February/March 1996

National Parks

of Ho eon

The Net

ood Nei ood Discovering America on My Belly Sf

your name on the most prestigious

address

in

town (that's where we are

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 ?ltea-Ho

~U4iHoe<U

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

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

Name Company's Address

Name

Plan

A LETTER

FROM

ince my arrival in India I've been impressed by the strength of the environmentalist movement in this country. As one who has worked as an environmental journalist, I'm acutely aware of these issues. I think one reason there is such a strong environmentalist movement here is the Indian heritage of ahimsa, strengthened by Gandhiji's philosophy of the spiritual value of a life of simplicity, of "living lightly on the earth."

The United States Government is concerned about the world's environmental problems because these problems are truly global in their implications and can be solved only through international cooperation.

Four basic environmental problems have been stressed by the world's scientific community: (I) The greenhouse effect and consequent dangers to the Earth's climate; (2) the depletion of the ozone layer; (3) the extinction of species; and (4) environmental degradation and population growth.

S

The greenhouse effect. The human race pollutes the atmosphere with enormous amounts of carbon dioxide that traps the sun's heat just as heat is trapped in a greenhouse. This effect contributes to global climate change, which could be disastrous to agriculture, human health, indeed human existence. What is being done? The United States and other countries have pledged to reduce the world's carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 as well as to define what steps should be taken beyond 2000.

Depletion of the ozone layer. The consequent increase in ultraviolet radiation threatens people everywhere with skin cancer and possible dangers to the whole human immune system. The U.S. and other nations have agreed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out use of ozone-depleting chemicals, the chlorofluorocarbons.

Extinction of species. Living species-animals and plants-now vanish 1,000 times faster than at any time in the past 65 million years. The extinction of animal and plant species depri ves the world of potential foods. and medicines. It is also a kind of "genetic erosion." U.S. Vice President Al Gore, in his 1992 book on environmentalism (Earth in the Balance), says that one aspect of genetic erosion is the loss of germ plasm. Through genetic engineering, scientists can develop plants resistant to new conditions on Earth. And the scope of genetic engineering is drastically reduced as thousands of species become extinct.

THE

PUBLISHER

The United States and the international community have developed a program to protect the world's coastal areas from land-based pollution, which is responsible for destroying many aquatic species. The U.S. also has signed the Biodiversity Convention, achieved a ban on destructive drift-net fishing, and has consistently worked to stop the worldwide trade in elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn, which threatened two animal species.

Environmental degradation and population growth. The population explosion is being felt by nearly all countries. The complexity of population issues was discussed in an article in the December 1995 SPAN, "How Many People Can the Earth Support?"

It is difficult to say which of these four basic environmental problems is the most serious. They all are. But the one that's had the most news coverage in the last year has been the greenhouse effect and the way it's apparently changing the Earth's climate.

The ten hottest years in recorded global history have all occurred since 1980. In September 1995, 2,500 scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement on the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe in the next century.

Climatologist James Hansen says the greenhouse effect is doing more than creating globa:I warming. It is producing more weather and climate extremes of all kinds-cold as well as hot, wet as well as dry. The recent paralyzing snowstorm and subsequent cold wave that crippled the eastern seaboard of the U.S. might be traced to the greenhouse effect, for example. So perhaps were North India's winter of 1994-95, one of the coldest on record, and the summer of '95, one of the hottest in history. These extremes may fit scientists' forecasts of what the greenhouse effect will be.

The Global Climate Coalition suggests that we have from 40 to 240 years to stabilize greenhouse gases before the Earth and humanity are in real danger. Dealing with environmental problems requires a determined effort by people and their governments, here in India, in the United States, and elsewhere.

Vice President Gore says in his book that many people are unwilling to look beyond themselves and see the effect of their actions on their children and grandchildren. This myopic attitude must change. As the Vice President wrote: "The faith that is so essential is the faith that we do have a future. We can believe in that future and work to achieve it and preserve it, orwe can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours."

- E.A.W.

HOII ON THINIT E-mail was last year's way of communicating.This year, itis the Web site: A virtual home where millions can "visit" you.

--

,..-'-

~:\i,~.~

Reprinted

by permission;

Copyright

'01995

John Seabrook.

Originally

in Tift".I'i('\l'

D

uring my first year in boarding school, I lived in a large open room with 35 other l3-year-old boys. It was like a model built to observe aspects of primate behavior from above. Each boy had an alcove and a curtain to pull in front of it, but the other boys did not regard what was within the boundaries of that cloth-and-plywood square as your personal space. These days, other people, like my fellow third formers, can wander in and out of my on-line personal space almost at will. In going online, you make some of your personal space available to other people; that is partly the point of the exercise. In this sense, online home life is closer to socialism than anything most people in the United States experience at home. At Brook Farm, the famous transcendentalist experiment in communal living which existed in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the 1840s, the main community building was called the Hive-the same metaphor that Kevin Kelly uses in his recent book, Out a/Control, to describe social life on computer networks.

A home in the real world is, among other things, a way ofkeeping the world out. If you buy space in what used to be a warehouse, gut it, and hire someone to turn it into a home, as my wife and I did, you invite the world into your life for a while, but when the work is done you have walls and a threshold. Of course, you never shut the

world out entirely,just as we will never get rid of all the little packets of sugar that the guys who built our loft brought along on the job with their coffee, but at least you have your privacy. It's like being inoculated with a little bit of the world, which makes you better able to survive the whole world.

An on-line home, on the other hand, is a little hole you drill in a wall of your real home to let the world in. E-mail, chat, postings, and other forms of computer-based communication that I engage in wh iIe slouched in my faux-corduroy padded chair, with a Power Book on my lap, are like the coded tappings on the walls of adjoining prison cells in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. An on-I ine home built for solitude doesn't make sense, maybe because people tend to be alone in front oftheir computers when they log on.

Building a home on-line means setting up some sort of private space for yourself within the public space of the network. By private space I mean the intimate airways of an E-mail exchange, which is like the space that is filled by a telephone conversation.

Now there is a new kind of on-line private space: You can have what's called a "home page" on the World Wide Web. The Web is technically only a part of the Internet (the Web is a graphics-intensive application running on top of the Net's operating system), but /

it seems to be rapidly taking over the Net, and one day soon the Net as we know it may look like a !'orse-drawn carriage next to the Web's Model T. No one owns the Web, but anyone can own space on it: The space is cheap and, theoretically, infinite.

Cyberspace also makes available abundant public space-common areas where small or large numbers of people can gather.

These public spaces might be "chat rooms," where people can talk with each other in real time; orthey might be "forums," where peopie contribute postings to discussions organized around'a topic; or they might be group game-playing spaces known' as MUDs and MOOs. Unlike telephone space, these public spaces often contain a record of past conversations, and as this record grows over time it becomes a history. Then the history is shaped into an ideology. It is interpreted and reinterpreted. It means something.

Within the public spaces, private communication is also possible. Private and public modes of discourse are the Sheetrock and sealing compound from which an on-line home is made.

A 17-year-old friend of mine has found a home in a role-playing room on America Online (AOL). A while ago, he met a girl there, Melynda, who, unlike many feri1aleusers, actually gives Melynda as her user name. Now whenever he logs on to AOL he uses the ,/,'member online" function to see ifMelynda is signed on. lfshe is,

.~~

/-J'

~-4-;':j- _/)

,I

/'

.1""- /.."

,,/

.,/

-:~~~i? .,of!'

