Span: June/July/August 1997

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/ A Message to India on its Fiftieth Anniversary of Independence from

William

J. Clinton

President of the United States of America

am pleased to salute the citizens of India on the fiftieth anniversary of your nation's • independence, For all of us who cherish democracy, this is an occasion for great celebration and a reminder of the debt we owe to the men and women whose struggles won for us blessings of liberty that we enjoy today. . . Over the course of the past"fifty years, India has confronted many challenges, but has stayed true to its founding principles. In so doing, India has become a model for other nations and peoples around the globe who are still striving to build civil soCieties, to institutionalize democratic values of free expression and religion, and to find strength in their diversity.

The people of the United States and India have long benefited from each other's wisdom and experience, a process that has enriched us all and has fortified the foundations. on which our democracies rest. In recent years, the bonds we share have developed an important new levels...pf bilateral dimension, as economic reforms in India have generated unprecedented trade and investment. \ TheDnite~ States seeks to further deepen these and other ties in ways that will advance the security and prosperity of our nations and help us to keep faith "Yith the principles that guided the founders of our democracies. we recognize that our two nations also As India marks this milestone of independence, share a special responsibility for promoting peace. The next fifty years offer us a/great opportunity to broaden and deepen our partnership and to work together for p~ace and progress not only for our own cOlmtries, but also for the world.

I am honored to congratulate India on fifty years of independence and to extend to the citizens of this great nation the best wishes of all Americans for lasting peace, freedom, and prosperity. Strengthened by our past achievements .and united by our dreams for the future, we set forth into the final years of this century full of hope for the promise of the next.

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A LETTER

FROM

nthis special issue of SPAN, America honors India on the Golden Jubilee of its independence.

We review 50 years of Indo-American relations and lookat what the next half century might bring.

Relations between India and the United States over this half century have had their highs and lows. This is recalled in the article "The Ambassadors Speak" (page 14), where previous American emissaries recall their days in this country. One of the most perceptive remarks is that of John Gunther Dean (Ambassador from 1985 to 1988). "India, like the United States," Dean said, "has a sense of mission in the world, what we call manifest destiny. Like the U.S., India feels she has a contribution to make to the world."

If political relations have had their ups and downs, economic relations have been going only up. Since India liberalized its economy in the early nineties, the booming growth of Indo-U.S. business linkages has been remarkable. SPAN has covered these linkages heavily in the last two years, so I "viII not dwell on them here.

Then there are the culturallit'lkages. Ambassador Wisner, in his farewell-to-India interview (page 20), speaks ofthe importance of cultural ties. "Culture and the arts are enormously important to the Indian spirit," he says. He is right. And cultural ties between our two peoples have always been strong, ever since the amazing influence of the Vedic classics on some of the greatest American writers of the 19th centuryEmerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Melville. These literary ties-and the philosophic, artistic, music, dance linkages of 200 years-are the subject of this issue's major picture story, "The Cultural Bondings" (page 28).

On India's Golden Jubilee, we look back to the past and we look ahead to the future. For a look to the past, in addition to "The Ambassadors Speak," we are honored to have as oUf lead article (page 2) a "personal memoir" on India andAn1erica by a distinguished Indian writer who is also a member of the family that has played such a large role in India's independence: Nayantara Sahgal, novelist, political commentator, daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru. Ms. Sahgal reinforces the belief that both of our nations have a unique "sense of mission" when she says "we are similar in ways we don't realize." In her conclusion she says: "I cannot imagine a time or a circumstance when either America, an orderly democracy, or India, a chaotic one, would settle for any authoritarian path to human development. No such plan would get far off the ground. The practice of freedom becomes a habit."

For the future, we have some heady predictions by Pramit Pal Chaudhuri in "The RoadAhead" (page 10).

"There is every likelihood T ndia and America will get to know each other a lot better in the coming years," says Chaudhuri. "Their links will go beyond their ambassadors,

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commercial attaches and visa officers who served as the symbols of past exchange. Instead, future bilateral relations could be about the interaction of a large cross section of civil society in both talking countries." Government-to-government will decrease and the dialogue between "the bits and pieces that make up a nation" will increase.

The key point is that the information superhighway and global capital markets acknowledge computer terminals rather than national borders. International relations will b. quite different in the future. The word "nation" may no longer be relevant. Future ties between two countries will be determined not by military alliances or shared votes at the U.N. but by how well their business executives and NGOs get along with each other-and by the amount of trade and investment.

"The nation-state is making way for the network," says Chaudhuri. "Diplomats may continue to push around files labeled with the problems of yesteryear: territory, weapons, treaties and similar fuddy-duddy issues. The future currency of international togetherness ",rillbe things qui te outside their scope: scientific research, subcontracts, language, immigrants and websites ....

"Whether on human rights orthe environment or child labor, [NGOs in both India and America] have worked closely to form a united front and lobby both their governments accordingly."

He discusses the Indian diaspora-the NRI network-and says its strongest and most substantive connections V\rithIndia are being formed by the one million Indians in the U.S. For proof of this, look at websites and patterns of investment. "The steady flow of hundreds of thousands of Indian students to the U.S. continues to top off this network with the sort of educated, technically proficient and affluent people that networks thrive on."

Geography has become so unimportant that it does not matter where these NRIs reside, or whether they move back and forth between India and America, as is likely. As long as they have interests in both places, they add to the network.

And much of this network is commercial. Chaudhuri concludes: "The next 50 years may see the rise of an economic bond that may push the cultural relationship between the two countries to transcendental levels. " In sum, the predictions are optimistic for everybody except diplomats like me. This brave new world ofIndo-Arnerican relations is one foreseen by many experts-a transcendental bonding between our two peoples. In the next half century we will see the further evolution of that mysterious commonality Ambassador Dean mentioned-that sense of mission, that manifest desti ny.

INDIAAND AMERICA

A Personal Memoir he first American sounds I heard were on gramophone records: "Somewhere the sunis shining, so honey don't you cry .... " And my earliest American images came straight out of Hollywood. The movies I saw were selected for their lighthearted child-worthiness, starring a nimble Fred Astaire and a silver-spangled Ginger Rogers swirling in the clouds; a dimpled candied confection called Shirley Temple; Nelson Eddy and Jeanette Macdonald singing their hearts out in duets.

I sat with my sisters in a nine-anna seat at the Picture Palace or the Palladium or the Majestic in Mussoorie, my eyes riveted to the screen, willing the proj ector not to break down as it sometimes did, and hoping hail wouldn't hit the tin roofin a deafening monsoon downpour. I was no blase moviegoer. I was part of it all. Every image on the screen had a startling clarity and every emotion made an overwhelming impact. There I was, eight or nine years old, dressed all in handspun handwoven khadi, and scrubbed in swadeshi soap, in thrall to Hollywood. I stayed glued to those enrapturing images until The End was flashed across the screen and the audience stood up to the strains of God Save the King. This was the signal for rebels against empire like my small self to walk out of the hall.

On the three- or four-mile walk back to Landour-the last part of it steeply uphill-I dragged behind my sisters. I was still half in a dream, my imagination working hard to keep the dazzle of Ginger Rogers from evaporating into the mists of

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In a series of vignettes drawn from her life, a distinguished writer reflects on the ties that bind our two countries.

"I cannot imagine a time or a circumstance when either America, an orderly democracy, or India, a chaotic one, would settle for any authoritarian path to human development.

No such plan would get far offthe ground. The practice offreedom becomes a habit."

Mussoorie. Those dancing feet of hers were a kind of insurance that somewhere the sun was really shining. In that magical somewhere people were born free. They didn't have to spend their lifetimes fighting for freedom and being separated from their children again and again by prison bars. I had reason to be profoundly grateful to Ginger Rogers and her spun-sugar ilk.

But I didn't think of them or the songs I heard on the gramophone as "American."

It never occurred to me to connect them with the flesh-and-blood Americans I had already come across.

Of these real people the first was Sam Higginbotham at the Agricultural Institute in Naini, across the Jumna bridge from our house in Allahabad. He had been to Anand Bhawan, the home my parents shared with my uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, and my father who was a keen horticulturist had once taken me along on a visit to him in N aini. Of their conversation, as they strolled up and down a garden path, the sentence that sticks is Higginbotham's final weighty pronouncement: "We will talk about the bullocks on Monday." Which bullocks, and why Monday, I never did find out, but the ponderous nasal emphasis that held down each word till Higginbotham's impressive girth was ready to move it on, gave that sentence a staggering significance. I must have registered, too, the fact that this language, which was English and yet not English, proclaimed as clearly as anything could that its speaker came of people who followed in nobody's footsteps. It was an invigorating thought.

My conclusion was borne out when I spent a day soon afterward with a missionary family at the Jumna Mission in Naini, to get acquainted with their daughter, with whom I was going to travel in the school party to an American boarding school in Mussoorie. I thought her name was Jenny May Sweetheart and her little sister's sounded like Jocelyn Sweetie-Pie, these being what their mother called them.

Sweetheart and Sweetie-Pie, my first white playmates, were of absorbing, almost anthropological interest to me, not only because of their names, their plump whiteness and their fluffy yellow hair, but because they ate things I had never heard of calJed waffles and succotash and angel food and a soup that went by the exotic name of chowder.

At Woodstock the novelty of their bursting health and their accents wore off when I made other American friends. Later their parents and m'ine befriended each other.

Among these adults were remarkable men and women. Anna Mow produced American cakes and casseroles in,a primitive makeshift oven, kept open house and fed all comers as generously as if she knew the food would grow and multiply like the loaves and fishes. William and Charlotte Wiser's years in the United Provinces [now Uttar Pradesh] had given them an intimate knowledge of the villages in their area, reflected in the title of their book Behind Mud Walls. And there were those who left their names and contributions behind in the medical and educational institutions they built-the Ewing Christian College in Allahabad, the Forman Christian College in Lahore and the home for children of lepers near Dehra Dun, among others.

At school, Alan Parker, principal of Woodstock (known as Pakku behind his back), was in a class by himself. Every Thursday at assembly his long loose frame leaned over the lectern on the dais to remind us we must "launch out in our faith," giving me the distinct impression that this was as necessary- as grammar or geography and a lot more urgent. There are people whose presence reassures because they are as great-hearted as they appear to be.

Pakku was one such, striding lankily up

the ramp to the classroom buildings, or towering like a tree over a six-year-old to say hello, or conferring earnestly with us and then with the Almighty at assembly.

Christianity, hitherto linked in my mind with the Viceroy's God and his imperial power, came down to me from the dais as a just and gentle creed.

In those days missionaries were required by the (British) Government of India to guarantee they would stay clear of politics.

My parents' newfound friends must have been bound by it. What bound them to us was their sympathy for the national movement for independence and their admiration

from the pulpit to their congregations in America, making India's struggle for freedom come alive as the great human event it was, at a time when leading newspapers abroad were caricaturing the Mahatma as a humbug or a freak. A 1939 film, Gunga Din, had the evil chieftain of a band of thugs made up to look like Gandhi. Not surprisingly, the Americans we knew who strove to set the record straight seemed like a new sincere breed of white man in Asia.

My education at Woodstock came about as a result of Gandhi's appeal to patriots to boycott British goods and institutions. It was why my grandfather, Motilal Nehru,

Rebels against the Raj. On vacation from the Woodstock School, Nayantara (left) and her younger sister Rita walk beside Mahatma Gandhi in Allahabad. Atfar right is Congress leader J.B. Kriplani.

for Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent leadership of it. Naturally they didn't think of this as "politics." To them it was plain commonsense that liberty was everybody's birthright. Nor did we think of them as "missionaries" although evangelism was their calling and their purpose. In the best tradition of give-and-take, they who had come here to preach the gospel according to Jesus Christ took back with them the gospel according to Gandhi. We had a book about Gandhi called The Christ of the Indian Road

by E. Stanley Jones in our library at Anand Bhawan. He and others introduced Gandhi

had ordered a bonfire ofthe family's British possessions. It was why he, along with my uncle, my father and countless Indians had given up their professions to work full-time for the national movement and spend years injail. An American school turned out to be a happy choice after the rigors of a convent, where I had had to stand up when teacher entered the classroom, learn by rote and feel the ruler crack my palm when I didn't know an answer. A dismal textbook called Highroads of History informed me how heroically the empire had been built and the natives vanquished. At Woodstock the deci-

"The coming of independence brought India the opportunity, at last, to act in her

mal system and American spelling made classroom life a breeze, and stories like Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and "Ichabod Crane" opened up more cheerful vistas than Highroads of Literature ever had. Instead of the King and Queen's portraits in the hall, Woodstock had student government. I was used to democracy. We had itathomewhere nodecision concerning us children was ever taken without a family council presided over by the youngestmember. But it was the first time I had encountered democracy outside. Woodstock had its rules and its quota of prescribed religionhymns at assembly, grace before meals, church on Sundays-but the relaxed atmosphere gave all these the verve of cooperative enterprises. And after the ritual formality of convent prayers, Pakku's extempore observations built up a pleasing sense of anticipation. "Thou who art innerested in all the things that innerest us," he would pray, and pause, leaving me guessing what would come next.

Years later my older sister and Ifound ourselves at college in America, again for nationalist reasons. The war was on. Japan was

overrunning Asia. The British, French and Dutch were in retreat from their colonial possessions, and in India the Congress Party was demanding self-government so that it could rally the country for its own defense.

