Span: April/May 1997

A LETTER H

FROM

aving just returned from a vacation in Kerala, where my family and I enjoyed the beauty of the beaches and the verdant serenity of the inland waterways, I'd like to focus on the article "A Passage to India" [page 37], an overview of the tourism industry in this country. This article is an interview with Uday Chatterjee, managing director of CTI, a major Delhi travel agency. CTI specializes in "business tourism," catering to the complex logistics of multinationals' CEOs on their business trips to India, plus "filmmaking tourism," serving the increasing number of Hollywood producers doing films involving India.

According to Chatterjee, tourism is not only one of the world's three biggest industries, it also has the largest multiplier effect.

"The tourist dollar not only benefits hotels, airlines and the whole travel trade," he says, "but it percolates down to the handicraft industry, the poultry industry, local farmers and people in many other occupations." In other words, if a country's tourism industry booms, thewhole economy can benefit.

Chatterjee and many other experts feel that India needs to do a lot more to develop its tourism industry.

The World Tourism Association (WTA) says in its most recent annual report that] 996 saw an acceleration in the growth rate of international tourism, with arrivals and receipts reaching new records. It adds that little or no slowdown in this expansion rate is expected over the period to the year 20 10.

I'd like to quote some figures from this WTA report on 1996: In terms of number of travelers, there are four Asian destinations in the top 20 destinations. China, with 26,055,000 tourists annually, ranked 5th; Hong Kong with 1] ,700,000 ranked 14th; Turkey with 7,935,000 ranked 19th; and Malaysia with 7,742,000 ranked 20th.

In terms of dollar earnings, there are six Asian destinations in the top 20 destinations. Hong Kong ranked 8th with receipts of $11.2 billion; China 9th with $10.5 billion, Singapore 11th with $9.4 billion; Thailand 13th with $8.6 billion; Turkey 17th with $6.5 billion; Korea] 8th with $6.3 billion.

Where was India? According to the WTA, India's figures for 1996 were: number of tourists, 2,288,000; dollar receipts, $3 billion. This is not a misprint. Those are the official numbers.

The news is not totally bleak. India registered a 7.7 percent increase from 1995 in tourist arrivals and a 9.9 percent increase in tourist receipts. But the figures for China in that same period are 11.5 percent growth in arrivals and 20.23 percent growth in receipts.

People often make comparisons between China and India-the first and second largest nations on earth in terms of people, both inheritors of long and proud histories, both candidates for super-

THE

PUBLISHER

power status in the future, etc. In light of this comparison, the difference between India's and China's tourism statistics is stark. Perhaps more striking than the China-India comparison is the one between India and three much smaller neighbors immediately to the East-Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Each has a much greater tourist industry than India.

Why is this so?

Chatterjee gives some answers in this SPAN interview: underdeveloped infrastructure and a shortage of hotel rooms.

A few weeks ago, Sanjay Anand's article in the Times of India reported that the Indian Government's Department of Tourism has a plan that "envisaged an investment of Rs. 40,000 crore for infrastructure development in the tourism sector, through investments from the Centre, states, financial institutions and private industry so that the country could be ready to receive five million or more tourists [annually] by the turn of the century." He also said that the Indian Government's new tourism policy "was likely to aim at higher earnings rather than at a many-fold increase in arrivals."

We hope this will lead to an increase in Americans visiting India.

In our interview with Chatterjee, he says "the average Anlerican tourist to India spends more nights and spends more dollars per night than do tourists from other parts of the world." He adds: "The average American tourist to India is focused and looldng for specificinterest tourism, niche tourism, rather than casual sightseeing."

Foreign investment can help India develop the infrastructure that will let tourism take off. A.K. Rungta of the Indo-U.S. Commercial Alliance has identified infrastructure development as one of the four priority areas for foreign investment. And Ratan Tata said in his interview in the last issue of SPAN: "We keep talking of direct foreign investment byway of investment in industry. What about tourism?"

I concur. The potential is enormous. I have been in India almost two years and have come to realize that this beautiful country, with one of the earth's oldest, most complex and profound civilizations, possesses dozens of tourist attractions that are among' the wonders of the world by any standards-the Taj Mahal and other sites in the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur triangle, the fairy-tale allure of Rajasthan's fortresses, the Ajanta/Ellora caves, the temples of Khajuraho, Konarak, Halebidu and Belur, the ancient spiritual centers of Varanasi and Gaya, the great national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, the Himalayas with their superlative trekking, the beaches of Kerala and Goa.I could go on and on. But SPAN readers know well enough the magnificent things that can be seen in this land. The famous IndologistA.L. Basham wrote a classic book about the cultural heritage of this country, The Wonder That Was India. The tourist industry should take that title and put it in the present tense. •

r- Are You Afraid If Success?

A surprising number of talented people are.

To find out if you're one of them, take the quiz in this article.

Then take heart. The dread of doing well is rooted deep in the unconscious, but you can overcome fear of success.

"An amazing day. Amazing. I don't know how it happened. He had played so great. It was the strangest turn of events I've ever seen. I feel so sad for him." So said Nick Faldo about Greg Norman, while wearing the greenjacket that everybody, including Faldo, had assumed was finally going to be Norman's at Augusta last year. The man is a mystery. Far and away the biggest moneyhe gets to a maker in pro golf, he wins and wins and wins-until major tournament. At the Masters, he took a six-stroke lead and the next day, in just five holes, handed his six strokes and then some to the guy behind him. He's done this not just once, not twice, but over and over and over again.

If you're a fan and didn't send Norman a fax, you're apparently in the minority. "We have thousands of faxes here, so many thousands we haven't counted them all yet," says Frank Williams, Norman's manager and friend. "People worry about him. Some of these faxes have tearstains on them."

What is it about Norman that is so riveting? Maybe we recognize in him something of ourselves. In a world that seems determined to sort out winners from losers, he is that terrible enigma: a gifted loser, a player who clearly can win but, when the stakes are highest, somehow hamstrings himself. It almost looks as if he's doing it on purpose. And yet, how could he?

You don't have to be a sports fan to see the parallels between golf and business. The same phenomenon is far from rare in corporate life: the talented person, with everything going for him or her, who self-destructs for no reason that anyone can fathom. Some of these tales-and everybody knows a few-are as spectacular in their own way as Norman's, although they mercifully aren't broadcast live via satellite around the world. Robert Meuleman, president and CEO of Amcore Financtal in Rockford, Illinois, tells of a bright young banker with a solid marriage who, shortly after his promotion to the presidency of a division, began an affair with an employee, whom he then knocked down a flight of stairs. "We don't know why he de-

stroyed himself that way," says Meuleman, who fired him. "His career has never recovered." Then there's the executive at Union Pacific in Pennsylvania who, despite his $500,OOO-a-year salary, claimed lavish business outings with imaginary customers on his five-figure expense reports. "Even after he was spoken to, he kept doing it," says another Union Pacific executive. "In fact, he did it more." He too was fired.

You'd never be so reckless, you say? Probably not. Buthold on.

Most often, being your own worst enemy is a far more subtle thing.

You're in line for a promotion you've worked toward for years, and suddenly find you can't get to work on time. Or you start losing your temper in meetings with higher-ups where cool is the rule. Or you somehow misplace the data for a client presentation that could make or break your team. Or maybe you haven't made any obvious blunders, but you haven't been doing your best work for quite a while now, and you don't know why.

Any of these examples may share a common cause: fear of success. It's strange to think, at a time when so many people are struggling just to hold on to what they've got; that fear of succeeding could be much of an issue ordo much damage. His and does. "Fear of success is a terrible problem in this culture," says Brian Schwartz, a psychologist and consultant in Greenwich, Connecticut. "The vast majority of people I see are afflicted with it." Whatis so treacherous about this anxiety is that the people who suffer from it most acutely are usually not aware they have it.

Those who do know are not eager to own up in print, at least not by name. In an ever more Darwinian business world, an admitted weakness is a dangerous thing.

The dread of doing well in life is rooted deep in the unconscious.

Nobody deliberately sets out to wreck his or her own career. And people are so adept at rationalizing their own mistakes, or misinRight: Greg Norman losing the Masters-again-after blowing a six-stroke lead. Fans sent him thousand offaxes expressing sympathy.

Maybe we recognize in him something of ourselves.

terpreting those of others, that fear of success can be hard to distindo succeed, eventually," says Canavan. "But it takes them longer guish from, oh, let's see, incompetence, arrogance, inattention, than they or their peers may have expected. They get less far. And burnout or any of the 101 other gremlins that can send a career into it causes them a lot more mental turmoil and emotional pain than it a tailspin. Often fear of success shows up in the exceptionally taldoes someone else to get to the same level." ented as a long pattern of underachievement, of schlubbing along Where does all this angst come from? Today's shrinks acknowlin the same old rut. "People who have an unconscious fear of sucedge that most fear of success springs from mostly the bad stuff cess won't set ambitious goals for th,emselves, so they achieve far that happened to you as a kid and hammered your opinion of how less than they're capable of," says James O'Connell, a psychologood you are. "People will achieve only the level of success that gist at the outplacement firm Drake Beam Morin. their image of themselves can absorb," says Brian Schwartz, the If this is an unconscious fear, how can you tell if you have it?

Greenwich psychologist. He notes that the human species has, in Shrinks have been studying the problem since 1915, when Freud the course of evolution, made a trade: a bigger brain than any other wrote an essay called "Those Wrecked by Success." He noted the mammal in exchange for a longer period of dependence on others "surprising and even bewildering" tendency of some people to fall while that brain takes its sweet time to develop. During the helpapart "precisely when a deeply rooted and long-cherished wish lessness we call childhood, all kinds of psychic harm is done. has come to fulfillment...as though they were not able to tolerate When finally an adult achieves success, says Schwartz, "that old happiness." As with the Illinois bank president, a spate of selfstructural damage is still there." destructive behavior-often involving Long ago, if somebody important to drinking, drugs, sex or all three-immediyou-a parent, a teacher, a sibling-con"Achildhood belief that ately before or after a major triumph is a vinced you that you aren't very smart, or dead giveaway, Says Elissa Sklaroff, a very competent, or very likable, or that what you are is never enough, therapist in Philadelphia who treats sucnothing you do is ever quite good enough, that you must live up to cess-fearing executives: "Being on the you will have the devil's own time believothers'lofty expectations of brink of success brings a crisis, and all of ing that you're capable of doing well in.life our neuroses pop right up to the surface. or that you deserve to. This conviction of you, can lead to a lot of On some level, success-fearing people are unworthiness is rarely something people self-sabotaging behavior later take out and examine, except in therapy. running from change-especially from on at the office." having to change their secret self-image as It's just there, lurking around the edges of an unsuccessful or undeserving person." life like a creature out of a Stephen King Sometimes, Sklaroff says, people about to novel, spoiling everything. People with take a big step up in their careers become convinced, without any rotten childhoods do become successful, of course, but often they medical evidence, that they have a grave illness, usually cancer. can't enjoy what they've achieved. The archives of American Donnah Canavan is a psychology professor at Boston College, popular culture (Marilyn Monroe), politics (Richard Nixon) and a practicing therapist and coauthor of a textbook called The sports (Dennis Rodman) are crammed to bursting with examples.

Success-Fearing Personality [from which the quiz in this article is Consider a recent one. Don Simpson, coproducer of hit movies adapted]. For 15 years she's taught a course on this subject; many like Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun, had it made in of her classes are full of business people. "I keep expecting to run the shade-by everyone's standards except his own. Simpson reinto some skeptic who'll say, 'Fear of what? Oh, come on,'" says cently died of a drug overdose. Shortly before his death, he said: Canavan, "But I never have. Everybody seems to know exactly "The degree to which you make enough money to then feel like what I' m tal king about." you don't have to make any more money is the degree to which you That's probably because, at one time or another, most of us have have to deal with something pretty interesting. It's called You." He had occasion to ask, What was I doing? Maybe you once procrastichose not to. nated until a crucial deadline sailed by, or inserted foot firmly in David Krueger, a Houston psychiatrist, has treated some very' mouth at the worst possible time, or had one cocktail (or was it rich go-getters who come to him because they can't figure out why they're so miserable, and they know all too well what Simpson was six?) too many at the office Christmas party, or showed up inexcusably late for a big job interview-well, hey, nobody's perfect. talking about. "If someone is used to feeling bad, feeling good is hard or impossible," Krueger says. He asks his patients how long Over time, though, too many of these missteps should be telling you something. "Self-defeating behavior feels, to the person dothey can stand to feel happy. "They always know what I mean. They say, 'Notmorethanaday.'

Oreven, 'Not more than an hour.''' ing it, like an accident or like bad luck. And of course there are such things," says Lenora Yuen, a therapist in Palo Alto who speA childhood belief that what you are is never enough, that you cializes in treating the chronically self-sabotaged. "But after a must live up to others' lofty expectations of you, can lead to a lot of while you may notice a pattern of 'accidents,' a whole run of 'bad self-sabotaging behavior later on at the office. Sometimes sucluck.'" Warning lights should flash. cessful people don't want to be where they are. They're there because someone else-a parent, a spouse-expects them to be.

Likewise if you, or someone you know, has been stuck in the same job despite obvious talent. "Often people who fear success They can't imagine how to extricate themselves except by mess-

he following quiz is adapted from a questionnaire developed at Boston College (and published in The Success-Fearing Personality, by Donnah Canavan, Katherine Garner and Peter Gumpert). The testisn'tfoolproof, but itshould give you a pretty good idea of where you stand. If these statements apply to you, answer yes. Then figure your score as described below.

T

1. I generally feel guilty about my own happiness if a friend tells me that (s)he's depressed.

2. I frequently find myselfnot telling others aboutmy good luckso they won't have to feel envious.

3. I have trouble saying no to people.

4. Before getting down to work on a project, I suddenly find a whole bunch of other things to take care of first.

5. I tend to believe that people who look out for themselves first are selfish.

6. When someone I know well succeeds at something, I usually feel that I've lost outin comparison.

7. I rarely have trouble concentrating on something for a long period of time.

8. When I have to ask others for their help, I feel that I' m being bothersome.

9. I often compromise in situations to avoid conflict.

10. When I've made a decision, 1usually stick to it.

11. I feel self-conscious compliments me.

when

someone

who "counts"

12. When I'minvolvedin a competitive activity (sports, a game, work), I'm often so concerned with how well I'm doing that I don't enjoy the activity as much as I could.

13. A sure-fire way to end up disappointed thing too much.

is to want some-

14. Instead of wanting to celebrate, I feel let down after completing an important task or project.

15. Mostly, I find that I measure up to the standards that I set for myself.

16. When things seem to be going really we]] for me, I get uneasy that I'll do something to ruin it.

SCORING: Give yourself one point for every question you answered yes to, except Nos. 7,10 and 15.For each of those, subtract one point if you answered yes. Anything under 5 points means you're basically okay. Between 5 and 10 points, you're moderately at risk for selfsabotaging behavior. Between 10 and 16 points, you have a problem.

Get some help.

ing up. If! provoke my own firing, the unconscious logic goes, I'm off the hook. I can get out of here, and the decision can appear to have been someone else's. The ex-railroad executive who partied himselfright out of ajob, says an erstwhile colleague who knew him well, "didn't want to be here so bad, he didn't even know how bad he didn't want to be here." He gothis unconscious wish, but in a way far more damaging than ifhe' d been able to figure out his motives beforehand and leave the company on his own steam.

Even if you manage to get through childhood unscathed, along comes adolescence. Alas, when novelist Kurt Vonnegut remarked that "life is high school," he wasn't kidding. Much of our grownup self-image is formed at a time when, let's face it, most of us are no prize. "Does anybody not remember how godawful those teenage years were?" asks a well-known CEO who has wrestled with a deep distrust of his own accomplishments. "Everybody feels ugly and inadequate. I think that as a result, a sense of peace, the idea that 'I am good enough' eludes most of us." There may be many adult moments when doubts about your achievements are nothing more or less than your old high-school self coming back to nag that you'll never be (or date) the football quarterback or the head cheerleader because you're just too tall, or short, or smart, or dumb, or teeth-braced, or-fill in the blank. Dennis Rodman perfectly captures this vague feeling of inadequacy in his autobiography, Bad As J Wanna Be: "1 wasn't accepted there [in his Dallas neighborhood]. I was too skinny, too ugly, too something."

The trouble with teenage self-loathing is that a severe case of it may make you spend the rest of your life with achip on yourshoulder-or to put it in shrinkspeak, suffering from a compensatory disorder. This can be a dandy way to wreck a career. Steven Berglas, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and specializes in treating fear of success in executives, tells of a CEO who is very short and who has been self-conscious about it ever since he was ruthlessly razzed back in high school. As part of a lifelong campaign to prove his masculinity, this CEO started sleeping with a board member's wife. Yes, that's right. Out of all the women in the world, he got mixed up with the wife of am ember of the only group of people with the power to fire him. And sure enough, they did. "Compensatory disorders use success as a vehicle for masking or suppressing old traumas," says Berglas.

"Succeeding-being CEO-can 'tfix or cover up a painful feeling of inadequacy. You have to deal directly with the feeling itself and put it behind you, or it will sabotage you."

Through everyone's past, whatever the individual circumstances, flow the cautionary tales. If you have any ambivalence about getting ahead, these stories will reinforce it. They have a way of sinking into the unconscious and lying in wait like old banana peels for the unwary to slip on. The ancient Greeks came up with the notion ofhubris-provoking the wrath of the gods by acting godlike-and illustrated it with, among others, the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun on his wax wings and plunged to his death in the sea. The Judeo-Christian tradition echoes with similar warnings, from the Tower of Babel and the injunction that pride goeth before a fall to the New Testament idea that it's easier

KRISHAN GABRANI: Under the new liberalized economic regimen in India, the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce must be in a much better position to carry forward its mandate-to foster closer business ties between India andthe U.S. RAGHUMODY: Thisis the year oflndia's 50th anniversary of independence. India will continue to grow, but we have a long way to go. In the next 25 years I see a glorious India.

In the old days of socialism and the license raj, there wasn't much scope for marketing India. But now we need to market India as compared to, say, China, which is attracting massive American investment.

India cannot afford to lose this opportunity of getting American investment. If we lose this opportunity, I am afraid, American investment will go from China to South Africa or to some other country.

We have everything here we need. But somehow, we as a nation are not able to put our act together. I am not the government.

It's the government's job to market India.

My job as president of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce is to make relationships, "marriages," between businesspeople oflndia and the U.S. We have a lot of common things with America. We both speak English. We both are great democracies. American investment in India is the highest and it's a great pleasure to work with the Americans.

from. We're talking about the Carolinas, Boston and places like those.

Q: You just now said that the CocaColas, the GMs, the Pepsis know India.

Similarly, there are Indian companies like Ranbaxy, Mahindra & Mahindra, Arvind who know American and other foreign companies. Several of these companies already have collaborations or are in the process of working out some kind of joint ventures. But there are also any number of small and medium-sized Indian companies who are eager to seek foreign tie-ups but who either don't know how to go about it or have limited resources and expertise to pursue on their own. What is the Chamber doing to help these Indian companies?

A: That is the key problem. I always mention three things to people. One, the decisions that young people leaving schools and colleges have to make. They don't know what to do in life. Should I become a scientist, a computer expert, a doctor or a civil servant? Young people have to make that vital decision. A man's next vital decision is: Whom shall I marry? Is this girl right for me? Will I be able to afford her?

Will we be compatible? He is very much worried when he has to make that decision.

But these two decisions a man can make for himself. The third, the most difficult and important decision, is: What business should I get into? How to get into it?

Anyone who can make that decision has, in my opinion, made it.

Q: What kind of goals have you set for the Chamber?

Coming back to your question, the A: The first goal that we have set is to Chamber can playa vital role in bringing toreach those American companies that are gether small and medium-sized U.S. and not here in India-medium-sized, familyIndian companies. Fortunately, I have good owned companies, FORTUNE 500-1000 American connections, and the breakcompanies. The Fords, the GMs, the Cocathroughs in communication technologyColas, the Pepsis-they know India. But the Internet, the E-mail, the lSD, the fax there are 600 to 700 of these 1,000 FORTUNE service-are a big help. Communication companies that don't know India. that took one month to come from New We are soon going to lead a delegation to York today happens in 30 seconds. This was America-to places where business is posnot possible until recently. sible. Not to New York, Detroit, Chicago or Now is the best time to forge mutually Los Angeles to waste our time. That's not beneficial Indo-U.S. business ties. I have where new American business will come always believed that the best painting is still

to be painted, the best song is still to be sung, the best bookis still to be written.

