December 1996/January 1997

Amenca Celebrates

the 50th Anniversary of IndIan Independence

The following companies are generous contributors to the Paul Taylor Dance Company Tour of India 1997 SPECIAL PATRONS

Indian Airlines ITC Hotels Limited United Airlines

E.I. DuPont India Pvt. Ltd. Goodyear India Limited Occidental Petroleum Corporation ASSOCIATES

PATRONS

American International Group, Inc. Bank of America Bechtel India Pvt. Ltd. Birla-AT &T Communications Ltd. Boeing Citibank N.A. Enron Development Corp.

GVK America Inc. ITT Sheraton Mahindra Ford India Limited Modi Xerox Motorola Oracle Software India Limited Pepsi Foods Limited Procter & Gamble Raytheon Company Texas Instruments India The Oberoi Grand, Calcutta Whirlpool South Asia SPONSORS

AMP India Pvt. Ltd. Caltex (India) Limited Carrier Aircon Limited

AT&T India Ltd. Cargill Coca-Cola India Complete Business Solutions (India) Private Limited Cummins Engine Company, Inc., U.S.A. Dow Chemical International Limited Fluor Daniel India Pvt. Ltd. Gillette Guardian Industries Corp.

Hughes Software Systems Monsanto (India) Private Ltd. Novell Software Development (India) Pvt. Ltd. Oberoi Hotels, Mumbai Tata Information Systems Limited Tata Steel FRIENDS

G.E. India Honeywell India Software Operation Pvt. Ltd. Nortel Textron Inc.

A LETTER

T

FROM

here's a famous poem of Yeats that ends with these lines: "0 body swayed to music, 0 brightening glance,/How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

I sometimes think of these lines ,,,hen I see a great dance performance, and I think of them now because great dance performances are on my mind. Why? Because this issue of SPAN is dedicated to the greatest living American dancer and choreographer, Paul Taylor, who is conting soon to this country.

India celebrates the Golden Jubilee of its independence in the year 1997. and the U.S.A. is honoring this 50th birthday by bringing to India, in January of '97, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, An\erica's finest modern dance troupe. (The U.S. will celebrate the anniversary in other ways throughout the year; more about that in future issues of SPAN.) Paul Taylor will bring his two dance troupes to India for four weeks in January 1997. The first troupe will perform in the four largest cities-Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai. And the second company, "Taylor 2," will perform in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Jamshedpur, L,ucknow and Pune.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company's tour of India, although organized by the U.S. Information Service, is being funded through the generosity of 47 American, Indian and Indo-U.S. corporations, whose names are listed on the facing page (the inside front cover). Ambassador Wisner asked these companies to help sponsor this tour at the outyear. The Ambassador set of India's 50th-anniversary sought a public-private partnership, a very American tradition, to honor India and U.S.-Indian relations. This tour by the two Taylor companies is one of the most important cultural events ever organized by the U.S. Information Service in India.

I would like to thank the companies listed on the opposite page for making this great event financially possible.

And I would like to thank the scores of others, in USIS, in the American Embassy and in the Indian Government, who worked so hard to make this great event possible.

The Ambassador chose dance for the inaugural event in the U.S.A.'s celebration of India's Golden Jubilee because dance is at the very core of! ndian cuIture and modern dance is one of the liveliest expressions of American culture. Having

THE

PUBLISHER

decided on dance, Ambassador Wisner would not settle for anything but the best. He wanted the premier dance troupe of the United States: the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Newsweek magazine has rightly called Paul Taylor "the world's greatest living choreographer."

This issue of SPAN is dedicated to Paul Taylor, the Paul T3ylor Dancf Company and the corporate donors who made their trip to India possible. Five articles participate in this dedication. New York dance critic Deborah Jowitt writes eloquently on why Paul Taylor is the best there is (" Maverick Genius: The Art of Paul Taylor," page 24). This is followed by a picture essay, "The Paul Taylor Dance Company" (page 32). Music and dance critic Raghava Menon presents "An Indian Tribute to Paul Taylor" (page 38). There is Paul Taylor's "Letter to India" (page 40). Finally, the article "Grace in Giving: Corporate Responsibility for the Arts" (page 44) explores the timehonored American tradition of business firms as philanthropists to culture.

SPAN was inaugurated in 1960 to build a bridge, a span, between America and India. It is altogether fitting and proper that this "Paul Taylor issue," at the beginning of India's Golden Jubilee year, is the largest SPAN (72 pages) in the magazine's history, with the most advertisements ever, 28.

During his recent reelection campaigil., President Clinton often referred to his desire to "build a bridge to the 21 st century." SPAN has been building bridges between India and the United States for 36 years. In the expression of its art, the Paul Taylor Dance Company will do the same during its upcoming tour of India. I believe that the three-way partnership that has made the Paul Taylor program possible both ends and begins an era-like the Dance of Shiva. I hope that this triumvirate of the U.S. and Indian governments and the private sector will continue to work together for the good of both nations-not only offering cultural programs but collaborating in education and other fields where we share common goals.

Everyone at the U.S. Mission joins me, the Paul Taylor Dance Company and the 47 corporate donors in saying, "Happy Birthday, India!" •

The Optimists Are Right

This Way to the Future

So why do so many people think things are going to hell?

Text by JOHN TIERNEY Illustrations

by GOPl GAJWANI

he future used to be so much simpler. A century ago, prophets had no trouble knowing what life today would be like. The Popular Science monthly already realized in 1895 that the 20th century would be "the Trolley Age." In Looking Backward, the best-seller that fomented a national political movement in the 1890s, Edward Bellamy foresaw that the socialist government of the year 2000 would give each citizen an annual "credit card"-and that the allotted sum would be so generous that the happy citizen wouldn't even want to spend it all. The house of2000, according to H.G. Wells, would have self-cleaning windows, and the floor would be easy to sweep because the architect would "have the sense and ability to round off the angle between wall and floor."

Wells's most audacious prophecy was about prophecy itself-what he called "the discovery of the future." Soon, he

T

Reprinted from The New l'<>rk Tillles Magazine. Copyright Š 1996 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.

announced in 1902, experts will make forecasts that "will be just as certain, just as strictly science, and perhaps just as detailed as the picture that has been built up within the last 100 years to make the geological past." Today his smug confidence sounds preposterous, but in fact Wells was quite prescient. The future has been discovered. Most people still don't realize it, but we can scientifically predict what will happen in the next 100 years.

We can't foresee the technical details-whether, for instance, the Digital Age will last longer than the Trolley Age-but we can confidently predict the important things: how humans of2006 or 2096 will fare materially and emotionally. We can do this by studying the prophets of the past century, which for sheer quantity has been the golden age of prediction.

Doomsaying was popular all century among the intelliâ&#x20AC;˘ gentsia-E.M. Forster envisioned a mechanized dystopia long before Brave New World and 1984-but in the early

toward Boston and Philadelphia," just as Wells predicted. years, prophets like Bellamy still hoped that utopia would arrive with socialism. Other optimists were busy at pulp People enjoy long retirements and routinely live to their magazines like Amazing Stories and Modern Mechanix, eighties, as Bellamy dreamed, and they have even more culwhich promised the 13-hour workweek, the Nuclear-8 tural wonders than the citizens of his utopia. In Looking sedan and an aerocar in every driveway. The peak of opti- Backward, a visitor to Boston in 2000 is astonished to dismism was the 1939 World's Fair in New York. It featured cover he can listen to any of/our concerts being transmitted the General Motors "Futurama"-a tour of "the wonder by wires from distant halls. He tells his host how incredible this would have seemed in the 19th century: "[f we could world of 1960" on the seven-lane "express Motorway"and a huge model of a planned community called have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with Democracity, which the New York Times Magazine hailed music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quanas "The City of Tomorrow Morning." tity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at "It is no impossible dream ofH.G. Wells or Jules Verne," will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity the article explained. Democracity would have convenient already attained." suburbs, ample parking and "little or no traffic congestion."

Well, we have the music. What happened to the felicity?

It wouldn't need a police force, since "a city devoid of If Bellamy were here today, I would suggest he look for the slums and poverty will breed little crime." As the city's answer--and learn how to predict the next century-by planner, Henry Dreyfuss, said: "Living in a spacious world, heading off not to Boston but to another utopia that I once filled with beautiful and useful things, Man of Tomorrow visited: Shangri-La. will be a happy, healthy animal."

Man of Tomorrow has looked a lot less healthy since Lost Perspective World War [I. Ifhe's not fatally irradiated, he's likely to be a James Hilton created Shangri-La in Lost Horizon, his mutant trying to survive in a wasteland. Ifhe's not enslaved 1933 novel about a peaceful Himalayan valley of long-lived by technology, he's at least profoundly alienated by it. people, but there was already a real place named Hunza that fit the description. This isolated valley, in northern Pakistan Scientists have been turning out popular books prophesying nuclear annihilation and assorted environmental catastronear the Chinese border, is inhabited by people of uncertain phes. Dystopian visions have become the norm in films like origin who speak a language unrelated to any other known Planet o/the Apes, Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange and tongue. For more than a century, travelers who braved Himalayan cliffs to reach Hunza have been returning with Waterworld. Perhaps the closest thing to a popular modem reports of a "valley of eternal youth" where illness is virtuutopian novel is Time and Again, the 1970 book in which the narrator reaches an enlightened, unpolluted world by ally unknown and farmers work the fields at the age of 140. going back in time to I 882-the reverse of the trip taken by A Harvard Medical School physician investigated Hunza Bellamy's narrator in Looking Backward. and declared it a "bastion of longevity" in a 1974 article for Today's pessimism would National Geographic titled, have been difficult for the "Every Day Is a Gift When You Are Over 100." When I old prophets to understand, went there seven years ago because the modern world to write about the fabled actually contains many of "Hunza health secrets," I their predictions. For all their understood why everyone loopy utopianism, the opticalled it Shangri-La. mists got a lot of things right.

It was the most beautiful The air-conditioned house, place I'd ever seen. The valpredicted in a 1915 artic Ie in ley's lush green terraces were Ladies' Home Journal headlined "You Will Think This a shielded from the outside Dream," is here. We have the world by a 25,000-foot (7,600-meter) pyramid of dishwashers imagined by snow shaped just like the Wells and the "electronic mystical mountain in ovens" featured in the old Hilton's novel, and there RCA/Whirlpool "Miracle seemed to be a remarkable Kitchen."

Thanks to the number of old people as hale Futurama's expressways, as the monks of Shangri-La. New York is "spreading in "It s probably true that higher percentage oflhe world's But my enchantment didn't wide and splendid suburbs populalion is living in peace than ever before in history. "

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last. The great Hunza secret to old age turned out to be its thinking makes for lousy prophecy. absence of birth records. The illiterate elders didn't know The best way to predict the next century is to study the how old they were, and they tended to overestimate their past few millennia, as the economist Julian L. Simon has ages by a decade or two, as I discovered by comparing been doing ever since he saw a headline in the New York their recollections with known historical events. Hunza Times Magazine in 1965 warning of a "population doomsdidn't have an unusual number of centenarians, it turned day." Simon was properly alarmed and decided to make out, and its traditional way of life was not a formula for population control his lifework. But then he came across good health. long-term historical studies-the kind ignored in the popuThe mountain air did seem pristine, but the people spent lar press-that contradicted the prevailing despair about most of their time inside mud huts breathing horribly polpopulation growth. Simon, who now teaches business adluted air from open fires. They suffered from bronchitis ministration at the University of Maryland, went on to deand a host of ailments like tuberculosis, dysentery, malaria, bunk doomsday predictions with his own forecasts, and tetanus and cancer. An iodine deficiency in their diet also with his own money. caused mental retardation. Children went hungry in the spring as food stores dwindled. The life expectancy for The Long-Term Forecast people in the isolated traditional villages, according to a Simon's latest book, The State of Humanity, includes J 986 medical study, was only 53 years for men and 52 for 660 pages of historical statistics and concludes with two women. The healthiest people were the ones living in more basic predictions for the next century and any century thereafter: modem villages near a new road to the outside world.

There, trucks were bringing in food, vaccines, antibiotics, â&#x20AC;˘ Humanity's condition will improve in just about every iodized salt and stoves with vented chimneys. Nearest this material way. road, life expectancy was rising, a trend that would have â&#x20AC;˘ Humans will continue to sit around complaining about, delighted the designers of General Motors' Futurama: beteverything getting worse. ter living through highways.

If you doubt his forecast, Simon will be glad to make a The people of Hunza were not delighted, though. bet. He and a consortium of fellow optimists have Virtually everyone I interviewed believed that the intrusion $100,000 available to wager all comers, with a limit of of modern civilization was shortening lives. People $10,000 for any single bet. A neutral party will hold both blamed their current health problems on chemicals in imsides' money in escrow. You can name the sum and pick ported fruit and germs in imported grain, and they insisted any year after 2000. Simon will bet you that the average that the valley had once really been Shangri-La. An elderly person in any country that year, compared with today, will live longer, be better nourished and educated, have a bigwoman named Bibi Khumari told me: "The people today ger home, make more money and enjoy more free time in a are like pencils. We were like tree trunks. The babies were world that's safer, cleaner and blessed with cheaper energy so healthy in the old days."

"How many babies did you have?" I asked. and natural resources.

"Sixteen. But the first 13 died."