When this demand was turned down, Gandhi called on his countrymen to carryon a Do or Die struggle until the British Government quit India. Tens of thousands ofIndians were imprisoned during the QuitIndia movement, my parents among them, and it was fromjail they had to make the decision to send us overseas. My sister, Lekha, a university student who had just been released from seven months' imprisonment herself, had been refused reentry to university unless she stayed out of political activity. This was unthinkable, so for America we set sail after hurried arrangements had been made by family members who were outside jai1. Two heartwarming gestures from Wellesley College cheered our anxious parents, the award ofthe first Mayling Soong Scholarship to Lekha and a cable from the college president saying: "Wellesley proud to welcome your daughters." first voyage had to be a strange experience.

This one was, aboard a troopship packed with 700 Polish refugees, that changed course to take on, at New Zealand, a cargo of marines who had been wounded in the South Pacific. I have often thought of our teenage transfer from a small, albeit politically important town in North India to torpedo-ridden high seas, and then from San Pedro harbor across an unknown continent by train to the towers and sights of Manhattan, as an adventure to compare with any of Sinbad the Sailor's. From Manhattan to Wellesley's 400 tranquil acres in Massachusetts, where I spent the next four years, completed this saga of the unexpected.

I would have been less prepared for being flung across the world if it had not been for the world-consciousness I had grown up with. There was a great coming

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and going between Anand Bhawan and the wider world. The house attracted crowds who thronged there from all over India to "sightsee" one of the centers of the national movement, where Congress leaders foregathered to decide what next; where family decisions were taken in consultation with Mahatma Gandhi; and where foreign visitors came to hold talks with my uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru. Among these were British Quakers, Chinese scholars and American journalists, including John Gunther, Edgar Snow and Vincent Sheean. In between the long absences from home imposed by jailor other commitments, activity filled the house and support for the Congress Party's provincial and national programs was organized from it. But nothing about the national cause or the goal of independence came over as narrowly national. The grown-ups' talk covered international issues ranging over the years from Italy's invasion of Abyssinia to the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, making these sound like disasters affecting ourselves.

Oddly enough, this sensitivity to tragedies within and beyond our borders was always balanced by an irrepressible optimism. The very walls of the house breathed it. I knew by osmosis that it was a wonderful world in spite of its sorrows, and that its gifts and riches were within reach of the aspiring, inquiring mind. Gradually I became less dependent on Ginger Rogers as a talisman against bleakness and moved into the tide of energy and involvement that flowed in and out of Anand Bhawan. As a living part of its tradition, I waited impatiently to grow up so that I, too, could go to jail.

On the troopship, Lekha held her own with poise, answering questions about India from the handful of ordinary passengers like ourselves and a group of friendly marines. I was awestruck by the amount of food the navy fed us. Who could possibly be that hungry? But huge helpings were served out by the stout stocky mess sergeant known as Mac, who for some reason ad-

own best interests, according to her own perception of what those interests were."

dressed thin pale me, floating about like a ghost in a sari, as Rosie.

"Hey, Rosie! You ever bin to the U.S. of A.?" he demanded, unloading a mountain of meat and potatoes onto my tray.

I shook my head.

"Well, how d'ya think you're gonna like it when you get there, Rosie?"

I couldn't hold up the queue while I thought of an answer to this perplexing question. How could I answer it at all? But what I understood by it was an Americaconsciousness that was as different from country-consciousness in general as ritual convent prayers had been from Pakku's spontaneous relationship with the Almighty. I hadn't been in Mac's country long when I realized that Americans regarded the condition known as freedom in much the same way, not as something to be taken casually for granted ..The 168 years it had been around had apparently not been long enough to get them used to the idea.

Their constant joking or serious or belligerent references to it made it sound like a new arri val. As a result, being on free soil for the first time in my life had a euphoric effect on me that I doubt it would have had in a more staid environment. Coming from its haunting absence, finding myselfin "afree country" was intoxicating. So this was freedom!

"Hey, Rosie!" Mac had finally supplied his own emphatic answer, "Lemme tell you something. You're gonna love the U.S. of A." The question of mildly liking it, or disliking it, wouldn't arise. His perfect assurance implied that loving America was in the nature of things. Love, T discovered, was certainly part and parcel of the national imagination. It was embedded in the popular culture. Songs were all about it. At college social life revolved around it, and the pursuit of it was at least as singleminded as slogging for good grades. It came as a revelation to me that these practical people who set great store by objective evaluation and didn't put a foot forward that was not grounded in literal

fact, nursed impossible cravings for romantic lovethe all-or-nothing, everlasting, happily-ever-after kind-in spite of all the evidence around them to the contrary, and nursed these cravings from youth on into old age.

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o romantic an imagination has to spill overinto other departments of life, and I suspect that this is what happened to policymaking after the war. Frank Sinatra singing "All or Nothing at All" on the hit parade in the 1940s might have been a foreshadowing of things to come when misunderstandings arose between America and the nonaligned nations who were described as "sitting on the fence" because they refused to take sides in the Cold War. An old layered civilization like India, fashioned out of plural strands Nayantara with her uncle Jawaharlal Nehru after her returnfrom Wellesley College. and subtleties, for whom the homogeneity of the melting pot has never been a virtue, seldom boils to make her own titanic push into modern life down to simplified formulas of "for" times and she was joined by others who had and "against." Nor does it see a world as just won their freedom, but it made little sense to the West. Interpreting Indian polcomplex as this one in terms of a canvas icy became a rough assignment once the reducib.1e to friends and foes. But temMcCarthy era outlawed political nuance, perament apart, the coming of independence brought India the opportunity, at last, demolishing many distinguished American to act in her own best interests, accordi ng to reputations in the process. her own perception of what those interests Misunderstandings are as much a matter of cultural as of political perceptions, as my were. Just this had a young America done when she announced the Monroe Doctrine mother, Vij aya Lakshmi Pandi t, discovered to a shocked Europe. India's decision to when she was Indian Ambassador to the keep out of military blocs and alliances was United States, 1949-51. During Prime just such a declaration of independence. It Minister Nehru's first visit in October 1949 was based on self-interest combined with to the U.S., he was entertained by leading the conviction that only thus could she help bankers at a luncheon which they saw as an reduce world tensions, and not by the occasion for him to ask for financial assisfrozen armed posture of countries lined up tance. My mother's heart sank as the guests as if for war. It was a logical position for a were introduced to him in terms of their multimillion dollar assets. Nehru was new nation who needed help from all sides

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"My own personal and professional contacts with America have been all that I could have hoped for, starting with Wellesley. I cannot remember feeling foreign in that kindly university town."

acutely embarrassed and in reply to the toast he made no mention of money at all.

Later, at the Foreign Policy Association in New York, he spoke of aid as a cooperative effort. What he said about it, about the nonaligned approach and about the meaning of a sound relationship between countries, is worth quoting since it remains the foundation ofIndian policy: "Many of us have grown up in admiration of the ideals and objectives which have made this country (USA) great. Yet though we know the history and something of the culture of our respective countries, what is required is a true understanding and appreciation of each other even wnen we differ.. ..We realize that self-help is the first condition of success for a nation no less than an individual. We are conscious that ours must be the pri mary effort and we shall seek succour from none to escape any part of our responsibility .... (But we shall) gladly welcome such aid and cooperation on terms that are of mutual benefi t. The objectives of our foreign policy are the preservation of world peace and enlargement of human freedom. We are neither blind to reality nor do we propose to acquiesce in any chaUenge to man's freedom, from whatever quarter it may come.

Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.. .."

Senator McCarthy would probably have been surprised to learn that the man who would not join the for-or-against lineup, kept a brass mold of Abraham Lincoln's hand on his desk, and headed the government of a country whose constitution had in part been inspired by provisions of the American Constitution and American judicial practice.

Mutual bafflement has covered a lot of territory. When I was a student it was an uncomfortable experience walking down a

New York street in a sari, attracting stares and an occasional Cherokee war cry. Social life, ruled by the custom of dating, took some getting used to. But as virginity was the norm and the consensus, boy-meets-girl was not the culture shock it later became for the unprepared. In the 1960s, when I was on a lecture tour to promote a book and had spoken at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the dean of foreign students asked me to help out with an Indian student who was suffering a nervous breakdown.

The problem, I discovered, was that the boy's American roommate regularly brought his date to the room, and the Indian who had nowhere to go, became a traumatized witness to the proceedings.

Misperceptions have their funny side. I was visiting my mother in England, who was then India's High Commissioner to that

country in 1960, and Paul Robeson's grandchildren were coming to play with my children. "Remember these are not the kind of Indians who live in wigwams and wear feathers in their hair," their grandmother had carefully coached them beforehand.

But it so happened I had been out shopping that day and bought my children a wigwam, and they were dancing around it with feathers in their hair when the Robeson grandchildren arrived. It must have been years before they were convinced that there are Indian Indians too!

And then there's philosophical misperception. I had never thought of the Hindu approach to salvation as being a stumbling block to mutual understanding. How could it possibly be? Didn't Hinduism look upon all religions as paths to God? Who could find fault with such a universal approach?

Left: The author with Prosser Gifford, deputy director of the Woodrow Wilson International Centerfor Scholars in Washington, D. c., during her time as a Fellow of the centel; 1981-82.

Far left: Nayantara and her husband E.N. Mangat Rai in their Dehra Dun home.

But that, an American friend pointed out, was precisely the irritant. The man who knew for sure that God was a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew, would be quite appalled by it.

My own personal and professional contacts with America have been all that I could have hoped for, starting with Wellesley. I cannot remember feeling foreign in that kindly university town where my discoveries ranged from treasures at Hathaway's books hop to the endless variety of the national meal known as a sandwich. All consciousness was tied at the time to the progress of the war, Wellesley's president was head of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), and the college made its contribution to the war effort. But for me it was peacetime. It was my first encounter with a life outside crisis, uncertainty and upheaval. I haunted the library. I roamed the woods and wandered along the lake holding my breath, afraid it would all vanish before my eyes. Autumn was a miracle and snow an unending surprise.

Concerts at Symphony Hall in Boston and visits to art galleries introduced me to a West I had not known. And I wondered why the white race that had produced these marvels of music and art had wasted so much valuable time

going to war, and conquering and occupying vast lands that were not theirs.

Mac proved right. I loved my slice of America. Buthe was wrong about my wanting to stay on. The idea would never have crossed my mind. Mac didn't know, of course, that his heightened country-consciousness was something he and I had in common. I was as stubbornly, proudly Indian as he was American. For neither of us would any other place be home. I did go back to America, as writer-in-residence at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas; as a research scholar at the Radcliffe (now Bunting) Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts;lI.s a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. All these were memorable opportunities for intellectual stimulation as well as the privacy to work undisturbed. They convinced me that cutbacks in government of institutional spending-if they must be made-should never touch areas that convey the best a country has to offer in the way of its learning, its culture and its people, to the rest of the world.

What we call the world is another name for our own particular angle of vision, derived (quite by accident) from where we

happen to be placed on the map. In imperial times the East was divided up into Near, Far and Middle (labels that still stick), depending on how near or far it was from the British Foreign Office whose writ ran over much of the region. Several hundred years of European colonization had made the West see itself as master and center of civilization, the rest of human habitation as outlying and peripheral to it, and the majority of human beings as created for the purpose of serving and servicing the center.

If this were ancient history, it would not affect today's outlook orimagination. But it is living memory. That lopsided arrangement ruled by the West's priorities was the one I was born into, when it seemed the freedom to be, to do, and to decide our own fate, would never be ours. Now that it is, the point of view we speak from is bound to reflect a whole other way of looking at the universe: another philosophy of politics, of love and marriage; other prescriptions for peace, health and salvation; and other goals to pursue in "the pursuit of happiness." It seems reasonable to believe that if choice is all right in the marketplace, then other value systems have a right to flourish too, and that alternative approaches could play an important role in remaking us all into more harmonious, less ferocious people.

On a planet so dyed in the blood of all our crimes against humanity, only a pooling of material and spiritual resources can begin to tackle the job oftruly civilizing us.

At this point in history can any nation or race, however powerful or privileged, go it alone without genuine give-and-take, except in a lopsided scenario like the one we once had, in which justice and equality were a far cry? As freedom could not remain a restricted preserve, nor can science or technology or any other branch ofknowledge. The world is not constituted that way anymore. Power itself, in my own (perhaps freakish) opinion, is as outmoded as absolute monarchy. It has had to find its rational harmless level in private life, in relations between men and women, and it will have to recognize its limits in public policy and dealings among nations. Like Anna, the Danish heroine of my novel (Continued on page 51)

INDIA AND AMERICA

~ROADAHEAD ike two headstrong lovers who show affection by squabbling, India and the United States have spent the past 50 years uncertain whether what they share outweighs what keeps them apart or vice versa. But there was always a flip side to their relations. Even while their officials agreed to disagree about the Soviet threat and Kashmir, a million Indians settled down in the U.S. and the two remained the brightest beacons of democracy in the world. The aftertaste of that bittersweet past still lingers. But the future holds out this promise: the two countries will see eye to eye on more and more things as the years go by.

