January 1996

The New America

Environment and Economic Growth

Indo-U.S. Man and Wife Team Linl(s Small Businesses

The Mysterious Image,s of Jerry Uelsmann

your name on the most prestigious

address

in

town (that's where we are always located).

And you benefit from a host of facilities paying only for what you use. So you

don't

expense

have

the

and hassle

of

running your own office, hiring staff and buying equipment.

Ask any of our growing list

of members.

The

@ Corporate Club We ?leu#(,

~ÂŤ4i#('e44

Raheja Chambers, 213, Nariman Point, Bombay¡ 400 021.

~~ '1

YES! I want to be on the DBS Address/Identity Plan

1 Name !

Company's Name

i'

Address

SP~

VOLUME

In this issue of SPAN, four of the articles are directly or indirectly related to Indo-U.S. economic relations. Two other articles are concerned with general business and management subjects. This high percentage of economics is not an accident. To reflect the new dynamic business relationship between our two countries, we are making a conscious effort to coverthese subjects more than the magazine has in past years.

We have a news story (page 30) on the new U.S.-India Commercial Alliance (USICA), which is totally private sector. The Alliance is concentrating on the four areas India believes are top priority for its economic development: Information technology, power, transportation and infrastructure, and agribusiness.

USICA is also focusing on linkages between small and medium-sized businesses in both countries. The FORTUNE500 companies have fewer problems finding collaborators.

USICA wants smaller firms in both countries involved so as to broaden and deepen the [ndo-U.S. commercial partnership.

The human-interest feature article in our business section is the story of Vi nod and Linda Chhabra, the Indian and American husband and wife team who are doing precisely what USICA wants done at the grassroots. [n his Bangalore office, Vinod finds American partners for small Indian businessmen. [n her office in Ocala, Florida, Linda finds Indian partners for small American businessmen.

What the Chhabras do is first bridge the American-Indian cultural gap between potential partners: "We want them to feel comfortable with each other first. After all, there is no right or wrong way. Both societies are built on a spirit offree enterprise. One is cautious and honed by generations oftradition, while the other is youthful and raring to go. We first try and bring them together as friends, dispel any hint ofmistrust, and then nurture a partnership."

This issue also features an interview with India's Ambassador to the United States, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, who mentions the good work this new commercial alliance is doing. Ambassador Ray says India's economic reforms "are here to stay."

Lastbutnotthe least, we report on the Novembervisitto India of former U.S. President George Bush. He was invited here by Citibank to deliver another in the Citibank Asian Leadership Series of lectures. On page 36 we run excerpts from his speech in New Delhi, which was devoted mostly to Indo-U.S. economic relations. He emphasized that the United States stands ready "to work in pannership with India in pursuing our common interest and meeting out common challenges. We want to work with you. We want India and her people to grow and prosper."

In his conclusion President Bush said: "We are interconnecfed; we are also interdependent.

And the more we do business with one another and work with each other on security issues, the more I believe we will find we can help one another build a safer, more prosperous, more peaceful future for our children and our grandchildren."

I fully share President Bush's hope and faith. And to conclude this letter on a personal note, I should like to wish all SPAN readers a HappyNewYear.

-E.A.W.

XXXVII

Ja"a,yJ996

NUMBER

I

2 7

The New America

9

A"GI¡ orlOus Mongre I"by Gerald

10 14 16

by Michael Barone

One Nation, One Language In Search of Raga mala

bySusanHeadden Parshall

bySachidanandaMohanty

What Is Music? Math, With Feeling by Jim Holt A Conversation With Ambassador Ray

by Connie Howard

20

24 30

32 36

38

43 44

45

Hostile Takeover Chaos Inc.

by Marilyn Stern

bySimonCaulkin

USICA: An Engine That Powers Business Ties Indo-American Man and Wife Team Links Business by v.I. Mohan "We Wantto Work With You" byGeorgeBush Mysterious Images The Photographic Art of Jerry U elsmann On the Lighter Side FocusOn ...

Environment and Economic Growth

by David Gardiner and Paul R. Portney

Front cover: of astounding

Managing A. Venkata

Edi/Of; Krishan Gabrani; Narayana,

Editol; Avinash Nimbalkar; Managel;

Jerry Uelsmann uses multiple variety, mystery, and enigma,"

Snigdha

Pasricha;

Staff Designcl; D.P. Sharma;

Associate

Goswami;

Art Directol; lIemant

Research

Editors.

Editorial

Nand Katyal;

Bhatnagar;

Sen'ices,

printing techniques to create "images such as this one "made" in 1987.

Arun Bhanot, Assistants.

Contributing

Production

Sanjay

Services,

Editors,

Chandra;'Copy

Goel, Ashok

Designers,

Assistant,

USIS Documentation

Prakash

Rashmi

Kumar;

Gopi Gaj"ani.

Pokhriyal;

American

Photo Suhas

Circulatian

Center

Library,

New Delhi.

Note to readers: Beginning with the February/March 1996 issue, SPAN will become a bimonthly magazine. Subscription rates will remain the same: Rs. 120 for 12 issues (Rs. 110 for students), over a two-year period. (See SPAN order form on page 43.) 0 annual subscriptions (six issues) will be accepted.

Erratum: The copyright line for "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" by Joel E. Cohen in last month's issue should have read: "This article is reprinted from The Sciences and is excerpted from Hall' Many People Can the Earth Support? by Joel E. Cohen, with permission of the publisher, w.w. Norton & Company, Inc." Photographs: Front cover-Jerry Uelsl11ann.2-3-illustration by Suhas Nimbalkar. 7-illustration by Gopi Gajwani. I0-13--courtesy Barbara Rothenberg. 17-Aradhana Seth, courtesy India Today. 20-23-courtesy Lower Manhattan Cultural Coullcil, New York. 26-29--courtesy 18M. 31,32,35, 37-Avinash Pasricha. 38-42,45-48-Jerry Uelsl11ann.

Published h,' the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Ncw Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841 ),on behalfofthe American Embassy. New Delhi. PrimedotThomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad. Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily rellectthe views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission orthe Editor. Forpermissio/1 write to the Editor.

,

ENE A recent poll shatters many old assumptions about American politics.

America has always been a divided nation.

E p/uribus UI1UI11 may be a national motto and the melting pot a national metaphor, but the reality has been patriots and Tories, free whites and black slaves, Philadelphia bankers and Tennessee woodsmen, Northern abolitionists and Southem slave owners,

free silver and hard currency, natives and immigrants, Wall Street and Main Street, Republicans and Democrats, hawks and doves, liberals and conservatives.

Today America is divided in new and different ways. There are scraps of evidence everywhere that old ties have frayed and

,

,

RICA

loose new ones are being wQven. The South, once solidly Democratic; is fast becoming Republican. In 1994, 40 percent of labor union votes went to Republican candidates.

A frican- Americans and Hispanics are di vided about affirmative action and welfare refOnll.

There is a gulf between women who work

,., ..

,

, .."

•. -

.~'V

-\ .~..

.... '"

~

"

"

""..L • ,"

,.;

}~ .."

ot~l\·.

,-"

~.u -:'" . ,.' .

'71 '.'

~.>,

,~

~

. ~;~

.'

'.

.... ;:-'C.

outside the home and women who stay at home with their children. Politicians of both parties squabble over whether economic issues should take precedence over moral ones.

"Are we a nation?" are the first words of Michael Lind's The Next American Nation.

"Social classes speak to themselves in a dialect of their own, inaccessible to outsiders," wrote Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites. Republican analyst William Kristol warns of "the Balkanization of America."

We can sense these new divisions every day-living in geographical and cultural

enclaves; sitting in walled backyards, not open front porches; listening to our own music and watching our own cable-television channels. Some of the institutions that once served as little melting pots, like the military draft and basic training, are gone.

Others-public libraries and public-school systems-are in disrepair.

News took a fresh look at America, using polling and social science techniques to find what divides and unites Americans today. The results, based on a nationwide poll of 1,045 registered voters by Democratic

u.s.

pollster Celinda Lake of Lake Research and Republican pollster Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group, indicate that culture is now more important in shaping voters' attitudes than race, geography, gender, or political ideology, and they challenge all the ways in which politicians, academics, marketers, and the media traditionally try to understand, describe, and persuade voters.

Using techniques called factor analysis and cluster analysis, Lake and Goeas identified seven species of voters-not according to demographic traits such as race, gender, and region orpolitical attributes like ideology or party identification, but according to attitudes toward four cultural, two economic, News and one foreign dimension. The poll and analysis help to illuminate the tensions in both major political parties, explain the increasing volatility of the electorate and reveal which issues are likely to be most effective in 1996. The survey, for example, found supporters of the Christian Coalition, Perot voters, and African-Americans not clustered in single groups but scattered in many of them; African-Americans are present in significant numbers in six of the Neil's poll. seven groups defined by the Three striking messages emerge from the survey. The first is that there no longer is any center in American politics.

The seven groups are not arrayed along a one-dimensionalline from conservative right to liberal left; instead, they can be thought of as seven separate galaxies, clusters of stars, some of which look close together from one vantage point but far apart when viewed from another.

Second, while most Americans think they are much like most other Americans-only 17 percent said most of their fellow Americans are not like themselves-most Americans don'tthink the people who run the country are like them. Almost 58 percent said the nation's leaders are not very much or not at all like themselves. Finally, the country is divided largely by the fervency of religious belief.

Only two of the seven tribes tilt heavily toward one political party or the other; the other five are ambivalent, drawn to one party or candidate on some issues and to the other side on others. This helps explain how the "Republican lock" on the presidency that analysts described in the 1980s was broken in 1992, how the Democrats who were thought to control Congress lost resoundingly in 1994 and why today's Republican revolution may not last.

Although together they account for only

u.s.

u.s.

35 percent of the electorate, the two most polarized groups-"Liberal Activists" and "Conservative Activists"-form the foundations of the Democratic and Republican parties and dominate the political debate.

Just as geologically young mountain ranges have sharp peaks, while older ones have been softened by time, so the younger-thanaverage Liberal and Conservative Activists stand out from older groups that have less dramatic profiles.

The "Stewards" and the "Ethnic Conservatives" are the descendants of the pro-management and pro-labor blocs whose battles polarized American politics halfa century ago.

If many Stewards are lapsed Republicans, skeptical of the party's growing emphasis on abortion and other social issues, many Ethnic Conservatives are fallen Democrats.

Although Ethnic Conservatives are the

While most Americans think they are much like other Americans, most don't think the people who run the country are like them. group with the second-lowest incomes, their feelings of class conflict seem to have eroded over the years, though they still see government as an educator and protector. They are the group most often positive about banks (76 percent), lawyers (60 percent), and the news media (51 percent).

Two other groups perch at odd angles to the battle between Liberal Activists "Populist and Conservative Activists.

Traditionalists" feel strong conflicts with gays and lesbians, welfare recipients, large corporations, and the news media; they are most friendly to senior citizens, small business, and the police. "Agnostics" see little conflict with any other groups; they are pro-large corporation and pro-labor union; pluralities are friendly to gays and lesbians and Christian conservatives.

The Agnostics' strongest negative feelings are toward those they see as disturbing the peace: Prime-time television, the news media, talk-radio hosts, the National Ri fle Association, welfare recipients, and lawyers.

The final group, "Dowagers," is the smallest, only seven percent of American voters.

They rely heavily on the old media of network TV news and newspapers, but many recent

events and arguments seem to pass them by.

Two-thirds are not sure whether they are friendly or in conflict with either large corporations or labor unions; smaller majorities are unsure about Hispanics and Jews, feminists, gays and lesbians, Ivy League graduates, lawyers, and immigrants.

These seven tribes produce no stable alliances. Rather, they line up with different groups on different issues: lJ Crime, More than 55 percent of Conservative Activists and Stewards prefer punislunent over prevention to stop crime; more than 60 percent of Af,'l1ostics, Liberal Activists, and Ethnic Conservatives prefer prevention.

But when the trade-off is between faster, more certain punishment and protecting rights, the lineup is different: Liberal Activists join Conservative Activists and Stewards in preferring speedy justice; Agnostics, Ethnic Conservatives, and Populist Traditionalists are split evenly.

Traditionalists and Conservative Populist Activists, however, both say they're reluctant to give up some rights to control crime, while 76 percent of Ethnic Conservatives-who are 010St likely to fear crime in their own neighborhoodssay they would give up some rights. lJ Economic threats. Conservative Activists fear federal deficits and high taxes. Liberal Activists, Ethnic Conservatives, and Agnostics are most concerned about rising prices; Populist Traditionalists, about high taxes. Unemployment, for years the economic threat assumed by politicians and journalists to have the greatest political impact, was the concern of no more than 12 percent of any tribe. lJ Government's role. Although most Ethnic Conservatives and Liberal Activists think government should help families achieve the American Dream, large majorities of Conservative Activists, Stewards, and Agnostics say government should stay out. Populist Traditionalists, the tribe identifying itself most as working class, are split. down the middle. lJ Safety net. Dowagers, who presumably are concerned about Social Security and Medicare, tend to prefer a f~f\eral govel11ment "safety net." ' .

lJ Abortion.

Most Ethnic Conservatives, Conservative Activists, and Populist Traditionalists think abortion should be illegal in some or all cases. Over 70 percent of Liberal Activists and Stewards think it should be legal. ]n both cases, alliances cross party Iines and economic di vides. lJ Radical agendas. Conservative Activ-

A FIELD GUIDE Identifying members of the seven species of voters is, of course, an inexact science.

Many groups share some traits, and voters often align themselves with different groups on different issues. But here is a guide to help define where each group can be found, how to identify it, and what noises it usually makes.

POPULIST

suburbs,

TRADITIONALISTS

Competing species: Welfare recipients, labor unions, the National Rifle Association, talk-radio hosts.

(15% oj voters) Song: Distrustful of institutions, protectionist, actively religious; anti-gun control, like Conservative Activists, but anticorporation, like Liberal Activists.

Description: Tend to be male and under 45. Married, with few college graduates and many union members and gun owners. Middle income, most likely to describe the~elves as working class.

Habitat: Nationwide, usually in farther suburbs and rural areas.

Common in Midwest and South.

1992 VOTE

CLINTON

31%

BUSH

42%

PEROT

17%

the news media, large

Main sources of news: Local television news.

STEWARDS (15% of voters) Song: The most strongly pro-management group and the second-most-unfavorable to unions; very often ancestrally Republican; lukewarmly religious; strongly in favor of gun control; positive toward most institutions. Though 47 percent identify themsel ves as Republicans and only 28 percent as Democrats, they voted for Ross Perot more than any other group in 1992.

Description: Relatively affluent, attended or graduated from college, married but with nO children at home, often 1992 VOTE retired.

CLINTON 33% 36%

PEROT

22%

Habitat: Comfortable

in West.

Main sources of news: Newspapers, local TV news.

1992 VOTE

CLINTON

65%

BUSH

15%

PEROT

10%

Habitat: Urban settings; more common in the Northeast and California.

Competing species: Religious right, talk radio, gun owners, large corporations.

Main sources of news: Newspapers, local TV news, CNN.

DOWAGERS (7% oj voters) Song: Identify as middle class but have low incomes; watch national television news but have low levels of political knowledge about current issues. More likely than most other groups to be negative to minorities.

Description: Mostly elderly women with low education levels.

Competing species: Gays, welfare recipients,

corporations.

BUSH

more common

~~-

Habitat: More common in Midwestern small towns; common in parts of Florida, Arizona, and southern Texas, especially in winter.

CONSERVATIVE (15% of voters)

Song: Advocate conservative "family values," pro-free market, pro-Christian right, tend to think most Americans are like them. The most strongly Republican group of all.

Description: Two-thirds are men.

Have the highest incomes; almost half are college graduates, but fewer have graduate degrees; relatively young, often married with children; gun owners; traditionally religious. Can often be found listening to talk radio.

Habitat: Suburbs or small towns outside major urbap centers, more common in Texas.

1992 VOTE

Competing CLINTON 40% species: BUSH 37% Lawyers, the PEROT 7% National Rifle Association, feminists, immigrants, gays.

Main sources of news: National TV news, local TV news.

LIBERAL ACTIVISTS (20% o.fvoters)

ACTIVISTS

Competing species: News

1992 VOTE

CLINTON

8%

media, welfare recipients, PEROT 13% lawyers, primetime television, labor unions, feminists.

BUSH

73%

Song: Pro-abortion rights, tolerant of race and sexual orientation, opposed to increased military spending, anti-big business, very Democratic.

Main sources of news: Newspapers, local and national TV news, talk radio.

Description: Likely to be a working woman or single, the least religious, relatively young, the most educated; has the secondhighest proportion of AfricanAmericans (mostly male and younger).