~:;,;~?r

. .c.:~..- ' ~~~;~

~~~~~;:d'

:~:;>,~:r

they jointly open a private chat window on their screens and type messages to each other while watching the group discussion scroll past in another window. Part of what they discuss in their private space is the stuff that people are saying in the public window.

They're like junior-high kids meeting at their lockers and watching other students pass by in the hall.

When I first went on-line, the nomadic quality of existence in cyberspace was a big part of the appeal. It was like taking an extended camping trip in the backcountry ofa national park: You follow a path through the wilderness, and when you reach the designated campsite, or when you get tired, or when the weather tu':!1sugly, you unpack and put up your high-tech geodesic dome for the night. In the morning, you stuff your home into its nylon sack and move on. ut aftera while I gottircd of camping out and started looking for a place to settle down. For me, finding a home on-line has meant finding a group small enough to resolve itself into a social organization I could become a part of. I began house hunting on the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), one of the older computer conferencing systems. Some of the earliest members on the WELL lived on the Farm, a commune in Tennessee, back in the 1970s. Stewart Brand, who helped found the WELL, recruited people from the Fann specifically because of their communal-living experience. Brand says they brought a lot oflessons to the WELL: "Don't overwork and underappreciate the females, or they leave, and then the party's over. Don't invest much in a charismatic leader: He will steal everything you've got and then blame you for not having any more. It takes more than a sharp stick and earnestness to make a garden produce food. Stu ffl ike that." CliffFigallo, a Farm recruit, has written to the WELL about life on the Farm:

B

lection of pages of which the home page is the natural starting point) is mainly a commercial enterprise, it doesn't have to be. It's also a way to meet people. You want guests to have a good time when they visit your home page, and you hope theywill take away a favorable impression of you. You can link your home page to the home pages offriends or family, or to your employer's Web site, or to any other site you like, creating a kind of neighborhood for yourself. And you can design your page in any way you wish, and furnish it with anything that can be digitized-your ideas, your voice, your causes, pictures of your scars, or your pets, or your ancestors. You can have a professional photographer come and take pictures of your apartment, and then upload those pictures onto the Web, or you canjust describe your day. You can describe your upstairs neighbor's day, as one Web denizen does on his home page:

l04.alfQn;

1 •• t~J'

~t'sH

••••

I/VVY

?1 Vh.

1_1 ••, _ ••~ull.I1oO.1

stoo171

H~

I

I

HtlS,.rch

H•.tOhotOf~(

I keep t.he!l.cpktUr'C:1near my computet like f 5Omttimr::s fcd when

I'm on-lJne.

f"'lof$9t'~

beciltSt

A certlill

I

ihcy look di..'d'

Qugh! In the htildllghtt k:cliog. The)' .•.•. erotth.>n ln4 rhoWllooth Inlheold Centnl PltrkZoo. Nt·wYorlcOty. I U$ed the other two ptes (rom !he ~trlp (Of a Vl$I. ltppUCO\tion 10 Ltos. whc:rc I went surnJ)1(,'.,. I WlU told tholl the:'LAOtiJlre might rot leI me Into the countr). if I $01fd on tht ;tppliQUon lh;)t J wril.« ..SOIn!lt6xi J UId I W,1$" 1lOt5e 1f'3I~r on the vi$I. One night I was ~1ed OUI 01 my hold tQOIn in l.uAng PraNttg. b¢n to the $tln of It tugh SO••.. "l:1TUTlc:ni OmdAI',f horse .. And ordt::rtd to tn.ln It. Ht lod a wild nunn~!tallion.oncof4~ofroyal ,1~UoR5 U\.ll Iud ~ CX1t'ICt:altdinthe Bunnest oounlty1idt (rom Iht: rullngJunbt. Thei horse ""~ CXlmpletclyOUI o( I~ rnlnd.lspakcs.oothiJ\gly until 11:5 tyt'S slOp~ rolling 1)10000. Then I wt'.tU Into thestAll .,nd got on lhe hor.lle·' 1.'0& ThI: gow'nu:ntn1 oiitdals wet'l:awesUuck.

wt

w~.,

You on dick me. or didc (In tM hoo'O 8ft'" A(J\(-nan wriltn bclow..who~ tome lQrdlecl thcrwosidesQI on·lInccxpcrlt:nce ..the one IooJdng "'ell. toward the 1ron1iC1'.and lhl! wide open fJ»e:tlf. tN.- other looking E.151.

Insld~td~L

We were very much' into Truth, and at times we wielded it like a bludgeon. It was for their own good, of course, but it felt so good to lay a big fat TRUTH on someone. Almost as good as it felt bad to have one laid on you. Some folks (we called people "folks," folks) were "tennis ball eaters." You would serve up your best, most compassionately worded explanation about how and why they were assholes, and for a return you would get some lame reply that sounded like they deliberately missed the point. Grrr, that was frustrating.

Especially when you were staying up until 2 a.m. just to "get into their thing"; and it was for their own good!

That resonates with aspects of my home life on the WELL. Looking for a home there has involved learning to get along with the neighbors, and some neighbors have been zealous about seeing to it that I do. On-line, good fences do not necessarily make good neighbors. This also reminds me of boarding school. In my second year, we were given rooms with walls, but by then the walls were just symbols of boundaries that had already been established in that big open room.

What exactly is a home page? In the simplest terms, it is like an E-mail address, a place on the Net where people can find you; but whereas an E-mail address isjust a mailbox, a home page is a reception area. Although building home pages or Web sites (a col-

Advertisementsfor himself: The author:S home page shaH'S pictures of him and his current obsessions-Francis Parkman and Henry Thoreau-which act as "hot bUllons. " Click on these to enter his "virlllal home. "

Friday February 24, 1995 Loser woke up early as usual and took his 20-minute shower.

Then silence. The slow, laborious clockwise pacing began and continued until he had to leave for classes. A short phone call was made as is done every morning. Either he was calling "stooge" or he was checking in with his mommy. I left and did not get in until after II p.m. I thought that Loser might have gone out somewhere. Within

a few minutes Loser got up and started pacing around. It is Friday night, for goodness sakes' Finally, he either sits down or goes to bed.

Nope, he's back upagain. Hchas to take a whiz.

If you want a really slick-looking home page, you can hire a professional Web designer to build and maintain one for you, or you can do it yourself, with whatever materials you happen to have around. At first, that was my plan-a handyman special.

Although I am not "technical," the programming language you use to write forthe Web, H.T.M.L., is not very difficult to learn. I bought a book called Teach Yourself Web Publishing wilh H. TM. L. in a Week, by Laura Lemay. But the time I might have invested in studying the book I instead spent on-line, and although the book still sits within reach on my desk, I suspect it may eventually find its own home near the various do-it-yourself books

Noone owns the Web, but anyone can own space on it: The space is cheap and, theoretically, infinite.

I bought back when we were renovating our loft and never used.

So I decided to hire someone to build my home page for me-an interior designer of virtual space. Web designers-or, as they are called when they also maintain the pages, Webmasters-are much in demand these days, especially in Manhattan. They tend to be youngcyberslackers who learned H.T.M.L. in college and are now finding that harried business executives, having been handed the job of setting up their companies' Web sites, are desperately trying to hire people in the know to build their Web sites for them. At the same time, a growing number of designers from the print and TV media are getting into Web work. One of these pcople, a former book editor named Dan Levy, happens to be a friend of mine.

I called Dan and asked him if he would help me build my home page, and although he was busy preparing a proposal to build a Web site for a division of Sony Electronics (the proposal itselfwas a Web site), he offered to come over one morning and help me raise my virtual roofbeam.

Dan arrived, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and carrying his software tools and his PowerBook in a cloth bag. I showed him into my study. He sat down with my PowerBook and began loading floppies into the disk drive and installing the software nccessary for the job. I watched his moves on the keyboard, trying to pick up some new software shortcuts through the Macintosh operating system.

While Dan was working, he said, "This Web stuffisjust exploding. It's kind of ridiculous. The Spin Doctors Web site I did in 1994 would be worth over ten thousand dollars now." Dan had to speak loudly because a garbage truck was hauling rubble from an interminable renovation job on the Smith Barney building across the street. He went on, "I think the situation is that some people in the big-media world just view it as a problem now-like, 'We need a Web site, here's some money, go and build us one.' Yours shouldn't cost much. You ought to be able

to find some neighborhood kid to do it for you, the way you'd find one to cut your lawn."

Prior to Dan's arrival, I had spent a few weeks thinking about what I wanted my home page to be-and what a home on-line is in a more general sense. In the real world, I know I'm nearing home when my brain subliminally recognizes the olfactory pattern of North Moore Street in Tribeca, with its row of old warehouses, from olive oil to coffee to nutmeg. But in the on-line world there are no sensory clues to tell you when you're almost home. "No location! No location! No location! " would be the online real-estate agent's rallying cry. Sitting in my study, I surfed the Web and hit other people's home pages, in search of some ideas for my own. Surfing a TV set is like surfing Long Island, compared with surfing the Web's Waimea Bay. The odd thing about watching TV with a remote control is that the remote changes the channels but has no effect on the programming, so what you aren't watching you miss. On the Web, the technology of the remote control is built right into the way the programming is designed: The "show" never begins before you arrive. You move from place to place by pointing your mouse and clicking on words or pictures that function as "hot buttons." When you click on one, something cool happens: A picture appears, or sound begins streaming out of your computer, or you jump to another place in the same Web site, or to another site altogether. Hot buttons that take you to another place are known as links, and programming the links is known as tweaking the links.

I

fyou want people to visit your home page, it helps to have appealing content to offer. In an information society such as the Web, all the members have their chunks of information-the poorest having only charcoal to set in front of their corrugated-tin huts, the richest having glittering and irresistible palaces of mind candy. Some people keep track of their "hit count" as a way of rating the popularity of their home page. In a way, setting up a home page is an exercise in self-promotion, like writing a personal ad. In the "All About Mel! I" sections of some home pages, people describe themselves in the same peppy marketing voice that I hear almost daily on my voice mail at work, but instead of selling some cool new piece of software they are sell ing themselves.

But putting up a home page is also an act of joining the community of the Web, by sharing what you hope is some useful information with others in the group. The point at which the self-promoting ends and the public-spiritedness begins is very hard to place.

A lot of people offer you their "hot-list"-a selection of their favorite Web pages. Clicking on the name of a page will take you there. You don't have to ask permission to link your page to another page. For example, a woman may find herself listed on Robert Toups's "Babes on the Web" page, which is one ofthe more controversial sites on the Web. Women are assigned a rating on his Toupsie Scale, from one to four. Toups writes: Placing a Home Page on the World Wide Web is an invitation for entry. Having a personal photo on that page is an invitation for it to be rated based on the TOUPSI" SCALE.

Women who don't want to be linked to "Babes on the Web" can E-mail Toups and ask to be removed, though he doesn't make any promises.

But, as Shawna writes on her home page:

Benson,

one of Toups's

"Babes,"

I am now listed in Rob Toups lovely "Babes on the Web" page! When I first saw this page, I wasn't sure if it was good or bad. I have since decided that it isn't too bad-considering the added traffic my page now gets! So check out his brilliantly designed page.

She has added a clickable Because essary

link.

a lot of the people

to create

home

pages

with the programming are college

students,

skills necmany

page~

resemble college dorm rooms: They're decorated with pictures of Bono, Cindy, etc. At David Golden's Web site, you can tour the house he lived in on Moran Avenue, in Princeton, with two friends. You see a picture of his front porch, and the porch is also a hot button that takes you through the front door; then you can follow other hot buttons

through

dress is one of his hot buttons; few messages

the house.

I clicked

about home pages.

Golden's

E-mail

ad-

on it, and we exchanged

a

He wrote:

The home page is somewhat like a hyperactive electronic resume. It's designed to tell anyone who looks about who I am and what I do. I personally prefer to do that with text, and use graphics as attention grabbers, but some people like to paste up tons of pictures.

Entertainment is important, too. My home page is the first impression of me complete strangers get on the Net. Hopefully, they'll find it interesting, and entertaining, and maybe even useful. I don't want them to find a boring page and think I'm a boring person.

There's also a bit of pride at stake. It's a great feeling to get E-mail from someone in Australia you've never met complimenting you on your home page. It's also a thrill to find your home page listed on someone else's page, especially when you don't know them.

So do you use it as a resume? Do you refer prospective employers to it? Or is it more like a resume for social life on the Net, where the difference between business and pleasure, information and experience, advertising and editorial seems blurred?

The journal entries have been extremely therapeutic, as has my correspondence with the Spot surfers of the world .... But the privacy I've given up is beginning to fuel my paranoia about everything in my world outside of the computer.

It is easy to see the content of many home pages as evidence of the further decline of civilization, although the shocking uses to which typography was put in its early days-bawdy stories, of which

Chaucer's

and unsanctioned

Canterbury

Tales is the most famous

translations

of the Bible-are

And amid the noise on the Web you can also hear the authentic voice of youthful idealism, which is harder to find in print and on TV, where young voices are so thoroughly most celebrated

I personally don't use it as a resume, nor would I refer employers to it as it isn't particularly businesslike. The main page i.tselfis mostly a short bio with some contact information, and the other pages are mostly links of various sorts. In that sense, it is a "resume for social life"-or perhaps more of a "travel diary" (yet another metaphor)-the equivalent of the slide show of the places you've been on vacation.

One popular home page, called "The Spot" and recently voted Cool Site of the Yearon the Web, is ostensibly the work of six people who share a beach house in Los Angeles.

In some of the journal of why they are publishing Lon writes:

entries,

the Spotmates

their journals

on-line

try to make sense in the first place

example,

well documented.

marinated

callow youth on the Web is probably

in irony. The Justin Hall, a

20-year-old junior at Swarthmore, whose "Justin's Links from the' Underground" is a famous site. Among the odds and ends found under "Justin's

Writings"

is this cyber-rap:

Go out into your neighborhood and do a video documentary!

Stage a play on a street corner! Strike up a conversation! Read a poemonatrain!

Then, write about it on your Web page.

Remember the first time you had sex? How strange that was?

Write about it. Put it on-line.

Rememberthe first time you were dumped? How shitty that was? Write about it. Put it on-line.

I'd sooner read that than Barry Diller's five means ofmedia ascension.

Culture doesn't come from Warner Brothers and Sony.

Culture is that woman friend of yours who tells the most outrageous stories.

Culture doesn't cost big bucks, and hang in a gallery of modern art. Culture is your. friend who likes to draw ....

The Web is an opportunity [0 make good our 15 megabytes of fame.

The more widespread and grassroots the Internet, the more di fticult it will be to dominate and control it. YOLlcan contribute directly to the humanizing of the wires by telling your story, adding your persona to the unaml iated.

y the time of Dan's visit I had come up with a plan for my home page. I wanted to make something out of the media flooding into my study-to take the words and sounds and pictures and "repurpose" them, as they say on-line. I explained this to Dan and showed him a strip of pictures of myself that I had sitting around on my desk. Could I put this up and add a description of where the strip was taken, and make it hot, so that if you clicked on it you could learn some more things about

B

A home page is like an E-mail address, a place on the Net where people can find you; but whereas an E-mail address isjust a mailbox, ahome page is a reception area. me? Dan said sure, and that he would scan the pictures for me back at his place. Then, at the bottom of the page, I wanted to put the words "West" and "East" and, under the words, pictures of Francis Parkman and Henry David Thoreau, respectively. Both Parkman and Thoreau would be hot, too. If you clicked on Parkman, you'd go out to the A merican frontier, as he did in his great book The Oregon Trail, and you'd see a picture ofa buffalo hunt, and you could read some of my musings about the ~ature of public space on-line. If you clicked on Thoreau, you'd go to a cabi n in the woods, and there you'd fi nd more musings-these on the nature of inner space on-line and what Thoreau might have made of all this. I ,vould link my Thoreau room to the Thoreau Society's on-line publication, and I'd link my Parkman room to the National Parks' Web site. Maybe I'll be redecorating in a few months, but the Thoreau/Parkman scheme would display my current obsessions.

Sitting in my study, Dan converted what I had written into H.T.M.L. When he was finished, he looked at my pictures, which he had to measure in pixels-the units of space that pictures occupy in the virtual world-and asked, "Do you have a ruler?" A ruler! I got one out ofa drawer in which artifacts of my pre-electronic work life have accumulated-a personalized lctter embosser; a rubber stamp that my wife, Lisa, handcarved for me; a Cross pen set that my dad gave me-and handed it to Dan. He laid it on my photographs, measured them, pul led the calculator down from the Apple menu on my PowerBook, and said, "Let's see.

That's one and three-quarters inches, and 72 pixcls per inchthat's 126pixels."

While Dan was working, Lisa came out of her study. I watched the shadow of her door as it swung open, making changing shapes on the hallway floor. And as I watched this some of the excitement I was feeling about setting up my home page dwindled. Nothing on my computer screen seemed as substantial as this shadow, or the simple arc of space that the edge of the door described. When Lisa and I were designing our place, we were about to get married, and imagining the space became a way of configuring what we wanted our future together to be like. What started out as an open floor plan soon grew walls, making discrete blocks of space, which the architect called "living area," "bedroom," "Lisa's room," and "John's room." The most unstable element in the design was the positioning of these two rooms, our private studies, which kept swelling and shrinking and moving as we changed our minds about whether we should work near one another or at opposite ends of the loft. We ended up next to each other, and Lisa's doorway is a hot button for me.

After saying hi, Lisa went down toward the living area, and Dan swivelled back to my home page. He copied the document, opened it with Netscape, which is a popular program for browsing the Web, clicked "Reload," and then dialled in to his Web server from my PowerBook. All that remained was for him to upload my site onto one of his computers, but we got stuck waiting for something to happen, which is a drawback of using the Web with an ordinary phone line. (The wires aren't yet fat enough for the heavy load of bits streaming through them.)

Sitting side by side in front of the small screen made eye contact difficult, and the tension of the waiting constricted conversation. After what seemed like an unusually long time, Dan said, "Uh-oh, is my server down? Where's your phone?"

Although Dan's office is in Manhattan, some of his computers are in a renovated warehouse on 137th Street at Wi Ilow Avenue, in the Bronx. While we were waiting for someone to pick up, Dan told me about a friend's recent scare: An employee had stolen two of the friend's computers. After he confronted the employee, someone called his office and said, "If you want your computers, they are sitting under the bridge around the corner."

"Well, why did the guy steal them at all?" I asked.

Dan said, "Because that's the state ofdespair his life is in."

Finally, Dan reached someone who was with the machines and reported that they seemed to be working fine. We tried again, and this time we got through. Dan uploaded my home page onto his server, tweaked my links for me, and told me my Web address, which is http://www.levity.com/seabrook/.

"All right," Dan said. "You have a home. All within the comfort of your own home."

I'm ready for company.

0 About the Author: John Seabrook is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He also writesfor the Harper's andVanity Fair.

"There is no there there" -GERTRUDE STEIN(speaking of Oakland)

IS There a "There" in Cyberspace?

CYBERHOOD

vs NEIGHBORHOOD

am often asked how I went from pushing cows around a remote Wyoming ranch to my present occupation (which Wall Street Journal recently described as "cyberspace cadet"). I haven't got a short answer,. but I suppose I came to the virtual world looking for commun ity.

Unlike most modern Americans, I grew up in an actual place, an entirely non intentional community called Pinedale, Wyoming.

As I struggled for nearly a generation to keep my ranch in the family, I was motivated by the belief that such places were the spiritual home of humanity. But I knew their future was not promising.

At the dawn of the 20th century, over 40 percent of the American workforce lived off the land. The majority of us lived in towns like Pinedale. Now fewer than one percent of us extract a living from the soil. We just became too productive for our own good.

Of course, the population followed the jobs. Farming and ranching communities are now home to a demographically insignificant percentage of Americans, the vast majority of whom live not in ranch houses but in more or less identical split-level "ranch homes" in more or less identical suburban "communities." Generica.

In my view, these are neither communities nor homes. I believe the combination of television and suburban population patterns is simply toxic to the soul. I see much evidence in contemporary America to support this view.

Mcanwhile, back at the ranch, doom impended. And, as I watched community in Pinedale growing ill from the same economic forces that were killing my family's ranch, the Bar Cross, satellite dishes brought the cultural infection of television. I started looking around for evidence that community in America would not perish altogether.

I took some heart in the mysterious nomadic City of the Deadheads, the virtually physical town that follows the Grateful Dead around the country. The Deadheads lacked place, touching down briefly wherever the band happened to be playing, and they lacked continuity in time, since they had to suffer a new diaspora every time the band moved on or went home. But they had many of the other necessary elements of community, including a culture, a religion of sorts (which, though it lacked dogma, had most of the other, more nurturing aspects of spiritual practice), a sense of necessity, and, most importantly, shared adversity.

I wanted to know more about the flavor of their interaction,

I

what they thought and felt, but since I wrote Dead songs (including "Estimated Prophet" and "Cassidy"), I was a minor icon to the Deadheads, and was thus inhibited, in some socially Heisenbergian way, from getting a clear view of what really went on among them.

Then, in 1987, I heard about a "place" where Deadheads gathered where I could move among them without distorting too much the field of observation. Better, this was a place I could visit without leaving Wyoming. It was a shared computer in Sausalito, California, called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or WELL. After a lot of struggling with modems, serial cables, init strings, and other computer arcana that seemed utterly out of phase with such notions as Deadheads and small towns, I found myself looking at the glowing yellow word "Login:" beyond which lay my future.

"Inside" the WELL were Deadheads in community. There were thousands of them there, gossiping, complaining (mostly about the Grateful Dead), comforting and harassing each other, bartering, engaging in religion (or at least exchanging their totemic set lists), beginning and ending lOve affairs, praying for one another's sick kids. There was, it seemed, everything one might find going on in a small town, save dragging Main Street and making out on the back roads.

I was delighted. I felt I had found the new locale of human community-never mind that the whole thing was being conducted in mere words by minds from whom the bodies had been amputated.

Nevermind that all these people were deaf, dumb, and blind as paramecia or that their town had neither seasons nor sunsets nor smells.

Surely all these deficiencies would be remedied by richer, faster' communications media. The featureless log-in handles would gradually acquire video faces (and thus expressions), shaded 3-D body puppets (and thus body language). This "space," which I recognized at once to be a primitive form of the cyberspace William Gibson predicted in his sci-fi novel Neurol/1al1ce/~ was still without apparent dimensions or vistas. But virtual reality would change all that in time.

Meanwhile, the commons, or something like it, had been rediscovered. Once again, people from the 'burbs had a place where they could encounter their friends as my fellow Pinedalians did at the post office and the Wrangler Cafe. They had a place where their hearts could remain as the companies they worked for shuffled

time, great typing skills, high math SATs, strongly held opinions their bodies around America. They could put down roots that could on just about everything, and an excruciating face-to-face shynot be ripped out by forces of economic history. They had a collecness, especially with the opposite sex. tive stake. They had a community.

But diversity is as essential to healthy community as it is to It is seven years now since I discovered the WELL. In that time, I cofounded an organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, healthy ecosystems (which are, in my view, different from communities only in unimportant aspects). dedicated to protecting its interests and those of other virtual I believe that the principal reason for the almost universal failure communities like it from raids by physical government. I've of the intentional communities of the 1960s and 1970s was a lack of spent countless hours typing away at its residents, and I've watched the larger context that contains it, the Internet, grow at diversity in their members. It was a rare commune with any old such an explosive rate that, by 2004, every human on the planet people in it, or people who were fundamentally out of philosoph ical agreement with the majority. will have an E-mail address unless the growth curve flattens (which it will).

Indeed, it is the usual problem when we try to build soinething that can only be grown. Natural systems, such as human communiMy enthusiasm for virtuality has cooled. In fact, unless one counts interaction with the rather too large society of those with ties, are simply too complex to design by the engineering principles we insist on applying to them. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Western civiwhom I exchange electronic mail, I don't spend much time engaging in virtual community at all. Many ofthe near-term benefits I anlization is now finding its rational skills inadequate to the task of creating and caring for life. We would do better to return to a kind of ticipated from it seem to remain as far in the future as they did when agricultural mind-set in which we humbly try to re-create the condiI first logged in. Perhaps they always will. tions from which life has sprung before. And leave the rest to God. Pinedale works, more or less, as it is, but a lot is still missing from Given that it has been built so far almost entirely by people with the communities of cyberspace, whether they be places like the engineering degrees, it is not so surprising that cyberspace has the WELL, the fractious newsgroups of USE NET, the silent "auditorikind of overdesigned quality that leaves out all kinds of elements ums" of America Online, or even enclaves on the promising World nature would have provided invisibly.