Young Indian businessmen, in the age bracket of25-30, who are coming up, are so intelligent, so competent, so aggressive that they can take on anybody. The pool of entrepreneurship now available in India is unafraid of competition. All that we have to do is to put our act together.

Q: There's been criticism recently, which is still aired, that multinational companies when they come to India go in for local partnerships because it suits them in the early stages of their entry into the country, because local companies are in a position to help them. They know the local bureaucracy, local laws and regulations, and the like. But once the multinationals are safely ensconced, they tend to change the terms of their joint-venture agreements to have the controlling rights of the company. What is your assessment of this ? And what should be done so there are fewer areas of friction and disagreement between joint-venture partners?

A: It is a tricky question, but not a very difficult question. When India opened the doors' to foreign investment after 45 years or so of socialism-when joint ventures and freedom to take equity were unheard of-we never thought that foreign direct investment will come in a big way. We were not ready for this situation. So we plunged to get into partnerships. What do these American companies have to offer? They have brand equity, they have technology.

Indian companies could also have the brand equity and technology. But for 45 years we neglected the Indian consumers because they were nobodies. We were a protected, state-controlled economy, just like the Soviet Union.

Let me give you an example. I have recently negotiated a joint venture in Nepal for my Rasoi Vanaspati, which is a premium brand. I have nursed it for 35 years. I am asking for 51 percent of the equity because I want to protect my brand, so nothing goes wrong with it. I am giving my JV partners the latest technology, so

The Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC) was set up in 1968 "for the promotion of two-way trade and investment and to foster business and economic relations between Inclia and the United States."

The Chamber, which has its head office in Mumbai, interacts closely with the Indian Government, state governments and Indian missions in the U.S. on trade and investmentpolicies of bilateral interest. It also liaises with the U.S. Government, the American Embassy, consulates and trade representatives in India. In addition, the IACC works closely with all the major chambers of commerce in India and the United States to promote the interests of its members.

One of the Chamber's major activities is organizing trade missions of Indian businessmen to the U.S. to meet with their American counterparts and attract them to set up business in Inclia.

It also regularly holds seminars and workshops in different parts oflndia on specific business issues. The Chamber also provides a host of other services to Indian and American businessmen.

Among the services it provides Indian businessmen are: Arranging introductions and meetings with American businesspeople; advising and assisting on business regulations in the U.S.; providing information of U.S. corporations interested in doing business in India; and liaising with U.S. Government officials on specific business issues.

The Chamber's services to American businesspeople include: Arranging meetinosb with Indian Government officials and business leaders; providing expert advice on doing business in India and on legal, financial and tax issues; and assisting in obtaining government approvals of projects.

The IACC has four regional offices and seven branch offices in India. In addition, it has several representatives in the U.S. The Chamber has more than 2,700 members inIndia and the United States.

For more information, please contact: Mr. N. K. Hate, Execu ti ve Director, Indo- American Chamber of Commerce, l-C, Vulcan Insurance Building, Veer Nariman Road, Churchgate, Mumbai 400020.

Tel: 2821413/2821485. Fax: 2046 I41.

I want to control that technology.

We Indians thought by getting big-name partnerships, we'll get the brand equity, the technology, that we will be in the driving

seat and get the goodwill and we can own that company. This is not what the American investor wants.

But I think the initial problems in JVs are

getting sorted out; the process has now stabilized. The American businessman knows that what the Indian entrepreneur can put on the table is the local knowledge, local practices, contacts with politicians and bureaucrats, which are still needed. Liberalization hasn't really trickled down to the grass-root level. You still need the local man to negotiate you through local customs and practices.

Those whoplay golf will understand that you need a local caddie to play, say, in Chembur, Mumbai. Jack Nicklaus can come here, but he can't bring his American caddie here. He needs the caddie of Chembur, the local fellow. By paying him only two dollars-you pay something like 50 dollars in America per round-the local caddie can tell him whether the green is fast or slow, where the water tanks are. They call it local knowledge. On 1y a local caddie can give that. No book can teach you. You need a local partner to take you through the lanes and bylanes of the bureaucracy and licensing and all sorts of clearances that you need.

All partnerships should be between equals. Indian business is not equal to the multinationals.

The multinationals, with due respect, should not look for Indian partners but should come with their own 74 percent equity.

It is, however, different with familyowned companies; they understand each other better, because here your interests extend beyond business. With these companies, you often develop family relation-. ships. For example, I have business relationships with two or three familyowned companies in Europe and one with an American company. I know their families and they know my family. Their grandsons will one day interact with my grandson. Here you build a long-term100 years or more-relationship.

They don't hanker for 51 percent, I don't hanker for 51 percent. They know the advantages of having me as a partner and I know of the advantages of having them as my partners.

!

was born in 1939. My father migrated from Assam to Calcutta in 1903 and began working as a clerkin Victor Oil Company, a small company. It used to import lubricants and greases from America. When World War II broke out, the Victor family migrated back to California and sold the company to my father for Rs. 10,000. My father amassed a lot of wealth in the war; war normally means a lot of wealth for people who take risks.

My father was keen on sending me to England for higher studies. But then he lost a major chunk of his capital money in an oil deal with the government and our business was closed. He died an unhappy man in 1960. He left very little liquidity. Not only that I couldn't go to England, I couldn't even go to college.

In 1956Igotmarriedinto the well-known, rich Jalan family of Calcutta and I started life once again. I was just 18 then. I worked hard and got back into the oil business.

I became friendly with John Benton, the general manager of Gulf Oil Company in India. He started helping me by giving me lubricants on credit and I was on my way up to build my business.

In March 1965 we acquired the Hindustan Development Corporation, once a very profitable company, but now it was a sick company. They had one large vanaspati plant and two engineering units. We did not know anything about the manufacturing business. But we plunged right into it, often working 20 hours a day to learn all about these businesses. By 1975, we had turned it around and made it into once again a profit-making company.

I was about 35 years old then. But I decided that I would retire from business when I was 50. I, however, set a very ambitious business target for the next 15 years: to increase 100-fold the sales of our group of companies, from the then Rs. 50 million to Rs. 5,000 million, and increase the staff from 300 to 3,000. But I told myself that even if I didn't succeed in achieving my business goals, I would still retire at the age of 50.

Everything started happening to the plan. In 1987 we acquired J.L. Morison. The same year we also acquired a majority stake in Hindustan Ferro Limited.

Whatever I have done路 in my life-whether it is the vanaspati industry or cosmetic industry-I have always reached the pinnacle, because I have always believed that if someone else can do it, I can also do it. The same is true of my associations with professional and social organizations. I have never asked for or requested for anything. The communist government of West Bengal appointed me, a businessman, sheriff of Calcutta. I became the youngest sheriff.

In 1987, as I was nearing 50, I decided to keep my promise of callingitaday. On November 16 of that year, Ibegan the process

of passing on the control of my business to my son, Manoj, who had shifted to Delhi, because, as he said to me, it was easier to operate from Delhi, the seat of the central government. Those were the days oflicense raj, permit raj, contact raj. Nothing ever happened if you didn't know someone in the government.

Manoj was a brilliant young man, married. Hehad a three-yearold son, Varun. I started withdrawing, playing golf. I am a keen golfer. Golf is a passion to me.

Everything was working to the plan. But then, as the Good Lord would have it, Manoj had a car accident on the 8th of December. I rushed to Delhi the same day.

Doctors told me that the first three days are critical, that ifhe survives for 72 hours then there is nothing to worry. Three days passed and they assured me that there is nothing to worry now.

They made arrangements to shift him to a normal room. But then the worst happened-he passed away. We were shocked and shattered. In this hour of grief, my wife, Sumitra, was a source of great strength to all of us. I went back to Calcutta with my grandson, Varun, and daughter-in-law, Shashi, with me.

All my wealth couldn't save him. All my political connections couldn't save him. If nothing could bring him back to life and if that was God's will, I decided to turn to religion for guidance-to SantMurari Bapu who lived near a small village called Mahua in Bhavnagar. I got much strength and peace of mind from his discourses. I decided to spend 25 percent of my time for religion, 25 percent for sports and the rest 50 percent to train my daughter-in-law in business and with Varun.

Soon after the last rites were performed on the 12th day of Manoj's death, which was very depressing, I took my daughterin-law to the office and made her sit in his chair.

She was nervous, but I told her that I'll train her. I gave her street-level training. I also told senior executives-chartered accountants, MBAs, management specialists-to initiate her into the finer points of marketing, finance, labor and general management.

She has now been in business for ten years. We have several companies, but Rasoi Ltd. is our flagship company. One of our companies, J.L. Morison, has a partnership with Ni vea. We have offices in all the metros and branches in 43 Indian cities. We have one of the largest distribution networks in the country.

I have a daughter, Pallawi, who is married to Rajiv Podar, a successful businessman ofM umbai. Raji v's father, Kanti Podar, is a prominent citizen of Mumbai. He is the past sheriff of Bombay and a past president ofFICCI. In retrospect, I have lived very happily and very unhappily at times. But I have no regrets in life. I have lived my destiny and my future is in the hands ofthe Good Lord.

But the multinational character is different; it's all professional. A professional who is here today may be in Australia after three years, and after eight years he may be in South Africa. These professionals don't know what the emotional relationship of a joint venture is.

Q: India has not been able to attract as much foreign investment as it needs for its development, especially for upgrading infrastructure-in telecommunications, in ports, in roads, in power. These need massive doses of capital, and India's internal resources are quite small. What is the Indo-American Chamber doing to attract more American investment for these areas?

A: As one of the largest developing nations in the world, we'll always have problems of infrastructure. But to upgrade our infrastructure, we certainly need massive doses of foreign capital. Our biggest asset to achieve this at this moment is Ambassador Frank Wisner who is very keen on promoting American investment into India. I don't think anybody today in the country has done more than what he is doing to attract more American capital into India.

Q: But, asyou saidthatpeople come and go. Today they are here, tomorrow they'll be somewhere else. So will Ambassador Wisner.

A: If Ambassador Wisner goes, I think his departure, his not being on the scene, may create a very big vacuum for the interest, the push, the clarity in the way he promotes Indo-U.S. business and the way he promotes India as a whole.

But, at the end of the day, he also has his own career, he has his own family, his own commitments. He cannot be a permanent ambassador to India. People come and go.

Dr. Manmohan Singh has gone but we are still talking about liberalization.

Frank

"Now is the best time to forge mutually beneficial Indo- U.S. business ties. I have always believed that the best painting is still to be painted, the best book is still to be written."

Wisner will go, his successor will understand this. That's the only way to do it. It's not a thing that can be done in one term by one ambassador. It will take many, many ambassadors on a continuous basis to complete the task which Mr. Wisner has started.

Indians are, however, poised for this investment. The Americans are poised for this investment. We still have a lot of pinpricks; we still have this sluggish capital market, we still have the bureaucracy. The big projects of GE and Ford are all coming through. It's the medium ones that need to come through. The Chamber will act as a catalyst. We are doing our best. We can definitely do better. We will definitely do better.

What we need to do is to interact, as I said earlier, with the family-type of American multinational companies-who have the technology but don't know India.

Q: Would you conclude India is on the righttrack?

A: Of course, India is on the right track.

But we should be on the fast track. We

were always right. But as the Americans say: Step on the gas.

Move, move. That's what Indian business should do. We need the investment. We need to promote ourselves. We need the business. We need India to grow. We should do everything to make foreign investors comfortable.

I think the Indian business community should become more aggressi ve.

Government has very little role to play today in joint ventures. If anybody in India says his work is stuck in the government, I don't agree.

None of my workis stuck. I don't use any influence. Everything happens automatically with the Reserve Bank of India. I have not been to the Reserve Bank or telephoned anybody for any of my joint ventures.

When the guidelines are there, things happen.

The going for medium-sized projects is very good in India as long as you abide by the foreign investment promotion rules.

You mentioned the problem of friction between local and foreign partners of some joint ventures. There are one or two instances of not very happy marriagespartnerships are like marriages in life. But don't people in the Western world or here break up, divorce? A man and wife may not be compatible due to any number of reasons. Don't we have problems of incompatibility as human beings? So is it in the world of business; some may be compatible as partners and others may not be.

But one swallow doesn't a summer make.

One rain today doesn't mean that the monsoons have come.

By and large, joint ventures in India are in a learning process. Some learn in a good way, some don't. But remember one thing: When you sleep with a hippopotamus in bed and the hippopotamus turns, you are liable to be crushed. You have to make sure that the hippopotamus lies on one side of the bed. That's what a multinational is.

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India Will Send a Powerful Message '0 'he World An Interview with President of the National Endowment for Democracy Carl Gershman predicts that the democratic system in India can show other developing countries that democracy and economic development go hand in hand. On a recent visit to this country he met Indian leaders and intellectuals to encourage more bilateral discussions of the problems of democracy and how to solve them. He also held meetings with publishers regarding an Indian edition of his organization's magazine, Journal of Democracy. SPAN Editor Stephen Espie and Managing Editor Krishan Gabrani met with Gershman. Excerpts from their discussions follow.

Q: Mr. Gershman, could you tell us what the National Endowment for Democracy is and does?

CARL GERSHMAN: The Endowment was established as a grant-making institution. Although it's nongovernmental, the Endowment gets a public appropriation for the purpose of supporting groups around the world that are working for democracy.

We have limited funds. We try to apply these funds to countries like Burma, which are not democracies, where we support groups that are working to establish a democratic process.

Q: You publish the Journal of Democracy with the aim of strengthening democratic processes and institutions around the world. Won't it be a good idea to have itpublished in several countries so that it will have afar larger readership?

A: In 1990, we started the Journal of Democracy. The Journal publishes articles on democracy. Its focus is the whole world.

The current issue focuses on South Asia.

Ambassador Wisner expressed his interest in seeing if an Indian publisher would print the Journal here. There's so much interest in democracy in India.

About three years ago, we established the International Forum for Democratic Studies, a research center for which we raise private funds. It is associated with the Endowment. It publishes the Journal. It holds conferences on democracy. It has a fellows' program, an information system called the Democracy Research Center and a home page on the Internet to share information globally. It has a library on democracy. The Endowment became a kind of center not only for activism andgrant-making, but also for research on democracy. I think the latter is of great interest here.

We organize conferences on the larger themes of democracy, such as ci vil- military relations, the relationship between economic reforms and democracy, the question of political parties, accountability, transparency, corruption. We also have country-specific conferences. We've had

conferences on Nigeria, China, Egypt, Mexico, Korea, Taiwan and Russia.

Q: What about a conference on India, which is a living example that democracy canfunction in a developing,poor country?

A: We've a plan for a conference on India on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of India's democracy. We want to do this in Washington, a one-day meeting that would examine India's democracy at age 50. We'd like to have a reception on Capitol Hill cele- . brating the fact that democracy in India has endured for these 50 years and is evolving.

We hope it will be an appropriate event which would give due recognition to this accomplishment, which I think is very important from the point of view of people who believe in democracy around the world. This meeting could become the first step in an ongoing dialogue and relationship on democracy where we examine common problems between our two democracies, perhaps involving representatives of other countries whose experiences might be si milar because

countries around the world are grappling with similar problems.

Corruption is a problem all over the world.

It's the biggest issue today in Latin America.

It's obviously a major issue in Africa, China and South Asia. So what are people doing about this? How do they grapple with this issue? Then there's the problem of campaign funding and its reform, and the problem of how to deal with ethnically and racially pluralistic societies. There's the problemoffederalism. All these are issues on which Indian and American organizations should be talking to each other and sharing experiences.

The fact that we now have this research center gives us the vehicle for engaging with India on these issues.

We're finding from this visit of ours here that there's a tremendous amountof interest on these issues in India. There's a feeling that this would be a great thing to talk to the United States about--"an agenda to reach out and embrace countries around the world in the discussion on democracy.

Q: Though India is a young democracy, it is the largest. It must have lessons to share about its democratic experience.

A: I do believe from my discussions here that India has something very special to contribute to the growth of democracy. Like America, democracy here is at the center of people's existence. They realize that a multiethnic society, a multilingual society like India, cannot survive without democracy.

India is dealing with a number of very central issues affecting democracy. How do you build a democratic society which also must develop economically? How do you maintain a unified country which is also immensely diverse ethnically, religiously, linguistically.

These are not problems that are unique to India. The questions being debated here have meaning for people in other countries.

Q: In 1975-77 India hada lapse in democracy. It was called "the Emergency." What was the reaction in your organization?

A: First of all, the Endowment didn't exist when the Emergency took place. But I will say this: In the United States that event had a very significant impact on people's thinking about democracy.

The Emergency took place right around

the time of the celebration of America's bicentennial. And I can remember Senator Moynihan, who was then the U.S. ambassador here in India, writing an article for a bicentennial issue of a magazine called the Public Interest. It was a very pessimistic article about the prospects of democracy. He said: "Democracy is where the world was and not where the world is going." And he said that because of what happened in India. Now the irony is that at the very moment Moynihan was writing that alticle, people in Portugal were in the streets demonstrating for the opening ofthe newspaper Respublica. There was a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism in the streets of Portugal. The people of Portugal won. At that very moment.

Moynihan didn't know it. We didn't know it and the people of India didn't know it. But that moment has been identified now by scholars as the beginning of the third wave of democratization. In other words, democracy was where the world was going. But because of what happened in India there was a kind of pessimism. In India, the Emergency became the occasion for the vindication of Indian democracy.

One of the things that is remarkable about democracy is the extent to which people whom you would think do not benefit from democracy have the deepest faith in democracy-even more so than the elites. It was explained to us that the upsurge of comm itment to democracy began with the election of 1977 when India voted Indira Gandhi out.

People showed that they had the power to do that. With the vote they could do that. So the Emergency, which was in a sense the source of so much pessimism about democracy, coincided with the beginning of an upsurge in democracy. It was the occasion here for the election which vindicated the democratic principle. That's a source of great hope.

Q: We have been talking about democracy and development. In China there's economic development but not democratic development. China's rate of economic growth is possibly the highest in history. Here in India because of certain aspects of Indian democracy, multinationals sometimes get impatient. How much do democracy and economic development need each other?

A: Well, democracies have to produce re-

suIts otherwise they can lose legitimacy. It's remarkable, given the economic problems here, that people have this deep faith in democracy. Also I think there is a kind of implicit understanding that they're not going to get anything out of totalitarianism. India has not really taken part in a debate about the relationship between democracy and development. In a certain sense, the Philippines has been much more a part of this debate. The Philippines is now beginning to take off economically because it's pursuing the right kind of economic policies. They're showing that you don't need authoritarianism in order to have development.

It has never been demonstrated that there is a relationship, a positive relationship between authoritarianism and development.

There are a lot of impoverished, corrupt, failed authoritarian systems. There are some authoritarian systems that seem to work well ifthey pursue the right economic policies. The irony, the paradox that they have to face, is that if they succeed in economic development then they'll probably at some point have to become democratic, because economic development produces a middle class. Economic development produces a more educated populace and people are not going to stand for authoritarianism for long. This is the catch-22 situation for authoritarian systems.

Q: So youfeel the growth of India's middle class has strengthened democracy?

A: Yes. India has progressed in a remarkable way economically. There is a middle class here that wasn't here a generation ago-a very large middle class. There is a vast internal market here. There are very serious problems that India has to deal with.

We're told that something like a third of the population is under 14. How do you educate that one-third of the population? But if India pursues the right kind of economic policies, these policies will be inclusive of people because India is a democracy, then India could take off economically. And if India does take off economically, it will send a very powerful message to the entire world-that democracy and development can go hand in hand.

I haven't found many people here in India (Continued on page 24)

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM vs

J UD IC IAL RESTRAI NT A renowned authority on constitutional law examines some key Supreme Court rulings in India and the U.S. and concludes that "Judicial activism is but the conscious exercise by judges of the power of judicial review to meet the changing needs of time."

"Telephone tapping violates right to privacy, says Supreme Court," screamed headlines on the front page of all leading dailies in India a few months ago. They were lauding ajudgment pronounced by the Court the day before which held telephone tapping to be violative of two of the most precious rights the citizen has-the right to freedom of speech, embodied in Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution, and the right to privacy which is not guaranteed in explicit terms in the Constitution. But the Court spelt it out, in rulings over the years, from

the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21 . That is judicial acti vism at work in the finest manner. It is reflected in the press day after day.

Last December it was reported that the Court had banned felling of trees in forests, in a case from Arunachal Pradesh decided the day before. The Court also put curbs on the running of saw mills and mining in forestareas.

