November 1995

•

•

Inoas rea

IS •

Ice

Executive Centers ~ 6 Business Centers in India & 140 Business Centers abroad in tie-up with GLOBAL-ALLIANCE

NETWORK

Bangalore: Tel: 2267272 * Fax: 080-2261133 Bombay: Raheja Chambers. Tel: 2872641 * Fax: 022-2872640 Calcutta: 8 A.J.C. Bose Road, Calcutta·700 017. Tel: 2477280 * Fax: 033-2474614 Madras: 31A, Cathedral Garden Road, Near Palmgrove Hotel, Madras-600034.

Tel: 8275191 * Fax: 044-8257258 New Delhi: World Trade Towers, Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi-110 001. Tel: 3314668 * Fax: 011-3312830 Secunderabad: 111-115 Chenoy Trade Centre, Park Lane, Secunderabad-500 003, Tel: 842588 * Fax: 040-846855

~ CD

o

v;

"

.~

:l"

'"

'6

Q)

.§

~

In this issue of SPAN we offer you articles on a wide range of subjects from adventure sports (skydiving, hang gliding, mountaineering) to one of America's finest business schools (Kellogg). There is a thoughtful analysis by international affairs scholar Leslie Gelb on a major world problem, the many civil wars sundering fragile nation-states. Gelb argues that the world's democracies have a practical and moral stake in finding a reasonable response to such wars.

For lighter reading in this issue, we offer Bruce Watson's witty analysis of that famous American passion for organizing clubs. He mentions famous groups we've all heard of such as the American Medical Association.

But he also reports on other groups such as SCROOGE (the Society to Curtail Ridiculous, Outrageous and Ostentatious Gift Exchanges) and INATAPROBU (International Association of Professional Bureaucrats).

The latter's motto is: "When in charge, ponder. When in trouble, delegate. When in doubt, mumble."

I would like to focus on two serious articles in this issue.

India means many things to many people. But in the mid1990s, the aspects of this nation most watched by the world and privatization. outside are economic liberalization Recently, we sent correspondent Kathleen Cox to cover a four-day international seminar in Delhi on global experiences in privatization. Among other things discussed was nomenclature. Privatization is called different things in different countries depending on what words are thought to be most effective in winning the hearts and minds of the people ("de-statization" in Brazil; "people-ization" in Sri Lanka;

"restructuring"

in Tunisia;

"partners

in develop-

ment" in Egypt; "economic democratization" in Costa Rica).

As India integrates ever more with the world economy, there is an increasing linkage with the telecommunications revolution and the Internet. Our article "Brave New World of the Digerati" tells the story of the magazine Wired, "the bible" of the computer age's avant-garde, and of a newel ite inaugurating the Digital Revolution, the "digerati." Author Paul Keegan, who writes the hip cyberspace language of the digerati, gives us a feeling of what it's going to be like in the 21 st century. ("The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon.")

This article's predictions give us much to think about.

"The Internet will eventually place so much power in the hands of the citizcnry that oppressive 20th-century institutions-government, public schools, the mass media-will crumble." Keegan says the digerati will build a new society, a new culture, a new way of thinking about community. He tells us the revolution will allow "humanity to evolw into ever higher forms, to make of the entirc globe and ofthe human family a single consciousness."

Mysticism') Maybe not. This is the high-tech voice of scientific

people who will probably be the leaders of the 21 st century-not necessarily political leaders but possibly so. It·s a voice of optimism and, as such, it is a wclcome \'oice indeed.

-E.A.W.

2

Brave New World of the Digerati

10 12

Indian Americans Surfthe Net The Software Market-Why

byPaulKeegan

byCynthiaRankin

America Leads

by David F Salisbury

14

The Countryside You Knew

16 22 28

You Are What You Join

A Poem by Robert Richman

by Bruce Watson

Getting High on Adventure Sports Jumping for Joy-The

Thrills of Skydiving

by Shoba Narayan

30

A Handshake in Space

34 37

Quelling the Teacup Wars

38

Focus On ...

40

Privatization: Global Experiences Come to India

43

byLeslieH.

Gelb

On the Lighter Side

The Kellogg School-In

by Kathleen Cox

a Class by Itself

by Charles Leroux

45

A Kellogg Link to India

Front cover: Rock climbing, as shown here in Colorado, is one of the popular adventure sports in the United States.

Publisher, E, Ashley Wills; Editor. Stephen Espie Managing EditOl; 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 DirectOl; Nand Katyal; Contributing Designers, Gopi Gajwani, Suhas Nimbalkar; Staff Designe/; 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.

Photographs: Front cover-© William Niccolls. 2-3-George Lange, IO-Stephen J. Rankin, 16-20-illustrations

by Gopi Gaj\\ani. 22-23-© J. Grant Brittain, 24-25-© Allsport, 26-© Bob Martin/Allsport. 27-George Bracksieck. 28-Mark Hatchette, 3033-NASA, 39 top-© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. 41-42-Avinash Pasricha, 43-47-Charles Osgood except page 45 courtesy Management Development Institute, Gurgaon.

Published ""the United States Inrormation 11000 I (phone: 3316841). on behalrorthe Limited,

Faridabad,

lIar) ana, Theopillions

Service, American American Embass" expressed

Cemer. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Ne\\ Delhi Ne\\ Delhi, PrinledarThomson Press (India)

in this magazine

do not necessarily

relleclthe

\ iews or

policies orthe V,S, GO\ em men!. Nopal'ro!this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. FOl'permissio/1 write to the Editor. Pl'lce 0/ magazine, one year subscription (12 issues) Rs, 120 (Rs 110 lorstudents):singlecopy.

Rs, 12,

Brave New

of the Di erati Wired magazine is at the forefront of the Digital Revolution, leading a whole community of computer buffsthe Digerati-into the 21 st century.

Left: Douglas Coupland, a contributing writel; goes bazooka at a Wired editorial meeting.

At the table,from left, are Kevin Kelly, execUTive editor; Dave Dix, deputy managing editor; Jessie Scanlon, an editorial associate, and Erica Ackerberg, an assistant photo editor.

Right: Louis Rossetto, editor and publisher. Below: Jane Metcalfe, president.

Bot/om: Kevin Kelly.

e have to wrap our brains around 3:05 for a second."

John Battelle, the managing editor of Wired, is using softwarespeak to start a meeting about the fifth issue of the magazine's third year. But Louis Rossetto seems to be somewhere else. Wearing sneakers and jeans, his wavy gray hair yanked back into a ponytail, curly wisps escaping around the sides, he stares blankly into space, like some cocky kid on an internship.

Actually, he is Wired 's45-year-old editor and publisher, looking lost in a daydream ... about how he trounced the mass media, maybe, those Second Wave dinosaurs who wouldn't know an Ethernet if somebody hacked one directly into their brain stem ....

Rossetto props himselfup on a bony elbow. The daydream would go

W

like this: He lopes through the streets of Manhattan-a tall, skinny figure-with his partner in romance and business, Jane Metcalfe. It's 1991 and they have no jobs. They're looking for money to start a new magazine about the Digital Generation, whom they call "the most powerful people on the planet today."

Eventually, they get one bite-from Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who introduces them to certain people who might be forgiven for thinking they are among the most powerful people on the planet. But each one-Rupert Murdoch, S.l. Newhouse, Christy Hefner, Henry Kravitz, and on and on-politely tell Rossetto and Metcalfe to get lost.

A cute couple, but what the hell are they talking about?

It's not a good time to be asking for money. The United States is in recession, the Gulf War has exploded, and the term "information superhighway" doesn't even exist. As magazines fold and advertising budgets are slashed, those lucky editors, TV producers, and ad execs who still have jobs are clutching ever more madly for a trend that will define the 1990s, any plausible new market for companies to hawk their products to-Generation X' No, the End of Greed! Wait, Grunge' O.K., maybe Rossetto's record ofreading entrails was spotty. After getting his MBA from Columbia in 1973, he lay on the beach and smoked dope until the inspiration struck to write a novel about a President named Richard Nixon who avoids impeachment by fabricating a national security crisis-but Takeover was published just a week before Nixon resigned. Bummer. A few years later, he was hanging out in Rome working on the set of the raunchy sex flick Caligula when he realized that those real, 200-person orgies would make a perfect metaphor for the sexual revolution-which was history by 1981, when the book he ghostwrote, Ultimate Porno, finally came out.

But by 1991 Rossetto just knows what the Next Big Thing will be.

He and Metcalfe tell everybody in New York who will listen, practically climbing the Empire State Building and blasting it through a bullhorn:

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

IS NOT A TREND. n's

NOT EVEN A ZEITGEIST.

THIS IS ... A ... PHREAKING ... REvOLUTION!

The Digital Revolution is happening now, on the cusp of the millennium.

Why can't they see? Why can't they wrap their puny minds around the fact that for a lousy $350,000 they can have control of not only two unemployed dreamers and their new magazine but the key to the new American soul, the whole damn

future ofmedia, a worldwide ....

"This really doesn't work-it's creepy." Rossetto has snapped out of his trance. He is talking about a story on techno-pagans.

"I'm not persuaded it's a trend at all," agrees Kevin Kelly, the executive editor. The manuscript is sent flying across the table. Tired, not Wired.

Located in a fourth-floor loft in an old factory building in San Francisco, Wired's office is almost too techno-chic to be true. Most of the 77 employees are in their twenties. An African gray parrot squawks in the lobby. Healthy meals are prepared daily in the kitchen by the staff chef and on Thursdays you can pay a masseuse named Ratka $10 to knead out the kinks in a private room. And everywhere are blue-gray wires, bunches of them, crawling across ceilings, snaking and twisting down walls and columns, across desks and tables, eventually plugging into four Ethernets and 150 computers-a self-conscious display of the new American status symbol ofhipness and emerging power.

Today, Rossetto's daydream is real: Wired has become one of the hottest magazines in America. It went from an object of derision to a moneymaker just three issues after hitting newsstands in January 1993 (five years is considered miraculous for most new magazines). It has won more than a dozen honors, including a National Magazine Award, reached 228,000 monthly circulation, started new editions in Japan and Britain, and spawned Ho{}vired, an already lucrative, if esoteric, new form of journalism delivered on the Internet's World Wide Web. But Wired is more than a successful magazine. Like Rolling Stone in the 1960s, it has become the totem of a major cultural movement. Its leaders-those "most powerful people on the planet today"-are mostly affluent white guys in their thirties and forties. They speak their own fanguage-ofhypertext, data compression, bit strings, and bandwidth. They wrap their minds around ideas, jack into computer networks, interface with virtual worlds, and grok (meaning, they dig) hacking. They have their own style of dress (sneakers, no ties) and artist icons (Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno). In their universe, science, entrepreneurship, and free markets are cool; the mass media, old literary establishments, and government meddling are not. They can be arrogant and self-involved, but many are also intelligent, creative, and fun-like big kids, some of them! his is the mainstream

T

culture of the 21 st century," Rossetto

says. "It's a new economy, a new counterculture,

and beyond

politics. In ten or 20 years, the world will be completely transformed. Everything we know will be different. Not just a change from Lyndon Johnson to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at all. I think Alvin Toffler is basically right: We're in a phase change of civilizations here."

Those comments come during one of many excitable interviews.

Back at the editorial meeting, Rossetto zones in and out, cupping his angular face in one hand, eyes roaming to a corner of the ceiling, skin so pale that just where his long fingers end, you can see blue veins around his eyes.

Behind him, curling on the walls, are pages from the latest issue, splashed with the ground-breaking design that has become the magazine 's trade~ark. Since Wired was conceived as a report from the future, its creative director, John Plunkett, liberally sprinkles the pages with psychedelic Day-Glo colors and places text over spooky images of brains, circuits, globes, and TV screens. Some stories are impossible to read-even laid out sideways. Marshall McLuhan is listed on the masthead as "Patron Saint." In the very first issue, Rossetto warned

that "the Digital

Revolution

is whipping

through

our lives like a

Bengali typhoon .... " The message is clear: Without Wired, you'll drown. The magazine makes the future look likea terrifying, disorienting place. This is no accident. Wired is a magazine for and about the Digital Vanguard-and anybody else who thinks they are smart and cool enough tojoin the club.

How they discovered this new digital subculture is explained

by

The genius of Wired is that it makes the Digital Revolution a selffulfilling prophecy, both illuminating this new subculture and promoting it-thus creating new demand for digital tools, digital toys, digital attitudes. Now you need to read the "Fetish" and "Street Cred" sections (to know what to buy), "Jargon Watch" (what to say), "Net Surf" (where to go in cyberspace), and "Idees Fortes" (what to think about).

Rossetto

upped the ante in October

1994 by going on line with text, sound, photos, that he claims will revolutionize jourSo many advertisers signed up for be turned away. Subscriptions, free to World Wide Web, have soared to

Jane Metcalfe, whose office is atthe opposite end of Wired's loft space.

The 33-year-old company president moves her thin frame around with great bursts of energy and charm, talking rapidly about how she and Rossetto met in Paris and worked together in Amsterdam for Electric Word, a technology trade journal. When the journal folded in 1990,

Hotwired, a new medium featuring hyperlinked

Rossetto made the rounds at industry shows and conferences, trying to figure out what to do next. That was their moment ofepiphany.

180,000 and could reach the millions.

"We saw this whole new community of people," she says. "There was this gathering political agenda, a perspective on the world, a sense of the future."

At first, the community seemed quite diverse-architects, filmmakers, engineers, designers, writers, computer scientists, artists, musicians. Then came the insight: They were all becoming increasingly wealthy and powerful through their pioneering use of digital

Ow the big media moguls get it. By late 1994, Disney, Ted Turner, and Cox Communications all wanted a piece of the action. Conde Nast trumped everybody at the last moment by offering $3.5 million for a minority interest in Wired-no strings attached. ". These media tycoons desperately want access to this burgeoning market-which is visible now, through a window, from inside Wired's

technology.

Rossetto

and Metcalfe

popularized

a nickname

for these

people that dramatically reflected the tremendous shift in power under way-the one McLuhan predicted way back in 1964 when he announced the demise of the 500-year-old literary order spawned

by Gutenberg's press- The Digeratil "The amount of video compression they did," John Battelle is saying at the Wired meeting-Rossetto has perked up again-"it's like 134 gigabytes of video compressed down to two CDs, and that's 650 times two megabytes, so that's incredible compression, and he was the guy who wrote the algorithms to make this possible .... " .

Everybody in the room knows what he is talking about.

Today, the concept of an emerging digital elite seems perfectly obvious. But a truism of American culture is that a trend doesn't exist-never mind a full-blown Zeitgeist or a once-every500-years revolution-until somebody finds a market for it.

That's why the whole concept of Wired magazine didn't really click until somebody (nobody remembers who) exclaimed: "It's a consumer magazine!"

The industry experts said to forget about it: Nerds simply don't buy Absolut and Volvos. So Rossetto and Metcalfe did what Americans with a dream have been doing for 150 years: They went to California.

By the fall of 1992, they scraped together $75,000 from Negroponte and $150,000 from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Charlie Jackson and hired a staff to produce the first issue.

At any previous moment in history, a magazine so inscrutable and nearly hostile to its readers certainly would have flopped. But finally, with a Digital Something dawning, Rossetto's timing was flawless.

The ensuing deluge of press coverage was mostly fawning, and bigticket advertisers like Volkswagen and Dewar's bought space to reach this lucrative new consumer niche. The digerati Wired reader is a demographic dream: A 34-year-old man in upper management with a household income of more than $80,000 and ajob that includes recommending or actually buying expensive digital equipment.

video, and discussion areas nalism in the 21 st century.

Hotwired that some had to anyone using the Internet's

N conference

room. Those bright young staffers do look cool: Ripped

jeans, black spandex pants, backward baseball caps. Some have body piercings; others slap the gray carpets with bare feet, grooving to thumping techno-pop music. They don't make enough money yet to be considered true digerati. But they give the movement crucial hip cachet, while the older Wired readers provide the dough.

This next generation marks the cutting edge of an enormous cultural gap Wired has exposed-between the on line and off line, young and old, rich and poor, digerati and literati. Wired's shakeup of the media establishment is a metaphor for the tremendous wealth and power that will be gained or lost-in business, the arts, education, pol itics-according to who most shrewdly associate themselves with the latest technological advances.