Wide Web. Also missing from both the communes of the 1960s and from What is missing? Well, to quote Ranjit Makkuni of Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, "the prana is missing," cyberspace are a couple of elements that I believe are very imporprana being the Hindu term for both breath and spirit. r think he is tant, if not essential, to the formation and preservation of real community: An absence of alternatives and a sense of genuine right about this and that perhaps the central question of the virtual adversity, generally shared. What about these? age is whether or not prana can somehow be made to fit through It is hard to argue that anyone would find losing a modem literany disembodied medium. ally hard to survive, while many have remained in small towns, Prana is, to my mind, the literally vital element in the holy and have tolerated their intolerances and created entertainment to unseen ecology of relationship, the dense mesh of invisible life, on enliven their culturally arid lives simply because it seemed there whose surface carbon-based life floats like a thin film. It is at the was no choice but to stay. There are many investments-spiriheart of the fundamental and profound difference between infortual, material, and temporal-one is willing to put into a home mation and experience. Jaron Lanier has said that "information is one cannot leave. Communities are often the beneficiaries of alienated experience," and, that being true, prana is part of what is these involuntary investments. removed when you create such easily transmissible replicas of Butwhen the going gets rough in cyberspace, it experience as, say, the evening news. is even easier to move than it is in the 'burbs, Obviously a great many other, less spiriA lot is still missing from the where, given the fact that the average American tual, things are also missing entirely, like communities of cyberspace. body language, sex, death, tone of voice, moves some 12 times in his or her life, moving To quote Ranjit Makkuni clothing, beauty (or homeliness), weather, appears to be pretty easy. You can not only find violence, vegetation, wildlife, pets, archianother bulletin board service (BBS) or newsof Xerox Corporation, tecture, music, smells, sunlight, and that 01' group to hang out in, you can, with very little "theprana is missing." effort, start your own. harvest moon. In short, most of the things I think he is right about this.

And then there is the bond of joint suffering. that make my life real to me.

-JOHN PERRYBARLOW Present, but in far less abundance than in Most community is a cultural stockade erected the physical world, which I call "meat against a common enemy that can take many space," are women, children, old people, forms. In Pinedale, we bore together, with an unpoor people, and the genuinely blind. Also derstanding needing little expression, the fact mostly missing are the illiterate and the that Upper Green River Valley is the coldest continent of Africa. There is not much huspot, as measured by annual mean temperature, man diversity in cyberspace, which is popin the lower48 states. We knew that ifsomebody ulated, as near as I can tell, by white males was stopped on the road most winter nights, he under 50 with plenty of computer terminal would probably die there, so t~1efact that we

found I had one in the virtual world. might loathe him wasnot sufficient reason to On the WELL, there was a topic announcing drive on past his broken pickup.

But what are the shared adversities of cyher death in one of the conferences to which I posted the eulogy I had read over her before berspace? Lousy user interfaces? The flames burying her in her own small town ofNanaimo, of harsh invective? Dumb jokes? Surely these British Columbia. It seemed to strike a chord can all be survived withQut the sanctuary proamong the disembodied living on the Net. vided by fellow sufferers.

People copied it and sent it to one another. Over One is always free to yank the jack, as I have mostly done. Forme, the physical world the next several months I received almost a When we are all together in megabyte of electronic mail from all over the offers far more opportunity for prana-rich cyberspace we will see planet, mostly from folks whose faces I have connections with my fellow creatures. Even what the human spirit, and never seen and probably neverwill. for someone whose body is in a state of perpetual motion, I feel I can generally find more the basic desire to connect, They told me of their own tragedies and community among the still-embodied. can create there. what they had done to survive them. As huFinally, there is that shyness factor. Not only .-JOHN PERRY BARLOW mans have since words were first- uttered, we shared the second most common human are we trying to build community here among experience, death, with an openheartedness people who have never experienced any in my sense of the term, we are trying to build community among people that would have caused grave uneasiness in physical America, where the whole topic is so cloaked in denial as to be considered who, in their lives, have rarely used the word we in a heartfelt way. It is a vast club, and many of the members-following Groucho obscene. Those strangers, who had no arms to put around my Marx-wouldn't wanttojoin a club that would have them. shoulders, no eyes to weep with mine, nevertheless saw me Andyet. .. through. As neighbors do.

I have no idea how far we will plunge into this strange place.

How quickly physical community continues to deteriorate.

Unlike previous frontiers, this one has no end. It is so dissatisfying Even Pinedale, which seems to have survived the plague of ranch failures, feels increasingly cut off from itself. Many of the ranches in so many ways that I suspect we will be more restless in our search are 110W owned by corporate types who fly their Gulfstreams in to for home here than in all our previous explorations. And that is one reason why I think we may find it after all. Ifhome is where the heart fish and are rarely around during the many months when the creeks is, then there is already some part of home to be found in cyberspace. are frozen over and neighbors are needed. They have kept the ranches alive financially, but they actively discourage their manSo ...does virtual community work or not? Should we all go off to agers from the interdependence my former colleagues and I cyberspace or should we resist it as ademonic form ofsymbolic abrequire. They keep agriculture on life support, still alive but lackstraction? Does it supplant the real or is there, in it, reality itself? ing a functional heart.

Like so many true things, this one doesn't resolve itself to a black or a white. Nor is it gray. It is, along with the rest of life, And the town has been inundated with suburbanites who flee black/white. Both/neither. I'm not being equivocal or wishyhere, bringing all their terrors and suspicions with them. They washy here. We have to get over our Manichean sense that everyspend their evenings as they did in Orange County, watching television or socializing in hermetic little enclaves offundamentalist thing is either good or bad, and the border of cyberspace seems to Christianity that seem to separate them from us and even, given me a good place to leave that old set offilters. their sectarian animosities, from one another. The town remains.

But really it doesn't matter. We are going there whether we want The community is largely a wraith of nostalgia. to or not. In five years, everyone who is reading these words will have an E-mail address, other than the determined Luddites who So where else can we look for the connection we need to prevent our plunging further into the condition of separateness Nietzsche also eschew the telephone and electricity. called sin? What is there to do but to dive further into the bramble When we are all together in cyberspace we will see what the' bush of information that, in its broadcast forms, has done so human spirit, and the basic desire to connect, can create there. I am convinced that the result will be more benign ifwe go there openmuch to tear us apart? minded, open-hearted, and excited with the adventure than if we Cyberspace, for all its current deficiencies and failed promises, are dragged into exile. is not without some very real solace already.

Some months ago, the great love of my life, a vivid young And we must remember that going to cyberspace, unlike woman with whom I intended to spend the rest of it, dropped dead previous great emigrations to the frontier, hardly requires us to of undiagnosed viral cardiomyopathy two days short of her 30th leave where we have been. Many will find, as I have, a much birthday. I felt as ifmy own heart had been as shredded as hers. richer appreciation of physical reality for having spent so much We had lived together in New York City. Except for my time in virtuality. daughters, no one from Pinedale had met her. I needed a Despite its current (and perhaps in some areas permanent) insufcommunity to wrap around myself against colder winds than ficiencies, we should go to cyberspace with hope. Groundless hope, fortune had ever blown at me before. And without looking, I like unconditional love, may be the only kind that counts.

D

J ~D?&JN fยง

A Calcutta artist finds fun and fantasy in SPAN's pictures; he uses them to create a blend of collage and painting that defies description.

16.

"My SPAN series originated says Partha illustrations has made

these

works

found in SPAN magazine collages,

in my desire to have fun with art,"

Pratim Deb, "and also because I saw in these photo a vast playing field for the medium of collage." Deb of art from

photos

over the years.

he adds. "They transcend

and illustrations

he

But they are not mere

the barriers

of the collage

and

of pure painting. I don't think they are anything definiti ve orthat I have achieved a new form. They were fun doing and if the images give pleasure to people, all the better."

A regular SPAN reader, Deb had always been fascinated by the ambiguity of the magazine's photographs.

"As a modern artist I should penchant

be free to experiment,"

for modernity

two of India's

premier

he says. He attributes

his

Santiniketan Baroda.

and the Faculty

"My years

made me value freedom ativity," he says.

Deb, Calcutta,

who

of Fine Arts at M.S. University of [Santiniketan] and Baroda

in Visva-Bharati

teaches

above art

at

all other Rabindra

tries to instill this playful

qualities

in artistic

Bharati

University

attitude

in his students.

crcin Says

he: "An artist is alive so long as he is able to extract fun out of the creative process. I have never been an artworl11--a painter who goes about with blinkers and is not interested in other art forms. I like to be with students who are not just painters but complete human beings, also involved with literature and music."

The SPAN

series

and experimentation

to his training

at

on the opposite

art institutions--the

Kala-Bhavana

at

creati ve ph i losophy.

(some

page)

of which

is a showcase

arc presented of Partha

below Pratim

-KishoH'

and Deb's

Chaltcrjl'c

" A crane operator offloads afinished valve at the FXSL plant in Karapakkam near Madras. The factory produces 2.500 valves a month.

on Our Laurels" These words of N. Sankar, chairman of the Sanmar Group, summarize his company's attitude toward their successful joint venture with Fisher and Xomox of the United States.

M

orethan a century ago, Jasper Fisher-a farmer in Marshalltown, Iowa-wanted to improve the flow of irrigation water in his farm. He designed a "pump governor" which proved very effective. Word spread about his new tool. Soon he was making pump governors for all farmers in the neighborhood. This gave him an idea: The Fisher valve factory was born. Today it is known as Fisher Controls International Inc., a billion-dollar company, and a division of the $10 billion Emerson Electric Company.

Service to neighbors spurred Jasper Fisher's success. Service to customers is tr.e bedrock of the Fisher company's philosophy.

The same spirit animates Fisher-Xomox Sanmar Limited (FXSL), an alliance of the Sanmar Group with Fisher and Xomox, two American companies that are legends in the industrial valve business.

The Sanmar Group is one ofIndia's major business conglomerates. It comprises 24 companies involved in everything from chemicals, engineering, and electronics to shipping, real estate development, finance, and footwear.

The Sanmar Group has a long history of collaborations with foreign companies, including eight American corporations.

"Our first joint venture was way back in 1963," says Sanmar Group Chairman N. Sankar in his Madras office overlooking the greens and whites of the city [see cover]. "That 1963 joint venture was between our Chemplast company and

B.F. Goodrich Chemical Company, for the manufacture of thermoplastics. Its success paved the way for other joint ventures.

When we wanted to diversify into strategic but related areas in engineering and electronics, the American companies we approached were impressed by our earlier record in joint ventures."

A chemical engineer with a master's degree from Illinois Institute of Technology, Sankar, 50, has been chairman of the Sanmar Group for 20 years. He is director of many companies outside the Sanmar Group.

Under his stewardship, the San mar Group has expanded manyfold. He has been a strong believer in setting up collaborations with foreign companies that will bring the latest technology to India, particularly in medium engineering and electronics products that are critical to industry.

Sankar has won several awards, including, most recently, an award "for leadership in the chemical industry," presented by the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers.

At the national level, Sankar has been president of several business organizations, such as the Asso'ciated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (Southern Region), and the Madras Management Association.

He is also Denmark's Consul General for South India.

Sankar is justifiably proud of all his group's joint ventures, but he is especially proud of the FXSL, which is one of the most successful of his U.S. collaborations.

FXSL makes Fisher control valves at Karapakkam, near Madras, and Xomox onoff valves at a plant in Viralimalai, near

Trichy. The combined annual production of the two plants is valued at about Rs. 400 million, including exports of about Rs. 50 million.

"You can't put a price tag on the material losses our valves prevent, or the plant shutdowns they avert," says S.R. Seshadri, executive director of San mar Engineering Corporation, of which FXSL is a part.

"To understand how important a valve is, think of the simple tap at home," says K. Achyuthan, president of FXSL. "The water tank that's the source of all your water may be full, but unless you operate a tap, which is a simple kind of valve, you get no water to drink, cook, or clean."

Industrial valves are essentially of two types-control valves which regulate flow; and on-off valves that shut off flow. They do countless jobs in homes, stores, factorieschemicals, petrochemicals, power, refineries, fertilizer, paper and pulp.

"As valve manufacturers, we are unique; we play three roles," says Achyuthan. "We make and supply Fisher and Xomox valves to Indian industry; we export valves and components to Fisher and Xomox affiliates in other countries; we also import critical Fisher and Xomox valves (which are not made at our two plants) for Indian industry."

R

SL began in 1982 as Tuflin India at ViraIimalai. Initially it produced Tuflin-sleeved plug valves, Pliaxseal high-performance butterfly valves, and Matryx vane-type actuators. It later widened its range to include GuIde control valves and acquired Invest Valves, a unit located in Belgaum, Karnataka, that made ball valves

"WE WON'T REST ON OUR LAURELS" continued

and diaphragm valves. In 1995, the Karapakkam facility was inaugurated. It caters to the needs of the entire Asia-Pacific region for Fisher control valves, regulators, and level trois. The company was later renamed Fisher-Xomox Sanmar Limited.

There is a natural synergy between FXSL and other companies of the San mar Engineering Corporation whose products (such as mechanical seals, rupture disks, solenoid valves, flow meters, pressure and temperature switches) strengthen safety, enhance performance, and avert crippling plant losses-of materials or in shutdown time.

"Our products have not merely met vital needs of Indian industry; they have enhanced the reputation and credibility of Indian industry abroad," says Seshadri.

"We are fortunate to have both Fisher and Xomox as joint venture partners," he adds.

"Fisher is the Rolls-Royce of the control valves business. Indian industry has used Fisher control valves for many years. But since imports were expensive, their use was restricted to very critical applications. We now make these legendary world-class valves available in India."

About the collaboration with Fisher, Sankar says: "In 1980, when we decided to diversify, one of the premier products we identified was control valves. It eluded us for many years as we could not get the right partner. I personally have been courting Fisher ever since we decided in 1980 to make control valves. The collaboration with Fisher fulfills our longstanding desire to bring world leaders in this critical industry to India as our partners." merson, the parent company of Fisher and Xomox, is one of America's most dynamic companies. Says Seshadri, "It made profits even during the worst recession. Its shares have never gone down in the New York Stock Exchange. It has consistently pursued two strategies: additional products through right acquisitions; and locating plants internationally so that they serve as best -cost producers.

That we have won Emerson's trust and esteem is our best endorsement."

Sankar speaks highly of Charles Knight, chief executive of Emerson. "He is a charis-

E

matic figure, one of America's top managers. I have known him for about 15 years, and meet him every two years or so. He cam~ to the Emerson Group as a consultant and stayed on with the company. He introduced to Emerson a management system based on a very interactive planning process with continuous and detailed reviews. This system is a case-study for management students the world over."

The FXSL project epitomizes Sankar's corporate philosophy-a vision that has allowed Sanmar and Emerson to reap benefits from the joint venture. Speaking of Emerson's benefits, Sankar said: "Emerson's main benefit was good returns on their investment. Since 1991, India has become an excellent low-cost source of components for valves. We are a best-cost producer for sourcing components needed by Fisher and Xomox plants worldwide."

What is unique about the two FXSL valve plants in Karapakkam and Viralimalai? What difference do they make to Indian industry? What exceptional

service do they provide?

To begin with, Fisher and Xomox valves are exceptional. As Julie Moran, vice president of Fisher Business Asia-Pacific, Singapore, remarks: "When a customer buys a Fisher product, he buys not just a valve; he buys security, a headache-free operation and confidence."

U.S.-made valves must comply with stringent pollution and anti-emission laws.

America's Clean Air Act is harsh on "fugitive emissions" which result from invisible leakage, and lays down strict limits for such . emission. Though a similar act is not in force in India, the Fisher and Xomox valves made in India by FXSL must conform to American quality and environmental standards. "This certainly gives our valves an edge over others," says Kesari Prasad, assistant vice president of the Xomox division of FXSL. A Fisher valve coming from Karapakkam is identical to that from Fisher factories in Singapore or Marshalltown; likewise, a Xomox valve from Viralimalai is interchangeable with one from the Xomox plant

Opposite page: Colin Lewington (left), from Fisher '.I' Asia-Pacific office in Singapore, is currently stationed at Karapakkam to ensure that "made-in-India" valves adhere 10 Fisher 5' worldwide exacting standards.

Above: A technician tests afinished vall'e on a hydraulic press. Left: Chairman N. Sankar meets with three of his management staff

Sankar's Views on Joint Ventures

I

nApril 1995, N. Sankar gave a speech at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Titled "Gateway [ndia: Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Challenges," the speech set out his views onjoint ventures. Here is a sampling: • Both partners of ajoint venture must accept that their gains will flow from the gains of the joint venture. Not from selling agency arrangements or offloading of expenses or through supplies at high prices or charging of coqjorate overheads.

• Both partners must consider the joint venture important. The moment one partner feels that the other is superfluous, that is the beginning of the end of the partnership. In providing technology, technical or marketing support, the international partner must treat the joint venture exactly the way he treats a fully owned subsidiary abroad. The Indian partner must provide all possible managerial and business support to the joint venture, even if it is only a small portion of his Iota I Indian business.

• The partners must agree on the way the joint venture will be managed. No business \'enlure can be mQnQgedjoinlly. One identified partner should have primary responsibility for managing'the joint venture in India.

• A system of transparency and trust is essential. A legal document has to be drawn up, but "if that document has to be frequently referred to in order to decide who can do what, there is something wrong."

in Cincinnati, "Our customers feel secure in the knowledge that world-class valve technology is behind their plant," says M.N. Radhakrishnan, director of Sanmar Engineering Corporation.

Radhakrishnan stresses FXSL's philosophy of technology management-acquiring the latest technology from world leaders, absorbing it, internalizing it, applying it.

The result is high-caliber service. Examples: • Some months ago, NOCIL (National Organic Chemical Industries Limited) made an unusual request: They wanted spares for their Bombay plant's 50-year-old Fisher control valves, which were still functioning.

"From the valves' product code, we found out that the valves had been made by Fisher France," says J, Sridharan, marketing executive at Karapakkam. "The valve design was obsolete, but since spares were needed for this design, old drawings were retrieved. Fisher France then made and supplied the needed spares." NOCIL was impressed that FXSL could provide spares for 50-year-old valves, and even obtain them from Europe. Fisher regarded it as just another customer service.

• FXSL is the only company in the world that can make a four-way plug valve with integral castings. "Foundries in the U.S. do not supply an integrally cast body. Too inconvenient for them," says Prasad. "But we get foundries in India to provide integral castings." Advantages: Lower cost, quicker manufacturing time, greater ease of operation. FXSL exports this product to several countries.

• "We have the unique advantage that we own a full Fisher facility for control valves and a full Xomox facility for on-off valves," says Prasad. "We can supply a package consisting of Xomox valves fitted with a Fisher positioner and so on."

• The Xomox plant in Viralimalai makes a special product used in fertilizer plantsthe pump-changeover valve. Every fertilizer plant needs about 20 such valves. It

by Xomox was originally developed Germany in consultation with Snamprogetti, Italy. FXSL is the only Xomox plant outside Germany to make this valve.

• One of FXSL's first orders for Fisher valves was from Reliance Petrochemicals.

In fact FXSL got this order before the Fisher (Continued on page 53)

Managing

M~~agementConsultants Can't live with them, can't live without them. friend called with a telling bon mot making the rounds in Atlanta. It's about the American rowing team that challenged the Japanese to a tenmile race on the Hudson River. The Japanese won by more than a mile. The Americans angrily appointed a task force to examine what the media called "an American humiliation."

The task force found that the Japanese had two people managing and six people rowing. The Americans were using seven managers and one rower. The task force suggested a radical reengineering of the U.S. team and called for a rematch.

This time the Japanese team defeated the Americans by more than two miles. An even larger task force was assembled.

They discovered the Japanese were now using one manager and seven rowers, while the U.S. team employed six management consultants, one senior manager, and one rower. The U.S. team immediately fired the rower and called for another restructuring.

Quietly, consultants are edging out lawyers and used-car salesmen as the pointed butts of Great American Jokes.

This notoriety is partly based on the last decade's runaway success of consulting firms. Companies of all sizes now routinely hire consultants. Many of the largest firms have been growing at annual rates of25 percent-plus. The U.S. consulting industry counted $20,500 million in revenues in 1994, employing 137,000 professionals, according to Beaconsfield Bucks, U.K.based Alpha Publications, a compiler of worldwide industry data. Annual growth between 1995 and the end of this decade is expected to average nine percent, with the largest firms in double digits.

A

But consultant jokes are also being generated by some frictions in the consultant-client relationship. Although new economic realities assure that consultants are here to stay, a New York publishing executive notes that "Every laid-off executive gets a fax machine and a cellular phone, and sets up as a management consultant."

The noisiest laments are about shortterm consulting projects that quickly balloon into years and consultants' fees that are constantly being readjusted, always upward. Many large-scale consulting projects now cost $30 million to $50 million and can stretch over three to five years.

And consultants are changing with corporate needs: Many companies say they no longer need help in reducing costs; they know how to do that themselves. They are looking for consultants who can maximize profits, not chop bodies.

Consultant watchers see a major shiftaway from selling what one CEO calls "weight reduction medicine" (restructuring, reengineering, rightsizing, et al) and toward new ways of competing globally, and kicking up profit margins.

Many companies, in fact, are no longer looking to consultants to clean their houses.

Says Civil Service Commission (CSC) Index senior vice president Fred Wiersema: "Because the projects are bigger and longer, you're getting so close to your clients that they come to know all your tricks.

Familiarity can breed contempt. You're no longer the guru with all the clever ideas."

A chemical-company executive makes this point: "The easiest damn thing in the world is showing a company how to save money. But hey, killing pigs is always easier than raising them. My problem with consultants is that very few of them can help you

with the tough stuff, like transforming work processes that are sustainable and get beyond easy short -term resul ts."

A number of consulting firms are getting the point. They are trying to help companies find new profit sources, downplaying the slash-and-burn strategies popular for the past six years.

Mercer Management Inc., one ofthe first big-league consultancies to use global advertising to trumpet its case, is now pushing this barbed theme: "You Can't Shrink to Greatness."

Their point: Downsizing, which almost always saps employee morale, has done little by itself to increase shareholder value. Mercer calls for a more "radical" strategy: Growth.

"For more than two decades, consultants have made money by taking money out of company costs," says William P. Dunk, whose New York- and Dallas-based firm advises both CEOs and other consultants.

"But most companies have learned to reduce costs by themselves. The real challenge is to show clients how to respond quickly to new revenue sources and gain higher market share. We consultants will have to stop coming on like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers and learn to re-create ourselves as 'Mighty Morphin Profit Rangers.'"

The Business Beauty Pageant The lust by consultants to create the next big winner in the lottery for new management ideas is clearly being dri ven by tougher corporate clients. They continue to make consultants compete harder for company business. Dunk calls this process "the new and improved business beauty pageant."

More companies today are taking longer to select consultants and are conducting rigorous interviews with consultants' other

clients. British Telecom PLC examined and screened 16 major firms over six months before finally slicing the list to three major companies. The company then asked each of the three-McKinsey, Gemini, and Andersen-for references from companies they worked for. The eventual winner was Gemini. Another telling example: One of America's leading pharn1aceutical companies took II months to decide on two consultants to redesign its global-information systems. "It cost us time, but we got more than we bought," says a senior "Miss Anderson, what this company lacks is discipline, so I've decided to hire my motha " executive.