Song: Favor government intervention in economy, strongly religious, the remnants of New Deal Democrats. Do not share the cynicism or hostility to institutions of some other groups.

14 percen t are Southern Baptists.

Often older and lower income than average; few college graduates.

Habitat: The American heart and from the Appalachians to the California border, central cities, and small towns.

Competing species: Gays and lesbians, gun owners, prime-time TV,

1992 VOTE

CLINTON

43%

BUSH

35%

PEROT

11%

talk-radio

hosts.

Main sources of news: Local TV news, newspapers.

AGNOSTICS

(12% o.fvoters) Song: Tolerant culturally, cautiously conservative on economic issues, averse to conflict and hoping for harmony, favorable to both corporations and unions, with few negative feelings toward any other group. Little or no religious belief.

Nearly three quarters oppose increased military spending.

Description: Older baby boomers, mostly secular, disproportionately graduate-school educated with incomes slightly above average, the most middleclass group 1992 VOTE of all.

CLINTON 47% BUSH

31%

PEROT

11%

Habitat: Upscale suburbs, high-tech areas.

Competing species: Prime-time TV, talk-radio hosts, the National Rifle Association.

Main sources newspapers.

of news: Daily

ETHNIC CONSERVATIVES (16% oj voters)

Description: Sixty-one percent are women. The most ethnically diverse group. Eighteen percent are African-Americans, 27 percent are Roman Catholics, and

u.s. News poll of 1,045 registered voters and an oversample of 45 African-American voters conducted by Celinda Lake of Lake Research and Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group May 7-10, 1995. Margin of error: plus or minus 3.0 percent. Percentages may not add up to 100 because some respondents answered "Don't know."

Today's America is divided, but its divisions, properly and sympathetically understood, can help hold it together. ists, Populist Traditionalists, and Ethnic Conservatives worry more about the radical gay or feminist agendas; Liberal Activists, Stewards, and Agnostics are more worried about the religious right.

[J Foreign aid and trade. More than 70 percent of the usually antagonistic Liberal Activists and Conservative Activists agree that foreign aid is in the nation's interest.

Seventy percent of Populist Traditionalists -the Perot-leaning group both Clinton Democrats and Gingrich Republicans are courting-disagree.

Similarly, two-thirds of Liberal Activists, Conservative Activists, and Agnostics-the usually antagonistic high-education groups-favor expanding free trade with Latin America; two-thirds of the Populist Traditionalists oppose it.

[J Military spending. A whopping 82 percent of Conservative Activists favor increased military spending, as do 54 percent of Populist Traditionalists; 71 percent of Agnostics and 63 percent of Liberal Activists and Stewards oppose it. In these numbers one hears echoes of 25-year-old debates overthe Vietnam War. [J Feminism. While 73 percent of Liberal

Activists think the women's movement has not gone far enough, no more than 23 percent of any other tribe agrees.

[J Civil rights. A big 68 percent of Liberal Activists think the civil rights movement has not gone far enough. But only 14 percent of most other groups agree.

The results show how hard it is to assemble a stable political majority in the divided America of the 1990s, in which people vote social issues along cultural lines. Indeed, without the majority-forcing features written into the American political system by the faction-fearing Founding Fathers-the Electoral College and the single-member congressional district-both political parties might be fragmenting.

And although conventional wisdom holds that third parties are not viable in America, the survey suggests that there is now plenty of room for serious third-party candidacies. reliThe balance on major issues-on gious beliefs and values, on the size and scope of government-favors conservatives. But if the Democrats seem an endangered species, the Republicans are also vulnerable. Voters are split on abortion, favorable to some forms of gun control and more sympathetic to labor than to management. While Populist Traditionalists, with their mistrust of institutions, seem to like political attacks, Agnostics and Stewards seem

ALIEN NATION The new U.S. News poll found that many Americans feel alienated from their leaders and institutions.

AMERICAN VOTERS WHO THINK MOST AMERICANS ARE LIKE THEM

AND WHO THINK THE PEOPLE RUNNING THE COUNTRY ARE LIKE THEM

AMERICAN VOTERS WHO THESE GROUPS AND THE WORK THEY DO CONFLICT WITH THEIR AND THEIR FAMILIES' GOALS

SAY

repelled by confrontational tactics.

Many Americans, especially Agnostics and Stewards (who together are 27 percent of voters), hunger for a political dialogue above partisan squabbles and perhaps for an abovethe-fray candidate for President.

The conflicts in today's divided America can be overstated, and new alliances are easily overlooked.

In only 22 of 217 cases does a majority of any tribe think its goals conllict with those of varioLls controversial groups, from gays to gun owners. The two groups most often seen as hostile-the news media and prime-time television-both highlight the conflicts and divisions in American life and often take one side to the irritation of others. And with the notable exception of the disproportionately African-American underclass, Americans today are freer than ever to join whatever tribe they choose. Race and ethnicity no longer determine one's group; nor do economic status or geography.

Personal values are now the critical variable.

The culturally unified and much romanticized America of the 1950s, in contrast, had much less room for economic entrepreneurialism or cultural activism. And if today's elites seem disconnected from most or all 0 fthe tribes, Americans of all groups show no more deference to those who set themselves up as their betters today than the nation's founders showed to the king of England's royal governors in 1776.

But the things that are dividing us also may be holding us together. At America's extended family Thanksgiving dinner table, the Liberal Activist sister and the Conservative Activist brother argue one issue after another. Father, a Steward, and Mother, an Ethnic Conservative, find themselves agreeing and disagreeing, first with. one side and then with the other. The Populist Traditionalist cousin relishes the clash; the Agnostic cousin wishes the siblings got along better. The Dowager grand-' mother tries to follow issues that were never raised when she formed most of her opinions. But all of them stay at the table. The argument keeps them together when they otherwise would have dispersed to watch their separate cable channels and listen to their di rrerent music, plug into the Internet or page through their favorite magazines.

Today's America is divided, but its divisions, properly and sympathetically understood, can help hold it together.

0 About the Author: Michael Barone is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report.

One Nation, One Language million people in the United States speak For a Sherman Oaks, California, a language other than English at home. election worker, the last straw was Of the children who returned to urban hanging campaign posters in six lanpublic schools last fall, a whopping oneguages and six alphabets. For a taxthird speak a foreign language first. "It payer in University Park, Texas, it was a blows your mind," says Dade County, requirement that all employees of the Florida, administrator Mercedes Toural; local public utility speak Spanish. For a who counts 5, 190 new students speaking retired schoolteacher from Mount no fewer than 56 different tongues.

Morris, New York, it was taking her elEnglish-only advocates, whose derly and anxious mother to a Pakistani ranks include recent immigrants and doctor and understanding only a fracsocial liberals, believe that accommotion of what he said.

As immigration, both legal and illeILLUSTRATION BYGOPIGAJWANI dating the more than 300 languages gal, brings a new flood of foreign speech spoken in the United States undercuts into the United States, a campaign to make English the nation's offiincentives to learning English and, by association, to becomingnn ciallanguage is gathering strength. According to a new u.s. News American. Massachusetts offers driver's tests in 24 foreign languages, including Albanian, Finnish, Farsi, Turkish, and Czech. poll, 73 percent of Americans think English should be the official language of government. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Federal voting rights laws provide for ballots in multiple translations. Internal Revenue Service forms are printed in Spanish. And Majority Leader Bob Dole, and more than a third of the members of in Westminster, California, members of Troop 2194 of the Boy Congress support proposed federal legislation that would make Scouts of America can earn their merit badges in Vietnamese. "It's English America's official tongue; 22 states and a number of municcompletely insane," says Mauro Mujica, chairman of the lobbying ipalities already have English-only laws on the books. group U.S. English .and himselfan immigrant from Chile. "We are Like flag burning and the Pledge of Allegiance, the issue is not doing anybody any favors." largely symbolic. Without ever being declared official, American English has survived-and enriched itself from-four centuries Pulling the Plug of immigration. It is not much easier for today's Guatemalan imThe proposed official-English laws range from the barely nomigrant to get a good education and a good job without learning English than it was for his Italian, Polish, orChinese predecessors. ticeable to the almost xenophobic. A bill introduced by Missouri Republican Representative Bill Emerson would mandate English And at best, eliminating bilingual education might save about a for government use but provide exceptions for health, safety, and dollar per student per day. But many Americans are feeling threatcivil and criminal justice. Although it is the most viable of the ened by a triple whammy of growing economic uncertainty, some bunch, it would change the status quo so little that it begs the quesof it caused by foreign competition; rising immigration, much of it tion of why it is needed at all. The most extreme official-English illegal; and political pressure to cater to the needs of immigrants measures would pull the plug on what their sponsors consider linrather than letting them sink or swim. "Elevating English as an guistic welfare, ending bilingual education and bilingual ballots. icon," says author and bilingual expert James Crawford, "has apAdvocates of official-English proposals deny that their meapeal for the insecure and the resentful. It provides a clear answer to sures are draconian. Says U.S. English's Mujica: "We are simply the question: Who belongs?" saying that official documents should be in English and money Nation of Strangers saved on translations could go to help the people learn English.

We're saying you could still take a driver's test in another lanThere is no question that America is undergoing another of its guage, but we suggest it be temporary till you learn English." periodic diversity booms. According to the Census Bureau, in 1994 U.S. English, which reports 600,000 contributors, was founded 8.7 percent of Americans were born in other countries, the highest by the late Senator S.1. Hayakawa, a Japanese-American linguistics percentage since before World War II. More tellingly, at least 31.8 professor, and boasts advisory board members such as Saul Bellow 'With Linda Rodriguez Bemfeld and Sally Deneen in Miami, Missy Daniel in Boston, and Alistair Cooke. The group was tarred eight years ago when its Monika Guttman in Los Angeles, Barbara Burgower Hordern in Houston, Scott Minerbrook in New York, Debra Schwartz in Chicago, and Jill Jordan Sieder in Atlanta. founder, John Tanton, wrote a memo suggesting that Hispanics have

"greater reproductive powers" than Anglos; two directors quit, Tanton was forced out, and the group has been rebuilding its reputation ever since. Its competitor, English First, whose founder, Larry Pratt, also started Gun Owners of America, is more hard-line.

Defenders of bilingual education, multilingual ballots, and other government services ask whether legal immigrants will vote if there are no bilingual ballots. If foreign speakers can't read the street signs, will they be allowed to drive? Such thoughts bring Juanita Morales, a Houston college student, to tears. "This just sets up another barrier for people," she says. "My parents don't know English, and I can hardly speak Spanish anymore and that's painful to me."

Go it alone, the hard-liners reply, the way our grandfathers did.

But these advocates don't mention that there is little, if any, evidence that earlier German or Italian immigrants mastered English any faster than the current crop of Asians, Russians, and Central Americans. And it's hard to argue that today's newcomers aren't trying. San Francisco City College teaches English to 20,000 adults every semester, and the waiting list is huge. In De Kalb County, Georgia, 7,000 adults are studying English; in Brighton Beach, New York, 2,000 wait for a chance to learn it.

The economic incentives for learning English seem as clear as ever. Yes, you can earn a good living in an ethnic enclave of Chicago speaking nothing but Polish. But you won't go far.

"Mandating English," says Ron Pearlman of Chicago, "is like -mandating that the sun is going to come up every day. Itjust seems to me that it's going to happen."

What worries many Americans are efforts to put other languages on a par with English, which often come across as assaults on American or Western culture. Americans may relish an evening at a Thai restaurant or an afternoon at a Greek festival, but many are less comfortable when their children are celebrating Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, and Chinese New Year along with Christmas in the public schools. In Arlington, Virginia, a classically trained orchestra teacher quit the public school system rather than cave in to demands to teach salsa music.

But diversity carries the day. The U. S. Department of Education policy is not simply to promote learning of English but also to maintain immigrants' native tongues. And supporters ofthat policy make a good case for it. "People ask me ifI'm embarrassed I speak Spanish," says Martha Quintanilla Hollowell, a Dallas County, Texas, district attorney. "I tell them I'd be more embarrassed ifl spoke only one language."

Language Skills That may be what's most disturbing about the English-only sentiment: In a global economy, it's the monolingual English speakers who are falling behind. Along with computer skills, a neat appearance, and a work ethic, Americans more and more are finding that a second language is useful in getting a good job.

African-Americans in Dade County, now more than half Hispanic, routinely lose tourism positions to bilingual Cubans.

Schoolteachers cry foul because bilingual teachers earn more money while monolingual teachers are laid off. "There is no way I could getajob in the Los Angeles public schools today," says Lucy

Fortney, an elementary school teacher for 30 years.

The proliferation of state and local English-only laws has led to a flurry of language-discrimination lawsuits and a record number of complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ed Chen, a lawyer with the San Francisco office of the American Civil Liberties Union, says clients have been denied credit and insurance because they don't speak English. But courts increasingly have endorsed laws that call for exclusive use of English on the job. Officials at New York's Bellevue Hospital, where the vast majority of nurses are Filipino, sayan English-only law was necessary because nurses spoke Tagalog among themselves.

Other employers have wielded English-only laws as a license to discriminate, giving rise to fears that a national law would encourage more of the same. A judge in Amarillo, Texas, claimed a mother in a custody case was committing "child abuse" by speaking Spanish to her child at home. Another Texas judge denied probation to a drunk driver because he couldn't benefit from the all-English Alcoholics Anonymous program. In Monterey Park, California, a citizens' group tried to ban Chinese signs on businesses that served an almost all-Asian clientele. In Dade County, a since-repealed English-only law was so strict that it forbade using public funds to pay for court translations and bilingual signs to warn metro-rail riders against electrocution.

Though it is not intended as such, the English-first movement is a reminder of a history of prejudice toward speakers of foreign tongues. Many American Indians were prohibited from speaking their own languages. The Louisiana Legislature banned the use of Cajun French in public schools in 1912, but instead of abandoning their culture, many Cajuns dropped out of school and never learned English. French was finally allowed back in the schools in the 1960s.

As recently as 1971, it was illegal to speak Spanish in a public school building in Texas, and until 1923 it was against the law to teach foreign languages to elementary school pupils in Nebraska. At Ellis Island, psychologists tested thousands of non-English-speaking immigrants exclusively in English and pronounced them retarded.

Champions of diversity say it's high time Americans faced the demographic facts. In Miami, with leading trade partners Colombia and Venezuela, businesses would be foolish to restrict themselves to English. If emergency services suffer because of a shortage of foreign-speaking 911 operators, it IS downright dangerous not to hire more. As for embattled teachers, Rick Lopez of. the National Association of Bilingual Education says: "Why should we expect students to learn a new language if teachers can't do the same? We have to change the product to fit the market. The market wants a Toyota and we're still building Edsels."

Many Americans still value the melting pot: General Mills's new Betty Crocker is a digitized, multiethnic composite. But Skokie, Illinois, educator Charlene Cobb, for one, prefers a colorful mosaic. "You don't have to change yourself," she says, "to make a whole thing that's very beautiful." The question is whether the diverse parts of America sti 11make up a whole.

0 About the Author: Susan Headden is an associate News & World Report.

editor of

u.s.

A "Glorious Mon reI" enriching the word hoard. Example: You reared a child (Anglo-Saxon) or raised a child (Norse).

As every schoolchild used to know, the Norman French conquered England in 1066.

The language of the Saxon peasantry then conquered the Norman aristocracy. The result was a tongue that kept its Germanic structure but took in a huge new vocabulary of French words and through it Latin and Greek terms.

Traders, warriors, scholars, pirates, and explorers all did their part to advance English's cosmopolitan destiny.

Three out of four words in the English dictionary are foreign-born, and

the language is richer for it.

The language was happily spiced with words from 50 languages even before the opening of the New World offered fresh avenues. Americans quickly became known for their own coinages, the many "Americanisms" they invented~words like groundhog, lightning rod, belittle (minted by Thomas Jefferson), seaboard~new words for a new land.

But American English also adopted American Indian terms (mostly place names) and welcomed useful words brought across the water by immigrants.

The Dutch suppliedpit (as found in fruit) and boss (as found in the front office), sleigh, snoop, and spook. Spanish supplied filibuster and bonanza; Yiddish enabled Americans to kibitz schmucks who sold schlock or made schmaltz.

Big Dictionary Today, after 1,500 years of promiscuous acquisitiveness, the vocabulary of

English is vast. The Oxford English Dictionary lists more than 600,000 words; German has fewer than one-third that number, French fewer than onesixth. What makes English mammoth and unique is its great sea of synonyms, words with roughly the same meaning but different connotations, different levels of formality, and different effects on the ear. Anglo-Saxon words are blunt, Latin words learned, French words musical. English speakers can calibrate the tone and meter of their prose with great precision.