But be warned. Simon has already won money from pro"Thirteen died? But you said in those days the babies fessional prophets, notably Paul R. Ehrl ich, the popular were so healthy."

"I had a curse from the fairies,." she said.

"That was why my children were dying.

Otherwise the babies were healthy." She paused, then added absent-mindedly, "Nowadays there is not as much fairy sickness."

I was surprised at her nostalgia, but I shouldn't have been. She was no different from the typical person in America or anywhere else. We're living through the greatest miracle in the history of our species-the doubling of life expectancy since the Industrial Revolution-but we prefer to believe that our troubles are growing. Like the people of Hunza, we focus on current prob:We 're living through the greatest miracle in the history of lems instead of looking at long-term trends. our species-the doubling of life expectancy since the Industrial Besides reducing felicity, this short-term Revolution-but we prefer to believe that our troubles are growing. "

ecologist.

Ehrlich's 1968 Only war or political upheaval, Simon believes, book, The Population Bomb, envisioned a fifth of humanity could halt human progress.

"I predict that the incidence starving to death by 1985 (and of wat will decline," he says, that was the most optimistic "because the incentive for scenario). In a later book, The conquering land is becoming End of Affluence, he predicted lower now that we need so that prices of natural resources would soar. Simon, much less land for agriculture. But I wouldn't bet on knowing these prices had this prediction. It's probably been falling for centuries, protrue that a higher percentage posed a wager. In 1980, of the world's population is Ehrlich and two colleagues living in peace than ever bepicked five metals (chrome, fore in history, but we don't copper, nickel, tin and tungsten) and bet $1,000 that they have good long-term data."

It's often argued that the would be more expensive in 1990. A decade later, all five mere existence of nuclear metals were cheaper. Simon weapons is an unprecedented collected his winnings and isburden on humanity: we all sued an open challenge to bet live in fear of an entire city on any measure of material being instantly destroyed.

"The amount of cultivated cropland per person is shrinking But our ancestors lived in today, as it has been for centuries, but that s because farmers human welfare. grow so much more food per acre that they need less land. " So far; Simon has found a fear, too. They didn't buiid couple of bettors on future massive walls around their food supplies and lumber prices, but he hasn't been able to towns for aesthetic reasons. Even the farmers in the shelget another wager with Ehrlich or other well-known tered land of Hunza weren't safe. They built a massive fort to protect themselves against farmers in a neighboring kingprophets. Ehrlich has ducked Simon's challenge by offering dom, who would periodically invade, hoping to make slaves to bet instead on various "global indicators," like the future of the Hunza villagers. atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide or the amount of cropland per person-trends that disturb environmentalists but When you consider how widespread legal slavery and that aren't reliable measures of human welfare. It's true, for political despotism used to be, today's threats to personal liberty don't seem so frightening. Free democratic sociinstance, that the amount of cultivated cropland per person is shrinking today, as it has been for centuries, but that's be- eties have never before been so common around the world. cause farmers grow so much more food per acre that they The possibility of Big Brother or a Brave New World need less land. The important statistic is the amount of food seems less likely today than earlier this century, when many prophets-both utopians and dystopians-believed produced per person, which has been rising for centuries.

The loss of cropland has been a recurring scare in doomsthat central planning made for a more efficient society. day books, but it's actually good news: less cropland means Democracies feared they couldn't compete militarily or more habitat for humans and wildlife. economically with dictatorial regimes, but the dictators lost the wars and ruined their economies. It is possible, of Simon acknowledges that technology creates environmental problems, and ifstrict environmental preservation is course, that dictators will regain power, or that intrusive your highest priority, he won't try to persuade you that governments and powerful special interests will stifle things are getting better. But he's confident that humans freedom and economic growth. But Simon is ready to bet will eliminate most environmental problems and adapt to you it won't happen. the rest'. Whatever climate changes are caused by the greenFuture Angst house effect, farmers will keep producing more food. New In the eighth century B.C., long before the Parthenon plagues and forms of pollution will appear, but life expectancy will keep rising because humans will find new was built, the poet Hesiod announced that Greek civilizaways to cope. As people in poor countries get richer, they'll tion had no future. Greeks had once enjoyed an "age of buy the technologies that have reduced air and water pollugold," he wrote, but now they were burdened with "soultion in rich countries. They'll be able to afford more parks crushing cares" in the "age of iron." Soon, things would be and nature preserves, and they'll have more opportunities¡to even worse: "To mortal men shall remain only the most visit them. woeful anguish."

Unless a 2,700-year-old trend is about to reverse, humans will be making the same complaints 100 years from now.

The utopian prophets early this century mistakenly assumed that human nature could change dramatically-no greed, no crime, no conflict-once we satisfied our basic material needs. But technological abundance merely gives us more opportunities to worry. Simon likes to quote an old saying: "No food, one problem. Much food, many problems."

Our social discourse next century will be shaped, as usual, by nostalgists and technophobes. The ancient Greeks believed Pandora's Box was a punishment for the discovery offire, and we've never lost that distrust of new technology.

Last century, the New York Times warned that electric light would damage people's retinas; French experts predicted

''It:S conceivable that something in the next 100 years will cheer us up. Perhaps drugs or genetic engineering will tame our rogue hormones and make us more blissful. "

that railroad travel would cause passengers' blood vessels to burst. Railroads were decried by literati like Melville and by the aristocrats, who complained that the lower classes would "move about needlessly." In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen summarized the perennial attitude among the gentility: "Innovation is bad form."

New technologies threaten vested interests and give political and religious leaders opportunities to rally traditionalists against unholy menaces. Today's fundamentalist Muslims ban satellite dishes as a form of moral pollution; 17th-century Catholic and Protestant clerics opposed surgery as an "unnatural" way to relieve pain; 5,000 years ago, shamans probably sacrificed virgins as penance for the sin of irrigation. Next century's clerics will find new causes for alarm, and they will be abetted by the growing class of secular worriers.

Academics and bureaucrats will seek funds by discovering new problems to study. Journalists will win awards and attr~ct audiences by finding new scourges, real or imagined.

As the rest ofrhe world becomes as rich as America, people

everywhere will have the luxury offretting about the problems that consume us. As more of their babies survive, they'll focus on endangered species of beetles. Once they've removed raw sewage from drinking water, they'll worry about one-part-perbillion traces of chemicals. Environmentalism looks very much like the great conservative crusade of the next century.

The movement includes traditional technophobes-Ianded gentry, intellectuals, bureaucrats, political activists-and appeals to the innate desire to revive "a sacred age of the remote past," as the philosopher Robert Nisbet has observed. In its quest to restore a "utopia of nature," Nisbet says, environmentalism has succeeded Christianity and socialism to become Western history's third great redemptive struggle.

Why can't we see that by historical standards we're already living in Shangri-La? Why do we listen to doomsayers? It seems to be our evolutionary heritage. Our species thrived by learning to plan for the future, and to fear it. We react instantly to danger, and nothing seems as dangerous as the unknown.

We're primed to pay attention to frightening stories on the evening news, and we'll pay for the adrenaline rush of watching a disaster in the movie theater. The only other drive that produces such a visceral response is sex, which creates its own set of discontents. The evolutionary imperative to reproduce-to attract the best mate and support the most children-seems to have imbued us with endless desires for more status and more resources. No matter how much better we're doing than our ancestors, we're always doing worse than some of our neighbors. No matter how much healthier and wealthier everyone becomes, we always read about a "gap" between one group and another.

And no matter how much our life expectancy increases, we know that it is finite. We're prone to that literary pitfall, the pathetic fallacy, in which the poet believes that Nature is reflecting his own mood: the rain clouds are weeping for his lost love. We think the world is getting worse because our bodies are deteriorating. In 1902, whenH.G. Wells was 36, he declared that "we are entering upon a progress that will go on, with an ever-widening and ever more confident stride, forever." Four decades later, when he was 79 and fatally ill, he saw no hope for humanity. "This world is at the end of its tether," he wrote. "The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded."

It's conceivable that something in the next 100 years will cheer us up. Perhaps drugs or genetic engineering will tame our rogue hormones and make us more blissful. Maybe someday we'll live forever by downloading our brains into synthetic bodies. Would the conquest of death be enough to make our cybernetic descendants content? Or would they sit around reminiscing about how much happier and healthier everyone was when bodies were made of mortal flesh? I 0 know where I'd put my money.

About the Aut~or: John Tierney is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine.

"Opportunities and challenges defme your career. You just have to follow your instincts. Do what excites you."

-Rebecca

"Just because you're a woman with a child, you can't be allowed lower standards of performance."

Mark, CEO of Enron Development Corporation

-Shelly Lazarus ofOgilry & Mather

omen, Text by PATRICIA SELLERS Photographs by BARRON CLAIBORNE

This is a story about seven remarkable American women-each better than all the men (and women) in . their chosen fields.

e

fwomen are from Venus and men are from Mars, then Rebecca Mark is from another planet altogether. Six years ago she was a 35-year-old student at Harvard Business School, nicknamed Mark the Shark for her ferocious ambition. Today the 5-foot 7-inch [l70-centimeter] honey-blond is CEO of Enron Development Corporation, the international ventures arm of Houston's hyperaggressive Enron Corp. As a builder of pipelines and power plants, Mark brings electricity to browned-out comers of the earth. From Bogota to Bombay, the lady knows riots. She's dodged bombs.

When foreign governments collapse, she digs in her high heels.

After the Maharashtra Government canceled Enron's power pro-

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"I tell my kids that it's okay not to know what you want to do. I think diversity, the idea of trying everything, is important."

-Jill Barad,president ofMatteI

nder ject in India-the subcontinent's largest-ever foreign investment-Mark reincarnated the deal. "I enjoy being a world-class problem solver," she says. "I'm constantly asking, 'How far can I go? How much can I do?' " Welcome to the corporate orbit of supersuccessful women in the U.S.: the ones who blast through glass ceilings, achieve otherworldly feats and take astronomical risks to/boldly go where no man has gone before. Fortune magazine looked inside hundreds of companies in dozens of industries and found seven women who are the best-better than the men and all other women in theiI: businesses. Charlotte Beers led the most impressive turnaround of

"I've always believed in fate. Certain things you can control. Others you can't. Life is about how you deal with adversity."

-Diana Brooks, CEO ofSotheby)s

Power an ad agency at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. Jill Barad made Barbie the world's most popular toy. Little-known Roberta Williams is the best-selling designer of computer games. Some of these women are chief executives. This is not, however, a genderbending group of tomorrow's CEOs. Linda Marcelli will never head Merrill Lynch. But as director of Merrill's flagship New York City district, she made Fortune s cut because she oversees the topperforming branches in the top market at the top brokerage firm.

The real surprise is how the women reached their pinnacles: They broke every rule imaginable and trashed the conventional wisdom of executive women's groups, career counselors and other

gurus of getting ahead. They didn't plan their careers. They didn't network and still don't-in fact, they despise the word. They don't blend into the corporate culture. They don't whine when the culture works against them, and they never cry-: "Discrimination!"

They don't play the man's game, literally or figuratively. They don't act like men or think like them. They never dress in androgynous suits and those homely bow ties. And they don't golf. Well, one of them does: Diana "De de" Brooks, the unstuffy CEO of Sotheby's, one of the world's stuffiest companies. And wouldn't you know, she plays better than most guys, scoring in the mid-80s.

This new female elite is definitely not your parents' paradigm.

Re,member when executive women used to be overwhelmingly single and childless? All of these seven have children. Five are married and two, Mark and Beers, used to be. Feminists in no standard way, they flaunt their femininity. As Rebecca Mark says: "It's startling to people when you're attractive and also really smart or extraordinarily good at what you do. You have greater impact.

People want to meet you. They remember you." Beers, 61, is a flamboyant flirt who calls CEOs "honey" and "darlin'." She's been known to refer to IBM CEO Lou Gerstner, her largest client, as "that adorable little man." Says Beers: "One of the biggest mistakes women make in business is that they aren't friendly enough."

Which brings us to our title: "Women, Gender & Power."

Unlike so many women, these seven see their gender as a help, not a hindrance. Women who are attractive and successful, particularly in male-dominated fields, sometimes have to fend off suspicions: How really did she reach the top?

It's the Mary Cunningham curse. Sixteen years have passed since Cunningham, a young, blond MBA straight out of Harvard, arrived at Bendix, where she simultaneously became a top corporate strategist and a constant companion of CEO William Agee.

Now married, the couple always denied having a sexual relationship at Bendix. But the Mary-and-Bill saga was the talk of the business world, and it remains so titillating that high-powered women to this day carry some burden of proving they did not succeed the same way.

"There are still so few women in high-powered corporate jobs," says Kathleen Reardon, a professor at the University of Southern California Business School and an expert on male-female relations. "When people see something unusual, like a woman who is No. I, rumors provide a rationale." For women, the dilemma is how to fight them. "Defensiveness causes more rumors," Reardon says. "You know, 'the lady doth protest too much.'"

The seven portrayed here are complex, controversial women who have made long-and not always politically correctmarches to the top. Nonconformists to the core, they have unique styles but also share some similarities. Here are five ways they have acquired and kept their power.

They Use Their Sexuality Most women in business downplay their sex appeal. They seem insistent on being judged like men, repressing a trait they could be using to persuade, win favor, gain power--okay, manipulate their â&#x20AC;˘ way to the top. Not these women. Says Barad, decked out in

shocking pink from shoes to suit to lipstick: "We never gave up our femininity. We didn't become little men. I don't care to get on equal footing with men." Welcome to the boys' club anyway, Jill.