On December 9, 1996, the Supreme Court directed the Central Government to initiate a pilot project on 50 two- and three-wheel

scooters to find out whether propane was more eco-friendly than petrol. The project was to be completed within four months and its results intimated to the Court. India's capital city, New Delhi, is among the worst polluted cities in the world.

The very next day the Court struck a blow at the shackles of an estimated 100 million children employed in hazardous industries.

It directed payment of Rs. 20,000 as compensation for every child so employed to be deposited in a fund to ensure compulsory primary education of the child. The State was directed also to provide a job for the guardian or parent in lieu of the child or contribute Rs. 5,000 to the fund. On December 11 the Court directed the closure of all aqua farms in coastal areas except those which use traditional methods of fish farming. The Delhi High Court directed the Delhi Government and the Archaeological Survey of India, on December 11, to prepare a scheme for the restoration of the "haveli" (house) in which the legendary Urdu poet, Mirza Ghalib, dwelt in the 19th century.

A decade ago such orders would have seemed unthinkable in India. They are fairly common now.

Traditionally, in democracies with a written constitution based on the rule of law, the main function of an independentjudiciary was simply to act as umpire, to ensure that limits were observed-especially in a federal distribution of power-and the citizen's rights were not violated. This is judicial review in the classical manner-the court's right to oversee the exerci se of executive and even legislative power. There is an old maxim of law that it is the proper function of a good judge to expand his jurisdiction. This can be overdone, of course.

But courts do enlarge their power gradually. Judicial activism is but the conscious exercise by judges of the power of judicial review to meet the changing needs of time.

There is the judge who is hopelessly mired in the past and one who wants to use his power to accomplish desired results even if it means trespassing on the powers of the executive or the legislature. A wise judge is one who heeds the limits onjudicial power and the judicial function, yet is ingenious and courageous to mold the law, case by

case, to answer to the needs of the times.

The law is not broken. It is evolved.

American constitutional thought and the work of the U.S. Supreme Court had a profound impact on the minds oflndian constitutionallawyers and the top leaders of the freedom movement. They opted for the British parliamentary system but consciously adopted the American model of a judicially enforceable Bill of Rights and a federal system with the Supreme Court to keep both the Union and the states within their respective spheres.

Rather than leave it to judicial interpretation, the Indian Constitution explicitly declares in Article 13 that all laws, existing or future, shall be void to the extent that they are inconsistent with the fundamental rights. The State is enjoined not to make "any law which takes away or abridges" those rights. The right to move the Supreme Court for the enforcement of the fundamental rights is itself a fundamental right (Article 32). The high courts are also empowered to issue writs for their enforcement (Article 226). Further, "the law declared by the Supreme Court shall be binding on all courts within the territory of India" says Article 141 while Article 144 enjoins that "all authorities, civil and judicial, in the territory of India shall act in aid路 of the Supreme Court." he principle of judicial supremacy was firmly established. Butthe contours of judicial activism varied, as they necessarily must, with the composition of the Court. Only a couple of years after the Supreme Court oflndia came into being, it had to reckon with criticisms that would seem very familiar to an American chief justice. Chief Justice Patanjali Sastri's reply is still remembered: "We think it right to point out what is sometimes overlooked, that our Constitution contains express provisions for judicial review oflegislation as to its conformity with the Constitution, unlike in America where the Supreme Court has assumed extensive powers of reviewing legislative acts under cover of the widely interpreted 'due process' clause in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments."

As with its American counterpart, the

T

Indian Supreme Court went into phases of restraint and activity. In 1973 the Court took judicial review to unprecedented heights. In Kesavananda Bharati's case it struck down a constitutional amendment on the ground that it violated the "basic structure" or framework of the Constitution. Six years later, the Court began to develop the jurisprudence of "public interest litigation." This innovation has enabled the courts to enlarge fundamental rights in areas untouched before, such as protection of environment.

Fifteen years ago, on December 30,1981, the law on this was laid down definitively by the Supreme Court in the High ludges , case. No longer would the courts insist that only the person aggrieved has the locus standi to sue. Any publicspirited person can move the courts in the public interest for redress of injury suffered by others; especially the handicapped, underpri vileged.

Justice P.N. Bhagwati noted in that case that "the concept of public interest litigation had its origin in the United States and over the years, it has passed through various vicissitudes in the country of its origin."

Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court on the circuit struck down state laws which violated the U.S. Constitution well over a decade before the legendary John Marshall pronounced judgment in 1803 as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the classic case of Marbury v. Madison.

Just before leaving office President John Adams and his Secretary of State executed the commission of one Marbury to be Justice of the Peace, but the Secretary forgot to deliver it. Ironically, the absentminded Secretary was John Marshall, who was about to take office as Chief Justice of the United States and would write the opinion in the case resulting from his own negligence. The new President was Thomas Jefferson. He and his Secretary of State, James Madison, withheld the commission. Marbury then brought an original suit in the Supreme Court seeking a writ of mandamus requiring Madison to deliver the commission.

Marshall began by expounding the executive's duty to abide by the law and the citizen's right to invoke the judiciary's help against illegal acts. The refusal to deliver

Marbury's commission was illegal and a writ of mandamus lay to enforce its delivery. Section 13 of the Judiciary Actof 1789, had empowered the Supreme Court to issue writs of mandamus in original suits, but it enlarged the jurisdiction conferred by Article III of the Constitution.

Ergo, Section 13 was unconstitutional and a writ of mandamus prayed for in the suit could not be issued. Marshall affirmed and rejected power in the same breath.

In words that have been echoed in courts of several countries for two centuries, Marshall said: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

After ruling that the Act of Congress giving the Court original jurisdiction was inconsistent with the constitutional provision limiting its jurisdiction to appellate cases, he continued: "The Constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. !ftne former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable."

Not many realize that in refusing to exercise power while affirming it, Marshall was performing an act of judicial statesmanship of the highest order.

Professor Archibald Cox has well described the dilemma which Marshall faced: "To dismiss the case would apparently acquiesce in the Jeffersonian position. To issue the writ would invite President Jefferson and Secretary Madison to ignore it-a step they surely could and would have taken-while the country laughed at the Court's pretensions. Either result would confirm the independence of the Executive and Legislative from Judicial control."

Marshall resolved it deftly. He affirmed judicial power emphatically but did not exerci se it.

Even as late as 1958 a great justice like

Judge Learned Hand asserted that there was "nothing in the United States Constitution that gave courts any authority to review the decisions of Congress." Judicial review violated the principle of separation of powers. Judicial review oflegislation turned the courts into a "third legislative chamber."

He added tartly: "For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not."

Not all the opponents of judicial review have used language as elegant. Some have been denunciatory. "Impeach Earl Warren" they declaimed on thousands of billboards across the United States about a chief jus-

tice who is compared to Marshall.

To resume our narrative, after Marbury, the second landmark was McCulloch v.

Maryland (1819). This involved the constitutionality of a federal law that established a national bank. Marshall held that the Constitution must be construed to "allow to the national legislature that discretion, with respect to the means by which the powers it confers are to be carried into execution, which will enable that body to perform the high duties assigned to it, in the manner most beneficial to the people."

Thus was the doctrine of implied powers evolved to strengthen a federal union in which the states were very jealous of their rights and distrustful of judicial power.

The shrewd French observer Alexis de Tocqueville saw what was happening and wrote of itin his immortal work Democracy in A me rica as earl y as 1831: "The power vested in the American courts of justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional forms one of the most powerful baniers that have ever been devised against the tyranny of political assemblies."

According to one authority, the Supreme Court invalidated 105 acts of Congress or their provisions in 108 cases and 900 state laws between 1789 and 1976.

There was a period (1887-1937) when the Court used the "due process" clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to sit in judgment not so much on the constitutionality as on the wisdom of legislation. The limit was reached in 1905 in the famous case of Lochner v. New York when the Court struck down a law which limited working hours to 10 daily and 60 weekly as an interference with a bakery worker's right to work longer hours.

When between 1934 and 1936 as many as 16 New Deal laws were struck down, President Roosevelt propounded his plan to "pack" the Supreme Court by adding new members, who would support his view, to the traditional nine. The plan was defeated, but the Court "saw reason." Within three months of the defeat in February 1937, the President won two favorable rulings from the Court. It was, as the wag said, "the switch in time that saved nine." Substantive due process gave way to procedural due process-checks on abuse of executive power. ontributions of thoughtful justices of the Court to the ongoing debate on judicial activism have been far more profound in their impact than those by academia or the media. In 1936 Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone warned: "While unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive and legislative branches of the Government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check of our own exercise of power is our sense of selfrestraint."

C

In 1964 Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered a powerful dissent, which all who are impatient for change would do well to bear in mind: "The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare; nor should this Court, ordained as ajudicial body, be thought of as a general haven for reform movements ....This Court, limited in function, in accordance with that premise, does not serve its high purpose when it exceeds its authority even to satisfy justified impatience with the slow workings ofthe political process."

He ;;poke thus when judicial activism was at its very zenith in this century and Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over the Court magisterially, from October 2, 1953, until June 23, 1969. The eminent authority Bernard Schwartz points out that "by midcentury the welfare state had become an accepted fact-constitutionally as well as politically .... Warren was willing to follow the rule of restraint in the economic area."

But no such deference to the legislature was shown when human rights were violated. The "separate but equal" doctrine propounded in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to justify racial segregation was buried in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. The Court's unanimity was due very largely to Warren's leadership. He was not erudite.

But his readiness to listen and his masterly conduct of the Judges' Conference won him unstinted praise from ruggedly individualistic colleagues. Brown was followed by a whole series of cases which struck powerful blows at racial inequality.

Next only to Brown in its revolutionary impact was Baker v. Carr (1962) in which the Court ruled that federal courts were competent to entertain a suit challenging apportionments of electoral constituencies on the ground that the guarantee of equality was violated. The Court brushed aside its own cautionary principle that "courts ought not to enter this political thicket."

Two years later, Warren hi mself affirmed the principle of "equal population" principle for legislative apportionment. The most noted passage in his judgment said: "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." It follows, he said, that "the Equal Protection

Clause requires that the seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis." Thus, the "one person, one vote" principle is now established firmly: equal numbers of people are entitled to equal representation in their legislature.

Warren himself regarded the reapportionment cases as the most important cases decided by the Court when he was Chief Justice. His most controversial rulings were the ones on human rights in criminal procedure. The famous case of Gideon v.

Wainwright (1963) required the State to appoint counsel for indigent defendants. Next in importance was Miranda v. Arizona in

"The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare; nor should this Court, ordained as ajudicial body, be

thought of as a general haven for reform movements."

1966. [See the author's article, "The Police and the Suspect," SPAN, July 1979.] The Court ruled by a narrow majority (five: four) that a person held for interrogation must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult counsel and to his presence during interrogation. This right accrues to him as soon as he is taken into custody.

Chief Justice Warren foreshadowed these developments when he wrote in 1955 that "when the generation of 1980 receives from us the Bill of Rights, the document will not have exactly the same meaning it had when we received it from our fathers."

Professor Bernard Schwartz's summation of the Warren Court is hard to improve: "Perhaps the period of judicial activism that took place under the Warren Court was unprecedented in legal history. But almost all the outstandingjudges in American law have been characterized by a more affirmative approach to the judicial role than that taken by their lesser colleagues. The great American judges have been jurists who used the power of the bench to the full. This

was particularly true of Chief Justice Warren. The Marshall Court and the Warren Court have now become major parts of American legal history."

How have Earl Warren's successors treated his legacy?

Warren Burger had publicly criticized his predecessor's rulings on criminal law.

[See "The Burger Court," SPAN, January 1981.] Shortly after Burger became Chief Justice, Abe Fortas, a liberal justice, was forced to resign, and two intellectual giants, Hugo Black and John Harlan, died. The new appointees (Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist), often joined by Justice Byron White and less often by Justice Potter Stewart, dismantled the Warren legacy on criminal law, its most fragile contribution based on narrow majorities. But it proceeded apace on racial integration. Warren's injunction to proceed with "all deliberate speed" was replaced with immediate desegregation . 1ll Alexanderv. Holmes (1969). Not all rulings were as helpful. The Burger Court was less likely to find State involvement in racial discrimination where it arguably existed than the Warren Court might have been.

In reapportionment of electoral districts it even extended the Warren rulings (White v. Weiser, 1973). Buttherewas a determined dilution of the Miranda ruling. Voluntary confessions were admitted; in Oregon v.

Elstad (1985), for instance. It, however, allowed plea bargaining (Corbitt v. New Jersey, 1978).

There was a similar dilution of the Warren Court's famous ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), protecting the press from libel suits except on proof of actual malice or reckless disregard of the truth in regard to "public figures." The Burger' Court set about redefining this charmed category. But in New York Times v. United States (the famous "Pentagon Papers" case, 1971), the Court ruled (six-three) in favor of the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the press.

Two of the most notable cases of this period were Roe v. Wade (1973) and Doe v.

Bolton (1973) when the Court held antiabortion laws unconstitutional.

Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist were (Continued on page 49)

apy. It's where the shrinks separate the neurotic from the normal. If for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to you decide you really don't want to scale the corporate or profesget into Heaven. And look at some of the most enduring characters sionalheights, good for you, as long as you know what you're doing in literature and film: the Great Gatsby, a rags-to-riches golden and why. Jill Natwick Johnston, a trademark lawyer at Stroh boy who ends up dead in the swimming pool behind his mansion.

Brewery in Detroit,just turned down a far betterjob at another comOr Citizen Kane, as rich as, well, William Randolph Hearst, on pany to spend more time with hereight-year-old twins than the new whom the character was based, but who dies friendless and heartposition would have allowed. The decision wasn'teasy. "It's ajob alot broken amid his collected treasures.

It's no accident that some of the most popular American TV of people would have killed for," says Johnston. "But I decided it's not worth it if it's going to kill you." EconomistJuliet Schor, author shows-Dallas, Knots Landing, Dynasty-have been soaps of The OverworkedAmerican, discovered in a 1995 survey of 1,000 about unhappy rich people. As a culture we love the idea of hitting it men and women that 28 percent had downshifted-that is, voluntarbig, but we also fear and distrust it. Some scholars maintain that ily accepted a lower income and less stress to do a better job at life Elvis's fantastic, almost mythic, popularity is so enduring because outside the office, especially raising kids. it ties together powerful and contradictory elements in the This is not fear of success. Steven Berglas, the Harvard American, and perhaps especially the Southern, psyche: Yes, you can come from a humble background and psychiatry professor, wrote The Success Syndrome: Hitting Bottom When You become a huge star, but you will pay a "AsI got more successful, Reach the Top, based on years of clinical tremendous price. The bitch goddess sucsessions with business people who needed cess, as William James called it, in the end I got more and more will kill you. help figuring out what success really is. alone. I knew that would If this all seems too abstract, consider a "What we call success may have consehappen, and it did." specific case. A New York media executive quences that you know you don't want," was taught in Bible school as a small child says Berglas. He suggests that ifthe idea of that money and power are evil. He has enthe next promotion makes you queasy, do a joyed a thriving career despite occasional fits of self-sabotage. cost-benefit analysis. "Approach it as you would any other business decision," he says. "What are the pros and cons? What will But he refuses to handle cash, which he says is dirty. When you go through a tollbooth with him, he makes you hand the money to the atyou have to give up to get this? Is it worth it?" Are some losses, tend ant and take the change, even if he's the one driving. And such as having to spend weekends in the woods with a beeper . whenever things are going particularly well at work, this fellow strapped to your fishing pole and a portable fax in your pack, not develops a stubborn (and medically mysterious) rash on his hands. worth a new title and a bigger paycheck? Ifnot, say, "No, thanks," Cultural archetypes that equate success with isolation are so and let somebody else sweat it. As Berglas puts it, you're being "rational and adaptive." persuasive that in some highly accomplished people they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Says Bill Morin, who recently left Or think about this: Do you have the right personality and the reqDrake Beam Morin to start two new businesses: "I was always enuisite skills to take on the role of the person above you? If the idea of vious of my parents, and they never had any money; they lived getting promoted is keeping you up nights, it may be that you ain't from one paycheck to the next. They never had a damn thing exgot the chops, as jazz musicians say, and you know it. That's not fear cept each other. Now I have a lot of money, but I still envy them, of success, it's fear of failure, and it may be a realistic fear indeed. because as I got more and more successful, I got more and more Berglas believes the long-standing American career path of promoting people from technical to managerial jobs is wrongheaded alone. I knew that would happen, and it did." for lots?f reasons. Some people have terrific technical skills but the It may in fact be lonely at the top-but perhaps only if you insist personality type known as "empathic." These are folks for whom on it. People who fear they will end up alone often bring it upon the task of controlling someone else's fate, which is what managethemselves. They may actively shut out their nearest and dearest, ment comes down to, is, in Berglas 's words, "stressful to the point of usually with work as the pretext, and allow old friendships to toxicity." If that applies to you, turning down the Big Management wither from neglect.

Job is no sign of neurosis; it's common sense.

The generation of American women now in middle and upper Work keeps getting more precarious, more complex, more demanagement has had to grapple with the same personal and cultural manding. The last thing you need is a jumble of unfinished psyaspects of fear of success as their male peers-plus a few marked chological business to trip you up. Before you can decide whether Women Only. Long before there was anything like Take Our you're a success fearer or a commonsense downshifter-or neiDaughters to Work Day, girls were routinely taught that being too ther-and then act accordingly in your own best interest, you have capable, too smart or too ambitious would make them unfeminine, to know yourself, including those parts of your psyche that you unlovable and unmarried. The primal fear of abandonment, of sucmight rather ignore. You have to like yourself too. And that, inicess as a road map to loneliness, hits women hardest of all. Obliged tially, can be even harder.

0 to choose between success at work and fulfillment after hours, some women consciously or unconsciously choose the latter.

Conscious choice is a wonderful thing-the Holy Grail of ther-

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THE HUMOR OF THE MARX BROTHERS Unlike the "insider" humor that defines much of American comedy today, says the author, the Marx Brothers perfected in their films a madcap "outsider" humor born of the immigrant experience. hat's your most common anxiety dream? Is it the dream where you're in a college classroom, sitting . down to take an exam for a course that you never attended? Or is it the one where you find yourselfuninvited and underdressed (maybe not dressed at all) at a gala reception? Or perhaps you dream that you're in a position of some responsibility-a doctor, a college president, a head of state, a performer-but you don't have any idea how to do what everyone around expects you to; you're a rank impostor. (This is my brand- I find myself onstage in a 13-odd-piece rock group, resembling the Band, plus some sitters-in, with a guitar in my hands and no clue, none.) These dreams go on like slow torture-you bungle along, quaking with humiliation, searching vainly for the red exit light.

But what ifinstead of suffering through the humiliation, you simply took the dream over? Suppose that you, maybe with the help of a couple of henchmen, shooed the imposing professor out of the exam room and began a lecture of your own bizarre devising, a loony parody of the course as you imagined it to be; or, finding yourself wearing the badge of office and surrounded by lackeys of various sorts, you set in and began to pilot the nation (hey, it's easier than you'd think) on toward sweet anarchy; or, dumbfounded at the door of an elegant party, decided to take the place by storm.

What you'd be doing if you could commandeer an anxiety dream this way is turning it into a Marx Brothers movie. In their best films, the Marx Brothers find themselves in a place where they emphatically don't belong-college classroom, society bash, front office.

They're the characters who have no business on the scene, the new people, the ultimate outsiders. But rather than wilting, they take the joint over. All that the other, accommodated characters have hidden beneath their bogus civility-greed, lust, desires of all sorts-the Marx Brothers suss out and parody forthwith. They grab a listless world by its expensive lapels and shake it up.

The Marx Brothers made their best movies in the late' 20s and the ,30s, during the Depression, a time in America when any of a number of people were compelled to see themselves as outcasts. The

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Marxes themselves started poor, growing up on the East Side of New York. As kids they were in vaudeville, pushed on by one of the most ferocious stage moms in history, Minnie Marx. From vaudeville they went to Broadway, then on to Hollywood, big success, bundles ofloot. In the beginning there were five of them in the act: Groucho, Harpo and Chico, the great ones, and also Gummo and Zeppo. Gummo was never in a movie. Zeppo, who played straight men and romantic leads, is one of the stiffest actors ever to face a camera, a walking two-by-four.