They may end (AngloSaxon), finish (French), or conclude (Latin) their remarks. A girl can befair (Anglo-Saxon), beautiful (French), or attractive (Latin). A bully may evoke fear (Anglo-Saxon), terror (French), or trepidation (Latin).

Its depth and precision have helped make English the foremost language of science, diplomacy, and international business~and the medium of T-shirts from Tijuana to Timbuktu. It is the native tongue of350 million people and a second language for 350 million more. Half the books being published in the world are in . English; so is 80 percent of the world's computer text. While Americans debate bilingualism, foreigners learn English. Its popularity is fed by U.S. wealth and power, to be sure.

But Richard Lederer, author of The Miracle of Language and other books on the peculiarities of English, believes the language's "internationality" has innate appeal. Not only are English's grammar and syntax relatively simple, the language's sound system is flexible and "user friendly"~foreign words tend to be pronounced the same as in their original tongues. "We have the most cheerfully democratic and hospitable language that ever existed," Lederer says. "Other people recognize their language in ours."

0 About the Author: Gerald Parshall is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report.

Kumar's Leaf, 1994-1995 Oil on paper.

Elephant Music, 1995 Oil on papet; 94 x 101 ems.

A Very Small Circus Oil on paper.

A

utumn in New England brings a breathtaking riot

of orange, yellow and red to the woods. In the stunning light-filled studio that her architectJ1Usband built on Bayberry Lane in Westport, Connecticut, artist Barbara Rothenberg often lifts her eyes from the assembly of brush, easel, and canvas, and listens mesmerized to the "unheard melodies" of her paintings.

Rothenberg is not a compulsive daydreamer or a denizen from the world of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. She is a serious painter anJ art historian. An adjunct professor of studio art and art history at Fairfield University, Rothenberg belongs to a growing body of artists who see their work as a unique fusion of painting and music. "It's not just color," Rothenberg says, "it has to do with sound. I want my work to sing. Perhaps I will travel and continue to search for places that resonate with my artistic sense."

While others continued to debate over links between two seemingly disparate art forms like painting and music, Rothenberg's search for the perfect "spirit of place" brought her to India to study the famous Ragamala paintings. She found part of the answer to her artistic quest in the deserts of Rajasthan.

It was not just a passion for the exotic that drove Rothenberg to cross continents. She is a popular teacher and speaker on art history often in demand at the Westport Arts Center, the Institute of Asian Studies, the Bridgeport Museum, and the Great Neck Library. Rothenberg's work finds a pride of place in a number of distinguished public, corporate, and private collections, including those at Pitney-Bowes, Chase Manhattan, General Electric Corporate Headquarters, Housatonic Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution.

As luck would have it, Rothenberg, looking for a special key to unravel the mysterious world of music and painting, stumbled upon th~ Ragamala exhibits while strolling in the Nehru Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Rothenberg recalls that she could actually hear musical notes while gazing at these paintings.

Once she set her mind to it, it was only a matter of time before Rothenberg applied for and secured a Fulbright fellowship. Coming to India, she says, was important because "my orientation throughout has been Western and I wanted to experience art history and color in another world." She envisaged her project, "The Music in Art," as a personal investigation with Indian miniature paintings and how they depict music from the Ragamala tradition.

Rothenberg had impeccable credentials for this project.

She is an aficianado of painting as well as music. She serves regularly on the board of Friends of Music and has sung in musical theater and chorals. "I like to feel my painting has melody," she says. "Music is as important to my life as visual things."

Rothenberg has an equally impressive pedigree in

Kamoda Ragini Bundi/Kota, 1685.

painting. She has studied art at Bennington College, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University. She describes her paintings as a "mix between abstract and figurative; a mix of things both observed and imagined, with color being the subject." While nature, music, and color all contribute to her work, "it is ultimately a sense of surprise," says Rothenberg, "that propels me in my work."

It was the same desire "to be constantly surprised" that pulled Rothenberg to India and Rajasthan. The Ragamala concept, she says, links music, poetry, and painting, and is a uniquely Indian contribution to the history of world art.

Rothenberg attempted to grasp the links of such an art while journeying through Rajasthan, one of the prime areas of the Ragamala tradition in India.

As Rothenberg explored the region and combed

with new and enchanting images, through specific sites such as the "I dream of living in a color, and sounds. She also gave a legendary City Palace in Udaipur world where there is that one often finds in the Indian similar talk to the Friends of Music miniatures, she also sought to dein Connecticut, whose effectivea greater generosity of termine whether there were any ness was greatly enhanced because spirit in art and in life." parallels between the art of the past a former exchange scholar and and the life of the present. The sarod player David Trasoff joined palaces, forts, festivals; the incredible range of coshands with her; he played matching abbreviated tumes, pageantry, visual wonder, and an array of dazragas on sarod that illustrated the visuals. zling color everywhere-all left an overpowering Since her return to the United States, Rothenberg impression on the artist. The Ragamala miniatures, she has continued to paint and expand on the theme of Ragamala. says, "sang" to her of the fascinating world of Rajput She was recently featured by the customs, religion, and rituals, and Connecticut Commission on the she sensed a close affinity between Arts. She was especially commisthe miniatures that she saw in sioned by a Jewish temple in Westport to paint Jacob s Laddel; Udaipur, Jaipur, and Delhi and the a vibrant abstract painting based life of present-day India.

Rothenberg, as she traveled on the biblical theme of the covenant between God and Man. through the Ragamala country, also Rothenberg says that it was began to grasp the varieties of mood the cultural experience of the and sentiment (rasa) and the relaRagamala and India that prompted tionship to nature, season, and time her to take up religious themes that are the basis of the raga and at this stage of her career. In Ragamala paintings. Such parallels in art forms are known to exist in Jacob s Ladder she travels from the Hindu temple to the Judaic. the Western context, say between Many Indians who saw her the music of Wagner and the work exhibition found Indian motifs of the pre-Romantic poet James in Jacob s Ladder. In an interThomson. For an American artist view for an Indian newspaper, from New England, however, a simRothenberg says that "the colors ilar discovery across cultures and [of Jacob:S' Ladder]are very much genres must have been a profoundly . . reminiscent of colors used in movIng experIence.

Indian art. This was the first paintWith Delhi University's College ing I did when I got back and I was of Art as her base, Rothenberg used filled with the Indian sense of her sojourn in India to have a wider Barbara Rorhel1berg ar Sal1skriri. al1 arrisf.\¡' color and luminosity." exposure to the world of Indian muref/'ear, during her visiT ro India. sic and paintings. Traveling down Barbara Rothenberg's discovery south, she had a brief stint at the of the Ragamalas has just begun.

Sarojini Naidu School of Fine Arts at the University of There are many talks and presentations at hand. Within Hyderabad, participating in a special etching workshop and outside her studio, Rothenberg does not seem to have with lectures and individual critiques to students. had enough of India. At her house on the river, her Finally, she capped it all by spending two fruitful weeks at husband and two grown-up children are always suppOl,tive of her great passion.

Sanskriti, an artists' retreat, reflecting on the Ragamala paintings and their relationship to the larger world of "One of the things that confronts me," Rothenberg Indian music and art. muses, "is the pull of certain countries. In India I found By the time Rothenberg left India, her love of the an echo of my sense of color in the paintings and the Ragamala paintings had become compulsive and contapeople .... My backyard is all green. But the world is larger than our backyards, and I dream of living in gious, and her understanding of Indian art and culture in general had deepened.

At Fairfield University, a world where there is a greater generosity of spirit Rothenberg gave an illustrative talk on the stylized world in art and in life."

0 of India's past as seen through the Ragamala paintings and reflected in the culture and life of India today. With About the Author: Sachidanal1da Mohal1l)' is a reader in English the help of slides, she retraced her exciting journey filled al rhe Un il'ersiryojHvderabad.

What Is Music?

Math, With Feeling

by JIM HOLT

A new book by Edward Rothstein

explores the relationship between mathematics and music. hich is the highest and purest of the arts? The question may have a fatuous ring to our ears, but during the Enlightenment it was thought to make for an excellent parlor game. The trick was to justify your answer on philosophical grounds. And here the defender of the claims of music had a marked advantage. Architecture, after all, was tainted by its utility. Painting and sculpture were deemed to be merely depictive arts, parasitic on visual reality. Poetry, too, was mimetic, holding up the mirror of language to human action. But music-here was an autonomous art. To be sure, for most of its history it had been tied to texts of one sort or another: Lyrical, liturgical, dramatic. By the 18th century, though, Western music was well into the process of emancipating itselffrom the wordand hence, it seemed, frol'n the world. The fugues of Bach, the symphonies of Haydn, the sonatas of Mozart: These were explorations of ideal form, unprofaned by extramusical associations. Such "absolute music," as it came to be called, had sloughed off its motley cultural trappings. It had got in touch with its essence. Which is why, as Walter Pater famously put it, "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music."

The only art that can rival music for sheer ethereality is mathematics. A century or so after the advent of absolute music, mathematics also succeeded in detaching itselffrom the world. The decisive event was the invention of strange, non-Euclidean geometries, which put paid to the notion that the mathematician was exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with the scientific universe. "Pure" mathematics came to be seen by those who practiced it as a free invention of the imagination, gloriously indifferent to practical affairs-a quest for beauty as well as truth.

W

The affinity between music and mathematics goes all the way back to Pythagoras, who in the sixth century B.C. hit upon the arithmetic basis of harmony. Music, the.

Pythagoreans devoutly believed, was nothing less than number made audible. Ever since, Western civilization has teemed with musically inclined mathematicians and mathematically inclined musicians: Euclid and Bach, Kepler and Schoenberg.

The latest in this ongoing Pythagorean brotherhood is Edward Rothstein, a lapsed mathematician who is now the chief music critic of the New York Times. In Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics, Rothstein sets out to reveal the profound correspondences between these two enterprises, and to plumb the mystery of how both, despite their almqst gelid abstraction, manage to get to us, spiritually speaking.

Or some of us, at least. Rothstein is well aware that only a tiny elite knows what he calls the "giddy" feeling of doing pure mathematics, the sense of "extravagant freedom, and frightening possibility." Music, even of the highbrow variety, seems to be more democratic: We have all taken tonal baths at Mostly Mozart concerts, letting our thoughts wend their sweet way as we are enveloped by nice sounds and hummable melodies. Yet many of the greatest works in the Western canon-Bach's "Art of Fugue," Beethoven's late quartets-can be as unintelligible to the naive ear as an argument in differential geometry.

Happily, Rothstein is a wonderful guide to the architecture of musical space, its tensions and relations, its resonances and proportions. Whether he is writing about the opening bars of the "Marseillaise" or the D-Sharp-Minor Fugue from Book I of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier," his account of what is going on in the music is unfailingly

felicitous. Ditto for the math.

Instead of dwelling on the pedestrian stuff that one is made to slog through in school, he leaps straight to the heady heights of mathematical reasoning. Have you ever heard of algebraic topology?

It is the most abstract imaginable approach to the logic of fornl, a sort of rubbery generalization of geometry. To Rothstein, algebraic topology resembles "a mature artistic style" in its battery of elegant devices: "Homeomorphisms," "fundamental groups," "covering spaces." Not only do we painlessly become acquainted with these but we are led to see how they map onto musical structures-how a classical sonata, for example, is "an exploration of musical' space' " that, by establishing and transforming tonal surfaces, "creates its own topology." For Rothstein, it's like listening to pure mathematics.

But music must be more than that, or sensible people wouldn't sit through three-hour concerts. What do we descry in the parade of tonal forms? Heroes and shipwrecks, radiant beams and giant shadows, even-and this is mainly Schopenhauer's fault-the ultimate nature of metaphysical reality. Less fancifully, we hear feeling. Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" flashes anger. The adagio introduction to the finale of Mozart's String Quintet in G Minor oozes despair.

The opening of Mendelssohn's "Italian Symphony" is the soul of cheer.

How music comes to have this expressive clout-how it manages to sound the way emotions feel-is a conundrum that has withstood a couple of centuries of fevered theorizing. Some people have been driven to deny that it really is possible. Stravinsky, for one, maintained that "music is powerless to express anything at all." Rothstein is more reasonable. Music does model the tensions and resolutions of our emotional life, he concedes, altllOugh the methods by which it does so are "puzzling." The abstract structures of mathematics do not bear a similar affective freight; as Rothstein notes, no one has ever encountered an "angry" theorem or a "sad" proof. Yet these structures possess a reciprocal power, and one that to a scientist is just as mysterious: They appear to govern the essential workings of the cosmos. God, it seems, is a mathematician.

So the symmetry is nearly complete. Music brings to light hidden patterns in our inner, sentient lives, while mathematics does the same for the outer, physical world. Each, in building ever grander and more coherent unities out of abstract details, aims at formal beauty. Each, by encompassing awesome infinities, evokes the sublime. These correspondences make for a pretty enough vision, but Rothstein goes further. He gives the whole thing a Platonic gilding. Breathing new life into the slightly hackneyed allegory of the cave, he presents music and mathematics as paradigms of the mind's ascent from the shadowy world of appearances to the luminous one of intellectual essences. Both are "emblems of mind," he submits, borrowing the figure from Wordsworth; they serve as "a model for our coming to know at all."

One curiosity remains unremarked by Rothstein. If mathematics and music are two aspects of the same Platonic pursuit of truth and beauty, one might expect the greatest figures in both fields to-exhibit similar patterns of creativity over the course of their lives. This is not the case. Composerslike painters and poets-tend to grow more interesting with age, the very best hitting their stride in their "late" period. Deep originality comes to them only when knowledge offeeling has ripened and the heyday ofthe blood is tamed. Mathematics, by contrast, is "a young man's game," as the Cambridge number theorist G.H. Hardy sadly noted in late middle age. Scour the history of the subject as you will, you'll never find a momentous discovery made by a mathematician past the age of 50. The most startlingly beautiful theorems have often been the handiwork of teenagers.

What, then, is the aging mathematician to do as his transcendental vision begins to fail him? Perhaps the only dignified option is to descend into the sensuous world of music, and to write lovely, wistful remembrances of its Platonic counterpart-like this one.

0 About the Author: Jim Holt is the science-books columnistfor the Wall Street Journal and the U.S. correspondent for Literary Review. He also contributes articles to various magazines including the New Yorker and the New Republic.

A Conversation With ~~assador Ray In this interview, Siddhartha Shankar Ray discusses Indo-U.S. relations since he became India's ambassador to the United States in October 1992.

CONNIE HOWARD: What do you feel is the single most important thing that has happened or changed about IndoAmerican relations while you have been ambassador?

AMBASSADOR RAY: [ think what strikes me most is that we have really come to understand each other. When I say "understand" I mean understand each other's concerns and problems. I had the feeling when [came here in October of 1992 that all our concerns were not understood here and, also, we did not understand what was working in the innermost crevices of your minds.

So, I thought we should be very frank with each other. Tell each other exactly what we thought of each other, and then try to find out what were the obstacles, what were the difficulties that existed.

Before I came here I had read a considerable part of the history of our relationship. I came to the conclusion-and I've said this quite often-that the history of our relationship, the relationship between India and America, has been a history oflost opportunities. We have almost come together so many times but something would happen and we went apart. And, that's why I put it that we don't understand each other. There has to be greater cooperation, greater understanding, greater realization of the various aspects of the life of each other.

So, when I placed my credentials before President George Bush, I said, "Let us today not think of yesterday but of tomorrow.

And, tomorrow's mission has to include as one of its integral parts India and the United States working together in the closest possible amicable friendship and cooperation."

To that, President Bush, in his official role, responded magnificently. He saidand I remember the words very well because I have repeated them so often-"Mr. Ambassador, you've talked of a vision. A vision of the future when our two countries should work together in the closest possible cooperation and friendship. Rest assured, Mr. Ambassador, the American people also have the same vision." Then he talked about cooperation.

Now in October 1992 when I came here, for the first time there was a tremendous debate going on about trademarks, difficulty about copyrights, difficulty about intellectual rights, difficulty about sanctions being enforced, di fficulty about the Special 30 I sanction-human rights-this is happening. That is happening. So, we had a million problems. Gradually, I think, we understood what your concerns were and you understood what our concerns were. And that we are a democracy as much as you are.

There was no one in India who could just say, "Alright, I'll do this."

The perception, I think, in the very early years was that if it was said that something should be done and I said look it can't be done, it was taken to mean that we don't want to do it-not that before we do anything in India we had to have the consent of

the people and that consent wasn't there.

From my own experience I had seen that nothing could be done in India until you had the people. I was able to put across this point of view relying on my experience and by telling them what had happened. And, I'm also a lawyer so I had experience there, too, and with the rules oflaw that wOI:ked.