While there is widespread agreeDrawing by Eric & Bill Š 1995 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ment that companies crucially need-and are profiting fromirony is that through all this, the consultants consultants' expertise, some executives grow fatter while selling us the value of getworry that they are buying yesterday's faddery, rebottled. Others complain about an ting leaner."

Dunk and others say the crucial problem "anogance factor" in consulting, arguing is not arrogance but better management of that too many consultants are buzzing with consultants. "Because of their success, it's sophisticated answers to nonexistent questions. And yes, another hee-hah: What do true that consultants have developed massive egos," he says. "Let's face it-we are they call consulting firms' annual barbeall much too much in love with our wondercues? "Bonfires of the Vanities." ful ideas. But the real problem today is that But consultants have good reason to disclients are getting average results from play puffed chests. When CBS was facing their consultants because they manage boo-birds on Wall Street, some company them in an average way. As the economy officials reportedly told analysts to "stay put because McKinsey is on the case." A weakens, and reengineering continues, we could be heading into the best-advised ecotroubled European firm was reportedly able nomic decline in history." to negotiate sharp price reductions with two major suppliers because "Andersen was Czars of Consulting helping implement a breakthrough in our No concept is being as aggressively marinformation systems that will give us a maketed as reengineering, which is still being jor market niche." One Wall Street investment banker noted: "I can't tell you the sold as Prozac for corporate malaise. But studies show that it's producing as many times firms attempt to persuade you about flops as successes, even by companies that shareholder value by pitching names at you swallow it whole, without water or salt. A such as Mercer and Booz Allen and Price study by reengineering hothouse CSC Waterhouse, and it goes on and on."

Index shows that most of the reengineered "I've watched guys with small laptops and huge egos come into plants and pull off North American and European firms studwhat amounts to a friendly takeover," says a ied have not seen dramatic improvements in their business. But among companies reformer Baxter International Inc. executive who now works for another FORTUNE 500 porting the biggest payoffs, strong managecompany. "I've seen situations where all ment was cited as a key reason for success.

What to do to improve the process? Dunk employee input had to be filtered through the consultants, who run messages from of- calls for two drastic changes: (I) appointing corporate czars to oversee outside confice to office, up and down the firm. The

sultants and (2) basing pay on "gainsharing," which would link fees directly to results.

Many senior executives see a major need for a single executive or powerful team to oversee consultants' activities. "A czar should be designated and trained to coordinate all consulting efforts at the corporation," Dunk declares. "This will cross-pollinate all consulting efforts and can result in substantial overall cost savings."

Many companies and consultants agree with the czar idea in principle but see problems in finding an allpurpose executive to manage this cumbersome process. "Czars are a marvelous idea, especially if the czar is a real enlightened adult who understands consulting and is working for the good of all parties," says Bill Dauphinais, partner in charge of change integration, Price Waterhouse LLP. "But centralizing this function is not likely to work ifit follows the old World War II mentality that we still see out there. I've seen this in its worst form in purchasing where somebody tries to manage consultants with a one-page agreement. I don't worry about whether we have czars or people with other titles. The question is: How good is the person who will do this job? If the person isn't good, business units will go off and hire their own consultants. " Here is the problem: There are no courses to train would-be czars to manage outsiders. And departmental booby traps wait for those who push centralized control over decentral ized use of consultants.

While nobody today carries the official title of "czar of consulting," a growing group of major companies have internal consultants. These are senior executives charged with managing business and technical issues in their companies. They often are the company's direct liaison with outside consultants. The group has its own thriving network of more than 150 professionals, the Association of Internal Management Consultants (AIMC).

While these executives aren't viewed as czars (or even "dukes and duchesses," as one executive says), they are often called on to guide and manage external consultants as

they generate change. "I don't know about earth. We've had pay-for-performance time when we merely do O.K. work. Sure, the czars, but internal regulators are needed to heavily pushed by the consultants. Maybe average engagement McKinsey or Andersen manage huge resource expenditures," ex- wecan get them tojoin their own plan."

Consulting or ChiatiDay completes is thorBut management consultants are not easplains Michael Overby, vice president of ough and professional. But it does not change quality and reengineering for American ily tamed. Even as some companies seek the world, because, mostly, we spend too more control over consultants, some conExpress Company Inc. and president of the much time sucking up to the client-and fail ArMc. "Without a regulator, you may get sultants are calling on their colleagues to (the correct use of the word) to push the client get tougher with their clients. the big-gear little-gear problem. That's to or past the breaking point-that is, toward Tom Peters, a leading management guru, when companies bring in outside consuldaring departures." Peters concludes by callis accusing his fellow consultants of wimptants to carry out major changes, they may ing on his fellow consultants to "take big-time ing out to clients. Writing in Forbes ASAp, move the gears at the top, but the gears at the risks. Which means courting big-time failure bottom don't know about the changes, but Peters recalls facing an executive at one of and fiasco and, ultimately, shucking our his recent seminars who told him his clients they have to keep working to run. This wimpishness." process has to be internally managed to won't tolerate the failure Peters claims is Wimps or not, sturdy growth is projected essential for growth. "What am I to do?" make sure it works." for both the mammoth consultancies and asked the confused chap.

The gainsharing idea also isn't an easy for the nimble, smaller firms, which have sell. Companies don't want to give away Answers Peters: "We fail our clients all the learned to sell new profit buttons to clients. years of future profits to consulOne of the latter is Symmetrix, the tants; many consultants don't Lexington, Massachusetts-based young tiger of consulting. With want to gamble too heavily on the future, preferring up-front money about 130 consultants, most of in the here and now.

William P. Dunk, a management consultant to both them 35 or younger, Symmetrix For Dauphinais, who is comwas created in 1986 with a simCEOs and other management consultants, has designed pleting a book on the current cora tough menu of do's and don'ts (mostly don'ts) for complistic-sounding mission: To make porate struggle to manage chaos companies more competitive. pany executives in managing their consultants. Here are and confusion, gainsharing is While dwarfed in size by dozens of eight of his most widely used concepts: clearly no magic bullet to get other consulting firms, it has been • Make profit the first, not the last, word. Make your more and better work out of conan innovative force in helping comconsultant push hard on the profit levers. Assignsultants. panies drive new revenue sources ments must move the top line or the bottom line.

"It's very difficult to measure and introduce the idea of gainsharPursue only big opportunities. and manage gainsharing in this ing. Its client list ranges from giants • Don't hire a consultant unless he or she has a powerful such as DuPont to midsized and era of reengineering and change champion in your organization. The CEO, or another management," he notes. "Downsmaller companies. Founded by executive with unquestioned authority, must sell the sizing was different. It was not alGeorge Bennett, Symmetrix is consultant's credibility. credited with getting companies to ways pleasant, but it usually • Don't move forward until expectations are spelled out concentrate on how they make their called for something specific, with great precision. This could take several months. such as taking 30 percent out of money, which many insiders say is costs. Assignments are much the last things many companies do.

• Don't let new initiatives get strangled by old business more complex today and not easBennett introduced what he calls habits. Better to start over in entirely new quarters with ily measured." "the Waldo thing." Waldo is the 50 percent new people than to get blindsided by yesterBut Dunk and others see gainnerdy cartoon character found in a day's practices. sharing as an idea whose time has series of best-selling children's • Fat consulting cats seldom build strong, lean compalong come. "Gainsharing is not books. nies. Pick very lean fellows. And always hire the horses, "The Waldo thing is getting comthe solution for all consulting pronotthefarm. panies to look for the one critical jects, but it clearly makes sense • Don't measure the skills of consultants. Measure for many projects. It makes sure factor in generating revenue," says their character. Never hire a consultant you can't that both sides of the relationship Bennett. "When you find Waldo stand, even if he or she is very good. Life's way have stakes in producing real revyou discover how you make money too short. enuegains." and what strategies you need.

• Don't even think of hiring a consultant if you are no A gainsharing advocate at Waldo is a good metaphor for the good at accepting advice.

Boeing makes this point: "It manager's life today, which is crowded with a blizzard of daily iswould key projects to results and • Each good consulting firm does one thing well. sues and problems clamoring for could bring some of the more celMake sure that what yours does is what you need. time, money, and attention. It symebrated consultants down to

pened is that people were taken out of combolizes the elusive relevant. My advice is to gainsharing agreement on that."

REMEMBERTHATRISKSAREPARTOF THE panies but the work wasn't. You have situafind Waldo before you paper conferenceDEAL.The fundamental idea of gainsharing tions where people are so stressed they room walls with flow charts." is that both parties will share not just the can't do the work required. The consulting The company uses a widely watched gains but the risks as well. focus for many will be on building compatechnique it calls the "fly-by" to determine STAY TUNEDTO REALITY."Gainsharing whether it can deliver what the company nies' top lines, not cutting costs. Patience is the key. At the moment, American business agreements have to recognize that the future needs. "Rather than have an organization is uncertain and that our best forecasts are has a serious attention disorder." tell us what they want done, we send in our And companies are clearly paying attenimperfect models of reality," says Mehlman. team of experts in areas ranging from While many consultants still sell virtution to a bitter fact of business life: Most strategy and operations to information ally every type of management expertise, firms don't have the internal know-how to be systems and organization structure," says as good as they can be. They must buy experSymmetrix chief operating officer and more and more firms are beginning to focus on one single specialty. "Clients know the tise from outsiders. As a 1994 survey in the chief financial officer Pat Flynn, who has difference between genuine knowledge Journal of Management Consulting noted, been with the firm since its beginning, after and elegant theory," says Simon Philips, 61 percent of companies say they hired cona IS-year fling at Bank of America. "Then founder of London-based Bridgewater sultancies for expertise they didn't possess. we come back with a proposal. Sometimes Business Analysis.

Another 26 percent say they bring in consulwe suggest that we can't do the work tants to provide an external view. needed and suggest others who And 21 percent say they gain crediare better in a specific area than bility with their management and we are. But our strength is our staffbuying outside advice. teams. We strongly believe that Consultants' News, which prowls you get the best product from a Bill Dauphinais of Price Waterhouse offers some the consulting netherworld the collective brain." sturdy guidelines for companies seeking consultants to way the Michelin Guide dissThe most important thing in help them create and implement major change. Here are ects rich food, keeps telling us: making gainsharing work is estabfive, heavily grounded in experience and common sense: "Management consulting is one of lishing trust, says Jeff Mehlman, a • Don't use the same procurement process for conAmerica's greatest success stories."

Symmetrix vice president who has sulting that you would use for hammers and furniture.

It's more than that: If other sectors set up gainsharing arrangements • Don't keep the consultant away from the real ecoof the economy could grow as for several clients. "Measuring renomic buyer. steadily and rapidly as the consultsults, which is not easy, comes • Don't let top management off the hook for particiing industry, America's economic later after trust is achieved. Since pating in the selection process. growth would be assured. it's often hard to measure results, As The Economist warned in we minimize the number of vari• Don't get dazzled by big citations; determine what 1988: "In the 21st century, manables involved." real experience the actual project team has. agers may find themselves increasMehlman makes it clear that • Don't expect the consultant to bring more courage ingly judged on their ability to gainsharing needs a high-placed to the table than you are willing to muster yourself; make the best use of consultants." backer in the client's organizacontingency-fee situations frequently derive from a Or as Dunk puts it: "The question is tion. In fact, he has concocted a lack of internal conviction about what can be no longer whether to use consulmarket-tested recipe to make achieved. tants but how this messy consulgainsharing cook. Among the key tant-client relationship can be ingredients: managed better. And if better manGET A STRONGSPONSOR."GainConsultants peddling all-everything agement can keep consultants out of the sharing needs to be sponsored by a senior joke books, so much the better." executive who is interested in dramatic, not strategies may be in for trouble, according Well, maybe just one more: At a workshop incremental gains," says Mehlman. to Alpha Publications projections. Biggest DON'T JUMP IMMEDIATELY INTO GAIN- dollar growth is expected to be posted by in London for corporate strategists, the modconsulting firms specializing in informaerator asked ten executives how they inSHARING.It takes time to get a mutual undertion technologies, a $9,000 million wor1d- stantly know they are dining with a certified standing that gainsharing can create real consultant. "He's always the first one to pick wide market already, heading for $16,000 results-from six months to a year of conup the check-and hand it to you."

D million by the year 2000. stant dialogue.

Some say reengineering is yesterday's MEASURERESULTS. "It's critical to design a fad, but "a ton ofreengineering will be done About the Author: Randall Poe is director of practical model to measure gains," for another 20 years even if the term itself communications for the Conference Board and Mehlman notes. "Pick one or two numbers, fades," says Dauphinais. "What's' hap- writes about major management trends. such as revenue or expense, and base your

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&Ts construction engineers.

For over half a century. L&Ts 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 ECCs 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&Ts 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.

THE CUTTING EDGE OF BUSINESS

Competitive Intelligence CI can be the key to corporate performance-but only iftop management believes in it. a n 1991 Across the Board article, an expert identified six American companies with first-rate competitive-intelligence (CI) programs-Corning, Digital Equipment (DEC), Eastman

I

Kodak, McDonnell

Douglas,

Since then, Kodak, McDonnell

Motorola,

and Southwestern

Bell.

If the programs

were so good,

is a first-rate

detennine

intelligence

whether your CI program

bility to match this use. When they don't, the intelligence quickly deteriorates into another paper-shuffling function.

function

why were they cut? And what

Some people may recognize the link suggested here as the reverse of what happened to the quality revolution in corporate America.

Postmortem analyses in recent years have suggested that the quality revolulion often failed to make its way down to the organization,

program?

where it really mattered.

Indeed,

how do you

is first -rate or a waste of money?

The answer is far from simple. Surely, any business

initiative

should

contribute to the bottom line, and recent studies by two researchers confirm a statistical link between competitive or business intelligence acti vities and corporate performance.

In 1985, the CI people at Motorola, which boasts the one surviving first-rate program, launched a study of Japanese business strategies in Europe. At that time, Motorola-Europe executives saw no signs of a thrust by Japan into Europe. That did not fit the character of their rivals. The study discovered

and strategic business unit (SBU) hcad use intelligence intheir companies and their people quickly develop a capa-

Douglas, and DEC have downsized,

rightsized, or otherwise killsized their intelligence programs.

Corning's program lost some of its influence and with it, resources.

Southwestern Bell still maintains an excellent operational program in one of its divisions, butthe HQ unit has been effectively dismantled. exactly

prcsident, tensively,

that the Japanese

planned to double their

the diagnosis

With competitive

is the reverse:

by the insularity

or business

Middle management

of their companies'

intelligence,

has been frustrated

inward-looking

culture.

And

while those at the middle level, especially the younger managers, function, top intuitively grasp the benefit of an outward-looking management in American corporations generally undervalues competitive information.

This factor helps explain why Kodak, McDonnell Douglas, Merck, US West, and many other veterans of the intelligence revolution that swept America in the 1980s have recently though,

scaled down their CI programs.

It still doesn't explain, the following statistics: At thc same time that the cr

capital investment by 1987, going after the European semiconductor market. As a result, Motorola changed strategy, sought joint ventures

programs

with European partners, and was able to hold off the Japanese.

just about doubled every three years since 1985. To understand this phenomenon you must understand the nature of cr waves in corporate America.

As that example reveals, one of the most signi ficant roles of a CI program is as an early-warning system to ward off disasters. Unless one knows the details of the intelligence delivered and the thought processes

of the decision-makers

receiving

it, averted

disasters

are

hard to quanti fy.

A first-rate CI process must affect the mind-set of the people whose actions most significantly

affect the bottom

line. Therefore,

it must

affect the actions, decisions, and thinking of the CEO (or another top decision-maker).

This is also the decisive factor separating Motorola from the other companies mentioned above. At Motorola, all CEOs since Bob Galvin have had a love affairwith theirCI function.

Motorola

hasn't

been the only company

where the CEO under-

stood the tremendous benefits of an effective business-intelligence capability: Better knowledge of the market, customers, and competitors; quicker

response

time; and superior

strategy

based on early

identi fication of both potential threats and potential opportunities for alliances, acquisitions, and new products. The top guns at Toyota, Toshiba, N EC, Matsushita Electric, and Shiseido don't take a strategic step without a thorough. examination of the available intelligence data. Intuition plays a smaller part than in thc typical American company. Their employees, following their Icad, regard the collection of competitive inforn1ation as fundamcntal.

When the CEO, division

at Kodak,

emasculated,

Digital,

the number

and McDonnell of U.S.

firms

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, American series of humiliating agile, more-efficient, Corporate

Douglas

with

new

were being CI programs

corporations

suffered

a

defeats in the marketplace at the hands of moreand better-prepared Japanese competitors.

America

responded.

A survey

of 315

American

companies in 1988 revealed that while only three percent had a "fully developed" intelligence function, 34 percent already had "fairly well-developed" a "loosely companies over

functions,

developed" anticipated

the next

and an additional

48 percent

few years.

This

was corporate

America's

weapon in its attempt to regain market position-against Japanese and against increased domestic competition-and this "CI revolution" was in full swing.

Since then, however, cutting, downsizing,

many corporations

and restructuring

not spare the new intelligence focus groups Professionals failed results

had

function. The vast majority of American an increase in the budgct for CI activities the in 1988

have gone through

that, surprisingly

programs.

secret

The reason?

cnough, Surveys

cost did and

led by the Society for Competitive Intelligence revealed that the ovelwhelming majority of firms

to use the competitivc-intelligcnce were frustrated

analysts,

function

low organizational

properly. recognition

The or

acceptance of the function, and virtually no impact on firms' top executives. Then, too, newcomers into the CI game were numerous, innocent, and rather ignorant. They copied the format ofCI programs from others in their industry, learning very little from past mistakes.

Why did it work for Bob Galvin butnotforus? they will ask.

The answer is quite simple. Galvin had experience with intelligence during his short tenure on President Nixon's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. His successors at Motorola inherited his affinity to foreknowledge. As my experience bears out, once an executive is exposed to the full capability of a properly organized CI program, he cannot and will not do without it.

Most CEOs and their top teams are in the dark about the role ofintelligence, though they all want to be more knowledgeable about their competitors. All these executives share a clear dissatisfaction with their companies' state of competitive "preparedness." Little wonder: What the CEOs ortheirtop executives perceive as CI activities is a far cry from a true CI capability. Many advocate the development of CI capability in their firms without knowing what CI people actually do' In my experience, every CEO exposed to the correct concept of CI has seen the enormous benefit to himselfand his organization.

The problem, of course, is that most do not get this exposure. As French-American management expert Jean-Marie Bonthous states, the influence of national culture on business's perception of in tell igence is what makes it so easy to sell the concept to a Japanese, French, Israeli, or Swedish executive, and what makes it such a hard sell in America. In the United States, intelligence is associated with the military, covert activity, and secrecy. As Bonthous points out, in Japan, for example, the ningen kankei, the social networks of intelligence transfer, are an integral part of society; in Israel, the vast majority oftop executives served in the military.

More Than Just Watching Competitors Lacking a social-national framework for the intelligence function, the majority of American executives followed the next route. In one instance, a large division of a FORTUNE500 consumer-products company, under severe competitive pressure in the mid-1980s, created a competitor-monitoring program; this was theirversion of competitive intelligence. The division president allocated the task to the marketresearch department. A senior marketing analyst was told to "monitor competitors' activities." Lacking any experience or specialized training, he interpreted his role as compiling pro iiies of competitors. Being a marketing person, he requested the help of the sales division in collecting marketing information on the major competitors, which naturally were large divisions of other FORTUNE500 companies.

The response was less than enthusiastic. Most inforn1ation channeled to him consisted of competitors' coupons, announcements of trade deals, and price sheets. The analyst then hired the services of a clipping service and an on-line database search finn to provide him with more information on the competition. Thepublished data wasan average of six months old and already well known to the division's brand managers. However, few brand managers used the information in their market plans, and even fewer provided feedback to the analysts. The company market share kept sliding, as smaller competitors and private labels ate its lunch. At the yearly performance

review, when resource-allocation fights erupted, the president questioned the real benefits of the monitoring program.

Several things were wrong with this company's approach, some of them obvious, some of them more subtle. Yes, competitor-watching is an important part of competitive intelligence, but it is not passive competitor watching. Intelligence functions when a company develops a core competency in understanding competition. This competency drives challenges to the status quo, brings an outside perspective to insular cultures, devises unconventional strategies to stun competitors, and points out opportunities everyone else ignores. Competency in understanding competition implies a maverick ability to throw competition off balance. It isn't achieved through clipping coupons or searching databases.

More importantly, competitive intelligence is not reactive competitor-tracking, and certainly not a mindless collection of competitors' marketing data. It is the much more ambitious undertaking of creating a fully devoted guardian of the enterprise's overall competitiveness.

A War on Many Fronts Competitiveness is dynamic and requires a continuous and objective assessment of the enterprise's core competencies, mythical vs. real strengths, unspoken weaknesses, and its relative position vis-avis both current competitors and new threats. This should occur on many fronts: Products; technology; customers' revealed, hidden, and emerging preferences; supply chains; distribution strategies; manufacturing processes; acquisition opportunities; and of course competitiveadvantage, knowledge, and the use ofinforn1ation.

Competitiveness is fragile: You slack a little, you lose it. The timing of decline may vary between industries, but no one is immune to a decline in competitiveness.

CEOs could benefit from insightful, thorough, and honest competitive analysis, not just competitor analyses by junior analysts somewhere in marketing who compile the typical competitor profiles and call it CI. As the fate of the old guard at U.S. car manufacturers reveals, this management style doesn't cut it under competitive pressure. While top officers are presumably well-connected and possess good information for their CEOs, in reality, using them as sources doesn't meet the bare-minimum requirements for possessing competitive-intelligence capability: (I) Integration of all functional data into one place where an objective, analytical, and thorough intelligence estimate can be compiled and maintained through time; and (2) a cross-disciplinary network of human sources inside and outside the company that is motivated to communicate competitive infonnation.

These conditions, as a rule, have never been the nonn of corporate structures and cultures. Mostexecutives do not have the time to maintain such a network. Their sources are haphazard, their analysis spotty, their memory short-tern1. In the more autocratic cultures, some CEOs don't have the motivation to keep information unfiltered. Lee lacocca, Roger Smith, and their colleagues at the old Big Three were forced to retire or were eased out because their staffs, their division heads, and ultimately themselves still considered the Japanese a minor nuisance as late as 1985. While it is possible that with self-absorbed leaders such as Iacocca and Smith no early warning would have helped, there is also evidence that a lot of infonnation simply didn't make it to

