a breast tumor by surgery is dramatically more likely between two and three weeks from the first day of the patient's menstrual period than it is at other times in the menstrual cycle.

The effects of circadian rhythms in cancer are somewhat less obvious than they are for arthritis or asthma. But they bear enormously on treatment, especially because the stakes are so high: Cancer is life-threatening, and the cure often involves chemotherapy, the use of drugs with frequently serious side effects.

Chemotherapeutic drugs generally kill human cells by exploiting their relative vulnerability during cell division: They damage actively reproducing cells far more severely than they damage cells that are not dividing. Thus the drugs kill cancer cells preferentially, because such cells, by definition, grow and proliferate at an abnormally high rate. The catch is that anticancer drugs also sometimes damage and destroy noncancerous cells, usually including the white blood cells of the immune system, the precursor immune cells in the bone marrow and the cells that line the gut.

Most oncologists give little thought to the time of day when a drug is given: Generally the deciding factor is convenience for the medical staff. But a growing body of data suggests that the patient can gain an optimal therapeutic effect with minimal toxicity if the drugs are dispensed at carefully selected times. Regular circadian rhythms in the division of cells in the bone marrow and in the gut may partly explain why chemotherapy is more toxic to those normal -cells at certain times of day. There is also evidence that suggests the division of human tumor cells follows a synchronized circadian pattern. An understanding of that pattern could reap extraordinary benefits. For example, if the daily periods of cell division in healthy and cancerous cells are not identical, chemotherapy could be tailored to work when only the cancerous cells are dividing.

Although much work remains to be done, the benefits of timing have so far been demonstrated for a diverse class of anticancer drugs. Consider doxorubicin, a complex fungal derivative that attacks the DNA of all kinds of cells, cancerous as well as benign.

Often taken in conjunction with a platinum-based drug called cisplatin, doxorubicin significantly depresses the body's concentration of white blood cells. Although the effect is not understood, when doxorubicin is given in the morning, the dip in white blood cells is much less profound, and recovery to normal levels is complete within 21 days. In contrast, when doxorubicin is administered in the late afternoon or early evening, full recovery does not take place even after 28 days. Women with ovarian cancer who receive optimally timed doses of doxorubicin and cisplatin are four times more likely to survive for five years than are women who receive the same drugs in illtimed doses.

Recent multicenter

studies

by

(Continued on page 48)

The Many

Faces of Native America

OfdManinaBfanket

Ed Edmo, a member of a Northwest American Indian tribe, is committed to explaining and preserving his native culture through the art of storytelling. He entertained audiences in Bombay, Calcutta, and New Delhi recently with a program entitled Through Coyote's Eyes, in which he adopted the guises of five different characters (see photos) The performance, alternately poignant and humorous, offered insights into the history and life of his people, particularly the conflicts they have faced living amidst the country's dominant white culture Edmo-a poet, playwright, and actor-said that through the pro-

motion of storytelling and other indigenous art forms, American Indians are gaining renewed understanding and respect for their past. Observers of his program saw parallels between his stories and morality tales from the Panchatantra and the Hitopadesha.

Edmo accompanied the Eugene Ballet Company of Oregon on its tour of India, serving as narrator of its signature work, Children of the Raven. When an equipment failure temporarily interrupted the performance in New Delhi, Edmo entertained the audience with several stories until the performance could resume.

TEE TIME IN The US & Foreign Commercial Service (FCS) has just published a new directory on Indo-USA Collaborations illustrated with charts, graphs, and tables, the publication is a useful source book for Indian and US businesses interested in forming joint ventures (JVs) as well as for students of Indo-US. commercial relations As Ambassador Frank G Wisner says in the Foreword ''American companies have made the United States the largest investor in the Indian economy. We believe any US business executive interested in doing business in India will be helped by this directory We also think it will be valued by Indian business executives wishing to work with US companies" The 300-page directory, published under the direction of Commercial Consul John S Wood in Bombay, is divided into four sections While Section I serves as an introduction, Section II lists Indian companies with their US collaborators and American companies with their Indian partners JVs are indexed by state and

city in India and in America. As of 1994-the directory's cutoff date-there were 1,641 JVs with varying collaborative arrangements: Joint ventures with equity (330), technical collaborations (366), design and drawings (40), licenses (58), representative offices (80), agency agreements (485), distributors (236), and finance/ others (46) The top five Indian states in bilateral business ventures are Maharashtra (680), Delhi (304), Karnataka (173), Tamil Nadu (165), and Andhra Pradesh (78). It is interesting to note that the biggest Indian state, Madhya Pradesh, has just four joint ventures, and the most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, has33.