From the very beginning, Marx Brothers humor is what we might call outsider humor, the humor of the outcasts, the ones who aren't in the big plan. It's crucially American, as I see it, ours being, atleast in intention, the country where outsiders get an unprecedented and unequaled shot. We aspire to welcome unexpected wit for its powerto revitalize whatever status is quo. But if my intimations are right, the competing brand-call it insider humor, the humor of the ingroup-is our characteristic mode in America today ..Insider humor, the sort of thing that's epitomized by, say, TV host David Letterman, invites you to join a club composed of people likewise in the know, and to stop feeling like a bedraggled loner. In the mid'90s, a period of relative conformity, of other-direction (to borrow a term from sociologist David Riesman), we can probably use an extended hit of rebellious Marx Brothers humor.

In The Cocoanuts, their first film, released in 1929, the Marx Brothers start small, running amok in a Florida hotel; in Monkey Business (1931) it's a classy ocean liner, then Big Joe Helton's swank party; in Horse Feathers (1932) they commandeer a college; in Duck Soup (1933), an entire nation, Freedonia.

For sheer imperial nerve, though, there's little in their films to match the big entrance scene of the 1930 Animal Crackers.

Groucho plays Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding, the famous African explorer (who probably has never been to Africa), and in his open-' ing sequence he's borne into Mrs. Rittenhouse's mansion on a litter; supposedly they've carried him all the way from the jungle.

Groucho, in high form-frock coat, grease-painted mustache, dancing eyebrows and runaway crouch, with authentic Livingstone-I-presume pith helmet added for the role-disembarks and begins to dicker with the chieflitter bearer about the fare.

"What? From Africa to here, a dollar eighty-five? I told you not to take me through Australia. It's all chopped up. You should have come right up the Lincoln Boulevard."

But Groucho can't rest content with simply abusing the help. Soon he turns on the hostess, played expertly by Margaret Dumont, and on her Long Island manor. "It is indeed an honor to welcome you to my

poor home," says Mrs. Rittenhouse. "Oh, it isn't so bad," says Groucho. But he can't bear the amenities for 10ng-ifGroucho tried to blend in, he'd be quickly recognized for the fraud he is. The only defense is offense. "Wait a minute. I think you're right. It is pretty bad.

As a matter offact, it's one ofthe frowziest-looking joints I've ever seen ....you letthis place run down, and what's the result? You're not getting the class of people you used to." A possible slip-maybe Mrs. Rittenhouse will apply the remark to him. So attack! "Why, you've got people here that look like you. Now I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll put up a sign outside: Placed Under New Management. We'll set up a 75-cent meal that will knock their eyes out. After we knock their eyes out, wecan charge anything we want."

Then, having the enemy on the run, Groucho flourishes paper: "Now sign here and give me a check for 1,500 dollars." roucho keeps addressing the company as though they're like him-shysters interested in money, sex and getting on in the world. And aren't they? By the time he goes into his marvelous song and dance-"Hooray for Captain Spaulding the African explorer," runs the chorus-he's got everyone so cowed and entertained that he can call himself a "schnorrer" (Yiddish for sponger-hustler) and no one has the wherewithal to catch the affront and toss him back onto the street.

Groucho shows that the most satisfying way to take over the social anxiety dream is not only to run amok through it but to tell the assembly exactly what you're doing to them.

Then on come Harpo and Chico, and Mrs. Rittenhouse's problems compound. Chico arrives first, announced as Signor Emanuel Ravelli, musician. Chico's a clown, with peaked cloth

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In one of the most hilarious scenes in American cinema, hordes of people including the Marx Brothers crowd into a ship s tiny stateroom in the 1935 film A Night at the Opera.

cap, the sort of thing that, decked with flowers, appears on cartpulling donkeys; h~'s got bristly hair, blunt features, a suspicious peasant's kisser. Chico is aggressively, militantly ignorant. He knows nothing but that he's right. Whatever he wants, he should have it, now. His persona is bullish, self-interested, obtuse; he's the archetypal low- Taurus from offthe astrology charts. He's perpetually vehement, surging on, head forward, arms in action, as though hauling the weight of his own dense spirit. And yet, strangely enough, Chico is remarkably appealing. He can't be daunted; slammed again and again to the mat, he pops up grinning, ready for another go.

Groucho serves. "What do you fellows get an hour?" "For playing," Chico replies, "we get 10 dollars an hour." "I see. What do you get for not playing?" "Twelve dollars an hour," Chico says. Then the conversation goes down the rabbit hole. Chico continues: "Now for rehearsing we make special rates. That's-a 15 dollars an hour."

"And what do you get," Groucho asks, "for not rehearsing?" "You couldn't afford it. You see, if we don't rehearse, we don't-a play.

And if we don't -a play, that runs into money."

A minute later, Harpo comes in. ("The gate swung open and a fig newton entered," says Groucho.) He's announced as "the Professor." Harpo is part baby, part raw anarchist; he's a sweet satyr with his smooth, guileless face, curly wig (red) and popped eyes. He's an infant: etymologically, one who never speaks. His honking horn is a baby's toy, akin to a rattle, but also sometimes a

squawking phallus. Harpo is an accomplished klepto: the trickster, Hermes, come to earth; shake him and the house silver falls out. He steals wallets, ties, handkerchiefs. When he's playing a wacko bridge game with Chico and two polished ladies, the camera pans back to reveal him wearing one of the women's high heels. From Abie the fish man, Harpo steals a birthmark.

Harpo loves to relax. He has a charming habit of smoothly hoisting his leg up onto any unsuspecting arm; he naps with the serene righteousness of a cat. Adoring blondes and sleep, he reaches apotheosis at the end of Animal Crackers, spritzing himself with a soporific and falling off into dreamland in the arms of a beautiful woman. nall the Marx Brothers' films, Harpo represents sweet anarchy-an angel stroking his harp with thick hands, and a demon at war with all civilization. When he angrily balls up a telegram, Chico explains, "He gets mad because he can't read." Harpo tears up mail, eats a thermometer like a candy cane, burns books, drinks ink, uses pens for darts-perpetrates aggression against all culture. Signs of complexity can bring on his most sublimely disgusted expression, the Gookie: bulging cheeks, bared teeth, outraged eyes. He speaks to everyone's urge for regression to infantile bliss (and infantile furor), just as Chico speaks to our rancor against every baffling social form.

Chico and Harpo are a ferocious tag team; their greatest moment of collaborative mayhem perhaps comes in Duck Soup. The boys are spies, reporting to Trentino, leading statesman of Sylvania. (Groucho, as Rufus T. Firefly, is Trentino's opposite number in Freedonia.) Trentino, tall, elegant, with a whisper of a mustache and fine- fitting clothes, is the perfect social antithesis to everything Marxian. Harpo and Chico hit him like a couple of daffy sharks. By the time the encounter is over, Trentino's coat-

I

Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo gave yet another memorable performance of their madcap humor in Duck Soup. In the 1933 movie, the Marx Brothers commandeered a mythical kingdom, Freedonia.

tails have been cut off, his hair has been snipped, newspaper is glued to the seat of his pants, and his fingers are jammed in a mousetrap. The moment of greatest beauty transpires when Trentino asks his spies to give him Groucho's record. Harpo pulls out a phonograph r.ecording and hands it to Trentino, who hollers, "No, no!" and sends it flying over his shoulder. From nowhere Harpo flourishes a pistol and fires, breaking the record as though it were skeet; in a blink, Chico hits a bell ("And the boy gets-a cigar") on the desk and hands Harpo the promised stogy. Then Chico slams the humidor closed on Trentino 's fingers.

Trentino is a male version of flustered, Junoesque Mrs. Rittenhouse. Tall and rather stately, both are waxwork monarchs of propriety. But of course when the Marx Brothers attack in every sense from below, there's very little that the sort of person who relies on the well-timed, cutting remark and the dismissive glance. can do. The Marxes just don't accept those signals; they barel y register them. Trentino and Mrs. Rittenhouse hate pleasure; they're Puritans in H.L. Mencken's sense, always beset by the fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time. Harpo and Chico, outsiders in love with ease and rough bliss, have no mercy on them.

But of course, the Marxes aren't just generic outsiders-they're outsiders of a certain sort. They're immigrants; they're just off the boat. Groucho is the grand Jewish schnorrer, fast-talking, greedy, exuberant. Chico is the dumb Italian. (Harpo is from Mars.)

Rather than trying to disguise their immigrant status, rather than trying to pass, Groucho and Chico crank the volume way up.

They're immigrants to the nth degree. Message:- Even at our stereotypical worst, as you in-group types imagine it to be, we're

still more vital and amusing than anyone else around.

At one point in The Cocoanuts, the "quality," as Mark Twain called them, are getting down on Harpo. He's been a bad boy.

Someone says he's a bum. Harpo bobs his head and mouths the word bum, then bum, bum, bum, bum; Chico joins in. A melody begins to form. Harpo whips out a flute; Chico begins to solo on a nonexistent drum; then Groucho flourishes his handkerchief and wraps it across his forehead like a bandage and turns his cigar likewise to a flute. In a second they're marching off, playing a fife-and-drum ditty out of the American Revolution, three brave colonials on the march. Bums indeed. Witty and exuberant, the newcomer Marx Brothers are, in the best sense, original Americans.

The brothers aren't al ways kind in reminding all and sundry that America is, or ought to be, an immigrant nation. In Animal Crackers, Chico and Harpo recognize one of the invited plutocrats, now going under the name Mr. Roscoe W. Chandler, as a former fish peddler from Czechoslovakia, one of their own. "Hey, you're Abie the fish man." They tell him that unless he pays up, they're going to expose him. Abie equivocates, hems and haws, and there follows a vintage schoolyard teasing, with the two brothers marching around the victim, Chico chanting "Abie the fish man, Abie the fish man, Abie the fish man," Harpo whistling insanely, all to the poor man's raw consternation. The egalitarian wars aren't always cleanly fought. Outsiders, immigrants, parvenus, the Marxes speak up for the ones on the other side of the door, but the ones who, they insist, need to be inside if the party is going to be worth attending, if collective life is going to be something more appealing than a protracted anxiety dream.

What does it mean to say that the scene the Marxes intervene on is usually an anxiety dream? The setup in Trentino's office is familiar enough: The boys have been called on the carpet. The boss is going to give them hell. Such things happen to us all, of course, but when events like this begin to dominate our dreams and daylight fantasies, it probably means that we've invested too much authority in society, not enough in ourselves. We feel inadequate before the gaze of the social collective, the Big Other (Big Brother's younger, less overtly potent sibling) out there.

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utsider humor comes along with the intent oflifting our anxiety, at least for a while. It reminds us that society can get too strong, too imperial in its sway over its members. Outsider humor reasseits the right to individual happiness; it comes out for simple good times, for play. And it shows us that social fqrms can be rejuvenated, made more conducive to real satisfaction. Outsider humor can also remind us that those who apparently live to promote conformity are sometimes victimized by it; it asks us to feel a little compassion for them, too.

Perhaps we can get a clearer view of outsider humor by comparingittoits opposite form, the humor of the in-group.

The insider joke asks the audience to join in a consensus, to get with a community that's in the know. Sometimes insider humor asks us to form that community by laughing at another person or group. Take the example of the man who, heading up the gallows steps on Monday morning, says, "This is a fine way to begin the

week." What the man is doing is seeing himselffrom the perspective of the world at large, with all its teeming affairs. From that vantage, the life of an individual-especially a criminal-doesn't look very important. If you see things from the position of society overall, one life more or less, one more tragedy or farce in the midst of millions of other stories, doesn't add up to a whole lot.

In the execution joke, the speaker is asking us to laugh at him, but most of the time insider humor points outward, getting the audience to laugh at someone or something else. Every Polish, Jewish, woman or whatever joke is an attempt at insider humor.

Insider humor can have broadly humanizing effects. In his blackly funny Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift asks his readers to form a community of revulsion against the way that England is treating the Irish. It's a community that's open to any thoughtful English person, as well as to Swift's Irish countrymen.

Outsider humor can turn into sheer anarchic malice, a rage against all that exists, just because it exists. In African-American comics like Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, for example, there's a rancor against the world, and especially the white world,

that could never, one feels, be appeased. Murphy and Lawrence are both strong talents, but unlike their great predecessor Richard Pryor (and unlike Groucho), their humor is almost purely aggressive; they fire out against the world, but rarely if ever turn their eyes back on themselves. So Roseanne (in her recent manifestations) and Andrew Dice Clay turn vehemently against their top opponents-men (for Roseanne), gays and women (for Clay)-as though their simple existence were an affront to nature. There's nothing they could ever do to reform.

But if our outsider humor often devolves into antagonistic rancor, much of our insider humor has become smug, reflexive jeering at anything that's new or that threatens stability. David Letterman, gifted comic that he is, seems to me often to illustrate some of the less appealing sides of the insider sensibility.

Letterman is knowingness incarnate. Nothing surprises him. He presides over his show as though he were watching and commenting

on a rerun rather than experiencing it in the present tense.

Whatever comes along, he's seen it before.

In general, two kinds of guests appear on Letterman's show: the celebrities who banter with Dave in equally ironic, equally empty terms, and the plebes, who are the objects of ridicule. First the plebes were featured accompanying their pets in the Stupid Pet Trick sequences: Dog attacks vacuum cleaner, owner cheers absurdly, etc. But then the show took a sophisticated step forwardand found its essence-when Stupid Pet Tricks morphed into Stupid Human Tricks.

On comes Scott from West Chester, Pennsylvania. A hotdog salesman by day and bartender by night, Scott has brought an electric fan with him. What will he do with it? What else? He'll stop its rotation with his tongue. Scott has a big tongue, a potent one too, as we see when he sticks it way out and forces it against a whizzing fan blade. Fan freezes, Scott's tongue pressed grotesquely against it, looking like fresh beef liver. Letterman gives his boyish hateful look, part gap-toothed Tom Sawyer, part Ranthar King of the Fire Lizards: "Nice of Scott to drop by and make us all sick." Poor Scott.

But there's no escape. Of the top 10 reasons proffered for watching Letterman on one of the show's Top 10 Lists, number 10 is this: "When you're not watching the show, we're making fun of you. " Much of the show's interest revolves around testing Dave's cool. Madonna hit him with a few dirty words, and succeeded, it seemed, in startling the guru into full wakefulness for a moment or two. The show went to England, which is to low-key hip what India is to spirituality, and it brought on Dave's mom. Can Dave continue to be laid back even as his mother reveals childhood secrets? (Tune in.)

So, too, the inveterate Letterman viewer can learn to survive all sorts of encounters without doing the one thing likely to sink you in current professional culture, the sort of culture the Marxes would assault forthwith: showing naked emotion, making Dave ashamed of you. Like Dave, you can learn to greet any expression of enthusiasm, excitement for a new idea, a fresh way of doing things, a new vision, with the laid-back contempt that it surely deserves. Johnny Carson, Letterman's predecessor, somehow combined an in-group temperament with generous curiosity. "Is that right? I did not know that," he liked to say, sometimes ironically, often not. Letterman knows everything; Letterman is never curious.

Letterman partakes of the spirit that presides over that distinctly insider form, the TV sitcom. As the Olympian gods looked down on the doings of puny mortals, so we're invited to look down on the players on sitcom TV. They have so many problems. And they're always so agitated. They're obsessives. Why can't they relax and see that it's all no big deal? Why can 'tthey be cool, like us? The sitcom teaches detachment, superiority. It's an insider humor that lets us feel in control ofthe world. Oh, what fools these mortals be.

And in America now, insider humor seems to be ascendant. To read American newspapers and magazines, there are only two important comics currently at work, Len.o and Letterman. Letterman is the ultimate insider; Leno the lovable, sloppy St. Bernard, always looking for a reassuring pat from his audience. In return he provides his predictable run of jokes. Nightly, he turns the political

Ultimate outsiders: the Marx Brothers shake it up in Animal Crackers, a 1930film.

complexities of the day into waggish tales about inept, venal officials to whom we can all condescend. .

In a time of widespread social anxiety, when every value seems, to some, to be up for grabs, it's not surprising that we gravitate to Leno's and Letterman's assurances-not surprising, but not gratifying, either. A great insider humorist like Swift demanded of his audience that they rise to join a group that could see the world in more enlightened terms. Our insider humor, as exemplified by Leno and Letterman, reassures us that we're fine just as we are, no need to change, no need to grow.

Is a cigar ever just a cigar? I doubt it. Surely David Letterman's and Groucho's cigars transcend all literal meanings. Dave wields his ironically; he grins at himself for being the sort of person who would end up holding such a thing, the scepter of lord high gangsters and big businessmen. But wield it he does, and the grin of self-knowingness only enhances the power effect. Rank him out about the cigar; he's got a dozen comebacks in the mental files.

Groucho smokes twofers (as in two for a nickel) and bums them whenever possible. Groucho's cigar, which doubles occasionally as sword trumpet, often as mock phallus, is the mark ofGroucho's status as ambivalent enemy of the world as it is. Groucho is attracted to power; he wants to wield the magic wand. But at the same time he righteously detests all authority and status, detests what he also, in some measure, wants. Groucho, to get to his most famous line, doesn;t wish to join the sort of club that would accept the likes of him as a member-but he does want to be invited to join. (When he was rejected from a California swim club for being Jewish, Groucho asked if his daughter Miriam, who was halfJewish, could go in the water up to her knees.)

Of the three brothers, Groucho is by far the most complex. And it is his presence that makes the Marx Brothers more than just outsider humorists, more than Letterman's simple antitheses. Sometimes Groucho is like Harpo and Chico, a proponent of joyful disorder, pure and simple. My fav6rite surreal Groucho line comes in a scene with Chico inA Night at the Opera where he's trying to read the fine print of a contract and can't quite get it into focus. "Hmm," Groucho stretches his arms out, "if my arms were a little longer, I could read it. You haven't got a baboon in your pocket, have you?"

But bizarre as his humor can be, Groucho also sometimes represents the forces of relative cogency and order against his brothers.

Take the famous scene from The Cocoanuts where Chico, looking with Groucho at a map, adamantly refuses to come to terms with the arcane notion of the viaduct. Groucho: "Now, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland."

Chico: "Why aduckT' Groucho: ''I'm all right. How are you? I say here is a little peninsula, and here's a viaduct leading over to the mainland." Chico: "All right. Why a duck?" Soon things have de-

generated to an abysmal state: "All right. Why a duck? Why awhy a duck? Why-a-no-chicken?" By the end ofthe riff, Groucho, steam rushing invisibly from his ears, promises to build a tunnel in the morning so as to clear everything up. On another occasion, Chico's obtuseness pushes him so far that the great immigrant/outsider points at his brother and cries, "There's my argument: Restrict immigration." roucho is often divided about his outsider status. He loves the puns that send him flying high over all the timid literalists; he loves to pull the covers off conventions.

He's allergic to the word "gentleman"; he hates to pick up a check (one of the most plangent scenes in all the movies comes inA Day at the Races when, gulled by Chico, Groucho hands over dollar after dollar); he loves to flail away after beautiful women.

But in some part of his being, he also wants to be accepted. He wants Mrs. Rittenhouse to love him, and Trentino to recognize him as a fellow statesman, a man among men. He wants to be rich; he wants to be a celebrity. But he won't give up anything to achieve these ends. He wants to insult everyone at Mrs. Rittenhouse's reception and make the professors sitting in session look like a parliament of chimps, and to be beloved still.

Yet Groucho's great integrity as a character comes from the fact that whenever it's time to choose between being accepted and letting go with the joke that will destroy the peace, he chooses the joke. Whenever Margaret Dumont is just about to take his sui t a IittIe bit seriously, he says something so surpassingly nasty that she leaps away as if bitten.

We might compare Groucho with his fidelity to the joke (at whatever cost) to Woody Allen. Woody is Groucho's heir, something he warmly affirms in Mighty Aphrodite when he suggests to his wife that they name their adopted child after the great man.

(You'll also recall that Annie Hall begins with a disquisition on Groucho's line about the sort of country club he could never join.)

Woody, like Groucho, is in love with the antiestablishment joke.

He takes rich pleasure in shooting down macho pretensions, social snobbery and cultural affectations. (Especially the latter: remem-

G

ber his splendid line about Commentary magazine merging with Dissent to produce Dysentery.) Yet unlike Groucho, Woody isn't prone to record the nearly inevitable cost of being a brilliant misanthrope. Woody simply can't resist putting his film persona in positions where he tells all the antiestablishment jokes and gets the girl too. He carries on like Groucho, and gets to sleep with Diane Keaton. This need to have it both ways is part of what makes Woody's movies, splendid as they are, often seem like genial wish fulfillment next to Groucho's.