Some of the friction of the past can be blamed on circumstances, ways of the world that neither government could control. The next half century of relations will also be defined by the ways of the world. However, for a number of reasons mostly connected with that much bandied about and little understood force of "globalization," there is every likelihood that India and the U.S. will this time get to know each other a lot better in the coming years.

If anything, they may develop a rapport unique to a rich and poor nation. Their links will go beyond the ambassadors, commercial attaches and visa officers who served as the symbols of past exchanges. Instead, future bilateral relations could be about the interaction of a large cross section of civil society in both countries.

This is not written in the stars. It is written in the unfolding dynamics of the post-Cold War period.

Take a look athow the world is evolving right now.

The world system is being turned on its head. This has nothing to do with the end of the superpower face-off or half a century of Indian independence. There are global developments at work here: technology striding forward in ten league boots, a capital market that acknowledges only computer terminals rather than national borders, and recognition that when it comes to migration and the environment it's a small, small world after all. Putthem altogether and the big loser is the nation-state, the former building block of the world order.

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A new world order is under construction. Look closely and you can see the hard hats already putting it together. It will be an edifice where nations will not speak to other nations. Instead the bits and pieces that make up a nation will do the talking. And form the alliances. And cut the deals.

Domestic society in any country is made up of lots of small churches, bingo clubs, rock and roll groups-companies, bands, and so on. Yet when countries interact they do so through governments. This sort of mediation, like the Norman Rockwell family, is on its way out. Instead of having to work through a visa office or stuffy pen pusher, all these components of civil society have begun talking directly to their counterparts in other cities. Indian and U.S. academics now chitchat through the Internet. Environmental groups in both countries lobby their respective governments over dams and biodiversity and tigers.

Corporations, thanks to ever cheaper transportation and communication, are ignoring geography and spreading their wings across continents, building factories in some country, outsourcing to others.

The newspapers are full of creeping globalization. Look at the headlines: new free trade agreements, international conventions on everything from human rights to biscuit making, new and improved MTV copycats popping up in ever more godforsaken parts of the world.

Everyone of these developments serves to undermine the authority of the state.

They may have to stop calling it international relations a few decades from now. The root word "nation" will no longer be relevant. Instead they may have to call it intersocial relations. Future ties between countries will be governed by how well their YMCAs and businessmen get along with each other. Instead of measuring bilateral relations by shared votes at the United Nations or military alliances, the future indices will be the number of visas a country has issued to the citizens of another, how well their nongovernmental organizations vibe on issues and, above all else, the amount of trade and investment they share. In these and other indices, there is reason to believe something special wi II develop between India and the U.S. Here's a visual metaphor. The world of the past was made up of big plastic boxes filled with small magnets. The boxes were the nation-states, the magnets the components of their respecti ve civi I societies. International relations were plastic boxes bumping or resting against each other. Today the boxes are falling apart. The magnets are not only spilling out, they are being attracted to similar magnets in other boxes. Corporate magnates are seeking out other corporate magnets, "save the whale" magnets are joining other "save the whale" magnets.

Issues and interests, not flags and ethnicity, wi II determine transborder relations. The nation-state is making way for the network.

That's one way of putting it. But there are as many labels for it as there are crystal gazers. The information society, global power circuits, new international civil society, the virtual state system, the plurilateral world model-take your pick or think up your

own. They boil down to the same thing. Government will not define relations between countries. Instead, the actual makeup of societies and economics will. It's either locals or internationalists.

Officialdom will follow in their wake, but only to make sure the paperwork gets done.

What this does mean is that two nations that get together will do so not because two ministers have signed a piece of parchment.

Bilateral ties will blossom because of affinities that will often be intangible, largely economic but at times even cultural. This is why the next 50 years could see relations between India and the U.S. move onto a plane that the respective governments of both countries would perhaps find uncomfortable. The diplomats may continue to push around files labeled with the problems ofyesteryear: territory, weapons, treaties and similar fuddy-duddy issues.

The future currency of international togetherness will be things quite outside their scope: scientific research, subcontracts, language, immigrants and websites. ut it another way. There was always a head and tails to the coin of Indo-U.S. relations. The head stuff kept them apart. Most of that is now a rapidly depreciating currency. The tail stuff pushed them together.

That is gaining worth every day.

Tail stuff comes under three rough heads: ideas, people and economics. A glance at any of them indicates a rosy future for bilateral relations.

First, there are the ideas.

India and the U.S. have long been prone to using the rhetorical flourish of describing themsel ves as the "two largest democracies in the world," often as a substitute for anything more substantive to agree upon. No more. Being a democracy actually means something these days in international relations.

The post-Cold War world is seeing the slapping down of layer after layer of international regimes governing everything from human rights to gender equali ty to workers' rights. All of these new conventions and treaties and agreements reflect the ideals of liberal democracy. After all, this ideology won the Cold War. Many countries find this new stress on what were once the concerns of newspaper columnists and other humbugs disconcerting. Thus West Asia is the area of the world where democracy has made the fewest inroads. A bigger challenge lies in "Asian values," a political philosophy popular in East Asia which stresses curbs on individual rights and legitimacy through economic development rather than votes. Much of it is a thinly veiled attempt to maintain the political dominance of a single party. The West has already crossed philosophical swords with proponents of Asian values. As it develops, a key weapon in the arsenal of democracy will be the long-standing democratic example ofthe second largest Asian country: India.

And India is not merely a case of ballot boxes and legislative debate. It has the entire panoply of Enlightenment political tradition: an independent judiciary, political parties, a bill of rights, common law, the works. Democracy and its sibling concerns are just beginning to step up the rungs of international concerns. As

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they climb upward, it is Third World countries like India that the future, one of the main network arteries of the future is going to run U.S. will seek and need as allies. between these two countries.

Second, there are people.

The U.S. lead in direct investment in India is a particularly imAt the heart of the rising global networks are individuals portant measure of the likelihood oflong-term economic ties. with common concerns. And few better foundations for develTrade in finished goods and primary commodities is all very oping such concerns exist than ethnicity. Already non-resident good, but in a world economy in flux it is a tenuous link. India can Indians are cited, along with the overseas Chinese, as examples sell tea to the U.S., but so can a host of other countries. The reverse of a transnational network in the making. Numbering about 10 is also true: Indian tea can find another buyer as well. Bilateral million around the world, the net worth of the NRIs is estimated trade is easily broken and easily diverted. at $350 billion, roughly equal to the gross domestic product of Investment is different. This is a tie that binds. It signifies a India. They have all the characteristics of a future virtual state: commitment to stay and brings about the sort of market integrastrong online connectivity, a tendency to do business with each tion that is the stuff of the new world economy. A company that other and an increasing interest in having a stake in the future puts up a factory or a design facility in another country puts its economic and political progress of India. This means not money where its mouth is. And countries which invest in each merely investment, but also political lobbying on behalf of other today end up moving their economies from dating to being India in whatever country they reside in. wedded.

The NRI network is strong in the United Kingdom, South Today economics is also about networks.

Africa and Hong Kong. But there can be no doubt that the Companies source out the bits and pieces that make up their strongest and most substantive connections product to other companies, often in with India are being formed by the one mildistant lands. But they also source out the lion Indians settled in the U.S. One has only services that go with it: marketing, adverto look at the plethora of web sites and the tising, even mundane things like salary Bangalore is as patterns of inve路stment. slips. Thanks to information technology The steady flow of hundreds ofthousands integrated with the even service subcontracts are being tossed ofIndian students to the U.S., for example, around the globe. economy of Silicon continues to top off this network with the Whether a nation sinks or swims in the Valley as it is with sort of educated, technically proficient and world economy-to-be depends on what affluent people that networks thrive on. And degree its economy becomes networked. that of neighboring such is the unimportance of geography these The world will be one horribly competiTamil Nadu. days that it does not matter whether they detive place as basic advantages like geographical closeness fall by the wayside. cided to physically live in North America or Asia. So long as they have interests in both Countries are specializing, trying to be the places, they add to the network. best at a select number of things rather than While people-to-people interactions at the business and acadeaverage at everything. This means not merely being good at makmic level are the most visible, networking is taking place on many ing, say, clothes but being the best at making T-shirts. Not merely other levels. One of the closest interactions between Indian and being good at computers, but being good at monitors or chips.

The U.S. is a key player in all this because its economy has U.S. private individuals has been through NGOs. Whether on human rights or the environment or child labor, groups from both walked furthest along the path of post-industrialism.

Its compacontinents have worked closely to form a united front and labby nies lead the pack in frontier areas like services and infotech.

The countries they decide to invest in will become integrated both their governments accordingly. into the world economy to the greatest degree and at the most adThus it was Indian NGOs which first raised worries about the patenting of genes under the rules of the World Trade Organization vanced levels. The spin off: billions in production profits and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Being the world leader in T-shirts with their U.S. counterparts. The latter have now taken the bit by may sound blah, but it means multibillions of dollars and enough the teeth and are fighting patents taken out on Indian biological products in U.S. courts. Irrespective of the merits or demerits of the business to keep a medium-sized economy ticking over nicely.

The future is with specialists and subcontractors. cause, it shows how interests now form private alliances across The best borders. And how these alliances are particularly strong between strategy for a developing country is to join as many product netcivil groups in the U.S. and India. works as possible. Become the wheel for a business hub.

Third, there is economics.

Factories are fleeing countries like Japan and the U.S. Barely 15 When it comes time to crisscross the world with information percent of the U.S. workforce is today involved in manufacturhighways, the road map will be largely determined by flows of ing, by the turn of the century it will be 10 percent. It is no longer a trade and investment. Economic players, after all, will pay the nation that makes things you can touch. It is a "head" country, an bulk of the tolls. With the U.S. looking as if it will remain India's economy driven by services and information-based industries. number one source of trade and investment for the foreseeable Like pensioners, the factories have gone off in search of warmer

climates-Southeast Asia, Latin America and so on-though more for cheap labor than for the temperature.

The Third World countries that have secured the bulk of such investment have become "body" countries-manufacturing bases for post-industrial economies. The East Asian miracle is largely about converting coconut plantations into the subcontractors for Silicon Valley and General Motors. China is now in a similar phase of transformation.

There is every indication that India is going there as well. The best pointer of this: the extent of foreign direct investment. The bulk of such investment in India is coming from the U.S. This means that if one counts the networks India has signed up for, most of their hubs should be U.S. based.

The result will be the ultimate form of international bonding: a U.S. head economy grafted onto an Indian body economy, and both profiting immensely from the surgery. This, in neon lights, is the future ofIndo-U.S. togetherness.

Becoming a body economy is not an automatic development.

India is still waking up to its potential to be one of the world's biggest manufacturing bases, a factory to mankind. China may have a headstart in this, but India has inherent advantages that once the more obvious problems Iike intellectual property rights and labor rights'are out of the way will start to tell in its favor: A Western-style court system with Anglo-Saxon laws of contract, politics determined by ballots not bullets, widespread use of English and a bureaucracy that is overly stable. These are things, however, that companies seeking havens during investment storms will look out for.

There is more. Probably more so than any other Third World nation, India can also push a large chunk of its economy into doing head things. It is already the world's number two exporter of designer software. Bangalore is as integrated with the economy of Silicon Valley as it is with that of neighboring Tamil Nadu.

India is already realizing a potential as a source for a host of other high-level skills functions like accounting and scientific research. The Delta Airlines payroll is done in Bombay. American head-hunting firms roam Indian cities looking for executives to poach. Indian laboratories already do contract work for U.S. firms, doing science on the cheap.

All this points to another economic interface between the U.S. and India, one that is rare among rich and poor nations. Namely, the role of a service provider. A "neck" country so to speak.

The next 50 years will be one of economic relations at many different levels. Indian metal-bashing firms churning out parts for U.S. car or aircraft companies. Indians snapping together keyboards and printers for California computer makers. Indian software firms using satellite links to write customized software for Wall Street. Indian advertising companies putting together campaigns for U.S. products that will be sold in Europe.

Indians balancing the books of U.S. companies. Indian doctors carrying out remote control heart surgery on patients lying in beds in Miami.

As Indo-U.S. trade diffuses into parts other economies cannot reach, the transfer of goods and money will, bit by bit, be sup-

planted by the transfer of information and people. This is a logical consequence of post -industrialism. Much of the asset base of service and information industries lies in brainpower. To do business they need to move people. In software it's almost de rigueur. "Body shopping," the practice of moving high-technology workers from country to country to do bit work, leaves a bad taste in the mouth today. Tomorrow it will probably be the norm.

Capital and technology are already globally footloose. Soon, so will post-industrial labor. Again, India and the U.S. are already ahead of the loop. Nearly half the temporary worker visas issued by the U.S. for skilled workers-the normal channel for body shopped types-are issued to Indians.

Trade builds rope ladders between countries. Investment converts them into steel bridges. Labor makes it a land corridor.

Going by present trends, one of the strongest such links in coming decades, at least between a rich and a poor nation, will be the one that will lie from the Indian subcontinent to North America. he funny thing is that India and the U.S. have been here before. Historians point out that the barriers that exist today between nations are of relati vely recent origin. Go back to the 19th century and one finds that free trade, mobile capital and visaless travel were the norm. Globalization, though put on the fast track thanks to technological developments, is little more than a return to the freedom of the past.