Section III provides data on US investment in India based on responses to an FCS questionnaire from 117 JV companies with US equity participation as well as on reports provid by the Reserve Bank of India, 162 chambers of commerce and trade associations, the Secretariat for Industrial Approval, and the

Indian Investment Centre. As such, editors write: "While neither comprehensive nor statistically representative, we believe our survey provides the most complete snapshot of US investment in India currently available, and a useful baseline against which future investment developments can be measured."

Section IV provides the addresses of the FCS inthe United States and India, the addresses of major Indian chambers of commerce and trade associations, and other useful information for prospective collaborators.

The directory can be purchased for Rs 460 a copy from the US & Foreign Commercial Service in New Delhi (American Embassy, Shantipath, Chanakyapuri and American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg), Calcutta (US Consulate General, 5/1 Ho Chi Minh Sarani), Bangalore (W202, II Floor, West Wing, Sunrise Chambers, 22 Ulsoor Road), Madras (US Consulate General, 220 Mount Road), and Bombay (American Center, 4 New Marine Lines).

For orders of 20 copies or more, the per copy price is Rs 360

Two Florida businessmencum-golf professionals-Jim White and Tom Dubois-are to conduct a series of golf clinics beginning this month at Bangalore, Bombay, Calcutta, Coimbatore, Delhi, and Pune The clinics, however, are only a small part of their burgeoning association with India, which includes the making of golf clubs and the creation of a world-class resort that will be home to India's first year-round golf academy Until a year ago, White and Dubois, who run a golf-club assembly company, Custom Golf Crafters, in Gainesville, Florida, knew India onlyon a map. Then in November 1994, Asia America Marketing Inc, a Florida-based company that finds markets for American products and services in India, negotiated a deal between the American company and the Maini Group to supply components for 400 golf sets and to set up an assembly plant Florida golfers Jim White (left) and Tom Dubois.

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team to mal!order clients from as far away as Germany and Japan. Their assembly plant in Bangalore has been operational since mid-March this year.

Perhaps the most exciting part of their passage to India will be their involvement in the construction and management of a 60-hectare golf resort near the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary in the Blue Mountains (Nilgiri) of Tamil Nadu The golf facility will be part of an eco-friendly resort-replete with stables, health spa, tennis courts, French cuisine, and croquet lawns. It will also host a 12month golf academy to develop Indian talent and will offer free training to promising young golfers from poor families.

"I'm excited about the opportunities here and that it will be my second home," says Dubois "It will probably be the only golf course in the world fertilized by elephants I" White predicts that India will have more than a million golfers and produce world-class pros by the turn of the century. "We're coming in at the very beginning of the golf boom that's about to sweep India," he says. "[Golf] is taking off everywhere in Asia, and is temperamentally perfectly suited to India."

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AN AY¥AIPIPA SHillNE FOR WASHKNGTON> Indians and Americans from up and down the East Coast of the United States got together on July 10 to consecrate a new shrine at the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in Lanham, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. The temple, with its five main altars and nine deity idols, is the embodiment of long-held aspirations of Hindus in the Washington area to recreate an important aspect of Indian culture in America. Work on the 1, 115-square-meter white stone structure was started in 1976 and took almost two decades, and $3 million, to complete.

The new shrine is dedicated to Ayyappa-a divine manifestation that combines the qualities of Siva and Vishnu It is a replica of the Ayyappa Temple atop the Sabarimala Hills of Kerala, and, according to the Washington Post, is the first such shrine in the United States.