Groucho always rebels against his own success. When it seems that Trentino might treat with him on equal terms, as a gentleman, Groucho stages an imagined encounter between himself and the Sylvanian ambassador that ends in disaster. "I'll be only too happy," Groucho pledges in most statesmanlike tones, "to meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him, on behalf of my country, the right hand of good fellowship." But then, Groucho worries, maybe the ambassador will snub him (stranger things have happened). "A fine thing that'll be! I hold out my hand and he refuses to acceptit! That'll add a lotto my prestige, won'tit?Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador! Who does he think he is that he can come here and make a sap out of me in front of all my people?" Then, rising to a boil, "Think of it! I hold out my hand and that hyena refuses to accept it!. ..He'll never get away with it, I tell you!. ..He'll never get away with it."

Enter Trentino, looking haughty. Groucho, raging now, "So! You refuse to shake hands with me, eh?" Groucho slaps Trentino with his gloves. This means war!

It's Groucho's contempt for his own high-mindedness and posing-"I'll be happy to meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him the right hand," blah, blah, blah-that sends him into a spin.

Groucho was about ~oact decorously, something for which he cannot forgive himself. As his predecessor Thoreau put it, "What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"

The richness of Groucho's antiestablishment comedy is that it compels us not only to challenge social hypocrisy but to consider our own. And it's that double vision, it seems to me, that helps make Groucho and the Marx Brothers as indispensable now as they were in the 1930s.

For maybe we all dream of cutting our own kind of deal with society in which we're saint and thief at once. To be perfectly rebellious, perfectly true to one's most refractory impulses, and yet to be loved-that is Groucho's wish, as it is, perhaps, everyone's.

What Groucho learns and learns again, and also teaches, is that you've got to choose-you can't have your cake and cream Trentino with it, too. Groucho speaks to all of us who are both rebels and conformists, and tells us that wecan'thave it both ways.

Finally (though not without second thoughts), he endorses a life in which, though the anxiety dream generally reigns, you can, if you're daring enough and witty enough, take over for a while, launch the joke and exult-then pay for it.

0 About the Author: Mark Edmundson, a contributing editor of Civilization magazine, is professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses onfUm, Freud and visionary poetry.

that are tempted by the arguments heard in Singapore or China that somehow authoritarianism is necessary. Or that there is something about Asia that is antithetical to human rights and democratic principles. Quite the contrary. Democracy has evolved in India in an indigenous way. Nobody asked India to be democratic. People believe in democracy here because that's what they believe in.

That's what they think is good for the country. That in itself has a very powerful message to send, because there is a sense in which this message that Asia is different is very insulting to Asia. It suggests that somehow people in Asia are not able to govern themselves freely, that they need some kind of a benign dictator. And that dictator may be benign for a while. He may not be corrupt, but at some point of time, power corrupts.

Q: Winston Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried. Do you think human ingenuity can someday fashion a system that would be even better than democracy?

A: Yes, human ingenuity could fashion democratic systems that work better than they do now.

Q: Afew weeks ago the Economist magazine had a special section on how democracy may evolve in the 21st century. They said that today people in many democracies elect their representatives to legislatures and then they loathe these representatives, despise them. We see it here in India, we see it in the United States. The Economist predicted that there will be an evolution toward more "direct democracy," more use of referendums of the sortthere are in Switzerland. Could you comment on that?

A: Well, certainly television accelerates that process because politicians can go directly to the voters. You don't need themediation of a political party. Frankly, I am very worried about referendums. I don't think that's a good development. I think that there is no substitute for representative democracy. Political parties can somehow aggregate popular demands, offer people real choices. Direct democracy can be abused. It

Congress wants to impose sanctions, these are issues that have to be resolved in our own democracy. Congress sometimes passes laws that bind the executive branch or government to advance these principles. And the executive branch will sometimes on its own seek to stick to these principles. I think the question is: Do we or do we not have a moral obligation to speak out when other countries violate principles? I think we do have a moral obligation.

Q: Some Indians feel bothered by America's "moral beliefs." For example, on the issue of child labor many "We'll probably vote for the least qualified candidate.

Indians see the U.S. and several indusWe have no judgment skills. " trialized nations twisting their arms.

But it is a complex socioeconomic problem. In many parts of India, if a child doesn't get employment, however meager really offers the possibility for demagoguery and simplistic pitches on issues. the wages, he will have nothing to eat. Until such time as India is able to provide educaThe issues of government are very complex in the contemporary world. They re- tion and economic opportunities, it may not quire elected representatives who can be possible to eradicate this problem. grapple with the complexities. And if peoA: Well, I think everyone agrees that ple don't like what they're doing, democchild labor is an evil. It will take time to recracy offers a way to throw them out. What I tify it. In a certain sense we have the same have been impressed by in India is that the kind of debate in the United States over the cynicism about politicians has not affected minimum wage law, where some people the enthusiasm for democracy. say you price people out of many jobs that are needed. Other people say: Well, the jobs Q: India and the United States often are low paying and they undercut good jobs claim, with pride, that they are the world's and so forth. These are complex questions. largest and oldest democracies.

But I think it's appropriate if people think there there's now and then afeeling in India that is injustice involved. But speaking against the U.S., the only superpower in the world, things like child labor does increase the is sometimes overbearing in its dealing pressure on India to find a way to deal with with other countries. Have you heard that this problem. on your current visit here?

I, for one-and speaking only for myself A: Living in Washington as I do-and because I haven't studied the problem of child seeing how paralyzed American power can labor very carefully-would recognize this as sometimes be-it doesn't seem to me that something that's obviously a problem that is America is a superpower. very complex and cannot be solved quickly.

The American people believe in freedom Like the problem of inequality and how one deals with the Scheduled Castes. How does and democracy. The American Congress reflects that in a very strong way. There should one grapple with these problems? How do we be a way in which America can express its in the United States deal with the heritage of commitment to democratic principles, can racial injustice, or the fact that we have express its disapproval of the violation of poverty in our cities? How do we grapple with these issues that are complex issues, that grow universally recognized norms of human rights, without being seen as twisting arms. out of history? But nobody would say to us If a particular government doesn't want to do that we don't have some kind of a moral imwhat the United States says, and ifthe U.S. perati ve to deal with these problems.

Q: Let's return, ifwe may, to the subject of problems of democracy, which the U.S. and India both face. The dialogue on this between the two nations would be something new in Indo- U.S. relations, would it not?

A: Yes. Until now a dialogue between India and the United States on the issue of democracy was not really possible because there was always a suspicion that other agendas were at work-the Cold War, sensitivities on both sides, and so forth. But we're at a new moment right now. The Cold War is over. We're looking at issues afresh.

We both have a common commitment to democracy and a desire to see it grow and expand in the world, which we can perhaps work on together.

Q: The sudden end of the Cold War came as a surprise to almost everyone.

What do you think led to the demise of the Soviet Union? Contradictions in the system itself? Or did organizations like yours play any role?

A: This subject was raised in one of our discussions here in India. The central point has to do with the difference between democracy and totalitarianism. Democracy is a messy system. It's difficult to make decisions. You've got to include everybody in the discussion. You can't have one person making all the decisions. But ultimately it gets the job done-in a messy way though.

And there's a certain stability in that, a certain legitimacy to the process.

Totalitarianism seems superficially like a more efficient system. You can plan. It is one person making the decision. obody questions it. But it's a brittle system. It doesn't have the ability to evolve, to change. It has no way of getting information about what's happening because it has no feedback from the people. The Soviet system depended on keeping people closed off from information from the outside world. These days you cannot do that, given the nature of communications. You have a population that is inevitably going to want to participate because they are going to know what's going on. Communism simply was not geared to participation in the modern world. It was those internal weaknesses of the system which led to its demise, not what anybody did from the outside.

Q: The National Endowment for Democracy is a private agency but financed by the U.S. Government. Has the Government given you a mandate of any kind? Or do they tell you what they want youtodo?

A: The Endowment is premised on the fact that it is independent. We have a very distinguished board consisting of some outstanding Americans who would not sit on that board if somebody were telling them what to do. I mean, they would be wasting their time. They don't get paid. They meet once every four months to approve projects. If the board members felt that decisions were made elsewhere and their corning together was not necessary in order to approve those projects, they simply wouldn't come together.

The one thing that we have to do is prove to the U.S. Congress that we're doing a good job. This is taxpayers' money. We have to demonstrate that we're serving some kind of a national interest. It is our belief that it is in the broader interest of America to see that there are more countries in the world that are governed democratically, because they will be friendly to the United States, they wi II be more peaceful in their international behavior, and so forth.

This is an argument we have to make to.

Congress. In that regard, the work we do with other countries, the support that we get from the people we're helping, is very important in persuading the U.S. Congress that what we do at the National Endowment for Democracy is a worthy th ing to do.

Q: Suppose we are the congressional committee responsible for your funding and we said to you: Name three or four of the Endowment's major achievements over the last ten years.

A: We are proud of certain things we did in the 1980s, especially in countries like Poland and Chile where I don't think we claim the credit but we were part of what happened. And the people who did make it happen would be the first to say that what the Endowment did is appreciated, and we're very proud of that.

One of the things that we're very excited about is a grants program in the Middle East and the Islamic world. It is one of the most

challenging areas in the world forus to work because there's a lot of suspicion about American groups in that area. We have gone out and established relationships of trust and confidence. We have developed a network of people who are committed to democracy and the spread of democracy in that part of the world. Modernizing the countries in the Middle East politically as well as economically is important. The work there, in my view, is very impressive.

Similarly with a country like Mexico with which the United States has had difficult relations. Mexicans are working toward free and fair elections. The fact we've been able to work with a country like Mexico along those lines is very important. I'm also impressed by the fact that we have been able to support and sustain human rights organizations in countries like Nigeria and Zaire.

Even though they haven't achieved great results, to keep these organizations alive in these countries is an achievement itself. We also have been able to support work in China on local elections, and groups that are working for human rights and democratic liberties. The fact that we've been able to have a broad program of support for democracy in a country as important and as difficult to work in as China is significant.

And in our list of achievements I'm very proud of the establishment of the Journal of Democracy and the International Forum for Democratic Studies.

Q: Don't you think that you would have a much greater impact and acceptability if you forged some kind of an international organization, say the International Endowment for Democracy, to propagate the cause of democracy around the world?

A: One of the great things we're trying to do now is to build an "association of democracies." It will be the catalyst to engage other democracies in the work of supporting democracy. So it's not just the Endowment that is supporting groups in Burma and elsewhere, but increasingly other democracies will join and become part of a broader association of countries that are supporting democracy. It becomes important to bring new players in. It is important to show that the movement for democracy is a genuinely 0 global movement.

AMERICA CELEBRATES

INDIA'S BIRTHDAY "For sheer visual pleasure, Paul Taylor's works are in a class by themselves."

"Body language at its best."

-The Hindu, Chennai

"At the end of the dance one was left with an impression of exploding energy.

It was incredible dancing."

-The Telegraph, Calcutta

T

hese are among the many accolades that the Paul Taylor Dance Company received during its recent four-week tour of India as the beginning of America's celebration of 50 years of the country's independence. The company performed in the four cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai as well as Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Jamshedpur, Lucknow and Pune.

The highlight of the tour was the world premiere in New Delhi of Prime Numbers, a new work especially choreographed by Paul Taylor as his personal tribute to India on its golden jubilee. The company also performed such well-known works from its repertoire as Polaris, Airs, Company BandA Musical Offering.

At the end of the tour Paul Taylor, often called "the world's greatest living choreographer," was visibly moved by the enthusiastic reception he and his company received. He said that he was a bit apprehensive in the beginning as it is "a little terrifying coming to a country with such an old tradition." But, he added, the visit was "very satisfying."

The Paul Taylor tour was possible because of corporate philanthropy; it was funded by 47 Indian and American companies, many of them Indo-U.S. joint ventures. Said Ambassador Frank Wisner: "We are setting a new trend with this collaboration between corporates and the government to fund artistic activity."

On these and the following pages, SPAN presents a selection of photographs mainly from the performance at Roosevelt House in New Delhi, which was attended by a select and distinguished audience.

A scene from Prime Numbers, a new work Paul Taylor especially choreographed as his Iribule 10 India S 50lh anniversary.

Above: The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs at Roosevelt House in New Delhi. The guests at the company's performances in 10 Indian cities included several of India's most prominent people. Clockwise from right: Actress Shannila Tagore shakes hands with Paul Taylor while her husband Nawab Mansur AU Khan Pataudi and Ambassador Wisner's wife Christine look on; danseuse Tanusree and musician husband Ananda Shankar with members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company; Ambassador and Mrs. Wisner with Paul Taylor; Wisner with Chief Election Commissioner M.S. Gill; Dr. Karan Singh and Suresh Rajpal, chairman of the American Business Council and president of Hewlett-Packard (India), with Paul Taylor; Raghu Mody, businessman and president of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, is introduced by Wisner to John Tomlinson, operations manager of the dance company, as Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, senior assistant editor of the Telegraph, looks on.

The eight winners of the "Imagine the Magic" contest. Front row (left to right): Aradhana Chakraborty, age 12, St. Mary's English High School, Guwahati; Aboli Satish Kadam, 8, B. V.'s English Medium School, Pune; A. Abhishek, 9, St. Joseph's Public School, Hyderabad; Kabir Bose, 10, Shri Ram School, New Delhi.

Back row (left to right): Gyalthang Tse Ta, 16, Upper T.e. v. School, Dharamshala; Shrenik Dasani, 17, St. Xavier's College, Calcutta; E. Rakesh, 17, St. George's Grammar School, Hyderabad; and Nirav Mehta, 17, N.M.e.e.E, Mumbai.

United Airlines Unites the World The world's biggest airline, operating in India for slightly more than a year, recently joined Microsoft Corporation to sponsor a contest for Indian children called "Imagine the Magic."

"Use your wildest imagination to tell us what you think the coolest computer could do."

These were the words on the application form in Living Media magazines for Indian schoolchildren ages 8 to 18 to enter the "Imagine the Magic" contest. They could write, draw or paint.

The eight winners (photo above) were

named March 4 when they each shook hands with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at New Delhi's Taj Palace Hotel. Their prizes: a free return trip on United Airlines to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and a Compaq Multimedia personal computer loaded with the latest software.

The contest was cosponsored by

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Left: Aboli Sat ish Kadam (top photo) andA. Abhishekpose with their award-winning artworks depicting what "the coolest computer could do. " Right: Aboli shakes hands with Bill Gates at the award ceremony in. the Taj Palace Hotel, New Delhi.

United Airlines, Microsoft and Compaq corporations ofthe U.S., and India's Living Media Ltd. "This is the kind of community involvement that our company does more and more," says Richard Snyder, United Airlines' Country Director for India. "We did not come to India just to make money but to build a relationship with this country.

"Since starting operations in India in December 1995 we've tried to do a lot of things for Indo-American relations," says Snyder. "We were a special patron [one of the three biggest donors] in sponsoring the January visit of the Paul Taylor Dance Company to honor India on its 50th anniversary.

We sponsored the 96th Amateur Golf Championship of India last February because sports is an area where United Airlines can foster the spirit of friendship and camaraderie.

We also brought the U.S. Army polo team to India."

United Airlines was founded in 1926 when its first open cockpit biplane began carrying mail for a new U.S. postal service called "airmail." In the seven decades since then, United has a history of innovations: the world's first flight attendant service (1930); the first airline flight kitchen (1936); the first nonstop coast-to-coast U.S. flight (1955); the first nationwide (U.S.) automated reservations system (1971); the first commercial carrier to use satellite data communications in flight (1991).

The airline's first service outside North America began in 1983 with a nonstop flight to Japan.

Today United is the world's largest airline. It has 85,966 employees, including 8,580 pilots, 24,600 mechanics and 24,660 flight attendants.

It carries more than nine million travelers on 70,000 international flights every year. It flies more passenger-miles than any other airline. It is the only airline flying around the world daily, operating 2,200 flights a day, uniting more than 300 cities in 30 countries and three territories on five continents.

• • • • •

J.P. Singh, regional marketing manager

Arly B. Gozum, corporate sales

(passenger and cargo sales), United Airlines, New Delhi.

and marketing managel; United Airlines, New Delhi.

"So our motto that we unite the world is no exaggeration," says Snyder.

Statistics are impressive but they're about quantity. Customers of airlines are more interested in quality.

"If people try United they'll find the quality," says Regional Marketing Manager J.P. Singh. "For a written tribute, there's the 1996 year-end issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review that ranked United as one of Asia's 90 leading foreign companies-meaning companies headquartered outside of Asia-that were notable for leadership in five areas: quality products and services; innovativeness in responding to customer needs; long-term vision; financial soundness; and being a company others try to emulate. More than 6,000 senior Asian executives and other professionals participated in this Far Eastern Economic Review survey."

There's another story about United Airlines that should be told. It is America's largest employee-owned corporation.

Fortune magazine said it is one of those companies that "have begun to operate much like extended families."

"What I have learned in these past two years," said CEO Gerald Greenwald in a Fortune interview in 1996, "is how to manage with the consensus of all employees.

I've come to believe strongly in the value of

consensus and I've come to believe that it is becoming a prerequisite in the 1990s for almost any corporation ....The most publicized aspect of our experiment is that employees own 55 percent of the company.

Less visible, but in my view equally dramatic, we have a no-layoff policy commitment to everyone who was here at the beginning.

"I think the day is gone," Greenwald. continued, "when an adversarial relationship between labor and management worked for both sides in some productive way. In the 1990s it's just not healthy anymore. The inefficiencies such wrangling causes make it that much more difficult for U.S. companies to compete in the world.

Customers aren't locked to anyone company in a global economy, and they can always take their business elsewhere."

It is a challenge to be the pilot of America's largest employee-owned company, but Greenwald loves the challenge. "It is important that we communicate with all our people and justify what we're doing-to all our people. There's no point in running up a hill yelling 'Charge!' if no one is following you."

In the Delhi office of United Airlines, I ask Corporate Sales and Marketing Manager Arly Gozum about the application of the United Airlines philosophy in India.

She points to a wall plaque with a list of the company's corporate "values":

Safety at all times in all things.

Customer satisfaction.

Respect for each other as individuals.

Integrity in everything we do.

Teamwork supported by open and honest communications.

• A commitment to community services.

• Profitability for shareholdersemployees, owners and investors.

"These are not just words," Gozum says.

"We take these things seriously, and that's one of the reasons we scored so high in that Far Eastern Economic Review survey.

There's one more survey you should mention in your article. Our frequent-flyer program has been named the 'best frequentflyer program' by Inside Flyer magazine for three years in a row. The magazine polled 18,800 readers to name their favorite frequent-flyer program."

Plans for the future? United hopes to expand its operations to Mumbai and Chennai. I ask if they're concerned about the soon-to-come competition from Northwest Airlines. "We welcome competition," says Snyder. "Competition improves the product.

"But we want to be more than just a product," he adds. "United Airlines is number one in the world in many ways-miles flown, passengers carried, etc. These statistics are nice. But we'd also like to be number one in corporate responsibility-or call it corporate 'caring' -for customers and employees and for the people in the communities where we operate. We're a company that makes a profit-every company must-but we'd like to be known and we are known as a company that cares about more than just profit. We really believe we must improve the quality of life in communities where we operate, with emphasis on helping youth, which is why we cosponsored this contest for Indian children. If we can do community service well, if all companies can do community service well, imagine the magic!"

0

A Passage to India Over the past year, SPAN has been looking at various aspects of the Indo-U.S. business scene. Tourism is one of the growth industries in India and the world. In this interview, the SPAN Editor talks to Uday Chatterjee, managing director of CTI Travels Pvt. Ltd., for a look at the big picture. CTI is a Delhi-based travel agency involved in all aspects of American travel to India, especially "business tourism."

SPAN: Mr. Chatterjee, one hears a lot about business tourism. What's the difference between the tourism business and business tourism?

UDAY CHATTERJEE: The tourism business encompasses the whole range of activities that one undertakes to serve a traveler-whether the travel is for business or pleasure. Business tourism is a niche area of tourism, specialized activities provided to business travelers. When I started en in 1986, I could see that the Indian economy was opening up to American and other foreign businessmen and there was a niche market for a specialized travel agency to handle this kind of upmarket tourism, which involves

business conferences', conventions, trade shows, chartering executive aircraft and helicopters, event management and high pressure travel schedules of busy executives as they crisscross international boundaries. So we started as a very focused agency handling multinationals' business travel.

Q: What are some of the companies you handle?