Which has triggered a small but fierce backlash: Are Wired's digerati cynical manipulators of techno-babble, hyping a utopian "revolution" that conveniently allows them to cash in before retirement? Or are they truly visionaries, the only ones with enough technological sophistication to lead LIS into a complex and more egal itarian world? " ... it would be one of those things that, you know, our core audience would really grok," Battelle is saying.

The editorial meeting ends. Rossetto heads for the door, ponytail bounding. This afternoon, he'll hop into his black Saab and drive to Monterey, California, where digerati from around the country are

meeting

at TED6-the

sixth Technology,

Entertainment

conference-to plan the next stage of the revolution Rossetto reverently calls "a celebration of ourselves."

and Design

and enjoy what

ave computers changed your notion of God?" Stewart Brand reads the typed question through halfglasses perched on the end of his nose, his long body cramped into the passenger seat of Kevin Kelly's dusty four-door Mazda.

Kelly is driving them to Monterey. Considered the West Coast center of the Digital Vanguard-the MIT Media Lab is the East Coast axis-the TED conferences have been held intermittently since 1984.

H

They are organized by a gregarious writer-architect-corporate consultant named Richard Saul Wurman, who looks like a short Hemingway and says cryptic things like "I sell my ignorance."

Brand is one of Wired's contributing writers. He is reviewing questions for his interview this afternoon with Nathan Myhrvold, a TED6 speaker and the boy-wonder physicist who heads Microsoft's advanced technology team.

"Will we see artificial intelligence in our lifetime?

"Will your children use paper at work?"

These are the kind of questions the digerati love to think about.

They've been pondering them since the 1960s, where the roots of their movement

are firmly planted.

Brand remembers when he saw his first computer,

in 1962. He had

Kelly, who is sometimes referred to as Brand's protege, took over for Brand in the mid-1980s as editor of Brand's magazine, Coevolution Quarterly, which later became the Whole Earth Review. At 42, with a hound-dog face, Kelly wears a button-down shirt and smudged black pants and carries the distracted air of a professor. He is Wired's Big Think guy, "the balloon we follow around," as one staffer calls him.

Kelly's latest idea is to not read or write for several months to see how well a person would function in a post-literate, electronic society (the result, of course, might be a book).

Kelly champions the magazine's best stories, like the one about the Internal Revenue Service's sinister plot to electronically suck taxes directly from bank accounts. But Kelly also defends stories about bizarre utopian fantasists that Wired regularly embraces-like the Extropians, who believe we can achieve immortality by downloading the contents of our brains onto a hard disk.

Kelly's conversion to digital technology came in the early 1980s, when he was running a mail-order company and began using the Internetto send his catalog to the typesetter. "I plugged in and had a religious experience," Kelly had said in his soft mumble back at the Wired office. "I discovered that there was this thing out there." It's one of many conversations about computers that turns mystical, dri fting from scientific fact to unproven belief. "Technology is not neutral," Kelly said. "Technology is absolutely, 100 percent, positive."

From that widely shared faith, the theology of the digerati flows.

"You know, I don't like computers," Kelly said. "But I use them be-

just gotten out of the Army and was hanging out with the Beats in San Francisco when he happened into a laboratory at Stanford University, where he saw "wild-eyed, long-haired radical people" playing Spacewar, the first computer game. "Spacewar was pretty psychedelic," Brand says. "But the computer people, the hackers, were not taking drugs. They were stoned on a much more lively drug than LSD. See, LSD never got better. That was the problem. But computers just kept getting better and better."

Brand knows something about hippies, drugs, and computers. He

cause they're very handy tools. The reason why the hippies and people like myself got interested in them, is that they are model worlds, small

was one of Ken Kescy's Merry Pranksters and could be found in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" wearing an Indian-beaded tie and driving Tom Wolfe around in a pickup truck; Brand launched the nowfamous symbol of the environmental movement-a photograph of the planet Earth-and started the Whole Earth Catalogue in 1968.

There, he says, he was the first to coin the term "personal computer."

"These hills, I've walked stoned many a time!" he laughs, gazing out the window at the meadows made lush by the winter rain.

Brand is 56, white hair circling his nearly bald head. He doesn't do

Riding to the TED6 conference, Brand elaborates on Kelly's point, recalling the conflicts that arose in the 1960s' counterculture.

There

drugs anymore. Lanky, with a boyish face, he is dressed injeans, black felt hat, brown leather jacket and carries a white-handled knife on his belt. Now he works as a futurist business consultant for major corporations and tosses off such famous aphorisms as "If we're going to be gods, we might as well get good at it."

Kelly and Brand share a joke about the earnestness of the Whole Earth Catalogue's back-to-the-earth days.

"Hand flour mills!" Kelly says.

"Oh, yeah, and jug and bottle cutters," Brand says. "Cut the top off bottles, make them into glasses and save the world!"

They roar with laughter.

universes. They are ways to recreate civilization.

"The first things discovered by people like Jaron Lanier," he said, referring to the pioneer of virtual reality, "is you start to say, 'What is reality?' We get to ask the great questions of all time: 'What is life?

What is human? What is civilization?' And you ask itnot in the way the old philosophers asked it, sitting in annchairs, but by actually trying it.

Let's try and make life. Let's try and make community."

was the do-your-own-thing crowd versus those into "consensus." The psychedelic trippers in opposition to conventional-reality types.

Rebels who disdained politics versus marchers on Washington. People who believed in technology (usually acolytes of McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller) and those who feared computers as evil instruments ofthe military-industrial complex.

Clearly, today's digerati emerged from a convergence of the doyour-own-thing, psychedelic, apolitical technophiles.

"Since we started dropping out of college," Brand says, "one of the things we missed was academia's disdain for business and money: 'Do your own thing' translated into 'start your own business.'" He mentions some of the most famous hippie entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer. "A lot of these people were tremendously rewarded," Brand says. "They didn't change their views. They just became rich and powerfuL" What Brand doesn't say is that many of the do-your-own-thing, psychedelic, apolitical technophiles have also become wealthy and powerful by viewing civilization in startlingly Darwinistic terms that are

rather, well, unhippie-ish.

Kelly's recent book, Out a/Control, for example, argues that our increasingly technological society has begun to resemble a biological system, with computers simply part of a natural evolutionary process that's far too complex for mere human beings to control.

"And it's better that way," exclaims book jacket.

In Wired's view, the Internet will eventually place so much power in the hands of the citizenry that oppressive 20th-century institutionsgovernment, public schools, the mass media-will crumble.

the

Being "out of control," in fact, is central to the idea of the Digital Revolution. And nothing embodies the chaotic, boundless ecosystem of the future more than today's hottest digital craze, summed up by a sign Kelly and Brand notice as they pull into downtown Monterey: "Introduction to the Internet: $149.99 for three two-hour courses."

"All the fishermen are getting on line," Brand says, laughing.

The transformation of the Internet has been a techno-hippie's dream: Originally designed by the Pentagon as a communications system so decentralized that it could survive a nuclear Armageddon, the Net has since mutated into "the largest working anarchy in the world," as Kelly calls it. Censorship is nearly impossible. Left unfettered, in Wired's view, the Internet will eventually place so much power in the hands of the citizenry that oppressive 20th-century institutions-government, public schools, the mass media-will crumble.

The Digital Revolution will reach fruition, Rossetto argues at particularly rapturous moments, when society is organized by a "hivemind consensus" that allows humanity to evolve into ever higher forms, perhaps even fulfilling McLuhan's prophecy to "make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness."

Of course, the gnarled fishermen aren't on lineyet. But until then, not to worry: The digerati are hard at work getting cyberspace ready for them. As Brand told the Los Angeles Times not long ago, expressing an idea Wired roundly endorses: "I think elites basically drive civilization." reat swarms of digerati (and faux digerati) are buzzingswanning and buzzing like the Great Hive Mind of the Future-as they gossip and mingle. Trumpets blare a dramatic fanfare, drums pound the Earth, and a choir of angels sings. It's the theme music for TED6, which means that everyone should get back into their seats.

Rossetto and Metcalfe have strolled into the Monterey Conference Center and now float up to the lobby on the escalator. They laugh and hug old friends. Metcalfe is beaming; Rossetto looks rested and refreshed, having chopped offhis ponytail. He has also lost that spacedout look from the previous day's editorial meeting.

"We came in as adventurers ... ," Rossetto shouts over the hive. He is talking about his first TED experience in 1990. " ... and we came out with a cause." He thrusts a white fist into the air and cries, "The revolution has begun!"

It's easy to see why he is excited. Rossetto was a nobody back in 1990. Now he and Metcalfe are the king and queen of the new digital media. They have been given one of the highest honors at TED6: A prime-time slot on Saturday night-just before the emotional farewell dinner-fora live demonstration of HotH'ired.

He surveys the throng: They're crowding the table selling New Age

O

books and tapes with titles like Healing Yourself With Your OlVn Voice. clustering around giant color computer screens to group Net surf, walking around with cell phones sl\lck to t~eirears. Plastic-tube necklaces mark the 650 people who paid $2,000 to watch high-tech demonstrations and hear speeches by people like the architect Frank Gehry, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and the polio curer Jonas Salk.

It's like a Digital Parallel Universe stretching out before him.

Digital Queers (an activist group led by Tom Reilly) talk to Digital Journalists (Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand), who are represented by Digital Agents (John Brockman), who listen to Digital Musicians (the jazz vibist Gary Burton) and sometimes hang out with Digital Comedians (Penn and Teller), who talk about Digital Films (Jurassic Park) with Digital Scientists (Marvin Minsky).

"The things that we've dreamed about are becoming real," Rossetto says, gazing around the lobby. "The fire has been sparked and it's spreading."

TED is where Rossetto first noticed the digital wave expanding from the nerdy pioneers to the next stage. These "early adopters" pushed the revolution forward by spending money on primitive equipment-like that first Macintosh with no hard drive-and dreaming up new uses for it, demanding that it be better, faster, cheaper.

When Rossetto started Wired, some outsiders had trouble imagining who these "most powerful people on the planet" were. Stories about sci-fi cartoons and Donkey Kong video games ran alongside ads asking the reader to match characters from a Comedy Central sitcom with color photographs of their vomit. (A bunch of 12-year~0Id boys are taking over the world?) The very same issue also explains how to get stock quotes over the Internet and a list of "deductible junkets," like a three-day conference about the World Wide Web, for $995. (So now it's a business magazine?)

But Rossetto had gleaned a deep truth: His readers were juveniles trapped in the bodies of successful businessmen. The coverofthe April 1995 issue perfectly sums up this strange phenomenon: The heads of Sumner Redstone and Frank Biondi are stuck onto cartoon bodies of Beavis and Butt-Head, the headline blaring, "Viacom Doesn't Suckl" Somehow, the chairman and CEO of a $30,000 million media conglomerate have become way cool.

Dwelling too much on marketing strategy, however, would ruin the post-hippie sensibility so crucial to these gatherings. We're talking about a revolution' So Rossetto stands amid the buzzing swarms waving his hands, unleashing long volleys of outlandish rhetoric, like this one about the "huge forces in our society starting to surface. And now they're starting to walk on land. And when they do, they're going to change the way the landscape looks in mammoth ways!"

Not bad. A kind of evolutionary, "Creature From the Black Lagoon" thing.

He'll be a bit more modest during his HotlVired presentation Saturday night, reaching back only to 1948, when television was about to radically alter American li fe. Other times he invokes the Industrial Revolution, Tomer's Second Wave. But he really outdid himselfin his first editor's note in Wired: Today's social changes are so profound, he

wrote, that "their only parallel is probably the discovery offire."

The TED conference is brimming with evangelism and boundless optimism-like some rally for Amway or Nu Skin. Empowerment is on everyone's lips, the faster tongues psyching up the others with wild claims, saying outsiders will laugh at you when you compare this movement to the biggest forces in history, which hardly seems farfetched when a new market starts growing crazily, exponentially, like a force of nature, out ofcontrol, with an evolutionary mind ofits own!

"When I said there would be one billion people on the Internet by the year 2000, they laughed!" Negroponte tells the TED6 crowd later.

"That was eight months ago. People aren't laughing today.

Gutenberg's press was a drop in the bucket compared peningnow!"

to what's hap-

ew speak this hyperbolic language as fluently as Negroponte, who has had ten years of experience asking FORTUNE500 executives for money to help the Media Lab "invent the future." In his best-selling book, Being Digital, Negroponte even uses the pyramid logic of multilevel marketers, comparing today's technological advances to a child's fantasy in which one penny doubles in value each day for a month, skyrocketing from $2.6 million to $21 million in the last three days. "We are approaching those last three days in the spread of computing and digital telecommunications," he wrote.

American business has done the same math. Just look around: It's a

F

feeding frenzy! Some people on the TED6 guest list are probably authentic members of the digerati, but which ones? Quincy Jones? U2's Edge? William Randolph Hearst III? Jay Chiat of Chi at/Day? Michael Lynton, president of Disney's Hollywood Pictures? And which of the lesser-known but powerful executives from every company and institution you can think of: The Museum of Modem Art, Metropolitan Life, the New York Times, Random House, Polygram, Nike, Viacom, Hoffman LaRoche, MatteI, Levi Strauss, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Encyclopedia Britannica, MGM, General Motors?

That's exactly why this might be the last TED. The conference has no invitations, news releases, or advertisements.

Notice travels only by word of mouth-which kept the gathering pure, for a while. But now any digerati manque with a lousy $2,000 check is just buying his way in and the TED conferences don't seem to have that exclusive quality anymore.

During the morning session, for instance, some lady from a major New York publishing company had the nerve to raise a hand and ask: "But how do we make money if we just put everything up on the Net?" Ro:,~etto, in the lobby, repeats the question with mocking tones. No reference to huge forces crawling out of the sea? No Tofflerian Second Wave? No dis-

ing money. But for God's sake, don't say it.

Actually, Rossetto has already figured out how to make money on the Net. That's the next phase on the revolution. It began in October 1994 when he started Hotwired, widely regarded as the most ambitious commercial media service ever attempted in cyberspace.

"Wired covers the Digital Revolution," Rossetto likes to say, "but Hotwiredis the Digital Revolution."

Hotwired, located in a loft adjacent to Wired, is filled with more young people staring at computer screens. The publisher, Andrew Anker, a stocky 29-year-old, sits calmly as his staffrushes to get the latest offerings on line. Hotwired is growing so fast he is about to knock out a wall to double the office space. They are adding more editorial content and the number of advertisers has jumped to 16-including Zima, AT&T, and IBM-who buy discrete billboards that provide a wealth of information ifsubscribers are interested enough to click.

At least for now, that's how Hotwired makes money. Without the enormous costs of printing and distribution, this service has been profitable since day one, and today at least $200,000 per month in ad revenue comes through the door.

Sitting next to Anker is Hotwired's managing editor, Chip Bayer, 30. He admits they struggled at first to describe what exactly Hotwired is.

Finally, they settled on calling it a "cyberstation" containing "a suite of vertical content streams with an integrated community space."

In plain English, that means a broad smorgasbord of magazinestyle text, digital photographs, sound clips, and short and somewhat jerky video segments, plus room for subscribers to discuss the material and add their own multimedia contributions.

HoMired takes full advantage of hypertext, perhaps the most revolutionary feature of the World Wide Web, which allows users to click to supporting documents or related material located anywhere in the world.

Rather than simply dump printed material on line, Hotwired is cooking up original offerings to take full advantage of the new medium. It's "Way New Journalism," says Joshua Quittner, a Hotwired writer, featuring not only the best devices of the novel but also movies, radio, CD-ROM, and networked communication.

Bayer describes an example of this revolutionary journalism: A series about a reporter named Robert Levine following the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile across the Rockies. A subscriber could aim a camcorder at Levine as he whizzes by in the Wienermobile, Bayer says, and post a video bite on line as partofthe story!

Subscription, which is free, has skyrocketed to 180,000, and Anker says it's growing at the astronomical rate of 1,000 per day.

Hotwired is aimed at "digital savvies," who make up an even more exclusive group than Wired readers because they must have both the computer equipment and know-how to navigate the World Wide Web.

covery offire?

"It's like these people haven't spent half a millisecond to consider the issues," he says, disgusted.

Look, lady, nobody here is against mak-

~d~~ "Don'tforget, we'll meet tonight at eight 0 'clock...