the top. One senior automobile executive lamented that Japanese progress with transmissions and styling, as evidenced by their successful transition from compact cars to the luxury-car market, took Detroit by surprise.

Fonning an effective human network for infom1ation is a very complicated task. A 1993 research study by professors Bernard Jaworski of the University of Arizona and Liang Chee Wee of Luther College, Iowa, reveals that out of 103 pharmaceutical organizations surveyed, only about35 percent had a topmanagerchampion CI activities. And in only 20 percent ofthe cases did respondents agree that their top management encourages employees to provide intelligence, or provides positive feedback on the role of intelligence. It is not that pharmaceutical companies don't collect CI. They do. But the eff0l1 is very often infOlmal, fragmented or segmented by departments, and rather limited in its strategic impact.

The Need for Intelligence at the Top Management for the present is based on the success of the past.

Management for the future requires that top management, not product managers, receive brilliant analysis of early signs of change in competitive conditions and that they payattentioll to it. This scenario is not wishful thinking. In a small subsidiary of a health-care manufacturer, the top executive committee devotes considerable time to discussing intelligence reports from the field force. The field personnel know that the president and his vice presidents are going to look at and respond to the data, so they send it in systematically. The subsidiary is therefore capable of quick response, and because the attention paid to the CI is both regular and conducted at a high level, proactive strategies are the rule ratherthan the exception.

However, at the parent company of the same subsidimy, direct transmission ofCI to the top is impractical. There is too much of it, too many layers of management in the way, and not enough time for top managers to do their own analyses. Unfortunately, top management lacks the sense of urgency and proactive mind-set of the small subsidiary. In a typical fashion for a pharmaceutical giant in the United States, limited competition and the long cycle of drug development lower the perceived need for intelligence at the top, and in a manner of speaking, some ofthe top executives are asleep atthe helm.

Early signs of structural changes need considerable attention at the highest levels. Roy Vagelos of Merck chose to ignore the rising value of generics and therefore paid $6,000 million to acquire Medco very late in the game. Perhaps intelligence analysis from a function devoted solely to monitoring competitive change would not have persuaded him to act earlier, but the absence of a high-level intelligence advocate guarantees that a company will be reactive, slow, and insular. The essence o/smart, competitive management is all action that precedes its obviolls time. An aggressive CEO must ensure that all early signs from all sources converge on one point.

Sealing the fate of many units is the next deadly sin: The choice of the CI function director. Since CEOs and SBU presidents in the United States haven't fully embraced the activity, the choice of the intelligence director became a matter of shuffling people according to vacant positions elsewhere, not selec'ting the most brilliant analyst, the most unconventional, independent observer, who can be

found. No one pays much attention to what qualifications an intelligence analyst needs so the wrong people are put inthe wrong place to carry out the wrong mission, and nobody minds the store.

As of 1995, about nine percent (and growing) of Western firrns already possess or are building business-intelligence capabilities.

While these companies differ in the way they adapt the new intelligence function to theirculture and processes, they all have one thing in common: There is an ongoing love affair between the division president orthe parent company's CEO and the intelligence function.

In these companies Cl is the backbone of continuous strategic dialogue between theCEOand his top executives. Given the high profile of the intelligence function in these organizations, intelligence managers can tap a human network webbed throughout the organization and the industry. The function coordinates major studies of competitors, as well as benchmarking of internal capabilities. In some cases, the day-to-day flow of intelligence from internal and external sources is subject to analysis by multidisciplinary teams. In the more advanced organizations, intelligence reviews have been woven into the norrnal processes of project and budget planning.

Before embarking on this new activity, these companies spent money and time carefully picking the president's intelligence adviser, studying weak areas in the intemal decision-making process, flushing out competitive blind spots, and carefully delineating the ethical guidelines for their employees. Without exception, the nine percent spend considerable resources on training, for both intelligence analysts and network members. There are no short cuts, no mandates without real management support, no lip service to the importance of "getting closer to the market."

Once it is clear that top management means business, the entire organization falls in step, Managers are embarrassed to be found ignorant of competitive development. One survey revealed that in companies where the CEO makes frequent use of the intelligence analysis, budgets for CI activities over the next two years are expected to grow by an average of33 percent, following an increase of 50 percent in the previous two years. This is not "nice to know" paper shufning down in market research. This is what one of the companies I worked with called, very appropriately, developing "superioranticipation."

Furthermore, as this model catches on, competitive CEOs will place market research and several other boundary-spanning functions such as corporate libraries, economics departments, and development specialists under the CI function, consol idating all sources of external-information gathering and analysis under the special intelligence assistant to the CEO, in a reorganized office of the CEO. Quar1erly intelligence assessmcnts of the company's competitivencss based on input from a well-placed and well-motivated human network inside and outside the firrn will become the nOnll for intelligel1Ce functions and a base for executive action.

0 AlJout the Author: Ben Gilad is u founder of the Gilead Institute/or CI ArchitecflIre and Training. He is an associate professor a/managemellt at Rutgers University ill New BrulI.l'\vick, New Jersey, alld the author of Business Blindspots.

The Best Idea America Ever Had "To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same ...unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." With a stroke of his pen, President Woodrow Wilson thus signed the National Park Service Act 80 years ago.

Thirty-six national parks were brought under a single federal agency by this law. Former British Ambassador to the United States James Bryce called them "the best idea America ever had." In the words of J. Horace McFarland, one of the visionaries who helped establish [the U.S.] National Park Service (NPS) in 1916, "It is the one thing we have that has not been imported." Other nations had preserved gardens and open spaces~but mainly for the privileged classes. Not so for American parks, which would be preserved for all.

The National Park System has grown to 357 sites covering more than 32 million hectares, including national parks and monuments, wild and scenic rivers, seashores, historic sites, scenic trails, and battlefields. In addition to natural wonders, such as Yellowstone in Wyoming and Grand Canyon in Arizona, the Park Service preserves pieces of history and culture~British cannon surrendered at Yorktown, the derringer that killed Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg's typewriter, even a type of short-legged Hereford cattle bred

by President Lyndon Johnson.

The service is acutely aware that its lands are among the last natural refuges for America's plant and animal diversity. More and more, it is being called upon to provide scarce habitat for thousands of species and to use the parks as laboratories for research in a world of dwindling wild places. The service's 12,000 employees include those

investigating why rare saguaro cactuses are dying in the Southwest, seeking how to protect a shrinking population of sea turtles in the U.S. Virgin Islands, exploring how to get clean water to Florida's Everglades in the right volume, and managing a bison herd in Yellowstone that wanders outside the park.

These concerns reflect a growing sensitivity and sophistication in our understanding of the natural world. In Yellowstone, for example, where bleachers were once erected at the garbage dumps so tourists could watch grizzly bears feeding, the dumps have been closed, the bleachers have been razed, and thousands of dollars have been spent to install bear-proof garbage cans. The bears have returned to their normal diet, and they are healthier.

As our understanding of nature has changed, so has the role of national parks. Most Americans probably still think of picture-postcard vistas. But most parks today focus on history or culture, and they often are within easy reach of cities and suburbs. And many of today's parks reflect the nation's evolving values and demographic mix.

In San Antonio, Texas, the Park Service has worked with the Roman Catholic Church to preserve old missions representing the heritage of Spanish colonial days. In (Text continued on page 35)

Vicksburg National Military Park, Mississippi. Some 1,400 monuments commemorate the siege and capture of Vicksburg by the Union army in 1863, a decisive battle in the American Civil War. The victory split the Confederacy in half, giving the Union complete control of the Mississippi River, thus prompting Lincoln remark: "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. "

s

__

Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it; not a bit. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.

Sequoia National Park, California (below). The world's highest trees, sequoias, are often as tall as 75 meters-and still growing.

They are also among the most ancient living things on Earth, some more than 2,500 years old.

Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (right). While there are higher peaks elsewhere in the Rockies, none quite match the rugged majesty, the raw wild beauty a/the Grand Telon~. Climbers go 10 this park/or mountaineering 0/ all degrees 0/ difficulty.

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado (below, center).

The only Us. park devoted to the works 0/ early man, Mesa Verde holds mysteries yet unsolved about the artisans who built cliff dwellings in canyon walls with tools a/slone.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota. This is the only park named ajier a person, Theodore Roosevelt, who played a key role in protecting the nation natural bounty. As honorGly president o/the American Bison Society, he also did a great deal to save the bison, such as these at leji, from extinction.

s

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Yellowstone National Park, WI'oming. The world~'first national park, founded in 1872, Yellowstone offers an astounding variety a/natural wonderswater/it/Is, canyons, rivers./orests, mountains, and animal life like these trumpeter swans (above). The park is most famous for its geothermal attractionshundreds ofllOt springs, pools a/boiling mud, and the world's greatest concentration 0/ gevsers (opposite page, top).

Denali National Park, A laska. The peak attraction is the Mount !vlcKinle!', which, at 6, 195 meters, is the highest poim on the North American continent. But the entire park is at such a high altitude that ojien all one can see are tops a/clouds. Tourists on bus trips can glimpse Alaskan animals, such as a bull caribou (right) and a cow moose (far right), as they move gracefully in the sub-Arctic light.

~When, like a merchant taking a list of his goods, we take stock of our wildness, we are glad to see how much of even the most destructible kind is still unspoiled.

Crater Lake National Park, Oregon (above). The deep blue waters o.fCrater Lake hold . both mystery and history. The lake lies inside of a volcano that collapsed. Wizard Island (shown in photo) was formed by a volcanic eruption thousands of years ago.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii (left). Molten lava pours from a volcano in one of nature S'grandest sound-and-light sholVs. White Sands National Monument, New Mexico (right). This nature preserve is famous for its big and beautiful gypsum desert.

In bright light the constantly shifting sands look like a vast snowfield.

â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘

Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath inthe stream is a saving ordinance."

Yosemite National Park,

Bryce Canyon National Park,

California. This much visited tourist attraction is a showcase oj wooded groves, fields oJflowers, icecarved ca~yons, alpine pastures nestling at the Joot oj glaciers, and the Jamous Bridalveil Fall (left).

High-tech rock climbers love Yosemite s massive granite cliffs (left, below).

Utah (far left, below). An area oj brilliantly colored giant grotesque figures sculpted by the elements over the millennia. The Paiute Indians, who Jor centuries lived in and around Bryce Canyon, called it Unka-timpe-wawince-pock-ich ("Red rocks standing up like men in a bowl-shaped canyon '').

Massachusetts, restored 19th-century textile mills at the Lowell National Historical Park sit in a city of 103,000, the site of America's first planned industrial town.

The national park system has been called the "largest university in the world." The prime purpose of the system, says Yale University historian Robin Winks, "is to educate people, with the 357 park units as branch campuses." But this great university faces a number of challenges stemming from overcrowding, understaffing, and budget constraints.

In the 1970s parklands were doubled with the cI:eation of many urban parks and the addition of more than 16 million hectares of Alaska lands. But there has been no comparable increase in staff-this during a time when more people than ever, more than 270 million a year, are visiting parks. The number of visitors is expected to grow, with estimates that the parks' popularity will push the annual visitation figure to 500 million by the year 2010.

Today there are parks-such as Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Shenandoah in Virginia-where millions offeet walk over the same ground during the course of a year. Visitors seeking solitude are often disappointed to find that some parks are beset by the same crowding and noise that afflict cities.

Even the former chief of the National Park Service, James M. Ridenour, once remarked, "On my first visit to Yosemite two years ago, it was so noisy outside I had trouble sleeping.

It's quieter in my home not far from the nation's capital than it was in the park that night. We hope that we don't get to the point where we'll have to close parks down, but at Yosemite

and some other parks we may have to put up a chain across the road and say, 'Sorry, nobody gets in until somebody comes out.' " While the flood of visitors rises, the federal budget for parks has failed to keep pace, leading to the deterioration of many parks, which suffer under a backlog of maintenance, renovation, and repair that could cost more than two million dollars.

A ready source of income for the parks could come from concessionaires-private businesses licensed to sell food and hotel space in parks. They operate as monopolies and make more than $500 million a year but return only a small portion of that profit to the federal government. The money disappears into a general fund for use in other programs. But even if Congress mandated that a larger portion of concessionaires' annual earnings be returned to the Park Service, this alone would barely reduce the financial strain.

Another approach for stretching federal park dollars has already begun, with the Park Service joining with state and local governments to create jointly operated parks, such as the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in Texas and the Lowell Historical Park in Massachusetts.

The federal government also relies on partnerships with private land conservancies. In the old days the government might have acquired wild lands and unique habitats. These days private conservation groups buy lands and manage them as preserves or hold them in trust until they can be transferred to the Park Service. Concerned citizens have also established the National Park Trust, which is raising money to buy the 810,000 hectares of private lands within the national parks. The idea is to hold these lands safe from development.l?usinesses also contribute to the trust, gaining goodwill in the process.

Such partnerships will carry the Park Service into the 21 st century, according to Ridenour. "Without the active involvement of state and local governments and the private sector, we could not begin to preserve-let alone managethe land needed to meet the outdoor recreation and openspace needs of our population. The natural resources of the parks are under increased stress. The present and future health ofthe system depends, to a great extent, on the level of public support we can achieve."

The 80th birthday of the National Park Service has rekindled concern among Americans, who care deeply about their natural and cultural heritage, for the well-being of the country's national parks and the dedicated staffers who run them. "Doing right by the people in the Park Service-that's the first job," says NPS Director Roger Kennedy. "Do it, and other good things will flow from that."

0 About the Authors: Paul C. Pritchard is the president oj the National Parks and Conservation Association and aJrequent contributor to proJessionaljournals.

Cathy Newman is a senior writer Jor National Geographic magazine.

The World's Money Markets, How do they work? Are they dangerous?

Can governments control them?

The author, who studied these markets as a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow in 1994-95, gives some startling answers.

Early every morning some 50 men and women collect in a large, well-lit room atop New York City's Chase Manhattan complex, just a brief stroll away from Wall Street. The men wearties but not jackets. Their conversation is largely about basketball and Alan Greenspan, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board.

As they fi Ie in, a few stapled pages of charts and prose are passed around. Some sit down at the table, most just stand against the wall and near the door. "We'll spend most of the day in a chair," one explains. A pair of economists seat themselves at the head of the table. They begin to drone about some action expected out of Canberra. They're watching out for a minister's statement in Berlin. A head bends my way and whispers, "Technical analysts."

The pieces of paper in front of me are filled with graphs crawling with little boxes and arrows. They point out "congestion zones" and warn of "resistance" and speak of "uptrendlines." One entire page is about the recent past and immediate future of AUDJPY. I point and ask with my eyes. "Australian dollar-Japanese yen," someone says. The briefing is short. Even then, well before it is over, many in the audience head for the door. The bank expects them to make at least $1 0,000 in profits before they go home that night. For them, in ways most people cannot even dream, time is money. They are currency traders, players in the biggest financial market of them all.

The foreign exchange market is a behemoth. Last year it was estimated that traders bought, sold, and gambled on different currencies to a tune of $1.3 tri IIion a day. Supposedly keeping a rein on this market arc the world's central banks. Their collective reserves, however, total less than half the trade's daily turnover.

These days, when a government says it wi 11defend the value

of its money, everyone takes the claim with a handful of salt. The state is too poor. It is also too slow. The media of currency trading are the computer and the telephone.

Buying and sell ing are done in nanoseconds.

Currencies crash and rise in a span of 48 hours.

On this hangs a phobia.

There is a popular demonology regarding the foreign exchange market. Every six months these fears are enhanced by the sight of yet another currency being carted off to the cemetery.

The most spectacular crash was the collapse of the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). The ERM, which locked the currencies of Western Europe together, was part of Brussels' attempts to create a more perfect European Union. International currency traders stormed the ERM bastion in 1992. The Bank of England's futile attempts to keep the pound sterling within the ERM alone earned the Wall Street speculator-turned-philanthropist, George Soros, an estimated $ I billion.

Last year began with the sharks collecting in the Gul f of Mexico. Traders so ripped apart the Mexican peso that the LJ nited States Government, fearing a larger financial meltdown, put together a $40 billion rescue package for its southern neighbor.

Hence the common man's image of the currency trade as the financial equivalent ofa Mongol horde. Thousands of young men in ties, sitting in front of screens in New York City, London, and Tokyo. They circle overhead like vultures. A nation stumbles and they pounce. The currency is sold short, hundreds of bill ions of dollars are thrown against it, all monetary defenses are overrun. A few days later only the bleached bones ofa once thriving economy are left.

This has elements of truth. But there is much more to the foreign exchange market. Jt is not irrational". It has its own logic and rules.

The problem is that most governments have yet to understand the way the market thinks. Yet the currency market is an integral part of the world economy, a key force behind globalization. Handled sensibly it can be a great asset. Handled foolishly it punishes without mercy.

The international currency market has its origins in the Cold War. In the late 1940s the Soviet Union decided it was safer to place its U.S. dollars in European rather than American banks. The

After the end of Bretton Woods, foreign exchange hedging European banks began trading with these assets, giving rise to the and speculation took off. Currency trading went through the Eurodollar market. A plethora of such currency combinations ceiling. In 1973 a meager $1 0-20 billion of currency was traded arose in almost every country. Banks and individual traders bea day. Ten years later it touched $60 billion. In 1993 it was camc used to dealing in yen, deutsche mark, and more obscure curabout $900 billion. Today it is $1.3 trillion and rising. Though rencies. Today there are always a few screens for traders with a computing exact figures is impossible, it is estimated some 70 taste for strange cocktails~say, drachma-zloty rates. In the trade percent of this is speculative. these arc called "exotics."

In the cascade of events that followed 1973, it is important to Eurocurrency was the dough. The yeast was added in 1971 recognize what happened to the authority of governments. The dewhen the U.S. withdrew from the Bretton Woods system offixed control of capital put the market under the bonnet and the private exchange rates. Over the following few years, the web of capital player behind the steering wheel of world finance. controls that Western governments had created to uphold the fixed exchange rates was removed. The process was similar to the exterCorporations and financial institutions decided where the picknal liberalization initiated by some developing countries in the ings looked the best, and capital flowed accordingly. Places like the Eurodollar market~last year estimated to be replete with past few years.

This had a number of consequences. about $2 trillion of capital~provided money minus red tape to any The first was that exchange rates began to float. In other words, investor. Markets provided the exchange rates. Currency traders the amount of currency one could buy with another currency bespread the risk through hedges.

The currency market is close to being a laissez-faire market. came a matter of supply and demand, not bureaucratic diktat.

Even other capital markets, like bonds and equities, are increasThe second was an explosion in overseas investment. Capital ingly beyond the purview of the rulebook. Governments, to put it was now fluid. It flowed back and forth seeking the best return.

This could mean buying shares in an East Asian stock market. It crudely, have lost control of capital. Logically, losing control of their currencies would be next. could mean being used to set up a factory in Cape Town. Today's It is not as if governments have not tried to tighten their grip on boom in foreign portfolio investment and foreign direct investment in the Third World is a direct descendant. the reins. But the market is too big, too spread out, and too sl ippery.

This is an industry, note, where when people say "one dollar" The third was a rapid expansion in trade. Exports and imports began to go back and forth in ever larger amounts. Butthis ran into a they mean one million dollars. One academic study concluded that problem of floating currency rates. A company exported a the effect of even huge government interventions lasts barely two shipload of widgets for a hefty profit. By the time the ship made it days. A 1995 proposal to put together a $60 bi IIion international to the foreign port, the profit had evaporated because the buycr's bailout fund for currencies got nowhere after it was pointed out this was equal to 85 minutes worth offoreign exchange trading. currency had collapsed.

Providing companies with security against this sort of thing beIn 1963 the U.S. Government, for example, attempted to tax the came an industry all on its own. Currency hedges and options, sale of dollar-denominated bonds to foreigners. The trade moved which allow a company to lock in a currency at a certain rate over a to Europe. The tax was repealed, but the trade, with attendant jobs, never came back. certain period, put foreign exchange trading on the fast lane.

A further development was individual currency speculation.

In 1992 Japan tried to stop the sale of Nikkei index futures. It This can be traced to the American econclamped down on Tokyo, but the market omist, Milton Friedman.

In 1967 immediately moved to Singapore and Friedman got it into his head to sell the New York City. One Japanese official pound sterling short. Ilis bankers told threatened to hit his Singaporean counterpart on the head with an ashtray in an athim private currency speculation was a tempt to get Singapore to stop. All to no no-no. He complained in the press. The avail. It was on Nikkei futures that Nick artic les caught the eye of a board mem bel' Leeson was to trip up in early 1995 and of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange who bought the idea, with an endorsement bankrupt his employers, Barings from Friedman, for $5,000. The idea Securities.

Attempting to regulate or even tax this gained strength and finally received a stamp of approval in the early 1970s from sort ofa market, in other words, is an exercise in futility. It would just pick up and the then U.S. Treasury Secretary, George Shultz. move elsewhere. As exchanges go onThe upshot was that the individual line, the world currency market may soon currency speculator, formerly a black quietly lose touch with geography and "Mone)' isnl evelything. A person with $20 million marketeer working out of a Third World disappear into cyberspace. is no happier than a person with $/5 mil1ion. " alley, became a legitimate player in the Regulation is theoretically possible. If every government in the world got tointernational financial market.

gether and agreed it was time to put those pesky currencywallahs in their place, it would happen.

But there would be a fallout. First, this would create a huge foreign exchange black market. Second, it would force the world imposback to pre-1971 levels of economic isolation-probably sible without an enormous depression in between. Third, if even only one government opted out, the whole regulatory system would fall apart.

This level of cooperation is in the realms of fantasy. When the Mexican peso was bailed out last year, for example, European nations refused to sign up for the U.S.-led rescue package. In a competitive world, it's every country for itsel f.

When it comes to the currency market, most governments are coming round to the view they will have to learn to live with its

The currency market is an integral part ofthe world economy. Handled sensibly it can be a great asset. Handled foolishly it punishes without mercy. ups and downs. After many bruising run-ins that have cost them billions, central banks are starting to believe that inactivity is the best policy.

An excellent example was the Clinton Administration's reaction to the collapse of the dollar against the yen early last year. Washington did precisely nothing. The dollar eventually stabilized.

In today's world economy a country needs a competitive exchange rate. That is not necessarily the same thing as a stable one.

Time to stop worrying and learn to love volatility, to paraphrase the line from the movie Dr: Strange/ave. Or, to use the technical analysts' jargon, policy should "seek out the optimum risk-adjusted return." This is the sentiment finding grudging acceptance among the Alan Greenspans of the world.