Barad, 45, is expected to become MatteI's CEO next year, making her one of two female chief executives in the FORTUNE500. (The other is Marion Sandler, CEO, along with her husband, of Golden West Financial, a California S&L.) Like Bara~, Linda Marcelli greets colleagues and clients with hugs, ~ometimes kisses. "If one of my financial consultants is having a problem, I'll put my arm around him," says Marcelli, 53. "A male manager once asked me incredulously, 'You touch your financial consultants?' I said, 'Yeah. What's wrong with that?''' In fact, these women are taking advantage of an odd double standard: Men who touch women risk accusations of sexual harassment.

Charlotte Beers is known for sweeping theatrically into client meetings. Even before hellos are exchanged, she'll drawl to the group: "Now, you're gonna give us this business today, aren't you?" To most men, she's beguiling. Sears CEO Arthur Martinez, an Ogilvy client, says: "I think a lot of male-female business relationships get stilted. What I like so much about Charlotte is that you can have fun with her." Beers's former colleague BBDO International President Jean-Michel Goudard says: "Charlotte, more than anyone in this business, wants to seduce. There's something deep about Charlotte, and also frivolous. She is a woman, a woman, a woman."

It is the women, the women, the women who knock her style.

Some say she sets feminism back years. "The criticism really ticks me off," says Beers, who comes across as intimate, incisive, tough, funny and a decade younger than her 61 years. A cowboy's daughter from southeast Texas, she first learned to dazzle the crowd when she was in her twenties, teaching algebra to oil-patch engineers. Beers reckons that Southern charm is simply smart business. "Yes, I call CEOs 'honey,' but to me, that's wry Texas humor," she says. "I'm likely to say the most outrageous thing in the room-to liven things up."

Four years ago, Beers seemed an unlikely corporate revivalist.

The longtime head of Tatham RSCG, a one-office ad firm in Chicago, she moved into a New York company with 270 offices around the world and famously inbred management. Ogilvy & Mather used to be the class act of Madison Avenue. Then in 1989 it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Britain's WPP Group. When Beers arrived, key Ogilvy veterans had quit. Clients were pulling major accounts. "A lot of people thought Charlotte should have her head examined for going to Ogilvy," says WPP Chief Executive Martin Sorrell. "And most people thought I was crazy to hire her."

Sorrell, who pays Beers $1.5 million a year plus stock options, acquired a CEO many thought was mercurial, flighty and disorganized. Instead of talking profits, Beers preached "passion"-the esse~ce, she said, of resurrecting Ogilvy & Mather. She had one big idea to sell to clients: "brand stewardship." Insiders considered it pretentious shtick about the emotional bond between a product and its consumer. Even David Ogilvy, the 85-year-old Scot who founded the agency in 1948, was a skeptic. "I had to shepherd the idea because our own people were unconvinced," says Beers,

adding, "I think consensus is a poor substitute for leadership."

She globetrotted, mostly alone, visiting 50 clients in six months.

"As a woman, I got in to see people quickly," says Beers. "They were curious about me." Before long she landed two important accounts: American Express, which had earlier yanked its $60 million business from Ogilvy, and Jaguar. During a pitch to Jaguar executives, Beers tossed her own car keys on the table, then rhapsodized about the relationship between an owner and her Jag. She didn't create Ogilvy's award-winning campaign, but it is quintessential Charlotte: a glamorous ode to the Jag, set to the 1961 Etta James recording, "At last my love has come along. My lonely days are over ...." She tools around Manhattan in her ice-blue XJ6. Her buddy Martha Stewart drives the same Jaguar in gray.

It's supposed to be a secret, but Beers's No.2, Shelly Lazarus, is likely to succeed her as Ogilvy's new CEO. Lazarus, 48, was the key to reeling in the worldwide IBM business two years ago-the largest account shift in the ad industry. IBM made Ogilvy hot again and helped attract global advertisers such as Kodak and Swatch. (Ogilvy, the sixth-largest ad agency, has billings of $7.6 billion, up from $5.5 billion when Beers arrived.) Beers will probably remain chairman for a while. Says WPP's Sorrell: "I hope Charlotte will work with WPP for life."

They Don't Plan Careers Not one of these seven women pursued a career step by logical step. They did what interested them, focusing intently on the job at hand. If they slipped, no big deal; they moved on. When Mattei's Jill Elikann Barad was attending Queens College in New York City 25 years ago, she wanted to become a doctor. Her first time in an operating room, she fainted. She tried acting. Her first job, playing Miss Italian America in a 1974 gangster movie called Crazy Joe, "seemed superficial," she says. Veering into cosmetics and then advertising, Barad arrived at Mattei in 1981 as a $38,000a-year product manager. Today, as president, she earns more than $1.5 million. "I tell my kids that it's okay not to know what you want to do," says Barad, wjlo is married to a Hollywood producer, Tom Barad, and has two sons, Alex, IS, and Justin, 13. "Ithink diversity, the idea of trying everything, is important. Somehow all your experiences come together and make you multidimensional."

The variety-show format made a superstar of Barad-and Barbie too. Mattei had a do-nothing brand, with $235 million in annual sales, when Barad took charge in 1982. She refashioned the doll into a versatile career woman-doctor Barbie, astronaut Barbie, executive Barbie, altogether 100 different versions. The ad slogan (courtesy ofOgilvy & Mather): "We girls can do anything."

Says Barad: "1 really believe that." Barbie is now 37 years old, but hardly mature. Sales of her and her wardrobe increased 25 percent last year, to $1.4 billion.

Rebecca Mark, too, had no idea what she would eventually become. "Opportunities and challenges define your career," she says. "You just have to follow your instincts. Do what excites you.

And you don't see the path until you get there." Mark's path began on the family farm in northeast Missouri. Land rich and cash poor: her Baptist parents couldn't afford to pay for college. So she put

herself through two years at Missouri's William Jewell College.

Then she transferred to Baylor (where Beers also went to college but did not graduate).

She initially wanted to be a clinical psychologist. But working with juvenile delinquents was "personally depressing," Mark says-"the antithesis of everything I learned growing up: that you can control your own destiny." In 1978 she entered a bank training program at First City National Bank of Houston and began lending money to energy companies for big, risky development projects.

In 1982 she joined Continental Resources, a natural-gas outfit that later became part of Enron.

Winsome when she wants to be, brazen when she has to be, Mark never displayed the modesty that holds women back. She was tough and self-confident when she arrived at Enron; John.

Wing, her boss, made her even tougher. A West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran and onetime General Electric manager, Wing came to Enron in 1985. According to people who know them both, Wing frequently yelled at Mark in meetings and called her a failure. Sometimes he fired her for a few hours, or a few days. This was Wing's way with many people, but no one endured as much as his star student. "There's good and bad in every situation," says Mark, who abhors talking about Wing. Mixing ruefulness with defiance, she says, "John gave me my fearlessness. He taught me not to be afraid to make decisions in intense, difficult and emotionally charged situations."

When Mark left Enron for Harvard Business School (HBS), some thought she was crazy to interrupt a promising career. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, she continued to work part-time. under contract to Enron. Soon she found herself back under Wing's wing, developing Enron's first foreign project, a cogeneration plant in rural England. "Rebecca was recently separated from her husband," recalls Ken Lay, Enron's CEO. "She had her small twin boys to take care of, and still she worked almost full time for us while she went to business school. It was her choice." Fellow HBS '90 grads recall Mark dashing into classes late, overstuffed briefcase in tow; they considered her brilliant. Says Mark Connors, president of Database Publishing Group in Cambridge: "She could read a case study and boil it down quickly. We learned a whole lot from her."

MBAed and back in Houston, Mark was ready to take on the world-literally.

Her career path expanded when Wing, who had alienated many people at Enron, left the company. Replacing him as boss of power-plant development, Mark persuaded Ken Lay to create a~eparate company to build in Third World markets. In 1991 she became CEO of Enron Development Corporation. Today Mark has 25 developers working for her; 22 are men. Like investment bankers, they make their money when deals get done. In an average year, Enron people say, Mark can earn over $2 million.

She and her group have built plants in Guatemala, China and the Philippines. They have projects in the works valued at $19 billion, including power facilities in Indonesia, Puerto Rico and two dozen other countries. Says Daniel Yergin, a leading energy consultant: "Rebecca is tops in her business. She has some unfathomable source of energy that allows her to crisscross time zones and operate with acuity and focus."

"I felt deep down inside that someday I'd do something really extraordinary or different."

-Robena

"If one of my fmancial consultants is having a problem, I'll put my arm around him."

Williams, chiefgame planner of Sierra On-Line

-Linda Marcelli,a district director at Merrill Lynch

"Yes, I call CEOs 'honey,' but to me, that's wry Texas humor. I'm likely to say the most outrageous thing in the room-to liven things up."

"Really, I'm a warped human being," says Mark, whose dashes of humor are disarming. Her own fuel is exercise. She runs 25 kilometers a week, at a very human six-minute-per-kilometer pace. She skis and rides horses with her twins, Rob and Jared, in New Mexico, where she is building a vacation home. Is Mark gunning for the top at Enron? "As I said, I don't plan my career. Maybe I'm going to run the World Bank or CARE. I think of my job as one step in a life's work. It'll lead to bigger and different things."

-Charlotte Beers, chai,man and CEO ofOgilJry &Mather

They Take the Flak

6

All these women have faced opposition and discrimination-bosses who labeled them weak, men who refused to work for them, clients who discounted their opinions. They've survived flak attacks from women as well as men. Says Charlotte Beers: "Early in my career, during my first week at 1. Walter Thompson in Chicago, I had a secretary who asked the company for a transfer. She told me, 'No offense, but I want to work for a man who's going to move ahead.' " Beers agreed to the transfer. Two years later, the secretary asked Beers to take her back. Beers did. "I liked her honesty," she says.

These leading women possess an odd blend of optimism and fatalism that yields a remarkably resilient personality. Says Sotheby's Dede Brooks, 45: "I've always believed in fate. Certain things you can control. Others you can't." Brooks's older brother, whom she

idolized, died in a motorcycle accident when she was 16. She believes his death gave her the confidence to weather any setback. "Life is about how you deal with adversity," she says.

Rarsed on Long Island and trained as a lending officer at Citibank, Brooks didn't appear to be top-management material when she arrived at Sotheby's 17 years ago. An American girl in a bastion of British men, she hardly knew her Pissarros from her Picassos. Brooks was working in the finance area in 1983 when she caught the attention of Alfred Taubman, Sotheby's new American owner. Walking into a meeting where Brooks was the only woman, Taubman asked her to get him a cup of coffee.

"Yeah, I'll get you coffee if you'll Xerox these papers for me," Brooks replied.

"I suppose it was a little bold," she says now. "But Al laughed.

We both laughed. I think having a sense of humor is as important as anything to getting ahead."

Boisterous and Doris Day-ish, with a mussy bouffant, Brooks has loosened Sotheby's uptight culture and tightened its bottom line.

"I've always taken a lot of flak," she says. Once, after she fired some people and the press labeled her the "Terminator," she displayed a picture of Schwarz enegger, with her face pasted over Arnold's.

Although Brooks deserves kudos for Sotheby's mass-marketing masterpiece, the Jackie Onassis auction, she's had to deflect criticism of her auctioneering style. Aficionados complain about her lack of finesse at the podium. She had never raised a gavel until she began training for the Jackie auction. For ten months she watched videos and practiced with colleagues. "I think I made thousands of people comfortable who had never been to an auction before," says Brooks. "They needed an auctioneer who was direct and kind, not intimidating." The high-priced tag sale rang up $34 million in sales-a triumph. Even so, Brooks plans to keep her day job.

Mark says women need to try hard to roll with the punches: "You can't take things that people say personally. If you do, your confidence goes down, your ego gets in the way and you don't get the work done. Then you're defeated." Colleagues and competitors alike cite Mark's deft handling of Enron's near disaster last summer in India. A new government in Maharashtra, where she planned to build a multibillion-dollar plant, canceled the project.

Mark's job was to salvage the deal. "1 was amazed," says Charles Frank, a vice president ofGE Capital (GE and Bechtel are minority partners). 'The more things we'nt against her, the more determined she seemed to be." Mark spent about 20 weeks in India over the course of the year; last January she agreed on a revised contract with the Maharashtra Government.

They Don't Blend In Charlotte Beers maintains that true leaders disdain decorum. "So many CEOs are impeccably logical, but they don't lift your heart," says the diva of Madison Avenue. "They rely too much on the way things should be done. I believe in provocative disruption."

Linda Marcelli concurs: "In order to lead in a man's world, you can't be plain vanilla." A showboat in an ocean of corporate gray, Marcelli, a tall platinum blond, wears loud suits, bright pink I1pstick and lots of gold. Her colorful packaging is but one of many

things that make her stand out. She is the only woman among 29 district directors who run Merrill's brokerage' offices across the United States. Her bailiwick, New York City, generates annual revenues of $300 million. By several measures-total revenues, business growth, recruitment of new brokers-Marcelli ranks first in the Merrill system. "Wall Street is a culture where women find it very hard to deal with barriers," says Paine Webber President Joseph Grano, who used to work with Marcelli at Merrill. "Linda doesn't look at being a woman, having children, and having an unusual living situation as barriers at all."