Seven priests from the Ayyappa Temple were flown in to lead the prayers in Sanskrit as a metal Ayyappa idol was hallowed, along with 18 holy steps that represent an extension of the sanctum sanctorum.

A temple spokesman told the Post that money for the $500,000 shrine, and the rest of the temple, came entirely from private donors More than 2,000 worshipers attended the ceremonies, according to the Post. One of them, Rajath Shah, who drove with his family five hours from their home in Queens, New York, told the paper the temple is "a once-in-a-lifetime thing to see."

With this expansion the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple, designed to serve the Washington area's 80,000 Hindus, may be the largest of its type in North America Community leaders ~xpressed the hope that the temple would inspire young U.S.-raised Hindus to find their way to worship. Sanjay Subramanian, a senior at the University of Maryland, and a member of the temple's youth committee, told the Post that temples remain a focus for Hindu communities in many American cities, and "events like these define community pride."

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I was trained as a painter to depict classical, realist forms on canvas. Gradually, I switched from painting to constructing shapes that corresponded more to my two-eyed, wide-angled field of vision. These were concave shapes based on two halfcylinders intersecting each other at right angles. Eventually I started making photographs in similar format, using dual, curving negatives in pinhole cameras that I improvised.

Because I was showing two sides of things, my central focus almost inevitably became the differences between them. The curving forms on which I worked also created a fluid, dynamic basis for composition.

My subject became not so much the things in the picture as their phenomenological flux.

When I came to India in 1991, I was looking forward to having long stretches of time for my work, uninterrupted by teaching or freelance jobs. India was fascinating, but I resolved not to let it change my work too quickly. I had learned on other travels that the things that initially seem exotic, striking, and unique in a foreign country, later seem like tourist cliches. Of course, I couldn't resist traveling to see the usual sights in India:

The tombs, palaces, and forts; the temples, bathing ghats, and holy men. I almost immediately broke my resolution and stal1ed several paintings of Jaipur's Jantar Mantar. Its unusual architectural structures for charting heavenly movements presented a curving conception of surrounding space with which I identified.

Still, I felt there was a far more important subject to explore: Modern, industrializing India. Most Americans take middle-class life for granted, but in India different classesand centuries-seem to exist side by side. A Maruti zips past an oxcart, only to get caught behind an overloaded bus.

Indian society seemed to me to be visibly struggling along chaotic, frustratingly indirect paths to determine what sort of economics, culture, politics, and even psychology would work best for its massive population. America might be in the vanguard of technological change, but India seemed to me to be in the vanguard of the wider world's future.

Lured to some places like Ud'aipur by the prospect of palaces and other tourist attractions, I would find myself, instead, sitting for hours on a mundane side street, observing and occasionally photographing as a vegetable vendor slowly pulled his cart past motorcycles and wandering cows.

The photographs would sometimes reveal ironic juxtapositions, such as a BJP election-graffiti lotus symbol visually entangled in the wiring of ad hoc electrification, an armless beggar, who con-

fronted me for coins, in front of a TllUms-Up advel1isemcnt.

Bicycling, I came across a colony of brick makers. Whole families worked with trowels, pans, and wooden forms to mix clay and form bricks to dry in the sun. They stacked these in huge conical pyramids, ten to 20 meters high, around burning charcoal for curing. The pyramids served as surreal, smoking monuments to their labor.

In Goa, headload workers formed themselves into human escalators, pouring concrete in rising vacation complexes. ] rented one such flat, just over the dunes fi'om the beach. During my sojourn there, I probably learned more from reading Indian authors than I learned from traveling. The daily newspaper was a challenge for me, unfamiliar as I was with Indian English with its lakhs of me las, bandhs, morchas, dalits, adivasis, panchayats, and pandits, not to mention RBIs, UGCs, AICCs, and AIADMKs. I began to explore the bazaars, where I carefully gathered the tools and ingredients to try my hand at cooking such rare and exquisite treats (to me, anyway) as alu methi and baingan ka bhartha. I found just about everything to be interesting. Even the tourists started to seem relevant as a subject of my al1. Often I photographed at the Anjuna Flea Market, where once a week Western hippies, trying to look like tribals, and tribals, trying to look like Western businessmen, traded goods, services, and customs (such as nose piercing and business cards with fax numbers).