Certainly one of the most positive things that has happened in recent years is that lvith the changes in trade regulations in India. American businesses are discovering India as a good business choice. Do you have any advice for American businesses planning to do business in India and what are good investment opportunities there right now?

The new commercial alliance between India and the United States has identified four areas that would be very easy to get into: Information technology; power; transportation and infrastructure; and agribusiness. These four have been specifically mentioned but there are also many other areas such as mining, the environment, and the infrastructure.

But I would advise any American company to be aware of onc thing. We are a little slow in India. Things can't be done in a hurry. There are a lot of committees we have to go through. There's no restriction except the restriction that everything passes through a committee and that is the democratic process of re-

view. People want to have their say.

So, before they venture to do business in India American investors should do a proper study of the place they want to go to.

They should do proper research. And I would advise them, as I as a lawyer used to advise my clients when they wanted to have collaboration in other countries: "Yes, you go in but try to have a local partner.

Whatever share you give to a partner alright but try to have a local partner."

It does seem as though there are enormous industrial and technical changes takingplace in India now. Why is that?

Connie, you have to keep one thing in mind. India was not allowed to enter the industrial revolution. India was not allowed to gain any benefit out of two industrial revolutions-of the last century and of this

century. We are determined that the informational revolution and technological revolution that are taking place now will not pass us by. So we have to make up for a lot of lost time. And we are.

Americans are always curious about India. Are there any questions that people here most often ask you about India?

People ask me two questions most often. First, have your economic reforms come to stay, and, two, have you become politically unstable?

The facts show there is no going back on the economic reforms. Because, first of all, economic reforms came in because of the consensus of the people. When economic reforms were announced in 1991 by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, he was head of the minority government, because so

many states had gone over to other parties opposed to the party running the government. And Parliament passed a resolution saying all this is nonsense. Then elections brought new chief ministers to power in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra.

Each and everyone of them, after coming to power, declared that economic reforms are here to stay.

And we are very stable.

What kind of misconceptions, if any, do you think Americans still have about India-especially those who have never visited the countly?

Well, certainly, there is still a lot of talk about snakes and things like that. [Laughs] But I think all that is changing. People certainly realize that India is a democracy; they realize that we want to grow economi-

cally. And they realize that if we carryon the way we are, by the end of this century India will become the single largest democratic free market in the world.

There is a lot of talk about thefact that we are moving into a period of time that is being called "The Pacific Century." If you look at a map it certainly shows that India is ideally locatedfor what could be called a return of the ancient "silk road" route, with India serving as a land route to a great portion of the world. Will India be ready for it and will the infrastructure be up to the great growth that is taking place in India and other parts of Asia?

Yes, although we know that we have a great deal to do. The rupee must be fully convertible. And on the infrastructure alone we must spend $100,000 million by the year 2000.

If President Clinton were to come to you and tell you that he would grant one wishany wish-what would you wishfor?

I would say: "Yes, yes. Let us become really and truly very, very good friends. And, let us establish the foundation of a friendship and understanding that can never in the future be destroyed in any way."

I think the strongest benefit to being good friends is that friends can argue, friends can disagree, andfriends can even on occasion say: "Oh, you're era::y!" But, the fhendship remains.

Yes, I think we have now learned it is possible to agree to disagree. And, another point is that if we said yes to everything you ask us for, we wouldn't be a democracy. And, if you said yes to us in everything we asked, you'd consider that you had gone crazy.

Are there any personal goals that you'd like to accomplish during the rest of the time that you are here?

I would like, in the remainderofmy term, to cometo a complete agreement on nuclear nonproliferation. I would like everyone to understand our concerns. We were cosponsors of two resolutions in the United Nations for a complete ban-test ban, complete comprehensive nuclear test ban, and a universal ban on the manufacture of nuclear

weapons. And that there will be no first strike by anyone. There are other things too.

More confidence-building.

This is a sane world although we sometimes act in an insane way. I have no doubt that one day in this sane world we will come to an agreement that there will be total nonproliferation by everybody. We want every country to do away with nuclear weapons.

Since this was your first visit to the United States. what surprised you most when you got here?

Nothing surprised me. I was a student of American literature and American politics.

Abraham Lincoln was one of my favorites as was Thomas Jefferson. Through my studies I knew them all. I knew Abraham

"Americans realize that if we carryon the way we are, by the end of this century India will become the single largest democratic free market in the world."

Lincoln. I knew your greatest President of this century. I mentally knew Franklin D. Roosevelt. I thought President Roosevelt really put the United States on the international map in a very big way. And, the culture-the heritage that you have here-I knew that. A Iso, I was a lawyer for a number of American companies in India and worked with them. So I can say there was really nothing that surprised me.

The year 1997 is going to be called the "Year of the Tourist" in India. If somebody came up to you and said they were about to take theirfirst visit to India and, after they saw the Ta) Mahal, would like to know what else to see, what would you recommend to them?

Well, I would certainly suggest the South. But, it depends upon what they want.

I would ask: What is your area ofinterest-

Architecture? History? It depends upon what you are interested in. If you are interested in seeing natural beauty, go to the hills and go to the seashores. Go and see where the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea meet. Sit on a stone there and meditate. There is so much that I would have a hard time choosing. Certainly the Taj Mahal. But, then there are the Buddhist caves at Ajanta. Or you can go to the temples and see the II th-century architecture.

See a mango grove. It is a very difficult question to answer unless someone is very specific because there is so much to see and do in India.

If Prime Minister Rao and President Clinton were going to spend a private weekend together, what would you advise them to talk about?

That's more or less what they did. We saw the excellent results of such a talk on May 19, 1994, when they issued a joint statement that India and the United States were entering into a new era of partnership. I would now like them to have the time to sit and see that the main elements of partnership are being followed.

I would like them to talk about faith and confidence.

You must have both. You know, when Mrs. Clinton spoke at the Kennedy Center for our Gandhiji event [the 125th birth anniversary celebration of Mahatma Gandhi] after her return from India she talked about common ground between India and the United States. I would like them, the President and the Prime Minister, to talk about that.

Are there any points that we haven i co\'ered that you think are important to mention?

It all comes back to understanding. I' think that covers a whole lot of things. We must realize each other's difficulties.

Realize each other's concerns. It is necessary, it is required, it is inevitable, that India and the United States must understand each other much more and work together much more. And we will both benefit from such a relationship and friendship.

0 About the Author: Connie Howard is directol; Office of Special Projects. at the Indiana Un ivel's ity of Penn sylvan ia.

Petals unfold, to reveal a prayer And a devotional melody strikes up... in sheer marble.

The Baha'i House of Worship in New Delhi is said to be the finest tribute ever paid by the construction industry to the glory of a faith. It is yet another historic achievement

by L&Is construction engineers.

For over half a century. L&Is Construction Group has played host to history. Take some of the landmarks of our times The Nehru Stadium in Madras. the Stock Exchange tower in Bombay.

Or the country's highest viaduct being built for the Konkan Railway.

All of them carry ECes insignia of excellence.

Overseas. the ECC imprint is visible at the Abu Dhabi international airport terminal complex. two hotels in Uzbekistan. five bridges in Malaysia Of course. chances are you won't see L&Is Construction engineer at the landmarks he has helped to create. Already. he has moved ahead - further down a timeless road.

Tomorrow, a new project.

A new landmark.

Hostile Takeover When artists occupy offices, the results may be discomfiting.

Taking advantage of the abundant commercial vacancies in the Wall Street area of New York, a group of Manhattan artists (and one from Los Angeles) seized a floor of a half-empty office building and mounted a unique multimedia exhibit offering their interpretations of a real office atmosphere.

Sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, "The Office: History, Fantasy, and Irregular Protocols" drew lots of media attention and hundreds of enthusiastic visitors-mostly people on

lunch breaks from neighboring office buildings.

That the exhibit hit home is no surprise: All of the participating artists had slogged through the office grind themselves at some point. And though the artists were all women, their visions struck a universal chord.' One visitor, upon viewing Freya Hansell's ceiling-high stack of papers, confessed: "When my desk got that bad, I had to move into the office next door. " About the Author:

Marilyn Stern is an editor at Across the Board.

A Proper Burial

The Museum of Office Culture

by Freya Hansell

by Kay Hines

Hansell's display is a 20-year accumulation of her own papers-a nightmare vision with a touch of humor. "It's a metaphor for being buried

In a lighter vein, this mock museum display (above) traces the evolution of office life, with fossils of paper clips and primitive typewriters crawl-

alive," explains the artist. "One tries to order one's life, but it's never

ing out of the primordial type pool. Stamphenge is a mysterious ring of

entirely possible. No matter how many papers you deal with, there are always ten more."

columns attributed

to a cult of priestesses. On top of the columns, mes-

sages such as VOID, PAID, and NO CASH REFUNDS have been inscribed backward for the benefit of dyslexic gods.

A hilarious video accompanies

the exhibit. It warns of the upcoming

Virtual Office Brain Implant: "The ultimate in efficiency: The office you never leave because it is the office that never leaves you."

Acces sihili tyfIn -acces sihili ty by]udite

Dos Santos

Nylon twine fills a room, entangling four chairs. Dos Santos, who worked eight years for General Electric in Brazil, says her installation is meant to debunk the dubious promise of upward mobility in the workplace: "People have dreams when they start a career. But they come to realize that their space is more limited than they expected. If not promoted within a limited amount of time, it's better to leave the job and try somewhere else. It's a very painful process."

Receptionist Wanted

by Leora Barish

A live, caged cricket sits on a desk under a looming telephone receiver while an audio tape mixes the sounds of stock traders in a brokerage house with a singing cricket. On the wall, the shadow of a ladder climbs toward a picture of an inviting landscape.

Explains Barish, a screenwriter and film director: "The cricket is confined in the office but dreaming of its natural environment. Wherever we are, we're still part of nature, even in a highly evolved setting like an office."

The Power of a Singular Vision

by Nancy Barton

This Los Angeles artist pays a melancholy tribute to her father, an actor turned inventorbusinessman: Fred Barton invented the TelePrompTer. In the tradition of trade-show displays,life-size photos of the senior Barton at di Herent stages of his life appear on the walls, on the floor, and at a desk. An interview taped just before his death reveals a man full of regret at having abandoned his creative interests, a man for whom financial success came to have little meaning.

Sweet Escape

by Shirin Neshat

Daydreaming is also the theme of this piece, in which a video projection of the artist's eye-eerily moving and blinking-hovers over the window. Neshat, an Iranian-born photographer and gallery director, explains that, for a veiled Islamic woman, the eye is the only contact with the outside world. Her own eye is restless, yearning for faraway places-a desire echoed in the bilingual poem scrawled on the wall.