Two decades ago Marcelli was a teacher in Boston, committed to transforming young lives. When the school closed where she and her husband Tony worked, she reassessed her career. Linda knew she liked managing her family's money. So she applied to be a broker. She interviewed at Paine Webber but says, "Merrill treated me with the most respect."

Marcelli joined Merrill in 1975 and instantly attracted attention.

The men couldn't get over this 32-year-old trainee who at home was taking care of two of her own kids, nine foster children, a few former students, a husband, a dog, and two ferrets-and boy, could she sell stocks! A believer in the you-can-sleep-when-you're-dead philosophy of life (Marcelli gets by on four hours of sleep), she threw herself into her work and family with equal elan. Says Merrill Lynch senior Vice President Bob Sherman, Marcelli's current boss: "Linda's strength has always been her ability to make people believe, 'If you do this, you're gonna have a better life, more money, and be happier.' She's very sincere about it. She has tremendous empathy for people."

During her early days at Merrill, says Marcelli, "everybody sold stocks by cold calling. But I didn't. I set up personal meetings." Her clients weren't the only people packing the reception area of the' Boston branch. "There'd be these children, multiracial and all different ages, coming in and saying, 'I'm here to see my mother,' " recalls Marcelli. "People told me they needed an organization chart for my family." Marcelli's husband Tony, who is 13 years older, told her that he was content playing second fiddle. So in 1980 she moved to where the money was-Manhattan-and became a manager. The Auntie Mame of Wall Street says she used to keep a tarantula named Oscar in her office, "to see what the men who work for me are really made of."

Tony, meanwhile, moved to Florida to help care for his and Linda's sick parents. He also started a tomato business, buying expensive vine-ripened tomatoes from Florida farmers and dri~ ving them overnight to Manhattan. For years, Linda worked nights and weekends on the trucks, sorting and delivering. "I'd rush home from work and get out of my suit into sneaks and jeans," she recalls. "I'd have to take long showers each night because I didn't want to go to the office smelling like rotten tomatoes." Today, Marcelli commutes weekends to Florida, and still helps with the business. Lucky's Real Tomatoes ships almost one-and-a-half million kilograms of its sun-kissed varieties exclusively to New York City. Order a salad at the Palm or the Union Square Cafe or Le Bernardin, and you will get a taste of Linda Marcelli.

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Roberta Williams, 43, is another who contends that only ordinary people blend in. "I never felt like I fit in," says the tiny, waiflike top gun of the computer game industry. "But I felt deep down inside that someday I'd do something real1y extraordinary or different." Mischievous as a child growing up in California, she rebelled against her father and refused to go to college. She married at 19, had a child at 20; by 25, she was a discontented housewife. One evening, her husband, Ken, a computer programmer, brought home an early computer game. Roberta became hooked, instantly. After playing a few more games, she recalls thinking, "There must be opportunity here."

Ken scoffed at Roberta's notion that designing games was what she wanted to do with her life-. She had worked with computers in part-time jobs, says Ken, "and she was never a good programmer."

Roberta concurs, but she still badgered him to start a business with her. In 1979, he agreed. They packaged their first game disks in Ziploc bags; their factory was in their kitchen. Today, Seattlebased Sierra On-Line is the world's No. 1 seller of computer games. Ken is CEO; Roberta is chkf game designer. The 23 games she has invented, including her best-known King's Quest adventure series, have sold nearly seven million copies, vs. three million for the Miller brothers, the one-hit wonders who created Myst.

Last February, Connecticut-based CUC International agreed to buy Sierra for $1 billion in stock; under the terms of the deal, Ken and Roberta will continue to run Sierra.

In a field dominated by men, Roberta says she creates gaInes "guys wouldn't think to do": fairy tales instead of Doomlike shoot-'em-ups. Much like a screenwriter/director, Williams concocts a story and its characters, then instructs a team of engineers, . programmers and artists to perform the technical magic. WiI\'iams created the first game that blended graphics and text, the first 3-D animated adventure and the first adventure with a female protagonist. Yes, of course, her women are brilliant and beautiful. In Williams's recent Phantasmagoria, which cost $4 mil1ion and took 200 people to produce, newlyweds move into a spooky old mansion. When Hubby becomes possessed by evil spirits, he turns into a demented rapist. The game player's mission is to help lovely Adrienne outwit the demons and get her husband back.

They Don't Favor Women Hard-core feminists might call these business leaders seven queen bees-women who move ahead but don't pull along their sisters. Except for Dede Brooks, who wants to recruit female managers at Sotheby's, these women don't think about affirmative action.

They don't try to promote or even hire females. As Jill Barad says, "To get the best person, your approach has to be gender-free."

Charlotte Beers's rule of recruiting is: "Don't hire anyone you wouldn't want to have dinner with." It's pure coincidence, then, that the CEO-to-be at Ogilvy & Mather is a woman: Shelly Lazarus, the level-headed, pragmatic, unpretentious foil to Beers.

When she joined Ogilvy 25 years ago, she was the only woman among 100 account managers. Six months pregnant with her first child in 1973, she became the company's first female account su" pervisor. She has consistently sought out difficult assignments that

no one else wanted. Direct marketing was a dud business when she moved into it. "I didn't care," says Lazarus. "I wanted to run something." She built up Ogilvy's direct-marketing unit, and then she turned around the agency's beleaguered New York office.

Hoisted to higher-profile posts by Beers, Lazarus looks like an overnight sensation after 25 years.

Following the footsteps of her boss, Lazarus doesn't favor females. She angered working mothers at Ogilvy by forbidding anyone who works part time or flextime to become a senior partner (Ogilvy has 162 senior partners, 63 of whom are women). "Just because you're a woman with a child, you can't be allowed lower standards of performance," Lazarus says.

Despite their toughness, these women try to nurture-we can't avoid the word-al1 their employees. Rebecca Mark hosts an annual Christmas party at her home for the 180 people who work for Enron Development. Spouses, kids and Santa come too. Every Fourth of July, Marcelli invites hundreds of Merrill Lynch's support staff and their families to her fireworks bash in Manhattan.

She and a few friends cook themselves. "It's labor of love," she says. Jil1 Barad threw a crazy party at her new home in Bel Air, California, last spring. Buses that were supposed to transport 120 Mattei employees failed to show up. After everyone arrived late, a storm blew out the electricity for' four hours. Barad's sons spent the evening escorting executives to the bathrooms with flashlights.

"It was worse than awful, but it became this bonding experience," says Barad, ,",:hose laugh was heard above the din all evening.

Do these women feel balanced? NQ way. Brooks has been married for 25 years to a venture capitalist and has two teenagers. "I have the most exciting job imaginable, and it's a killer," she says .

"I don't have control of my life." Lazarus and her husband, a Manhattan pediatrician, have three children, ages 8 to 22. Though peers consider her the model working mom, Lazarus begs to differ.

"Someone once described me as a swan," she says. "I look smooth going across the lake, but underneath, I'm paddling like crazy. I'm happy that I'm fully engaged in all parts of my life. But 1 don't ever feel satisfied."

Adamantly, these women say no one can expect to have it all, even though they are trying hard. Mark has a live-in nanny for her twins. The nanny and her 16-year-old daughter have spacious quarters in Mark's home, and Mark helps pay for the girl's private schooling. Recently Mark enrolled her sons Rob and Jared in a school that caters to international students; its flexible curriculum wil1 allow her to take the boys on some of her trips. Still, there's only so much any supermom can do. "A marriage or relationship hasn't been feasible for me," says Mark. "Too many women think they can have a wonderful career, a terrific marriage, happy children and a great social life. It's just not reality."

When she talks like this, Rebecca Mark doesn't seem to be from another planet. Like most hard-working, high-achieving women, she sounds a little vulnerable. Mark and the other superstars portrayed here are larger-than-life proof that no matter how spectacular the ascent, life at the top is never comfortable.

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The Art of Paul Taylor nyone who saw Paul Taylor perform the male solo in his 1962 Aureole has probably never forgotten the experience. It was stunning to watch a tall, athletic-looking man dance to one of George Friedrich Handel's melting adagios as if the music were spooling through his body and flowing out his toes and fingertips. No stops snagged the viewer's eyes to betray that image of a constantly evolving current. The solo redefined lyricism in modem dance; that it was created and performed by a man made it all the more remarkable.

Paul Taylor, the director and sole choreo-

A

grapher of what is possibly one of the world's most famous dance companies, creator of approximately 100 dances, the winner of over 40 awards, prizes and fellowships, hasn't danced since 1973. Yet it is important to remember that he danced and how he danced.

From the beginning, American modem dance defined itself as powerfully antitradition. Its important pioneering heroes issued frequent manifestos decrying establishment forms. By 1900, Isadora Duncan found ballet unnatural and deforming.

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Asian dances of her teachers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn as "the weakling exoticism of a transplanted orientalism." The early modem dancers saw themselves as staking out new artistic territory uninfluenced by foreign traditions in somewhat the way their forebears had left Europe to settle a new frontier. Their individllal bodies were virgin soil for the cultivation of new species of expression.

Paul Taylor has never been a writer of manifestos, but he inherited the tradition that to be a contemporary dance maker means building a style on one's own body and predilections, becoming the director,

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star and sole choreographer of a company bearing one's name. He followed a typical path of training and apprenticeship, taking classes at the Juilliard School of Dance, spending a summer studying at the American Dance Festival and performing in the companies of others-most notably Merce Cunningham, with whom he spent one season, and Martha Graham, with whom he danced from 1955 to 1962.

Graham capitalized on his unique blend of fluidity, strength and oddity. To her, Paul Taylor was never quite the hero. He played the blind seer Tiresias in her version of the Oedipus legend, Night Journey. In Clytemnestra, he was the greedy Aegisthus, in Embattled Cardell, "The Stranger," alias the snake who disrupted Eden. Perhaps his most sympathetic role was that of the goodnatured, leonine Hercules in Alcestis. rlene Croee, dance critic of the New Yorker, wrote in 1984 that she discerned an influence on Paul Taylor of Graham's radical nonlinear ways of structuring drama and went on to say that "Without a doubt, he rather than Graham herself or any of her other heirs is the choreographer who has moved Graham theatre ahead in the second half of this century." But the style that Paul Taylor gradually developed owed little to any mentors, even though it's possible to sight a Grahamish movement here and there in his dances, or, in certain of them, a flat, two-dimensional look that recalls the archaic Greek heroes who populated Graham's dances during the period he worked for her.

It may be significant that a swimming schO"larship paid for much of Paul Taylor's college tuition. In his autobiography, Private Domain, he writes of "an almost spilitual state of being one with the water."

He had difficulty adjusting his timing to be in perfect unison with Graham's other dancers, because he had loved the feeling of pushing through water and treated air the same way. This smooth, pressured quality informs his style. His choreography looks weighty, but resilient-as if the floor were not a taut drumhead (as Graham once conceived it), but something spongier. It's the sense of pressure, too, that gives depth to

A

lyrical passages; in his work, lightness can rarely be equated with fluttering. Instead, one imagines a great sail filling with wind, a boat set skimming over water.

Paul Taylor's subject matter owes little to either Cunningham's plotless, chancedri ven works or the serious grandeur of the Jungian scenarios that Graham built on the theme of the heroine-quester. One of the characteristics setting him apart from both the modem dancers of his generation and the younger postmodernists is the diversity of his repeltory and the variants within his style. His choice of music reflects the range of his tastes. He consorts sensitively with the likes of Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Wagner, Haydn and Debussy, but also uses contemporary commissioned work, pop tunes and such unusual items as melodies played by an amusement-pier band machine.

Paul Taylor established himself as unpredictable as early as 1956 with Three Epitaphs, a piece that still entrances audiences. Completely covered, heads and all,

by Robert Rauschenberg's costumestaupe unitards glinting with scattered pieces of mirror-the six dancers lope around to the raucous music of a New Orleans funeral band. As they preen and pose, follow one another in slightly disorderly processions, get their own limbs badly tangled, they look slightly simian and as if some great burden were weighing them down. They're familiar, yet utterly mysterious, sad and hilarious at the same time.

The choreographer-as-young-dog became notorious for a 1957 concert, titled 7 New Dances. All made use of minimal everyday movement-rearrangements of posture and gesture; in one, Duet, he stood and his partner sat motionless for the duration of the piece. Announcing the dance world's bafflement, the curmudgeonly reviewer and composition teacher Louis Horst published in his Dance Obsenler a review consisting of four inches of blank space signed with his initials. However, the great critic Edwin Denby, some seven years after the infamous performance, wrote that "Taylor's first choreography was antidance with a beautiful clarity and ingenuousness."

In 1982, Paul Tallor honored that fairly disastrous early concert by incorporating

some of its "found movement" into Lost, Found and Lost, whose theatrical ingenuity, stylishness and tongue-in-cheek attitude made what had once seemed boring immensely compelling. He learned important lessons from the 1957 experience: for instance, that no matter how neutrally dancers performed or how abstractly they were presented, audiences always imputed meaning to their movements. He also discovered that it was nice to please an audience and that he liked dancing better than not dancing.

Nevertheless, on one level he never lost interest in having dancers appear human on stage, anti-heroic, almost rough around the edges. The members of his company, especially these days, are highly trained virtuosos, and the movement Paul Taylor creates for them is physically demanding, but they

Tongues (1988). In these and others, death, nightmare, disease and depravity run rampant. Dancers scrabble on the floor, tie their bodies into curious shapes, enact lustful scenarios on one another.