I traveled again for several

Udaipur Brickmaking, 1992, 137 x 188 em., oil on canvas.

Urban Buffalo, 1992, 48 x 66 em., oil on canvas.

Thums Up Ashoka, 1992, 89 x 81 x 66 em., oil on canvas/wood construction.

I couldn't resist traveling to see the usual sights in India .... Still, I felt there was a far more important subject to explore: Modern, industrializing India. weeks, first to Karnataka, and then to the Himalayas. I lived on a beautiful mountainside in the Kulu Valley for the summer, in a household of Tibetan-Buddhist monks. In August I mounted the rooftop of a local bus to gain an unhindered view of the incredible scenery during a trip across several icy passes and through an endless series of hairpin turns to Spiti, which only recently had been opened to foreign visitors.

From the villages I would hike up thousands of feet to ancient monasteries, improbably perched on cliffs, their prayer rooms ornate with medieval tanka paintings.

My travel companion, Bob Gerace, stayed behind in the village as I went off on one of these hikes and found himself sharing a table at a dhaba with a monk.

After several village officials came to bow before the monk, Bob learned that he was the Rinpoche of the region. He had leamed several foreign languages, and hadjust retumed from a trip to Europe to raise funds for the restoration of a·monastery.

They compared notes on the skiing in Davos, Switzerland.

When the Rinpoche asked Bob about his trip to Spiti, he recalled the grinding gears, hair-pin curves, and his calculations to whether he could jump free before the bus slid over a cliff. The Rinpoche then explained to him the significance of the prayer stones, stacked by the thousands at the passes. Bob replied that he was an atheist and didn't believe in these

things. "So your God is in the gearbox?" the Rinpoche asked.

"No wonder you were scared!"

Little of this got into my paintings. Nonetheless, I kept working.

That September I traveled to Bombay, Baroda, and New Delhi on a lecture tour sponsored by the United States Information Service (USIS).

I showed slides that included provocative feminist and homosexual images by Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Barbara Kruger, and David Wojnarowicz, a controversial group of New York photographers. I was worried that my Indian audiences would object, but they discussed the cultural issues candidly and with sensitivity.

My real agenda in lecturing, though, was to facilitate my meetings with Indian artists, and in this the USIS greatly assisted.

In Bombay my studio visit with Nalini Malani was particularly interesting. She showed me books she was making by photocopying drawings, reworking them, and then copying them again. She had developed a technique in her paintings of floating images of colonial domination and male domination in a liquid-looking space of melancholy feminist consciousness.

In Baroda I visited artists Gulam and Nilima Sheikh, who

have fused qualities of traditional miniature painting and international modernism in boldly colored, poetic works. As dean of Baroda's School of Fine Arts, Gulam helped make it a mecca for artists from all over India. Before I left the city I spent an afternoon with Bhupen Khakhar, perhaps the most idiosyncratic pioneer of the Baroda style of painting. He had just represented India in Germany at Documenta, an impOJ1ant intemational exhibition. In recent years his work has become more explicitly homosexual, and we talked a lot about this mostly invisible aspect ofIndian life.

I finally felt I was getting valuable perspectives from artists on the new India. To be honest, before I came to India, I wasn't sure that I would. Very little was known about contemporary Indian al1ists, even in internationalized New York. I wasn't as interested in the antiquities and folk and tribal m1 that dominated the Festival of India offerings in the United States in the mid1980s. I was looking for work that was individual, and reflected the complexity of contemporary experience. I wanted to be provoked to think about my assumptions in a world that is changing rapidly. Would I even find India's best al1ists in India, I wondered?

Some, like sculptor Anish Kapoor or photographer Raghubir Singh,

have relocated to London, where there seems to be a thriving South Asian art scene.

My first impressions weren't entirely reassuring. I went first to the well-known public institutions like the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi and the Jehangir Gallery in Bombay. These go out of their way to show a democratic breadth of work from every state and style. It's easy to miss an uncommon al1ist's achievement in a large group show.