I'll pick you up on your Web site. "

With Hotl'l'ired, Rossetto is venturing into sensitive territory. The wider digital culture is one thing, but the Net community is distinct. Based on the free sharing of information, the Internet for years has been used by

academics, scientists, and public-policy makers around the world to exchange ideas, opinions, and research. Now the commercialization of the Net has begun and Rossetto-one of the first to profit in cyberspace-knows he must tread softly.

And speak profoundly.

This "connection of human minds," he

This is the mainstream culture of the 21st century. It's a new economy, a new counterculture, and beyond politics. In ten or 20 years, the world will be completely transformed.

-LoUIS

says, represents the best hope for regaining that old- fashioned American sense of community that the mass media has stolen from America.

"With Hotwired, people can talk back to us," he says. "And they can talk to each other. People don't just passively consume one too many episodes of The Simpsons. They connect to us to connect to their friends, to connect to a community, to be part of a mind-set and a consciousness that transcends the limits of the old media. And in the process, they start to begin to build a new society, a new culture, a new way of thinking about community."

One trick you aren't likely to perform on Hotwired is to hypertext yourself into a conversation with Jonathan Steuer. A 29-year-old PhD from Stanford in interface design, Steuer was instrumental in getting

Hotwired off the ground but clashed repeatedly

with Rossetto over what "virtual community" means. He quit last January.

"I think Louis's claim that he has any commitment to the idea of community is a lie," he says.

On this particular day, Steuer is wearing purple pants and socks and bright blue shoes. His curly black hair reaches his shoulders and long silver earrings, with stars on the end, dangle from his lobes. He sits in a restaurant near his house in the Mission District, where he works on Cyborganic, a World Wide Web site that he hopes eventually will spawn real coffee-houses where people can meet.

Steuer dismisses Rossetto as a Net latecomer. The first issue of Wired mentioned the Internet only once-and in a manner that drew some snickering, even from Rossetto's friends. Above Negroponte's column, his E-mail address was printed as nicholas@internet, which would be like addressing a postcard clo Planet Earth.

Perhaps realizing his limitations, Rossetto chose as Hotwired's executive editor Howard Rheingold, author of the best-selling book,

Virtual Community. But like Steuer, Rheingold wanted Hotwired to be

ROSSETTO

the future is the ability to take the raw material of the world and make sense of it.

Because you as a writer or me as an editor can do a better job of interpreting reality than they could."

Um ...doesn't that make this supposedly empowering, many-to-many medium an aw:

fullot like the old, one-to-many mass media?

"No," Rossetto insists, "the mass media talks to everybody. It tries to be abstract and discover a voice and attitude that everybody can connect to. I think Hotwired focuses on a voice and attitude that certain people will connect to. We don't need to have an audience of 100 million people. We're happy with an audience of maybe a million. But a million is a lot different than 100 million."

How big Rossetto's audience will ultimately get is anybody's guess.

But clearly he has ambitions to be a major media player in the 21 st century. And no, he says, the Digital Revolution doesn't mean the end of paper: The printed page is still the best medium for the sensuous graphic art and the "highly intellectual discussions" found in Wired. In fact, Rossetto projects that Wired will eventually reach 450,000 circulation, perhaps spawn an entire series of books about the Digital Revolution, new magazines that might cover every subject-sports, business, arts-that will be radically transformed in the new world.

But paper simply can't offer the kind of exponential growth that the Internet does. Hotwirf!d is currently free to subscribers, but Rossetto acknowledges that could change. As Quittner might say, there's some "Way New Economics" at work. If 100 million people are on the Net by the year 2000, the writer points out, andjust one percent are willing to pay three cents each to read a story about OJ. Simpson, that's $30,000

per story.

Think about it: Ten such stories per day. Twenty! A hundred!

Suddenly, the temptations of the mass media are creeping into this empowering new medium. Everybody knows you can sell more stories about OJ. than about a quest for the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

"Pretty soon," Quittner says, "you're talking about real money." t's my pleasure to present to you a man who is a visionary many regards ... Louis Rossetto."

I in

more about bringing people together and less about selling Volvos.

"Hotwired is a business with a payroll," says RheingoId, who also quit. "There's nothing wrong with that, but don't pass it off as cultural revolution."

Call Rossetto a Net outsider and he gets agitated. "Hotwired is acknowledged to be the best thing out there," he fumes. As for Rheingold and Steuer, Rossetto says that last fall, I I days before going on line, they had burned through $200,000 to $300,000 without setting any

Wearing green-striped Adidases and blackjeans, Rossetto takes the podium, having taken a one-day break from TED6 to fly to San Diego and speak to a national association of college newspaper editors. He gazes at the audience of several dozen students, then pauses. "I don't know how to respond to that introduction."

Rossetto rarely accepts speaking engagements and doesn't often stray

firm deadlines

Revolution-which, by its definition, is not supposed to have one.

"Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters," he had said on the flight from San Jose, quoting Bob Dylan.

Rossetto also cringes at being portrayed as a Hot Young Anything.

He and Metcalfe are walking Gap ads, but they turned down the chance to pose for the company's campaign.

"It's not why we started this thing," he explains. He wants Wired to be

or producing

a prototype.

Hotwired office, froze out the touchy-feely hard-nosed

investment

Rossetto moved into the crowd and elevated Anker, a

banker.

"To me, it's like the fascination with CB radio," Rossetto says about Steuer's and Rheingold's idea of virtual community. "It is amazing, when you first get into it, to be able to just talk to whomever you want to whenever you want to. But in the long run, people actually want something else out of media. The major thing that's going to be necessary in

outside the digital world. This "visionary" business makes him nervous, too. He frequently disavows any claim to being a leader of the Digital

(Continued

0/1

page 48)

Bajinder Paul sits in his upstairs office above his Bel Air, Maryland, home scanning E-mail messages from his Internet friends. He is so absorbed he's oblivious to surroundings and in his mind he "sees" himself walking on the busy streets of New Delhi, savoring the aroma of bhaji, samosas, and frankies, listening to the din of beeping horns, and stepping swiftly out of the path of an oncoming rickshaw. An Internet user, Paul is tapping information from people he would never meet even if he were to visit India.

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, Maryland, Mahesh Mahadevappa has just finished a grueling I8-hour day in the physics research laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. But there is one other thing to do before he calls it a day. He has to send a

recipe for making idlis in response to a plea on the soc.culture.karnatika discussion news group from a student in a university dorm in Dallas, Texas. Mahadevappa gets down to the task, writing in transliterated Kannada. His mother would never have imagined that her particular recipe for idlis would become so popular in America, Australia, England, and Canada~in fact wherever South Indian students have access to the Internet.

To many, the word Internet seems daunting and futuristic, something ofrelevance only to computer buffs. But for numerous Indians in America, this latest high-tech wonder has become the ideal medium of communication with each other and with their roots. Through its various formats~Web pages, discussion

groups, networks, and E-mail~the Internet is a new medium helping preserve Indian culture in America.

But why is the Internet so popular with Indians in America? Why are Indians represented with more discussion groups per capita than perhaps any other ethnic minority in America?

One Indian who foresaw the potential of Internei was K. V. Rao, associate professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. With the help of private donations, volunteer writers, and one graduate assistant, he developed an electronic newspaper, India-D, to which anyone with access to the Internet could subscribe. Monitoring the various discussion groups, he also saw the social needs of his countrymen abroad and began a

They're increasingly turning to the Internet to communicate with each other and keep in touch with their cultural roots,

section on matrimonials, job announcements, finding old classmates, and a forum dealing with immigration-law questions. More importantly perhaps, it brought couples together, reunited friends, and advised husbands on how to bring their wives over from India.

Now Indians abroad can communicate with each other on a regular and casual basis through the Internet. But the reason why the Internet has had more effect on India than other countries is that India represents more than one culture. The variety of discussion groups in America accurately reflects some ofIndia's rich diversity.

First, there is the soc. culture. indian group which receives about 1,000 entries daily.

Then, there are the groups that have their basis in religion such as alt.hindu

and soc.religion.sikhism.

There is even a discussion group geared toward the second-generation Indians called alt. culture. us. asian-indian. An inadvertently humorous post was sent about the plight of the Cherokee Indians. Members debate among themselves what they should be called: Asian-Americans, Asian-Indians, East-Indians, or IndianAmericans. They have also developed their own vocabulary: ABCD-American-born confused desi; FOP-fresh off the plane; westie-westerner; coconuts~American on the inside, Indian on the outside, which reflects the concerns of this group of Indians.

The majority of groups, however, are classified by language or geography: Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kerala, and, as of this year, Punjab, Marathi, and Delhi.

When the Marathi group started, they published a list of all who belong to the group-there were thousands of names from universities, people who had access to commercial Internet, and others who had access to it at their places of work.

To get things rolling, members sent posts introducing themselves.

Here's one sample: "I was born in Indore, moved to Bombay when I was two. I now live and work in the Boston area. My father's family is from Baroda, and that's what I consider my 'hometown' in India. My apologies to the Mumbai-ites and Pune-kars, but I think Baroda is just so much nicer. My Marathi is rusty at best, but it's improving with deciphering some of the posts here. Using both languages and making jokes about hometowns only enhances the cultural melange. Whoever made comment about pomfret and bombil has incurred my personal wrath. I haven't been able to stop thinking about them all day'"

This post raised a point: Should culture be preserved through the language or should the group be open to as many people as possible? Indians born in the United States sent inquiries about how to learn Marathi. The discussion continued on the

best way to transliterate Marathi phonetically into the Roman alphabet.

The Tamil group placed their phonetic alphabet in their FAQ, or frequently-askedquestions document, which all groups post periodically. The Tamil FAQ even has infomlation on how to get a software package to learn the Tamil alphabet. One P. Kuppusami developed the software, using simple words and his son's voice for the Tamil sounds, and then he made it available over the Internet.

Network users can also find the FAQs in the Web, a sort of library of the Internet that can be accessed at any time. One user entered a request for Indians to create a home page and offered to compile a directory. In a home page, an individual gives information about himself and offers access to other Web pages that he likes, such as Web pages about his home state in India, cricket, and other hobbies. He might have graphics, showing pictures of the Taj Mahal or even a sound bit of an Indian saying "Namaste," which readers can download or copy and use for their computers.

While surfing the Indian Web pages, one might discover the Action India Home Page, an offshoot from India-Net since 1993. Action India is just what its name implies: Action. It has about 150 coordinators all over the world who are responsible "for influencing a certain number of elected representatives of his/her own country in favor ofIndia and Indians living in that country." The coordinators encourage others to send letters to these representatives by offering a sample letter and the appropriate addresses. They monitor local publications for articles about India. They write letters to the editor either praising the article or criticizing it, especially if the article presents a stereotype picture of India. They actually provide information about lndia through a group called InfoIndia. In November 1994, the leading coordinators of Action India were honored at the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. These coordinators provide information

on how members of the House of Representatives vote on issues concerning India, such as the Immigration Bill H.R. 3182. Recently, CBS aired a segment on its program 48 Hours which, Action India felt, depicted a false picture about Indian Americans taking over Americans' jobs through a loophole in the immigration system. Action India sent CBS a report with statistics showing otherwise.

The Internet presents the picture of Indians to the world as well as to themselves. An article was cross-posted earlier this year in February through the various discussion groups on the subject of the Indian self-image abroad. The replies to the article were noteworthy; more than 80 people posted their opinion. One poster said: "Unless we pride ourselves for our past achievements, and are at ease with history (the good and the bad) and are capable of having a good laugh at the past, we wi II not be in a position to look to the future and say yes, it is going to be better."

Another poster said, "Personally, what I like is Indian spirit and cultural values reflected through Western style for interpersonal relationship and communications."

Still another poster simply had, "Subject: Self-respect." Fifteen percent were women and 17 percent replied anonymously.

Anonymity is another reason why the Internet works so well with Indians.

Young people give their opinions about arranged marriages. Heated polemic discussions result in what the Internet calls flaming-an argument that inflames the emotions of many. These discussions can be so emotional that they take over the character of the news group, chasing out members who had only wished for cultural and social postings. Some young students experience a release from home constraints, resulting in locker-room prose. The news groups, Web pages, and networks publish aspects ofIndian society that were hidden. Each group will have to determine how they will deal with these reflections of their own culture.

0 About the Author: Cynthia Rankin is a linguist and author based in Bel Air, Man'land. She formerly lived in Bombay.

The

__ ~(J \\!AY7[}uw

&WDŽ[?DŠ@

he Japanese have virtually no presence in the United States or world software markets. By contrast, American software dominates not only domestically but also worldwide, making up nearly 75 percent of global package software sales.

Through a series of more than 60 in-depth industry interviews in Japan and the United States, Stanford University researchers have identified the key factors that have contributed to the U.S. success in this large and growing market, as well as those that have hindered the Japanese. The study is part of the Computer Industry Project, a multidisciplinary research effort funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

"It is very interesting that the Japanese, who have been so effective in consumer electronics, laptop computers, and computer memory, among others, have virtually no presence in the $100,000 million to $120,000 million U.S. software market," says Edward A. Feigenbaum, Stanford professor of computer science, who heads the software study. The software market is

1F

important for the future, researchers point out. As computer hardware increasingly becomes a mass-market commodity, profit margins are shrinking. Software production, however, has remained a high value-added area with large profit margins.

According to the researchers, a number of economic, organizational, and cultural factors have made it possible for the U.S. software-products industry to thrive: • The U.S. government has taken a number of effective actions to foster competition in the software industry. Arguably the most important was the threat of antitrust action against IBM that in 1968 led to the company's agreement to price and sell software separately from hardware. This action a quarter of a century ago created an independent software market. By contrast, Japanese computer manufacturers continue to bundle softwilre programs with their

are Market 11® @ @~

by DAVID F. SALISBURY

machines, making it difficult for independent software makers to compete.

• For the past 30 years, the U.S. government has actively funded basic research in computer science. This provided several new ideas, such as the Internet computer network.

In addition, a number of important start-ups came from university labs. A recent example is Mosaic Communications, which formed around a group of young engineers and graduate students who helped develop an Internet browser called Mosaic.

"It was not the funding itself, but the independence of the research that was important," says Avron Barr, who directs the study jointly with Shirley Tessler. In addition, the Japanese government provided only limited support for basic software research until 1983.

• Software companies in the United States have been fostered by venture capitalists.

By demanding enough capital in each company so that they can make a profit even if only one company in ten succeeds, venture capitalists have provided an important way to support diverse and competitive start-up companies. There is nothing

comparable to the venture capital sector in Japan, so it is much more difficult for small companies to attract the capital necessary to grow.

• Piracy is not a major problem in the United States, but it is in Japan and in a number of other countries around the world.

Because it is possible to make high-quality copies of programs and manuals for a few dollars apiece, software piracy can be highly lucrative. Rampant duplication of programs makes it much more difficult for software companies to make a profit.

Despite multibillion-dollar estimates of economic losses, the researchers have found that executives in U.S. software companies generally admit that piracy is not hurting their business. Japanese software vendors, on the other hand, list it as their greatest concern.

Part ofthis difference is due to the fact thatthe U.S. government has established more effective methods to protect authors' intellectual property rights. In Japan, the government is one of the major duplicators of software, because departments are given a budget for purchasing hardware but not software, the researchers discovered.

But the reasons for piracy in Japan go far deeper, the researchers have concluded.

Because software is largely intangible, the Japanese do not consider it to be real in the same way as a computer or television or automobile. That is one reason why the Japanese government's efforts to stop computer companies from including software with their computerslt-----I has been ineffective ---and many Japanese see nothing wrong with copying it freely.

• In the United States, software authorship carries high prestige. Not only do programmers tend to be highly paid, but software entrepreneurs like Microsoft founder Bill Gates are folk heroes.

Consequently, many of the brightest students go into the field .

In Japan, by contrast, software programming is considered a relatively low-status job, even though companies have increased the pay for such positions in recent years.

• Entrepreneurship is looked on far more favorably in the United States than in Japan and a number of other countries,

where being a part of a big company is considered more prestigious. Such risk-taking is more highly valued in the United States, in part because there is a greater social .acceptance of failure. A person who has tried to start up two businesses, both of which have failed, can get backing to try a third time in the United States, but not in many others.

• The positive attitude toward youth in America is yet another contributing factor, the researchers say.