The demoralized people who confront their images in the shining mirrors of Last Look (1985) scarcely dance in any accepted sense of the word; their bodies seem to be melting in self-disgust even as they torment others. In Dust (1977), he shows what seems to be a ragtag procession of medieval cripples and plague victims: the halt leading the blind. The dance Private Domain (1969) turns the audience into voyeurs, glimpsing the sexual shenanigans of a sleek crowd between black hangings that artist Alex Katz hung between the dance and the spectators.

Movements that might appear lyrical in another context take on an oily lasciviousness. Robust jumps, like those with which the ,men bound across the stage in Airs, metamorphose into bodies hurtling like bunched-up projectiles. hat is remarkable is Paul Taylor's lack ofcensOllousness toward some of his nastier creations. In these dances, he shows us the darker or more primal side of our natures as a necessary corollary to the light. In his book, he writes: "Turn Order and God over and what've you got there in back? Chaos and Satan, naturally. But the back side is not the opposite; it's of the same cloth-some say it's exactly the same thing." In a few pieces, he shows the two sides melding. The tuxedoed gents and silk-gowned ladies of Cloven Kingdom (1976) dance with decorous joy, but when the sweet strains of Archangelo Corelli's music cede to ominous rumblings and drumbeats, the men turn satyr, pawing the ground goatily, and the women unleash wilder depths of competitiveness.

A slight hint of darkness sometimes hovers over his most apparently light-hearted works. The idea lightly infusing Sunset (1983) is that the soldiers who dance with innocent girls in a park are perhaps on their last leave before a battle that may prove fatal to some of them. Two soldiers, infinitely restrained, perhaps prefer each other to any

W

are rarely asked to display a "beautiful" line, as ballet dancers do. They look robust, yet modest and essentially serene, whether a particular work has a sweet-tempered atmosphere or a demonic one. Typically they also seem individual, the way people on a street do, rather than mustering the uniformity typical of dancers in an ensemble.

When Paul Taylor contributed an essay to Selma Jeanne Cohen's The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief in 1965, he titled it "Down with Choreography" and devoted much of his space to affectionate descriptions of company members.

Paul Taylor's versatility stems not only from his omnivorous taste in music and the pragmatism that might deem it advisable to follow a sunny work with a darker one in order to create a varied program. His dances seem to reflect different aspects of the

human psyche. Some of them are deliciously comical-silly even-some are idyllic, others terrifying. No choreographer handles lyricism as freshly as Paul Taylor.

His greatest "beautiful" dances-Aureole, for example, or Airs, Esplanade, Arden Court-present Edenic worlds in which high-spirited joy mates with tenderness.

One duet in Airs is danced twice in a row, the second time at about half the speed of the first. The effect is ineffably touching.

It's as if the dancers are really lovers and have wanted to repeat and savor a communication whose depth they understood only after uttering it once. Because of the slowness, the repetition is not without effort.

And that too is moving.

The same choreographer also made such dances ¡as Scudorama (1964), Nightshade (1979) and Speaking in

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of the women, but daren't show their feelings. The giddy kids of Company 8(1991) dance to World War II hits of the Andrews Sisters, while at the back, silhouetted ranks of men occasionaIly prowl, attack an invisible enemy and fall. And Paul Taylor's dances often harbor an unsolved enigma, a loose end like those that Native American weavers traditionaIly leave in their work because to create absolute perfection is to risk angering the gods. aul Taylor's ingenuity often leads him into surprising directions. The movement for Profiles (1980), an austerely formal quartet, is almost identical to some of that given to the four principal dancers of his amazing Rite of Spring (1980), in which Stravinsky's scenario becomes a layered construction involving a ritual, the workings of a dance company, and a silent-movie-style tale of gangsters and moIls. Few other choreographers would think of performing the same dance twice within a single work; in Polaris (1976), two different casts, different music and altered lighting mysteriously transform the material, causing remembered moments and present vision to jostle bewitchingly together in the spectators' minds. Noticing in 1994 that quite a few of his dancers were interested in choreography, Paul Taylor, with their permission, built his Funny Papers out of phrases borrowed from them-treating himself to a new adventure while gi ving the novice choreographers valuable on-the-spot lessons in editing and shaping.

Many young choreographers would have liked to be flies on the wall during the making of Funny Papers. Or maybe during the making of any of his works. Few have achieved his ability to construct a dance phrase and loop it so musically yet so adventurously through whatever score accompanies it. Few have his grasp of the ar~ chitecture of a dance or how to vary its impetus through time.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Paul Taylor received high praise for his choreography.

Yet for a few years, his initiaIly smaIl company's existence followed the usual pattern for modem dance groups. This was before the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts provided

P

America's first government funding for artists. Dancers might be paid for performances, but not for rehearsals. United States tours, whether the company was booked into civic theaters or university auditoriums, consisted of one-night stands.

Performers in different companies could trade lore about splintery floors, unheated dressing rooms, inadequate lighting equipment and stage crews who had no idea what this modem dance stuff was all about.

Paul Taylor was luckier than most. Private donors helped support his New York seasons. Artist friends like Alex Katz and Robert Rauschenberg were designing decor and/or costumes for him at a time when he could hardly have paid them the huge fees their work could command. (Often, however the costumes were credited to "George Tacet"-Paul Taylor himself). Gian-Carlo Menotti invited him and his dancers to Italy to perform in the Spoleto Festival. The U.S. State Department sent them touring under its aegis as cultural ambassadors. Paul Taylor's onetime manager, Charles Reinhart, had lived abroad and had connections in Europe.

Thanks to him, the Paul Taylor Dance Company was the first American modem dance group to perform at the Holland Festival and the Edinburgh Festival. The danG:ers were enjoying European opera houses at a time when coIleagues back home could never be sure whether their tours would land them in decent theaters, high school stages or university gymnasiums. In 1969, he was knighted by the French Government as "Chevalier de 1'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" (upgraded in 1984 to "Officier" and in 1990 to "Commandeur").

The creation in the late 1960s by the National Endowment for the Arts of what was initially known as the Coordinated Residency Touring Program altered the debilitating one-night stand pattern. Now the U.S. Government would contribute a portion of the funds, with state arts councils and local sponsors supplying the rest, provided a community would hire a company for a week of performances, lecturedemonstrations, master classes and the like, or two companies for a half-week each. Things immediately brightened, although Reinhart remembers with amusement that in the early days of this expanded

touring, eager communities weren't always sure what they were getting. Decatur, Illinois, for example, expected the June Taylor Dancers (wildly popular from their precision routines on the Jackie Gleason Show). Still, when the Paul Taylor Dance Company finished its residency there, the appreciative sponsors sent a marching band to the airport to see the dancers off in style.

The penurious days ended long ago (even as though companies as prestigious Taylor's still have to work hard at fundraising). Paul Taylor is an eminence grise on the American scene-indeed, worldwide. The dancers are paid well. The organization boasts a thriving school.

That company today is both like and unlike its earlier self. It's bigger for one thing, and Paul Taylor can select dancers from hundreds who show up for auditions or from the fresh talent in the school.

While he was stiIl dancing, his ineffably quirky personal style marked the company as his territory; he performed leading roles in almost every work. When injury and iIlness unexpectedly forced him off the stage, his admirers wondered how he would manage without his own remarkable performing persona as a source.

Esplanade (1975), the first major work created after his retirement, courageously reassessed walking, running, gesturing and falling. His old interest in everyday movement, transformed by genius and garlanded with Bach's Double Violin Concerto, produced a work as original and as full of delight as any he ever made. And his movement invention very soon became almost more prodigal, since he drew not only from his own imagination, but from the smart young daredevil dancers who were his instruments.

It seems altogether fitting that the Paul Taylor Dance Company should have been chosen to tour India in 1997, the year marking the country's 50th anniversary of independence. For over 40 years, Paul Taylor's work has celebrated independence of spirit-the profound strength and originality necessary to pursue a vision.

0 About the Author: Deborah Jowitt is the dance critic of New York's Village Voice, one of America S most reputed weeklies.

THE PAUL TAYLOR "The world's greatest living choreographer," is what Newsweek

magazine calls

Paul Taylor, who is bringing

his dance

company to India in January

1997 as a

tribute

to India's

independence.

50th anniversary

of

He has choreographed

a

new work, Prime Numbers, for the occasion, which will have a world premiere in New Delhi.

As a choreographer,

Paul Taylor is the

master of "found movement." vocabulary

consists

His dance

largely of everyday

gestures like skipping or walking. As he once wrote: "Everywhere the city's inhabitants are on the move ...their moves and their stillnesses are the ABCs that if given the proper format could define dance in a new way." Paul Taylor assembles simple movements complexity

and

these

into dances of great symbolic

weight,

as

shown in the photographs on these and the following pages.

The simplicity of Paul Taylor's choreography is deceptive.

The British critic

Alastair Macaulay compares him in this regard to another American poet Robert Frost-"plain phisticated

original, the of speech, so-

of thought, wise, ambiguous,

troubling and memorable."

Paul Taylor, who earlier performed India in the fifties and sixties,

in

says: "I

look forward to my visit to India to celebrate and pay tribute to this nation on its 50th anniversary.

United States

I am honored that the

has chosen

me and my

danee company to honor India on this historic and great occasion."

0

Indian Tribute to Paul Taylor aul Taylor will come to India leading his extraordinary dance company in January 1997. The thing about Paul Taylor is that he was never taught dance in the classical sense.

Yes, he studied at Juilliard School of Dance in New York and at other places, and danced with the Martha Graham Dance Company. But there was too much of Paul Taylor in him to learn dance in the way people who want to become dancers usually do.

Once when asked why he wanted to be a dancer Paul Taylor had replied that he liked to move. The whole animate and inanimate world belonged to Paul Taylor in his meaning of dance-people milling about, running after buses, lounging on subway platforms, full of unplanned momentary stillnesses. He did not want any exotic costumes or Edens with dying falls in perpetuity. It was good enough to be just anywhere-where things were innocent and moving.

For 40 years and more Paul Taylor has been central to the evolution of American dance, turning its face in a wholly new direction. During the fifties and sixties he had been in Martha Graham's Dance Company as a soloist. More than 50 companies worldwide have commissioned his works that are now performed all over the world and he has been honored with more than 40 awards which include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation and

P

Samuel H. Scripps ADF awards.

For people of the grain and timber of Paul Taylor, the classical inheritance in any art is anathema. And for a career of any sort, a choice among several likely alternatives in which he could weigh the customary ingredients of money, status, worldly opportunities of other kinds, was difficult in Paul Taylor's case for he hated the nine-tofive routine, the city compulsions to wear a jacket. Even the need to talk his way into and out of things was beyond his kind of energy to achieve.

After casting about languidly for a while, Paul Taylor finally decided to join Syracuse University. He opted for its art department where he found he could get at least a partial scholarship. And this was not because he loved art. He knew nothing about modern art or about Matisse, Ingrcs, Lautrec, Millais and others. There were campus cliques which he scorned to join. If there was any art at all that he cared to look at, it was perhaps the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. In that area he might have tried his hand at copying Norman Rockwell. Rockwell also did not belong in any of the campus cliques.

Finally, when Paul Taylor diverted to swimming it seemed at first a curious choice for him to have made, but for the fact that there was a fully-paid scholarship in it.

Eventually Paul Ta lor became a superb swimmer learning more by a process of ap-

perception than by practice alone-the dynamics of the medium magically holding him aloft, his body literally flying through it. He mentions at some point that his continued swimming practice not merely gave him speed but also a strange and unbelievable feeling of being one with the water, that was almost spiritual in its quality.

It was this same aspect of his nature perhaps which very soon after gave him what can only be called a theophany, like what happened to a tent-maker from Tarsus on a dusty road to Damascus a long time ago.

No, he had not fainted the way the tentmaker did, but suddenly he came inexplica~ bly to a certainty that he was going to be a dancer. This was a whole feeling, a thing not made out of little bits and pieces of logic or arguments, but a complete and total reaching in a journey whose first step he had yet to take. He continued to swim, marking time and trying to figure out this mysterious and thoroughly incomprehensible exultation of certainty that he carried within him. Talking about swimming at that time, he says: "The swimming routine lengthens muscles, but it loses its snap and resilience which are needed for dry-land sports." Paul Taylor certainly belonged on dry land.

They call Paul Taylor's dance modern. It is an easy word that says very little. His dance is perhaps only as modern as a living human body is modern which is not really

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It gives me great joy to return to India after 30 years to be part of America's celebration of the golden annilJersfllY of India's independence.

Dance symbolizes life and has always been an integral part of all cultures; especialry so in India which has such a varied and rich heritage of classical dance forms. OPel" the years, dancers from 1J!y country-Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawll, Jvlarth(l Graham, Meree Cun/lingham and many others-halJe been drawn here, enthralled and on occasion influenced by the heaut:)Iand dilJersity of dance in India.

Dancers around the world share a common language that crossesall boundaries of plnce, time and even cultures. As I set out to choreograph a new work to commemorate this special moment ill India's histOly, Ifound that unconsciousry little touches of Indian dance-some small hand gestures orfoot mOJlemCilts-hnd crept into the piece. My first instinct was to remove them lest they look merery like imitations of nn Indian art f01711,but they seemed tofit in (lnd becomepmt of the whole. I hope the dance lvill represCiltfor Indian audiences a celebration of cultural exchange and that tluy will be able to relate to this nellll work and see themselJles in it. I belieJleit touches on common experiences of people ellC1ywhere,no 1Jlntterwhere we live.