It is no coincidence that the 18th and 19th centuries were a golden age of intercourse between the U.S. and India. Indian spices and textiles flowed to the U.S., their profits financing such institutions as Yale University. The U.S. shipped back cotton, tobacco and peculiarities like ice in return. This trade also meant India had a standing in the U.S. worldview similar to what China holds today-a land of promise, a realm of the future. It is no accident that Indian influence on U.S. philosophy and literature was at its height in the years before the British Raj. This, in a way, was the 19th century's version of data transfer.

In 1847 Henry David Thoreau, the New England hermit philosopher, found out that the ice covering Walden Pond, his home for the past two years, was exported to India. He was moved to write: "I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas ... .1 meet his. servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well."

A steady to and fro of goods and money lay behind this crosscultural fertility. The next 50 years may see the rise of an economic bond that will surpass what once existed between India and the U.S. And which may push the cultural relationship between the two countries to similar transcendental levels.

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About the Author: Pramit Pal Chaudhuri,

a graduate of Cornell University, is senior assistant editor of the Telegraph, Calcutta, and writes extensively on the new global economy.

INDIAAND AMERICA

m assa Dr Several former U.S. ambassadors to India reminisce about their times and events here for this special issue of SPAN. Says John Kenneth Galbraith: "The United States has long been captured by the magic of India, and Indians have an enormOus interest in the United States. That's the fundamental relationship and that doesn't change."

he citizens of the world's two largest democracies have always had close people-to-peopie relationships.

But the political relationships have had their ups and downs.

Talking to half a dozen former U.S. ambassadors to India-whose ambassadorships spanned from the 1960s to the 1990s-I did not find even one

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who disliked India and her people. In fact, all of them look back fondly on their assignments in Delhi-and, indeed, many of them keep returning.

John Kenneth Galbraith-in his 80s and still associated with Harvard University-gives no credence to the question of the "ups and downs" in Indo-U.S. relations. He says: "I pay no attention to such matters, it's a problem between a handful of officials in Washington and a similar group of officials in Delhi. The real relationship is the fact that the United States has long been captured by the magic of India, and Indians have an enormous interest in the United States. That's the fundamental relationship and that doesn't change."

Looking back from the perspective of over 30 years, Galbraith, who was ambassador during 1961-63, says that India in his time was "perhaps too much concerned with the heavy furniture" of economic development such as steel mills. "I think mistakes were made," referring to the lack of

emphasis on education, health care and family planning.

Today, as India celebrates the 50th anniversary of its independence, the renowned economist thinks that "broadly speaking" India is heading in the right economic direction with increasi ng reliance on the market system and an open-door policy on foreign investment.

"Indian history, art and architecture" are among the fondest memories of Galbraith's associations with India, which go back to the 1950s when he was there as an adviser to the Indian Statistical Institute.

Galbraith, who has visited India several times since he completed his assignment in 1963, had these thoughts to offer in 1997: "I hope India would have in mind two problems.

One is the problem of poverty, particularly in the great cities. What was rural poverty has become something worse in the form of urban poverty. Two, like so many others, I react with concern to the population problem; there are

some parts of India, Kerala for example, where it has been solved or is on the way to solution. I would hope that this would be the case for the whole of the country."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who became ambassador in 1973 and who just turned 70, did not have time for an interview because of his preoccupations as a Senatoffrom New York. But going by the fact that he has kept coming back to India after completing his tour of duty as ambassador and by ,the fact that his daughter Moira keeps visiting India in connection with her work with Tibetan refugees, it seems that he still loves India. In his introduction to what is currently a basic book on U.S.-India relations, Dennis Kux's Estranged Democracies. published in 1992, Moynihan writes: "Whatever injuries we have done India, we never intended them, save possibly in that sclerotic interval in 1971." He was, of course, referring to President Richard Nixon's tilt toward Pakistan in the India-Pakistan war over Bangladesh.

One of Moynihan's principal achievements as ambassador, 197375, was solving the huge rupee debt problem that India had inherited from owing the United States for past import offoodgrains under PL-480. The rupee debt had become a major irritant in Indo-U.S. relations. He wrote off the debt by presenting India with a $2.2 billion check in rupees in 1974 and hel ped to restore the bilateral dialogue.

His other achievement was to pave way for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's visit to India late in 1974.

During his visit the Secretary signed the Indo-U.S. Joint Commission agreement with the Indian Government, which in years to come became, through its subcommissions, a building block for some of the most lasting Indo-U.S. cultural, educational and scientific ties.

Although Ambassador Moynihan hosted many private soirees, he held only one public press conference just before his departure in 1975. He had to keep a low profile after the fallout from the Nixon tilt and a generally very difficult period ofIndo- U.S. relations.

Robert Goheen, former president of Princeton University and still associated with it, recalls that during his 1977-80 tenure as ambassador, Indo-U.S. relations were "quite good" until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan late in 1979. He said President Jimmy Carter had a great interest in India because his mother had served as a Peace Corps volunteer near Mumbai during the late 1960s. Carter became the third American President to visit India. (Dwight Eisenhower was the first U.S. Chief Executive to come to India in 1959 followed by Richard Nixonin 1969.)

Relations remained at a "thin political level" with no advances made in economic and commercial relations, Goheen said. The forcing out of Coca-Cola and IBM during that period discouraged further U.S. investment.

Robert pOhee~

As an educationist and cochairman of the educational and cultural subcommission of the Indo-U.S. Joint Commission, Goheen had an interest in education in India. In fact, as one who was born in India of missionary parents, he still retains a close relationship with the country and keeps returning frequently for business and personal reasons. One of the most important things that India needs to attend to, Goheen said, "is the tremendous problem of providing good educational opportunities for the masses who want it and need it." He noted that the capacity of many institutions was strained and that the quality of education is not as high as one would want it to be. On the other hand, he said that there were exceptions. "You think of the departments of economics such as the one at Bombay University, most of the institutes of technology, various research institutes such as the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore-these are really outstanding places," he said.

Reflecting on India's 50th independence anniversary, Goheen hoped that "the people of India can function with a more open relationship with the Western world. It's really to their advantage to reduce the internal bureaucratic box and the psychic box with respect to doing business with the West." He adds that among many Indians "there is a residue, quite understandably, of anti-colonial thought at the way they look at the West. But I think that's passe, it's no longer relevant, and they should get over that."

It became Ambassador Harry Barnes's job during President Ronald Reagan's Administration to bridge the growing gulf between America and India over the U.S. arming of Pakistan as a frontline state following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Ambassador Barnes, a career diplomat who had served as a junior officer in Mumbai in the early 1950s, said that upon his arrival late in 1981 Indo-U.S. relations were at a low point with the United States even opposing a World

"I traveled to almost all corners of the country and acquired a sense of the energy, the variety, distinctiveness and intensity of Indian society."

Bank loan to India. Yet "eight to nine months later," he pointed out, relations between the countries turned for the better. To support his point he cited the decision of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not to abrogate the U.S. agreement for the supply of fuel to the Tarapur nuclear plant (France re-

Harrybd placed the United States as fuel supplier) and her acceptance of President Reagan's invitation for a state visit to the United States in July-August 1982.

"An intensification of cultural and scientific linkages" between the two countries became "much more open and cordial," Barnes recalled. During her U.S. visit, Ronald Reagan and Indira Gandhi launched an initiative for science and technology cooperation. Also, their initiative to name 1985 as the "Year of India" in the United States for a comprehensive Indian art and cultural exhibition tour of the U.S. became a reality when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi during his 1985 U.S. visit inaugurated the "Festi val of India." The Festi val "provided Americans with a very vivid

and visual sense of India," Barnes reflected.

There was "greater mutual trust between the two governments," and this grew during Rajiv Gandhi's visit.

There was a resumption of military training exchanges and discussions on sharing U.S. technology with India to develop a light combat aircraft (LCA).

It was the first time that the United States was willing to consider sharing defense high technology with a country that it had hitherto perceived as being Soviet-aligned.

Ambassador Barnes, who now works at the Carter Center in Atlanta on a conflict resolution program, expressed his views on a variety of issues. Discussing nuclear proliferation and the potential for a nuclear arms race in South Asia, he said: "It is in both the U.S. and India's interest to reduce the global burden of weapons of destruction. Both countries have the talent to tackle the situation."

On the Kashmir problem between India and Pakistan, the ambassador said: "If the U.S. is imaginative enough, perhaps then there should be ways to try.to assist the countries to improve their own relations-though it is not easy for an outsider."

When posed the question of possible India-China rivalry, Barnes observed that "India now with its economic reform is in a very favorable position and has a major opportunity to show what a democratic society is capable of doing compared to an autocratic society." He, however, added that "India, by virtue of its democratic experience, and China, beginning to learn something of democracy, both might be successful" in solving their bilateral problems.

Talking about India's Golden Jubilee, Barnes said: "India can look back on an extraordinary achievement-a society that has been able to govern itself for half a century reI ying on democratic values." He recalled his first assignment to India as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer stationed in Mumbai not long after India's independence. "I traveled to almost all corners of the country and acquired a sense of the energy, the variety, distincti veness and intensity oflndian society." He left after two years-his second daughter was born in Mumbai-with a feeling "how welcome foreigners can be in India."

Ambassador John Gunther Dean (1985-88), another career diplomat who followed Ambassador Barnes, presided over the period when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi began liberalization of the economy. In a telephonic conversation with this writer from his horne in Paris, where he lives a retired life with his French wife, Dean said he was proud that "a total of 300 joint ventures" with the United States were put in place while he was there.

"Above all," he added, "it was a period when we tried to work on the basis of cooperation rather than confronting or lecturing each other. Nine hundred million people in India cannot be lectured or administered the same way as 250 million people in the U.S." Cooperating on high technology and John Gunther~

science was a very good way of "working together," Dean added, and "this was appreciated by both sides."

Ambassador Dean said that Afghanistan had been a major issue during his time and it was important to understand India's concern at the tremendous rise of fundamentalism in Afghanistan. "India is a secular country-you have Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Buddhists, Christians and Jews all living together. Certainly there were some frictions. But just because Kashmir is a state with a majority of Muslims did not mean that they [India] should get out.

"I had a very open and fine relationship with Mr. Gandhi and I am very grateful for having had this opportunity of working with him. India had lost out on the industrial revolution but must not miss the opportunities of the scientific 'and technological revolution. And he did his best to bring India to this revolution."

Gunther Dean added that "India, like the United States, has a sense of mission in the world, what we call manifest destiny. Like the U.S., India feels she has a contribution to make to the world. India has made a contribution to world civilization. I believe that India has a contribution to make to the 21st century."

Dean had a special word for the Indian bureaucracy: "The Indian bureaucracy on the whole was one of the finest bureaucracies.

Having served in so many other countries during my 42 years of active service, I can say that the Indian ci vi I service is of a high caliber."

Congratulating India on its 50th independence anniversary, he expressed the hope that the country stands united, and works "for the welfare of the entire nation-all the population-and continues to remain a secular, tolerant state which can be an example to other countries in the world."

John Hubbard followed Dean as ambassador in 1988. As former president of the University of Southern

California, he had also headed the Indo-U.S. Subcommission for Education and Culture.

Ambassador Hubbard recalled that he was in India during the breakup of the Soviet Union and that he had "wonderful relations" with the Soviet ambassador in Delhi who had previously served in Washington, D.C., for 17 years.

One highlight of his assignment was the improvement of relations between the Indian and U.S. armed forces. He was instrumental in arranging for the visits to India of the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the U.S. Air Force commander for Asia and two U.S. Navy admirals. On the other side, he arranged for Indian Defence Minister K.C. Pant to visit the United States and tour the Pentagon. "He [Mr. Pant] and his lOP aides were wonderfully received and the "whole relationship changed" with joint training exercises being setup for both the Navies.

Ambassador Hubbard recalled that the low point of his ambassadorship was the passage of Super 301 that lumped India with Japan and Brazil as the major violators of fair trade practices with the U.S. This caused "untold difficulty," he said. He noted that on the economic side he took the same line as his predecessors had, or as his successors have- "to get India away from London School of Economics socialism to a market economy."

Hubbard recalled that he first went

to India as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer with USAID in charge of educational programs. During his time, 1965-69, nine agricultural universities, four technology institutes (the highlight being the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur) were set up, and in the process hundreds of American academic consultants came to India to introduce new curriculums in the sciences and mathematics.

Hubbard, who calls India "my spiritual home" and which he visits twice a year, is thrilled at India's 50th independence anniversary: "Bravo! From 1947 they were struggling and democracy was struggling, but they have made enormous strides and indicated their devotion to the process. In terms of the economy, the burgeoning middle class is something to see: they are good, they are able and aggressive and economically destined to be China's chief economic rival in another decade. With India emerging as she is, she can no longer be ignored in Asia or in the world as far as that goes."

Hubbard still teaches British history at the University of Southern California, which subject accounted for his initial interest in India.

President Bush appointed William Clark, Jr., now with the Japan Society in New York, to succeed Hubbard in December 1989. Clark recalled that when he made his first call on Prime Minister Y.P. Singh, he was told that India's top priority was liberalization William

t0rk, Jr.)

Moynihan on India Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most famous American ambassadors to India, was not available to be interviewed for the article on these pages. Some of Moynihan's most trenchant thoughts on Indo-U.S. relations, however, are expressed in the introduction he wrote for Dennis Kux's book, Estranged Democracies: India and the United States.