When they graduate and move into industry, they are generally appreciated and given positions of considerable responsibility early in their careers. They see that the latest technical developments are incorporated into their companies' products. In tenure-based corporate hierarchies, like those in Japan, all the major decisions are made by senior members of the firm. As a result, the researchers argue, new developments are incorporated more slowly.

0 About the Author: David F Salisbury is a staff writer with the Stanford University News Service.

The Countryside YOu!(new was what I traveled there to see.

It was as ifheaven itself had been liquefied, poured, and set to jell on eighty-eight acres.

The things you'd written of, I found: the rushed plunge of clouds at dusk; birds spreading their wings to catch the wind; a creek that bore your name through groves of pine; the bees that followefrwalls in search of warm panes, facing south.

Here s my window, someone said, as I closed the door to your room.

Later (a barge drifting to sleep), I breathed a little easier knowing I would soon wake to find what you once rose to see: last fall's ruined wall rebuilt; crows ceding ground to morning planters; a girl approaching a farmhouse at duskin her hand, the year's last lily, softening her late arrival.

Robert Richman, \1¡170 died in 1987, was a noted educator, \I'ritel; and authOl: He founded the noli' deJill1ct Instifllte 0/ Contemporarv Arts in Washington, D. C, a cultural and educational organi::atioll that hosted hundreds of artisTic pelj'ormances, exhibiTions, and lecfllres bv such celebrities as poers TS. Eliot

and Robert Frost, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, al/(l philosopher Paul Weiss. He \I'DSliterature and arts editor o/the ew Republic maga::ineji-om 1951 to 1954.

Among his books are Colors of Darkness, Abstract Art in America, The Endangered Phoenix, and Seal1lusic Seascapes.

You Are What You Join Although the United States is 9ften referred to as a bastion of individualism, Americans have a passion for joining clubs, societies, and associations -everything from the Esperanto League to the National FRUMPs (Frugal, Responsible, Unpretentious, Mature Persons) of America.

"With every Jim, Dick, and Bob closing ranks, as many as a thousand new associations are formed each yeal: How can a single group stand out in this crowd? "

im Smith steps to the podium and calls the meeting to order. He welcomes Jim Smith, and Jim Smith, and Jim Smith.

Off in one comer, Jim Smith signs a guest register and passes it to Jim Smith. Arriving late, Jim Smith takes a seat beside Jim Smith and Jim Smith, Jr., while all around the room Jim Smiths wonder about other Jim Smiths who haven't showed up yet.

Most of the time Jim Smiths blend in with the rest of society, but for the past 25 years dozens of"Jims" have been gathering annually to seek notoriety by the numbers.

Foursomes of Jim Smiths play golf. Whole teams of Jim Smiths compete in softball.

During "Meet Jim Smith" night ordinary Jims speak about their families and careers, then play "Jimgo," their own version of Bingo. After three days of hobnobbing with other Jims and their wives (who automatically belong to the Jim Smith Auxiliary), they head home, safe in the knowledge that they belong. They are among the 1,700 members of the Jim Smith Society.

"It's unique," says Jim Smith of Methuen, Massachusetts, known at the meeting as "Methuen Jim." "We bring together Jim Smiths from all over the United States. We have college professors, corporate executives, and truck drivers. Being a Jim Smith is such a special tie that no one cares what you do. There's a feeling here."

When Americans think of associations, they think big: The American Medical Association, the National Rifle Association, the American Association of Retired Persons. These are the organizations that make headlines, but hidden in the nation's niches are thousands of smaller groups making common cause for uncommon people. Though America is often referred to as a bastion of individualism, it is, in fact, a society of societies.

Notwithstanding current speculation in certain academic circles about an alleged falloff in "civic engagement" and volunteerism, there are in fact more than 23,000 national and 100,000 local and state organizations. Every last business, trade, religion, hobby, car, boat, and pet has banded together into clubs, lodges, fraternities,

J

Reprinted

from Smithsonian

1995 Bruce Watson.

magazine.

Copyright

Š

leagues, PACs (political action committees), or circles. Whether it's the Cookie Cutter Collectors Club, the Esperanto League for North America, or the National Association for the Advancement of Perry Mason, each interest has its interest group.

Some are serious, others little more than a gag. A few grow as large as cities, but most remain like small towns-quiet, cohesive, even FRUMPy. During the 1960s, Barbara Hovanetz felt alone. "I was not a protester, a beat, a hippie, or a sorority member," she recalls of her days at the University of Iowa. "There were about a dozen of us on our own, not belonging to any movement, so we decided to start our own group." And today they call that the birth of the FRUMPs-Frugal, Responsible, Unpretentious, Mature Persons. For 20 years, the only official FRUMPs were Hovanetz and friends who kept in touch, exchanging salad recipes, cleaning hints and tips on how to be a FRUMP in a changing world. Then in 1985, because "everyone who was fashionable in the 1960s had become FRUMPy just like us," Hovanetz branched out.

"Good-looking, wealthy, respectable, highly visible people need not apply," Hovanetz advertised in a pen-pal magazine. "All others contact the National FRUMPs of America for a free newsletter."

A newspaper columnist spotted the ad, interviewed Hovanetz, and sent word around the country. Seems there were a lot ofloose FRUMPs out there. Soon 25,000 of them, including bowling leagues, doilydesign clubs, and an elementary school faculty, joined up. Hovanetz, who lives in Winter Park, Florida, began writing a newsletter featuring holidays like "Godawful Tie Day" and announcements for Accordion Awareness Month. The newsletter got to be too much work, but Hovanetz still accepts new FRUMPs. To qualify, one just needs to answer questions like "Do you enjoy reading garden catalogs?" and "Do you have a nondescript appearance and a generic personality?"

From the Aaron Burr Association to the ZZ Top International Fan Club, no topic is too eccentric to have its own organization.

Unlike Groucho Marx, who would never "belong to any club that would accept me as

a member," seven out of ten Americans belong to at least one club or society. Eager to share interests, we join any club that promises a kinship of concerns. And if there are no such clubs, we start them. Time was when we defined ourselves by where we lived-a Texan, a New Englander, a Hoosier-but now we are what we join. We are idealists, 1,200-some members of Idealist International Inc. We are Frankenstein buffs, 250 in the International Frankenstein Society. We are Sherlock Holmes fans, members of nearly 200 separate societies honoring the fictional detective. We are Edsel owners, more than 900 in one club. Above all, we are people who yearn to belong to something larger than one.

Jim Smiths understand this need. In July 1994, 38 Jims gathered III York, Pennsylvania, for their 25th annual Fun Festival. Meeting in the same motel as the Association of Left-handed Golfers, Jims explained why they had come from around the country. The society's motto, "We don't shun fun," explained only half of it, according to Jim Smith of Conway, Missouri. "The human race is both individualistic and gregarious," says the retired history professor.

"Since individualism is a principle of our psyche, we need societies to give us a sense of who we are. Europeans, with centuries of history and tradition, know who they are.

But here, with our philosophy of progress and change, no two days in a row are ever the same. Belonging gives you an anchor."

Nearly 40 years ago the best-selling book The Organization Man lamented the loss of rugged individualists.

Author William H. Whyte, Jr., worried that Americans had become a nation of corporate middlemen who don't just work for an organization but "belong to it." Whyte did not foresee how individual eccentrics could add personality to organizations-even bland organizations.

On a sunny June day in 1991, Jim Boren gave a canvas bag full of letters to friends in a canoe on the Arkansas River near Muskogee, Oklahoma. The letters were addressed to several business people, university professors, and a couple of ordinary citizens-all in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 50 kilometers away. Boren's friends set out paddling. Earlier, at a

Muskogee post office, an associate had mailed another batch of letters addressed to the same people. The race between the U.S. Postal Service and the International Association of Professional Bureaucrats (lNATAPROBU) was on. Boren, a veteran foreign service bureaucrat, fornled INATAPROBU with a simple motto: "When in charge, ponder.

When in trouble, delegate. When in doubt, mumble."

Now celebrating its silver anniversary, the association gives annual awards for bureaucratic jargon, conducts exams for Certified Professional Bureaucrats (CPBs), and occasionally races the bureaucrats who run the postal service.

While the postal service processed its mail, Boren's canoers finished their relay leg and handed the letters to a jogger who set off running backward. The jogger passed the letters to a walker who handed them to a mounted rider. Next the letters were driven for several miles in a vintage roadster, then picked up by dancers who waltzed them to the campus of Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where Boren teaches political science.

There several Native Americans used the letters in a war dance before strapping them to the backs of turtles for delivery.

INATAPROBU's relay team won the race by about 30 hours.

It's a Mall World, After All Why has a nation that once championed Lindberghs and lone cowboys become a nation ofjoiners?Jt seems there's a flip side to the old pioneer spirit. No matter how rugged your individuality, pursuing a private passion on your own can make the world a lonely place. If you're just an average Joe or Jane with a fondness for, say, walking in shopping malls, where will you find someone who shares your hobby? Join the ational Organization of Mal"-Walkers ( OMW) and you'll never walk alone.

"People who walk in malls find it easier to walk with someone," says Tom Cabot, NOMW president. Since 1988 the organization has offered awards and certificates for mileage walked in more than 150 malls across the country. One member has logged some 17,000 kilometers in his local mall. Each year several hundred new

members join, meet walking partners and head out.

Societies provide some good clues to our national character and concerns. Our faith and hope spring eternal in multitudes ofreligious societies. Our charity shines through thousands of volunteer groups. Devotion surfaces in more than 500 fan clubs, while hatred hovers in some 20 white-supremacy groups. And as new interests evolve, from computers to crystal healing, new associations form to gather the faithful. Today's

"Since individualism is a principle of our psyche, we need societies to give us a sense of who we are."

Organization Man has shed his gray-flannel suit for a coat of many colors-sometimes even a spacesuit.

Otomar Tllak's society gets a lot ofletters that begin "I work with a person who is not from here ...." It might be an odd gesture, a frozen smile, or a vacant stare, but Tllak knows the telltale signs of an alien. Even aliens can be joiners, thanks to his Society of Earthbound Extraterrestrials (SEE).

Most of SEE's 500-plus members are merely unidentified flying objects (UFO) watchers, but some claim to be UFO pilots-"star people," with an accelerated body temperature and extra vertebrae. "We believe them because, after all, we are a nondenominational extratelTestrial organization," Tllak says. Based in Berkeley, California, and Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada, SEE provides UFO education, does UFO research, and has its own telephone number with a recorded message honoring an "Alien of the Month." In pushing the envelope of credibility, sometimes with tongue in cheek, Tllak is not alone. Dowsers, "ancient astronauts," werewolf researchers, Bigfoot fans, dolphin communicators, and others on (or beyond) the fringes of science all have their own societies, proving that in the 1990s everyone needs a newsletter.

Despite its space-age twist, this need for networking is not new. "Americans of all ages, all conditions and all dispositions constantly form associations," Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835. "Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association."

Tocqueville's observation has echoed throughout our past as societies have made history.

The American Anti-Slavery Society led the abolitionist movement. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union rallied the fervor that led to prohibition.

The Southern Christian Leadership of Racial Conference, the Congress Equality, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee championed the civil rights movement. NOW (the National Organization for Women) led the 1960s feminist movement. In the past few decades the urge to merge has been stronger than ever. More than 60 percent of the nation's organizations have been founded since 1965, according to Tom Gorski, a vice president with the American Society of Association Executives. An association of associations, Gorski's group keeps careful tabs on joiners. If America's associations and nonprofit organizations constituted a single country, Gorski notes, their expenditures would exceed the budgets of all but seven of the world's nations.

Because they lobby for freedoms or promote pet interests, some organizations take themselves very seriously. "The Flat Earth Research Society is not like those 20,000 other groups," society president Charles K. Johnson says. "We don't like to be categorized with them. We are different because we have the fundamental fact that the Earth is flat, and it is a fact. There's nothing odd about us." O.K. But in an often somber world, it's refreshing to find groups formed just for fun. othing bothers Russell Meyer more than hearing someone drone on and on at a podium. Meyer, an English professor in Emporia, Kansas, dreamed of preempting such pedantics. He and others formed the Porlock Society, which is dedicated to interrupting long-winded speeches. Soon members were coughing together, shuf-

fling chairs and synchronizing their "ahems." Meyer's own favorite interruption came when a Porlock member stood up in the middle ofa lecture and said, "I'm going. I've heard all this crap before."

The Porlock Society draws its inspiration from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Coleridge was interrupted by a visitor from the town of Porlock, England, when he was writing the poem and never finished it. The group has 230 members, a newsletter called Cogito Interruptus, and bushels of irreverence.

"We're determined to interrupt Norman Mailer some day," Meyer says. "We should have interrupted him just after he wrote The Naked and The Dead."

The Porlocks are America's only society of interrupters.

But if all goes according to pattern, someday there may be di fferent societies to interrupt di fferent kinds of speakers. Groups have a tendency to subdivide.

Ailurophiles Love to Split Hairs Consider a simple category: Cats. In 1897 the American Cat Association was founded to promote the welfare of cats and their owners. Broad, worthy goals, these, yet not particular enough to please some. So in 1906 the Cat Fanciers' Association was formed, sponsoring shows and pedigrees of its own. A number of cat fanciers were still restless. In the early 1930s they split off, creating the Cat Fanciers' Federation. Next came the American Cat Fanciers' Association, and the International Cat Association.

Not content with all those associations, many ailurophiles insisted on lining up and forming ranks by breed, starting the Greater Siamese Cat Club, the National Birman Fanciers, the Persian Bicolor and Calico Society, the Sacred Cat of Burma Fanciers, the United Silver Fanciers.

When associations split into subgroups, none are too small to attract a following.

The Encyclopedia of Associations lists 90 different motorcycle groups, 62 bird organizations, 279 societies relating to horses, 92 for cattle.

Shopping in this supermarket of societies, even the common man specializes. In his 1941 movie Meet John Doe, Frank

Capra imagined a nationwide movement of "John Doe Clubs"-that is, groups like the Jim Smith Society. But today, a common first name is all you need.

Late one night, Robert Idso lay awake pondering his name. "There are so many 'Bobs' and it's so easy to spell our name," Idso said. Tossing and turning, he could have joined the American Sleep Disorders Association. Instead he decided to start his own group-a club for Bobs. Idso advertised in a local paper, and word spread.

"Before I knew it, I was getting 300 letters a week from Bobs all over the world. I had no club and had to make one quick." Just as Bobs have their group, Richards, too, have gathered together, forming the Dicks of America to "make Dick the most beloved name in the country."

But with every Jim, Dick, and Bob closing ranks, as many as a thousand new associations are formed each year in America.

How can a single group stand out in this crowd? A catchy acronym helps. The Society to Curtail Ridiculous, Outrageous and Ostentatious Gift Exchanges fights excessIve gift-giving at Christmas. Its initials: SCROOGE. The National

Organization Taunting Safety and Fairness Everywhere, a group calling itself "the world's most sarcastic organization," is better known as NOT SAFE. And the Benevolent and Loyal Order of Pessimists is simply BLOOP. Joiners should beware: Some groups are not what they seem! The Errors, Freaks and Oddities Collector's Club in Norwood, Massachusetts, is not a circus-freak show.

It's a stamp club devoted to those one-of-akind blunders and misprints that occur in ordinary postage stamps. The Escapees Inc. in Livingston, Texas, is not a gang of prison fugitives. It's a recreational-vehicle club promoting full-time living in RVs. This struggle for attention points up the risks of organizing. Sure, you want to share your fondness for philately (252 clubs now taking members). Of course you want to meet others with your taste for toothpick holders (contact the National Toothpick Holder Collector's Society in Eureka, Illinois). Yet for every success story, there's a club that held an annual meeting and almost no one came. True belongers don't let low membership get them down. In societies, especially fan clubs, small is often beautiful.

"Strictly observing Robert s Rules 0/ Order, Jim Smiths elect new officers to plan next year s Fun Festival in Seattle. Then Jim Smith makes a motion. Jim Smith seconds it. All Jims in/avor? Meeting adjourned. "

Darlene Harffhad never been a fan offan clubs. "People always seem to think there's something wrong with you if you're in a fan club," Harffsays. "Someone can spend a lot of money to go to the Super Bowl or the World Series, but if you follow an actor, people think you're a groupie." Despite the risks, Harff decided to find out whether actor Alan Feinstein had other devotees out there. "He's the kind of person you see a lot in movies and on TV, but you don't know his name," Harff says of the actor who has been on 150 TV shows and won several stage awards. Now, thanks to her enthusiasm, Feinstein has his own international fan club.