S>jkC~()Ar~J-i-?(:.,o/~~;S?~

~~~!¡~"!Jj!..'-"~~~tZI iJ~

ClY- - . r S"Tf1RTEbTO D~i fT OfF- OUT THE RCQI\~r';ROt.U;~WlNOOW .. ~,. 0 ~

I

If you're wondering what will be management consultants' next Big Idea, here's a prime candidate.

aDS nc

In 1987, recounts M. Mitchell Waldrop in his book Complexity, a researcher at the nuclear physics lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, caused a sensation by demonstrating a computer-generated flock of birdlike objects that he christened "boids."

On the screen, starting from a random distribution, the boids formed into flocks: Just like the real thing, they swarmed, flowed smoothly around objects, and merged together again in a twisting, constantly changing formation.

Yet there was nothing in the software that told the boids to generate collective behavior. They were programmed individually with just three rules: Keep a minimum distance from other objects, try to fly at the same speed, and head where the concentration is densest in the vicinity. Flocking is one of the mysteries of avian life, but here it was-a complex, ever-varying pattern of behavior emerging from just three simple rules.

It is a crude analogy, but when Mike McMaster, managing director of Knowledge Based Development Limited, a management consultancy in Berkshire, U.K., recently undertook an assignment to increase productivity at the construction site of an offshore oil platfornl, he did something similar. With the help of a cross-functional team, including pipe-fitters and welders, he distilled the project down to just four key principles. Counter to intuition, the aim was to produce not simplicity but a complex and adaptive intelligent entity that would adapt to changing conditions as swiftly and organically as a flock of birds.

Says McMaster: "The project is a complex entity already. The problem is, we typically kill the complexity with rules and rigid structures which block the natural flow of information. So what we do, we just look at the four principles and let the rest take care of itself, so that the creative complexity emerges."

The difficult trick, McMaster says, is to view the principles not as independent but as interactive, working together to produce a higher collective behavior that, as wit~ the boids, is different than the sum of the parts. Why four principles? "Because you can't control four.

Companies often say, can't we just have two? But that misses the point-with two you can't get the rich interplay that we're after."

If this sounds like Alice in Wonderland management, buckle your seat belts-there's much more to come. For several years now, math PhDs have been using the arcane calculations of chaos and complexity theory, pioneered at organizations such as the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico, to try to predict movements in trading environments, and there is at least one venture-capital-funded complexity start-up, the Santa Fe-based Prediction Company, in this field. Insurance companies, too, are deriving new approaches to risk analysis from chaos theory.

But beyond the first wave of mathematical theory, McMaster is one of an advance guard of explorers introducing the concepts to mainstream business. His forte is organizational design-and, he claims, although his clients aren't too hung up on the scientific theory, they're happy enough with the results. This stuff works.

Productivity reportedly doubled at the construction yard, and a chemical company that had already sweated blood to get the cost of a plant down to economic levels took out a further 30 percent by working to the same principles, McMaster says.

Other hardy experimenters are reporting business gains all over the shop. Farm- and industrial-equipment manufacturer Deere & Company is using insights from complexity theory to figure out how to handle rapid changes on its assembly lines. Understanding how components of a complex system interact could help it choose . the right manufacturing technology, it believes. Coopers & Lybrand, an international consulting firm, is helping telecommunications clients handle fast-changing strategy issues with a sophisticated business-simulation game.

As for Citicorp, chairman and CEO John S. Reed was instrumental in urging SFI to undertake a pivotal economics program, as a result of which it is now gaining "hard operational performance improvements" from its better understanding of the behavior of customers and markets. Citicorp senior technology officer Colin Crook declines to be more specific: "Suffice it to say that results are so positive we sure as hell don't want to talk about them," he declares. Complexity, he predicts, will be "the next hot

II

thing" in consultancy after reengineering-and when it appears, Citicorp aims to have ready "a solid cadre of expertise on the basis of our own experIence."

But complexity and chaos theory come with a builtin disclaimer-don't expect it to be easy. McMaster prefaces each assignment with several days exploring fundamental operating and design principles of intelligent systems, and, he says, it takes "a lot of digging" to get down to the base-level principles that should drive a work site or multimillion-dollar project. As he and other workers in the cause admit, there's not yet any fully developed language or accepted set of metaphors to describe the complex intelligent organization. Cautions Crook: "This is nontrivial stuff. What we're talking about is a real restructuring of thinkIng about how the world works and the way to handle it. A lot of conventional organizations just won't get it."

Command, Control, Complexity Complexity goes against the grain of just about everything that most managers believe in. Up till now, the history of management can be seen as a constant striving for order, control, and predictability.

Today's "enlightened" policies of individual empowerment and flat organizations are no different. The aim is still to proceed in an orderly fashion from the A of now to the B of the company's strategic vision: It's just that nowadays freeing up the troops to make their own decisions is assumed to be a better means of getting there than direct command and control.

The disorienting implication of complexity, on the other hand, is that there's no sure way of getting to B at all. Complexity says that long-term outcomes for a complex entity such as a company, a market, or an economy are essentially unknowable. This is because the relationships between actions and outcomes are nonlinear; through intricate feedbacks causes become effects and effects causes, so that in practice causal links can't be traced. And depending on initial conditions, apparently insignificant variations can be magnified by positive feedback into huge consequences.

"---l

It may be that if atmospheric conditions are right, the heat from a jogger in Hyde Park will set off a hurricane weeks later in Florida-but no computer will ever be able to track the chain of causes.

As if that weren't enough, managers have to cope with a second dimension of flux and uncertainty, explains Ralph Stacey, professor of management at Hertford Business School and author of two studies on management and chaos theory.

"Purely physical or chemical systems are deterministicthe rules stay the same, even if actual outcomes are impossible to predict precisely. But complex organic systems such as species or ecologies or societies are adaptive rather than deterministic in that the rules change in the light of the consequences of the behavior they produce," he points out. They evolve to different levels, often in sharply unexpected directions, at which point a new set of rules applies.

One simulation project at SFI is an artificial stock exchange in which traders "learn," evaluating behavior and modifying their operating instructions according to results: The simulation produces all the hallmarks of a real stock market, including surges, periods of little movement, and crashes.

Some managers, like Citicorp's Crook, respond eagerly to this radically different description of the way the world operatesindeed, it was dissatisfaction with conventional models of economic behavior that led CEO Reed to SFI in the first place ..

Others are deeply upset by its implications. "You have just set management back 15 or 20 years!" one apoplectic British manager reportedly exploded in one of Stacey's seminars. His reaction is not surprising. Liberating for some, complexity makes of management a fundamentally paradoxical activity, a confusing mixture of order and chaos.

For a company to be capable of creativity and novelty, it must operate in the area of "bounded instability" or "edge of chaos" where alone novelty is possible-yet without compromising the order needed to accomplish day-to-day tasks. "It's a knife-edge," admits Stacey. "If a company tips over into total randomness, it disintegrates ~ompletely; if it gives in to the very powerful forces

to adapt to a given situation and become a single-equilibrium organization, it ossifies and dies like the dinosaurs."

Adapting to Dynamic Conditions If the complexity theorists are right, some of management's most cherished shibboleths are in need of an overhaul. For example: • Conventional doctrine says that management is a negativefeedback activity-setting a strategic aim and moving the company toward it by correcting deviations from plan. Under complexity the picture is more complicated. The conventional theory is right for day-to-day activities-routine order-processing or manufacture of standard parts. But for creative activities like long-term strategy setting, it is dangerously misguided.

The distant outcome of actions can't be plotted, because the structure of the system makes the future unknowable. The corollary is that viable strategy is not something that is the result of prior intent by a foresightfulleader. Rather, it emerges from the multiple possibilities thrown up by messy group dynamics in organizations in collision with the environment. Accordingly, says Stacey, managers should think of themselves as gardeners rather than executives-"instead of intending it they must let it happen."

• In the management literature, executives control the company through orderly structures and procedures. If that's all they do, in a complex world the company is destined to go the way of Tyrannosaurus rex. Attempts to make the system stable work only at the expense of making it incapable of interacting with the environment to create an alternative future. Result: Stagnation and death. For a cautionary example, look no further than the economy of what used to be the Soviet Union. In a chaotic dynamic, power must be distributed to the maximum"real empowerment, taken not given"-which is another reason why the concepts are less than popular at the top of large organizations.

• Consultants emphasize that strongly shared cultures and values are essential to steer the company into the future. Again, this is good for honing standard routines. But in dynamic conditions, where the future consists of multiple, shi fting agendas, a monolithic top management will likely fail to generate the creativity to give the company adequate options ahead. For this, diversity of opinion and approach is needed to fight consensus. Straight-ahead thinking untested by different visions may be one of the most important contributory factors to the fall from grace of so many once "excellent" firms over the past turbulent decade.

• Most strategists believe that success is the result of maintaining adaptive equilibrium with the environment. If this were true, managerial free will would be reduced to the choice of getting the fit right or getting it wrong. In the world of complexity, the stakes are much higher. First, equilibrium is death. Second, in unstable, evolving conditions, the environment adapts to the company as much as the other way about. The implications are that the company can't blame the environment for failure-and the successful business is vertiginously free to

Chaos Unraveled The graceful images on these and preceding pages were computer-generated by Clifford Pickovel; an award-winning researcher at IBM and ~ prolific author on the subject of chaos and computers. In Chaos in Wonderland and three other books, Pickover invites readers of mathematical persuasion to generate their own chaos-with beautifitl results. He explains this complex subject thus: _ To

ancient

represents

the

man

Chaos

unknown-

menacing visions that reflect man's fear of the irrational and the need to give shape and fonn to

his

apprehensions.

Chaos

theory today involves the study of a range of phenomena where there is a sensitive dependence on initial conditions-that is, where changing a parameter very slightly in an equation or system can result in very different behavior.

From toys with randomly blinking lights to eddies of cigarette smoke, chaotic

behavior

is generally

irregular and disorderly. Other examples include weather patterns, some neurological and cardiac activity, the stock market, and certain electrical networks of computers.

Although totally dictable,

chaos

"random" it actually

often seems and

unpre-

obeys strict

mathematical rules derived from equations that can be formulated and studied. And, though it may never be possible to precisely predict phenomena like the weather or the stock market, one might foresee the global patterns of their behavior-the "order within the chaos."

create its own future. The trade-off, of course, is that it then must be able to ride the bucking bronco it has created. • Most firms accept the traditional view of markets and economies as self-correcting mechanisms: Major changes are damped down by the reactions they themselves engender. The resulting equilibrium is the best possible outcome in the circumstances. Over the past few years, economists like W. Brian Arthur, Citibank professor at SFI, have begun to develop an alternative view of economic processes that emphasize the operation of positive feedbacks, or increasing returns (or vicious or virtuous circles), in many markets. To the discomfiture of conventional economics, this makes multiple and apparently arbitrary equilibria feasible. Take VHS videocassette recorders or the DOS operating system for personal computers. Both won out over the opposition not through an optimum technical solution but when initial early gains in market share-whether through corporate skill, accident, or external circumstance-suddenly snowballed. Increasing returns ensured that the "winner takes all," locking the future into the past-as the fortunes of Microsoft Corporation, for one, confirm.

For a company to be capable of creativity and novelty, it must operate in the area of "bounded instability" or "edge of chaos."

Given the heretical nature of these propositions, it's scarcely surprising that most companies are approaching them gingerly.

Only now, confirms McMaster, are corporations getting interested in the theory behind improvements that have typically been gained in relatively small-scale operations-"they're beginning to say, ifit works for a division or subsidiary, why don't we apply it to the whole organization?" Citicorp, although happy to claim benefits in economic understanding and in analyzing customers, admits it has yet to bring the principles to bear on organizational issues. Says Crook: "For us the broader organizational aspects will probably lag the hard, tangible parts until we have a more profound understanding of it."

Citicorp, like almost all other corporations dipping their toes in these waters, is still recognizably a company built on traditional, precomplexity lines. So what would a full-fledged, distributed, self-organizing intelligent organization look like?

One role model might be the Internet, a complex and creative organizational form that is evolving its own rules as it goes along, without benefit of headquarters, central ownership, or long-term strategy. But perhaps you don't see chairn1en of the FORTUNE500 buying something that-well-way out. In that

case, try an example a little closer to home: Imagine an organization with a globally respected brand name that is used by 23,000 institutions in 200 countries and territories; whose market-leading products are used by 355 million people to make more than 7,000 million transactions worth $650,000 million annually-the single largest block of consumer purchasing power in the world economy; that would have a value of around $150,000 mi Ilion in stock-market teons but that can't be bought, sold, or raided, since the 23,000 institutions that create its products are also its owners, members, customers, subjects, and superiors, holding ownership in the form of perpetual membership rights. Note, however, that that portion of the business created by each member is its sole property, its value reflected in that member's stock price. Oh yes, and that for a quarter of a century has been growing between 20 percent and 50 percent compound per annum.

The name of the riddle? "A little ubiquitous thing called Visa," chuckles Dee W. Hock, founder and fonner president of Visa International.

Contrarian Hock has argued for decades that Newtonian, hierarchical organization in whatever sphere is an "aberration of the Industrial Age, antithetical to the human spirit, destructive of the biosphere, and structurally contrary to the whole history and methods cf physical and biological evolution"-not just irrelevant but a menace likely to lead to an epidemic of institutional failure. Convinced there was an alternative, Hock has spent much of his life patiently building an organization on a biological rather than mechanical metaphor, capable of evolution and self-determination.

Now the world seems to be falling in step. Organizationally, Visa parallels to an uncanny degree the scientific precepts of complexity and chaos-indeed, Hock dubs Visa and the Internet "chaords," seamless blendings of the principles of chaos and order, competition, and cooperation. And where in the past people scoffed or yawned, he now finds an eager audience for his views.

"The seeds of chaordic thinking are sprouting everywhere," he told the conference of the Bionomics Institute in San Francisco in October 1994. "It is my personal belief, although I would be hardpressed to prove it, that we are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another struggling to be born; a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced."

With institutional backing, Hock is currently researching how the pump might be primed by creating four or five more influential "chaords," stretching over the fields of education, government, social services, and commerce. Others take a more evolutionary line. But those who have worked at it agree that there is only one direction to move in. "Complexity is going to be hard for people to take and turn into the hack stuff that consultants are selling in the process reengineering area," emphasizes Crook. "Those who do understand it will be differentially advantaged.

In my experience, this really is the way the world works."

0 About the Author: Simon Call/kin, a former editor 0/ Management Today, is management editor o/the Observer based ill London.

Understanding Chaos In the basement of the London School of Economics (LSE), notes Professor Paul Ormerod in his 1994 book The Death of Economics. there is an extraordinary machine built by a distinguished economist in the 1950s to teach the workings of the British economy to his students. "Levers are pulled, buttons pressed. Sluice gates open, and liquids of different colors rush around the tubes of the system in a controlled way."

For three centuries since Isaac Newton, scientists have pictured the world as fundamentally resembling the LSE 's wondrous model.

Governing this world were principles of regularity and order. All things were the sum of their parts; causes and effects were linked in direct, linear fashion; and systems moved in deterministic, predictable ways. Of course, scientists had long been aware of phenomena that appeared to contradict this linear logic: The swirling shapes of flames in a fire, eddies in a stream, and cloud formations, for example, can't be rendered by simple linear equations. And economies, of course, obstinately refuse to obey the forecasting models. But still, scientists reckoned, these were exceptions that did not ultimately disturb the ruling Newtonian paradigm.

It took the development of chaos theory in the 1970s and 1980s [see SPAN, September 1985] to suggest a very di fferent model of the way the world works. Says Ormerod: "The single most important scientific advance of the latter decades of the 20th century has been the perception that the world is fundamentally nonlinear."

Chaos in this sense is a misnomer. Part of what has become the broader science of nonlinear dynamics, or complexity theory, linking disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, chemistry, economics, and sociology, chaos denotes a unique area of "bounded instability" as entities move between equilibrium on one hand and complete

randomness on the other. It is in this area alone that creative behavior occurs. Flames, eddies, and cloud formations are classic chaotic systems: Operating far from equilibrium, they are unpredictable and richly creative in detail, yet constrained within certain physical limits.

In nonlinear chaotic systems, the links between cause and effect vanish in amplifying feedback loops that can turn tiny initial variations into huge consequences-hence the famous example of the flap of a butterfly's wing in Beijing causing a hurricane in Hawaii weeks later. In effect, the future of such systems is unknowable.

It was quickly clear to adventurous thinkers in the social sciences that chaos and complexity theory potentially threw much light on human and biological organizations such as companies, markets, economies, and ecologies.

They too were complex creative systems made up of many interacting agents with a seeming drive to self-organization-people into markets, birds into flocks, embryos into cells,

simplicity into complexity. And unlike flames or clouds they are adaptive, so that the rules of their behavior change as they evolve and learn.

Points out M. Mitchell Waldrop in his 1992 book Complexity: "They actively try to turn whatever happens to their advantage .... Species evolve for better survival in a changing environment-and so do corporations and industries. And the marketplace responds to changing tastes and lifestyles, immigration, technological developments, shifts in the price of raw materials, and a host of other factors."