Excerpts are reprinted below.

The term "estranged" nicely captures thesenseon both sides that affection has not been returned, or has somehow lapsed, or has found new outlets. In consequence of which the relationship is no longerthe same. But then it never has been.

That, at all events, is the general perception. All rather hazy and soft as of a summer afternoon. Also, all wrong. The United States and India are estranged democracies not because we have failed to understand each other, but because of conflicting policies we and they have pursued with regard to the most elemental of national interests, military security.

The supreme virtue of Dennis Kux's history is the way in which bedrock reality shows through at every stage in a halfcentury of on and off relations ....

Partition had been traumatic ....The aftermath was anything but tidy, with the dispute over Kashmir present at the creation, and alive to this day. And so when the United States commenced in the 1950s to provide arms to Pakistan, estrangement with India was inevitable. Indian fear of Pakistan may have been "irrational," as Ambassador Kux suggests. It was no less real. That we had supported [Indian] independence and welcomed it and promptly set about helping with the associated chores was something Indians understood well enough. Hence, estrangement rather than enmity, but estrangement for certai n.

The United States did not intend this. Our concern, early and late, was with the threat, as we saw it, of Soviet expansion. We never quite got it clear in our heads whether by expansion we referred to the Red Army or the Communist party. But at all events, it had to be contained.

Pakistan was on the Soviet perimeter and was an early and eager participant in the alliance system that developed in the 1950s under President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. This did not at first imply

any disregard for India. When the Chinese Red Army crossed her borders in the early 1960s, American military aid was promptly offered and accepted. When monsoons failed, wheat was forthcoming in continental quantities.

There would follow moments of intense attachment which can only be described as infatuation ....

The events of the Bangladesh war, as it came to be known, are set forth in great detail [in Kux's book). ...Far from a diplomatic victory, the whole affair proved an unnecessary and embarrassing diplomatic setback for the United States.

Through their misreading of the crisis, and their proPakistan bias, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger succeeded in needlessly transforming a regional dispute into one which threatened to become a great power showdown.

The main consequences were severe and long-lasting damage to U.S. relations with India and enhanced Soviet influence with New Delhi.

That is about how matters rested for the remainder of the first half-century of Indo-U.S. relations. At the end, however, a most surprising event occurred. The Soviet Union broke up! This was a blow to India, which had invested far more than she ought to have done in that relationship. Butif the United States were left the world's only superpower, the price of victory was considerable ....

All that is now past. In his closing chapter, [Kux] remarks that all things considered, "it is surprising the estrangement has not been worse." Things surely are better than they have been, not least owing to a marvelous migration that has brought nearly one million Indians to the United States, with no sign of stopping, such is the welcome accorded these remarkably gifted individuals. The United States has cut off all military aid to Pakistan; it is hard to imagine any resumption. Certainly, there would be no strategic grounds for anything of the sort, Pentagon planners to the contrary. Whatever injuries we have done India, we never intended them, save possibly in that sclerotic interval in 1971. In a sense, then, it is now India's turn. Kux writes: "Relations are unlikely to become more cooperative ifIndia decides almost viscerally that opposing the United States is the natural state of affairs for Indian foreign policy."

Maya friend suggest that that is a temptation which needs watching. As for the United States, there is a related disposition to assume that estrangement is the natural state of this relation. It is nothing of the sort, and we should watch that temptation!

of the Indian economy. In 1989 foreign direct investment in India totaled only $70 million; this figure went down to $39 million in 1990 as India almost ran out of foreign exchange reserves. But when Ambassador Clark left India in mid-1992, U.S. commitments of direct investment alone totaled $350 million just for the first half ofthat year.

The Gulf War created some problems between the two countries.

Nevertheless, Clark maintained that the v.P. Singh Government cooperated by offering the U.S. refueling rights in India for U.S. planes coming in from the Far East on their way to the Gulf.

Commenting on India's progress on the economic front, Ambassador Clark said that although the trend is positive he, like others, "wishes it had gone faster." India, Clark said, has a unique problem in trying to modernize while keeping itsl1Uge population employed.

On Indo-U.S. relations, Ambassador Clark said that the "economic interchange is going slower than we would like to." He believes the pace will pick up. He cautioned that "it is difficult for us to get along sometimes because we both like to tell the other fellow what the other should do." He also noted that U.S. relations with Japan was the reverse-economic relations are more troublesome than political relations.

One recurring theme of the ambassadors' reflections on India's 50th independence anniversary is the fact that, notwithstanding many serious problems, the country chose the democratic path of government and has steadfastly followed and stood by it.

"If you look around the world at the former colonial possessions-including the Soviet Union's-the difficulty of adopting a democratic form of government has been paramount," said Clark. "But India started with a democracy and never has deviated from it. You can argue about economic policy, but certainly regarding democracy and civilian rule, India has an unblemished record."

What Ambassador Clark liked most about India included conversations with Indians, who love to talk and argue; India's "happy heritage-the statues in almost all Indian monuments are smiling"; and Indian food, about which he light-heartedly said, "Do not go back to the buffet too often or you will leave India a much larger person than you were before."

The ambassador's final thought: "I am positive that the changes which have taken place have moved India considerably into the world. And to me the most encouraging part of it is that Indians can compete with the world."

Thomas Pickering, appointed by President Bush, served as ambassador 1992-93. He was unavailable for an interview because State Department rules would not permit him to speak to

Thoma~ tCkeri~

the press while hearings were in progress in the Senate on confirmation of his nomination as an Undersecretary of State. His office was kind enough to release some speeches he had made in India, which provide an insight into the ambassador's mind on Indo-U.S. relations. One speech, in part, reads: "We have the ability, the resources and the will to make Indo-U.S. economic and commercial relations truly flourish. Now let's get down to business."

Pickering's first professional association with India, as with several other former U.S. ambassadors to this country, preceded his ambassadorial assignment. Some 15 years ago, as Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, he served twice as the American cochairperson of the Indo- U.S. Subcommission for Science and Technology. That group provided the basis for one of the largest programs of science and technology collaboration between any two countries in the world. Although Pickering was in India for only about a year, almost 100 new technical and financial collaborations between Indian and American companies were signed during his tenure.

Indeed, now that the Cold War is over, and the strength of nations will be determined increasingly by their economic health, Indo-U.S. ties are being built up from the economic side. Latest figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce indicate that India's exports to the United States are climbing steadily: $5.309 billion in 1994; $5.726 billion in 1995; and $6.216 billion in 1996 compared to U.S. exports to India: $2.294 billion in 1994; $3.296 billion in 1995; and $3.318 billion in 1996.

It is fitting to conclude with excerpts from President Clinton's message to the citizens of India on their 50th anniversary of independence. In this message, he said: "Over the course of the past 50 years, India has confronted many challenges, but has stayed true to its founding principles.

In so doing, India has become a model for other nations and peoples around the globe who are still striving to build civil societies, to institutionalize democratic values offree expression and religion, and to find strength in their diversity."

D About the Author: M. Afzal Khan is a senior writer with the World Resources Institute, Washington, D. C.

AN INTERVIEW WITH FRANK WISNER

"India Will Emerge as a Great Power" QUESTION: Mr. Ambassador, you are about to complete your tour of duty in India. How wouldyou rate bilateral relations atthis juncture?

AMBASSADOR FRANK WISNER: The relationship between India and the United States, as the century draws to a close, is a very, very busy relationship. It is also a relationship that has changed in recent years in tone; much of the acerbic edge of political dialogue has disappeared.

The relationship is extraordinarily intense on the economic side.

At the policy level we have a very detailed set of exchanges, interacting on matters of economic poli(:y with the Indian Government.

The private investment side also demands a tremendous amount of time. America has, after all, a larger trading and investment relationship with India than any other country in the world, and this has grown quite considerably in recent timeso The political dialogue is less ample, but it is nonetheless a very important dialogue on matters principally related to this region. I predict it will be a dialogue of greater importance on issues that affect the world peace and security in the times ahead.

When you accepted this assignment, you must have had some ideas, hopes and expectations of what you wanted to accomplish as ambassador. Looking back, would you say that you have succeeded in putting bilateral relations on afirmer footing?

Wisner: I thought very hard about what I wanted to do when I got here. My assessment, my belief then, which has not changed one iota since, was that India was going to emerge as a great power in the world. Her history, her endowments indicated that that must happen.

Her national culture, the universal reach of her ideas indicated that was going to happen.

Second, I believed that my nation needed to have strong partnerships with nations of standing that could help guide, not shape or impose but influence, the course of world affairs, and India should be one of those key partners. I hoped to make a contribution to building the basis for that partnership between our two nations.

I think we've not traversed as much ground as one could wish, but we're on the road and moving in a constructive direction. There have been some bumps-CTBT, the Brown Amendment-but fundamentally, what we've shown in these last several years is that we can

take these bumps and get over them. The car shakes a little bit, but we keep on moving.

What do you think of economic reforms?

Wisner: I think India will carry further the process of liberalization.

But what I underestimated was the difficulty of achieving consensus. I thought consensus would fall into line faster and therefore it would be easier to be bolder about the economic choices. I've been here three years and we haven't seen a significant move to develop electric power, but we have finally seen a consensus on the need for it. I thought we would have a new telecommunications system by now, but I think this will happen. This country requires dozens of new airports, highways, roads, rail systems and ports. These things have to happen.

I would like to have seen another development as well: A much bolder opening of the financial community to mobilize the saving levels of the public. I thought India would be a bit further ahead in all these areas, but then there were elections to go through and elections were an important part of creating consensus.

If you were to write your autobiography, how would you describe yo ur stint as am bas sador in India?

Wisner: My honest answer is, I'm not planning to write my autobiography because, first, I've never felt myself sufficiently important to keep notes on my career. The second reason is, I believe my career belonged to my government, not to me. What I did, what I contributed to the decisions I took partin, is recorded in many ways in the documents that form the historical record of this period.

I would obviously like to sit down and record some thoughts for my family on what I did, as we all wish to hand down traditions from generation to generation.

You asked me what I would say about my time in India. Let me share my thoughts on that. I very deeply believe that I've been in India at a time of transition-transition of an economic nature, transition of a political nature, as India leaves the rule of a dominant political party, and responsibility for India's governance moves from the Centre to the states. In addition to these changes in the politics oflndia, there's another change and thatis India's re-emergence on the world stage.

India emerged on the world stage in Pandit Nehru's time, had a voice that reached around the world with a message about India and what she stood for. Once again, I think, India's influence will be felt in a political

sense, but this time it will be felt much beyond the nonaligned movement. India will find her new voice as an emerging great power in the world and it will be a voice that will help the world reach agreements rather than advocating the position of one group of nations.

You were the moving spirit behind the Indian tour of the Paul Taylor Dance Company early this year, America's salute to India's 50th anniversary of independence. Why did you think of bringing an American dance company to kick off, as it were, India's celebrations?

Wisner: I believe deeply that India and America must learn to communicate on many levels, including culture. Culture and the arts are enormously important to the Indian spirit. At the same time, gone are the days when governments could reach in their pockets and pay for cultural connections.

Paul Taylor was our way of showing respect to India on its 50th anniversary, a gift from all Americans. We put a lot of American Government resources into it, and a lot of American corporate money went into it. But it also opened up something else that's very significant, and that is an ongoing set of exchanges. We didn't spend all of the money we raised for Paul Taylor. We saved approximately $200,000, which will go into scholarships in the arts.

Our enduring gift to India, however, is still to be unveiled, and that is the creation of an America House in India. This is an unusual and unique America House-a virtual America House. It is a website on the Internet. It assembles important !nformation about India in one place where anyone who cares to know India, understand her, trade with her, invest in her, travel to her, will be able to find it. And the same is true for Indians looking at the United States. This is going to be a very powerful tool as India enters the information superhighway.

One often hears criticism, coming mostly from Western nations, about India's record on issues like human rights. Now that you have been here three years and seen for yourself, how would you react to that kind of criticism?

Wisner: I came to India feeling that I was going to have a bigger job than I did on this front. But the National Human Rights Commission, under two retired Chief Justices of India, has done some outstanding work in this area. It has really created a tremendQus record for itself. I'm also pleased that the Government of Jammu and Kashmir has voted into existence a state-level human rights commission. India has traveled a very important road in the field of human rights.

India is also tackling the status of women and of children in the workplace. These are huge problems. What is significant is that there's no more denial of their existence. A lot of Indians are talking about the fact that these problems exist and that they need to be worked on. These are all constructive developments.

The recent meeting between Prime Minister I.K. Gujral and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Male has raised hopes for some kind of a detente between India and Pakistan, a new beginning.

Would you like to say anything on that?

Wisner: I'm reluctant to comment in detail, butin principle, it suf-

fices to say that this step by the two prime ministers is most welcome.

Most welcome all overthe world. Most welcome to the United States.

To see India and Pakistan after a long period of estrangement create working groups that can tackle issues is a move toward detente in South Asia that is really encouraging.

The United States does not seek to be a mediator in the subcontinent. We have some ideas and we share them, on matters that concern us. But bilateral engagement between India and Pakistan represents the way to solve problems. There's a centuries-old civilization on the subcontinent. The ties are there. Common language. Common food.