A: General Electric, AT&T, Allied Signal, Bechtel, MCI, Bell Labs, Carrier Aircon, Harris Corporation, Price Waterhouse, Alcatel Alsthom, Spic Capag, Telstra Viacom, LVMH (Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton), British Aerospace, Banque Paribas, to name just a few.

event such as a huge conference. In the late eighties, we handled the International Congress of Energy Economists. The event brought together chiefs of several large oil companies, plus some important oil ministers from OPEC countries. Such events require meticulous planning. All guests have to be received and transferred to their hotels. Online information-on events, sightseeing, etc.-has to be provided to all the delegates before, during and after the conference. We have to provide audiovisual equipment, computers, back-office support, press relations and briefings. We also

tive" or "reward" for high achievers. Many large companies like Ford, IBM, Renault, Canon, LVMH, Prudential Insurance and Carrier have such incentive programs. A special program that we organized recently was for LVMH, makers of Dom Perignon Champagne. They had invited all their top dealers from the Asia/Pacific region. We commandeered the whole of Jaipur's Rambagh Palace Hotel for them. There was a very elaborate menu with copious amounts of bubbly. There were polo matches and theme parties.

Q: Could we talk about the impact of tourism on the whole economy of a nation, its so-called "multiplier effect"?

A: From the economic perspecti ve, tourism is believed to be one of the three biggest industries in the world-along with the oil and automobile industries. But the tourism industry has a greater beneficial impact on the economy because it has a higher multiplier effect. By that I mean the tourist dollar not only benefits hotels, airlines and the whole travel trade, but it percolates down to the handicraft industry, the poultry industry, local farmers and people in many other occupations.

Q: Are there any special requirements and challenges in arranging business travels? Can you tell us about any specific trips ofbig businessmen that you have handled?

A: Two of the most challenging were high profile visits of the CEOs of AlliedSignal and LVMH. These required a lot of planning which started six months before the visits.

Important CEOs travel with an en"The Andersons spent five weeks in Rome, five weeks in tourage of 30-40 people. Some Paris and five weeks in financial counseling." . come in special private aircraft like Ed Hennessy of AlliedSignal. They call on the prime minister, ministers Q: You spoke about specialized have to coordinate with various agencies of tourism or "niche tourism." What are and leaders of Indian industry. Schedules are hectic. But happily it's not all work. some of the other "niches"? the government for adequate security arrangements. And, of course, we have to There's also time off for recreation and A: The most common tourism is the concatching up on the local culture. Often ventional "cultural tourism" -traveling to make available elaborate cultural activities in informal surroundings a lot of brainsee the famous buildings, monuments, so the visitors will see highlights of the temples, palaces-the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur local culture. storming is done. For Hennessy's brief circuit, for example.

So this is a very large and growing segvisit to Goa we organized an authentic ment of business tourism, and likely to Among the "niche tourism" areas, there is Goan carnival-with Goan music, dance keep growing. and food. He was so impressed he told adventure tourism-which is further diWe also handle traffic to international vided into mountaineering, trekking, river me he would like to invite a group of top conventions and trade shows organized in rafting, ballooning, hang gliding, desert saU.S. corporate leaders to come for a vacathe U.S. and other parts of the world. faris, jungle safaris. Then there is sports and tion in Goa. ecotourism. Under sports tourism we have Q: Recently we heard a businessman scuba diving, skiing, fishing, golfing, bird Q: Many people think of a travel agency talking about his company's use of "inwatching.

Each of these niche areas has a as a place to go for airline and rail tickets centive tourism" for top management. and hotel reservations. We know you do a very select following of people who travel to What exactly is incentive tourism? lot more than that. What else does a travel new areas in search of their special interest.

A: Incentive travel is a lucrative segment agentdo?

A: Well, to continue with "business of the tourism business. Companies around Q: Ecotourism is an important developthe world use exotic holidays as an "incenment because environmentalists are untourism," we handle logistics for a complex

versities to study the impact of development-such as building a dam through a rain forest in Kerala, or the deforestation in the Doon Valley. Deforestation has caused havoc in many parts of India and Nepal.

Ecotourism educates us about the damage and raises the consciousness of society to do something urgently to stop the damage.

We encourage ecotourism. In my view, ecotourism is likely to be one of the areas of high growth in the travel business in the next 25 years. India, with its beautiful mountains and forests, offers a tremendous potential. happy with the way tourists are ruining the ecology of wilderness areas. What can you tell us about this?

A: Ecotourism is a response of the tourism industry to the growing importance of the environmentalist agenda all over the world. It's a way of saying: yes, we can have tourism and still preserve and improve the environment.

It's true that adventure tourism in some countries like Nepal has created a bad image of tourists destroying the environment.

Q: In America environmentalists have done a lot to protect national and state parks from the ravages of too many tourists.

A: This is an issue that concerns all thinking people. We all feel that the ecosystem of our planet is fragile and it must be preserved at all costs. We are aware of the irreparable damage done by rapid development and industrialization. We've also seen that nature, if given a chance, has strength to reinvigorate itself.

I firml y believe that tourism which brings people close to nature is ultimately good for long-term preservation of our ecosystem. It brings people a firsthand experience of the magic and beauty of nature and makes converts to the cause of preservation. So the answer does not lie in banning tourists from our national parks or preserved areas but to have education and awareness programs for all tourists visiting these areas-and very strict codes of conduct.

Fortunately an awareness of the need to preserve our ecosystem has increased. We have groups coming from American uni-

Q: What's hindering the development of tourism in India?

A: We certainly need to upgrade our infrastructure-we need more hotels in all price categories. We need better air and rail networks, better roads, more trained professional guides, good restaurants, good entertainment and cultural activities. And there needs to be more coordination among all these areas.

Since we generate business from India to the U.S. also, I have been invited regularly

to attend the Pow Wow, which is the annual exposition of the American travel business.

[Powwow is a Native American word for "conference."] Pow Wow is ajoint effort of the U.S. Government and private-sector tourism to showcase the extent and diversity of the travel business. I have been really impressed by the close coordination between the different segments of the industry.

I have also been amazed by the exhaustive use of advanced technology in the tourism industry, which one sees at these expositions. On such computerized reservation systems as Sabre, Galileo, Amadeus, etc-which are also available with travel agents in India-you can not only book your flight but also your hotel, your favorite opera, say, in New York, football tickets, and even make a reservation in a gourmet restaurant. Not only that, but while booking a hotel room with some reservation systems you can see the interior of room on the monitor screen and you can actually check out the bathtub in the bathroom before making up your mind.

Similarly you could check out the ambience of the restaurant, its menu, its wine list.

Q: It sounds like the onset of "virtual tourism." But seriously, how do you envision the future of the travel trade in view of the future tourist's easy access to the Internet where he can do everything for himself? Will this put travel agents like you out of business ?

A: This is the most heated topic of discussion in any gathering of travel agents these days. The consensus seems ~obe that in the future most people will be able to access the information superhighway and have all the information at their fingertips.

In the U.S., reservation systems have been provided to large corporations. They now make their own bookings from their office-after accessing the cheapest fares, the most convenient connections, etc. In fact, Delta Airlines took the lead and reduced the commissions to travel agents.

There was an uproar. But the writing seems to be on the wall. The future will have no room for the conventional travel agent who writes tickets or books passage. The future travel agent will be more like a travel counselor or consultant who will provide valueadded services. They will be specialists with niche market capabilities.

For example, we at cn Travels are developing special niche capabilities in offering complete logistical support to Hollywood studios and other studios to come to India for shooting their films. In the last two years we have been associated with two feature film productions: Peacock's Spring and currently Seven Years in Tibet, which is based on the life of the Dalai Lama and the life of an Austrian who spent seven years in Lhasa and developed an enduring friendship with the Dalai Lama. This is a big budget Hollywood film-with famous French director Jean-Jacques Annaud and with Brad Pitt, Hollywood's current heartthrob, as the hero. Though this film was not shot in India, we played a major role in helping the film unit scout for cast, crew, costumes and props~n India, Nepal and Bhutan. We als'o were responsible for the movement of the cast and crew to places like South America and Canada where the film was eventually shot.

We are now preparing a special brochure highlighting the facilities available to film units in India and our services

Americans who are Buddhist are actors Richard Gere and Steven Seagal. Apart from the film Seven Years in Tibet, there is another big budget Hollywood film about Buddhism being produced-Kundan-directed by Martin Scorsese. These two films are likely to create a surge of interest in India and we are already working with an agent in Chicago to advertise and capitalize on this interest to visit Buddhist places in India and Nepal.

for a one-stop-shop package. To give an idea of numbers: Seven Years had a budget of about $50 million out of which $10 million would be expenses on travel, hotels, transportation, catering, housekeeping, acquisitions of props, etc.

So our agency has become specialized in filmmaking tourism as well as businesS' tourism in general. We have also become specialists in spiritual tourism.

Q: What is that?

A: Americans have long been intereste~ in Indian spiritual movements and masters.

Deepak Chopra, who lives in America and propagates a holistic movement based on the Vedas and the Upanishads, has a huge following of famous people like Demi Moore and Elizabeth Taylor. In the sixties, Americans came to India in search ofIndian gurus. Today there seems to be a growing interest in Buddhism among Americans of all ages and classes. Some very prominent

Q: Is there much American involvement in the tourism business in India?

A: There is a very big interest. A little over a year ago United Airlines came to India with two daily flights [see article on page 33] and now Northwest Airlines has plans to come to India-to both Delhi and Mumbai.

In the hotel industry, there are the old relationships with Intercontinental and Sheraton. In more recent years, there have been collaborations with Holiday Inn, Quality Inn, Radisson, Ramada, Hilton and Hyatt. There is every indication that American hotel chains are interested in investing in India.

India's hotel industry represents an excellent business opportunity for American chains. The average room rates and occupancies enjoyed by three-, four- and fivestar hotels in major Indian cities are enviable by American standards.

Q: What percentage of foreign tourists that come to India are Americans?

A: About 10-15 percent. You must remember India is very far from the U.S., and Americans have a lot of tourism available at much closer quarters. India is a destination.

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for the serious seeker or the well-heeled traveler. I would say the average American tourist to India is focused and looking for specific-interest tourism, niche tourism, rather than casual sightseeing. I would also like to point out that the average American tourist to India spends more nights here and spends more dollars per night than do tourists from other parts of the world. I would rather handle 100-200 American tourists than 500-1,000 tourists who come to Goa by charter flights. A large number of my American tourists are repeat customers.

Q: Mr. Chatterjee, do you personally accompany any of your company's big organized tours?

A: I love to go as often as I can-especially to the Himalayas. My cn experiences during treks, during nights under clear desert skies, have changed my entire outlook on life. I have been on many mountain treks with tourists, such as to 14,000foot-high Chandra Tal Lake north of the Lahaul-Spiti Valley, and the trek from Padum to Darcha, which connects Zanskar in Ladakh to Himachal Pradesh and which crosses over one of the highest mountain passes. I have been on the Source-of-theGanges trek, which takes you to Gomukh and beyond. The sheer exhilaration of these treks are experiences that I would not exchange for anything else in my life.

This year in May and June I hope to accompany a cn trip to Kailash Mansarovar in Tibet with a group of Americans.

Seventy-five doctors have already registered and paid for that trip. There are more on the waiting list. In those pristine environments, adventure tourism, ecotourism, spiritual tourism all merge into one-into a beautifu Iholistic experience.

Q: HaveyoueverjoinedoneofyourCTI spiritual tourism groups to live in an ashram? What kind of Americans go on these trips? Young people? Seekers?

A: I join spiritual tourism groups every year because a large number of visitors are repeat clients and we all know each other more as friends. They are very careful that when I am in an ashram with them they do not disturb me. Most of the seekers who come are middle-aged people who have a great desire to evolve spiritually. They represent a microcosm of the American society. My great friends Peter and Dana Delong are artists and musicians in Hollywood; they have their own recording company. Another is an art dealer from Manhattan. Yet another old friend, Ellen Levand, is head of physiotherapy in a San Francisco hospital. Then there is Sondra Ray, a great teacher, who travels around the world lecturing on the development of human potential.

Some of these people have been to India every year for the past 20 years. That is the kind of "brand loyalty" I would like to see in all my other clients.

Q: You make the travel agent business sound like the best job in the world for nourishing all aspects of a human being: You've also educated us on the new world of niche tourism. Have we missed any of the major aspects of running a big travel agency? Is there any kind of niche tourism that is notyetin India?

A: Well, there is gourmet tourism.

Europe attracts a lot of gourmet tourists

from all over the world. India has not yet made a breakthrough in this. But I can envision a day when a chartered flight of American gourmets comes to India to sample the regional cuisines starting from delectable Lucknowi kababs, Kerala curries, Goan balchao to Bengali hilsa cooked in mustard paste.

There is one other area of high growth in the U.S. and elsewhere but not yet popular in India-cruise holidays. I would like to see a big cruise company like Carnival Cruise or Caribbean Cruise think ofIndia as a potential destination for starting this business. This has tremendous potential.

Q: Spiritual tourism and gourmet tourism and everything in between; we've covered a lot of ground. To end on a personal note, it seems as if you find a lot of deep gratification in what is obviously a high-stress occupation.

A: For me the tourism business has truly enriched the quality of my life. Not only have I traveled extensively in India and all over the world, but this career has given me a balanced perspective, compassion and an understanding of human nature in a universal holistic sense. I feel like I am at home anywhere in the world-transcending national boundaries while fully enjoying the local flavor of the food, wine and culture.

I think tourism can create a better understanding and tolerance in this world. Most of all it can create a healthy respect for our environment and ecology by instilling in travelers a planetary awareness.

Q: That's a good way to end this interview-thoughts about the ethical value of tourism. One of the mostfamous remarks about how traveling can give people a global awareness came from Mark Twain who said: ÂŤTravel isfatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

A: That's lovely. Rabindranath Tagore expressed a similar thought when he said: "We travel to bring things distant near. We travel to make the stranger our brother." 0

"You have to start taking life easierHave you thought of applying for a government job?"

Drawing by Eric & Bill; Š 1997TribuneMediaServices, All rights reserved.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Drawing by Eric and Bill; Š 1997 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Inc.

"My wife thinks I still act like a teenager and my children thinklneverwasone. "

Mystical Places

the Wild erness "America's magical showpieces lie inside the country's womb; they leave no signs in the accessible city landscape. But the doors are there, for anyone who chooses to open them," says a renowned Indian poet. here is more to the United States of America than New York or Los Angeles. And I am not trying to romanticize my relationship with the U.S. I have roamed around Atlanta with my friends, loitered in Pike Place Market in Seattle; but the city life is what I always seemed to have veered away from. Poetry and politics could perhaps come from the aroma of coffee in Seattle, or the delightful sight of sea lions basking on the sun-drenched rocks off La Jolla in California, or the sense of infinite freedom in the faded blue jeans of an of tenwashed pride.

T

But my America, the northern continent' where I was, and which I kept on searching for, in between the many places I encountered through my poetry readings in colleges and universities, was not restricted to superb, acoustically perfect auditorium~ and warm intimate classrooms across that vast country. I realized I was looking for something else, perhaps for some other levels of living; something that would maybe bring me a feeling of oneness with the country of my own birth, India, and which I thought I would find in the land's horizona horizon that was simply not limited to the curvature of the earth alone. Like India, the width of North America is somewhat immeasurable; maybe more so. And this gives it a sense of separation from its very own individual ingrained patterns. I could call it mystery. Einstein had once said that "the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious," and I was on the lookout for something of the kind, which would fill me with a fullness, a sort of union with the unknown. Perhaps a relationship with something like the imaginary line we call the horizon, forever moving away from the specific moments of our living. And I knew it was my traditional Indian

mind which pushed me on.

Mystery has sculpted this stoic expanse of America, and there is no denyi ng it. Here I was, patiently witnessing the autumn of 1995. The previous year I had spent two intensely enjoyable weeks on the West Coast, my travels taking me down from the serene San Juan islands into the sprawling, dusty city of San Diego, where the readings I gave of my poetry gave me the longed-for opportunities to travel.

The sight of Mount Rainier will always be a long mystery, a grand moment, bringing in that almost pal pable memory that will not go away. I recollect the drunken luminosity of the peak as we passed it by on Delta 255 from Dallas to Seattle; the subsequent shy face of the mountain, shrouded in cloud, as it hung limp from the invisible hands of the sky, and which I never hesitated to watch day after day, with my dear old friend, John Oliver Perry, from the shores of Lake Washington.

There would be people like me, I thought, who would spend much of their time trying to capture the fragile magic of the mountain's colors in their minds alone, and in the end are left merely holding on to the mystery of existence, nothing else. So I decided

to leave behind my cheap 35mm camera every time I stepped out into the open. My mind seemed enough. The lens would only take me away from whatIreally saw.

I should like to talk about two totally different landscapes of the United States which have had a profound effect on my thoughts. Maybe I was notsureofwhoI was as I struggled to absorb the two separate images I saw-one in Washington State in the Pacific Northwest, one in the southeastern state of South Carolina. Both these landscapes were unfamiliar ones, stranger than the India I knew. It seemed to be an open world, almost a vision of another, purer planet, in which one could see, reach up into a higher plane of life. Here, in both these places, strangely enough, the most ordinary elements appeared to take up an intensity of expression that is normally found missing in the Indian landscape.

I could be wrong, yes, but tokens of our awareness remain stuck somewhere in our minds, and the results of silent observation are so deep and abstract that one finds it difficult to talk about them. Any scene, any landscape, of which one becomes an integral part at a specific instant in one's life, is no doubt incomprehensible; there appears only an increased awareness of the self that is linked by an inexplicable silence to an uncertain sense of not needing anything in the world.

Perhaps John Perry, my friend of 20 years, had seen these sights before; and so he wanted me to see them. We knew it was not real virgin forest. The countryside of Washington State has innumerable places to be lost in, and I was looking forward excitedly to visiting those. I was eager especially for isolated sanctuaries away from the crowded shores of Seattle's lake, where one could just feel the warm afternoon summer sun stream down through the sparse spaces it could perhaps find between the trees to dapple the forest floor layered by sorrel and fern and moss.

We parked the dusty old car in a small clearing where the road seemed to end.

Somehow my interest in trees had remained unchanged since my childhood.

Or, more truthfully, it had grown through the years, and one of my deep-rooted urges had always been to see these giant firs and

pines I had read so much about.

The forest footpath opened before us into a rich depth of landscape I had only imagined in my rarest dreams. Denny Creek is a dream place of a prophecy: of a knowing and a not knowi ng. Of knowing through our eyes the stretch of reverent forest as we slowly climbed the narrow twisted path close to the mountain stream on our left.

And of not knowing the silence of sunlight and shadow that seemed to gain a measure of spirituality from unknown, unfound preserves of history and myth.

I remember we kept our voices low. Even our careful, light footfalls appeared to defile the purity of the forest. On all sides of us the forest grew: giant trees of Douglas fir and Sitka pine with their myriad networks of branches. The sun had been blanketed.

There was simply a subdued glow that appeared to emanate from the trees themselves. Wherever I looked, I saw both forest and stream transformed by an inner energy, a pleasing inner light. And through this extraordinary quiet radiance, I could sense an

amorphous, piercing silence-the silence of the forest.

I drew near a great fir tree. My mind and body both wanted to be close to it, to feel its largeness, its silence and its magic.

Instinctively, my eyes traveled upward. My gaze could only take in a mere 30 feet of the huge trunk before it got lost in the maze of intertwining limbs of other trees. I touched the coarse, deeply furrowed bark, marveling at the reservoir of its age, the stillness of its massive body. I let my own body reach out toward this other one, stretching pathetically against it, feeling time, and the brief flash of understanding of what a Iightyear was. All my knowledge of physics had not made me comprehend time and the images of constancy to which we involuntarily turn. Here I was, face to face, against a door. An unknown door of awareness, which Helt and realized I could never enter.

We followed the forest footpath higher and higher. Trees were everywhere, both living and dead, many fallen arbitrarily on the forest floor and across the gurgling stream. The appearance of these trees was the most important fact about them.

Through the forest canopy the giants seemed to breathe their sap into us, offering up their breaths so we could share in part the silent incantations of the years they had lived. Those giant trees belonged to a different world, and I felt the metaphor for time dance away out of reach of our meager human understanding.