It gives me immense pleasure to haFe the world premiere of this dance take place in NeH]Delhi at the beginning of theyear-long celebration

by America in honor of India's 50th anniversnry.

My appreciation and thanks to Ambassador and Mrs. WiSJlel~the U.S. Information Service in India (lnd to the malry American and Indian businesses for their generous support lvlzich has made this tour possible.

as modern as it is thc leading edge of its time which is the only history it can ever truly have.

The place of the fITStexponent of modcm dance in India should properly belong to Uday Shankar. It was he who took Indian classical dance a bit out of the hard sheath of its tradition and made it a personal statement of faith.

The reason why he was so hugely successful

was because there was so much person in his personality that he exhibited a spooky kind of authority which was difficult to explain either through his technique or from any other aspect of thc tradition of Indian dance that he may have chosen to adopt.

The Balanchine style, which is the American approach¡to ballet, continues to be pervasive. And when dancers like Susan

Farrell, for example, achieve their purpose not by isolated instances of athleticism but by making the whole dance into a kind of solidified music, a melody that had become material, dance had already moved out of its traditional definitions. In this kind of exploration Paul Taylor stands in a unique relationship by introducing a novel stirring in the Western dance scene. Paul Taylor came to his style along what would seem an agonizing route of searching, rejecting and selecting, picking and choosing, turning away and occasionally finding a minuscule nugget of truth as he grew. For example, the discovery that motion is really a pause in the original stillness of dance. That each posture gets lost in a sequence of other postures so that he would surround each posture with a moat of absolute stillness. This gives his dance a certain starkness, making each sequence seem mountcd and framed.

There is perhaps a distant parallel in India. It was Uday Shankar in the thirties who would stand in the fandava posture of Shiva for so many interminable minutes while the dance proceeded in the foreground that he became invisible. Nobody knew that Uday Shankar was actually dancing while the audience searched for him in the melee of dancers who occupied all the space on the stage, and when in a sudden movement the God of Creation would leap out of the circle of tapers in vvhich all the time he was furled, it was a shock that had no parallel in dance. Uday Shankar's Shiva was not destroying thc world he had caused to be crcated, angry at human transgressions, but mildly irritated, a little disturbed perhaps. A mere pout of the lower lip showcd that he was merely distracted, and if his dance was going to wipe out the whole world it was just too bad. He could always make another, but this one had to go.

The American Indian scout in Paul Taylor's own tradition does much the same.

He can stand ten feet in front of you, and you will not see him because of his preternatural stillness. Uday Shankar, who performed in the U.S. in the 1920s with Anna Pavlova practiced this technique almost yogic in its detachment, the dynamic power of stillness keening with potential life. This conception is, of course, part of the lndian spiritual and philosophical inheritance. Paul

moral correspondence

between

psychology

and physique.

To the lndian tradition, this technique can be must ring a bell. This approach likened to the kha)'al and thlll11ribandishes of Indian classical music which leave plenty of room for a singer to improvise and enrich meaning, in the way the musician understands the raga and his own place in the tradition to which he has been apprenticed.

This is a measure of what Paul Taylor achieves in dance through highly disciplined physiques whose ascetic awareness of the human body as a means of expression of the inner worlds of man and the space he occupies, a certain quality of being, born in the moment, a dance of the instant, impossible to repeat in the same way ever again.

Very little of a dancer like Paul Taylor can possibly be entirely gifted. It is the

Taylor, on the other hand, had to draw it out of his own body, fj'om his own awareness of the physical world. In a piece called the Epic, a 20-minute solo in the tlrst section of a whole evening called 7 New Dances, he stood frozen vvithout a breath. A wholly still episode, it became dance in a new sense.

And when Louis Horst reviewed the performance in the Dance Observer with four square inches of empty space with his initials as byline, it said what it truly was: the uncreated, waiting to be born. he review produced a great deal of consternation at the time. This was like silence in music which Indian singers like Kumar Gandharva in classical music and K.L. Saigal in the lighter field used as vital ingre-

T

dients of thcir musical language.

Paul Taylor showed his audience that night at the Kauffmann Concert lIal1 the nature of stillness in dance which is the very jetting source of motion.

Ba llet like Bharatanatyam is safe. Its rules are such that behind them a dancer may hide, performing perfectly, never breaking its etiquette, pulse-perfect in rhythm, and if an

abhil1Gl'a or two is underplayed

or over-

done, sharp footwork would always save the day. Paul Taylor decided to put his neck on the line, and it is this decision that shines to this day in his dance.

This kind of modem dance is difficult to pass on. Its transm ission docs not enter the student's mind through instruction, but by a mysterious process of osmosis that refuses to be serial and sequential.

The process lies along the breadth of instruction metaphorically at right angles to the teaching, and which leaps across gaps and separations in space and understanding, connecting dissimilar inspirations through an expanded awareness rather than through knowledge or skill alone. This was how Paul Taylor reached the domain of choreography when he ceased to dance formally on the stage. He ceased to build the details of dance steps but began to devise structures rather than personally tailored steps and postures to suit the individual physical and psychological characteristics of his dancers with distinctive quirks. This broad and flexible structure made it possible for a dancer to find himself within the dance and so interpret it within his own grasp and creative framework, leaving roles openended for personal discovery and passage through it. It was this approach that made it possible for P"aul Taylor to bring into tocus in the art of the dancers of his company the

mind perhaps, which is his gift, that makes that kind of dance possible, an eerie ability to look askance at life even while living it as others do; to look at all those things that move unconsciously across the earth's face and seek. their source, the informing intelligence that lurks behind appearances.

So when Paul Taylor said "1 \vant to dance because Ilike to move," it was not the appearance of motion that he meant but the state that precedes movement.

Whether he brings to India Big Bertha, which reveals the somber and the sinister underside of Paul Taylor's sorcery where a mechanical doll puts an average American family under its spell; or whether it is Funny Papers, subtle, wild and droll, full of seemor Esplanade, where is set to the Die Rheinnixen Overture; or the Offenbach Overtures, where you have a duel in which the duelists fall in love and their lieutenants carry on the tIght to the finish; or the unforgettable A Field of Grass, whose introduction begins with a piece named Arden COllrt and goes on to the seven dwarfs of Snow White, a dance experience of the tlnest vintage-dry, tangy and aphrodisiac-is in store for Indian ingly insane comedy;

the

music

audiences.

0

About the Author: Raghum R. Menon, a noted /IIusicologist. lvriter and Sanskrit scholw; is the author a/The Penguin Dictionary of Music, The Life of Allljad Ali Khan and Journey into Raga.

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GRACEIN GMNG Corporate Responsibility for the Arts Corporate philanthropy promoting the arts in America has traditionally been seen as good business as well as good citizenship.

he scene is the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The 2,200 seats in its magnificent Opera House-where some of the world's finest artists have performed-are packed to capacity. A ballet is being performed.

When the performance is over, there is a moment of silence before the audience begins to applaud. For the 3,923rd time (the Center has been presenting 52 shows every week in its five theaters since its inception in 1964) this fabulous theater with its glittering chandeliers and incredible ambience has cast its spell on one more set of spectators. They leave the Center transformed like the 32 million before them-testimony to the abiding faith of the man, John F. Kennedy, whose memory the Center commemorates. He once said: "We too will be remembered--not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics-but for our contribution to the human spirit."

These words stand engraved on the marble panels of the Kennedy Center to remind people about the enduring quality of artistic achievements.

But who makes these achievements possible? The realm of art may be rich, although the world of artists has often been known to be poor-without patrons. While their own genius makes them create, it is the donors' munificence that brings their creation to the public platform. Whether it is dance or music or opera or drama, the meeting of artist and audience cannot possibly take place without this vital link.

In a country like India, artists flourished in bygone daysthanks to the maharajas. Whether it was a Tansen or a Thyagaraja, the royal patronage was always there. Tansen accepted it.

Thyagaraja did not. But the sponsors were there when needed-.

In today's scenario, the kings have made way for the corporate giants. Big business houses, industrial sectors, commercial estab~ lishments. Each one of them is indispensable to the survival of the

T

arts. Their involvement has come to be accepted today as an inevitable link between the performer and the public. The more the sponsorship, the better the rapport between artists and audiences.

And this is increasingly true allover the world.

Take the Kennedy Center itself. During these past 32 years, it has presented no less than 3,923 performances of dance and ballet, in addition to 17,181 evenings of theater, 2,315 symphonies and 3,199 operas featuring tens of thousands of artists. In 1995 alone, the Center hosted nearly 3,000 performances besides touring productions and TV Iradio broadcasts. In America, it is an active

leader in arts education. How could the Center have accomplished these feats of artistic excellence without corporate support?

Kevin McMahon, executive vice president of the JFK Center, says that the Center depends almost entirely on private funding.

A large percentage of the $25 mil1ion it needs every year to support all its programs comes from private-sector businesses and individuals. Federal grants, says McMahon, are solely earmarked for the maintenance and operation of the $78 million building.

According to McMahon, philanthropy was always considered one of the hallmarks of good citizenship in America. Industrial giants like to give something to the community which helps to build their business. And what better forum than the arts? If, at the same time, it enhances their visibility and improves their public image, all the better. Corporates need to explain to their shareholders why they have chosen to support a particular cause.

The sponsorship by businesses of the forthcoming Indian tour of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, McMahon says, is a fine example of companies improving their corporate image.

Echoing similar thoughts, Vishaka Desai of the Asia Society in New York says that the marketing factor is very important in corporate philanthropy. "Whenever a business house sponsors a public event, it reinforces a message in the public mind. Association with cultural events gives them a cultivated image," says Desai.

Corporate sectors want to be perceived as responsible citizens who support good causes, she adds. Whenever they sponsor events like rock tours, sports or cultural shows, they are actually telling people that they want to improve their cities and their lives by doing so.

"A number of companies actually set aside money to target communities for their products," she states, adding that the sponsors of the Paul Taylor Dance Company have chosen an appropriate time and occasion in India to do so.

There is nothing wrong in such corporate aspirations, she continues. Why should one expect a private industrial house to plow its earnings into cultural shows and sporting events--or even education and health programs for that matter-without looking for returns? Even philanthropy needs to be backed by appropriate spin-offs for the donor.

Companies supporting Paul Taylor's present India tour are not merely assisting America's participation in India's 50th anniversary. Their greater contribution is in terms of enriching India's cultural scene by bringing in an internationally eminent dance troupe onto the Indian platform, where thousands of art lovers in this country will have a rare aesthetic experience. The tour will also provide an opportunity for greater interaction among artists as well as open a new window to the rich cultural heritage of other lands.

If the corporate sector can thus enrich the life of a people, that's no mean achievement. For example, if the sitarist Ravi Shankar influences even a handful of young musicians during his upcoming sponsored tour in the U.S. in the spring of 1997, the excellence of his art will endure for future generations and new audiences in a far-off land.

One may very well ask: What is there in all this for corporate industry itself? While it is true that it has a responsibility to improve the cities where it has established its roots; while it is true that it also has a responsibility to enrich the lives of the citizens and the Below left: The John F Kennedy Center/or the Performing Arts in Washington, D. C, depends almost entirely on private funding.

Below: Sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar and sarodist Us tad Ali Akbar Khan perform a jugalbandi with tabla maestros Ustad Alia Rakha and his son Ustad Zakir Hussain at the Kennedy Center where many of the world's leading artists have performed.

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Whenever a business house sponsors a public event, it reinforces a message in the public mind. Association with cultural events gives them a cultivated iInage. society who have helped it to grow-these are undeniable truthsone still cannot expect or even hope that a big business house will part with a substantial portion of its earnings vvithout positive returns for itself. These returns may be collateral. But, they must be there for the giving to be generous and spontaneous. Such returns could sometimes be unexpected.

That way, every industry must seek its own sphere of philanthropic activity. AT&T, which is one of the sponsors of the Paul Taylor Dance Company's tour in India, could serve as a model in this regard. The corporate values cultivated by this multinational telecom giant for more than a century have come to life through the programs supported by the AT&T Arts Foundation in New York.

By making grants to projects that support lifelong learning, or to civic programs that give children a sound start in life, or to artistic endeavors that build diverse audiences in select places where it has a distinct business presence, AT&T has successfully combined its business interests with its philanthropic activities.

In an interview with the author, Suzanne Sato, vice president of the AT&1' Arts Foundation, said that the arts are the most ready point of activity in any community involvement. Even though her company is "in-country" oriented in these matters, it takes its cue from what is happening globally and acts on it. For example, ifit feels that it needs to improve its visibility in India now, strategic grants will be made to supp0l1 events in that country. Whether it is the Olympics or a dance tour, says Sato, "We don't measure our grants."

AT&T is only one example. It could be Citibank, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo or Enron. Philanthropy could expand a communication network, a banking service, a pharmaceutical enterprise or a fast-food joint. It could even swing a power project favorably. As long as it also benefits the community, such philanthropy is welcome.

On the other hand, corporations also need to be motivated to become philanthropic. If there is grace in giving, there should be perception in asking. The beneficiary should adopt positive strategies like finding out his donors' business goals and provide them an opportunity to fulfill them. The gift should never be accepted gratis.