Common culture. It doesn't take an outsider to get an Indian and Pakistani talking to each other. You don't need us. In the final analysis, you're neighbors. We don't live here, you do. And that imposes on you a special responsibility to move to detente and from detente into a sustainable relationship.

One last question, Mr. Ambassador. You must have some private thoughts that you formed about lndia during the course of your stay here. Can you share some of them? I ask this question of you not in your capacity as a diplomat, but as afriend of India.

Wisner: I will be happy to. But I am a diplomat. That's my definition. When I was 12 years old, someone idly turned to me and asked what would I like to be when I grew up. I had no doubt about what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a diplomat. I never thought of doing anything else in my life.

Well, you can be afriendas well as a diplomat.

Wisner: That's true, but since T love what I do and I live what I do, and I have done it for 35 years, it's hard to get this old dog to do new tricks. But I have been pointing out several things to my Indian friends. Number one, take yourself seriously, believe in yourself and in your destiny; I believe in them.

I am very happy to say that one of the things I'm beginning to discover in India is that there's a growing sense of self-confidence: Indians believe they can compete economically, and make a contribution politically. This is exactly what is needed. The sooner this confidence develops, the better for India.

The second observation I would make is that India needs to be brave, to have the courage of her convictions. If she's going to create wealth for her citizens, particularly the poorer ones, she must get on with it. Half measures are of no use to anyone. To be mired in this system of subsidies, I believe, is to deny the prospect of growth. And it's only through growth that the poor of India will have something to share.

The third thing, I hope, is that Indians, much like Americans, will take a hard look at their democracy and recognize that it is not a Godgi ven fact. It takes some effort to make democracy work. Democracy has been uniquely important to India as a way of keeping this country together. Indians have to be careful about their minorities, because this is a country of minorities, just as my country is. The success of democracy is the very careful balance of minority sentiment.

So, some of my broad thoughts are: Take yourself seriously, get on with your economy, strengthen your democracy. India has a role to play in the world, not as the little guy or the big guy, but as an equal.

D

INDIA AND AMERICA

Fifty Years of the American Libraries Just as this issue of SPAN celebrates 50 years of India's independence, thousands of Indians felicitated the American Center libraries on their half century of service in this country.

Y

our libraries are the most important thing you do in India," were the words of Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he first visited the U.S. Information Service in Delhi in 1973. The remark may be apocryphal (other divisions of the USIS felt they did important things too), but Moynihan's words glow in the memories of US IS librarians.

Many Indians agree with those words. They expressed their feelings at the libraries' birthday party last March 14 at the American Center in New Delhi. "I consider the American library the best of its kind in this country," said the chief guest, Lieutenant Governor of Delhi Tejendra Khanna, who lit the lamp and opened the party [photo at left]. "It provides incomparable services to its members and visitors with its unique pool of information and learning."

The keynote speaker of the anni versary party was Betty Turock, immediate past president of the American Library Association, who made a special trip to Indiafor the birthday celebrations. The

essence of her message is summed up in these words: "Libraries and information are cornerstones of civic life, which is in turn the cornerstone of a democracy."

For a half century, the American libraries in Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai and Mumbai have been loved and used by Indians in all walks of life, from humble secondary school students to luminaries Iike S. Radhakrishnan and Satyajit Ray. "The American library gives access to the best of what America has to offer in terms of ideas and sensibilities," said media celebrity Dileep Padgaonkar recently. "The library beckons without inducement." Padgaonkar's association with the library goes back to his days atFergusson College, Pune, where he first availed himself of its loan services via the postman. Since then, he says, the American library has remained a constant source of information for him-even though he has occasionally been disillusioned

by American foreign policy.

Henry N. Mendelsohn, director, American Center Libraries in India, explains why the libraries contain some books critical of U.S. foreign policy. "We try to select the best books and journals to present a multifaceted view of America," he says, "showing both the favorable and the critical views of our society, government and culture." Dhirendra Sharma of the Center for Science and Industrial Policy Research, a regular patron of the library, recalls how surprised he was to find Senator Fulbright's hard-hitting attack on U.S. involvement in Vietnam, his book Arrogance of Power, freely available on the library shelves.

This, of course, is in the great tradition of the "marketplace of ideas" wherein libraries playa major role. Thomas Jefferson wrote that "a democratic society depends upon an informed and enlightened citizenry." In India Mahatma Gandhi expressed the same concept when he said: "No school of thought can claim a monopoly of right judgment. We are all liable to err and are often obliged to revise our judgments. In a vast country like this, there must be room for all schools of honest thought."

True to the tradition of the American public library system, access to information is available to all.

Far left: Chief guest Tejendra Khanna, Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, lights the traditional lamp to inaugurate the libraries' birthday celebrations as Betty Turock, immediate past president of the American Libraty Association, looks on. Above: Henry Mendelsohn, as head of the American Center Libraries (ACLs) in India, also lights the lamp. Others in the photo are Ashley Wills, director of USIS India and publisher of SPAN, and Veena Chawla, director of the ACL in New Delhi. Left: Journalists try their hand at some of the latest electronic technology available at the libraries-online databases and CD-ROMs.

ACL in 1955. During the course of her tenure, she says, she provided reference services to such personalities as Welthy Fisher, Hans 1. Morgenthau, Buckminster Fuller, YK.R.Y Rao and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, to name a few. B. Shiva Rao, one of those who drafted the Constitution of India, acknowledges that many of their references came from the American library. The list is virtually endless. The Calcutta library, for example, once provided material on juvenile delinquency in the United States to Justice Jyotirmayee Nag of the Calcutta High Court. A research scholar of Delhi University was assisted with the proceedings of the Houston conference on moon rocks. But the questions are not limited to America and Americana. The day the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik in 1957, the library got 50 calls asking for more information about it!

S

etup as an extension of the U.S. Information Service to provide access to books and magazines on American life and culture, history, politics, economics and business, the American Center libraries have "rendered a signal service to all persons who have an intellectual appetite for know ledge and learning," says Soli Sorabjee, the renowned jurist. Today, the American libraries are respected institutions, integral parts of the academic and intellectual fabric of the four cities they serve. Though 1997 celebrates 50 years of the American Center libraries in India, this is a little bit of an oversimplification in order to have the celebrations coincide with Manyfamous Indians have visited the American Center libraries such as Jawaharlal India's golden jubilee celebrations. Technically, all four Nehru (upper photo) and Sarojini Naidu (lower photo). •.

J . libraries-Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai and Chennai-are OY'qoJfZ.od6:J ,l-v I~~ U.5L-~ older. The oldest of the four, the Calcutta library, dates back to April 1943, when the U.S. Government set up a reading Located in the heart of the city, be it Chennai, Calcutta, Mumbai or Delhi, the American Center Library (ACL) has its doors open to room on the third floor of Tower House, near Dharmatala crossing, whoever chooses to walkin. to dispense war information.

In the ACLs' early years ofthe forties and fifties, Indian readers The Delhi library opened in 1946 as a reading room seating 24 were relatively unfamiliar with the open-shelf system. It took readers on Queensway, now known as Janpath, with an initial coleven longer for them to realize that the services of the library were lection of 3,000 books, 2,000 pamphlets and 50 periodicals. In free, particu larly the reference service. Free access to information 1951 free membership was introduced and the library began lending out books. Two years later a much appreciated mail-lending syswas a concept that citizens of a newly independent country had to tem was established. Though younger than those in the other meget used to. Kamla Kapoor, chief librarian (1948-73), still recalls the hesitancy with which students in the early days would aptropolises, the ACL in New Delhi settled down well. Its shelves proach a librarian to ask for a book. After a librarian reached for expanded to accommodate modern American writing, which was and found the answer to a question, Kapoor says, the library patron eagerly received by readers in Delhi. Very soon larger premises invariably asked: "How much should I pay?" became imperative and the library moved to its present site on Kasturba Gandhi Marg. The collection swelled to 25,000 volumes oday, a measure of the libraries' success is the number of and subscriptions to 324 magazines, prompting one awestruck queries any of the four ACLs handles on a wide range of user to marvel at the librarians' proficiency-"How do you mansubjects. On any particular day, as many as 40-50 questions, age to remember the names of so many books? I can't even recall each requiring over five minutes of reference time, are answered the name of my son's class teacher!" by letter, telephone, or over the counter. Heera Kapasi, library By the time the new building was inaugurated in 1974, the Delhi director during 1983-93, recalls recei ving a query from President library had 30,000 registered borrowers, a monthly attendance of S. Radhakrishnan over the phone shortly after she joined the Delhi 18,000 and a staff of 20 trained librarians. Membership was free

T

and procedures simple. It was possible for an individual to walk into the library and emerge a member. As a result, the number of members swelled to more than 30,000, of which about 30 percent were active. Over the years it continued to provide service to a wide cross section of readers in the capital and large parts of North India.

Throughout this gradual growth to its present stature, the service on which the library has established its reputation remained unchanged. To quote journalist Pran Chopra: "I have been using the Center from the time it was founded ... .!have always found the staff to be courteous and extremely helpful. The large resources made it easier for them to be so, but what mattered most was the desire to be helpful which I encountered at all levels of the staff."

This appreciation is echoed in the words of another regular user, S.P. Chopra, chairman, EFY Enterprises: "There are many other libraries. But the American library all these years has retained its leadership. The quality and quantity of service have been superb, thanks to the dedicated staff which has inherited rich traditions."

"Libraries today should be more than books. They should be gateways to the worldwide"information superhighways.

We are making the American libraries in India such gateways."

But perhaps more rewarding than the praise constantly showered upon the ACLs' staffers is coming face-to-face with the rewards of their dedication. "I remember a young boy with a speech defect who used to borrow copies of Popular Mechanics," says Vera Merwanji, director of ACL Mumbai.

"He often seemed depressed and I encouraged him in his interest. When I ran into him a few years ago, he told me he was happily married, had children, and was operating his own garage. He said coming to the library had given him the knowledge and selfconfidence to pursue his interest."

The American libraries were so highly respected that in 1968 a formal program of internship for India's library science graduates was introduced to provide hands-on training and exposure to the library work ethic. Anushua Choudhury from ACL Calcutta points out that it has become compulsory for library science students of all leading universities in eastern and northeastern India to come to the library for an orientation to the faci lities and services. Generations of library science students and other professional groups have visited the library over the years as part of their educational tours and have carried back an indelible impression of excellence in library service. The numerous lectures, workshops, seminars and other programs regularly organized by the ACLs also provide valuable opportunities to upgrade professional skills and knowledge. Many of the leading librarians and information scientists in India today have served as interns in American libraries in India.

keep In the recent past, ACLs have taken a quantum jump-to pace with the knowledge and information explosion and the advent of computers and the Internet. The role of the library and librarians is changing. As Delhi library Director Veena Chawla says: "We now have to link the end user with the right information resource at the right time." No, it's not really so different from what it used to be. It's just that technology has given a face-lift to the libraries. The face-lift is an approximate structural functional image of the libraries in the United States. Reference librarians in Delhi recall a research student who came in one day to use the CDROM ProQuest GPO [general periodicals on disc] to obtain recent articles on the training of teachers. In half an hour she had completed her assignment. Glowing with satisfaction, she exclaimed, "It's amazing, for half an hour I actually thought I was in Washington, D.C.!"

ProQuest general periodicals on disc offer access to almost 1,000 titles in abstract and index form, with 280 of them available in image full-text format. The titles covered include a broad range of journals, from art and entertainment to business and public policy and many other subject areas. Journal coverage starts from 1988 onward and the database is updated every month.

Automation has resulted in a more efficient information service and has enhanced the professional capabilities of the staff. The online public access catalog (OPAC) has stimulated catalog use among members of the library. The process has been made easier by providing multiple access points such as author, title, subject, key word, title word, etc. By speeding up the routine and laborintensive functions of researching through periodical indexes and other reference sources, CD-ROMs have considerably increased the librarians' abilities to respond to queries on a variety of subjects. Library patrons find the new technology user-friendly and time-saving. It is now possible to access the most up-to-date information. And with more full-text CD-ROM resources becoming available, it is now possible to obtain not just article citations and abstracts but the full texts of entire documents-a researcher's dream come true! Students and other users of the library responded enthusiastically to the changes and are increasingly, as M.K. Jagdish, ACL director in Chennai, puts it: "getting hooked to electronic databases." n1996, ACLs initiated fee-based services. This meant not just an enroll ment fee for indi vidual and corporate membersh ip, but walk-in charges for the casual users, a step that discouraged nonserious visitors from using the library. While this shift in service has not altered the user profile dramatically, it has shifted the emphasis. ACL Mumbai reports that more businessmen, company executives, journalists and graduate students are using the facilities now as compared to earlier years when the largest category of users was undergraduate students. Now mainly those with specific interests catered to by the library become members.

Engineering and science students have dropped considerably.

This is understandable since the library's resources on these subjects are not outstanding, though information can be accessed via the computer. Primary users of the library are now professionals

I

Right: Tejendra Khanna, accompanied

by Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy Matthew Daley, inspects the online public access catalog (OPAC). Below: Library members access information through OPAC, which has replaced the old card cataloging system.

and academicians, who expect an even higher level of professional efficiency from the library staff, and who also gleefully assert that "they are able to get the maximum benefit now."