It boasts 42 members. "I don't think I'd want anymore," Harff says. "Fifty would be too hard to keep up with."

Just as associations are born and reproduce, they also die. Some pass away from neglect, but most are smothered by paper-

work. Running one takes time-time spent publishing a newsletter, cashing dozens of $20 dues checks, planning an annual convention.

Some organizations that go belly-up just can't be replaced. If you joined the Institute of Totally Useless Skills; to learn advanced eye-crossing, spoon-playing, and penbouncing, where do you turn if its founder decided it was useless? Among the many defunct organizations are the Gertrude Stein Philately Society, the Tara Collectors Club, and the Buffoons of America.

The failure of these and many other organizations makes the American Association of Aardvark Aficionados (AAAA) an inspiration to joiners everywhere. In 1975 the AAAA began promoting National Aardvark Week in early March as an alternative to Groundhog's Day. "I figured it would be a novelty like

the Pet Rock," confesses founder Robert Bogart. "It never occurred to me I'd be doing it for 20 years." But the AAAA is still going strong, with about 700 members, now on a computerized database.

Bogart thinks the aardvark's eccentricity attracts some members. All one has to do to join is send in six dollars and explain why he or she is interested in aardvarks.

More than a century ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged Americans to trust their instincts and rely on themselves. With all due respect to Emerson (and the 40-member Ralph Waldo Emerson Society), people's burdens have grown too large to shoulder on self-reliance alone. From FRUMPs to extraterrestrials, millions are finding that membership has its privileges.

And although large associations give their members a slice of power, small societies are more fun.

"I've been coming to these meetings since I was two," says Jim Smith, Jr., of Millsboro, Delaware. "Some of the older Jims have passed away, but a lot of the same faces keep coming back. To think that this society has survived 25 years, meeting around the country, bringing Jims together, is pretty phenomenal."

Just before closing their annual meeting, Jim Smiths put away their fun and face the future. Their society is fraying at the edges.

Founder Jim Smith has died, taking with him a lot of the energy that held Jims together. For an hour they discuss how to maintain ties among hundreds of Jims scattered around the United States. Incorporate?

Delegate responsibility? Elect Jim Smith as benevolent dictator? After fumbling and feuding, Jims agree that after all these years they have a lot more in common than just a name. "None of us are related, as far as I know," says Budd Lake Jim of New Jersey, "but we've developed a friendship that keeps us coming back."

Strictly observing Robert's Rules of Order, Jim Smiths elect new officers to plan next year's Fun Festival in Seattle.

Then Jim Smith makes a motion. Jim Smith seconds it. All Jims in favor?

Meeting adjourned.

0 About the Author: Bruce Watson is afrequent contributor to the Smithsonian magazine.

HAppy

v"-s

HO

ON

SUBSCRIPTION DESIGN

TILL Unusual rare

collections,

the A

decor,

glossy feast

all

pages for

remarkable

of

your

slipped Design

architecture under

for

many

DIGEST NOVEMBER'95

and

your

Digest,

mind

30

TO

door

In

every

month.

happy

hours.

I

•

DES 1

._-----------------~-------------------INAUGURAL

OFFER

Please enter my subscription to DESIGN DIGESTfor D 12 issues D

36 issues D 60 issues.

Enclosed is my payment for Rs.__ vide cheque/DD No. favouring Spectrum Communications Private Limited (Add Rs. 25/- extra for non-Delhi cheques).

Mr/Ms Address D Home/D

Age Office

_ _

Subscription Term

No. of Issues

Newsstand Price @Rs.25

Your Special Price Rs.

Effective Price per Copy Rs.

Effective Discount

5 Years

60

1500

600

10.00

6O"k

3 Years

36

900

450

12.50

50%

1 Year

12

300

180

15.00

40%

NOTE: (a) The subscription contract City

---------

Pincode

-----

Phone

-------

Company Designation

isvalid for the number of issues offered.

The time period may change frequency of the magazine.

subject

to any change

in the

(b) Please superscribe your full name and address on the reverse of Profession__________

the DD/Cheque.

Spectrum CommunicotionsPrivoteLimited. SeculorHouse,9/11nstitutlonolAreo, Aruno Asol Ali Morg New Delhi-JIO 067 Phones: 011 - 6965572. 665769, 6857211, 6857225. Fox: 011 - 6868506

SUBSCRIBE AGAINST

NOW TO SAFEGUARD COVER PRICE HIKE

~~~~m(J!gJ"

_

~E!";'i"fij, ,i:-:

~:

:

,',-':

"II'"

fIJd]w@[i]OG!J[l@ ~[JJ0fM5

contil/ued

nmostsports, human beings pit themselves against other human beings. But there is another realm in which they pit themselves against nature itself: Against the ice and snow of winter, the sheer cliffs of mountains, the burning sands of deserts, and against the pull of Earth's gravity.

This is the realm of adventure sports, which are enjoying a newfound popularity among young people in the United States. In these extreme sports, one attempts to conquer not an opponent, but oneself and one's fear of the elements. As Ralph Emerson once said: "Why should we fear to be cmshed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?"

Seen by some as reckless adventures, these sports require highly developed skills, expensive equipment, and a willingness to contemplate death up close. For the athlete, it is a grueling test of nerves, stamina, and ingenuity. Muscles strain.

Concentration is fierce. Emotions ravage the face, as body and mind are pushed to breaking point in anticipation of that moment of ecstasy.

Some psychologists believe that dangerous sports develop character and courage, extend

I

Notwithstanding the element of risk-a spill could cause serious injury-land sailors revel in the sheer intoxication of speed while sitting so close to the ground. Their enthusiasm is unhampered by the problem offinding aflat, smooth area like this spot in the Nevadll desert in which to sail. creativity, and help establish an expanded sense of the possible.

Says thrill seeker Cathy Hanesworth: "If you can prove to yourself that you can do something that is very scary, you can carry that confidence with you into any situation because you have pushed your physical and mental limits farther than your comfort zone."

Those who thrive on physical challenge and risk often speak of a stress-triggered peak performance and ecstasy. "Scientifically, extreme sports actually do get you high," says Rob Schultheis, who wrote Bone Games: One Man 50 Search for the Ultimate Athletic High. "Risk-taking sports cause the body to produce adrenaline."

These photographs, depicting the wide, wonderful world of adventure sports in the United States, perhaps best sum up what Ernest Hemingway 0 described as "grace under pressure."

Right: With nothing more than a rope to secure him, a climber takes one painstaking step after another up a frozen waterfall in Colorado, using ice axes and the steel crampons attached to his boots to grip the sheer wall of ice.

um n or 0 The Thrills of Skydiving

one down below is the backup. The backup parachute has a c~mputer timer attached to it.

If, for some reason, I'm unable to open the

in the air. Then we pulled the right string and circled right. When we pulled both strings all at once, we stopped. We weren't moving. It was an eerie sensation to stand "still" on air.

We slowly descended further and [could see the trailer. I could even see the people sitting outside the trailer. I could feel Bubba pulling

quilt that is Planet Earth; to feel the wind buffet your body with a speed that wrenches your contact lenses off your eyes. It is not pleasant. to experience what psychologists have called humankind's most primal fear-fear of falling-at 200 kilometers an hour.

Tens of thousands of Americans skydive every year. Some do it to confront their fears, some do it forthe thrill of it, and some, like me, do it because they can't not do it. From Florida

main 'chute, the backup automatically

one string after another,

to Maine, from California to Colorado, there are about 230 skydiving schools that offer instruction and certification. Most people begin by tandem-jumping with an instructor, and then proceed to solo jumps.

Skydiving, for me, was like an itch that refused to go away. One hot August afternoon, boosted by the presence of my brother, Shyam, who had agreed to dive with me, I decided to take the plunge.

landing can be harsh on your feet if you don't know how to do it. You got all that? Let's go."

The plane was small, with a seat for the pilot, and a hole for the door. The five of us squatted on the floor of the plane. Bubba and his companion, Howie, kept up a lighthearted conversation all the way. We later concluded that this was a tactic they used to keep our minds off the jump.

Soon, we were at 2,500 meters. Thankfully,

We drove to Northampton, Massachusetts, and then through a dusty, gravel road to a tiny

we had decided that Shyam and Howie would jump first. I watched Shyam's bright red suit

airfield at the edge of town. In one corner ofthe airfield was a dilapidated trailer. As we walked up to it, we were met by a smiling woman. "Welcome to Airborne Adventures' I am Lori," she said, shaking our hands.

Lori led us into a cramped office where we signed disclaimer forms that released Airborne Adventures from any liability should something nasty happen to us.

Tandem-jumping with an instructor cost $195 per person, with an additional $62 if you

become smaller and smaller. "Okay, our turn," Bubba shouted. "Remember, arch your body."

I teetered on the edge of the plane. Just as my body instinctively began to pull back, I went into a somersault. A moment later, I was

S

kydiving is not a natural act. It is not even a pleasant act. It is not pleasant to jump off a plane at 2,500 meters and plummet head-first toward the hazy patchwork

wanted-and I did-a photographer to jump alongside and take pictures of your jump.

Half an hour later, we were off. The lesson had been alarmingly brief. My instructor, Bubba, handed me a red jumpsuit, a helmet, and goggles.

"We will be hooked together in six places," said Bubba, displaying a small steel hook.

"Two hooks at the shoulders, two at the waist, and two atthe hip. Each of these hooks can hold Above: With hooks holding them togethel; the author and instructor Bubba arch their bodies whilefallingfrom 2,500 meters.

Left: A cheerful author and her brother Shyam in the plane headingfor thejump site.

about 100 kilograms. So even if five hooks come off, the sixth hook can hold us together.

My backpack contains two parachutes. This red one here is the one we'll use, and this black

opens.

But this scenario hardly ever happens.

"Now, there are only two things you should remember. We go up to about 2,500 meters for the jump. As we free-fall for about 30 seconds, I want you to arch your body as much as you can. This improves the aerodynamics.

Also, the photographer can see your face to take pictures. Next, when we land, lift up your legs, so that my feet hit the ground first. This is because

spread-eagled and staring down at the green and brown patches far, far below. There were too many sensations and part of my mind was blocking out everything. The wind was deafening my ears, plastering my cheeks back as I opened my mouth into a scream I couldn't hear. Oh my God, there was nothing under me! When would the damn parachute open?

This was taking far too long.

"Arch! Lookup!"IheardBubbayell.

I looked up. There was the¡photographer, surrealistically suspended in midair, clicking away through a camera attached to his helmet.

With ajerk, the parachute opened. After the furious velocity of the free-fall, the parachute was anticlimactic in its gentleness. All ofa sudden, everything was quiet and we were floating down slowly, gently. This was nice.

"Here, pull on the left string and we can make a left turn," said Bubba.

We yanked the left string and made a circle

directing

the para-

chute toward the trailer, but I was too spent to help him. My body felt like it had been wrung by the wind, squished by the elements.

We were descending fast. What had seemed like a slow glide up at 700 meters, seemed inordinately rapid once I could see the ground rushing toward us.

"Lift your feet, lift your feet," yelled Bubba.

Arms raised, the skydivers celebrate their successfuljump.

I did, and heard the "thud" of his feet on the ground. In spite ofBubba's warnings, my feet touched the ground with a speed that sent a shock up my legs.

I was grinning stupidly. We had done it!

"Congratulations!" the photographer said Bubba and Howie scribbled away on little blue books, stating that we had "successfully completed" our first jump. Certificates and film in hand, we waved good-bye. The whole thing had taken two hours.

I went to skydive without really knowing what to expect. But now that I've done it, I know why I did it. Strange as it sounds, the reason I skydive is because it prepares me for life, it teaches me to trust a piece of equipment, to trust another human being, to take chances, to let go and hope for the best-and to confront imponderable questions such as "what if the parachute doesn't open?" Life, after all, is full of imponderables.

D

About the Author: Shoba Narayan, who lives in Sian/ford, Connecticut, is working on a master:, degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York.

ouston, Atlantis, we have capture." With these cryptic words, Robert "Hoot" Gibson, commander of Atlantis (Shuttle Mission 71) announced the recent perfect linkup of his IIO-ton space shuttle with the lIS-ton, manned Russian space station Mir, 395 kilometers above the Earth. The event marked a new era in space ¡cooperation between the United States and Russia.

Atlantis, launched on this past June 27, climbed quickly into a matching orbit with Mil; which has been in orbit since 1986. Over the next day or so, the space shuttle gradually closed a 64,000-kilometer gap with its target.

When the two spacecraft were 75 meters apart and coasting through space at 28,000 kilometers an hour, Gibson and shuttle pilot Charles Precourt began the delicate maneuvers to link the two ships. After several midcourse correction exercises, Gibson guided the orbiter to within 30 meters directly below the Russian space station.

At nine meters he stopped to ensure the alignment was perfect. And as Atlantis approached to within a few meters of Mir, six sets of hooks and latches locked perfectly into place. The docking capped more than two years of preparation by American and Russian flight controllers at Houston and Kaliningrad who had worked together to coordinate the mission.

The operation was so ticklish that one indifferent burst of a thruster jet could have destroyed Mir's feathery solar panels; or a forceful bump from Atlantis would have severely damaged either or both spacecraft.

And if Gibson and Precourt had failed to align their spaceship to within seven centimeters and two degrees of its assigned position before the final docking, the whole mission would have been aborted.

But before they could celebrate the docking, the astronauts and cosmonauts made final checks to ensure a leak-free air lock (a tunnel that linked the two spaceships). That done, the hatches swung open to let Mir 's commander, Vladimir Dezhurov, float through the air lock and grasp Gibson's hand in joyous greeting.

For the next few hours the astronauts and cosmonauts drank toasts, mixed freely,

H

A HANDSHAKE IN SPACE continued

Atlantis and Mir crew members pose for the traditional in-flight portrait (clockwise from bottom): Solovyev, Harbaugh, Gibson, Precourt, Budarin, Baker, Dunbar, Thagard, Strekalov (at angle) and Dezhurov.

Facing page: Close-up photo ofMir from Atlantis.

(Mir cosmonauts can be seen photographing Atlantis through the windows.)

exchanged symbolic gifts (flowers, candy, and fruit for the crew on Mir, and the traditional Russian offering of bread and salt for the Americans), toured each other's spacecraft and acknowledged greetings from Earthbound officials, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin.

Atlantis returned to Earth July 7 with more persons on board than when it was launched.

For besides Gibson, Precourt, and three mission specialists, the shuttle also brought back astronomer Norman Thagard (after his threemonth stay in Mir) and the two Mir crew

members (who were relieved by the two cosmonauts who had gone aloft in the Atlantis).

The A tlantis-Mir docking is not a one-shot space show as was the Apollo-Soyuz mission 20 years ago. Under a $400 million lease agreement that runs through 1997, the United States will send several such shuttle missions as a prelude to the construction of a pernlanently manned international space station~ an orbiting laboratory that, as NASA administrator Daniel Goldin says, has been "the heart of the [U.S.] space program."

Follow-up Atlantis-Mil' encounters will

give astronauts and cosmonauts more practice at docking their craft, provide an opportunity to American astronauts to spend three to six months aboard Mir to adapt to living in space for extended periods, as well as allow them to tryout space construction techniques.

Then sometime in 1997 they hope to begin putting together an all-new space station. A year later, the European Space Agency, Canada, and Japan are scheduled to join them to expand the facility into a permanently staffed international space station that will operate through 2012.

0

uellin the Teacu ars

and plan for the emergence of a new Fifty years ago and 75 years ago, Russian empire. Though Germany our forebears exulted in their military triumphs and wrote of endings has evolved as one of the most staand beginnings. Filled with hope ble democracies in the world, we secretly dread its reversion to and cynicism, they sketched new international maps and instituauthoritarianism and militarism. tions. Idealists and realists alike, Though the United States has never In this article, a distinguished most made the same basic error. before been as entangled in the scholar shares his views world as it is today, we fear its reMost assumed that the world had on the challenges that changed more than it really had. turn to isolationism. Most policy confront the post-Cold experts still lean on the central The danger today is that we may strategy of the Cold War: Keep the commit the opposite error, namely War world. Leslie H. Gelb, Russians out, the Americans in, that we will think or at least act as if president ofthe Council on the world has changed less than it and the Germans down. Only, we Foreign Relations since 1993, want to execute this strategy on the really has. And by so doing, we cheap, at bargain basement prices. will exaggerate old threats and has held several high minimize new ones, and thus fiThe Cold War's worries should positions in the U.S. Defense not be tossed aside. On the connally find ourselves overwhelmed Department and the State trary, we would be naive and irreby the all-corrosive danger that sponsible to ignore the possibilities stares us down daily~the teacup Department as well as with the of future Russian expansionism or wars filled with countless bodies New York Times. He was also German brittleness or the chaos of and horrors, the scourge of civil chairman, 1980-81, of the a world without American leaderand ethnic violence.

If we fail to ameliorate and ship. But we must examine these Carnegie Endowment check this scourge, both the vicconcerns with fresh eyes and judge Panel on Future U.S. Security anew whether they should remain tims and the unpunished killers and Arms Control. at the core of Western strategy or be will undo much of what we value and undermine efforts to mold a placed in different focus. just and stable international order. Without such an order, The issue of strategic focus is essential. No strategy can there can be little hope to tend the planet, nurture more tolersucceed unless it settles on the most compelling threat and ant societies, sustain economic progress, or contain the perdefines it correctly. The strategy of containment zeroed in ilous spread of military and nuclear power. on precisely the right problem. For all the misjudgments and miscalculations committed in the name of halting the spread Yet even as the physical traces of the Old World vanish, of communism, containment kept us pointed in the right dimany still cling to its intellectual trappings. While the New rection. Now we must look again at the main elements of World surrounds us and pounds us for attention, we answer Germany, and America~put them in mostly, though far more softly, with the old fears and the old containment~Russia, their new context and see whether and how they still fit. strategies.

Though the Soviet Union lies in ashes, we almost expect Reprinted by permission from Foreign Ai/ilirs. November/December Copyright <0 1994 by the Council on Foreign Relations. Inc.

1994.

It is probably true that Russia today, as the Soviet Union before, has greater potential to disrupt and endan-

ger the international system than any other nation. By its size and location, by its economic gifts and military and nuclear capacities, by its history and ancient ambitions and new nightmares, Russia could reconstitute itsel f as a Eurasian and even world-sized monster. But it would be rash or worse to assume such monstrous behavior, or assume that the proportions of a new Russian threat would rival the old Soviet one, or, more precisely, that containing such a possible threat should occupy the center of a new Western strategy.

No one envisions a Western-style democracy in Russia's near future. However, the collapse of the Soviet empire has loosed and created political and economic forces that will not bend easily to dictatorship. And while many of these democrats will be infected by historical Russian nationalism and seek to muscle their neighbors, they are unlikely to be old-fashioned militarists. Even new Russian nationalists understand that devouring their neighbors in the short run at least would make Russia itselfweaker. Russians generally seem mindful that the new nations bordering their country will not succumb to Moscow's blandishments as easily as their predecessor states. In other words, even assuming the worst happens in Moscow, it would be many years before Russia could pose a serious threat to America's vital interests. For a long time to come, Russia will be a second-tier country with virtually useless nuclear arms, weighed down by a grotesque bureaucracy and pervasive crime, more selfdestructive than dangerous to the West.

From this view of Russia as a sharply diminished power, several conclusions flow. First, deterring the possibil ity ofa Russia once again bent on dominating Eurasia should not be at the heart of Western strategy. Such a threat, even ifit were probable, is too distant. In any event, the West will have the time necessary to channel and parry future Russian challenges.

Second, while Russia is important and the West must be attentive to its needs, it is not sufficiently important for the West to give Moscow a veto over important policy decisions such as Bosnia and NATO. If the West decides to provide arms tD the Bosnian Muslims, it should go ahead with or without Moscow's approval. If the West feels NATO's umbrella must be extended eastward to provide leaders there with confidence in their independence-just as the United States established NATO to give confidence to Western Europe's leaders-this, too, should go forward, albeit with due sensitivity toward Russia.

Third, the West should do all it can economically and politically to bolster Russian moderates and a variety of Russian power centers. But because of the immensity and complexity of Russia 's problems, Western leaders would be well advised to recognize the huge limits of their influence in Russia's quixotic internal affairs.

Fourth, the West should continue the p'rocess of reducing

and controlling nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. Here as well, there will be significant limits on what can be accomplished. We cannot buy a denuclearized Russia. To secure a place at the big-power table, a Russia in inner turmoil needs nuclear weapons as much as before.

While the first goal of containment was to restrain Soviet influence, the second and unspoken goal was to keep Germany down and democratic. Westerners chose not to make this point publicly, for Germany had become an ally.

But never far from mind was the fact that Gemlany had started three wars within a hundred years, and the last one, Hitler's war, was from Hell itself. The fear of a resurgent Germany remained so alive and potent throughout the Cold War that West and East long colluded on a central line of policy-to prevent German unification.

Now the deed is done. Germany stands again as one nation. Should it be feared as before? Should the West, and the East for that matter, continue to weave visible and invisible ropes offriendship to bind the German Gulliver and prevent him from once again trampling his neighbors? Yes, ifnecessary, but it is not necessary. German leaders are dealing with the problem themselves by weaving their own webs to Europe and America. Bonn leads in proposals to bind the Gerl11an economy, its arms and aims into a larger Western universe, and to restrict its own mil itary power.

Nor should the West be preoccupied by the nightmare of Germany succumbing to another bout of Nazism. Everyone will be watchful, but as far as the eye can see, Germany is and will remain a stable democracy. That is as true of united Germany as it was of West Germany alone.

Our main concern about Germany should be that we are asking its people to do too much. West Germans are already transferring massive wealth to their East German brothers. Germans provide more aid to Russia and Eastern Europe than any other nation. Bonn along with Paris leads the drive for European unity. Bonn along with Britain continues to hold Europe close to America. The strain on German politics is enormous', 'particularly at this time of structural economic change.

Not to be forgotten is the fact that Germany's economy is only half as large as Japan's and one-quarter the size of America's. Western nations must rei ieve the German load in dealing with East European refugees and the economies of Eastern Europe generally. Yet the West tends to demand too much of German leadership in Europe and elsewhere. At best, this pressure on Germany to deliver is premature. At worst, it will cause democratic German leaders to fail and open the doors to demagogues with easy answers.

Waiting for Leadership Neither Germany nor Japan, nor both, can be expected to assume or be pushed into the primary leadership role in the

it is said, except at unacceptable cost. post-Cold War era. Only the United States can and must bear this burden, as before. Are Americans up to it? Yes. Must the Yet the costs of trifling with these wars of national debiliWest worry again about American isolationism? No. tation could prove high. While some of these wars would America's involvement in the world is deep, growing erupt in any event, many are fueled by a copycat phenomedeeper, and irreversible.

A huge proportion of the non, by seeing that guilty parties elsewhere get away with American economy is now tied to international transacmurder and conquest. Thus, Haitian and Rwandan killers tions, almost double two decades ago. With leadership from shout "Somalia" and "Bosnia." These wars also have a President Bill Clinton, Congress approved the North spillover effect. Their victims-50 million now-stream American Free Trade Agreement and ... the new world trade across international borders and become expensive and distreaty. Washington maintains more than 100,000 troops in ruptive wards of their neighbors. The Balkan refugees flooding into Germany are a case in point. Another 50 milEurope and a similar number in Asia. Few question American commitments to Europe and Asia. Nor has the lion displaced persons hover within their own lands far from United States shrunk in recent years from deploying ground their own homes. Some civil wars also create vacuums that forces to remote places such as Somalia and Macedonia or suck in and entice larger neighbors. Russian troops in air power to Bosnia.

Georgia and elsewhere are examples.

Of course, Americans do not like sending their sons and For the United States and the West, these wars present daughters abroad for combat. But they never did. What a constant challenge to their leaders, demanding attention and drawing off time and funds from important domestic country does? It is remarkable how readily, despite internal priorities. There is an even more opposition, Americans will fight damning cost to stable democrafor others if the cause is just and cies. The failure to deal aderightly explained-even in the absence of an overriding threat quately with such strife, to do Democracies have a large from the Soviet Union. something about mass murder and practical as well as moral stake Americans are not turning genocide, corrodes the essence of inward. If Americans are to sacria democratic society. If democrain finding reasonable fice when nothing seems to tic leaders turn away from genoresponses to wars of national threaten their survival directly, cide or merely pretend to combat debili tation. they want to know why and how. it, their citizens will drink in the Public opinion polls demonstrate hypocrisy and sink into cynicism. not the return of isolationism, but In sum, democracies have a large practical as well as moral stake good old American pragmatism.

Americans will not embark on a new crusade to make the in finding reasonable responses to wars of national debilitaworld safe for democracy and free markets. These aims are tion. The range of responses is no mystery: Stronger multilatworthy. But most Americans now understand that democeral organizations, standing peacekeeping and peacemaking forces, preventive action, and clear-sighted leadership. racy is a state of grace not readily attained and not within NATO needs to be remolded and strengthened as a their power to impose. Nor are they eager to expend lives regional organization. Washington also must nurture a and treasure to transform sinkholes into free enterprise paradises. Americans also understand that lofty goals do not greater sense of cooperation among Latin American and help us decide what to do in Somalia, Eastern Europe, Haiti, African regional groups for their neighbors. The very long Bosnia, or the Persian Gulf. p'rocess of shaping a more effective and responsible United Nations must begin. This will require some sacrifices of sovereignty. But sovereignty has already been compromised in the new world. It is impossible for Washington to Thus discussion circles back to where it must begin-to divining and defining the new core problem in post-Cold contemplate unilateral military action in most consequential situations. The Persian Gulf War is a prime example; War polit~cs that a new strategy must address. Nuclear tiny Haiti is another. Multilateralism, for good or ill, alproliferation, Russia, Germany, new Chinese ambitions, most always requiring American leadership, has detrade wars-all are serious. But the core problem is wars scended on the world. It is a fact not to be debated, but of national debilitation, a steady run of uncivil civil absorbed into American strategy. wars sundering fragile but functioning nation-states and The main strategic challenge for the United States is to gnawing at the well-being of stable nations. The stronger develop plans for multilateral action to stem civil wars withstates tend to minimize their stakes in stopping or containing internal wars. Such wars, it is argued, are ruinous to out drowning in them, and to do what it reasonably can to give victims of these wars a chance to live in peace without the combatants themselves but not to outsiders. Or outmaking them permanent wards.

0 siders can do little or nothing to quell these domestic fires,

"I'll be in here, dear, having my intelligence insulted. " Reprinted from The Wall Street JOl/rnal -Permission, Cartoon Features Syndicate.

(}J

~1P~~~~l\:,