Thus will the currency market find grudging acceptance with the average person. It will be recognized as part oflife, part of the gyrations of a world economy on speed. It will be understood to exist because it is needed. And because there is not much anyone can do about it. However, wunt on the foreign exchange trader to occasionally burst in the scene, cause a few coronaries, and then recede back into cyberspace.

There are numerous defenders of foreign exchange trading.

The key argument is that speculation is dangerous only to governments who try to play funny with their money. If a nation's economic fundamentals are sound, the argument goes, it has little to worry about. \.l' 'x The ERM, for example, collapsed because Brussels believed the worth of currencies could be set by bureaucratic decree rither than monetary policy. Once Germany jacked up interest rates to pay forthe cost of reuni fication, the deutsche mark's value became much higher than its fixed rate. The resulting gap between the mark and the rest was just the sort of gap speculators look for.

In this view, traders are Iike the child who said the emperor was naked. George Soros is thus a hero. And, to be fair, his sales of the British pound were dwarfed by large, panicked corporations trading their stocks of sterling for safer currencies. It was, one writer noted afterward,just like an old-fashioned run on a bank.

What the currency market has shown in recent times is that governments are on warning. Things like diddling the books to pay for an election, which is what Mexico is believed to have done, or running up huge budget deficits, which the United States does, or simply being chaotic and inefficient, as Italy is reputed to be, will be punished and severely. Give the foreign exchange trader a free hand, this thesis goes, and governments will be forced to become paragons offiscal prudery.

Countries that cannot make their books meet such puritanical requirements, like many Third World nations, will probably have to maintain capital controls, at least for short-term capital inflows.

Others have pointed out how easily the market has absorbed so-called crises. The U.S. savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, the popping of the Japanese real estate bubble-the world as a whole barely felt them because the market had so much padding.

Even as the ERM sank with all hands, the financial market still continued to beg, borrow, and buy. Its very size, in other words, is a source of security.

Obviously this is disputed. Speculators are a favorite bogey.

They do not have time to concern themselves with budget deficits and the like. There are two types of data used by traders. One is technical analysis-where did the currency go yesterday, last week, and last month. The other is fundamental analysis-what is the country's real interest rate, money supply, and so on. A study showed that traders used technical analysis 12 times more often than fundamental analysis. Many just go by gut feel ings.

The U.S. Federal Reserve Board put it another way. Its analysts believe three-quarters of the dollar's movement in the market is simply not quantifiable. It has no basis in anything tangible.

I'asked one Swiss Bank Corporation currency trader what was the most important skill in hisjob. He replied: "To get on a wave as early as possible and get offas late as possible." The gap between the two can be as little as a few seconds.

Traders do not conspire to bring down currencies. But they have only seconds to make buy and sell decisions. They live off wafer-thin profit margins. Buy and sell orders often revolve around a few hundred-thousandths' difference in one currency's value in comparison to another. Iftheir Reuters screen says someone is selling the franc or the dollar they do not ponder and philosophize. They just act.

Governments-unless their central bankers have, to quote one authority on the subject, "a nose for the ingenuity of markets, a sense of the gambler's instinct, and a love of computer technology"-are best doing as little as possible.

0 About the Author: Pramit Pal Challdhuri is an assistant editor o/The Telegraph, Calcutta. and a graduate o/Cornell University. In 1994-95 he was a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow at the University 0/ Mwyland where he studied topics related to international economics.

...------------------C) C) C9 0 o

-AMSleRDAM

LO~DoN

Nl=W

yoRK

Tol<~

ZLl~ICH

ONTHE LIGHTER

SIDE

111

"Your HanOI; we'll go along with whatever the media decides. "

"Marry me, darling. It will look good on your resume. " Drawingby

Eric & Bill Ii.) 1995 Tribune Media Services, All Rights Reserved.

Inc.

Drawing

by Eric & Bill © 1995 Tribune Media Services.

All Rights Reserved.

Inc.

Where do real dangers lie?

The aftermath of the earthquake is frightening: Fanned by strong winds from the west, fire races across the city of San Francisco. I can't help but hold my breath as I witness this Armageddon.

I look up from the. computer monitor and stare outside. It's rainy but otherwise an ordinary day in the Bay Area. On the screen the simulation continues, the computer counting the minutes as fire engines, represented by flashing blips, move along a gridwork of streets to battle the inferno.

Hemant Shah of Risk Management Solutions has re-created the conditions of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and overlaid it onto today's city. The company performs this simulation to anticipate what might happen in the event of a quake. Factored into this model are countless speci fics that only a computer could juggle: The location of gas mains, the kinds of firebreaks, the speed of fire engines battling rubble in the roadways, the type of construction of various buildings, as well as soil types and ground conditions.

Seven hours later, when the fires have burned out or been controlled, a series of blimp- and cigar-shaped splotches mar Reprinted from SlIIilhsonian magazine.

Copyrigh\Š 1995 John F. Ross

the city grid; they indicate fire damage.

With this information, Shah can calculate the claim costs for an insurance company.

The U.S. insurance industry has been burned recently by earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes.

Florida's Hurricane Andrew alone bankrupted nine insurance companies. Itchy to know their vulnerabi lity to natural hazards and their "probability of ruin," insurance companies have lined up for the help of Risk Management S¡olutions. Shah's company is on the leading edge of the new science of risk theory: How we recognize, understand, and manage the hazards that surround us.

On Capitol Hill in summer, 1995, the House passed legislation requiring both risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis before any new federal regulations are imposed. A similar bill stalled in the Senate. It appears that "risk analysis," "risk management," and "risk communication" will become trendy phrases on the lips of politicians, health experts, and environmental ists.

We have always been concerned with risk, defined as the probability that something harmful will occur. Yet the past 15 years have brought an explosion of interest, as computers, statistical databases,

and highly sensItIve quantitative techniques bring new tools to the task of assigning hard numbers to probabilities that range from the personal and mundane to the global and catastrophic. How we interpret and use these numbers is influencing how we live our lives, as well as how our society allocates limited resources. The numbers can embolden us to feel that we are masters of the universe.

Or they can make us feel despondent under the burden of making correct decisions. The subtleties of the questions ripple through the fabric of our society and threaten to recast the way we view the world.

Each of us makes hundreds, if not thousands, of risk assessments every day.

How fast will we drive if we 're late for an appointment? Is speeding, with its riskofa' ticket and increased chances of an accident, worthwhile if the meeting is important? Is a healthful lunch worth an extra expense? Should you place your retirement portfolio in stocks, a more risky path than some other investments but one more likely to keep pace with inflation over the long run? Lately it seems that understanding the risks in our daily lives has become a full-time job as we're bombarded constantly with warnings and new findings.

If we want to stay healthy, we must become risk experts ourselves and sort through the overwhelming and often complex information swirling around us like a dust cloud. Much ofthe material is contradictory: Read periodic press reports about caffeine and you'll never know whether or not it's O.K. to drink coffee. Based on observations made a decade ago on the Greenland Inuit diet, we've learned to eat fish more often. Nowa new study from the Harvard School of Public Health finds that eating fish does not make any difference in the rate of heart disease among men. Reports conflict on whether we should have an occasional glass of wine for good health or steer clear of it to avoid breast cancer; on whether we should spread butter with its saturated fats or margarine with its trans fatty acids; on whether we should take an aspirin a day to keep the doctor away or avoid it altogether for fear of bleeding ulcers and other side effects.

Then there's the whole category of possible risks on which the scientific community remains divided. Take radon, for example. This is an odorless, radioactive gas that seeps from the ground into many basements. It could be one of our chief environmental health risks, with one in every 15 homes in the United States estimated to have elevated radon levels. Worse, it could be causing anywhere from 7,000 to 30,000 lung cancer deaths a year. Yet some scientists are suggesting that radon is not a significant health risk. In some cases, science just can't give us a definitive answer. The fear oflitigation adds even more confusion to the picture as manufacturers and employers issue absurd warnings to protect themse lves.

Infectious Organisms in Your Pocket While confusion reigns in some areas, solid numbers are being nailed down in others, data unequivocal enough to change the ways all of us think about risks. Did you know, for example, that in the United States about one person a year dies from ingesting a toothpick? This minuscule death rate is actually higher

bly suggest that he chase rabbits yearround instead.

In our complex and technological society, threats to our person are usually less immediate. In some cases, technological advances have turned once life-furthering biological imperatives into life-threatening ones. Our bodies, for instance, crave fat, a way of storing energy for times when resources are scarce. Today in the industrialized West we can eat as much fat as we like, but that desire is making us ill with heart disease, obesity, and a host of other problems.

How Much Are We Willing to Pay?

than that attributed to widely feared asbestos. Did you know that more people die using crosswalks than while jaywalking? (Most people use the crosswalks, and jaywalkers tend to be more alert.) Do you worry about picking up a germ while visiting a friend in the hospital? You're more likely to acquire germs from the money in your pocket right¡ now. One out of every ten coins and almost half the paper currency carry infectious organisms.

Risk itself has always been a part of our landscape; responses to some risks are hard-wired into our beings in the form of instinct. A finely tuned recognition of immediate risks to our body is a prerequisite for survival. No risk will ever be clearer than a saber-toothed tiger stalking one of our ancestors. More complex risk assessments, however, req uire calculating the ratio of costs to benefits, rather than just responding to a hazard.

When ero-Magnon man, armed only with a spear and his cunning, decided to hunt a mastodon the size of a small house, he knew that he stood great risk, but the potential gain (enough meat to feed his family for a long time) was also great. Modern risk theory would proba-

While risks abound, the good news is that Homo sapiens has been particularly ingenious at inventing ways to minimize risk. In the parlance of risk theorists, this approach is called risk management.

Thus, as I slip into my car for a short trip to the drugstore to pick up antibiotics for my son, a warning beeps ifI don't don my seat belt and, down the road, guardrails prevent me from skidding offan embankment. Undoubtedly, driving will be the most hazardous aspect of my day (110 Americans die in car accidents daily). On the radio I hear that some stocks I've bought are down, but I'm not overly concerned because they're among hundreds of others in a mutual fund that spreads the risk. When I pick up my son's medicine, I fumble with the childproof cap, an ingenious risk-management device.

The downside of the antibiotics and these other risk-management tools is that they cost money. They are a choice: The money spent to buy antibiotics is no longer available to buy something else.

Similarly, billions spent to clean up toxic waste sites are not available to, say, immunize children. Yet most of us agree that these particular strategies are well worth the price. But how far will we go, or how much are we willing to pay, to minimize other risks where the payoffs are less clear-cut? That's where risk theory gets interesting.

The discipline of risk assessment has come from the melding of several different areas of study. Any meeting of risk

experts today will probably include engineers, safety experts, physiologists, policy analysts, psychologists, toxicologists, and statisticians.

An early form of the science came with the discovery of radioactivity at the turn of the century, prompting biologists and health physicists to examine the health impact of exposure to the curious new phenomenon. Later, studies of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided information on the effects of severe doses of radiation.

Engineers also contributed fundamental information for risk analysis as they pored over the safety of nuclear power plants, dams, chemical plants, and other large civil projects. They designed models and contingencies based on the probabilities of certain failures-and strings Their pioneerof failures-occurring. ing work in "what if" modeling is still used today.

Another building bloc k of risk assessment was the compilation offatality statistics for automobiles and airplanes that began in the 1930s. [n 1975 the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration set up a computerized data file called the Fatal Accident Reporting System. It now contains information about the more than 800,000 highway deaths that have occurred in the United States since then, recording detai Is that range from the speed and make of the" vehicle to the time of day and the age and sex of those involved.

Using these results, traffic safety scientists have been able to characterize the risks of driving. While common sense dictates that a larger car is safer to drive, the numbers tell us how much: Overall, you are 17 times more likely to die in a head-on crash if you're driving a small vehicle. Wearing seat belts reduces the chance of the driver's dying in an accident by 42 percent.

Large epidemiological studies over time have revealed links between certain activities and higher mortalitysmoking cigarettes, for instance, is a big one. Again, while we could intuit that sll10k ing was not great for our health, the

crunching of large numbers began to show clear and certain correlationsand was the genesis of the U.S. Surgeon General's ubiquitous warning label.

Squeezing the numbers further, some scientists now say that, statistically, one cigarette cuts five minutes off your life span. Other numbers are even more disturbing. For example, unemployment beats out steeplejacking as the riskiest "occupation."

So heightened is your risk of suicide, liver cirrhosis from drinking alcoholic beverages, and other stress-related diseases while not working, that being unemployed rates as the equivalent of smoki ng ten packs of cigarettes a day. Being poor is equally dangerous. Living in poverty reduces your life expectancy by about nine years. But there's good news as well as bad. If you're a man, think about getting married: The averages suggest that you will outl ive your bachelor friends by five years.

Feeding Megadoses to White Rats While epidemiologists were making these correlations, toxicologists were testing carcinogens on living creatures.

Laboratory animals that were fed huge quantities of certain chemical compounds would develop tumors. This result was extrapolated to human beings-though the debate about the applicability of these tests to humans still runs hot. As a result, in 1958 the U.S. Congress devised the Delaney Clause, which forbade the use of any chemical in processed foods that produces tumors in laboratory animals at any dose.

Before the 1970s, risk from contaminants was a pretty much black-and-white issue.

Scientists simply looked at whether the pesticide DDT, for instance, was carcinogenic (cancer causing) or mutagenic (gene mutating). Back then, only a handful of chemicals appeared to cause cancer. Today, two-thirds of the more than 800 chemicals tested so far have been found to cause or promote tumors in rodents. Yet more than 50,000 synthetic chemicals remain untested.

Now we also know that carcinogens differ enormously in potency, so it's no longer a matter of either/or but also of how much.

Complicating the science of cause and effect are our great leaps in quantitative chemical analysis. In the 1950s, scientists measured things in parts per million.

Today, with modern equipment, scientists can measure amou'nts down to parts per trillion (1,000,000,000,000).

Thus you could have a situation where a processed food was found to contain one part per trillion ofa compound known to cause tumor"s in nits when administered in massive doses. Under the Delaney Clause, that food could not be sold, even though no one can show that having the contaminant present at such a low level' could cause cancer in humans.

All of life is a risk. Take a deep breath and hold it. You've probably inhaled molecules of Earth's deadliest toxins: Dioxin, radon, benzene, formaldehyde.

How do we understand the effect of something so small on the human body, and should we be concerned? At what point do real risks begin and others remain negligible? Certainly the Delaney Clause of 1958, with its zero-risk inten-

tions, is hopelessly out of date with what we know today. Yet before Congress sweeps it into the dustbin, new guidelines on food safety will have to be thrashed out, which will be no easy task.

The numbers themselves present another problem because most of us (myself included) find it hard to visualize anything larger than 1,000 units of anything. In our largely innumerate society, risks expressed as I: 10,000 or I: 1,000,000 seem little different. Risk communication, the third branch of risk science, addresses the need to put these numbers into context; it is about how you and r understand risk in our lives. And we don't always do a very goodjob.

In a landmark test in 1980, a group of psychologists asked a representative sampling of the populace to rank 30 activities and technologies by risk; then they compared the results with rankings assigned by a panel of risk-assessment experts. In places, the two groups agreed, such as on the risk of motor vehicles, placed number one by the experts and number two by the public. But on others, there were large discrepancies: The public rated nuclear power as their number one risk, whereas the experts ranked it as a lowly number 20. Experts ranked X-rays as number seven, while the manin-the-street saw them as number 22.

What, the risk-communication scientists next asked, was influencing the public's perception of risk?

Spectacular Deaths For starters, they found that the public responds differently to voluntary and involuntary risks. You and 1are willing to tolerate far greater risks when it is our own doing, such as smoking cigarettes or climbing mountains. But if the risk is something we can't control, such as pesticides on food or radiation from a nuclear power plant, we protest, even if the threat is minimal.

Second, we tend to overestimate the probability of splashy and dreadful deaths and underestimate common but far more deadly risks. Many people can remember nearly every case of botulism

in the United States because the incidence of it is so small and the press coverage so large. This results in a perception that the risk is higher than it really is.

Along with botulism, people tend to overestimate the risk of death by, say, tornado. On the other hand, stroke and heart attack, which have affected all of our lives in some form, don't seem as dreadful, probably because they are so com- . mono The general public ranks accident and disease on an equal footing, although disease takes about 15 times more lives: Although 40,000 people die on American highways each year, and another400,000 from smoking-related diseases, a single crash ofajetlinerwith 300 people aboard draws far more attention from the press.

Spectacular deaths make the front page; ordinary deaths wind up back on the obituary page.

Yet another factor about how we rank risks revolves around whether or not the risk is perceived as "natural." Although 1 am generally good about applying sunscreen, sometimes I forget and I'll get a burn. What seems more natural than an outdoor activity on anice sunny day? Yet it involves serious risk: Skin cancer, for starters.

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has computed that one serious sunburn can increase your risk of skin

cancer by as much as 50 percent. Over a lifetime, one out of every seven people in the United States could develop melanoma or other skin cancer from overexposure to the sun. Yet people often remain lackadaisical about applying protective lotion. Because the sun is "natural," it doesn't carry the specter of death associated with the asbestos used in insulation. Asbestos poisoning, however, is an insignificant threat to Americans when compared with cancer caused by sun worship.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of erroneous public perception of unnatural and involuntary risk occurred in 1989 when CBS News' 60 Minutes ran a show alleging that the chemical daminozideunder the trade name Alar-put children at great risk for cancer.

Used by a small percentage of America's apple growers in the 1980s, mostly on red delicious apples, Alar is a growth-regulating chemical that is applied to keep apples from falling off the tree too early. Backed by a large apple and a skull and crossbones, anchorman Ed Bradley reported that Alar was the "most potent cancer-causing agent in the food supply today." In 24 hours, the country erupted in fear and panic. A woman called the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and asked if she could pour her apple juice down the drain or whether she should take it to a toxic waste dump. School districts in Los Angeles, New York, and other cities immediately banned apples and apple products from their cafeterias, and many millions of dollars' worth of apples were dumped into ditches. Actress Meryl Streep, a concerned mother, joined the fracas: In a TV commercial she used a detergent to wash pesticides off vegetables. The public appeared to believe that one bite of an apple treated with Alar could strike you dead. The apple industry lost more than $100 million, and a number of small-scale growers, many of whom had never even used Alar, went out of business.

The panic originated from a controversial report of questionable science in

which laboratory mice developed tumors when exposed to 35,000 times the amount of Alar that children were normally exposed to. Uniroyal, the maker of Alar, took it off the market. Later, several independent reviews found the threat minuscule, but by that time the notion of "deadly Alar" was firmly entrenched in the public's mind, and it remains off the U.S. market today.

Bruce Ames, an outspoken molecular biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, dismisses the Alar episode as a purely emotional reaction by a news media and public not fluent with relative risks. His research suggests that the human role in putting carcinogens into the food supply-in the form of pesticide residues-is minimal compared with what nature does.

Those Carcinogens in Your Coffee Over time, all plants have evolved sophisticated biochemical defenses against their enemies-fungi and herbivores.

Lettuce, celery, and beets contain caffeic acid; peanuts, corn, and milk can contain mold toxins, such as deadly aflatoxin and sterigmatocystin; eggs contain benzene.

Even the process of cooking food produces carcinogens. These naturally occurring chemicals are as carcinogenic as any synthesized by chemists. After Ames added up all the naturally occurring chemicals in a regular diet, he found we eat 10,000 times more natural than manmade pesticides.

Coffee, Ames says, is not dangerous, but it contains 1,000 natural chemicals, and only 26 have been tested. Of these, 19 have produced cancer in laboratory animals. Under the current law, if coffee were synthetic, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would ban it. Yet the cancer risk of an apple with Alar residue is far less than the risk from the natural compounds in a cup of coffee. Ames throws the pesticide controversy on its head by suggesting that pesticides actually decrease our incidence of cancer. Pesticides reduce production costs, thus making fruits and vegetables cheaper. So, he concludes,

more people will eat more fruits and vegetables-a proven strategy for significantly reducing cancer and heart disease.

Cancer is the risk people worry about more than any other. In 1981 Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress comm issioned two Oxford epidemiologists, Richard Doll and Richard Peto, to examine the roots of cancer in the United States. (Doll and Peto are the scientists who perfected the technique of meta-analysis: Looking at all the studies done on a subject in a statistically weighted way so that more information, and more certainty, can be extracted than from any of the individual studies.) They found that roughly onethird of the cancers were caused by smoking and smoking-related behavior, another third by diet, and the remainder mostly by lifestyle choices, such as occupational and recreational activities.

Environmental carcinogens accounted for only two percent of all cancers, they wrote.

Such results have been music to the ears of those opposed to government regulation and have made risk analysis less than popular with many environmental

groups. As the EPA can attest, however, the health of human beings is not the only reason to try to protect the environment.

Threats to other species, to ecosystems, even to the entire planet must enter the equation. More than any other U.S. governmental agency, the EPA has furthered the science ofrisk analysis, which has become one of the agency's best tools in supporting its mission to evaluate the health of the environment and regulate threats to it.

In 1987 the EPA did a study titled "Unfinished Business."

The agency found that it was spending vast sums of taxpayer money on certain activities that were inconsequential to the number of lives saved and the overall environmental impact. A prime example is the Superfund, the pot of money designated for cleaning up toxic waste dumps.

Everybody agrees that toxic waste dumps do not represent our finest hour.

But should we spend billions of dollars to clean them up to the last speck? How did the EPA define the group at risk ifthe cleanup were to be less than total? Very conservatively.

Suppose, for example, that some pollutant has accumulated in the bottom ofa pond. How much cleanup should the EPA require? Not down to the last molecule, the answer comes, but enough, in some cases, so that a child could eat bits of that mud for 250 days a year without becoming seriously ill.

Americans' emotional reaction to and abhorrence of toxic waste dumps have spurred them into remarkable action.

They spend $6, I 00 mill ion a year on hazardous waste to prevent as few as 500 cancer deaths a year. Compare that with the $100 million-plus spent on reducing the risk oflead poisoning for millions of American chi ldren.

In 1992 the U.S. Government incorporated risk assessment into its budget considerations and brought more cost comparisons to the table. It noted that the EPA's regulations ranged from spending $100,000 per premature death prevented (by mandating certain carsafety standards) to as much as $5 trillion (by designating and then regulating

wood-preserving chemicals as hazardous waste). Numbers like that last one have led certain scientists to contend that some government programs are the equivalent of "statistical murder" because they take limited resources and devote them to mitigating negligible risks. Any such numbers raise a core question that no one wants to answer.

How much is a human life really worth?

Is a younger person worth more than an older person? Is it better to save one life or help 10,000 people who are sick all the time?

Technology has pushed us into an ethical corner before we've developed the means to find our way out. Risk theory can only sharpen the questions; it cannot by itself solve the ethical dilemmas.

We are also realizing that the tradeoffs are not always so clear. Reducing risk in one area may very well increase the risk in another. John Graham at Harvard University uses the example of the fuel efficiency of cars. Most people would agree, he suggests, that higher fuel efficiency in automobiles is a positive goal, representing less air pollution and dependence on foreign oil.