Henry Fogel, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, said to this writer: "We must show our concern and understand the needs of our donors and sponsors when we ask them for support."

Talking about the annual corporate suppOl1 enjoyed by his institution during the past three years, he said that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) received $2,534,800 in 1994, $2,531,800 in 1995 and $2,796,400 in 1996. In addition, it received more than $10 million through individual SUppOI1.

"We have donors who give $5-but they are still our donors," says Fogel.

This 106-year-old company, which enjoys a unique position in the music world, raises more funds than any other orchestra in the world and spends less to raise the same-thanks to pioneers like Fogel who know how to enlist corporate support for the arts.

When I asked Fogel his secret in winning over the corporate

sector, he simply said: "We are easy to deal with." According to him, the issue of corporate giving is quite complex. It deals primarily with employees and their welfare. In order to improve their quality of life, their corporate leaders must ensure that their cities and surroundings are improved, their civic facilities are upgraded. And, most important, their cultural environment must be enriched. The corporate sector has to be perceived as a caring benefactor.

Perhaps the story of the Ameritech Corporation highlights the essence of corporate giving to the arts for better business. The very slogan used by this communications giant tells it all: "Of all the trucks we send into the community, we're especially proud of the one we send to charities." [n the Great Lakes region, the company contributes to some 3,000 charitable organizations every year. Its chairman, Ril:hard Noteb~ert, knows how to build bridges between the arts and corporate communities. This is what he says in an interview with Fogel on the subject of business and the aI1s. Fogel's question was direl:t: "What is the value of such collaborations?"

"Businesses operating in an increasingly competitive global marketplal:e arc under a greater pressure to make every dollar count. As a result, we prefer to make investments in the arts rather than mere donations." He goes on to elaborate how a mutual cooperation between the donor and the recipient works.

"Each proposal made by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra included valuable outreach opportunities which aligned Ameritech with world-class performances that also provided our corporation with the kind of visibility and recognition that would enhance our position in the world marketplace."

Talking more specifically about the upcoming Berlin Festival, which Ameritech will sponsor, Notebaert says: "Because the CSO was knowledgeable about our business objectives, they proposed the tour to us. We, in turn, suggested a cosponsorship with two German firms, Deutsche Telecom and Siemens, both of which arc our valued business allies. This sponsorship will offer us an opportunity to strengthen our ties with those two organizations. The performances will now give us excellent oPPoI1unities to host our potential customers in the European market...while we showcase the Orchestra as the centerpiece performer at this prestigious event."

This dialogue between Ilenry Fogel and Richard Notebaerttwo leaders in the world of the performing arts and business-highlights the importance of the f0ll11er recognizing the needs of the latter while seeking its financial support. It must be remembered that the arts are valuable not only for their impact on society but also for their role in helping their business sponsors to prosper-so that they can continue to support them.

0 About the Author: ~'clfsa/a Vedantw11is an assistant editor a/the Deccan Herald published in Bang%re. She visited the United Stares /ast summer where she did most a/the research/or this article.

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conomlcs or ers Does "foreign direct investment" have meaning anymore? "In the future," says the author, "there will be nothing definably 'foreign' or 'domestic' in the semiotic corporation. National boundaries will become so porous to economic activity that the word 'direct' will also become meaningless." here was a time when you could count on the "made in country so and so" sticker or "fabrique en someplace or another" engraved on a product to tell you where the T-shirt or hair dryer or widget in your hand came from. Not anymore. Ask the average U.S. citizen what car best deserves to be dubbed "born in the U.S.A."-to use the words of rock star Bruce Springsteen-he is unlikely to give the right answer. It happens to be the Honda Accord. On the other hand, when you buy anyone of the millions of cars sporting General Motors and Ford marques you are contributing most to the economic well-being of South Korea and Japan. On average, at most half the value of a vehicle on the world market goes to any single nation.

It's tough to be an economic jingoist these days. A few years ago the citizens of a U.S. town demanded that their municipality buy earth-moving equipment made by that stalwart of U.S. industry, John Deere, and not by its Japanese rival, Komatsu. The town hall did so-only to find that Komatsu's factory was in the U.S. while John Deere's was in Asia. This is the rule rather than the exception. Inspect the insides and most products these days are assembly-line United Nations.

This mishmashing of national economies is explained best by one economic phenomenon: the rise and rise of foreign direct investl11ent(FDI).

FDI is an index of an ongoing metamorphosis of the world economy, namely, the shift from the days when economic activity respected the political boundaries of nations to an era where a product could do with a passport to complete its manufacturing cycle. Highbrows have called this process "internationalization" and its consequence is huge amounts of FDI. In the good old days, industrial production was a relatively autonomous activity. Raw materials were taken in one end of a building topped with smokestacks and a completed widget

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popped out the other end. Sometimes the company would expand and buy a mine or plantation or the sh~p where its products were sold. Or it would buy up rival factories. But it always respected a national boundary. If it sold overseas it shipped off a finished product. If it bought from overseas it would buy raw materials.

This was reflected in international trade. In the past it was largely a boring business of finished goods and primary commodities, machinery or iron ore, nothing in between.

For a number of reasons companies began to not only ship a product to an overseas market, but move the whole factory overseas as well. Sometimes it was because labor was cheaper, sometimes it was because high tariff walls surrounded that country.

This was FDI in its most primitive form. The next step was to not move the whole factory but just a specialized portion of it across borders. Thus was born internationalization.

Today the assembly line that once ran across a single building floor is more likely to run several times around the globe. The factory has been exploded and its parts scattered to the four corners of the earth. But its parts are still connected by containervessels, airplanes and trains. Today a product skips from one country to another. At each stop a little bit more is added or reworked, until some thousands of miles and many customs inspections later it is picked off a store shelf. Often different parts are made in different countries and come together in yet another nation.

Scholars bandy terms like "global commodity chains" and "international production linkages" to describe this phenomenon. But all this essentially means is that a national product is an endangered species. The Honda Accord is more American than apple pie.

This also means companies are putting their money where their flag isn't on an enormous scale. Two decades ago FDI was a fly speck on the world economy. The total stock of American FDI in 1970, for example, was a measly $75 billion. Twenty years later it

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pieces for products that end up cartouched the half a trillion dollar rying the label of other countries. mark. As remarkable has been how much of this has spilled over Flag wavers may be disheartened into the Third World. In 1994, of but doing these odd jobs has meant the $226 billion of FDI that was employment and profitable consloshed around the globe, over tracts for South Koreans or $80 billion, or 35.4 percent, found Malaysians. its way to developing countries.

When a country gets plenty ofFDI The total accumulated assets of it means more of these global manFDI worldwide have grown like ufacturing cycles are making stops lemmings. They are now well past in its territory. As W. Bowman Cutter, a former White House the two trillion dollar mark.

The face of world trade reflects deputy assistant adviser for economic policy, recently said in New this change. So many factories the Delhi: "If there is no direct investworld over are doing bit work for a larger production chain that the ment, there won't be a manufacturbulk of trade today is in semi fining stage and there'll be no reason ished products. As economists for trade to move through a nation." like Susan Strange have pointed In today's world the distinction "I have no experience with that kind a/investment, out, trade is no longer about counbetween FDi and trade is basically but I'll be happy to provide advice, " tries but about companies. Even artificial. The latter follows the conservative estimates put intraformer. firm transactions as being responA country that gets FDi and thus sible for 70 to 80 percent of all world trade. The United Nations plugs itself into these global chains does not merely benefit through jobs and taxes. Its workers and managers leam about the Conference on Trade and Development estimates that the total sales of foreign affiliates of multinationals is suspiciously the latest technology and tactics in the industry. East Asian tigers, for same as estimates of the worth of the total corpus ofintemational example, have seen the percentage of finished goods in their extrade-about five trillion dollars a year. port flows increase over time. In fact, many of them now subcontract production to other countries.

There is more to come. Economists are already sifting'evidence his obviously raises the bogey of multinational corporate of a further stage of world economic integration. They call it domination of the world economy. It's true, world trade is be"globalization." Echoes of their jargon have filtered down to the coming a multinational sinecure.' But it can be seen in anpoint where the term has now becoming a popular buzzword. But other way. The intemahonalization of production is forcing not many understand what the term actually means. all companies, including dinkey sized units, to become multinaIt was and still is commonplace to think of the world economy tional. In 1991 Lubricating Systems Incorporated of Washington ' as being three distinct strands: trade, finance and investment. Time state became a multinational by investing in a factory in Europe. At to look again. These strands today are not merely intertwined, they the time the firm had 25 employees and sales of$6.5 million a year.

The question both politicians and the layman ask is how does are merging to the point that to speak of them separately is almost anachronistic. World economics is heading for depths of integrasomething as staid and parochial as a nation-state secure benefits in a world of long distance production and global ownership? The antion that academic jargon and business speak have yet to reach.

Consider trade and investment. As already noted, the two are beswer begins with forgetting about national origin. It is an increasingly meaningless concept. The real focus of a country should be coming one. But the shuttling back and forth of half-finished obcreating jobs and getting a slice of the profits. This means getting a jects does not fully describe what the future holds. global manufacturing cycle to pass through a country's economy as Increasingly trade is no longer about goods at all but a mishmash often as possible. The Honda Accord may be "Japanese" on the of the intangible and the material, a mix of goods and services, that presently defy definition. Telecommunications, for example, is both outside, but it is U.S. workers, U.S. Government and U.S. subcontelephones and wires and the services that go with their use. Studies tractors who get most of the money spent in its manufacture. have shown that even in traditional metal bashing industries, serTo put it roughly, a nation of subcontractors will make the most vices count for as much as 40 to 60 percent of production costs. of the new world economy. The masters of this have been the Some economists argue such goods-cum-services already domnewly industrialized countries of East Asia, popularly christened inate world trade, it is just that most national bureaucracies have the Asian tigers. Everyone talks of their export-based growth. no proper words to describe them. Robert Reich, a Harvard econoHowever, on average, half their trade has been in intem1ediate mist and the present U.S. labor secretary, argues that even the disgoods, products that require additional work before they are fit tinction between "manufactures" and "services" is vestigial for a shop window. These economies provide endless bits and

thinking, drawing on the experience of the industrial revolution.

Thus, he notes, IBM is officially an industrial corporation though hardly any of its employees actually make anything tangible.

Consider finance. In the stuffy decades before the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971, currency values did not fluctuate, foreign portfolio investment was a twinkle in Wall Street's eye and money trickled across borders at the behest of bureaucrats. The end of fixed currency rates and electronic technology changed all that. The first eradicated most government barriers to capital. The second made it possible to transfer a million from Macao to Mexico City with a press of a button. When geography became irrelevant to capital so did the nation-state. Money went global.

Another revolution in capital has been its decentralization.

Institutions like the U.S. Federal Reserve bank, the International Monetary Fund or even Chase Manhattan no longer hold sway in capital markets. International money is today more agile and is overrun with large numbers of small players. The consequence is that international capital is more sensitive to market signals. If the Bombay Stock Exchange offers good returns, the money goes there. If Nicaraguan Government bonds look sound, they get bought. World capital is being transformed, as one analyst has said, by a "movement from bureaucracy to the market."

The result is the erosion of the importance of ownership. If changes in trade made national origin irrelevant, changes in capital flows have pushed corporate ownership into an equally gray area.

The access to capital and markets that made a big company a center

"Today the assembly line that once ran across a single building floor is more likely to run several times around the globe.

The factory has been exploded and its parts scattered to the four comers of the earth." of economic activity is available to a lot more players. Standards of living among people, as Reich has argued, "depend less and less on what they own." What tlley do is more important. The subcontractors' conquest of world trade sends the same message. Owning a company is no big deal. Making things for a company is. Mix all this together and one can see a new form of economic activity arising.

Peer into the most competitive industries in the world, like consumer products, and one can discern the next stage of World Inc. Such cutting-edge companies are often described as "enterprises" or "webs" or "circles." Among them, owning physical assets has become so irrelevant that each facet of production is likely to be an independent company working on contract for another.

And it does not stop with the assembly line. Separate companies will provide services like finance, insurance, marketing, design, even the handling of mail and the filling out of payroll slips.

A future company is likely to 'be little more than a brand naIllt: and a few whiz kids with profitable ideas. The whiz kids will get

their ideas financed by one firm, hire another to design it, another to make it, another to market it and hand the final result to yet another to sell it. The company will have barely any tangible assets.

The textbook example of what is sometimes called a hollow company is the world's leading athletic shoe company, Nike.

Though it is a multibillion dollar firm, Nike owns almost nothing in physical plant. A small host of companies all around the Pacific rim do segments of the total production cycle including design and retail. The actual making of the shoe is low down on Nike's list of concerns. One of its vice-presidents boasted: "We don't know the first thing about manufacturing." Nike, as one analyst described it, exercises control only "over the symbolic nature and status of athletic shoes." Welcome to the age of the semiotic corporation. ational governments still work themselves into a tizzy over trade deficits and the like. Six years ago the Economist magazine prophesied that such figures would be increasingly meaningless. Sure, large chunks of the world economy deal with old-style industrial and raw material trade. But these are yesterday's heroes. Enterprise webs and subcontracting and direct investment that largely ignore political boundaries are trends that are expanding at a frenetic pace. World trade is growing at over double the rate of world productionevidence of the importance of services and semifinished goods.

The obvious motive behind much of this has been competition.