~~~@~r

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"In lieu of a grade, I'd like my test results in frequent-flyer miles. "

So

. I

YOU'v-e

lv,rvH ..J

l"to

~---~-

I

" "'-

""", "',

.~

YO"'I

P~J,

'-. ' '~

',~ ",

"It's been moved and seconded that we fly the company plane to Zurich, split the bank accounts, and go our merty ways. "

mu~iCtll Vi~itor~ "Close to perfection ...with a maturity, confidence, emotion, and virtuosity which belies his youth" This and other such accolades accompany the 21-year-old classical guitarist Jason Vieaux who arrives in New Delhi for a solo performance at the India International Centre on November 10 Vieaux learned guitar playing at the age of eight, building up an enviable reputation through his solo concerts and radio shows in New York. In 1992 he won the prestigious Guitar Foundation of America International Competition, and followed it up by undertaking a 53-city solo concert tour in the United States and Europe He has also released a debut album of solo works by Bach, Ponce, Regondi, Brouwer, and Morel.

Also touring India around the same time will be the Michiganbased Verdehr Trio-violinist Walter Verdehr, clarinetist Elsa LudewigVerdehr, and pianist Gary Kirkpatrick-which has been described as "one of today's most intense and exciting ensembles." Over the past 20 years, the enterprising Trio, which will perform in Bombay (November 9), Calcutta (November 11), and New Delhi (November 16), has played in major concert halls throughout the world (it first toured India in 1988) As not much music exists for the combination of piano, violin, and clarinet, the Trio has concentrated on molding and defining the per-

sonality of these instruments by rearranging old pieces and commissioning new ones. Through its commissioning efforts, over 75 works by such American composers as William Bolcom, Karel Husa, and David Diamond have been added to the chamber music repertoire. In addition, the Trio has rediscovered and transcribed many 18th- and 19th-century works.

The Trio is now recording new works created for it by contemporary composers It is also involved in a video series, The Making of a Medium, which comprises half-hour programs based on interviews and discussions with such composers and performers as Leslie Bassett, Thea Musgrave, and Gunther Schuller, besides complete performance of each work.

India and Australia Drift Apart In geology, what happened millions of years ago can be today's headlines. Scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, have just found out that the giant Indo-Australian Tectonic Plate, on which both India and Australia lie, has broken apart beneath the Indian Ocean just south of the Equator.

They say the break probably began several million years ago The two countries are slowly drifting away from each other.

The Columbia geologists, who published their findings in a recent issue of Earth and Planetary Science Leiters, say that the Earth's surface is divided into 13 major plates instead of 12, as scientists long believed.

The theory of plate tectonics holds that continents and oceans are carried on huge plates that ride atop the Earth's semi molten interior These plates move only a few centimeters a year-fast enough to cover great distances over tens of millions of years The movement of tectonic plates accounts for the formation of mountain ranges and volcanoes.

Scientists say that for the past 50 million years the Indian subcontinent has been drifting northward This northward pressure continues to distort Asia, pushing Tibet eastward-relative to the main body of the continent-and resulting in the Altyn Tagh fault, which stretches over 2,200 kilometers in western China Satellite images indicate that since the most recent ice age 10,000 years ago, the Tibetan side of the fault has slipped as much as 360 meters east.

The latest research suggests that, starting about eight million years ago, the accumulated mass of the Indian subcontinent

became so great that the Indo-Australian Tectonic Plate buckled and broke under the stress.

"In the Central Indian Ocean, nature is conducting a large-scale laboratory experiment for us, showing us what happens to the oceanic lithosphere [Earth's outer layer] when force is applied," says Columbia scientist Jeffrey Weissel. When pushed into an immovable object, "it can buckle like a piece of tin" James Cochran, a coauthor of the report, adds that the research '''gives insight into how strong and rigid plates are, how they respond to stress, and what their limits are before they break."

Scientists believe that continents have been drifting around the planet throughout history, repeatedly coming together and breaking up again. They theorize that on several occasions this has resulted in the formation of supercontinents containing all the land on Earth. It is believed that Pangaea, the most recent supercontinent to exist on Earth, began to break up around 160 million years ago.

According to Paul Hoffman, professor of geology at Harvard University, when Pangaea broke up, the Atlantic Ocean was created, splitting North America from Eurasia, and South America from Africa. Then Australia, Antarctica, and India separated from Africa, creating the Indian Ocean.

Today, Hoffman says, the Atlantic and Indian oceans continue to get bigger, while the Pacific is getting smaller And in 100 million years or so North America and Asia will probably drift into each other.

Hoffman has already named the new supercontinent "Amasia" -Jim

Fuller

en ~

'TIO

Renewable Energy Agreement The US Agency for International Development (USAID) signed a $3 million agreement with Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development of the United States recently to launch a renewable energy commercialization (RECOMM) project in India. The three-year project would link private sector expertise in India and America to meet India's expanding energy needs, especially in rural areas, through commercialization of renewable energy resources, which are nonpolluting. The project is a major step in implementing the IndoUS Common Agenda for Environment signed in April 1995 Winrock International, an independent, nonprofit development organization, is assisting more than 35 developing countries in the area of energy, agriculture, and natural resource management projects.

The agreement was signed by the USAID's regional contract officer Leonard Kata and David Hess, deputy director of the Office of Environment, Energy and Enterprise. Winrock's director for renewable energy and the environment program, John Kadyszewski, signed on behalf of his organization.

O:D :DC

S:m :D

,9\n ,9\mbitious and Seautiful

~mal

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond recently acquired a superb late 18th/early 19th-century ceremonial cloth from India The 75 x 75 cm. cotton rumal from the mountainous Chamba region of Himachal Pradesh is decorated in ink and silk embroidery.