If, however, the government pushed up the average miles-per-gallon requirement for new cars from 27 miles per gallon to 40 [about 12 kilometers per liter to 17], manufacturers might be forced to make smaller and lighter cars.

Graham calculates that these less-safe cars would eliminate the entire safety gains realized from air-bag technology.

Is less air pollution worth more fatal accidents? Or take the very costly removal of asbestos from the New York City schools. Some have suggested that the weeks the chi Idren spent out of school were far riskier to their health than the actual asbestos itself.

The questions become even more interesting when applied to more-hypothetical risks, the ones with small likelihood but huge impact. In 1994, two scientists analyzed in great detail the risk of a large asteroid or comet's hitting Earth in the next century.

We're hit often enough by small ex-

traterrestrial debris or meteorites. But there is strong evidence of impacts by larger bodies, the most famous being one that scientists believe occurred on the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago.

The dust sent into the atmosphere catastrophically affected Earth's environment and may have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Although the chance that it will happen is slim, the consequences of such an impact ifit does happen are extraordinarily great. The two scientists calculated that if you live for the next 65 years, you have a one-in20,000 chance of dying from an asteroid or comet impact. Compare this with the risk of being killed in events that are far more common but have only local impact: A flood, I :30,000; a tornado, I :60,000. To put this in perspective, in a game of poker the chance of being dealt four aces in a hand of five-card stud is 1:50,000.

Should we then develop costly programs to divert an incoming asteroid or meteor with nuclear bomb blasts? Can we afford to, when people on Earth are still dying from more immediate and preventable risks, such as malnutrition and infectious diseases?

Risk Management Sol utions' earth-' quake expert Haresh Shah, who is Hemant Shah's father, suggests that we mostly tend to ignore these large-impact, low-probability risks. Urbanization and growing populations, he believes, are putting people increasingly at risk from natural disasters. We can assume that earthquakes occur with a relatively constant regularity over geologic time. Today, populated areas near fault lines are becoming more and more densely packed at an ever increasing pace. When the 1906 earthquake hit San Francisco, about a half-million people lived in the area. Should a quake of the same size strike today, six million people would be at risk.

By the year 2000, more people will live in urban areas than there were people on the entire planet just 50 years ago. Also by 2000, about 75 percent of all Americans will live within 15 kilometers

of a seacoast, an area often at greater risk from earthquakes and hurricanes.

In the crowded cities, the construction of buildings now proceeds on formerly undesirable locations: Reclaimed waterfront land and steep hillsides.

Thus when an earthquake hits, many more people are at risk. During Japan's great Hanshin earthquake in January 1995, buildings on two artificial islands in Kobe Harbor were among the hardest hit. In the United States, the top relocation areas are plagued by natural disasters: Florida, hurricanes; California, earthquakes; Texas, tornadoes and hurricanes. Technology is not advancing quickly enough to protect the fast-growing concentrations of people and their attendant economies. While technology will help us chip away at the total percentage offatalities in natural disasters, the growing numbers of people in highrisk areas will result in larger actual num bers of deaths.

One question remains. Are we safer than we were, say, 100 years ago? In the United States a single number gives that answer. American life expectancy was 47.3 years at the turn of the century and has climbed to 75.8 years today; it continues to grow. In the past ten years, life expectancy in the U.S. rose 1.4 years, thanks to better medications, better diets, and better risk management in our personal as well as our collective lives.

In fact, the cancer we see around us is actually a sign of how well we're doing.

Not too long ago, most people didn't live to middle age and rarely got cancer because other, more immediate causes got them first.

Does all this mean you should have an extra pat of butter on your blueberry muffin tomorrow morning?

Probably not; you've got to watch your cholesterol, you know. But does it mean you should lose sleep about being bonked on the head by a meteorite? Don't worry, you have a better chance of winning the lottery.

0 About the Author: John F Ross is afreelance writer living in Bethesda, Maryland.

THE ART OF

RafalOlbinski In 1994, he received a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators in New York and a Creative Review award for the best British illustration in London. The same year his poster "Say No to Drugs Before It's Too Late" (see page 49) won the Ninth International Poster Competition in Paris for the "Most Memorable Poster of 1994." The sponsors, Urban Art International, in collaboration with UNESCO and the American Institute of Graphic Artists, also awarded him the prestigious Savignac Prize, which is given for a poster that best presents a "concise message that confronts the viewer with the beauty and economy of the image." His works are in the collection of the U.S. Library of Congress, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. And his illustrations and paintings have adorned the pages of Time, Newsweek, and Playboy, as well as covers of the New York Times Magazine.

He is Polish-born New York artist Rafal Olbinski, who employs surrealistic images to convey deep human emotions, colored by his childhood in his hometown of Kielce. Born in 1945, Olbinski has early memories of a war-ravaged Poland: Cemeteries, damaged buildings, long lines of hungry people waiting for food rations, the oppression of a total itarian communist system, and the general feeling of paranoia.

As Olbinski grew up, he acquired an early love of drawing, filling his notebooks with such icons of American folklore as Mickey Mouse and cowboys and American Indians. He also developed a love of poetry, of the works of Julian Tuwim, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Goethe (from whom he still likes to quote).

At one point, he seriously thought of becoming a

writer, but decided to study art instead, graduating with distinction from the prestigious Warsaw Poly technical School of Architecture in 1969. But his first love was jazz, and he abandoned architecture to become art editor of the respected Jazz Forum, an organ of the International Jazz Federation.

Like several of his compatriot artists, Olbinski soon turned to poster design which, like jazz, involved improvisation, expressed irreverent feelings, and had a large young rebellious audience in communist Poland. He developed a surrealistic style that delighted in absurdity, paradox, and quaint juxtapositions.

In the garb of providing color and excitement for the bare walls of Poland's cities, his posters confronted the oppression and monotony of the existing political order with their daring humor and hidden symbolism.

Olbinski's talent flowered after he arrived in America in 1981. Today he is rated aIllong the country's finest painters, illustrators, and poster designers. Steven Heller, art director for the New York Times, has paid tribute to his imaginative style, his "discordant imagery," and his "wit, elegance, and drama." Art critic Walter Thompson has commented on the "explicitness" of some paintings and the "absurdity or unexpectedness" of others.

Olbinski combines these opposite qualities as few can. "He places a private dream in a beautiful, if commonplace, landscape," says Frank Fox, professor of East European history. "Nature there is impersonal and allows everyone to parade their fantasies."

The writer Eva Hoffman has referred to his paintings as "mindscapes," as "provocations for the eye and the imagination."

His works, she says, are

Private Fame, oil and acrylic on canvas, 76x 102 cms.

Calendar oj Yesterday's Wishes, oil on canvas, 60x 50 ems.

Unfinished Story, oil on canvas, 81 x 56 ems.

"possessed of a sense of infinite, though always controlled, possibi lity."

A number of favorite symbols recur throughout o lbinski's oeuvre: Mountaintops, curtains, puppets and marionettes, clowns wearing dunce caps, birds and bird cages, trees, lighthouses, wide-open fields, and the sea. And above them all drift billowing gray clouds, as carefully rendered as those of the Dutch masters. There are humorous juxtapositions: A tiger, whose lower body is that of a clown, jumps through a paper screen. A brass instrument winds its way out ofa sardine can.

Such contrasts, says Fox, help to explain the art of Rafal Olbinski, an art "where sadness often masquerades as frivolity."

D

Poster, offset, 61 x 66 ems.

Nations are born, nations break up.

Racing to keep up with it all is Markie Hunsiker of the National Geographic Society's map-making division.

Raised in Pittsburgh, Hunsiker majored in history at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. After graduating in 1971, she spent six months getting to know American geography on a crosscountry jaunt with friends in a Ford van.

In the summer of '74, she visited her sister Melissa, who worked at the National Geographic Society. HlIl1siker got herself a job there as a clerk. In 1977, she was promoted to researcher for the maps that accompany articles in National Geographic magazine. In 1988, she became chief researcher of the society's Atlas of the World-a standard reference work in schools, offices, and libraries-just in time for the reunification of Germany and, later, the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Afew months ago, Ken Adelman, a syndicated columnist, talked to Hunsiker, who is associate director of the cartographic division, in her mapfilled office at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. What was it like, redrawing all the maps when the whole world changed?

As director of map research, I expected our fall 1990 atlas to last us five years or so.

Looking back, we should have known better.

We were scurrying around even to put that version to press. At the last minute, we had to draw a newly unified Yemen and a reunified Germany ..

Counrerc!ockwise from top: Associate Director Markie HUIl.~ikersays that sOllie readers use a magnifying glass in their zeal to jimifallits with National Geographic's maps; lIIap ediwr Gus Platis (left) and researcher Andreu' J. Wahil/ verify changes in the index w the atlas; technician John Sebastian constructs a map on his computer; and designer Bob Pratt works on a layout of a map of the Orion constellation.

We ended up with two German capitalsone Bonn, the other Berlin. Well, that lasted only through the first 6,000 copies. We then decided to stop the presses to make one capital, Berlin. Again we thought we were all set.

We weren't accustomed to rushing out maps.

We had put out six editions of the atlas over some 30 years.

Then everything fell apart. We could no longer make minor changes-a capital here, a border there. Now we had 15 new countries from the former Soviet Union and five more from ex-Yugoslavia.

We needed a whole new press run.

We ended up making more than 1,000 changesjust in Ukraine, turning into Ukrainian all the place names in that new country. They no longer used Russian names. In all we made 14,000 changes, getting rid of all the Soviet names in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, wherever.

So, late in 1991 and all through 1992, we rushed to get the revised sixth edition out.

Finally, we were set.

But just as we were off to press once more, we were faced with the breakup of Czechoslovakia.

We prepared that atlas with a stiil-united Czechoslovakia, but, knowing the rush of events, we did prepare a plate with separate Czech and Slovak republics. The first run, maybe J 00,000 copies, showed a united Czechoslovakia.

That got us through the holiday season. Then, starting in January, when the country did split, we began binding atlases with the other plate.

Right now we're working on yet another revision of the revised sixth edition since we have the new country of Eritrea. Meanwhile, Albania began changing the spelling of its place names, and there were other border alterations. How long this version will last, I justdon'tknow.

So this was National Ceo's biggestjlurry of revisions ever?

Sure. The last big flurry happened early in the 1960s with Africa's decolonization.

Though there were a lot of changes then, nothing compared to 1991.

Chechllya declares it's independent.

Russia declares it's not. What does National Ceo declare?

We're lucky to be here in Washington, where we can consult the embassies and the State Department. We confer a lot with them and with the United Nations, though we don't always agree.

Do countries sometimes object?

Oh, yes, especially since the breakup of Yugoslavia. We labeled one split-away state "Macedonia."

Well, there's been a huge letter-writing campaign against us-thousands of letters from the Greek communityobjecting to that name. So we looked into it and adopted the name the UN uses-"Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia."

How do you put all that

Oil

a map?

We never use initials as labels for countries on our world map, and only rarely do we use abbreviations.

So we shortened it to "Macedonia," even though some Greeks would like us to label it '~Skopje," the name of its capital. It's nice and short and easier to fit in. But we can't comes official.

do that unless

it be-

What about globes?

Changes there can be even tougher. Our 3.3-meter globe in Explorers Hall [in the society's headquarters building] had to be sanded off when Germany was reunited. Recently, we added Eritrea and Palau as independent countries, and we revised the shrinking shoreline of the Aral Sea.

What about disputed territory? How about Jerusalem, which Israel considers its capital but others don't?

That's tricky, especially because of Israel's small size. Everything's crammed together. When we have enough space-on large maps and in uncrowded areas-we add all sorts of notes. With Israel, on most maps, wecan'tdothat.

So whatdo you do?

Map de facto. Who has power over the area? If a state claims and controls an area, we show that area as part of the state. Take the Kuri Ie Islands, which Japan claims and wants back from Russia. We simply ask: If you're going to visit there, where would you go to get a visa? Not Japan, but Russia. So we show the islands as part of Russia.

What's been your biggest mistake?

We committed

a terrible blunder in January

1993. In the background of our dinosaur supplement map, we somehow transposed Connecticut and Massachusetts.

All of us were focusing on the dinosaurs.

Well, I can alibi it to death, but there's no excuse for a mistake like that. And our readers sure let us know! One guy wrote in about the "tremendous forces" working at the time of the dinosaurs "to transport the geographical locations of Connecticut and Massachusetts, and even their shapes. Wow!" He asked how

such a "startling revelation" could have been unknown until now. It was all good fun.

Some folks go through the magazine and maps with a magnifying glass every month trying to find something amiss and then take the pleasure of firing off a letter.

We receive around 40,000 letters and inquiries a year about one thing or another.

Some write impassioned letters claiming an inaccuracy in our maps, which usually means that it didn't show their hometown. There was just no room to get it in.

Some commercial mapping companies do publish little things "in error," just to see whether anyone is reproducing We've neverdone that.

their maps.

What's the difference between McNally's maps andyours?

They're

commercial

Rand

and we're nonprofit.

They do lots of road atlases and road maps, and wedon't.

Growing up, I remember Greenland looking like the biggest thing in the world. Later I learned it isn't.

Mapping a globe flat on paper leads to tortions. For years we used the Van Grinten Projection, which distorts places crazy-making Greenland a giant, for stance. But since 1988, we've used Robinson Projection, a compromise works well. That map looks better on evening news.

disder like inthe that the

How has computer technology changed yourlife?

AI160 of us in the cartographic divisionresearch, design, edit, and production-now use computers.

National Geographic has copyrighted fonts, designed by our calligraphers in the 1930s specifically to look fine on maps. When we're labeling a river, for instance, the name curves nicely along the river. Our maps are thus pretaddition to tier than others, which is why-in our reputation for accuracy-they hang in the Pentagon briefing room, Blair House, and other key spots in the United States.

We're now paying a small fortune to have these fonts digitized. Up to now, our production person has had to draw all the names by hand, in pencil. For a map of, say, Italy, that would total names.

some

4,000

individual

place

What kind of person is a map freak?

Anyone, like me, who loves to learn about different countries and places. It's so much fun to work on a project for a few months and

then change to a whole new region or topic. I have one of the best jobs in town. It's like going back to school again.

What have you learned about geography generally?

That a map is an essential tool of life. As our president, Gilbert M. Grosvenor, said, "If you want to teach someone about geography, hand him a map." I'm the most popular person at cocktail parties. When I mention I work here, everyone smiles and asks me about our maps. Everyone loves maps.

Some ten years ago, we started spreading the word through our Geography Education Program. We worked with teachers. By 1993, we had formed alliances in all 50 states to marry the expertise of college geography professors with high school teachers. Nearly a third of secondary school geography teachers never had a college course in the subject.

We also launched Kids Network, which now involves 42,000 classrooms in 47 countries. Students conduct science experiments and then share their findings, through telecommunication links, with other kids around the world. Kids in fourth through sixth grades learn about the culture of other children. All you need is a computer, a modem, and a telephone line.

I guess we're best known in our youngsters' program forourGeography Bee. We've gotten up to six million children taking part each year. The last one was won by a] 4-yearold from Bozeman, Montana, named Ander?

Knospe. Here's the final question: "The Tagus Ri ver roughly divides which European country into two agricultural regions?"

I give up.

Portugal, as that eighth-grader called out.

He won a $25,000college scholarship.

How can these kids know such stuff?

For the Geography Bee, there are no study guides. Winners don't memorize Iists of place names or capitals but have spent hours reading maps and atlases.

We have CD-ROM programs that are spectacular. Kids-and adults, too-can go into the world atlas and see pictures, maps, videos, and hear music. Punch up France, for instance, and push the little icon, and listen to music from a Parisian cafe or hear French spoken. We have another CD-ROM on mammals, and one on U.S. Presidents.

They can see a videoclipofJohnF. Kennedy's inauguration.

Memorization of state capitals or the

highest boring.

mountain or the longest river is Anyone can look that stuff up.

Geography has to be made a framework studying the world.

for

Tell us about some of the oddities in this business.

Well, some countries have two capitals, like the Ivory Coast and Bolivia. South Africa, in fact, has three-the administrative capital in Pretoria, the legislative capital in Cape Town, and the judicial capital in Bloemfontein.

How many maps do you doayear?

Six supplement maps for the [National Geographic] magazine, each in about 9.5 million copies. We also do 60 maps a year to accompany the articles. Our big atlas will be revised again in three years, and we have four orfive different globes. We also publish maps for sale in our store and through our catalogs, as well as maps foran-line computer services.

We've stopped printing 80,000 copies of our world map and expecting that version to last two years. We've begun printing 5,000 or 6,000 copies and expecting it to last months.

And we've begun toadd the month along with the year of our maps.

Do world Leaders use your maps?

During World War II, more than a million National Geo maps were requisitioned for everyone from the President of the United States to foot soldiers at the battlefront.

President Roosevelt especially liked our 1944 map, "Germany and Its Approaches."

Winston Churchi II wanted one, too. A copy of that map now hangs in the Cabinet War Room Museum in London.

More recently, as the Gulf crisis started breaking, we decided to do a supplement Middle East map for the magazine. It was the fastest we've ever done-begun in September 1990, soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and on press in December. We gave 50,000 of them to the armed forces. Most Americans received their copies within days of the Gulf War's beginning. In the good old days, we'd spend a year on a supplement map.

Now we have to crank them out faster, though this was particularly fast.

Above all, I've learned that geography is the most boring subject-when it's taught poorly. Geography becomes the most exciting when taught well. We stress the "what" and "why" behind the "where."

As we like to say here, without geography, you're nowhere.

0

"WE WON'T REST ON OUR LAURELS" continued/rampage

/7

A Fisher valve coming from Karapakkam is identical in every respect to that from Fisher factories in Singapore or Marshalltown in the United States. plant had even been set up. Says Prasad: "In A pri I

1994

we

recei ved

a call

from

Singapore. Fisher U.K. wanted to submit a quote to John Brown, engineering contractors in the U.K., for supply of Fisher control valves to Reliance's polypropylene plant in Hazira, Gujarat. Fisher U.K. requested that the quote be in rupees in order to be competitive. Finally we got the order. it was split between FXSL and Fisher U.S.A." This was

At the FXSLfactory in Karapakkam a quality control inspector checks each component individuallyforj7aws.

tems

the first of a series of orders from Reliancefor their polypropylene cracker

plant, their naptha

facility, the expansion

(monoethylene glycol) pakkam has executed.

of their MEG

lion expansion plans. He brought along with him a video film on tooling operations to help improve productivity. The film outlines is carried out the cell concept. Production

â&#x20AC;˘ How quickly can FXSL respond to an urgent request?

Some days ago a young

not sequentially, from step A 10 B to C to D, but as a cluster of operations around

entrepreneur

machines.

This saves time and space and raises productivity.To give a statistic: In 1987, a labor force of 65 made 750 val ves a

Karapakkam.

He was

providing the equipment for a polyester staple fiber mill; he urgently needed three Fisher control valves without which the equipment

would

be useless.

FXSL cut all

export,

supply

of raw

India is to export significantly.

Kara-

visited

plant-which

for transport,

material such as castings-as a problem area. This problem should be addressed if

month; now the same force makes 2,500.

Colin Lewington of Fisher's Asia-Pacific

says the

"Fisher has served the process control industry worldwide for over 100 years," Moran told her audience in Karapakkam, during the inauguration of the Fisher valve facility on July I, 1995. 'The industry has seen

delays and provided the valves in two days.

"In the U.S., such a request would perhaps

office in Singapore,

with Fisher, is currently

overseeing

have been met in a few hours. We are work-

operations

He says the FisheL

ing toward that," says Prasad.

philosophy is to provide superior technology, solve problems, generate a pleasant and safe work environment, and "do it right

No single person has all the knowledge the industry requires-which is why collaboration with a world leader is important."

the first time."

How do Fisher and Xomox view their col-

Talking about what Fisher and the Sanmar Group could do together, Moran outlined

laboration with the San mar Group?

Roger Fix, president of Xomox Corpora-

three

The fact that Fisher plants are identical,

valves at all Fisher no matter where the loca-

tion, ensures interchangeability.

If the Tokyo Fisher plant needs a two-inch plug, Karapakkam can supply it. Likewise, Viralimalai has been providing

components

for Xomox

who has spent 30 years

Julie Moran of Fisher Singapore

Sanmar Group leadership has shown rare foresight in anticipating the need of Indian industry for world-class products. It meets this need ahead of any other company in India through its collaboration with Fisher.

in Madras.

Fisher's

plants in Germany and the U.S. since 1992.

An engineer from Viralimalai was once

tion, told this writer in a fax message:

called

one. The initial

focus was to penetrate

domestic

chemical

upon to service

plied from Germany

Xomox

valves sup-

for a plant executed by a

collaboration

"The

has been a long and successful

Indian

the

and petrochemi-

Japanese company in Bangladesh.

How are uniform standards ensured at different Fisher or Xomox plants? Constant interchange of ideas and personnel is one way.

cal industries with Xomox products. The Xomox India joint venture has established itself as a major supplier of quarter-turn valves to these industries with a reputation

Two or three engineers from Viralimalai go to Cincinnati every year for training or discus-

for excellent

sion;

venture

planners

ami troubleshooters

from the

capability.

quality

and service

The future challenge

product

for this joint

is to achieve

world-class

customer

U.S. or Singapore are frequently in India.

Rollie Walrivan, former Xomox manag-

service and delivery capability so that the products manufactured in India can be suc-

er at Cincinnati, recently spent a week at Viralimalai to discuss the plant's Rs. 50 mil-

cessfully exported to markets outside India."

Fix sees the Indian infrastructure-sys-

much change during this time. Initially based on pneumatic analog controls

controls,

it later switched

to

and then to digital controls.

key concepts

for mutual

growth-

quality people, quality products, quality profit. It was essential to hire quality people who would turn out quality products to quality profit.

That's

what N. Sankar

that led

and his Sanmar

Group have always tried to do. "We won't rest on our laurels," says Chairman Sankar.

"However well one performs, the challenges that remain always seem greater."

0

About the Author: S.R. Madlnl is a freelance writer based in Madras. Formerly assistant managing editor of SPAN, he also worked as a writer/editor for many years with the Food and Agriculture Organization in Madras and Zimbabwe.

I

ExpandingIndo-American Agribusiness Linkages Dan Glickman, the Us. Secretary of Agriculture, visited India in late January as part of the ongoing bilateral endeavor to encourage closer cooperation between the two countries, e:,pecially in agribusiness.

During his three-day sojourn, Glickman met with Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, Commerce Minister P Chidambaram, and other government officials, and signed a memorandum of understanding on agricul-

tural exchanges between the two countries.

He addressed the agribusiness working group of the US.-India Commercial Alliance (USICA) at the FICCl headquarters in New Delhi, the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) in Ludhiana, which is one of several Indian agricultural universities that received American assistance during their early years, and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARJ) in New Delhi, where the United States is assisting in selling up the

he world stands at the brink of a new era in politics, in trade, in economics, and in global interdependence.

In just a few decades, India has transformed itsel ffrom a country offood shortages into one offood surpluses, which are being sold on the world market and converted into high-value products.

Indian business will work with private foreign companies to find and adapt technology to help small-scale Indian farmers grow new types of crops with seeds developed in universities and by private companies at home and abroad. For instance, India has plenty of good potatoes and plenty of wonderful oranges, but to have industrial production ofpotato chips, fried potatoes, or orange juice, new varieties must be developed by researchers and grown by farmers.

Last September, Ambassador Frank Wisner brought ~ team of U.S. business executives to Chandigarh for a dialogue'&rith officials and business leaders in Punjab and Haryana. The companies they represent are looking for long-term, productive relationships that will profit all paJ1ies involved.

Representatives offive major American food companies are here today in Ludhiana to examine these opportunities. They are: (I) Pepsi Foods, producing tomatoes, chilies, potato chips, flavorings, and Basmati rice; (2) Quaker/Cremica, producing sauces and other products in anticipation of the opening of McDonald's restaurants; (3) Protein Technologies/Ralston Purina, planning to introduce newedi-