As market share and profits go to the ever more cut-throat, a company that does not fragment itself and find the cheapest subcontractor or country to do its work is a company marked for doom. So it goes to Bangalore for its software, Taiwan for its computer peripherals and Japan for its electronic hardware. Globalization is also riding on a steady decline in the cost of information and transportation.

The price of information, by one estimate, falls 20 percent a year.

The latter is particularly important because enterprise webs require a high degree of communication and coordination. The logistics of Nike, one magazine recently wrote, would "make an army general green with envy." This underpins the world's obsession with infrastructure development. Without proper telecommunications or even port facilities, cities or even entire countries are in danger of being cut out of the 21 st century global economy.

FDI in infrastructure, thus, is the key to FDI in other fields.

One irony is that in the future the term FDI is likely to fall by the wayside. There will be nothing definably "foreign" or "domestic" in the semiotic corporation. National boundaries will become so porous to economic activity that the word "direct" will also become meaningless. As for investment, when a strand of an enterprise web touches a country it will encompass a host of activities of which paying money to buy assets will be neither the most important nor the most beneficial. FDI, like so much else in the world economy, would have moved onto a higher plane of evolution. 0

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About the Author: Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, a graduate of Cornell University, is senior assistant editor of the Telegraph, Calcutta. In 1994-95 he was a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow at the University of Maryland where he studied topics related to international economics.

THE

SOUNDS

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ROl1ARE BEARDEN "An artist doesn't paint things," says Romare Bearden. "He paints his feelings about things." This is what most vividly comes through in his art whose most common theme is music and t;I1usicians. Throughout his career, Bearden created art in which the shapes, colors and lines echo the pulsating sounds of jazz and blues.

An exhibition of his works, appropriately titled "The Painted Sounds of Romare Bearden," is now touring major Indian cities. (It will be shown in Mumbai, December 6-20, 1996; New Delhi, February 4-21, 1997; and Calcutta, March 2-31.)

A major American artist of the 20th century, Bearden (1911-88) grew up in Harlem, New York City. Because oft~e deep involvement of his parents in the cultural life of Harlem, young Bearden met many outstanding jazz players, poets and writers, who greatly influenced him.

One of his first art teachers was Stuart Davis, who helped his young pupil to see the relationship between music and color. Davis also taught Bearden to listen to Earl I-lines playing piano-to pay attention to the pauses in the music. Later, the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis helped Bearden to fill the pauses with shapes and colors. In sum, Bearden absorbed the cultural and musical heritage of African-American inteUectuals and artists.

Bearden avoided the traditional art form of oil on canvas. He created his own style and techniques. "Yet," says

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Gail Gelburd, the curator of the "Painted Sounds" exhibition, "Bearden freely borrowed from the traditional masters as wel1 as from literature, philosophy and, of course, music. His art represents a blend of c~ltural influences including the simplified abstract dynamism of African art; the shapes, space, color and

strokes ofYerrneer and Matisse; Chinese cal1igraphy; Buddhist philosophy and the dynamic jazz music of Earl Hines and Dizzie Gil1espie. It is this borrowing coupled with his innovative techniques that makes him stand out from the crowd of American artists in the second half of the 20th century."

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MISS ETHEL AT CONNIE'S, oil on paper, 57.8

x 76.2 em.

Ingersoll-Rand (India) is most famous for its compressors and construction, mining and water-well drilling ?quipment. Left: An IRI gas compressor at afertilizer plant.

Below: Workers assemble water-cooled compressors at IRI's Ahmedabad plant.

Bottom left: Ingersoll-Rand has developed truck-mounted water-well drilling rigs that are a boon for India's rural millions in tapping underground water. Bottom right: The company also markets earth-moving equipment such as this skid-steer loader made by Clarke Equipment of U.S.A.

The Oldest Indo-U.S. Joint Venture Good customer relationships, quality products and professional management have made Ingersoll-Rand one ofIndia's largest manufacturers and exporters of engineering equipment.

"Good customer relationships, Ingersoll-Rand (India) Ltd. (IRI) celebrates its quality products and professional management are the key to suc75th anniversary in 1996, it cess," says company Chairman and looks with pride on the fact that it is President Ashwin Nagarwadia, 59. the oldest ongoing Indo-American Nagarwadia has been with JRI for joint venture in this country.

Beginning as a small trading com33 years.

JRl's parent company is Ingersollpany in 1921, IRI has over the years become one of India's largest manRand of U.S.A., which in 1996 celeufacturers as well as exporters of brates its 125th birthday. One of the myriad engineering goods. IRI is, in world's largest non-electrical engineering equipments ,manufacturers, fact, the largest Indian exporter of Chairman and President Ashwin Nagatwadia. the parent company was involved in air and gas compressors. the construction of the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the Though the concept of total quality management (TQM) Trans-Alaska pipeline, the new Hong Kong airport and has gained currency only in the recent past, Ingersoll-Rand (India) has been practicing it as a policy ever since IRI China's three gorges dam on the Yangtze River. went from trading into manufacturing in 1965 when the Ingersoll-Rand (India) was incorporated as a whollycountry's industrial growth sent demand for engineering owned private limited company on December I, 1921, but equipment soaring. It is this commitment to quality that has went public in September 1977, when IRI diluted its shareholding to 74 percent. IRI's first manufacturing plant was won the company the trust and loyalty of industry not only set up in 1965 at Naroda near Ahmedabad. Two plants were in India but also overseas. added subsequently-at Peenya near Bangalore in 1977 Almost all segments of ,industry in India use some Ingersoll-Rand products. The construction industry uses its and in Ahmedabad in 1994. (The Bangalore plant has ISO 900 I certification-an international guarantee of quality.) drills and compressors on building sites and for large infraThe company counts a number oflarge public-sector organistructural projects. Its mechanized drills and other equipzations, including Coal India, Neyveli Lignite, ONGC and the ment are used for excavating minerals and for extracting oil companies among its customers. Recently, ONGC, followand transmitting oil and gas. In India, the company pioing an international competitive tender, awarded a $40 million neered new concepts and products such as blast-hole drills, contract to JRI. The mining industry accounts for 40 percent of custom-engineered process compressors, stationary feeder Ingersoll-Rand's business while industry and infrastructure acbreakers and rotary and centrifugal compressors. One innovation, a mobile water-well drill, helps provide wate\. for count for the rest. State governments have been regular customers for the company's water-drilling equipment. drought-stricken areas.

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Ingersoll-Rand (India) manufactures a wide range of air and gas compressors. Within the Ingersoll-Rand group, IRI is the sole manufacturer of all reciprocating compressors ranging from one to 30 hp and these are marketed around the world by group companies. The Naroda plant produced 800 compressors in 1965, its first year of operation. Today, it turns out 30,000 compressors annually in various capacity and pressure ranges.

The company's second production facility at Peenya manufactures a wide range of construction, mining and water-well drilling equipment. The water-well drill, an IRI innovation, is unique because of its great maneuverability.

Mounted on a rough terrain vehicle, it can negotiate the narrowest of village roads. The water-well drill has helped

Workers at Ingersoll-Rand:S Naroda plant assemble air-cooled compressors for export.

state governments and international agencies like the UNICEF provide desperately needed water to Indian villages. The drill is also exported to many countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. In recent years, IRI has also diversified into foundation drilling equipment, materials handling, pavers, rock breakers and other equipment.

The third factory at Ahmedabad manufactures gas compressors for process and allied applications. IRI makes a wide range of compressor frames and gas ends for specific applications in refineries, fertilizer and petrochemical industries, cryogenic and hydrogenation plants and carbon dioxide and LPG bottling plants. The company also manufactures custom-made compressors for special applications in oil and gas fields including gas boosting, gathering, lifting and injection and in situ combustion.

Over the last decade, IRI's turnover has steadily grown from Rs. 706 million to Rs. 2,829 million and its profit be-

fore tax has increased from Rs. 120 million to Rs. 403 million. IRI's net worth has increased fivefold during this period from Rs. 229 million to Rs. 1,252 million.

Whi Ie IRI has access to the full range of technology developed by its parent company, it does a fair amount of technology development of its own. A CAD-CAM unit in Bangalore works closely with some divisions of the U.S. company in designing and adapting products for Indian conditions. "We have clear advantages in technical capability and cost," says Nagarwadia.

Ingersoll-Rand (India) has always recognized the importance of effective supplier management. "We look at suppliers as partners and not just vendors," says Nagarwadia.

The company has over 300 vendors, including 45 foundries, ' in . Ahmedabad and around 150 vendors in Bangalore.

While IRI manufactures certain key components in-house, the rest are contracted out. Suppliers make entire assemblies based on drawings supplied by Ingersoll-Rand.

The company's industrial engineers help vendors design and set up production lines, train their personnel and build quality into the manufacturing process. Some vendor units are totally dedicated to Ingersoll-Rand.

"For all practical purposes they are our own workshops," Nagarwadia remarks.

IRI has made a substantial contribution to India's exports. With exports valued at Rs. 545 million in 1995-96, the company is among the country's largest exporters of engineering goods, exporting to technology leaders such as the U.S., Canada, Italy and Russia. IRI compressors are shipped to all parts of the globe and have an international reputation for reliability. In addition, the company exports drilling rigs and allied equipment to the U.S. and to Southeast Asian, African and European countries.

Unlike many foreign companies operating in India, IRI does not believe in being "expatriate dependent." Since 1968 its chief executive officer has been an Indian. N Rls are hired only for specific assignments where their contribution is essential. The emphasis has always been on appointing Indians to key positions and providing them with the training they may require. This commitment to the country, to its customers and to its employees has made Ingersoll-Rand one of India's remarkable success stories.

IRI is, indeed, "a pioneer in Indo-American business," as Ambassador Frank G. Wisner said recently at a function co.mmemorating the company's 75th anniversary.

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RETURN , OF THE CLICHE EXPERT

Q

Good morning, Mr. Arbuthnot.

• It's a pleasure to see you again, • and to hear further testimony from you on the subject of cliches.

Wrong man. You're thinking of • my uncle, Dr. Magnus Arbuth• not, who is no longer with us.

Bought the farm, checked out, fumed out, popped off, slipped his cable, went over the pass, hit the throughway. 1 mean, he's gone-zoo I'm Chip Arbuthnot, his heir.

His spiritual heir.

Q: But you are here to give us your views on current and established cliches, are you not?

A: Noway.

Q: You're not?

A: I'm here to share my views.

Q: I see. And you are an expert in the field, are you not?

A: Arguably.

Q: You wish to argue with the court?

A: No, I'm arguably an expert. The adverb allows me to say something and then partly take it back.

Q: I think I understand.

A: Don't worry about it. This stuff isn't written in stone.

Q: You're very kind.

A: There's a reason for that.

Q: I can almost guess what it is. It's on the tip of my tongue.

A: I'm a people person.

Q: I knew it! Now, Mr. Arbuthnot, may I ask a strange question? What's that on your head?

A: This is my other hat.

A

Reprinted by permission; © 1996 Roger Angell. Originally The Nelt Yorker All rights reserved.

in

Q: Your other hat?

A: This is the hat I wear when I'm being the cliche expert. When I'm doing something else, I wear a different other hat, not this one.

Q: Hmm. Are you telling us that being a cliche expert is not a full-time occupation?

A: As if. Get a grip.

Q: You must be a busy man, holding so many demanding jobs.

A: None of this is rocket science. But, yes, my plate is full.

Q: And you must have to maintain a constant schedule of travels to different parts of the country, if not the world, to keep up with regional as well as occupational cliches, is that not the case?

A: Been there, done that.

Q: Tell me, do most people know when they're speaking in cliches? Or is that a dumb question?

A: I'm not comfortable with it. If I said it was a no-brainer, I'd be sending the wrong message. Let's say that some folks who think they're pushing the envelope conversationwise ain't.

Q: Mr. Arbuthnot, are there specific occupations that produce a greater preponderance of cliches in daily human intercourse than others do?

A: "Daily human intercourse" IS very fine. Congratulations.

Q: Shall I repeat the question?

A: No, because I'm going to pass. This is a slippery slope.

Q: What about the sexes? Are women more likely than men toA: Whoa. Bask off, Mister. Don't go there. It's a no-win situation.

Q: Oh, I'm sorry.

A: You're putting me between a rock and a hard place.

Q: I didn't mean to upset you. I apologize.

A: You mean you empathize.

Q: That's what I meant to say.

A: You feel my ·pain.

Q: Yes, I do, I do!

A: Historically, you have concerns.

Q: That's right!

A: Unless I miss my guess, you're also pro-active.

Q:Yup. A: At the same time, you're a very private person.

Q: Absolutely. How did you know?

A: Trust me, it's easy. All you have to do is listen to your inner child.

Q: SO any of us can become a cliche expert-is that what you're saying?

A: How did we end up here? Hello?

Q: Oop, I'm going too fast again, aren't I? Just using cliches doesn't do the trick-is that right?

A: No. You have to talk the talk and walk the walk.

Q: But of course. I wish we could go on with this and perhaps find out how you got to ask all the questions, instead of the court. But our time is up. I hope you've enjoyed our little meeting.

A: You've made my day.

Q: You have enlightened us all.

A: It doesn't get any better than this.

Q: Thank you, Mr. Arbuthnot.

A: No problema.

0 About the Author: Roger Angell is the fiction editor a/The New Yorker magazine.

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