So I found that a part of the American Northwest was built of silence. The place of dream was the forest of ancient trees and the dark forest floor of moss and lichen; also where stranger plants wander over the massive trunks softening the rough bark with exquisite flowers. But this quietness was very different. This quietness was of the mystery of life itself. Something I had not experienced in the jagged, masculine ranges of the Rockies in Colorado I had visited two weeks before, or in the unending fields of corn in the Midwest. It was not only there in the roof of leaf and branch high overhead, it took root in the soil of the forest floor, among the blend of twigs, needles and fir cones. And this silence came from the forest itself, standing, breathing, listening to the wind.

he American South holds a remarkable geological fragility. It might be hard for some to sympathize with this view of mine, but I feel that the landscape of the South holds more than the history associated with these places in the southern states. Whether it is Tennessee, or the two Carolinas, one encounters an unaccountable difficulty in judging the landscape. It makes one ask oneself: Is it because of the history which is linked inexorably with it, or because of the attitudes of generations of Americans toward its own history? It is not right that I interfere with movements beyond apparent reality. Here I was only a visitor who seemed to take sustenance from what he saw and felt. And I sensed an extraordinary detachment in the world of the South. But I would only like to talk about a landscape I "discovered" near the small university campus of South Carolina State University (SCSU) in Orangeburg-a place which many visitors would not see.

Was it an indifference to the movement of the blood in my own veins I found in this small southern town? Or was it the stirring of something sublime, that is the material for poetry and for an awareness of human understanding? I do not know. But I came face to face with a time when I felt I had never loved the strange part of myself more.

October was nearing its end. The ground was beginning to show its litter ofleaves. A number of cotton fields we had passed by on our way from the university town of Laurinburg in North Carolina had already been sheared, and the few remaining ones would soon lose their coherent spread of white, as the cotton would be shipped to various mills. Something is always stirring in these old fields, for they seem to sing in the mellow sun as the old cottonpickers used to do. There is so much happening in these open spaces; it is there in the air when someone is intently listening. And each minute one spends here is memory; and history that goes unnoticed as we don't bother to know something of the memory of old cotton fields.

My young friend Bijoy and I took time off one afternoon to walk along the banks of the river that ran through Orangeburg.

Bijoy is young, years younger; but we have

T

always thought alike, seen and loved things alike. He had been living in the U.S. for about a decade now and taught at SCSU. But I was a pilgrim, perhaps just like everybody else who visits the U.S. In front of me was a river, the likes of which I had not seen elsewhere. The River Edisto. Fringed by maples and cottonwoods, the waters of the Edisto looked dark and foreboding. The currents were swift; leaves and small twigs were swept downstream as though with some dark, strange intent. I watched the scene before me with potential unease.

Anyone reading this memoir would surely ask: Why has someone to write about this common-looking, black stream of a river like the Edisto, instead of the Potomac or the Mississippi? Once again, I have no answers for that. The River Edisto is unlike any other river I have seen; centuries stare back at you with black, haughty eyes.

It is a spiritual river. I can't say what I exactly mean by that; but to be there, walking or simply sitting on the bank, seems to bring a physical sensation into you. I felt as though I were inside some cold subterranean cave in the deeps of some sea.

Maybe I tended to look inward, as a silence began to build inside me, and there was a consequent absence of thought.

And yet the sinister atmosphere SUfrounding the river was broken by slivers of sunlight that came down through the trees to be trapped by the clear water of the Edisto. One could see the water striders flitting past on the surface, their frail shadows visible at times on the shallow river floor near the bank where I sat. Beyond us were vague and anonymous depths; the water was the color of soul. On both banks of the river, the trees and the swampy soil mingle with one another when the river overflows, with the decidedly strange sense of things one can never see but feel. And then I notice the queer roots of those trees jutting out of the water like leprous, mutilated human limbs I have often encountered in my own country, startling me.

Here, by the Edisto, I should not have been surprised to find a Pee Wee Indian at my elbow, smoking his clay pipe; nor to see a Southern officer, sitting on his horse, silently watching me from the other bank.

For here time has stood still, and perhaps

one feels that time will bury us when we are still alive. Walking the river bank is an uneasy experience. To add to the queerness of the scene is the weird ash-colored weed, known as Spanish Moss, which grows in different lengths and hangs from the branches of the trees lining the river.

Neither Spanish nor a moss, the wavy, light brushes of the growth appear ghostly against the black Edisto, and add to the mysteries of natural growths. Such things make us talk in whispers when we are here, nothi ng else.

So the South will always have its strange fascination for me, because ofthings I have not been able to understand. I heard a saying during my travels around North America that even a white man can listen closely and understand how the drum is the IndianAmerican's heart. And here I was, another Indian from another land, and un-white.

But there were spirits of the departed that one could sense if one sat long enough and listened to the air. Maybe this is what the spirit does to one, and it does not matter where the spirit comes from.

At the end I feel that ifT have not spoken deliberately about the sprawling gilt-andchromium cities I have visited, it is not because of the sameness of their machine-like faces, but more because of the absence of that need in me to become invisible, which I experienced profoundly in the dark aura of Denny Creek and the Edisto River-to stand to brightness, and wonder at the forest rising pine-scented into the night; or to feel the strange power of a black silent river seep into one's bones.

There appear to be miracles happening around the world, like walking on water, . but for me these are but symbols of the power of silence. America's magical showpieces lie deep inside the country's womb; they leave no signs in the accessible city landscape. But the doors are there, for anyone who chooses to open them.

D About the Author: Jayanta Mahapatra is a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poet, translator and short-story writer whose works have appeared in many anthologies of Indian poetry.

He has been a "writer-in-residence" at several American universities.

ARIVER IN SOUTH CAROLINA "The River Edisto is unlike any otherriver Ihaveseen.

It is a spiritual ri ver.

Ican'tsay whatlexactly mean by that.

The strange power of the black silent river seeps into one's bones."

AFOREST IN WASHINGTON STATE "Wherever I looked I saw both forest and stream transformed by an inner energy.

And through this extraordinary quiet radiance, I could sense an amorphous piercing silencethe silence of the forest around Denny Creek.

This quietness was of the mystery of life itself."

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the only dissenters. These cases left women free to choose to terminate pregnancy at any time during the first trimester of gestation, and significantly limited state power to regulate abortion operations during the second trimester. President Reagan's move in 1983 to secure its reversal failed (six-three).

On balance there was the continuity and the departure from the Warren legacy. As Richard Funston summed up: "What dissimilarities there were between the Warren majority and the Burger majority largely were the reflection not of divergent ideologies but of divergent conceptions of the appropriate role of the Supreme Court in

"No apex court works in an ivory tower. Its outlook and performance reflect the prevailing climate of opinion. That changes with the times. So does the approach of the apex court."

American politics. That is still the most significant debate in American constitutional history" -the core of judicial activism.

William Rehnquist became Chief Justice in 1986. If there is one feature in his approach more pronounced than any other, it is his keenness to enlarge states' rights. On some liberal decisions, like the second reaffirmation of Roe v. Wade in 1992, he was in a minority. But he said in Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida (five-four) that "each State is a sovereign entity in our federal system." He ruled that a federal law governing the terms by which native American tribes can conduct gambling on their reservations to be invalid. In Felker v. Turpin, last June, he drastically truncated federal courts' habeas corpus jurisdiction.

In 1995 the Supreme Court struck down, by a seven-one vote, the all-male admissions policy at Virginia Military Institute.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion tracing the history of gender discrimination. She squarely placed the onus of justification of any discrimina-

tion on the State. Rehnquist's concurrence was limited. He would have upheld the Institute's policy had it provided "a comparable institution for women." In other words, the "separate but equal" policy is acceptable in gender discrimination though not in race relations. Justice Antonin Scalia's solitary dissent was acerbic.

We have but the trends of the Rehnquist Court and they do not permit sweeping characterization. All in all, its accent onjudicial restraint is as pronounced as was the Warren Court's on judicial activism with the Burger Court standing in between in an uneasy transition.

No apex court works in an ivory tower.

Its outlook and performance reflect the prevailing climate of opinion. That changes with the times. So does the approach of the apex court; active in one, restrained in another. In acti vity it must not forget the limits on its power that call for self-restraint. In periods of restraint it must not be unmindful of its duty to assert judicial power when circumstances warrant that.

A change in the political climate was noticeable in 1985 when U.S. Attorney General Edwin Messe III described the decisions of the Court as a "jurisprudence of idiosyncrasy." They were "policy decisions." In an unprecedented retort, JusticeWilliam J. Brennan, Jr., said: "We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way wecan: as 20th century Americans."

Judge Robert H. Bork ably argued the case against judicial activism. He argued that if the ambit of the rights can be enlarged by the courts, won't they increase the powers of the Union as well, one day?

"One form of judicial creativity is no more illegitimate than the other." Judges must not "recreate the Constitution." They must go back to its "original intent." Or else the law will vary with the majority on the court. his takes us back to the fundamentals stated earlier: How far may a judge go legitimately in the exercise of his power however noble his ends may be? In this writer's view, there are, in the main, two limits which he must not exceed. First, he must never forget that he is called upon to dispense justice ac-

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cording to the Constitution and the law of the land. He cannot ask the other branches of the State to stick to constitutional limits when he exceeds his own.

Secondly, while it is a truism that the province of law is life itself, it is equally true that the lawyer is trained in the law.

Complexities of life compel him to familiarize himself with other subjects. A judge who hears a case on the architect or the contractor's negligence, which is alleged to be the cause of the house collapse, will have to read books on architecture as will lawyers appearing in the case. But it is the experts in the subject who must guide the judge.

Zeal leads judges to enter areas with whose terrain they are not familiar; to order minutiae of administration without reckoning with the consequences of their orders.

Judges have made orders not only how to run prisons but also hospitals, mental homes and schools to a degree which stuns the professional. In their judgments they draw on material which is untested and controversial and which they are ill-equipped to evaluate. Judgments of the supreme courts of both India and the U.S. abound with copious quotes from literature on economics, politics, sociology and other intellectual disciplines.

These are part of cautionary tales onjudicial activism. In both India and America the judiciary has performed nobly, the lapses notwithstanding.

That is possible only with an independent judiciary. Chief Justice Rehnquist spoke for all, activists and advocates of restraint, when on April 9, 1996, he told the law students of American University in Washington, D.C., that judicial independence is "one of the crown jewels of our . system of government."

Nearly two decades ago, Chief Justice of India Y.V. Chandrachud expressed the same thought in very nearly the same language: "It is beyond question that independence of the judiciary is one of the foremost concerns of our Constitution."

D About the Author: A.G. Noorani is a constitutional lawyer concerned with civil liberties who contributes regularly to the Statesman, Frontline and various Indian language newspapers.

New Orleans A Spi t

Gumbo of Cultures New Orleans ranksjust behind San Francisco as the most desirable tourist destination among American cities. It's a traveler's dream of richly mottled buildings with filigreed cast-iron balconies, ornate fountains and statues in manicured parks, street musicians and artists, and, above all, gourmet food and all that jazz.

he sweet smell of jasmine. The clickclack of a horse's hooves on cobblestones as it pulls a white carriage outside your window. The resonance of a riverboat's horn in the distance.

The aromas ofbeignet fritters and of coffee being roasted. A sidewalk saxophonist swinging into a spirited rendition of a Louis Armstrong classic.

Ah, the delightful sounds and smells that greet a new morning inN ew Orleans!

In my book-which is thick with memories, having spent 23 years as a travel editor and restaurant critic in New York-New Orleans is one of the world's most engaging cities. And if you live to eat, you don't have to die to go to heaven, just go to "Nawlins," as the local scali it.

New Orleans is one of those places, like Seattle or Copenhagen or Montreal, that is relatively rarely visited because it is tucked away on a side street and not on the way to anywhere else. That's beginning to change as New Orleans emerges as a predominant convention center, and as word spreads of this alluring city of hot food, cool jazz and easy living.

Last year, more than nine million visitors poured into this city of 1.2 million. In recent readers' polls in the Conde Nast Traveler and Travel & Leisure, America's premier travel magazines, New Orleans was rated just behind San Francisco as the most enjoyable city in the United States, in the top 10 "Cities You Love" and as one of the

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Left: A street artist paints a boy's portrait in New Orleans'sfamous French Quarter.

world's best cities for food.

"This is one city where while you're fixing breakfast, you're talking about lunch and thinking dinner," says Anita Ratnam, dancer, choreographer, TV personality and businesswoman, who splits her time between Madras and Manhattan and graduated in the '70s from Tulane University, located in the elegant Garden District of New Orleans.

To understand what makes New Orleans the gourmet capital ofthe world in itself is a delightful voyage of cultural discovery that, in true American tradition, continues to involve and inspire.

While the British were busy settling the Atlantic Coast, the French in Canada set out to discover the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, and in 1682 claimed for France all the land that drained the Mississippi and Missouri rivers (an area 68 percent of the size of present-day India). They christened it the "Louisiana Territory" in honor of King Louis XlV. The site of New Orleans, near the southeastern end of the present American State of Louisiana and about 160 kilometers upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, is another story. It was a gleam in the eye of a Scottish conman, John Law, who operated as a financier and real estate speculator in France.

Law perpetrated a fantastic land scam in 1717 by plastering Europe with colorful posters telling of the fabu lous weal th, grand opportunities and rollicking good times awaiting European investors in "La Nouvelle Orleans."

Good times, indeed! Those who left be-

hind home and hearth found their new home was a mosquito- and alligator-infested swamp, most of it six feet below sea level.

They had no option but to dig in and rough it out, fighting disease, hurricanes and bloody attacks by the American Indians. Eight years later, out of compassion for the poor blighters stuck in the bogs of La Nouvelle Orleans, the French freed 88 women from notorious Parisian prisons and shipped them over as brides for the new settlers.

For the next several decades the Louisiana Territory would seesaw between being owned by France and Spain, with both motherlands adorning New Orleans with architectural splendors.

In the late 1700s, the French-speaking Cajuns in Nova Scotia, Canada, known for their zest for life, were exiled by the British.

Few could adjust to life back in conservative France and were warmly welcomed in New Orleans. Meanwhile, the culture of the Creole (any native-born Orleanian with a direct link to France or Spain) was developing, along with those of the descendants of路 African slaves, American Indians and labor from the nearby Caribbean.

New Orleans-the European Queen of the Mississippi-became an American citizen in 1803 when all of the "Louisiana Territory" (the entire watersheds of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers) was sold

by France to the United States for $15 million. This immense area of 2,150,00 square kilometers doubled the size of the U.S. at that time. Napoleon, who sold it to President Thomas Jefferson, did not have the naval power to defend Louisiana from

the British. And he needed the money to fight his wars. He reportedly said at the close of the sale: "I have given England a maritime rival that sooner or later will lay low her pride." Even then New Orleans was a sassy charming favorite with big spenders from across the Atlantic.

Then came new waves of immigrants-Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Germans and eventually Italians. To reclaim the land from the swamps, they developed a unique pumping system that would serve as the prototype used in Holland, established tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations upriver, turned the port city into the most important gateway to the South, set up banks and bordellos and made New Orleans America's glitziest and wealthiest city. Most telling of all, they established some ofthe continent's grandest restaurants and hotels. hat tradition of receiving newcomers has continued, with 'the newest sizable arrivals being the Vietnamese barely 10 years ago, who took to shrimping and oystering in the swampy bayous (creeks), cultivating exotic vegetables in the incredibly rich Mississippi delta soil, giving the local cuisine an exciting new spin.

Says Anita Ratnam, who in the '70s was the only female graduate student from India at New Orleans's famed Tulane University: "Back then, if you saw another Indian, you'd literally run across the street and hug her!" Today, the Indian population-mostly physicians, engineers and business owners-exceeds 5,000, and at least twice that number of Indians are drawn here by conferences and conventions.

"What makes Nawlins special is that it's not a 'melting pot' of immigrants, but a nicely spiced gumbo of cultures," our taxi driver explained, referring to a local culinary mainstay of gumbo, which gets its name from the African word kingombo for okra (bhindi, in Hindi), a vegetable in a hearty stew of a dozen or more ingredients.

"Like a good gumbo, you need lots of different things, but each ingredient must

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A Cajun cook displays a pan of crawfish-a New Orleans specialty.

In New Orleans you'll always be within sniffing distance of superb restaurants serving memorable culinary creations like this shellfish remoulade sushi roll (Cajun -French -Japanese-Chinese).

stand out, otherwise you'll just have plain 01' stew."

This gumbo of cultures makes sophisticated yet laid-back New Orleans, with its richly mottled buildings and its Gallic-Hispanic traditions, more of a European capital than an American city.

The townhouses, with their courtyards, carriageways and filigreed cast-iron balconies are related to the 17th- and 18th-century Parisian princely residences. It is a traveler's dream city-of ornate fountains and statues in manicured public parks, sidewalk cafes, art galleries, street musicians and artists, and carriage rides on cobblestone streets that curl through historic districts.

Hop aboard a quaint tram (called a streetcar here) at the bustling and colorful 250-year-old French Market, and let the panorama unfold-first the old French Quarter, then the picturesque Riverside Park with its cafes and paddle steamers on the river, up past one of the world's most impressive convention centers, new casinos, through the sleek high-rise downtown, and soon you're clicking along through the Audubon Park and past the world's largest collection of palatial homes in the exclusive Garden District.

No matter where, in New Orleans you'll always be within earshot of live jazz and within sniffing distance of a mouth-watering New Orleans dish cooking.

It is this unique ambience that nurtured a wealth of musicians, entertainers, artists and culinary wizards. Just a short list of its natives include Louis Armstrong, Antoine "Fats" Domino, Pete Fountain, Al Hirt,

Mahalia Jackson, Truman Capote, Louis Prima, Dorothy Lamour, Kitty Carlisle, Bryant Gumbel, Andrew Young, Richard Simmons and Paul Prudhomme.

With no official closing hour, this is a 24-hour city with most of the action all night long on the famous and naughty Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, which is lined with music parlors, art galleries, strip shows, cabarets, pubs, sidewalk cafes and food, food, glorious food as absolutely nowhere else. eing home to the world's fussiest diners means that in New Orleans you can't go wrong wherever you eat out, not even eating "street food" at a pushcart near a construction site where we grabbed a quick, mid-morning bite called Po-Boy-the original five-cent lunch for the "poor boys" who hang around the docks. This, one of the humblest of New Orleans fast foods-oysters spiced and fried, tossed in a zesty gravy and served on crusty French bread-would pass for a gourmet dish anywhere else.

The two predominant culinary traditions of New Orleans were developed by the Cajuns and Creoles.

Generally speaking, Cajun is country cooking, robust and pepper-hot. The Cajun cook uses a variety of sausages, duck, chicken, pork and seafood. Creole, developed by the French and Spanish, is urban fare using expensive herbs and spices and elaborate saucing with cream or wine.

Creole cuisine is categorized in haute Creole (for example, oysters Rockefeller, oysters

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Bienville), and lower Creole or food cooked by the Creole servants (such as red beans and plump sausages cooked withrice).

Paul Prudhomme, owner and renowned chef ofK-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans, says that over the past decade Cajun and Creole have merged into a new kind of cuisine called "Louisiana food."

"For us New Orleanians, sitting down to a meal is a joyous occasion. It is the main attraction of life to be enjoyed in a leisurely manner, lingered over, commented on, savored and remembered."

Indeed, here even the lowly catfish that feeds on the muddy bottom of the Mississippi is treated with respect. It's served with a crunchy coat of crushed pecans.

This is a city of hundreds of memorable culinary creations, including the flaming baked Alaska. Many of the staples created here are worth remembering. Here are some of them (with local pronunciations in parentheses) : ANDOUILLE (ahn-doo-ee): Plump, spicy country sausages, usually served with red beans and rice and other Creole delicacies.

BEIGNET (bin-yay): A delicious, feather-light, square doughnut without the hole, liberally dusted with powdered sugar.

It is consumed by the dozen at any time of the day or night, with New Orleans-style coffee (mixed with roasted chicory) with cream, which is robust yet smooth and resembles Mysore coffee. At night, though, you end your meal with CAFE BRULOT (caf- fay broo-Ioh)-rich coffee, spices, or-

ange peel and liqueurs, blended in a chafing dish, ignited and served in special cups.

Then there's the New Orleans version of the hot dog, the fancy BOUDIN (boo-dan)-a delicious sausage of spicy, pepper-hot pork mixed with onions, cooked rice and aromatic herbs.

The COURTBOUILLON (coo-booyon) here is not some wimpy seafood stock, but a spicy stew or soup made with fish fillets, tomatoes, onions and sometimes mixed vegetables.

New Orleans is famous for its CRAWFISH (sometimes spelled crayfish but always pronounced cra-fish), whichresemble toy lobsters and show up in a variety of preparations, including pies, but most effectively in the ETOUFFEE (ay-too-fay), a tangy, spicy and hearty tomato-based sauce.

GUMBO (gum-bo) is a fantastic anytime one-dish meal-a thick stew of tomatoes, onions, peppers, sausage, shrimp, oysters, crabs, chicken, spices, herbs, rice and thickened with okra.