It depicts two scenes of a royal wedding: A maharaja (top left corner in the photograph), accompanied by courtiers and musicians, riding an elephant to the wedding, and the wedding itself Joseph M. Dye III, the museum's curator for Asiatic art and an authority on Indian art, says that "the cloth is of such exceptional quality that it was doubtless designed by a court painter." Dye added "I have never seen a more ambitious and beautiful rumal."

India,n Artist Wins Award A young artist from Calcutta, 27-year-old Anjan Banerjee, has won the prestigious Dorothy & Jacob Goldman, Esq. award of the Pastel Society of America. The annual award, which carries a cash prize and a citation, is given to artists for outstanding contributions in the use of pastel.

Banerjee's work, The World of Shakila, was judged to be the best at the Society's 23rd Annual Open Exhibition held in New York in September in which more than 250 artists participated

zvaHOf!>I

UI

aJe salQuanbaJj

'" '"~ <Ii '" '"~ <Ii ..•. m (Y)

Global Experiences Come to India

N

<D

m <Ii N

r-<Ii N

r::.

0

~ <D

r-'"ro r-~

'" w:; ~ N

i i:.

N

0

..•. m

Lri

ro

~ ~ ci r--

'"'" 0 ..•. r-r-~ 0 '" '"~

<D

m

N

0 (Y)

'"

m Lri (Y)

N

a r--

N

0 r--

w:;

~ N

r--

~ ~ ",r-~

0

Lri

0

~ ~

0

r--

0

0

0

'" m ~

(Y)

~ ~ m m

r--

0

0

m

m <Ii

N

Ii OJ

en

r-<Ii <D

r::.

N N

c::

<D N

0 ro

ro

OJ e;,

w:;

m m

0

~

r::.

'" '"

'"~ <Ii

r--

W

'" r-~

0 N

~

0 <D

c::

:.

~ ~

'"

'6 c:: I

i

:.

0

~ ",-

e;,

I

§

.•..

0

.r::: .'!?

N 0 <D

ro

r--

!!

r::.

ro

N 0 <D

r--

r-Lri

r::.

Lri

m

'"

N

<Ii

..•. r-r--

0 N

~

!

m

..•.

Lri

w:;

0

N

ro

ro

'" w:; ~

ro

i .•..

0 (Y)

(Y)

<D

m

<Ii

'" ",r-'"~

~ '" m ro ~ ~

<Ii

'" ~

~ '"

0

0

r::.

0

0

0 <D

0 <D

m

8 •...

I

:!:

!

~ c:: OJ

a;

::J U

.0

::s

;=

~ a ~

::)

=:

111CIJ 2 ~.J:z:f-

~

Privatization

(J)

=»(5 -

ill 11I ~! ~ (5Q::) 0 0 E ~:z:~ ~ c= '---- A,U:z: CIJ~

-.-;:.' .'~~" 0

~

a z ::)

CIJ

hat is privatization?

How much of it should there be, in what public sectors, and at what pace? What are the appropriate strategies to consider before its implementation?

Most importantly, when a country does choose to privatize, how

W

should it market the concept so that it is supported by its own people-those who fear for their jobs and those who fear a rise in prices or a loss in subsidies?

India's first hesitant but unmistakable steps toward economic liberalization and privatization have generated supporters as well as detractors.

But debate, discussion, and analysis are part of the process: They help to clarify the extraordinary complexities that must be addressed

when a country

examines the performance of its public sector and how its govell1ment does business.

Discussion, debate, analysis. These were the unstated goals behind a four-day seminar held in New Delhi in late September under of the U.S. Agency for the auspIces International Development.

This special event was organized by the lntrados Group, a Washington, D.C.-based international consultancy specializing in privatization, capital markets development, and banking sector reforms, in collaboration with the Ministry of Industry's Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCl).

Rather than thrash and rehash abstract theories behind privatization, the seminar, titled "Privatization 111 Emerging Economies: Global Experiences," brought together practitioners and senior officials

from different countries that are implementing privatization programs to share their experiences and expertise with their Indian counterparts.

Intrados also brought in James R. Ryan, a financial analysis and valuation expert from America, to explain the issues that he considered whenever he evaluated and prepared targeted enterprises for privatization.

There were also several Indian guest speakers on panel discussions focusing on cach day's primary theme: Global Economic Trends and Privatization; Learning from Country Experiences; Initiating and Implementing a Successful Privatization Program; and Approaches for Successfully Marketing Privatization.

They were Rakesh Mohan, economIc adviser 111 the Ministry of Industry; Amit Mitra, secretary-general, FICCI; M.B. Athreya, management consultant; and Suresh Kumar, consultant for the Indian Council of Research in Intell1ational Economic Relations.

In his opening address, A.K. Rungta, president ofFICCr, set the tone for the seminar's proceedings with a plea to look objectively at the performance ofIndia's industrialunits under the govell1ment's control. "We have nearly 1,000 public enterprises of which 25 percent are in the central government sector," Rungta said. "The total investment is Rs. 160,000 crore and the overall return is about 2.8 percent on this investment; and if you take away the profit that comes out of the oil sector, then you find that overall it's a negative situation.

There is practically no retull1 on this investment." He then asked: "Can an economy in the new

order to introduce possible so that investment.

Left: flK. Shunglu, SecretalY, Department 0/ Industrial Policy and Promotion, Minislly o/Industl)', delivers the keynote address. On his left is FfCCf President AX Rungta. Below: Among the foreign guest speakers were, from left, Ivan Wilson (United Kingdom), Amalia Martinez (Argentina), and Azam Abdullah (Malaysia).

their products as fast as they can recoup their

Another interesting facet of Vohra's presentation was to show how even the use of the word "privatization" is a hotly contested issue-and not just in India. When a country decides to privatize, he said, winning over the hearts and minds of its people is a prerequisite for success. A critical first step is choosing the appropriate term or phrase that most accurately reflects a country's specific course of economic reform. In Australia privatization is called prioritization; in Bolivia, it's called industrial transition; in Brazil, de-statization; in Chile, popular capitalism; in Costa Rica, economic democratization; in Egypt, partners in development; in Mexico, dis-incorporation; in New Zealand, asset sales program; in Pakistan, dis-investment; in Sri Lanka, people-ization; in Thailand, transformation; in Tunisia, restructuring; and in the United Kingdom, de-nationalization.

Whatever the nomenclature, the foreign participants were essentially of one mind about the benefits of privatization-although there were other opinions covering a broad spectrum that showed just why analysis and debate are still the issues in India.

Ivan Wilson, former under secretary in

world economic order last with a negative return?

How do you sustain that much investment with no return?" It is therefore

Vohra, vice president of the Intrados Group, showed charts, graphs, and even a distorted world map where each ¡country's size was

extremely essential, he said, that "we do something about getting a return out of this investment bank and that is what the process of privatization is about."

determined by its GNP to emphasize the relevance of privatization.

This map led to a discussion about the international product life cycle that also put privatization's growth in perspective. Vohra explained how the time span from product introduction to product obsolescence has changed dramatically-from 15 to 20 years

charge of privatization and public enterprises of the Treasury in the United Kingdom, said that there is no universal privatization model that could be transplanted unchanged to other countries. Each country has to fashion its own model in consonance with its needs and circumstances.

But, he said that the lessons learned could help countries formulate their own policy. In describing how

in the 1960s and 1970s, to approximately three years or less now. What this means is that in today's economic environment investments must be recouped in a short period of time and for that businesses must design dynamic selling and marketing strategies, as well as chum out new technology-the engine that drives the world's

the U.K. approached privatization, which started in 1979, he enumerated four key elements: Thinking through the process of privatization; getting structures into shape before going through the process; determining what the government will do with the money raised from privatization; and understanding the importance of having excellent

economy.

Shortened product life, Vohra said, has radically altered how companies

public relations and marketing in order to sell shares. Wilson added that any hasty implementation of privatization could lead

In his keynote address, v'K. Shunglu, secretary of DIPP, emphasized the need for transparency and public accountability and called for a debate and discussion that would ultimately define the areas that should remain under the government's control.

Privatization, he said, should not be considered a panacea for all India's economic woes. "Unless the nitty-gritty of privatization is carefully and completely thought through, it is going to be very difficult to privatize," he warned. "I think this has been the lacunae

in our system:

That we have not

thought through what we want to do; and we have to do this."

Thinking through the issues of privatization is exactly what happened once the group discussions began. In his presentation, Baljit

and nations do business. Today's companies need worldwide strategic alliances to gain access to new technology, capital resources, and markets in emerging trading blocs in

to cOIToding of long-tel1l1 benefits. "It is not a quick money-raising exercise," he said.

Another foreign delegate to the seminar

lacked consensus and led to extended debates. One particularly contentious issue revolved around which public sectors should be privatized.

Some participants, such as M.C. Singhi, deputy economic adviser, Ministry Of Industry, were of the view that only loss-making enterprises should be relinquished to the private sector.

He spoke for many .when he said that there was'no reason to sell units if they were good performers, especially when there was no proven link between ownership and efficiency. "The governmept should reduce its

was Malaysia's Azam Abdullah, principal assistant director of the privatization section in the Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister's Office. Abdullah's enthusiasm was apparent,

as she listed the benefits

of the

privatization program started in Malaysia in 1983: Increased efficiency with greater output while using less resources, introduction of modem technology, faster rate of infrastructural development, introduction of competition, wider distribution of wealth through flotation of shares, restructured ownership pattem of the economy, increased participation of employees in the ownership of their companies.

She seemed genuinely thrilled, even astonished, by the willing participation of the private sector to get involved in her country's development.

Amalia Martinez from Argentina discovered, listening to the Indian speakers, that her own country's experience in privatization was particularly relevant. Martinez, who is under secretary, Secretariat of Finance! in the Ministry of Economy and Public Works, said that in many ways Argentina's problems were similar to India's before her country took to privatization in 1989. "We had lots of subsidies, lots of regulations," she said. She also saw similarities behind the reasons that led to the massive growth of the public sector: Security considerations and a lack of entrepreneurs that forced the govemment to invest in the economy to develop the country.

However, these problems have been solved, she said. Argentina has restructured its economy, from fiscal and tax refomls to decentralization, deregulation, the elimina-

Intrados Group Vice President Baljit Vohra (thirdji-om left) addresses the seminQ/: From left are. Ivan Wilson; Suresh Kumal; consultant, Indian Council oj Research in International Economic Relations; and VN. Nepal (Nepal). tion of the role of the government as entrepreneur, and the improvement of the present and future solvency of the remaining enterprises in the public sector.

To achieve success with privatization, all these three countries applied variants of a similar formula that always included the detemlination and commitment on the part of the government and people, the recognition for the need to change, the belief in absolute transparency with a clearly defined privatization process; and the importance of sensitivity when it came to addressing the needs and responses of the public.

Through the course of the four-day seminar, what became clear was that India needs and to have the same level of determination commitment to successfully privatize.

Financial analyst Ryan suggested that whenever an overwhelming body of sentiment exists in favor of state-owned enterprises, it frequently takes a traumatic event to change this economic preference. M.B. Athreya and Vidya Nath Nepal, former joint secretary in charge of the Nepal privatization program and currently serving as economic minister at the Nepalese Embassy in New Delhi, agreed. They also thought, however, that India was at a crisis point: It was in a "silent crisis," according to Nepal.

Numerous

other

points

of discussion

liabilities, which primarily come in sick units," he insisted. "So the first exercise is to get rid of sick units and secondly to introduce an element of competition."

Others were of the opinion that all public-sector units should be let go, even profitable units.

The one area that did come close to a consensus was worry over job security with the switch to privatization.

Almost all participants were actively aware that India's vast population and very real unemployment problem made its move forvvard with economic refomls particularly difficult. They had several pregnant questions to ask the visiting speakers: What were the compensation packages when redundancy led to job reduction? What was the scope of retraining schemes and their success rate? How did these countries win over the unions?

These were thorny issues that required careful management and had no easy answers. But Vohra made the point that privatization didn't always cause hardship.

One participant reminded the audience that the current Indian labor laws made it difficult to get rid of surplus workers. So they did have some protection.

That these were the primary issues was no surprise. That no clear sense of solidarity was evident during the four-day seminar was also expected. But the seminar did fulfill an important function. It provided a rare forum for the participants to share their views and experiences about the nitty-gritty of privatization and its potential impact on India.

0 About

the

columnistjor

Author:

Kathleen

The Village

Cox, a jormer

Voice in Nell' York, is

based in Nell' Delhi where she serves as the SOllth Asia editorjor Fodors trm'el books.

DrMfA Š[bfA~~

[ID\J Du~~[b~

THE KELLOGG SCHOOL n1985, the Wall Street Journal published a study by the management consultant firnl

I

of Brecker & Merryman. The study was the first to ask employers rather than academics to rate America's business schools.

Coming in first was the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Three years later, Business Week magazine also gave Kellogg the top ranking in business schools, with this comment: "Recruiters rate it tops in marketing and in a dead heat with Harvard in general management."

In 1990 Business Week again rated Kellogg No.1.

Success breeds success, and by the year of the third straight Business Week top ranking, 4,393 applicants were knocking on Kellogg's

Fifteen years ago itwasjust Northwestern University's business school. Today the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management is possibly the best there is.

The new name emphasized the revamping of the school's curriculum to focus on turning out all-purpose managers, people who could enter any company, be it textiles or textbooks, and, using natural and leamed skills, manage.

The new name also honored a $1 O-million donation from the John L. and Helen Kellogg Foundation.

(John Kellogg was the son of breakfast cereal magnate W.L. Kellogg.)

Donald J. Jacobs,

dean of Kellogg

for 20

years, says that in 1975, "the business school was probably the lowest-ranked school at Northwestern University, and the faculty certainly the lowest paid." Today, with the ranking problem firmly in hand, lucrative outside consulting and board work flow to Kellogg's

experts.

Jacobs used the Kellogg money to establ ish several endowed chairs, the prestige and research support of which would attract new, distinguished faculty.

When Jacobs began his deanship in 1975, there were two endowed chairs at the school, and he held one of them. Now there are 44 chairs in traditional areas of business study as

door hoping to be chosen to fill only 589 openings.

The graduating class that year breezed into the job market with 98 percent of them employed at salaries (not including perks and benefits, which, in some industries, are considerablc) ranging from $20,000 to $140,000.

Jacobs is in large measure responsible for propelling this traditional, respectable but not-much-noticed business school to become a very-much-noticed, unconventional institution that ranks with such powerhouses as the business schools at universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania (Wharton), Stanford,

well as in women in management, futures and options studies (endowed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange), ethics and diversity.

Because a chair represents eamings on a gift of at least $1 million, this leap in endowed chairs indicates, in addition to a surge in pres-

and Chicago.

In 1979 the school was named J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Ahol'e'

rermis~ion from Chicago Tribl/lIl! Jlaga:il1t'.

Copyright " September 19. 1993, Chicago Tribune Company.

All rigills resen cd. Used with permission.

Reprinted

\\ ith

Kellogg:5

heen Ihe guidillg success SIOIT.

Dean Donald J Jacobs has lighl ill Ihe schou/:5 (1Il1a::illg

tigious research, prodigious fundraising. The school also has prodigious ideas. Some of the philosophy comes out in a promotional brochure where it asks the question: "What is a manager?"

The answer: "It does not matter where, for whom, why, all managers are involved in the control, deployment, and use of resourcespeople, plants, materials, tools, money.

Successful managers are those who, in preparation for their careers, have gained a working knowledge of the techniques and tools of management. Teaching what these techniques and tools are and how to use them-that is the purpose of the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management."

However, some people like economist Robert Samuelson have criticized the Kellogg School for that philosophy. Writing in Newsweek magazine not long ago, Samuelson said the assumption that a good manager should be able to manage any enterprise was absurd. "We don't imagine a winning football coach switching to basketball," he wrote, "nor a concert pianist becoming a symphony violinist."

In response, Jacobs says: "That kind of [specific] knowledge is important if you're the marketing director or the accountant of a company-and we teach such people-but we also teach people in a much broader sense.