This world is not the one represented to the economics students of LSE. Things are more than the sum of their parts; equilibrium is death; increasing, not diminishing, returns are the rule; causes are effects and effects causes; disorder and paradox are everywhere. In this new universe new rules are necessary. Nothing, sums up Dee W. Hock, fOllnder and former president of Visa International, "can be made simpler without becoming more complex."¡ -S.C.

USICA: An Engine That Powers There has been a great boom in Indo-U .S. business collaborations ever since India embarked on its program of economic refonns in 1991.

And a new organization that has positioned itself to playa major role in promoting IndoAmerican trade, investment, and technology transf~rs is USICA, the recently established U.S.-India Commercial Alliance. USICA's Indian cochairman is A.K. Rungta, the head of Rungta Enterprises. The American cochairman is Jack A. Shaw, CEO of Hughes Network Systems in Germantown, Maryland.

"The first thing everyone wants to know about USICA is how it differs from all the other organizations devoted to helping boost India's business ties with foreign countries," says Rungta, who until December '95 was president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). "It's different in two ways: It's totally private-sector and it's country-specific. We're concerned with no other foreign countries except the United States. And we're not linked to the Indian or American governments-although we might approach these governments if we feel their support could help us in certain ways."

Interestingly, the idea and the initiative to set up USICA came from the Indian and U.S. governments-from the January 1995 meetings between U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and the then Indian Commerce Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

"They saw the need for a purely privatesector group with a prestigious and highprofile board," says Rungta. "But the Alliance was formally born in June '95 in Santa Clara, California, when Commerce Minister P. Chidambaram and Secretary Ron Brown inaugurated the new organization and hosted an information technology conference."

"Ours is a unique organization," says Jack Shaw. "Secretary Ron Brown and

Commerce Minister P. Chidambaram specifically wanted USICA to be a private enterprise-to-enterprise effort so that, although we interface with governments, our main objective is to work at the business-to-business level."

The Alliance has been busy fulfilling its mandate of promoting IndoAmerican trade, investment, and technology transfer. In September 1995 it hosted the visit to India of the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Trade Development, Ray Vickery. In November it sponsored an "India Day" seminar and an international food and dairy expo in Chicago. The same month in India, it hosted an interactive session with American food companIes. Another very important difference between the Alliance and other business-promotion groups, says Rungta, "is that we are focusing on four priority areas we feel India needs to develop the most: (I) information technology; (2) power; (3) transportation and infrastructure; and (4) agribusiness."

To identify, promote, and implement specific projects in these four core sectors, USICA has established "sectoral alliances," which have their own boards led

by Indian and American cochairmen.

"Another goal on which we are focusing," Rungta adds, "is getting more smalland medium-sized U.S. business enterprises interested in India. We're doing this through interactive meetings in places like the American Midwest."

Plans for the future may add other areas of focus-possibly textiles, health care, biotechnology, petrochemicals, and the environment.

"Let me sum it all up," says Rungta. "India is a highly populated country with massive natural resources. India's largest trading and investment partner is the United States. We need capital and technology, which the U.S. has. The United States needs new markets, and we have them. So there's a strong

synergy between our two countries."

Amit Mitra, secretary-general of FICCI and another key figure in gearing USICA into action, echoes similar thoughts. The key to India's economic takeoff, he says, lies in the four sectors the Alliance has chosen for its concentration.

"The Alliance is a unique entity," says Mitra, who received his doctorate in economics from Duke University in North Carolina and taught economics at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania for several years. "It combines in a synergistic way what in international diplomacy is often called 'first track' and 'second track' bilateral relations. First track is government-togovernment relations, such as the Indo-U.S. subcommissions. The second track is business-to-business relations. You see, the Alliance was conceived by our two governments. They together were the first track.

But they realized that governments should play only a facilitative role. They felt the Alliance's board should consist only of bus inessmen. Business to business. The driver in the driver's seat."

Economist Mitra pinpoints precisely the importance of USICA's positioning: "If the Alliance were only a government-togovernment entity, then bilateral political relations take on undue importance and constructive business activities fade into the background. On the other hand, if the two AMERICAN MEMBERS USICA BOARD

OF THE

JACK A. SHAW, chairman and CEO. Hughes Network

Systems

GORGE DAvlO,president United Technologies

and CEO, Corp.

GEORGE M.C. FISHER, chairman, president Eastman Kodak

MICHAEL GADBAW, vice president General

Electric

and CEO,

Co.

and senior counsel,

Corp.

REBECCA MARK, CEO and chai/person, Enron Development

Corp.

HARRY C. STONECIPHER,president McDonnell

Douglas

and CEO.

Corp.

WILLIAM B. STURGIS, president,

Cryovac

HATIM A. TYABJI, cllOirman and CEO, Veri Fane ROBERT C. WIESEL, chairman and CEO, Stone and Webster Engineering

Corp.

Business Ties

A.K. Rungra, Indian cochairman o/USICA, COll1merceSecretwy presents a gift to Ron Brown at the inauguration o/the Alliance in New Delhi in Jallu(//~v 1995.

u.s.

governments are not involved at all, then policy issues remain totally unaddressed.

So, the Alliance has positioned itself in a unique manner. The two governments are there, if needed, to address policy issues of direct concern to business in the two countries. But things are set up so that the governments keep a low profile~they are mere solvers of problems rather than potential adversaries in the bilateral process."

Elaborating on the four priority areas, Mitra says, "Information technology includes the whole conglomeration of multimedia telecommunications~telephones, computers, cable television, fiber optics, INDIAN

MEMBERS

USICA

BOARD

OF THE

A.K. RUNGTA, chairman, Rungta Enterprises DEEPAK BANKER, chairman and managing directol; Kunal Engineering Co. Ltd. SUBODH BHARGAVA, group chief executive, Eicher Goodcarth Ltd. JAMSHYD N. GODREJ, chairman and managing directVl; Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Co. Ltd. JAGDISH HINDUJA, Gokaldas Images Ltd. F.e. KOHLI, depull' chairman, Tata Consultancy Services SURESH KRISH A, CEO, Sundram Fastncrs Ltd. GOKUL PAT AIK, chairman, Agricultural & Processed Food Products Export Development Authority K.P. SINGH, managing director, DLF Universal Ltd. L.M. THAPAR,president and managing directOl; Ballarpur Industries Ltd.

The recently established U.S.-India Commercial Alliance is generating more trade and investment linkages between India and the United States.

the Internet, hardware and software, instruments, and services. Worldwide, this a trillion dollar industry, and India very much wants to be more in it."

On power, he says, "When we talk about power, well, India now produces 8 I ,000 megawatts of electricity annually. But to handle industrial expansion, we need 140,000 megawatts. That is roughly twice as much as what we now have. Who will be our partner?"

The third priority sector~transportation and infrastructure~involves improving airports and seaports, building more and better roads, freeways, four-lane superhighways, state-of-the-art road-building technology and equipment. In India one of the most common complaints of businessmen~domestic and foreign~is the undeveloped infrastructure.

Talking about the fourth sector, agribusiness, Mitra gives statistics to make his point that this is the sector which probably has the most potential for helping the Indian people.

"Did you know that India is the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world and yet it processes only 1.3 percent of these products," he says. "It's a$tounding; the other 98.7 percent is not processed at all. Compare this with some other developing countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Brazil. The percentage offruits and vegetables that is processed by those countries is as high as 60 percent to 75 percent! So agribusiness in India is a tremendous growth sector.

This is where we expect the biggest boom in job-creation~millions of jobs."

Summing up, says Mitra: "When India works with U.S. companies in the above four fields, it's a win-win situation. Both countries win. Nobody loses!"

Jack Shaw is equally enthusiastic.

"USICA provides a mechanism for exploring new opportunities to further commercial and trade developments between the United States and India. We are interested in getting companies of all sizes involved in promoting bilateral trade ties, and all companies are welcome to participate. Our

experience has been that businessmen associated with the Indian side are pragmatic.

We want to approach problems one at a time. I am very optimistic that India will emerge as the foremost country for trade and investment."

The USICA has already drawn up an ambitious timetable for early 1996. The big event scheduled for mid-January is the meeting of the main Alliance Board as well as the four sectoral boards. Commerce Minister P. Chidambaram and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown are expected to be the guests of honor. "At these January meetings," says Rungta, "we'll identify problems and try to solve those problems. There will also be a seminar on transportation and infrastructure. We also plan to inaugurate an information exchange link between BISNET [Business Information Network, a single-window online database] and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

"In late January," Rungta continues, "USICA hopes to playa key role in the expected visit of the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman. In February we'll be hosting a conference on information and technology. In March we'll be hosting a major agriculture show, Ahara."

In any discussion of the economic relationship between these two countries, one word heard again and again is technology.

During his state visit to the United States in 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi said: "We need new technology in a big way. A good part of it we will develop ourselves, but we must necessarily acquire the most ad-. vanced knowledge wherever it is generated."

And during his I 995 visit to India, Secretary Brown said: "We need to make sure that we use technology to create economic growth, to create new opportunity."

The USICA is testimony to Rajiv Gandhi's prophetic words; it is helping turn his prophecy into reality.

0 For more information

on the organization

described

this anicle, write to: The Indo-U.S. Commercial Federation

I-louse, Tansen

Marg,

Telephone: 3319251, Fax: 3320714.

New Delhi

in

Alliance.

110001.

Indo-American Man & Wife ~~ ~~',;;\III!t

Team Links Business Vinod and Linda Chhabra, from their offices in Bangalore and Florida, find Indian partners for small American businessmen and American partners for small Indian businessmen.

I

ist almost 6 o'clock on a Wednesday evening in picturesque Ocala, Florida. In a refurbished I05-year-old Victorian mansion, overlooking a rolling horse farm, what appears to be a routine business meeting is winding down.

Meanwhile, almost halfa world away, Bangalore is waking up to Thursday. In an elegant office at 303 Barton Centre, overlooking Mahatma Gandhi Road, a businessman is sipping his first cup of coffee of the day, and with an ear glued to the phone is tuned into the meeting in Ocala.

"Paul," he cuts in good-naturedly on the conference call, "this time remember to spell out the date. Here we go by day/month/year. And make sure the document reads 'Paul Whiting, son of....'"

"But I'm 64 years old ... ," Whiting whines, mimicking a toddler.

At 64, veteran Florida businessman Paul Whiting is a babe in the woods when it comes to dealing with Asia and he is discovering a promising new market in a country he had never considered-India.

If all goes well, he will soon sell his counterfeit currency detectors in Bombay and import tamarind paste from Madras.

While Whiting is being walked through the Indian bureaucratic maze, in nearby Gainesville, Tom Dubois and James White are loading a container with components for golf sets bound for India.

The small-town golf professionals, who had rarely traveled outside Florida, have recently returned from India and are working on a turnkey project to sell golf components and setup a computerized assembly plant near Bangalore.

About the only thing the small businesses have in common is a unique matchmaking company, which is the brainchild of an equally unique "Indo-American" husband-and-wife team who have a far-reaching interest in each other's country.

"Liberalization of the Indian economy is suddenly opening up many opportunities," says Florida businesswoman Linda Chhabra (formerly Linda Marks), president of Asia America Marketing Inc., in Ocala. "But, that's easier said than done. How do you find the right contacts and partners? How do you go about setting up the deal? Who's going to take care of all the formalities?

Unless you have a big-bucks marketing and liaison budget it's tough getting in the door."

In Bangalore, Vinod Chhabra, who spent 23 years as an awardwinning journ,alist in the United States before heading back to open the Indian counterpart, Asia America Marketing in Bangalore, observes: "So many Indian businesses want to sell in

byv.eMOllAN

America, but find it frightfully expensive and competitive.

"Meanwhile, with the keen competition and economic slowdown at home, American businesses are going global. They keep hearing about opportunities in India, but don't know how or where to begin. They are stymied by unfamiliar laws and a burdensome bureaucracy, and are wary about quality and rei iability."

That's the two-way gap Chhabra and Chhabra have been bridging since they opened their U.S. and Indian operations in 1994.

Essentially, what they do is match small- and medium-sized businesses in the United States, serve as a liaison, and establish a marketing program.

Paul Whiting's is a typical case. He manufactures pens with a patented chemical "ink" that immediately detects fake currency notes. While until recently he did well with his operation at home in America, he is now faced with increasing competition and has to work a lot harder to maintain his share of the market.

What he needs is a new market, and approached Asia America in Ocala to help him find a reliable importer in India. As his product is relatively inexpensive, easy to ship, and works on most major currencies, including the Indian rupee;the Ocala office ships samples to its counterpart in India.

In Bangalore, Vinod test-markets the product, and the feedback is encour?ging. It is unique, priced right, works well, and there is no doubt it will sell across the board-from banks and retail stores to hotels and currency exchangers. It also is rated as having a high novelty value, which means it will be relatively easy and inexpensive to market.

With import restrictions eased and customs tariffs slashed, there are several Indian businessmen who are eager to invest a few million rupees to pick up a product as exclusive importer, especially for a product made in the United States.

Vinod approaches some of them. Given the assurance that Asia America will help with the marketing, a garment exporter jumps at the opportunity. Now it is time to negotiate price and the minimum volume with a conference call.

"When the Ocala office is ending its day, Bangalore is opening for business making ours an operation that never sleeps," says Linda, who was recently in India for a family reunion and business discussions with her husband-partner. "We phone each other every morning, fax in the evening, bring in clients for conference calls, and the result is this," she adds, laughing, as she unfurls a two-yard-long phone bill.

The result also is that within a few weeks, Asia America has matched several manufacturers and buyers, hammered out many agreements, and planned a lotofpublicity and marketing.

For its efforts and expertise, Asia America charges a signup fee to cover its expenses, and a percentage of the total sales order or project price.

More important, Asia America in India and America formulates

a cost-effective marketing strategy and continues as each party's liaison office, thus establishing a smooth and long-term partnership. "Our clients consider Asia America in Ocala as their 'American branch office,' and that's just what we would like them to feel," says Vinod.

The result has also been a raft of unusual U.S.-Indian projects, some already completed, others in the pipeline.

The very first deal involved locating a reconditioned four-color printing press for a buyer in Hassan, Karnataka. "That was trial by fire," groans Vinod. "The paperwork came up to my knees and we took a bath with expenses. But it was an education that's worth several times what it cost!"

One reason was the importer kept changing his mind about the models available, which kept Asia America's staffin Florida shuttling between suppliers. "We had insisted on a thorough inspection and a guarantee, and ended up paying an engineer for several inspections," explains Vinod. "We didn't want to leave any room for complaints later."

The second deal sailed through. The owner of four sporting goods stores in Florida wanted a few thousand high-quality brushed-cotton shorts with his logo from India, an order considered too small to make it cost-effective to fly over or hire a buyer.

Asia America was the answer.

"What makes our operation unique and appealing is that an American manufacturer or buyer deals only with our office in Ocala," says Linda. "No headaches. For them it's as easy as picking up the phone and dealing with an American company right here at home. If they have a question, we have the answer from India byday's end."

The converse is true in Bangalore, which feeds its requests from a variety of businesses, such as an Indian producer of silica and a businessman keen on a tie-up with a manufacturer of educational toys, to Asia America in Florida.

Both Linda and Vinod evaluate each proposed project. "We don't dismiss any project out of hand because, quite frankly, we're interested in learning and making it enjoyable, and we're not going to get that just dealing with boring stufflike nuts and widgets."

One project that was under consideration, but not for long, was from an American who wanted a partner to set up an ostrich farm in India. "We didn't abandon it because it was zany, but because land in India is costly and we'd have an uphill task trying to market the idea of ostrich meat," says the Bangalore executive.

From the beginning, the Chhabras realized that matchmaking wouldn't be a cakewalk. "A lot of Americans expect business to be conducted according to their style and terms-quick, highvolume, one-time sales are fine," explains Linda. "Pushed by years of competition and product obsolescence, they tend to rush things but along the way fail to take into account the difficulties, restrictions, and cultural sensitivities and nuances at the other end.

"Ifan Indian businessman says: 'Let me think about it,' what he's politely saying is 'No,' but the American thinks he's really deep into the project. If we tell them the Indian businessman has gone to his niece's wedding and won't be back for a week,

or that he has taken the day offbecause of the solar eclipse, they figure he is stalling.

"On the other hand, Indians are curious, ask a lot of questions, want project reports, crunch figures, and love to negotiate and bargain. They take their time, and first want to build up a personal rapport with their potential partner," she adds.

In a very real sense, the Chhabras first bridge the AmericanIndian cultural gap between potential partners. "We want them to feel comfortable with each other first," says Linda. "After all, there is no right or wrong way. Both societies are built on a spirit of free enterprise. One is cautious and honed by generations of tradition, while the other is youthful and raring to go. We first try and bring them together on the same plane as friends, dispel any hint of mistrust, and then nurture a partnership."

The American Chhabra, who is compiling experiences and information for a book on doing business in India, is understanding, even appreciative, ofIndian ways. "Personally, I enjoy the slower pace in India, the constant human interaction, and genuine warmth for Americans. It may be frustrating when it's happening, but I admire the ability to roll with the punches and accept the unexpected and the tangled red tape with a shrug and ajoke."

However, Vinod feels Indian business has a great deal to learn from its American counterpart. "Efficiency, quality, and accountability are bare basics in America," he says. "Americans aren't hung up on hierarchy or pretense. They are straightforward and get to the point. That leaves them a lot oftime to be inventive and creative. When you figure that just about everything around you in your daily life was either invented, developed, or improved in America, it gives you a new appreciation." inod Chhabra's appreciation of America began back in 1969, soon after he landed in Albany, then a conservative city midway between New York City and Montreal.

"When I left India, I was a self-appointed editor of a small fortnightly in Ooty, a sleepy hill station where nothing much ever happened," he recalls.

"Soon after I landed in America, I walked into the biggest daily newspaper in Albany. Awed by the futuristic displays, I was standing in the lobby with my mouth open. A man walking by figured I had been separated from a tour group that apparently was visiting the plant at that time. Trying to be helpful, he asked me in touristEnglish: 'You look for tour?'

"I replied: 'No, I look for job. Take me to your leader.'