Coming from the huge, immaculate, climate-controlled museums of New York, with their multimillion dollar budgets, I found these Indian spaces to be unimpressive. Later I would find galleries that upheld the highest standards, like Bombay's Sakshi and Chemould galleries.

Of all the al1ists I met in India, I think Vivan Sundcram has best incorporated the traditional with the contemporary worlds. Originally a Baroda school painter, reccntly he has been making mixed-media installations whose unusual materials suggest the changes in the ncw India. In New Delhi he showed me works he made by applying used, blackened engine oil on sculptural shapes of thick, handmade rag paper. Works such as Approaching 100, 000 Sorties are covered with energetic patterns that allude to the Gulf War, with its burning oil wells and ecological devastation. They also reminded me of the trucks on Indian highways hurtling through rural villages and barely avoiding (usually) head-on collisions.

More recently, Vivan visited me in New York, with his wife, the critic Geeta Kapur. In Montreal he had just installed a new work, Memorial, that alludes to events surrounding the dcstruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

The installation was dominated by a sort of triumphal arch made of stacked tin trunks. These tin (Col11il1l1ed

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Chandralekha

Poised for an Encore

Noted dancer-choreographer Chandralekha has revitalized American interest in contemporary dance following her successful debut at the celebrated Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival last year.

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Those who have experienced Indian dance before have never imagined it like this.

-DANCE MAGAZ 'E

In August 1994, the Chandralekha Group took its latest production, Yantra, to the United States. The company performed at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Massachusetts, and in New York City to considerable public and critical acclaim. Now a year after Chandralekha's hugely successful American debut, the Madras-based dancerchoreographer is preparing to return in August next year to conduct workshops on contemporary dance under the aegis of the Pillow's Dance Anthology Project.

Chandralekha's performance at the Pillow was the first by an Indian dance group at the venerable festival in 13 years. The group's three-week American visit, which included two sell-out performances at New York's historic St. Mark's Church-in-theBowery in Manhattan's East Village, revived American interest in contemporary Indian dance. American dance legend Merce Cunningham attended the New York performance of Yantra along with members of his company and later met Chandralekha and her troupe of seven dancers-Shaji K. John, S. Sridhar, Meera Krishnamurthy, Krishna Devanandan, Padmini Chettur, Usha Nair, and Sudha Jagannathan. A member of Cunningham's troupe even shyly slipped a note in Chandralekha's hand which read: "Watching your work this evening I understood for the first time why I am a dancer."

Writing in Dance Magazine, America's leading dance monthly, Jacqueline Kolmes described Yantra as "an abstract piece dealing with female energy in its sensual and spiritual forms, [which] maximizes the importance of the dancers without resorting to traditional artifice."

The New York-based Indian dancer Uttara Asha Coorlawala noted: "This is the first time I'm seeing Indian contemporary dance being appreciated in this country." The dance critic of The New York Times echoed the sentiment: "More than anything, Yantra is the distillation of a cultural sensibility, a piece in which form and expression merge inseparably for a mostly hypnotic 90 minutes."

Opposite page: Chandralekha at the entrance of the open-air stage at Jacob s Pillow, and Yantra rehearsals in the barn-like studios.

Throughout her career, Chandralekha has consistently striven to push the limits of Bharatanatyam to accommodate such related traditions as the South Indian martial art, kalaripayattu, and yoga. In the process she has created a contemporary content for the art form that sets her work apart from the exotic fare presented since the 1940s at the

Pillow festival by a host of Western dancers, including Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, La Meri, Shrimati Gina, Nala Najan, and Matteo. Their rigid interpretations of classical Indian dance prompted the festival organizers to invite Indian performers over the years.