"The old model was, you got out of school at 18 or 22, and you worked for a company for 40 years, then you retired. Over time, you picked up the management skills you needed, like an apprenticeship. That used to work very well, but it's completely outmoded in the world we live in now. Change comes too fast. Here, we can teach you management skills a lot quicker than the old way. We can teach you how not to make mistakes. We can give you insights into new fonns of management. Our fonn of education is very open to change. We fine-tune all the time; and every three, four, five years, we make a big change.

The manufacturing program was one of those. [In conjunction with the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Kellogg offers a master of management in manufacturing degree.] We're talking now about adding a focus on design to the curriculum." ~nother criticism by students and alumni has been about the quality of teaching.

Jacobs's administration from its beginning

focused heavily on recruiting faculty with, he says, "a high taste for theory." He cited Kellogg's top-rank game-theory experts as examples of academics who are "pushing the frontiers. " In more recent years, the school has introduced several innovative programs to raise the quality of teaching. Only the best teachers get the reward of extra compensation, which can be significant, that comes from teaching at the school's James Allen Center for high-level executives where, Jacobs says, "the executives don't care if you're a great researcher." New faculty members are videotaped in the classroom with the tapes reviewed by outside experts. Peer review and student evaluations are part of the mix. To some professors' great chagrin, Kellogg posts the students' evaluations of the faculty.

It often is said that at Kellogg the students run the place. Outsiders say it critically; students say it with pride. Faculty and administrators feel that this isn't really true. They simply note that "taking charge" is an important part of the learning process.

Early in Jacobs's tenure as dean, students were given more control over their programs-more electives, more multiple majors. Students set up the complex travel and accommodation arrangements and the interviews with foreign political and business leaders that comprise the overseas trips during spring vacations-trips that are part of actual courses taken for credit.

Recently, students made it possible to do a major in entrepreneurship. Student involvement, however, spreads further than the classroom, pelmeating evelY corner of the Kellogg experience. It's a natural outgrowth ofthe sort of student body that the school has fostered.

The process through which applicants become Kellogg entrants has built a student body with a natural instinct for organizing.

Like hcrding dogs confronted with a flock of sheep, Kellogg students snap into action when confronted with a situation that needs managmg.

There are 1,100 students in the full-time, two-year program on campus. Another 1,350 attend a part-time evening program at a campus in nearby Chicago. They get their About the Author: Charles Lerollx is a senior \I'I'iter with the Chicago TribuneMagazine.

degree in two-and-a-half to five years. Also among the degree candidates are the 280 mid-career executives attending the Executive Master's Program, which meets mostly on weekends.

The full-time I, I00 students represent 40 nations. The school has in recent years taken several steps to increase the proportion of foreign students to better reflect the worldwide nature of business today.

Of the most recent graduating class, 22 percent had been economics majors as undergraduates; some 33 percent had majored in social sciences or humanities; 27 percent were women, 16 percent were American racial minorities. The age range of entrants was from 23 to 45. Virtually all came with the required minimum two years business experience, though the average was more than four years. The class under discussion included a public affairs director for a Canadian brewery, an Argentine Army medical doctor, the marketing manager of a California ballet troupe, a manufacturer and importer of Indonesian clothing, the head of a U.S. Agency for International Development disaster relief unit in Nigeria, an airline pilot, a major-league baseball player, a cowboy, five Fulbright scholars, three Rhodes semifinalists, and two Olympic athletes.

Collectively, this class scored higher on the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) than 94 percent of those who take it. Though GMAT scores above 700 are rare (800 is perfect), 644 of this particular Kellogg class, for instance, came with scores in the 700-plus range. Academic achievement, however, is not the only, nor necessarily the most important, key to admission. Of those 644 scholastic jewels, fewer than a third were accepted.

Remarks of students give some insights into what Kellogg is all about.

"Overachievers? I think we're more ovcrcommitters," says Joanna Baker, 31, a second-year student who was about to take a quiz in her marketing course. "The people shine with brilliance, but there's always something more-great squash playing, or inspiring parent."

Baker backs her point with statistics. She pulls out a ready resume when asked about her work experience. She depends on an answering machine. When asked for a cap-

KEllOCJG¡ MOl PROGRAMME ON CORPORATE flNANtIAl STRAJ~tiV OECliM81!JZ '4-,e.I9S3 , UNDEIl THE AUSPices OF UNPP I

The Management Development Institute (MDI) in Gurgaon, Haryana, has been a leading center of management studies since it was founded by the Industrial Finance Corporation of India in 1973.

In 1988, the institute launched its National Management Programme (NMP), aimed at providing India's practicing managers in government, private, and public sectors professional management education of international standards. The NMP also provides an opportunity for closer interaction and greater understanding among the three sectors.

The NMP got a big boost in 1991 when the United Nations Development Program helped MDI to forge an academic collaboration with the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, one of the world's top business schools. The linkage aims to set the pace for management training in India through joint curriculum reviews and exchange of faculties between the two schools. The collaboration also offers specialized executive programs for managers at senior, middle, and junior management positions.

Participants in this program, which is also becoming popular with managers from other countries, develop management skills and techniques through case studies of management situations. The NMP curriculum especially lays stress on the emerging global economic and business environments. "What we aim to do is to expose future managers to public policy formulation," says MDI's program officer Vipin C. Nagrath.

The NMP's faculty includes academicians as well as policymakers, administrators, and managers from India as well as overseas. "The pedagogy is interactive and participative," says Professor Chetan sule of her day of classes, she submits a threepage, single-spaced document.

But Baker is not the money-driven stereotype of the typical business school student.

She ran a shelter for battered women in New York and was drawn to Kellogg partly for its program in public and nonprofit management. She is interested in the causes of women and other minorities. "I want to be part of what's happening-and making it happen quicker," she says.

When deciding on a business school, she liked the fact that Kellogg showed an openness to her unusual background and that it was known for teamwork among its students rather than excessive competition.

Says Professor Louis Stern on Kellogg's philosophy of "group work" and its benefits: "Group work simulates the real world. In the business world, you have to rely on others. Only college professors and monks work in isolation. I assign intense classwork, and groups seem able to handle pressure that an individual wouldn't."

"In the military," says U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Sandy Stosz, who is studying public administration at Kellogg, "you are trained to look out for your group first

Baxi, head of the NMP. "Although the teaching is founded upon the Indian experience and values, it makes use of recent research material from around the world."

The Kellogg school is in an eminent position to help MDI with its National Management Programme. Not only does its Evanston campus lay stress on the global marketplace in its graduate business studies, but it also has the expertise to impart pedagogical methods suited for India because the Kellogg school conducts an MBA program in another developing Asian country-at Chulalongkhom University in Bangkok, Thailand. These include lectures, seminars, group discussions, business games, simulating exercises, and field visits. In addition, the Kellogg school also has helped bring experts from such prestigious institutes as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to MDI. The NMP's ultimate aim, says Baxi, is to create a nucleus of highly educated managers in the top echelons of government, public, and private sectors. "Going by the positive response and appreciation we've had from managers not only in India but even from abroad," Baxi says, "our tie-up with Kellogg has been an enormous success."

- P. C.

and yourself last. A ship is one big team, and Kellogg is famous for teamwork. Also, it was the only place that required an interview. I don't have the highest grades, but I do have the ability to relate to people, so I knew I would stand a better chance with an interview."

All Kellogg applicants must go through a personal interview, a requirement unique to this school.

Some are interviewed locally by an admissions officer, an alumnus, a current Kellogg student, or a combination of these. Other applicants, especially foreign applicants, may be interviewed by any of200 alumni living overseas and designated as interviewers.

Necessity gave birth to the interview requirement in the days before the school hild the reputation it now enjoys. It was a means, Jacobs says, "of identifying students who didn't look as good on paper as they were." Interviews helped Kellogg get the best catch from a pool well fished by other institutions.

Now, with a seven-to-one ratio of applicants to enrollments, Kellogg gets resumes that practically jump out of their envelopes.

For example, one recent applicant, Sergei Baida, said this about previous work experi-

ence: "Headed the USSR's Energia research engineering laboratory overseeing the design, development, and manufacture of flight control systems for a program similar to the U.S. space shuttle program."

When the Soviet Union dissolved, the country's aerospace program declined. By 1990, funding was cut for the Energia [the world's largest rocket booster proj ect].

Despite two successful test flights, future tests were canceled. Aerospace engineer Baida began to look elsewhere.

He took a management course in Moscow, attended a business seminar in England, took a job in a Moscow private telecommunication firm, all the time looking for ways to get I more education.

"I did research into 30 or 40 schools," says first-year student Baida, 39. "I wrote letters and narrowed my list. I wanted to come to Kellogg-the best-but I didn't know how to raise the money."

The break came when Baida received the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship from the American Council of Teachers of Russian, which enables students from the former Soviet Union to learn Western management strategies.

Left: Dean Jacobs with studentsinstilling the team spirit.

SWdents come from different backgrounds and countries such as Russian aerospace engineer Sergei Baida (right), Coast Guard officer Sandy Stosz (below left), and Marine Corps helicopter pilot Greg Watson (below right).

u.s.

Baida hopes to return to Russia after gaining U.S. work experience. "I think the timing will be right for a resurgence of business there," says Baida. "There will be a need for people who know how to deal with foreign business," he says. "People who know the rules of the game."

Then there is first-year student Greg Watson, age 30. Watson was born in Tunica, Mississippi. When he was ten months old and one of a family of eight children, his mother died. Shortly after, his father left. He lived with a grandmother for a while in Gary, Indiana, then with a sister in a gang- and drugdominated part of Chicago's West Side.

Good grades got him into a technical high school. Athletic ability got him a scholarship to Southern Illinois University, where he played wide receiver on the football team. He became the first in his family to graduate from college. After a tour in'the U.S. Marine Corps, he was admitted to Kellogg (where he has drawn high praise for his organizing of an African-American business conference) in pursuit of what he calls his "entrepreneurial dream."

"God," Watson said, "has been good to me."

0

taken seriously as an intellectual publication-not merely about lifestyle but about "mind style." No doubt they're also worried about wading too far into the mainstream and having their faces plastered all overthe world by the soon-to-be-extinct mass media.

"The mass media look at this phenomenon as a threat," Rossetto tells the college students. "If you read the front page of the New York Times, they don't talk about the emerging new economy; they talk about some idiot hacker who hasjust been caught."

Rossetto's thin body sways as he sculptures ideas in the air with his hands. He describes a utopian future in which encryption tools make all our financial transactions private, thus ending the government's ability to collect taxes-ending the nation-state itself! Home will become the locus of our lives. Families and neighborhoods will thrive again. As for poor people-the Information Have-Nots-he tells the college students not to fret: Anyone can buy a computer today for $700 and connect to a network forjust $lOa month. He quotes a Wired slogan: "To be information-rich today, you don't need to be rich."

After the speech, a woman in a red plaid skirt and green jacket, blond hair pinned up with barrettes, nervously hovers around Rossetto, who is surrounded by three or four students. As he finishes and heads for the door, she approaches him. "I listened to what you said," she says, "and Ijust had to say something."

She tells him she teaches at a community college in Arizona and takes exception to certain of his comments, especially the part about the American educational system being "as backward as it was a hundred years ago."

Her face reddens. "I'm out there trying real hard, trying to fight the good fight," she says. "You can 'tjust say that nobody's doing anything."

After the woman leaves, a kid in white shorts says to Rossetto: "You gotflamed. " It's a good thing she hadn't read the piece in the first issue of Wired. called "School's Out." Adapted from a book of the same name by Lewis Perelman, the article calls education "the last great bastion of socialist economics" and argues that eliminating all American schools would free up $450,000 million, fueling "a high-tech commercial industry" that would do a much better job teaching children skills they'll need to be "knowledge workers" in the new information economy.

"She just took it personally," Rossetto sighs, sitting in the lobby afterward. He's waiting for the limousine to pick him up. Demographic tests, he says, show that the person least likely to buy Wired magazine is an American schoolteacher.

That's hardly surprising, he is told, given that the magazine considers them obsolete.

"I'm sure it's totally scary," he agrees, nodding.

Scary even for some people within the digital elite. It seems the intramural battle of the I960s counterculture-"do your own thing" versus "get involved"-are happening all over again, except the combatants are now graying at the temples.

David Bunnell, a computer magazine entrepreneur, knows the technology as well as anyone but has a different idea about what to do with its

power. Five years ago, he put up $100,000 of his own money to start "Computers and You," a computer job-skills program in the sleazy Tenderloin district of San Francisco. It's a ragtag collection of drug addicts, ex-convicts, homeless people, midgets, transvestites, blacks, Asians, whites, Hispanics, and others who live in poverty. Until they can locate the "enter" button on a keyboard, they're no closer to the TED conference than the young black nanny who could be seen throughout the weekend chasing a white baby around the lobby.

"It's only white people," Bunnell complains of the Wired world, "it's only males and it's survival of the fittest."

Come to think of it, certain comments you hear while hanging around the digerati do make them sound almost like an entirely new race. "The people reading Wired are ...an entirely new civilization that is still in its infancy," Alvin Tofflertold Wired.

It's almost like an invasion from another planet. "It is an invasion from another planet," Kevin Kelly says. "Just like the hippies were an invasion from another planet. I mean, where did they come from?"

The point is driven home by Rossetto as he eagerly fast-forwards to the future. "My sense about this is that we're talking the beginnings of exo-brains," he confides at one point. "Brain appliances. And exonervous systems, things that connect us up beyond-literally, physically-beyond our bodies, and we will discover that when enough of us get together this way, we will have created a new life form. It's evolutionary; it's what the human mind was destined to do."

One nice aspect of an evolutionary view oftechnology, of course, is that it provides a biological explanation for why some people-like Bunnell's motley crew of key punchers-might not join what the digerati like to call their "self-selecting elite." But there's also a market imperative at work: These people have no money. They can't drive the Digital Revolution ahead. So why should the digerati log off long enough to truly empower them?

Back in the lobby, waiting for his car, Rossetto says he gets three speaking invitations a day. He used to take them all, but now he almost always says no.

Maybe he should get out more?

"What's my job?" he snaps. "I don't know, 1...." His voice trails off.

He watches bellboys wrestle bags across the hotel lobby. The spacedout look he had worn during the Wired editorial meeting returns. The encounter with the teacher seems to have unnerved him.

"I get a certain satisfaction out of this kind of contact," he says, his voice nearly inaudible. "But, in the end, what I have the most leverage doing isjust what I do, putting out a magazine."

Rossetto gets up, looks around. Where's his driver? The present is such a dreary place. He's anxious to get back to Monterey in time for the show tonight by Penn and Teller-back to the glorious future, where the digerati live.

0 j

About the Author: Paul Keegan. a freelance journalist. contributes

regularly to the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, GQ, and New England Monthly.

AT&T is here in India. Hand in hand with our Indian partners, we're fulfilling our commitment to make India's bright future a reality.

Our wide range of technology is already reaching out across the country.

In partnership with VSNL,we have been providing long distance phone services to the US for over 25 years. Our alliance with the Aditya Birla Group aims to provide basic and cellular services to consumers and businesses. Switching and transmission equipment manufactured by joint ventures with the Tatas is already being installed in the Indian network. Our project with Finolex to manufacture fibre optic cables goes onstream in early 1996.

The full range of modern AT&Tbusiness communication systems and consumer products is already available in India. And AT&T is also bringing together computing and communications, to provide the banking, financial and communications sectors with breakthrough information solutions.

In fact, with our alliances, manufacturing capabilities, over 100 years' experience and the unparalleled achievements of AT&TBell Laboratories, we are best equipped to design, build and operate complete state-of-the-art communications networks in India.

Our business is complex, but our vision is simple. We want to help bring people together, across India and around the world. Anytime, anywhere.

_== -=_ATs.T

-'S=~ Your True Choice ~

Mohan Dev House, 13, Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi-110 001. Phone: 011-3310513 NETWORK

SYSTEMS

• MULTIMEDIA

PRODUCTS

• GLOBAL INFORMATION

SOLUTIONS

• COMMUNICATIONS

SERVICES

o v R. CO R.R.E S

-

~

V;~On

0 En

t

WEn

t

T H R.O v G H

t

( B V t THE

Every month,

n j0 v

our journalists

R.n

A

go through

Lis

tS A~

hundreds

of ;tables, chairs, crockery, fabrics

and lamps to pick the very best in Indian and international objects that don't

S v P PO SED

design. Simple everyday

have the 'everyday' look about them. If that's enough to drive our

boys to drink, well, that's their business.