"He shook my hand and said, 'Hi! I'm Bob Danzig, the publisher. ' "Two days later I got a call from one of his editors asking me ifI could fill in as a night copy editor. He said: 'Nothing exciting,just slappin' on headlines, trims, cropping pix, replating the obit page-you can handle that, right?' "'Oh, sure, piece of cake,' I replied, and spent the next two days at the Albany Public Library trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about!"

Vinod spent the next 23 years at the same newspaper, owned by the Hearst multimedia chain, making his mark as a columnist,

V

If an Indian businessman says: "Let me think about it," what he's politely saying is "No," but the American thinks he's really deep into the project.

-LINDA

CHHABRA

investigative reporter, and editor, undertaking such plum assignments as reviewing restaurants, rating wines, travel writing, covering the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, and profiling the rich and famous.

Along the way he won several coveted international awards in journalism, and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer.

"Right from the beginning my experience was so typically American," he says wistfully. "There I was,just off the boat. They didn't even know if! was fluent in English, which was crucial to thejob, yet they gave me a chance!

"Bob Danzig's a big wheel now, and we still kid around in pidgin-English. Recently I asked him what made him decide to hire me, and he replied: 'I liked your chutzpa and the humor.' In India, a publisher would have had me thrown out because of what I said and how I said it. It would have been viewed as being cheeky and disrespectful! " While Yinod feels at home in America more than anywhere, he retains his Indian citizenship and gave America as much as he received. In 1993, when he decided to leave newspapering, his peers voted him "the best and most versatile writer" in the 24-newspaper Hearst chain and honored him "for enriching journalism with a sorely needed non-Eurocentric worldview."

His leaving Albany was dictated by matters of the heart. A few years earlier he had, quite by fate, bumped into Linda Marks, who had chucked her career in medicine to publish magazines in Georgia and Florida and was president of the Florida Magazines Association. Both Chhabra and Marks had been pen friends since childhood until they lost track of each other in the 1960s!

"I had never been to India, but its lure and appeal were still alive and fresh in my mind, as ifI had lived there in my previous birth," she says.

Now married, the former pen friends set about expanding the scope of the operations in Florida. "Finally, one day we decided there was more to life than headlines and deadlines," recalls Linda Chhabra. "We were in our forties and wanted to travel, spend time in India, Europe, and America, and do something new and exciting."

Named by a New York Times publication as "one of the most influential women in central Florida," and also as owner of an award-winning advertising company, Linda had built up a lot of credibility and a wide range of contacts.

Together, the Chhabras also were consulting for the New

York State Department of Commerce, Kraft Foods, Culinary Institute of America, New England Wine Council, Tourism Authority of Thailand, and were advising friends on doing business with India.

When India's economic reforms began kicking in, they realized that by combining their interest in America and India, and expertise in marketing, public relations, advertising, publishing, and journalism into an all-encompassing company, they could offer a unique service to small- and first-time businesses in IndoAmerican trade.

The result is two independent companies, one in Bangalore and the other in Ocala, that work exclusively in tandem.

"To make it affordable and useful, we offer a complete menu of services," says Linda. "Whether it's only publicity or only marketing, or to develop a project from scratch and see the whole project through to marketing, a client is free to pick and choose."

Today, the Chhabras are apart yet together, frequently meeting in Bangalore and Florida and points between. Located near Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, has been a boon for the Ocala operation. "There is so much talent and exciting new products coming out of the university, but the new inventors and entrepreneurs are strapped for investment money and opportunity," says Linda. "We offer them the whole ofIndia."

Projects on the block or in the pipeline for tie-ups in India include manufacture of decorative glassware, setting up of an Internet multimedia company, distribution of children's educational publications, and a turnkey operation to manufacture architectural forms.

Export and marketing projects from India include ayurvedic and herbal oils, custom jewelry, embroidery, even dehydrated petals for potpourri.

In Bangalore, Yinod sees opportunities galore being missed because oflittle importance being paid to marketing. "We're so used to standing in line, making bookings for cars and phones, even to become a member ofa club, that-to heck with the quality-we're glad when it comes through. The mind-set is 'Just produce and it will sell out.'

"The need to create a market or the idea of volume sales do not exist. But competition is changing all that and progressive businesses are realizing that effective 'marketing' no longer means just an ad in the newspaper. It's a combination of publicity, public relations, personal contacts, and creating and catering to a need ..

We try to impress that for a minimal investment you can sell 300 golf sets a month not 300 a year, or that proper packaging adds to demand and value."

Asia America's most enjoyable and challenging project is its involvement in conceptualizing and bringing together various American and Indian talents and products to create a golf course and health spa, along the lines of an American resort but with traditional Indian treatments, at the base of the Blue Mountains in South India.

"It combines the best of Asia and America," effuses Yinod. And when the Westbury Golf Resort and Spa is completed, in early 1997, it will signal the beginning of a similar Indo-American resort-this time in the Green Mountains ofYermont.

D

"We Want to Work With You" George Bush Visits India At the invitation of CWbank, former u.s. President George Bush visited India last November to deliver one of Citibank's Asian Leadership Series lectures.

Addressing a distinguished gathering of prominent Indian businessmen and senior government officials at the DUI'bar Hall of the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi on November 29, President Bush discussed a variety of issues-from global challenges in the aftermath of the Cold War to India's liberalized economic policy and the common prospects for the Indian and American corporate sectors to improve business and trade relations. SPAN presents excerpts from the former President 5 speech.

Let me just say what ajoy it has been to be back in India after a ten-year hiatus. I remember coming here as Vice President, being very warmly received by Indira Gandhi, your Prime Minister. Meeting for the first time Rajiv and his wi fe Sonia-the beginning of a friendship that blossomed.

So, I come back to a new India and I wish I were a young guy. I wish I were not 71 years old. I wish I was about 32. And upwardly mobile: I would bring what little bucks I had in my pocket and come over and try to make a joint venture with some of the successful people [in India] and then sit back and watch not only myselfprosper, but watch India prosper.

I would be remiss at the opening of these remarks, if! didn't tell you of my high regard for our Ambassador here. Frank Wisner is one of the very, very best in our Foreign Service. And it's a good thing in this dynamic time in India, that we have this kind of representation forthe United States in India.

In recent times the world has witnessed change on such a scale and with such finality that it's hard to believe how far we have come in such a short period of time. I'm speaking, of course, about the triumph of freedom in the Cold War. It was a dramatic period of historic transformation. And today, I am absolutely convinced-in spite of Bosnia, in spite of the horrors of Rwanda, in spite of turmoil we

see in other corners of the world-that the world is far better off and that the world faces a very bright future.

President Harry Truman, who presided over the end of World War II in our country and the beginning of the Cold War, once said: "Our goal must be not peace in our time, butpeaceforall time."

Such is the challenge that faces us today. The end of the Cold War has given us an unprecedented opportunity to shape a world in which freedom and the rule of law dictate the conduct of relations in the family of nations.

Many of the conflicts and suspicions of the past have given way to a new era of hope and cooperation.

Freedom and democracy are on the move.

But some think that with the Cold War being over, there are no more threats to. peace. That view is extraordinarily narrowminded. Today, people ask me: "Who is the enemy? Who is the opponent?"

Well, as I look at it, the enemy is unpredictability. And, it can be manifested by international terror, by nuclear proliferation, or by the international drug traffic.

There are plenty of enemies-different than those that held the world at bay during superpower confrontation.

Look at militant religious fanaticism in the Middle East. To me, I find it difficult to understand how people can kill one another

in the "name of God," whatever your religiousbelief. Killing one another in the name of God-that isn't faith, it's madness. And we must speak out against it. And we certainly shouldn't derail the quest for peace in a region that has seen far too much violence.

Look at the continuing plague of international terrorism.

I agree with Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. In his speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, he labeled terrorism "the world's greatest danger." Now here from a man of peace presiding over this fantastic country of yours is a very profound observation that should resonate all around the world.

But even in the face of these threatening challenges, there is much more reason to be hopeful. Today the twin tides of democracy and free markets are sweeping the globe. Countries which have known neither are now in the throes of managing the simultaneous challenges of economic and political reform.

India faces a situation which is in some ways quite different, and in some ways strikingly similar. On one hand, democracy is certainly nothing new to India. It's been here for ever. To the contrary, India is justifiably proud of being the world's largest democracy.

The Indian experience provides vivid proof to those struggling for the first time with the controversy, confusion and seeming

Above: The Finance Director of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, SD. Saxena, poses a question to the former Presidellt George Bush.

Leji: George Bush with the U.S Ambassador to India, Frank G. Wis/1eI; and the Chairman of RPG Group, R.P Goenka.

inefficiencies of the democratic process that it is worth every bit ofthe efforts it takes.

At the same time-and this is what has excited me about this visit-India has launched a series of bold economic reforms under the leadership of your Prime Minister.

Thanks to Citibank and thanks to Frank Wisner for bringing me to Bombay and to New Delhi.

Considering the brief period of time since the reforms were enacted in 1991, India has made remarkable progress in promoting the role of the private sector in the economy, and in encouraging private investment from both Indian and foreign sources.

During this same period, relations between India and the United States have steadily improved. I know it is fair to say that, every day, those relations are becoming not merely friendlier, but closer and wanner and, I think, more productive.

I believe this trend is going to continue, b.ecause I believe these reforms are both timely and irreversible.

The United States, for its part, stands ready not to lecture-much less dictatebut rather to encourage India in continuing down the free market path it is following,

and to work in partnership with India in pursuing our common interest and meeting out common challenges.

We want to work with you. We want India and her people to grow and prosper.

I know that India and the United Stateshave sometimes misunderstood one another, but I believe that those times are behind us now. And as we continue to engage India, I hope we can work together on areas of shared concern: Trade and investment, regional and global security, and, of course, matters environmental.

In many ways, it can be a natural partnership. India and the United States have many similarities. We have a common heritage offighting colonialism and standing up for freedom. We both know the pain and the price of independence. As the world's two largest democracies, India and the United States both are also large pluralistic societies, and we have seen how diversity can be a great strength and an invaluable asset.

For all your manpower-your population-it is India's intellectual power, entrepreneurial know-how also, that is especially impressive. And with the growing impor-

tance of technology and engineering in our transfonning world, India, in my viewand this isn't based just on a two-day or three-day visit here-is well positioned to playa leading role.

I was interested to [know] what Jack Welch, the CEO of that huge American company, General Electric, said during a recent visit: "India is a developed country with a developed intellectual infrastructure, and that makes it better than other developing countries." It's hard to argue with what he feels.

You here are the experts, but it seems to me that the remaining challenge isn't the ability to change, but to bring to bear that ability in ways that best allow India to fulfill its potential. Here again, I see great potential for cooperation.

Of course, the burden of initiative will fall primarily upon India's leaders to continue with this climate, to guarantee to investors in India and investors who can be attracted to India, to have the courage and vision to forge ahead.

I also know that American corporations-again I would single out our host, Citibank-stand ready to help build a better future for the people of India. Of course, they are interested in making money. But I have seen Citibank as a corporation with a conscience. I've seen what they do in communities. I also know they have the expertise, much evident in this country, to work with the people ofIndia.

We are interconnected; we are also interdependent. And the more we interact, the more we do business with one another and work with each other on security issues, the more I believe we will find we can help one another build a safer, more prosperous, more peaceful future for our children and grandchildren.

In the meantime, I am delighted to be here to see for myself how India is on the move, to see the great progress you've made. So to each of you here, I wish you success as you continue striving to build a future worthy of our heirs. Thank you very much for this unique hospitality. And now, I can't wait to get on that plane, even ifit's at one o'clock in the morning to head back to tell my wife of 51 years: "You missed the trip of your life, you missed the excitement ofIndia!"

0

Mysterious Illlages THE

PHOTOGRAPHIC

ART OF JERRY

UELSMANN

try to begin working with no preconceived ideas," says Jerry Uelsmann, an exhibit of whose photographs is now touring India. "Each click of the shutter suggests an emotional and visual involvement and contains the potential of establishing greater rapport with some quintessential aspect of the subject and my feelings toward it, both conscious and preconscious."

Uelsmann's photographs have been described as "images of astounding variety, mystery, and enigma." He merges disparate images to produce seamless, surreal compositions which are as emotionally and psychologically allusive as they are technically flawless.

Uelsmann's photographic montages trigger a response but never quite reveal their meaning. They contradict the viewer's assumptions concerning the predictability and literalness of the photograph. The viewer is asked not to believe but rather, in a theatrical sense, to suspend disbelief.

"It is important for me to create images that challenge one's sense of reality," Uelsmann says. "While many people are aware of a kind of camera-charisma, few sense the possibilities of sustaining mystery and magic within the darkroom. The darkroom experience affords us the opportunity for new beginnings."

Resisting the impulse to categorize his work "because it limits the artist and the viewer," Uelsmann says certain subjects clearly recur in his photographs, "images from nature; the inte-

I

created over the past 35 years documents his seminal contribution to 20th-century art. orn in Detroit in 1934, Jerry Uelsmann received his BFA degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and his MS and MFA from Indiana University in 1960. He began teaching photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1960, and has been graduate research professor of art at the university since 1974.

Uelsmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship In 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972.

He is a founding member of the American Society for Photographic Education, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and a trustee of the Friends of Photography.

Uelsmann has had over 100 solo exhibitions in major museums, universities, and galleries around the world in the past three-and-a-half decades, and his wor'k is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto.

Seven books devoted to his art have been 'published, and his photographs have been reproduced and discussed in numerous and other books, journals, magazines, newspapers.

An exhibit of Uelsmann's photos, a few examples of which are shown on these pages, is now in India under the auspices of the United States Information Service. Starting /976 last month with Bombay, where it was cosponsored by the Centre for Photography. as an Art Form of the National Centre of Performing Arts, the exhibit is scheduled to be shown in Baroda (January 1-15), Ahmedabad (January 16-30), Calcutta (February 1-20), and New Delhi (February 21-March 7).

It is difficult to explain the haunting power of Uelsmann's mysterious photographs. His own words may help clarify what he is doing.

"By our cameras we are introduced to an endless array of trees, clouds, rocks, objects, people, feelings, experiences, and so on, We wander through this varied landscape as contemporary archaeologists, anthropologists, poets and explorers essentially searching in our own internally directed way," 0

B

gration of nature and the human figure, and of exterior and interior environments; human relationships; and a psychological preoccupation in which the symbolism is sometimes obvious and sometimes mysterious."

When Jerry Uelsmann began his career in the late 1950s, fine-art photography was dominated by the documentary tradition of Walker Evans and the purist aesthetic of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and the West Coast School. Today the photomontage-the composite image generated in the darkroom by multiple printing techniques that employ several negatives-has become an accepted form, and Uelsmann is the modern master of it. This exhibit of some of his images

r-I--··-+-

:CU5fOMf[< ~

COfloWJNU

I

z

··r----'

••~

-l

co

0 co "U

co

0

0

or-

0 VI

I I I I

iD

0>

Drawing by Eric & Bill CD 1995 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

THE LIGHTER SIDE

~.

::J co ::J

~

0>

VI

:T

(l)

;,

~ 11 "0 .... O::c I\) (l)

00

:IJ VI

f\)

0

0

::J

iii'

~

VI

c:

0

VI

::J

c

JJ

C'

Q

0

Z

o' ::J VI

0>

::J '< :lE

~ co iD 5·

5'

Q

); < a. a. S.

~

:IJ

~ U1

0

::J 0

0

x-

.VI

iii'

"0 VI

~

~

~

(f)

I\)

I\)

0

~

~

Z

!Il

.... ....

3

CD

:?: 0

Q

N

0

~

~

::T

VI

e-a.

-u S·

0

~

!::!. :J CD (f) C

0-

en n

0 :J (f) CD

~

'< co co 0 :T co

s::

0"0 0=·

;,

g

"U 0>

Z

a::!·

(l)

0 a. ro

»

OJ .w to Z OJ

0

r0- o 0>

::c

"U 0

x

....

(j)

5 ::J co 0' 0 ::J"'< co

Q.

m

OJ "U 0

!Il

0> C -(Q ~ 0>

~ o·

0

(Jl

~

VI

s:

~

:IJ

VI

VI

I I I I I

::c

(l)

en C 0 0 "U :l> co co s· I Z I 3 iil VI

~

;,

00

to

_. "0 (Q -

"2

ON

I

a. ~ 0 (j)

a.

0 ro

Ci)

co

0

::J co '< 0

0

N' co Q.

(l)

-u

_.

0 2.

0

~ Sl

-

s.

s::

0> C

Drawing by Eric& Bill CD 1995 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

00

co

0

"Surprisingly, my attorney and J share a lot in commol/.

Starting JanuaJJ!, he comes here. and J go to law school. "

co

0 2-

::J

"Tiy to be more sensitive to customer problems rather than telling them to take a hike. "

a.~ Ql iD a.ro 00 3 III CD ro ro VI (l) 00 ::J

::J

~ '<3

0>

iii

VI

£?"O a. 0>

iD

co ::J

»-uz-u

0>

0

0

$. n .CD

0

x-

0 OJ

0>

::J

en

x-

~

0

'"

;::t

'"

-oJ

;:

» a. a.

~ r-

~

-l

(1)

a

00 00

Q ;; c

2T

o' ::J

;:

I

-u z

ro

Ql

(1)

(1)

00

"0

0

3

n ro

~ -u

00 00 Ql

0

0

0 ~ Ql 3 ::J

::J

co

0

(1)

S,

Ql

~.

Ql

ron

(1)

co

~

:E

::J

0 0

a.

a.

co .~

0

»

00 .00

"~ c

30>

" 0>

::J Q.

=.

;:

..c 0>

Z

co :lE 0 co

2:~ ~

0 0

~

-

S,

::J

m

0>

0-

;::;:

::J

'•.."

Ql 00 (1)

Ql

~

co

.z

::J n

~ Ql

::J

'tl :l>

00 00

n

0>

en

ro

00

Z

0>

a.

JJ

m

(Jl (Jl

C CJJ

m III

r 0 0 A

r

m -l -l

m :D !!]

(1)

Ql

n

co (1)

:::J

'< 0

ro ~ ~ () ::I: CJJ

"0

Ql

~

10 z Ql 00

ro

(1)

::J <

~ 0 C (1)

00

,.,.. ::J

"m

00 00

"0

10

(1)

(1)

Ql

n

:;: 5· (1)

S- 0' c :::J

ro

"0

CJJ

Ql

:t:-

Ql 00

0

00

a. a.

~

'< 0

0

SS' (1)

0'

3

0-

::J

:;: 0 ro :;: ro ,.,.. ~

00 ~ x· ~ Ql

ro

"0

0 "T1

:t:-

-c

n

co

Z

0 3

00

00

Ql

0

'<

ro ro a. ro a.

-g ro::J ~OJ n

~

S' ro Ql

0 9-

C JJ

m

CIl CIl "T1

0 JJ

s:

FOCUS ZjJaHOjl)/

UI aJe salouanbaJ:f

en

Painting Traditions

cr>

C')

en

lri en N

en

lri "" CD

cr> en N

"-lri N

r::.

c5

in

en CD

""-

en

0-

CO

N

~

'"'" 6 '"'" :=.

N

c5 cr>

lri co

"" en

co

~ ~

"cr>

CD

c5

N

c5

C')

en

""

en

co

~ lri

"-"-

cr>

c5

"-0'"

c5 cr> en cr>

6

"-en

lri C') N

en

N

en

N N

c5

"-~

'"&

lri

en

N

"::::

cr> co

~ ~ c5 .".

lri co

"-:::: C') CD

lri co

"-

"-:::: lri

0M N N

6

r::.

~ ~ c5 ~ cr>

0 N

6

l()

""-

N

co

co c5

::::

co

N

lri

"-c5

en cr> en

lri co

~

r::.

Hanuman revealing Rama and Sita ensconced in his heart.

~ cr>

DIGITAL HEARING AID

CD N

"-lri

r::.

r::.

The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque

c5

C;

c5 cr>

'""0

6

0

r--

S-

S-

D

'" '" rn

0> c

there are changes in his audiogram during periodic tests later, the chip can be reprogrammed," said

0-