Since the early 1940s, the Pillow has presented 11 Indian dancers o·r troupes,

INDIAN MOMENTS AT JACOB'S PILLOW

-

ClocA.'Wisefrom left: Legendary dancer Balasaraswati is flanked by "Oriental" dancer La Meri (left) and Ted Shawn, after her debut at the Pillow in 1962; dancer Ram Gopal in his famous Shiva-Nataraj costume; a scene from BuddhodayaEnlightenment of the Buddhaperformed by the Indo-American Dance Company; and, Bhaskar Roy-ChoudhUlY, son of sculptor DeN Prasad Roy-ChoudhUly, petjorming Surya Nirtham at the Pillow in 1956.

including Shivaram, Ram Gopal, Priyagopal, Bhaskar Roy-Choudhury, Thembal Yaima, Balasaraswati, Indrani Rahman, and Ritha Devi. However, the Chandralekha Group was the first Indian representation at the festival since 1981, when the Kerala Kalamandalam's Kathakali troupe performed there.

The Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival was founded in 1932 as a professional, nonprofit venture by the late dancer-choreographer Ted Shawn, who set up a company of male dancers among the wooded slopes of New England's Berkshire Hills. He established studios and theaters in barns, which served as architectural models for the Ted Shawn Theatre built in 1942.

Jacob's Pillow may be the oldest continuous dance festival in the United States.

Executive Director Sali Ann Kriegsman says: "[Pillow is] a place that has the most vital connections to be made between the past, the present, and the future of dance."

It was only appropriate, therefore, that

one of the world's premier dance arenas serve as the launching pad for Chandralekha in the United States, especially after the dancer's successful tour of the United Kingdom in 1992, which brought her the prestigious Time-Out/Dance Umbrella Award, and outstanding performances in Italy, Germany, and Japan. In May this year, the Hammoniale Festival of Women in Hamburg, Germany, held a" "Chandralekha Week" during the month-long event.

When he introduced Chandralekha in Massachusetts, the then president and executive director of Jacob's Pillow, Samuel A. Miller noted, "Through the course of the Pillow's 60 years, there have been a number of companies who have made their U.S. debut at the Pillow. But, for me, none have been more exciting or more privileged than About the Author: Sadanand Menon. who accompanied the Chandralekha Group to America as its lights designer, is the arts editorjor the Economic Times.

Chandralekha conducts a workshop at a Pillow studio.

this evening's opening of the Chandralekha Group from Madras.

"Chandralekha's work, we believe, offers us the chance to see the dance afresh.

Really speaking, there are very few doors to enter this country called 'dance,' of which· we all are citizens. Chandralekha ...is one important door."

Writing in The Village Voice, dance scholar Elizabeth Zimmer described Yantra as "a breathtaking Indian manifestation of postmodem minimalism." She continued: "While Indian classical dancers do not like being asked to sit or roll on the floor, Chandralekha's ensemble uses the floor as full partner." Zimmer compared the Indian dancer's work with the methods pioneered by the celebrated Mmtha Graham. "Watching Chandralekha's work you see the roots of Martha Graham's technique, the dancers' awareness focused on the mobility of the spine."

Counterclockwise from top left: Sam Millel; executive director of Jacob 5' Pillow Dance Festival at the time of Chandralekha 's visit; Chandralekha in conversation with Merce Cunningham in New York City; the dancer with her team of musicians~from left, Aruna Sayeeram (vocalist), N Ramakrishnan (mridang), and TH. Subhash Chandran (ghatam); a scenefrom Yantra; and, Chandralekha rehearsing on the open-air stage at Jacob 5' Pillow.

Although Chandralekha does not return to the Pillow until next year, she is already working on several collaborations with American artists and choreographers, one of which is a collaborative project with light sculptors Kirstin Jones and Andrew Ginzell at the Queen's Museum in New York City. It has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its "Next Wave" project.

Chandralekha's Pillow debut has opened up new possibilities for Indian dance in America.

0

The daily newspaper was a challenge for me, unfamiliar as I was with Indian English with its lakhs of melas, bandhs, adivasis, panchayats, and pandits. trunks powerfully symbolized for me the continuing Indian processes of invasion and emigration.

I had had a trunk made to carry my bicycle back to New York.

In New York I took Vivan and Geeta to the galleries near my home. Our first stop was a museum show surveying Japanese art since the 1950s. The artists were new to us, and we were interested in how an American curator had summed up another Asian country's culture, so we spent almost the whole day there.