As a consequence of the shift in membership profile, there has been a move to expand the reference and information service to specifically cater to the corporate community. What this means is an emphasis on American business and management issues, trends and data. A new core service entitled Business Connections serves the business community and includes the Knight Riders Dialog Information Service, a fee-based service that provides worldwide company information; trade and market data; international news; U.S. Government news, including public affairs; law and regulatory information; patents and trademarks; technical literature and reference material; and general reference material. Legi-slate is another online database which provides U.S. federal legislative and regulatory information, including the complete text of congressional bills and resolutions. The database contains biographies and descriptions of U.S. Congress members' 'districts with information on

each state and its governor. It also provides complete texts of transcripts of White House and other government press briefings and interviews.

"Online access is definitely more cost-effective," says Mendelsohn. "It saves on both storage space and shipping costs. I see our libraries in the future moving toward even more electronic access and buying fewer books and print journals. This is a worldwide trend, and our American libraries in India will be no exception. Reduced budgets and staff have necessitated smaller print collections. In many countries our libraries have stopped circulating books and become reference libraries."

For over 50 years the American libraries in India have opened and kept open a path to information and knowledge on the United States. Even today, whatever the constraints and changes, the task of dissemination of information remains focal. As Betty Turock pointed out in her address during the 50th birthday party on March 14: "Despite the role of telecommunications and satellites in shrinking the world into a global village, the world is once again divided, this time into information-rich and information-poor countries. Information highways are egalitarian for those on them and elitist for those who cannot reach them."

We asked Director Mendelsohn for some concluding thoughts.

"The great library of ancient Alexandria," he said, "had on its entrance a Greek inscription sometimes translated as 'Medicine for the Mind,' sometimes as 'Nourishment for the Soul.' Both are apt.

And I like the epigram that a great library contains the diary of the human race. But libraries today should be more than books. They should be gateways to the worldwide information superhighways.

We are making the American libraries in India such gateways-so that the information superhighways will be egalitarian, will be available to all Indians. The words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt now apply to the whole world: 'I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.'"

D About the Authors: Jehanara Wasi, who has had a long association with SPAN, is a Delhi-based researcher and editor. Madhavi Singh, also based in the capital, contributes to a variety of magazines andjournals as a freelance writer.

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INDIAANDAMERICA

Printmaking Partnership Everyone knows about Indo-American joint ventures in business, but not many people know about one of the most productive and successful collaborations in the arts-in printmaking. A pioneer in this frontier is Devraj Dakoji of Delhi's Atelier Studio, who recently returned from the U.S. to exhibit the results of his collaborations in printmaking with artists such as Lenny Silverberg, David Johanson, Berutta Hassen, Wan Chasta, Kay Walking Stick, Lee Dillon and Michi Itami. Dakoji also had a collaborative project with M.P. Hussain in the U.S. "Collaborative printmaking," says Dakoji, "offers challenges to both the artist and the master printer. Together, the two explore new aesthetic terrain which can yield extraordinary results." Adds his painter-wife Pratibha: "Collaborative printmaking has nothing to do with offset printing which allows you to take out innumerable prints of an artist's work,on calendar paper and which is of limited value. Collaborative printmaking involves a close working partnership between the artist and the master printer." The artist, who is the author of the image, participates in the process of making the master image plate that can be of various media such as wood, metal or stone. Only a limited number of "editions" or copies are made; artist and printmaker supervise the production of each one.

One of the best printrnakers in India, Devraj Dakoji trained in 1992-93 at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

There he worked with the world-renowned master printmaker Krishna Reddy. Subsequently, Dakoji was until 1996 a visiting scholar at New York University. He perfected his art under the guidance of Robert Blackburn, director of New York's Printmaking Workshop, where all ofthese collaborations were made.

Back home in India now, Dakoji hopes to collaborate with some of the country's best artists to bring their works within the reach of many art lovers.

-Maya Goburdhun 路Jani

Top,far left: Robert Blackburn, director of New York's Printmaking Workshop, examines a lithograph proof that artist Patricia Leighton made in collaboration with Devraj Dakoji. Top left: Dakoji and Leighton print the edition.

Left: Christianity by M.F. Hussain, 76 x 112 em, lithograph, chin-cholle and Xerox toner on B.F.K. Reeves paper. Edition of25. The chin-cholle technique allows the printer to use papers of different colors and grains to achieve a desired color combination. For this collaborative project with Hussain, Dakoji used blue paper for the top half and blacked out the faces of Mary and Mother Teresa to create a palimpsestic iconography.

Untitled by Lenny Silverberg, 76 x 56 em, black-and-white reverse lithograph on B.F.K. Reeves paper.

Edition of25. For this project, Dakoji used the transfer technique wherein the artist does not draw directly on the litho stone but instead makes a drawing on papel; which is later transferred to the stone.

Left: Untitled by David Johanson, 53 x 47 em, seven-color lithograph, edge-to-edge print on B.F.K. Reeves paper. Edition of 50. "As Johanson was unfamiliar with collaborative printmaking, " says Dakoji, "we engaged in an extensive discussion so that he grasped the finer nuances.

Once that was done, the result was an exciting seven-color lithograph print that we both liked. "

Right: A Broken Dream by Berutta Hassen; 76 x 56 em, two-color lithograph, chin-cholle and Xerox toner on B.F.K. Reeves paper. Edition of25.

It took Dakoji and Hassen almost a year to make a limited edition lithograph of this watercolor work.

El Pele El Hipo sel Espiritu by Wan Chasta (left),}8 x 76 em, seven- to eight-color lithograph with photograph on S.F.K. Reeves paper. Edition of 100.

"The artist had already done the initial proofing when she contacted me to do the edition, " says Dakoji. "I thought it would be a smooth job, but when I started working I encountered all sorts of technical problems.

Fortunately, Wan Chasta understood the situation and we started afresh after changing the plates. "

Pranamu by Devraj Dakoji, 20 x 38 em, color etching with chin-cholle on S.F.K. Reeves paper. Color trial proof "For my painting I did the etching on a zinc plate and used different colored rollers to produce the color trial proof," says Dakoji.

The Madman, The Silver Dream and the White Moon by Pratibha Dakoji, 53 x 76 cm,jourcolor lithograph, Xerox tone I; edge-to-edge print on Nepali rice paper.

Edition of 50. "Every collaborative printmaking project presents its own problems and challenges, " says Devraj Dakoji. "For example, here we had to make several proofs to ~ attain the desired fluorescent pink quality, and we also used the chincholle technique in the manner of a collage. "

You're An Indian? by Kay Walking Stick 76 x 112 em, six-color lithograph on S.F.K. Reeves papa Edition of 50. Dakoji prepared six large-sized plates for six colors for this print. The painter would bring samples of the original color to match the print proof, says Dakoji, who used Xerox toner to attain the same effect as the original painting.

Caprice No. J by Lee Dillon, 46 x 56 em, etching in sepia on B.FK. Boffpapa While working-on this etching, ~ Dakoji tried different papers and inks before he got the required softness of tone and density.

He Going to Bay America-T

by Michi Hami, 56 x 76 em, computer graphic and dual print lithograph on B.FK. Reeves papa Edition of25. This was Dakoji's first collaborative project as a master printer: The print was made by overlapping a computer graphic and a litho plate.

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INDIAANDAMERICA

T

Orson Welles in a scene from Citizen Kane, generally regarded as one of the finest films of all time. Welles was both director and lead actor.

INEM

NDIN American films have long been a model for a sizable part of the world's dreams, including India's. And in platonic fashion, the author concludes, India's affair with Hollywood continues unabated. ne Sunday morning in the early 1940s, I walked into Satyajit Ray's residence in Ballygunje, Calcutta, for a chat, as I used to do once in a while. There was something like panic on Ray's face when he saw me. He lOOKeddistraught, and said: "I can't talk to you now. I am in a great hurry. Paulette Goddard is in town and I am going to see her in a little while." He didn't even ask me to sit down.

He practically shooed me out.

Calcutta was then the rest and recreation center of the eastern theater of World War II and Paulette Goddard was evidently passing through on her way back from some neighboring country after having entertained the troops there. The center of the city, the shopping and entertainment area, was quite attractive in those days and often full of GIs walking around. Occasionally a tall, big black GI would startle a demure Bengali housewife by bawling out the greeting: Hi, baby!

What happened at Ray's rendezvous with Goddard I never found out-or have forgotten. But what struck me at the time was the expression of awe on Satyajit's face, a mark of his admiration for Hollywood. It matured as he became a great filmmaker himself, but never went away. When he got the Oscar in 1992 for his lifetime achievement, the much-awarded man declared that that was the greatest recognition ever for him. For

O

Hollywood was where he, like so many others across the world, had learned his basic film language. When Arthur Penn paid a tribute to him at the Asia Society, New York, at a complete retrospective of his works in 1981, Ray in his reply said, among other things: "I learnt from Hollywood not only what to do, but what notto do."

Even where Ray opted for new methods, his terms of reference were largely derived from Hollywood. In his years of apprenticeship, he would read a Hollywood script, then go to see the film; at other times he would write a script from a classic novel, then compare it with a Hollywood film made from it. He would see each film time and time again until he knew every cut almost by heart. Having a phenomenal memory helped this learning process. Two large volumes of Gassner and Nichols's collection of scripts of famous American films were al ways on a shelf within his reach. Ray's own films are substantially different from Hollywood's; they are contemplative, lyrical, patently Indian. They are often not "entertaining," and are more concerned with making audiences feel deeply, and think. Yet their style of storytelling is derived more from Hollywood than from any other source. Indeed for the majority of India's "art" (Ray disliked that unhappy appellation)

filmmakers who came in his wake, the storytelling part comes basically from Hollywood. One golden rule of Hollywood that most if not all filmmakers have imbibed is that nothing should disturb the illusion and make the audience conscious of seeing a film. Technique must be so well hidden that it never comes between the audience and its absorption in the story.

For Bollywood in Mumbai and Tollywood (derived from Tollygunje, where the studios are) in Calcutta, churning out mass entertainment, the American cinema has forever remained the model, and forever they have been trying to be "as good as Hollywood." Why? Obviously because Hollywood has, for a whole century, churned out highly professional products suitable for the whole world, ironed out regional differences, stayed at the cutting edge of technological innovations, canned and marketed entertainment on a huge scale and with a spe~d and efficiency few could ever match. It developed genres like the slapstick comedy, the western, the gangster film, the horror film, the musical, the sci-fi, that are as uniquely American as they are universal. The cowboy riding into the sunset, the gunman shooting from the hip, the dancer tapping out his beat, the chorus girls kicking their legs, the bathing beauties wading through water like mermaids-all became archetypes for a sizable part of the world's dreams, including India's.

The whole apparatus grew from the ground up. The early American cinema was an outgrowth of the vaudeville, the circus, the magic show. The nickelodeons were so called because you paid a nickel to get in and because odeon is the Greek word for theater. The sublime and the ridiculous, the high and mighty and the lowly, the classical and the contemporary never got together so happily as in that portmanteau word. What you saw in there was the real world in a way that had been impossible before. In the dawning world of technology, there was an urge to understand, analyze, absorb the sights and sounds of a new world taking shape before your very eyes-skyscrapers coming up, motor cars gathering speed, trains crossing each other in a new concrete music, electricity lighting up a room or a whole city at the flick of a switch. How

quickly painting became an art of the few and photography the passion of the masses!

From still to motion picture photography, from silent to sound films, from black and white to color, the cinema went from milestone to milestone on the road to realism laid in the early days.

Nothing illustrates this better than Hale's Tours, with what might be called their "cowcatcher realism," because the camera was often mounted on the cowcatcher in front of the engine on a moving train.

George C. Hale, fire路chief of Kansas City, shot a wide variety of exotic landscapes and projected them before audiences in a dark room, seated in a simulated rail car, giving them a fantastic experience of watching the landscape flying past. Beginning in 1904, Hale's Tours were an immediate, if shortlived, success. But by the time the tours ran out of steam, they had inscri bed themselves indelibly on the pages of film history.

Such extremes apart, realism became the foundation of American cinema over which were laid the various genres it invented.

Whether it is comedy or the western, social drama or the musical, the gangster or the horror film, a certain basic realism is never abandoned. In John Ford's Fort Apache, horses gallop over different surfaces and one of the pleasures of watching the film is to hear the changing sounds of the horses' hooves as they hit each type of surface.

Some gangster films, like John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle or Michael Curtiz's Angels with Dirty Faces, are quite awesome in their vivid portraiture of the under-

world. James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson or Humphrey Bogart still impress us not because they are handsome as tailor's dummies or lumps of cheesecake, but because of the closeness with which they represent a certain type, because of the uniqueness of their personality, their sheer credibility.

When the early movies were being shown, hosts of immigrants were entering America who could not understand much English; people from various countries and races speaking a babel of tongues were thrown together and they had to try to make a new life, a common language and find a way to belong. In their own unique way, the realism of the films silently helped them to come to terms with the new society they had entered.

The part the American cinema played in society at that point was not entirely different from what happened, is still happening, in India. The enormous honeycomb of group identities, defined by region and religion, language and customs, physiognomies and food habits, which have been coalescing through conflict and resolution, coexisting by learning to live and let live in independent India and indeed for many decades before independence as well, needed, and still need, some common perceptions of tradition and modernity, religion and science, threats to identity and hopes for the future. This the cinema has been able to provide in significant measure, behind its garb of entertainment. In the American cinema, the frontier spirit was invoked, followed by the portrayal of the slow but steady process of establishing the rule of law, added to the spread of the railroads, creating common experiences and values in the formative years of a new nation. Many claim that in India the Hindi (actually Hindustani) film has in fact created an informal but effective lingua franca.