0-

and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi have under a collaborative pro-

0 0

'"

CD 0

ject developed a new digital hearing aid that is supe-

ing from IIT-Bombay and was recently in New Delhi

6

6

rior to the conventional analogous hearing aids.

for discussions with his collaborators at AIIMS

Most conventional hearing devices cannot be fine-tuned to match the exact audiogram of a hearing-impaired person. Nor can they be suitably

CUDLS also makes speech discrimination easier as well as shuts off most background noises. "In real-life situations patients would be tempted to switch off their hea[ing aids because of background

co

CD

CD

'"

'"

(l:J

L{)

S-

Sc

'"

:;;)

Q)

..0

12 :::>

F

> CI:

adjusted to the minute changes that might occur later in the hearing. However, the new customized heart of which is a tiny powerful chip, "can be

"But, with the help of CUDLS they can converse easily,even in noisy surroundings"

:;)

tion required by hearing-impaired persons," says Neeraj Magotra, associate

w tn ::E ..I CI: :;) :J: a:: Q CJ :;) ~ CJ W 0 :J: 0 ~ a:: (J a:: Q. tn :J:

~l

~'U~ 'll

f(J)

ill

E

noises," says Vijaylakshmi Basavraj, assistant professor of audiology and speech pathology at AIIMS.

easily programmed to match the target amplifica-

••• CI:

Magotra, who is a graduate in electrical engineer-

universal digital listening system (CUDLS), the

Q

a::

'u'

different traditions around the country. The painting at right shows a scene from the Ramayana-

N N

'"

.':r:=

the

lri

'"

~

painting,

CD

~ ~

r--

6

urban

co

CD 0 0 (l:J

showing of India's folk, tribal,

cr> c5 co

"0-

CD

C W

'"

0>

:=.

co

C;

.~ 0>

'"

0

0-

'"

CD

6

r::.

(l:J

exhibition featured more than 100 works representing about 20

N

0-

0-

S-

c5

c5

CD

6

r::.

and popular

0 0 N

c5

0

US

co

0-

~ co

"-lri co

:=. '"

exhibition of Indian art, titled "From the Ocean of Painting: India's Popular Painting Traditions, 1589 to the Present." Billed as the first

N

cr>

co

lri

C')

lri

co

N

N

lri ""

'"~

C') N

cr>

en

cr>

"-

lri

~ ~

co

c5

co en en

l()

cr> co

lri

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art California recently held an

professor for signal and image processing at the University of New Mexico's

However, as technology for the new digital hearing device needs to be further refined, itwill be sometime before CUDLS can go commercial. "We're now

electrical and computer engineering department.

thinking of integrating digi-

> CI:

"Once that is done, the audi-

conventional

ologist

Q

(stores the circuit) and the

one developed recently by liT-Delhi to hasten the

•••

Z :;)

tn

i-=

'burns

the

chip'

device is customized for the hearing-impaired person If

tal technology

with the analogous

process," said Magotra -Kumud

Mohan

onventional economic wisdom tends to focus on trade-offs as the basis for exploring the relationship between the environment and the economy. It suggests that environmental policy conflicts with economic progress. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is trying to dispel this false dichotomy by leading discussion away from the somewhat reactive focus on trade-offs and toward a more proactive focus on ways to achieve environmental protection and economic progress at the same time.

The conventional approach to exploring the relationship between the environment and the economy is to pit one against the other-as if the real trade-off were between environmental protection and economic progress. By economic progress I mean quantitative and qualitative progress in the context of clean and equitable improvements to socioeconomic systems.

Quantitative improvements enable us to meet the essential needs ofthe present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Qualitative improvements reflect our capacity to convert physical resource use into improved services for satisfying human wants.

In general, theconv.entional approach ignores changes in technology and changes in cons-umer preferences, and it assumes that everyone out there in the marketplace is fully informed. It also treats expenditures on environmental protection as expenses, rather than investments, and affords no intrinsic or economic value whatsoever to natural resources, such as clean air and clean water.

In reality, none of these assumptions holds true. This is why less-than-optimal outcomes result for both the economy and the environment when decision-makers adopt an e;ther/or model of the economy-environment interaction.

One such outcome resulted when U.S. manufacturers in the automobile coatings segment of the paints and coatings industry failed to anticipate public demand for stronger environmental regulations or opportunities for cost-effective, safe, and clean technological advances. As a result, the manufacture of all water-borne base coats used in

C

the United States relies substantially on technology developed by European suppliers.

Another example of a less-than-optimal outcome comes from the agriculture sector, where either/or assumptions and market imperfections have left substantially un met the potential for realizing economic and environmental benefits. A recent cooperative study undertaken by EPA and the University of Missouri indicates that when compared to conventional systems of farming, cropping systems that incorporate reduced tillage, greater cropping diversity, and more efficient management of commercial pesticides and fertilizers can improve resource conservation, reduce environmental risks, reduce costs of production, and increase short-run profits.

To eliminate the false assumptions that lead to less-than-optimal decision-making, we must change the very nature of the debate over the relationship between the economy and the environment. This can be achieved, at least in part, by shifting discussions about that relationship away from the either/or model.

Environmental and economic interdependence is strongly linked to the development and diffusion of technology. As noted above, false assumptions about technology, tastes, and environmental investments form the basis of the view that increased pollution reduction can only be achieved at the expense of economic progress or vice versa, that greater economic activity inevitably hurts the environment. In reality, the myriad relationships between the economy and the environment are continually changing.

The key question, then, is not "Does environmental policy conflict with economic progress?" but rather, "How can we get environmental protection and economic progress at the same time?" Clean technologies and management practices have a particularly important role to play in answering this question, as do price and institutional reforms that encourage reductions in all polluting emissions per unit of industrial output. And because the demand for environmental goods and services, or for a clean environment, increases at a slightly greater rate than income in most cases, we know that the demand for a clean environment is going

to increase domestically and internationally.

We want to help give direction to that demand on an international level, so that when the market forms we can meet that demand with U.S. technology. Moreover, we want to provide incentives to industry to target its new capital investments in manufacturing practices and processes that are sustainable over the long ternl. In this way, we can realize environmental and economic benefits from the ongoing process of technology turnover in all industries.

The development and diffusion of environmentally sound technologies can change the way in which goods and services are produced and also generate benefits that can increase human welfare. The most promising areas for realizing the gains of environmental technology today relate to energy use and the development of alternative fuels, to biotechnology and the development of agricultural practices that use fewer inputs and harmful pesticides, and to industrial production processes that reduce or prevent pollution.

It's worth noting that industry's focus on environmental concerns results not only from the need to comply with environmental regulations; firms are also recognizing new business opportunities and realizing economic gains. Indeed, U.S. industry is racing to capture the world market for new and emerging technologies, which .the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates to be worth $200,000 million to $300,000 million and forecasts to experience sustained growth over the next decade. In addition, "environmentally friendly" has become a powerful marketing tool across all sectors, industries, and services, a tool that recognizes consumer preferences for products that have less harmful impacts on theenvironment.

Examples abound that let us "brag" about theeconomic and environmental benefits that result when the interdependence of economic and environmental goals are recognized, understood, and strategically advanced. Inform Inc., a New York-based, nonprofit, environmental research organization, reports that in many cases, initiatives to reduce pollution at its source have decreased waste streams by 90 percent or more and resulted in .significant savings. The savings, tallied for 62 projects, came to $21 million annually.

In one case cited by Inform, a mediumsized resin and adhesives facility in California made operational changes that slashed by 93 percent its major phenol-laden waste stream, which for years had been discharged first to the local sewer and then to an on-site pond. This reduction has saved the company more than $150,000 per year in waste disposal and potential legal costs. In another case, a reagent chemicals plant in New Jersey computerized its materials tracking system, identified 21 [waste] source reduction initiatives, and cut more than 270,000 kilograms of waste to achieve annual savings exceeding hillfa million dollars.

State governments also have documented some good examples. Minnesota estimates that six manufacturers using recyclable materials have created around 1,700 jobs, $39 million in new wages and an increase of$l 00 million in gross state product. Maine reports that recycling added nearly $300 million in wages, profits, savings, and secondary impacts, as well as more than 2,000 jobs to its economy. There are many more examples, and we want to continue to add to them.

One of EPA's driving principles is an uncompromising commitment to environmental goals, while allowing flexibility as to how those goals are met. This combination of uncompromising commitment and flexibility is designed to yield innovation and jobs, as well as better environmental results.

The agency recently announced a major initiative to work closely with U.S. industry, states, and environmental groups to explore-on an industry-by-industry basis-coordinated rule-making, pernlit streamlining, multimedia compliance and enforcement opportunities, and pollution prevention and environmental technology opportunities that offer "cleaner, cheaper" environmental results. Through initiatives such as these, we can expose the false premises that undennine constructive dialogue on the environment and the economy.

Moreover, by demonstrating the interdependence of environmental and economic goals, we can create a new model of thinking that encourages decision-makers to leverage the positive relationship between environmental protection and economic progress.

by PAUL R. PORTNEY

welcome this opportunity to react to David Gardiner's views on environmental regulation and its connection to economic growth. Because of the importance of this connection, and the key role that Gardiner's office of policy, planning, and evaluation plays in EPA's analyses of such issues, his willingness to exchange views is encouraging.

On several key points, I find myself in substantial agreement with him. For instance, the debate over environmental regulation has often made it seem that we must choose-in an either/or fashion-between economic growth and environmental quality. In fact, the two can coexist.

For example, between 1970 and 1990, per capita real disposable personal income in the United States (the best measure of what the average person has available to spend) increased by 42 percent. Meanwhile, concentrations of airborne lead, perhaps the most harmful of all the common air pollutants, fell by 90 percent between 1983 and 1990 alone.

In addition, the period 1970-90 saw significant reductions in ambient concentrations of sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide in almost every major metropolitan area of the United States, as well as significant-though much less unifornl-improvements in water quality.

Strictly speaking, then, we do not face an "either/or" choice when thinking about economic growth and environmental quality, and it is wrong to suggest otherwise.

I also agree with Gardiner that new environmental regulations do not inevitably lead to plant closures and unemployment. In fact, as he points out, a substantial numberofpeopIe are now employed in what might loosely be referred to as the "environmental industry." (Total U.S. employment in this industry is about one million people.) This positive side of the "jobs" issue is routinely ignored by critics of regulatory programs.

Finally, I agree wholeheartedly with the emphasis Gardiner places on the importance of developing cheaper ways of meeting the goals of U.S. environmental policy. Twenty years of careful research have demonstrated that we can meet our present environmental goals for a fraction (perhaps as little as 50 percent) of the $130,000 million we now

I

spend each year to comply with federal environmental regulation. Even if the annual savings were as little as ten percent, or $13,000 million, this would be roughly equivalent to all federal income assistance to poor families and nearly three times the amount of federal assistance to schools for disadvantaged children. We have to take advantage of opportunities like this.

Despite these points of agreement, however, I take issue with some of what Gardiner has to say. And I disagree fundamentally with a message I believe is implicit in his remarks: We can avoid painful choices when setting environmental goals and instead "have it all." That is simply not true, and we had better recognize this admittedly unpleasant reality if we are to fashion wise economic and environmental policies.

Gardiner refers several times to favorable job impacts from environmental measures.

But we need to keep three things in mind when thinking about jobs and regulation.

First, despite much rhetoric from both sides, environmental regulation will never have much of an impact on the aggregate level of employment in the United States. Rather, total employment is determined by much broader forces-such as domestic and international fiscal and monetary policy, attitudes toward saving and investment, and the quality of om labor force. True, regulation can "create" or "destroy" jobs in the short run, but only temporarily; in the long run, the opportunities for productive employment depend on the factors identified above.

Second, the environmental industry is now and probably always will be relatively small in the grand scheme of things. (The one million jobs in the environmental industry represent about eight-tenths of one percent of total civilian employment in the United States.) As economist Richard Schmalensee has pointed out, the yearto-year fluctuation in total U.S. employment is sometimes only slightly smaller than the whole of the environmental industry. This is emphatically not to disparage that industry-indeed, the United States enjoys a favorable balance of trade in environmental goods and services, one I hope will grow larger still. But if given the choice between

world dominance in the environmental industry or, say, a comparably strong position in automobile manufacturing, chemical production, or agriculture, we would be foolish not to choose any ofthe latter.

Third, even if environmental regulation could affect the overall level of employment in the long term, counting jobs created or destroyed is simply a poor way to evaluate environmental policies. Consider a regulation that resulted in the closure of a large factory employing hundreds of workers. While surely lamentable, this might be a very good policy from an overall social standpoint if the factory simply could not operate without discharging substances very harmful to human health and the environment.

Conversely, one could envision a regulatory program that in the short tern1 "created" jobs for hundreds or even thousands of workers.

Yet if this program did little or nothing to improve environmental quality, it would be foolish to implement it despite its employment effects-the environmental pork barrel is no more benign than that from which other kinds of make-work projects are often plucked.

Separating Wheat From Chaff How then do we distinguish wise from unwise policy proposals? The answer is at once very simple and very complicated. In my view, desirable regulations are those that promise to produce positive effects (improved human health, ecosystem protection, aesthetic amenities) that, when considered qualitatively yet carefully by our elected and appointed officials, more than offset the negative consequences that will result (higher prices to consumers, possible plant closures, reduced productivity). In other words, wise regulations are those that pass a kind of common sense benefit-costtest.

Three quick points are in order. First, and obviously, this type of evaluation is more easily described than done. Detern1ining when the pros swamp the cons is often terribly difficult for anyone of us to figure out; add the fact that we all have a different system of weights and measures, and you have the makings of environmental policy quagmires and donnybrooks.

Second, note my emphasis on a qualitative weighing of benefits and costs. While

this may make me persona non grata among my f~llow economists, I do not believe that a full-blown benefit-cost analysis-one in which all favorable and unfavorable effects must be expressed in dollar terms-should ever be the basis for a regulatory decision. In my view, uncertainties about valuation, the choice of a discount rate (and sometimes even whether to discount future effects at all), the appropriate handling of distributional concerns, and perhaps other problems, will always militate against policymaking by reliance on quantitative benefit-cost alone.

Third, these first two observations should not be taken to suggest that quantitative benefit-cost analysis has no useful role to play in environmental policymaking. Not only can this type of analysis help put on an equal footing many effects that seem incommensurable at first blush, but it can also reveal starkly the implicit values we hold that, understandably, we often are reluctant to express in dollars and cents. Better to make such trade-offs openly and explicitly, where all can see them, than to obscure them by pretending that they do not exist.

Moreover, contrary to some assertions, benefit-cost analysis is perfectly capable of supporting stringent environmental regulation. Among other policies, benefit-cost analyses have supported the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970, the removal of lead from gasoline, and the phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) because of their role in stratospheric ozone depletion. To be sure, benefit-cost analyses have also cast serious doubt on the wisdom of certain other environmental proposals. One thing we can be sure of is this: Environmental statutes that prohibit even the qualitative weighing of benefits and costs in standard-setting ensure uninformed policymaking.

Cost-Free Regulation?

Note my insistence that there will be costs to any regulation. Gardiner provides examples that suggest environmental regulation often jogs firms into discovering moneymaking opportunities about which they were previously ignorant. In these cases, he implies, citizens get the benefits ofa cleaner environment while the regulated firm makes out well, too. In such cases, do we escape the

unpleasantness of trade-offs?

I think not. First, while there surely will be cases where complying with a regulation causes a firm to recognize a moneymaking opportunity it had been overlooking, I think it unlikely that such instances abound or that the associated profits will be very large.

While corporations are hardly the paragons of efficiency that economics textbooks sometimes suggest, a kind of Darwinian market discipline does exist that forces firms to search out and take advantage of profitable opportunities.

More important, suppose a firm does realize profits rather than incur out-of-pocket costs when complying with an environmental regulation. In this case, surely, the regulation is costless, right? Wrong. While much more subtle, there is a cost here, too--an opportunity cost that takes the forn1 of the returns the firm would have earned had it invested its expenditures on environmental compliance in other areas-say, on expanding its plant, retraining its work force, or intensifying its research and development efforts. In the same vein, incidentally, there is an opportunity cost associated with a film's investment in any of the latter activities, even if that investment pays off handsomely. This cost is measured by what the firn1 could have earned had it put the funds to another use.

While opportunity costs are much less obvious than out-of-pocket expenditures for air or water pollution control equipment, cleaner fuels, or waste cleanup, they are no less real. Moreover, because it will never be possible to spend the same dollars on two things at once, a cost will always be associated with each environmental regulatory program. In some cases, it may take the form of out-of-pocket expenditures; but even when regulatory compliance helps a finTI make money, we must be sophisticated enough to ask how well the firm would have done if it had put that same money to a di fferent use.

In this regard, then, we can never have our cake and eat it too. Spending money in pursuit of environmental goals has been and can be a very wise use of society's scarce resources. But there will always be a cost to environmental regulatory programs, and environmental "paradigms" that promise otherwise are misleading and destined to D disappoint.

After helping to build advanced communications networks around the world, AT&T is doing the same here in India.

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&T business 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&T Bell 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.

ATlaT _.----You r True Choice

OBjEtS

D'ARt