T

s a center of the Green Revolution, it is fitting that India is building the largest gene bank in the world.

The gene bank-which India will complete [at lARI] this year is -important in the ongoing international efforts to preserve and use the genetic diversity of plants.

For centuries, people have improved plants, animals, and microorganisms to produce more and higher-quality food and fiber and to make our global Toodsystem more secure. Seeds-and plant characteristics-have traveled around the world. For instance, very few of

A

world:S biggest gene bank.

A common strand in Glickman:S speeches was the need for trade liberalization, closer Indo-US. cooperation in agricultural research for mutual benefit, and the importance of the private sector in developing new, improved commercial seed varieties as well as developing agribusinesses, which would greatly help raise incomes of Indian farmers.

Following are excelpts from his PAU and IAR! speeches.

ble uses of soybeans to supplement scarce supplies of pulses and meet some ofIndia's protein needs; (4) Seagrams /Tropicana, planning to manufacture fruit juices and other beverages in India; and (5) Cargill, planning to invest in a numberoffacilities around the country for bulk handling and processing of wheat, maize, and oilseed.

These American companies will help Indian farmers develop new profitable crops, and the growth of India's food processing industry will create demand for produce and jobs in the factories and distribution systems.

India's farms will continue to employ a majority of India's people forthe foreseeable future, but many of the new jobs will come in other sectors. In America, most of the jobs in our food system are in production and distribution ratherthan farming and that will probably be true in India as well.

In Punjab, partly because the atmosphere is so friendly to busi'ness, you can already see some results. For example, Pepsi Foods has introduced contract farming for tomatoes and chi Iies and bui It a manufacturing plant to produce tomato paste, potato chips, and flavorings. Pepsi also has invested in a high-technology Basmati rice plant in Haryana, for which it is buying rice from Indian farmers.

These are the kinds of benefits American investment in India can spread throughout your economy, benefiting rural areas and farming communities as well as cities.

the majorcrops now grown in the United States originated there.

The time-honored process of genetic improvement is the backbone of our ability to feed and clothe a growing world population.

Thanks to modern biotechnology we have the method to continue doing that-what about the materials? This gene bank will preserve germplasm that is the raw material for future crop varieties.

By protecting the germplasm of economically important crops and their wild relatives, we can not only develop new high-yielding crops, we can decrease the chances ofa new pest or disease destroy-

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman (left) with Ambassador Frank G. Wisner at the Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana.

ing the less and less diverse varieties the world depends on. It's like backing up your computer files.

Without the genetic resources and research capacity, the first Green Revolution would never have occurred. Without critical institutions like Pusa, the second Green Revolution will not continue.

India started its existing gene bank many years ago, and U.S. collaboration on the new gene bank began in 1988. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proud to have been involved in this project, cooperated with USAID, which provided much of the funding-some $18 million out of the $27 million total cost. We are also pleased USDA could provide not only substantial technical advice in construction, but help in training as well. In the gene bank project, more than 100 Indian government and university scientists have visited and studied in laboratories at American universities and USDA. The U.S.-Indian partnership has yielded many mutual benefits.

One highlight was the cucumber and melonjoint exploration in 1992 which collected and identified previously unrecognized lines of cucumbers, melons, and other crops for preservation and research.

Then, by using the genetic fingerprinting you are developing here and by gene splicing, we could quickly and reliably shift desired characteristics from one species to another.

Much remains to be done. A new generation of scientists must be trained in rapidly developing technology. We must learn more about how seeds deteriorate so we can develop better storage protocols. This will be important here in India, in Fort Collins, Colorado, and in other places where germplasm is stored for worldwide collaborative research.

Our agricultural partnership with India will continue many elements of our traditional scientific cooperation. On January 27, we signed an agreement to foster further scientific exchanges between our countries. There will also be new elements in the partnership.

We talked with private businesses and officials in the U.S.-India Commercial Alliance. This group is trying to develop new contacts between American and Indian agribusinesses in order to help agribusiness in India grow.

In Ludhiana, we started a program to explore cooperation be-

tween private agribusinesses and Indian agricultural universities.

Each university has an agribusiness coordinator, and we took representatives offive major American companies to Ludhiana to discuss future collaboration.

There are hundreds of new public and private opportunities. Now that India has made it easier for government researchers to work with private companies, I hope the research community will take a leading role in expanding Indo-American agribusiness linkages.

Nearly all countries are dependent on other nations for some sources of germplasm. Breeders have been freely exchanging germplasm for over 80 years. About 30 percent of the distributions of the U.S. National Germplasm System go to researchers in other countries-ISO other countries to be exact.

To give is to receive. Researchers in other countries make breakthroughs that benefit farmers worldwide. This free flow of material must be maintained. Farmers benefit directly. Because of shared germplasm, India has gone from being an importer of wheat to an exporter.

As incomes increase throughout Indian society, food needs will change: higher vegetable oil consumption; a shift from rice to wheat in urban areas; and some shifting from grain to poultry and livestock products. Also, the needs of new food processing industries will change the type of crops demanded.

Farmers must have access to new crop varieties in order 'to meet changing consumer preferences. Strong agricultural producers like the U.S. and India can work togetherto produce the high-quality products that are in demand in India and the international marketplace.

Let me touch on a controversial area-private companies and gene patents. Some people in the United States are quite critical of attempts by private companies to patent genes. Unfortunately, facts have sometimes been distorted. A patent of a formulation to preserve the active insecticide ingredient of neem products (a patent that is fully permitted under Indian and U.S. law) has been misrepresented as gene patenting.

Stories have spread that farmers would be prevented from growing neem trees or selling their products. This is simply untrue.

While virtually all researchers want a free flow of germplasm, we should recognize that private companies playa useful role in developing new crops. If a seed company develops a new variety of seed, either it will benefit farmers, or they will buy the less expensive government germplasm.

Therefore, in the interest offarmers, it is highly desirable to give private seed companies some measure of protection so they will have an incentive to develop or import the seeds which India's agriculture needs. For the sake ofIndia's future, I hope that your new plant varieties' legislation will provide the protection for private seed companies which will encourage them to provide the best seeds available for your farmers.

The world continues to question whether there will be enough food to go around in the coming decades. [ am an optimist. I bel ieve there will.

To benefit all our agricultures and to improve crops for all our farm0 ers, we must improve, and share, our agricultural technologies.

........

- --

Cliff's serves 'em big and g

REVIEW Route 9P. Saratoga Tel: 584¡9791.

lake "

Food: Good to very good baslc~: excellent ribs and steak. AmbIance: Homey roadhouse" g"".

Service: Swift. polite and efficient.

Prices: Reasoanble: excellent value.

Access for the disabled: Poor.

..

Open six days a wee and dinner; noon to 9 p and Monday. until 10 p. day and Thursday. and u Friday and saturday. C day. Reservations ac prime rib only. not for credit cards. "Bul perso are gladly accepted..'

The author, formerly restaurant critic for newspapers in Albany, New York, tells about the pleasures and pains of that glamorous but stressful job. ucking angry crosswinds, our fourseater Cessna struggled to Brattleboro, Vermont. With darkness descending and a squall on our tail, we set down on the landing strip that was raked with snow.

What had brought me and my three dinner guests to this idyllic New England town was word of a French restaurant quietly tucked away beside a mountain stream. As it was unusual for customers to fly in for dinner, and because Brattleboro's was a remote self-service airport for private planes, the restaurant provided pickup service.

B

~merica Apparently the restaurant was short of help and so the chef, replete with white smock and toque, picked us up in his grocery van.

Like a picture from a magazine cover, our table was resplendent beside a crackling fire. Chilled vodka and caviar piled on toast points primed us for the five-course meal to follow. However, dinner turned out to be a disaster: Meat overcooked to leather, mushy vegetables, a souffle that had caved in, and the wine sauce browned to caramel.

"What can I say, monsieur," the restaurateur said with a dismissive Gallic shrug as he handed us a hefty bill. "A chef's place is in his kitchen, not at the airport, non?"

That was back in the early 1970s. Albany, the imposing capital of New York State, had precious few good restaurants, and as restaurant critic of the Knickerbocker News I had to beat the bushes in a l60-kilometer radius to keep my weekly "Dining Out" column interesting.

Major American newspapers had just

started featuring regular restaurant reviews.

Being forthright, restaurant critics were perceived as harsh and mean, whose pronouncements could make or break a restaurant. For that reason, restaurateurs and their loyal customers kept a sharp eye on the critics, waiting for the slightest slip to extract retractions or sue for damages.

I was new at the post and, coming from a country which was stereotyped as a land of hunger and poverty, I was under tremendous pressure to establish my bona fides.

Now I found myself stumped. If I went by the standards I applied in reviewing all restaurants, the Vermont restaurant would get a terrible rating. Yet, I felt partly responsible for the ruined meal and, so, ethically a poor rating would be unfair to the restaurant that had gone out of its way to help us.

It was late at night and with my deadline just hours away and desperate for direction, I decided to approach the legendary Andre

potatoes fare. I tried to become a vegetarian but a diet of canned peas, boiled carrots, processed cheese, and spaghetti took care of that. I realized that in order to eat well I would have to do the cooking.

Fortunately, I had the time. As night editor at the Knickerbocker News, I worked from 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. That left my days relatively free, and I signed up for series after series of French, Italian, Spanish, and Indonesian cooking courses which were patronized by rich, bored housewives.

Soon I was hooked on food. I spent my weekends teaching Asian cooking at a chic Saratoga boutique and my vacations traveling on my belly across California and Europe.

It was the early 1970s and the baby boomers-those born after World War 1Iwere just beginning to flood the U.S. workplace and were reshaping the cultural scene.

Overseas travel, European styles, health

on My BellYbYVINODCHHABRA Soltner, owner and chef of Lutece,.

Manhattan's most celebrated restaurant. I had never met him and reasoned that as he didn't know me, the worst he could do was hang up and it would only cost me a longdistance phone call.

To my amazement, I found a weary but congenial soul at the other end of the line.

Soltner heard me out in silence, then said: "Far too many chefs have big egos and think they can do no wrong. But a good chef does not make excuses, he makes a good meal in 20 minutes. As a critic, your allegiance is with your readers. If a restaurant charges full price, it deserves full review!"

That endorsement saw me through my immediate quandary and helped chart the direction of my career over the next 20-plus years.

My tenure as a food writer and travel editor had happened quite by chance.

I had arrived in Albany from Europe in 1969 and quickly tired of the meat-and-

food, and French and Mexican fare were in vogue.

When my editors discovered I would rather cook than play golf or poker with them, they decided my time would be better spent developing the new food and travel sections for the newspaper instead of editing obituaries.

Thrust in the spotlight of travel and food-two sections that attracted young and keen yet mercilessly cynical readers-I was apprehensive. An Indian byline in the mainstream American press itself was an aberration. To be a critic and an arbiter of taste for hip American yuppies had me wobbling on a tight rope.

"Americans don't judge you by your name or religion but by the quality of your work," my editor, Harry Rosenfeld, reassured me. He was in a position to know. As a Jewish immigrant from Poland, and who spoke with a discernable East European accent, he had made it big at the Washington

Post as a key figure in directing coverage of the Watergate scandal, before taking over as editor-in-chief of Hearst's two Albany newspapers, the Times Union and Knickerbocker News.

"Just go out there and be uncompromisingand tough, but always be fair."

In order to be uncompromising, tough, fair, and credible, we set down policy for the restaurant columns. The critic had to have a solid knowledge about food, its preparation, costs, and the restaurant industry. A variety of restaurants-ranging from steak houses to health food to the fanciest French-would be reviewed and rated purely on their own merits and based on what they professed to be, taking into account the quality of food, preparation, presentation, service, prices, and overall value for the money. Only fast-food chaips and any restaurants recommended by the advertising department were off limits.

The weekly column had to be enlightening yet entertaining. If a particular dish was judged poorly it had to be on technical grounds, not based on the critic's unfamiliarity or dislikes. It had to be explained exactly why it was poor.

While the column was to be a guide to the readers, in fairness to the restaurant, it would be visited mid-week when the kitchen and staff were not under undue pressure.

It was decided that I would visit the restaurant unannounced just as any paying customer. I would be accompanied by a couple of knowledgeable "companions" of my choice so that we could sample a broad cross-section of the dishes and the companions would serve as material witnesses, if required.

Instead of visiting a restaurant several times before writing a review, as was the practice at the New York Times, I would base my judgment as the consumer did, on a single visit. Several visits would, after all, only be a composite and yield an "average."

As any customer, we would pay for our meals and leave as unobtrusively as we entered. A restaurateur would know of the visit only after I called him for comments before publication.

Easier said than done.

Over the next IS-plus years, first at The Knick and later also at the more widely circu-

lated Sunday Times Union, my "celebrity" assignment came with more than its share of heartburn and sleepless nights.

The very first restaurant I reviewed sued me for libel, because I observed the wines were thoroughly overpriced and the only thing "fresh" about the soup made from "fresh turtles" was that it was probably "fresh" out of a can. The metallic flavor, briny broth, and leathery texture were dead giveaways.

The restaurant finally relented after we proved the wines were marked up 200 percent over retail prices and, more seriously, that if inde~d the soup was made from fresh turtles the restaurant was open to prosecution because turtles were on the federal endangered species list.

A few weeks later, reviewing a ritzy continental restaurant, I observed that the bestselling "Veal Wellington, lovingly made individually by our Master Chef" was highly suspect. While veal has virtually no flavor, I observed that the relatively low price (veal is the most expensive meat in America) in relation to the other dishes, excess fat, and fibrous texture suggested it was a cheap substitute, not veal.

As the 35-year-old restaurant was one of the most popular around, there was a brutal

backlash. A petition signed by more than 100 customers demanded my dismissal. A radio-talk host tried to arrange an on-the-air shoot-out between me and the chef. The newspaper's attorney called to say we had been slapped with a massive libel suit and the column might have to be scrapped unless I could prove I was right or prominently feature aretraction which, in its own way, would have doomed the col urtm.

As luck would have it, inspectors of an obscure division of the New York State government that monitored "economic fraud" and was implementing the tough new "truth-in-menus law" visited the restaurant.

Their lab tests revealed that the "veal" was pork belly.

Vindicated but gun-shy, I retreated to the relative safety of reviewing Chinese and home-style Italian restaurants, until I happened on an unusual diner near the chic resort city of Saratoga Springs.

Housed in decommissioned or replicas of railroad dining cars, "diners" are best known for their 24-ho~r service, familystyle meals, and enormous servings.

However, this diner served haute farecrepes suzette, lobster thermidor, buckwheat pancakes slathered with sour cream and caviar, chocolate-whiskey mousse,

Indonesian satays, and Champagne by the glass, all at very reasonable prices. And so I effused about it, highly recommending it as one of the best buys around.

My review ran on Sunday. On Monday morning, a large woman and her tattooed husband, who resembled wrestler Gorilla Monsoon, barged into my office.

"Yo! Come here!" she thundered, circling my desk menacingly while the gorilla planted himself at the door. "I'm here to punch your lights out, buster!"

Apparently she had come to the wrong office, I opined. I was just a guy who wrote about food and wine.

"Dam right!" she hollered. "That's why I'm here, to give you a taste of my knuckle sandwich!"

It turned out the woman owned the diner, but she had leased it to "a couple of wimps" from San Francisco while she worked as a cook at the Saratoga County Jail. The "wimps" whipped up an eclectic menu, but soon after my visit and before my review appeared in print, they skipped town, leaving the owner with a raft of unpaid bills . .. Meanwhile, having read my review, Saratoga's glamorous crowd had flocked to the diner in their finery expecting a Champagne Sunday brunch. Instead they were accosted by the ill-tempered cook from the jail dishing out greasy eggs and a liberal amount of colorful language.

"Yo, joker, you're going to pay for this," she hollered, and I groaned at the sight of Rosenfeld scurrying in my direction shaking a fistful of phone messages from irate readers.

In due course, such vagaries became rather routine. After all, given the keen competition and the breakneck speed at which restaurants were heading out, grabbing on to every fad and trend, it was little wonder that only six percent of the restaurants in America survived to be five years old under the original management. The rest either went belly-up or changed hands.

The good came with the bad and memorable. My discovery of an imitation or inexpensive ingredients being passed off as the real thing-pork belly instead of veal, monk fish as lobster, casein as cheese, shark as scallops, cheap booze being poured from "premium" bottles-resulted in an expose,

which launched my weekly column, "Thought for Food."

Comfortable with my credibility, my reviews recounted exactly what I experienced, such as the time when I went to review a steak house that had changed hands. The new management had decided to perk things up by introducing belly-dancing waitresses and cigarette girls on skates.

Halfway into our meal, two of them ran into each other scattering several dinners. I decided to return to my unfinished meal the following week and feature the review in two parts. But when I returned, I found the belly dancers had been replaced with topless waitresses ahd a singing stripper who twirled pizzas on stage.

If it wasn't famine, it was feast. August is when Saratoga Springs becomes the "Queen of Summer Resorts," playing host to who's who on the American social register.

We had a new managing editor who was eager to make his mark and he decided at short notice to publish a special Saratoga edition. I was to turn in a capsule of reviews of 25 Saratoga restaurants I had visited in the past year.

As the new editor had recently arrived

from Baltimore, and didn't realize that being a vacation town, most Saratoga restaurants made a killing in August and changed hands after that. Therefore, as almost none of the previous reviews was valid, I visited two dozen restaurants in five days and ended up dictating my reviews from the sickbed.

Undeterred, the managing editor decided that in order to get the most mileage out of my expensive weekly culinary sojourns, on Wednesdays he would feature summaries of my previous four reviews.

However, since only about one in eight reviews was complimenting, the first column happened to be four restaurants I had rated poorly. Considering this to be rubbing the restaurants' noses in it, the advertising department hollered bloody murder. The Knickerbocker News published six editions a day and the new column was killed after only the first press run-possibly making "Le Doggie Bag" the shortest-lived column in America!

Apart from writing two reviews a week, a weekly food column, and setting out the Sunday travel section, I was permitted the diversion of special assignments, reporting

The doctor says it's better for my spine this way-more fat, more estrogen.

Well, then! There was a time when a wife's plump shoulders signi tied prosperity. ~ These days my fashionable friends getby on seaweed milkshakes,

~

~(;::~~~==:: =~~===:=J

Pall Malls, and vitamin pills. Their clothes hang elegantly from their clavicles.

As the evening news makes clear the starving and the besieged maintain the current standard of beauty without effort.

Whenever two or three gather together the talk turns dreamily to sausages, purple cabbages, black beans and rice, noodles gleaming with cream, yams, and plums, and chapati fried in ghee.

~

from more than 60 countries on subjects ranging from flaws in the Distant Early Warning System in Greenland to environmental issues in the Maldives and Bali, all wedged between travel reporting. This was considered a "light" load and a plum assignment by midsize newspaper standards in America, where most reporters routinely churn out 12 to 15 articles a week.

Through food, more than anything else, America was defining and shaping its cultural values and its role in relation to the new world emerging in 1970s and 1980s.

Being at the core of it, I learned to appreciate Americans as a people eager to experiment and learn, adapt, change, and head in new directions.

In merely a decade, just as in other values, American tastes had gone from meat-and-potatoes to embrace the exotic, flavorful, eclectic-Mexican, northern Italian, Indian, Thai, Lebanese, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese ....

Through food, Americans were appreciative of other cultures, mixing and matching the best of the world's cuisines without pretense or compunction, and in the process they were rediscovering their own heritage as a multicultural society.

In New Orleans, chef Paul Purdhomme, larger than life in every way, made Louisiana cooking and "blackened" food (the "blackened" referring to a thick crust of spices which darkened with searing heat) immensely fashionable.

My beat had expanded to judge wines and interview well-known and celebrity chefs.

When Purdhomme came to the newspaper to be interviewed, I realized that in true American fashion he had turned what many would consider a handicap into an asset. His massive frame was propped up by a scaffolding of heavy-duty steel. "Hey, my cookin's great, but I owe my success to this," he chortled, massaging his girth.

"People say it looks like I swallowed Julia Child sideways!"

Meanwhile, chirpy TV cooking star Julia Child was switching from classic French to regional American. Madhur Jaffrey and Julie Sahni's Indian cookbooks had gone beyond best-sellers to being food travelogues. Fredy Girardet, the venerable Swiss maestro, was deep into California chic.

"I'll have the businessman's special, but keep it under budget. "

Ismail Merchant had discovered his "room with a view"-a kitchen-and was contemplating opening an Indian chain called "Curry In A Hurry."

The world's best chefs, winemakers, and food writers, who not so long ago loved to lampoon America as a culinary wasteland, were now flocking there to earn and learn.

And the new-American cuisine had come into its own-frequently a delightful blend of That; regional American, Indonesian, and French ingredients and cooking methods with the artist1c touch perfected by the Danes and Japanese.

Americans themselves were moving en masse from hard liquor to vintage wines, from red meat to seafood, high-fat to lowcal, from Mexican to sushi ....

Indeed, food even permeated politics.

When New York City Mayor Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo were scrapping it out to be the Democratic Party's nominee for New York's governor, their chefs got into embarrassing verbal fisticuffs.

Jokes about each candidate's food preferences began eclipsing more urgent issues, much to the delight of pol itical cartoonists and the Republican camp. A radio-talk show host asked if I would critique each candidate's tastes. Both Koch and Cuomo good-naturedly agreed, and so did I. Koch's favorite restaurants turned out to be informal and inexpensive, including a hole-in-the-wall in New York's Chinatown and a cheap burger joint in

Greenwich Village.

Cuomo, who was virtually an unknown in New York at the time, his wife, and a daughter offered to accompany me to his favorite eatery-a 1960s Italian-American restaurant with heavy vel vet drapes, overstuffed booths, and a strolling violinist. The food was incredibly heavy with rich, red sauces, and quite out of tune with the times. In true Italian fashion we washed down our dinner with Chianti.

I turned in my column a week later. On that very evening, Koch proclaimed that ifhe became governor the first thing he would do . would be to crack down on drugs and raise the legal age for drinking alcoholic beverages from 18 to 19. Not to be outdone, Cuomo countered that he would raise it to 21.

I rolled the reviews over in my mind and something didn't quite set right, until four in the morning. I rushed to the newspaper to find my review was on its way to the presses. Sure enough, the accompanying photograph taken at the restaurant clearly showed Cuomo's 17-year-old daughter being served wine.

Since the photograph was taken well before the political pronouncements, Cuomo's daughter barely had a glass all evening, and my intention was not to turn the past into political ammunition, J decided to substitute the photograph.

As a result, the first edition hit the streets late, causing a foul-up in delivery schedules and a fortune in missed sales and overtime.

A furious Rosenfeld demanded an explanation. All fingers pointed at me.

He studied the photograph and column for a while and stared out the window. Rosenfeld was known to be harsh on politicians, and harder onjournalists, if there was a perceived sense of hypocrisy or impropriety.

He returned to the reviews and picture once more and I braced for the bomb to drop.

"Chhabra," he finally growled. "You were tough. But, thank heavens, you were fair. "0

About the Author: Vinud Chhabra H'on se\'eral journalism awards and waf nominmed Jar a Pulitzer in 1984 and 1987 during his 23 years with Hearsr Newspapers in Albany, New York.

He noH' divides his rime as copublisher oj Today Maga~ines Gmllp in Florida and as presidenroJ Asia America Marketing in Bangolore.

If you want a choice selection of articles from The New Yorker, Fortune, Harper's, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Forbes, Rolling Stone, and other leading magazines-plus incisive observations from some of India's leading writers-read SPAN, the magazine that helps to bridge the distance between America and India.

SPAN