No matter what, don't pass up a steaming bowlful of JAMBALAYA (jumbo-lie-ya): Tomatoes cooked with shrimp, chicken, celery, onion and an entire shelf of seasonings, including FILE (fee-lay), a native Indian herb made of ground sassafras leaves.

RED BEANS-AND-RICE is a one-meal dish made with a creamy mixture of red kidney beans, sausages, seasonings and rice. It is traditionally served onMondays because it is a "simple" respite after a week of rich dinners and brunches. By the way, the New Orleans brunch is a memorable, belt-busting gastronomic orgy that begins with champagne and is almost always accompanied by live jazz.

True to tradition, New Orleans and Louisiana cuisines continue to evolve as creativity constantly hits new peaks. Call it "fusion" or artistry, New Orleanian chefs continue to create by adapting and adopting from cuisines near and far and improving on whatever's around-such as a plump, succulent and silky smooth sausage made from shrimp, lobsters and smoked oysters in fresh herbs served with a cream-mustard sauce.

At the new and upmarket Bacco's, the style of preparation is "Creole-Italian" featuring enormous, leafy salads, flavored,

colorful pastas (squid ink, beetroot, garlic-pepper, smoked yellow peppers), delicate grilled pork medallions crusted with pecans served with a sauce made from fresh figs, ravioli stuffed with spicy crawfish, oysters Rockefeller soup. Wines-more than 200 varieties of exquisite vintages at Bacco's alone-flow by the bottle, not by the glass, with a different wine with every course. This is unusual for America, especially the South.

"True," says a head waiter at Feelings.

"Butyou'reinNew Orleans."

At the trend-setting Mike's on the Avenue, it is Nouvelle Louisiana cuisine, the dishes as appealing to the palate as to the eye. Here, Asian influences-particularly Thai and Vietnamese-come through clearly. eafood preparations borrow liberally from India's Konkan and Malabar coasts. Kerala-style spicing crusts the grilled crawfish; mango with fresh coriander make for a blissful sauce.

As Indian immigrants arrive and add to New Orleans's "cultural gumbo," the obligatory Indian tandoor houses are showing up. Says Jaspal Arora, a transplant from Delhi via Toronto: "What I've learned about food here in the past one year is more than I did in the previous 34 years of my life." In December 1997, Arora hopes to open the Orlean Dhaba, a courtyard restaurant surrounded by fountains and wall planters, the courtyard pocked with tandoor pits. The envisioned fare: "Punjabi New Orleans-rajma-and-rice, chicken tandooried with Cajun spicing."

Meanwhile, New Orleans is attracting its share of Indians-not all of them are medical or technical folks.

Last November, I bumped into Ravi Melwani, owner of Kids Kemp (Bangalore's most zany, eye-catching store) at the convention of the International Association of Amusement Parks.

Melwani was in New Orleans to check out costumed characters, virtual-reality games and the latest in indoor entertainment for his new Bangalore store, Fort Kemp. Also at the convention center was Jai Ghosal, handing out litera-

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Clockwise from top: Live jazz, water fountains, festive decorations-some of the many props New Orleans restaurants use to make eating and drinking a joyous occasion.

The French Quarter with its shimmering lights is like a scene from afairy tale at night.

Street artists displaying their works symbolize the rich cultural traditions of this cosmopolitan city. Seafood stews are among the hundreds of mouthwatering specialties. Even vegetable andfruit vendors tastefully decorate their stalls to entice tourists.

ture promoting his family's arcadegames-custom-manufacturing abilities in Ahmedabad. "I was here last year, too. It is a great fun bazaar and very good for business."

Booming business, great restaurants, multicultural ambiance and Old World atmosphere all combine to make New Orleans a tourist paradise. This is a city made for walking, although in summer the heat and humidity rival Bangkok or Calcutta. And walk we did-until a couple of hours before sunrise every night. But at the end of our fourth day, I left the city a full eight pounds heavier.

On a day when we were particularly stuffed to the gills, we decided to lunch lightly and were advised to confine our appetites to the MUFULETTA (moo-fooletta), the "simple" New Orleans sandwich.

To call this a sandwich is like saying Buckingham Palace is a cottage. A mufuletta has layers of Italian meats, cheeses and a salad of chopped olives. Stuffed in a tha/i-size loaf of yeasty, delicious Italian bread, it is consumed New Orleans-style, with a big glass of red wine, seated beside a fountain near the French Market, listening, to a sidewalk Dixieland jazz quartet break into Fats Domino's "Jambalaya."

Indeed, when New Orleanians are not dining on mouth-watering fare, they're singing about it.

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About the Author: Vinod Chhabra, for 23 years travel editor and restaurant critic with Hearst Newspapers in New York, now splits his time as president of Asia America Marketing in Bangalore and copublisher of Today Magazines Group in Ocala, Florida.

SAVE THE The American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad, one of the two largest repositories of Americana outside the United States, faces a budget crunch.

A distinguished scholar and senior academic fellow at the Centre makes a persuasive case why "such a monumental institution cannot be allowed to go waste." stillremember my first visit to the mandir of American studies in Hyderabad. That was three decades ago this summer.

Amazing it may seem, but how can anyone, least of all a scholar in search of research materials, forget his foray into the treasure house of Americana? Since the summer of 1967, I have come again and again to the American Studies Research Centre (ASRC). Each time I found it to be better than before in many ways, be it food for thought or just food, be it the ambience of scholarship in the library or the friendly exchange of ideas at the dining table.

The collection of printed works has grown enormously in depth and range, as have the non-print resources for research on every aspect of life and letters in the United States. The book collection is computerized. Collecting relevant bibliography of books can be done in ajiffy. For a pittance, the scholar-member can get a printout of all the books available on his research topic or area of study or teaching. The CD-ROM and PRO-Quest take only a few minutes longer to line up the periodical literature (not mere references). The information retrieval technology on hand is simply amazing and the task of collecting relevant materials has become simple. Fortunately, however, the scholar is still required to read, reflect and do his research by himself.

The fact that after 33 years of remarkable service this mecca of American studies should find itself in an unprecedented financial crisis comes as a shock. Unbelievable as it may seem, the sad denouement is an immediate challenge. The ASRC today stands at

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the crossroads of its history. The sole source of ASRC funding so far, the U.S. Government is caught in a severe fiscal crunch. The Clinton Administration is going through a tough (and hostile) congressional review of all "foreign" operations with a view to downsize, restructure, cut and eliminate projects and programs that are "not essential" in the post-Cold War world. Painful and sizable reductions of outlays across the board are on the anvil for U.S.-aided programs including the best and the most successful ones like the ASRC. The expiry of PL-480 rupee funds, a cornucopia at one time, simply adds to the serious resource crunch confronting the ASRC in the immediate future. The deadline is September 1998. Unless alternative sources offunding are mobilized in time and on an adequate scale, the ASRC may even be closed down.

Early Beginnings When India attained independence in 1947, many a thoughtful leader in higher education, public life and government realized that there was an urgent need for and acute scarcity of men and women knowledgeable about the world.

It was in this context of national awareness of the vi tal need to haveon hand people acquainted with the outside world (both at the popular as well as at scholarly/research levels) that familiarity with America, its institutions and public affairs acquired impor-. tance for the nation. By the end of World War II, the United States emerged as the strongest power on earth, unequalled in military, economic and technological fields. Subsequent ideological polarization actually enhanced the relevance and value of American studies for India. The global competition between the two superpowers propelled the United States to become a powerful champion and acknowledged leader of the free world.

For the U.S., the Cold War provided the rationale, motivation and the urgency to promote American studies all over the world, including India. The availability of U.S. PL-480 rupee funds supplied the wherewithal for the beginning, burgeoning and blooming of American studies in India over the last four decades.

Americans saw they had a lot to gain by Indians learning more

about them. Indians thought they had a lot to gain by learning as much as possible about America and Americans.

Responding to the changed global context, the Fulbright program in India under the leadership of Olive I. Reddick nurtured American studies in Indian universities in a variety of ways. A limited number of predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships were earmarked for the subject. The United States Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) and the United States Information Service (USIS) promoted and sustained a variety of academic programs: conferences, seminars, curriculum development workshops, research guides meetings, interdisciplinary courses on American civilization for college and university teachers, publication of low-cost textbooks, their translation into Indian languages, new textbooks in Hindi written by Indian scholars for use in Indian colleges and universities, etc.

Amidst such an array of programs and activities, two pathbreaking developments in the growth of systematic study and research on the United States occurred in the early 1960s. One involved university-to-university cooperation between the two countries and the other was the launching of a central research resource devoted to the study of the United States. Under the initiative of the Educational and Cultural Bureau of the U.S. Department of State, an ambitious plan was launched to create "Chairs in American Civilization" in three universities in India. These were concei ved as interdisciplinary programs adopting a holistic approach in tune with the intellectual trends in American studies circles in the United States. Bombay, Osmania and Jadavpur universities entered into five-year agreements with the universities of Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Missouri, respectively. Although these university-to-university agreements waxed and waned over time for a variety of reasons, on the whole the American literature program at Osmania University and American government and politics program at Bombay University gathered momentum, and are doing reasonably well today.

Osmania University Library building. Over the years a galaxy of distinguished scholars of history, literature, politics and American studies served as directors and gave the Centre academic leadership, its distinct Americanness and helped it secure its pivotal place in India.

The Centre's achievements have been impressive on all counts. Membership has grown from 198 in 1964 to more than 6,000 today. Members come from every nook and corner ofIndia and are spread across a multiplicity of disciplines. ASRC also has an impressive and growing number of internationallregional members from Asia and Africa. The collection of printed books, journals, reference materials, other serials, etc., has grown from less than 16,000 in 1964 to more than 140,000. The non-print collection consisting of microfilms, microfiche, films, video cassettes, CD-ROMs, etc., is in the order of 50,000. Over 3,000 MPhil and PhD dissertations on every conceivable aspect of American society and life-its culture, history, literature, politics, public life, economy, etc.-have been successfully completed utilizing the Centre's holdings. This collection, called

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Launching the ASRC The pathbreaking institutional development in the growth of American studies in India was the launching of the ASRC. The historic meeting of Indian academics at Mussoorie in the summer of 1962 was the act of creation. The USEFI, the US IS and a large assemblage of Indian academic specialists of American history, literature and politics in unison sought the establishment of an all-India resource center for American studies. A memorandum of association was adopted. In 1964 the American Studies Research Centre was launched. The credit for the choice of Hyderabad as the location for the Centre goes to the then Vice Chancellor of Osmania University, D.S. Reddy. He offered land on the campus and gave an interim "home" for the ASRC. ASRC began its work in two rooms on the first floor of the

Indian Contributions to American Studies (ICAS), is the real showpiece of ASRC. The number of books borrowed by outstation scholars is quite high despite the ever increasing restrictions (by way of categories and security deposits) and rising costs of postage and handling. The number of scholars using the library for research has grown phenomenally since the initial years; it now hovers around 22,000 per year.

All in all, the ASRC is a vast resource for research on the United States. The Centre's collection of Americana is the largest-or the second largest-outside the U.S. The Kennedy Center in Berlin probably has a larger number of audio, audiovisual and other non-print materials than has the ASRC, whereas our print collection outnumbers theirs. However, the ASRC's record ofMPhil and PhD dissertations based on its collection and the number and quality of scholar-users is simply unmatched.

Furthermore, over the last few years, the ASRC has become a prized American studies resource for all of Asia and Africa. Most recently we had a scholar from Mongolia! US IS posts in many parts of the world are finding it highly attractive (academically as well as fiscally) to send their scholars to the ASRC for study and research in American studies. During the last three years as many as 125 "regional scholars" from 25 different countries came to the ASRC to do research and/or participate in courses there. This new-found utility ofthe Centre is likely to grow in size and scope, especially when shrinking budgets have become a reality.

The visiting faculty over the years have included such luminar-

The list of ASRC's achievements adds up to a remarkable record of which any research institute anywhere in the world could be truly proud. ies as Joel Porte, Leslie Fielder, Marshall Fishwick, Ed Gustad, Ray Browne, Nathan Glazer, Pat Moynihan, Carl Degler, Charles Curran, Earl Rovit, Pulitzer Prize-winners R.W.B. Louis and Gordon Wood and many others. Directors, who are visiting Fulbright professors in their own right, have added to the richness of the resource persons on hand.

Workshops for Research Guides in American studies, an innovative program aimed at enhancing the quality of research-guidance, are held regularly on different university campuses. These are centered on the guides because they playa crucial role (far more than their counterparts in the West) in the research work leading to MPhil and PhD degrees in India. The most recent such workshop was held in Shimoga in December 1996. Twenty teachers from universities in South India, who are guiding research in American studies (among other subjects), and many senior professors from different departments of the universities participated in exchanging ideas on guiding research, selecting relevant research and writing publishable research, etc.

Over the decades the ASRC has conducted a large number of local, national and international seminars/conferences on a whole range of issues relating to American studies. A significant number of seminar papers and proceedings have been brought together in monographs or books. In some cases, selected papers have been published in the form of a special issue of the ASRC's biannual journal, Indian Journal of American Studies. This 25-year-old flagship of the Centre enjoys high academic standing in learned circles at home and abroad. It has provided a worthy outlet for Americanists in India.

Achlevemen's in Perspective The list of ASRC's achievements is endless, and adds up to a remarkable record of which any research institute anywhere in the world could be truly proud. The most significant contribution of the ASRC is to be seen in the quantity, quality, range and depth of research in American studies it has induced, promoted and sustained. Over 3,000 MPhil and PhD dissertations listed, cataloged and accessioned as Indian Contributions to American Studies are a living testament to this unique achievement. Many of these are published as books and monographs in their own right. A whole generation of Americanists has sprung up and is doing as well as, if not better than, any other such branch of research and learning in India's higher education system.

All this was attained in American studies in this country because India felt a deep need for this subject. The continental scale and multicultural complexity of the U.S. are extremely meaningful and relevant for India. There was interest at the top. Committed scholars were available and could be mobilized. Above all, key institutions were put in place. The ASRC was an institution with a mission and a vision. By all accounts, its achievements are remarkable in themselves. They are also remarkable in comparison with other institutions and agencies in this country-as well as in comparison with what has been accomplished in other countries (including those in which the PL-480 largess was also on hand).

All the American evaluations, including the most recent one, "The Carter Report," not only gave a favorable rating to the ASRC's record of achievements across the board, but also adjudged it as the most cost effecti ve dollar -for-dollar in comparison with such research centers anywhere in the world.

Where Do We ~o From Here?

Naturally, it takes money to do all this and more. The Centre's annual budget has grown from its modest beginnings in the 1960s to $340,000 plus in recent years.

Now, however, the Centre is ensured of funds only for fiscal years 1997 and 1998. This less-than-two-year period is to be used for raising funds from other sources on an adequate scale. The present academic director is to be succeeded by a manager-cum- fundraiser. If the fund-raising efforts don't fructify in time, September 1998 could be the end of the road for the ASRC. A recent message from USIA stated: "The New Manager will be charged to produce a comprehensive report on ASRC's situation and outlook with a set of recommendations for future operation of the ASRC due by the end of calendar year 1997. The report will examine the feasibility of all options for ASRC's survival, including moving the Centre from Hyderabad to another location appropriate to what may become the institution's redefined mission. In January 1998 the agency will decide what further support, if any, may be warranted for the ASRC or whether it would simply make more sense to close the institution, to merge it with another organization, and/or to distribute its large collection of research materials."

Such a monumental institution as the ASRC cannot be allowed to go waste simply because its historic source of supportthe U.S. Government-may be withdrawn. Other funding sources

have to be tapped. The ASRC on its part has to reconceptualize its mission, resituate itself in tune with the changed global scenario, and have a long-term vision of where it wants to go. Ithas got to retool itself to traverse along new pathways and reach new goals. In doing so the ASRC should not lose sight of its great strength.

While retaining the primacy for American studies and notabandoning its international perspective, the ASRC should stretch outward and branch out into new areas, activities and programs with an eye on their potential to attract outside funding on an adequate scale. Also, the general membership of the ASRC and all the others concerned about the future of American studies in India should participate in an exploration of ways and means to raise funds.

Help From the Privette Sedor?

American studies is the raison d' etre of the ASRC and promoting and sustaining research and teaching in the area has been and will have to continue to be its core mission. However, the original mission needs to be modified with a view to enhancing ASRC's relevance to and utility for India's higher education system. ASRC must also move a bit beyond the purely academic realm and offer programs and services meaningful to the world of Indian business.

Indeed, Indian business (especially, perhaps, Indo-U.S. joint ventures) hopefully will playa majorrole in fund-raising forthe ASRC The Centre should enter the field of human resources development for the 21 st century. For example, its vast holdings can easily become the basis for fashioning meaningful "training" programs beyond American studies. In international relations, in social and economic development at home, challenging programs should be devised for the benefit ofIndian government officials and business professionals, NGOs and other activist groups. One way ASRC can make itself more useful and ensure its continuation is to devise with the cooperation and support of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs a special three- to four- week intense "i mmersi ng" exercises in the politics and public affairs of the U.S. and its cultural ethos, etc., for Indian Foreign Service officers as well as for economic, commercial and legal officers. Nobody can and should underestimate the crucial need for a widespread knowledge of the United States and its ways oflife, government and politics on the part ofleaders and people of India (as well as the other countries in ASRC's "region"). Tailor-made "know-how" programs and specially designed trairung courses cannot materialize from nowhere. They have to grow from the solid base of across-the-board acaderllically oriented study and research sustained on a long-term basis. That is what the ASRC is all about.

Similarly, the ASRC could plan and conduct specially designed programs for senior and middle-level executives of companies engaged in trade and commerce between the two countries on the ways of the U.S. business and its unique features, and the cultural milieu in which they function. The ASRC is by far the most ideal location for such an enterprise. The Centre can take the initiative to plan and conduct similar "training" programs on Indian Government and politics as well as Indian cultural ethos, etc., in conjunction with Indian institutions and scholars. Lectures and discussion sessions on the "Indian-culture-and-values" context of

its economics and politics can complete the picture.

Over the decades the ASRC has conducted study courses for younger scholars and research guides workshops for senior academics in American studies. The Centre can easily branch out and do sirllilar programs in other areas. After all, research methods, study techniques and writing skills do not vary that much across disciplines or subject areas. In this context, the three-year grant from the Ford Foundation to the ASRC for the enhancement of research in international relations deserves special mention. M. Glen Johnson, a former ASRC director, took the bold initiative to diversify and branch out in a significant manner. The study courses and Research Guides workshops have clearly demonstrated that ASRC has the intellectual flexibility, administrative capability and infrastructure facilities to make the switch and make it work. The Ford grant, unfortunately, is due to end later this year.

There's still another way that the ASRC can be saved. The University Grants Commission of India (UGC) could be approached to recognize such courses in research methods to be on par with the orientation and refresher courses the Commission supports financially all over the country. The consequent augmentation of opportunities available for college and university teachers to improve their skills and competence will, one hopes, be welcomed by the UGC and the academic community in the country. Efforts should be made to seek the necessary recognition and program funds from the UGC Another possibility is to seek UGC funds under the rubric of area studies. It recently included American studies under its purview.

This route, however, has its limitations, because program and project money can go only so far and no further. Programs may wax and wane, but the core staff should be on hand to keep the library in good shape and continue acquisitions of research materials and renew serials at least at a minimum viable level. It is here that the recently formed ASRC Hyderabad Foundation in the United States under the leadership of Ed Harrell, most recent among the dynamic directors, can be of immense help.

If the seniors in the fraternity of Americanists in India take the lead, a real spirited campaign may yield results. All the colleges and universities benefiting from the ASRC should be mobilized to contribute reasonable sums to the corpus of the ASRC Board Members can help. Suggestions should be invited from all "concerned" and from committed scholars/members of the ASRC in India and abroad. Something like an alumni fund-raising campaign should be made on a permanent basis.

Let us all do what we can to save the ASRC. If there is a will, there is a way! It should be possible to raise funds in today's India.

There must be scores and scores of people who are willing and ready to chip in and help in fund-raising as well as spreading the word about the ASRC's magnificent record. Mobilizing a few leaders can and will make the difference.

D About the Author: B. Ramesh Babu, senior academic fellow in in/ernational relations at the ASRC, is a leading Indian expert on American government and political institutions. He s/udied and taught at the Indian School of International Studies, University of Bombay. He has also laug ht at seve ral Ame rican uni ve rsities, including Princeton.

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