Two years earlier in New Delhi, Vivan had offered to take me to visit an artist across the Yamuna River. The artist was not home, but it didn't matter. I was glad Vivan took me into a new part of Delhi, uncharted by the little schematic street maps in my tourist guide. As darkness fell, we took a wrong turn and found ourselves amidst miles and miles of trucks, all parked for the night along the Haryana border. The driver in front of us switched off his lights and climbed out. In desperation Vivan started driving the wrong way down a narrow lane between giant trucks. Our head-

lights swam through currents of smog, picking out fierce-looking drivers unrolling bedrolls or pouring buckets of water over their soapy bodies.

At intersections Vivan asked directions.

Soon the traffic thickened again. Vivan was changing lanes like a race car driver, but finally we came to a halt in another traffic jam.

Car horns erupted. In the distance, some sort of a tent palace was pulsating like a Las Vegas casino with thousands of colored lights. Colorfully dressed people were entering. Gradually I realized that the cars around me were beginning to glow. Turbaned men threaded through the cars, carrying neon tube lights.

Then, out of the pandemonium of car horns, a whole brass band came marching around us, trumpets blaring. Finally a young man dressed in shining white, on a pure white stallion, passed us, rupee notes fluttering around him. I was witnessing my first Indian wedding.

I wondered, could I capture this moment? I wanted to synthesize some momentary new coherence, different from the usual images of India. Traffic began to move again. Could I catch the flux?

D About the Author: Paul Smith, in addition to his painting and photography, occasionally contributes articles to Art in America magazine.

workers in Canada, France, and the United States suggest that for certain cancers drugs in the fluoropyrimidine family-widely used in chemotherapy-are safest when most of the daily dose is given at night. Moreover, the French trial found that nighttime doses of fluoropyrimidines given with daytime platinum-based drugs are safer and dramatically more effective against colon cancer than the same drugs given at a constant rate in daytime hours. Other data suggest that circadian timing is even more crucial for certain cancer therapies involving growth factors and peptides that stimulate infection-fighting white cells. nticancer drug development is a complex, protracted, and expensive high-risk venture. The few agents that graduate from in vitro screening to trials in whole animals or in human beings have high rates of failure. And so it is ironic that the results of such trials may themselves depend on time of day.

Consider the development of a new, so-called S-phase (for synthesis phase) active agent-a drug that damages only cells engaged in making DNA for self-replication. Suppose the Sphase agent targets an enzyme in the cell required for the synthesis of a nudeic acid necessary to replicate DNA. If the agent is evaluated for toxicity at the time of day when little DNA tends to be synthesized in the gut or bone marrow, the agent will be classed as highly therapeutic and scarcely toxic.

As it turns out, drug trials are usually run in the first half of the working day. That happens to coincide with the first half of the daily sleep cycle of the laboratory mouse, when relatively low levels of DNA are synthesized in the gut and bone marrow. When the drug passes the mouse test, it generally goes on to a clinical trial with real cancer patients. Those initial trials are also can'ied out in the first half of the working day-and therein lies a rub. At that time of day the level of DNA synthesis in people is at its highest-the reverse of its level in mice. Thus a potentially useful drug that works well in mice may well be prematurely discarded as too toxic.

The outcome could be quite different if laboratory studies were focused on finding the optimum circadian time for therapy and then, as a result, setting up the clinical trials at the appropriate time of day. Here, as in much else in life, timing is everything. In some instances, proper circadian timing may enable effectiv€ drugs to be distinguished from the ones that have no effect. That knowledge, in tum, can make the difference between tumor control and tumor enhancement growth-between life and death.

0

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About the Author: William JM Hrushesky is professor ofmedicine at Albany Medical College in NelV York, and an oncologist at the Samuel S. Stratton Medical Centel; Department of Veterans Affairs. This article is adapted from "Chaos, Clocks, and Cancel; " a lecture he gave to the Biomedical Section of the New York Academy of Sciences on May 4, 1994.

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