And there is no doubt that the films have helped to interpret the signs of the times to the migrant labor newly arrived in India's rapidly growing cities in the five decades of independence much as they once did to the immigrant population in the United States.

Charlie Chaplin, who did this in his own unique way in America, has a large following in India. No wonder Calcutta has a

square and a cinema theater named after him. In Ludhiana, Punjab, there is a Charlie House on Rai Bahadur Road where they sell woollen garments and pack them in carry bags with a big picture of the Little Man. Apart from such marks of affection for him, there have been innumerable takeoffs on the Little Man in India in all filmmaking regions and languages-easily the most important of these being Raj Kapoor's. He co-opted the Little Man's worldview, his agonies and his sense of being the lone victim of a predatory world seeking out other such victims. Kapoor romanticized and sentimentalized it further. In films like Awara he silverlined the sadness of Chaplin with a tinge of hope in early Nehruvian India in a unique manner which still holds its appeal. He articulated the tramp's mentality in Indian terms, bringing his pains, pleasures and humble dreams out in the open in words and songs where Chaplin's were clothed oply in gestures.

Chaplin's silence and Kapoor's volubility were both imposed by circumstances; the enforced silence gave a certain mute helplessness to Chaplin's agony, finding an echo in the hearts of millions across the globe. Raj Kapoor's torrent of words and songs made his sorrow very active and hopeful of a better world in the future, if not here and now. There is an underlying feeling that somebody out there is listening.

Chaplin's talkie fi lms first became somewhat intellectual, as Monsieur Verdoux.

Here he defended, as it were, the righttokill a few wives for money as against war which murders millibns. "Numbers sanctify," he pronounced with much moral flourish. Of course, his humor had not deserted him yet. Spotted by a policeman at a party, he promptly crawls under the table. The policeman crouches and asks him: Cop: What are you looking for?

Verdoux: A sandwich.

Cop: What kind ofa sandwich?

Verdoux: An ordinary sandwich-a piece of bread between two slices of meat.

In Limelight Chaplin finds his unique mix of laughter and tears set to a glorious theme music and based essentially on his own performance, but for the last time.

Neither A King in New York nor A Countess in Hong Kong get very far with their quips;

they simply fail to become verbal slapstick.

Compared to Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harry Langdon or Ben Turpin are hardly known in India. Like certain fine local wines, they did not travel well. Perhaps they were only funny and little else, failing to meanas muchas Chaplin did.

Chaplin did express the real through the funny, but the man who gave shape to the art of storytelling was I>avid Wark Griffith. He was devoted to the theater and despised the cheap art of the movies so much that until he was a huge success he would not lend his name to his creations on celluloid.

His mentor in evolving the form was, as Eisenstein pointed out in his famous essay, Charles I>ickens. Griffith himself acknowledged his debt to I>ickens in using the device of the parallel action, going from one set of characters to another every now and then and finally bringing all the strands together in a resolution of conflicts. His mix of realism and sentimentality was also very I>ickensian.

Griffith imparted a literary quality to his spectacles and sentimental dramas but he did not kill the underlying spirit of realisJJ;l in American cinema. Indeed, he helped it with his introduction of the close-up, which has become the stock-in-trade of all cinema, including the Indian. In fact, his search for realism was so keen that, according to the cinema's first superstar, Lillian Gish, he would always have someone copy the exact words spoken by the actors in his silent films so that the subtitles could be written up accordingly. "Since it was born out of the action, it would be truer than. anyone could make it up,"he would explain.

It was the emphasis on drama introduced

by Griffith that probably resulted in the star system. In the heyday of Hollywood the stars were the role models of society, the object of the dreams of the masses. The studios systematically built up the allure of the stars through a variety of means of which publicity was only one. When India started its film industry in earnest, its model was

Hollywood, and ineVitably the stars shone bright in its skies. Bombay Talkies or New Theatres or Pancholi Were nothing if not replications of the Hollywood studio. And the hordes of film magazines with stories on the secret lives of the stars were im~ ported into India soon enougn. Today the fan magazine has virtually disappeared from Hollywood but at last count there were something like 500 of them in India.

Needless to say, all American cinema In films like Awara, Raj Kapoor blended the sadness of Charlie Chaplin with a tinge of hope in a manner that still holds its appeal.

Chaplin has been a perennialfavorite with Indian moviemakers and audiences.

Jean Hagen and Sterling Hayden in John Huston The Asphalt Jungle.

s

was not, is not, mindless entertainment churned out by dream factories. Both inside and outside the industry there has been a steady stream of the new and the different invigorating it from time to time. One must remember that a film like Citizen Kane was born within the industry. Its maverick director, Orson Welles, went on making wayout films one after the other. Much of his vocabulary and style of phrasing has gone into current usage, bringing much enrichment to the language of cinema.

The import of talent from abroad also injected fresh blood into the system. From Germany came Ernst Lubitsch, from England Alfred Hitchcock, from Austria Erich von Stroheim, from France Jean Renoir. The list is long and impressive.

There is a flip side to the coin too-Rene Clair left in a huff shouting down "19th Century Fox," Fellini refused to sign even after being locked up in a room with pen and contract for an hour and a half, Renoir went back to France, Eisenstein left without finishing his epic on Mexico. But on balance one has to say that the import pol-

icy worked. Later, with the coming film festivals abroad. Some of them are so of television and the decline in the realistic in showing conditions among the mass audience, independent producpoor in India as to embarrass Indian diplotion became the order of the day. mats posted in the countries hosting the fesSubcultures of cinema proliferated tivals. It would not be an exaggeration to in small and big ways. Whether it is say that it is the government that virtually Robert Altman or John Sayles, created and kept alive the "new cinema" Francis Ford Coppola or Steven (Satyajit Ray's first film, Pather Panchali, Spielberg, all broke fresh ground was funded by the West Bengal Governalthough some broke box office ment as early as 1955). Most of these fIlms, records as well and others didn't. as we have seen earlier, adopt the basic Some of the experiments outside Hollywood narrative style. Hollywood is of the Hollywood industry have thus present in good measure in both the -"commercial" and the "art" film. been mind-boggling. In the summer of 1968, I drove 1,500 kilometers all However, Indian cinema as a whole alone, across New Mexico, to see learned its lessons from Hollywood so well Stan Brakhage in the ghost town of that it has been able to protect its business Gilpin, Colorado, where he lived in and build its own empire, making it difficult for Hollywood to maintain, not to speak of splendid isolation with his wife and expanding, its market in India. The Indian children, making 8 and 16 mm films film has become a model not only in South in his backyard, recording the death of his dog or his wife's delivery of a Asia but also in many of the less developed countries elsewhere. Until the other day, it baby. Sometimes he would scratch constituted a substantial item of export to the surface ofa strip offilm to make Southeast Asia, Wcst Asia, Africa and the images of unpredictable variety and erstwhile U.S.S.R. It has been the world's interest. He screened a copy of the delivsecond largest film industry and remains ery film called Window Water Baby the maker of the largest number of films.

Moving, a poetic film but one with such This is because it has developed an indigegraphic details of amniotic fluid and bodnbus form of melodrama so culture-speily slime that dear departed friend Rita cific, with its plethora of song and dance Ray, who wrote film criticism as Kobita Sarkar, nearly fainted and had to be carried routines, so popular with the big audiences home in a state of shock. Brakhage's work as to make its fortress impregnable. It has is highly respected by a very articulate midone away with the Hollywood classification of genres after tossing elements from nority all over the world. Earlier in New York I had met the father figure of this each into its very own goulash. Although the films carry a load of songs, they have movement at the Chelsea Hotel, made fatoo much drama to be called musicals and mous by Andy Warhol whose interminable static shots of one single object were a too much music to be called dramatic films in the Hollywood sense. When Basu strange protest'against the mandatory variety we normally see on the screen. These Chatterjee adapted My Fair Lady into Manpasand, he had to cut down the number subcultures of different eras have always of songs to make room for the mandatory stayed outside Hollywood but have never amount of drama. been denied right to exist even though they So the Hollywood product is kept out, but have had to struggle to survive and make its inventions, techniques and plotline go their mark. on being absorbed. In platonic fashion, Such frontiers of experimentation have India's affair with Hollywood continues not been explored much in India, but the 0 unabated. government has provided considerable state help even in making films totally dis- About the Author: Chidananda Das Gupta is a similar to the Bollywood product. Some of distinguished movie critic. filmmake/; cultural the films are highly critical of the establishcommentator and ajudge at many lVorldfamous ment, yet many of these have been awarded film festivals. Until recently he was cultural ediprizes by the President of India and sent to tor of the Teiegraph, Calcutta.

"What we call the world is another name for our own particular angle of vision, derived (quite by accident) from where we happen to be placed on the map."

Plans for Departure, I firmly believe that "at some time not far ahead, countries must shrink into Danish unimportance and languages be understood by inspired instinct."

Anna's English husband, Nicholas, says of her: "Anna thinks every country should sink into total insignificance as far as possible." His guests smile politely, thinking it's a feeble joke. But so, of course, not long ago, would have been the statement that a black man was going to be President of South Africa. ndo-American relations started on a "high," natural enough since the urge for freedom has the Americans' instinctive sympathy.

President Roosevelt championed it during the war.

He tried in vain to hurry Winston Churchill into accepting the idea and establishing a framework for it without delay .. Eleanor Roosevelt invited two young Indian girlsmy sister and myself-to tea at her apartment in New York City to hear from them about conditions in India that did not get reported in the press. In December 1944 my mother was helped to get to the United States without a passport, which had been confiscated when she was jailed. Widowed early that year by the crippling death of my father, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, from an illness contracted in jail, she was in Bengal doing famine relief work when General Startemeyer, chief of the Allied Air Command in the eastern theater of war, heard she was finding it impossible to leave the country to attend a Pacific Relations Conference in America. He put her onto a wartime plane at short notice and Sumner Welles, the then U.S. Undersecretary of State, gave clearance for her visit. Some months later she attended the inaugural meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco. She was an uninvited outsider with no status, as the official Indian representatives at the meeting had been appointed by the British Government. Yet it was she who made news and won popular

I

acclaim because she had the wholehearted support of influential writers, editors and commentators.

Later, as ambassador to Washington, she enjoyed a high degree of personal rapport with the administration and made enduring friendships-as American ambassadors have been able to do here in India-in spite of radical differences in world view and economic philosophy at the official level.

Officialdom and its policies of one sort or another will always be there, and we can count on them to keep changing. America will suddenly recognize the People's Republic of China . India will suddenly liberalize her economy. Things that were never expected to happen wi II keep happening, policy being the variable, changeable thing it is, and Frank Sinatra's "All or Nothing at All" being no part of it.

Relationship is something else. It can hang by a thread, travel a razor's edge. Itis made of one's own inner and outer experience: the splendor of Wellesley's woods in the fall; the novels of Saul Bellow; the tears in one's eyes as one reads Lincoln's words engraved on his memorial; "glorifried" ham and eggs on Lexington Avenue; Louis Armstrong singing "C'est si Bon." Relationship thri ves-in Nehru's wordson an "appreciation of each other even when we differ."

Cherishing our differences was never more important than it is now when technology is reducing Homo sapiens to a dreary surface sameness aimed at looking, eating and thinking alike. Luckily, since Indians and Americans are thankful to be themselves, they are likely to remain so, keeping their essential identities intact, and luckily, too, there is no securer basis for an equal relationship than sturdy selfrespect on both sides.

And yet we are similar in ways we don't realize. I cannot think of two other countries that are so blithely contradictory. Indians traveled nonviolently to nationhood and would like others to believe that ahimsa is

their highest value. Yet they fell apart in fratricide on the eve of independence and violence is endemic in the body politic today. Americans profoundly believe that the freedom to choose is the basis of life and dignity, but they have trouble accepting other people's choices when these are different from their own. Like Professor Higgins's puzzled query in My Fair Lady, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" they seem to be asking, "Why can't everybody be more like us?"

I cannot imagine a time or a circumstance when either America, an orderly democracy, or India, a chaotic one, would settle for any authoritarian path to human development. No such plan would get far off the ground. The practice of freedom becomes a habit.

As similarities go I have often wondered what to make of Superman's likeness to the yogi, and decided there is a hankering common to both that has little to do with the business-ridden aspects of relationship. In the American fairy tale an ordinary man is in secret possession of superhuman powers and uses these for others' welfare. India's ancient tradition of yoga teaches just this, that human powers are capable of unlimited evolution, that every man is potentially superman, and that powers acquired can only be used for the human good.

What better than an expanded consciousness to reveal to us that the individual, and the individual society, are only starting points designed to fit us for membership of the human race.

D About

the Author:

published

Nayantara

eight novels,

Sahgal

has

two autobiographies

and a political study of Indira Gandhi's years in power. In 1990 she was elected foreign honorary membe r of the Ame rican A cademy of Arts and Sciences. Her latest book, published this year, is an anthology of essays, Point of View: A Personal Response to Life, Literature and Politics.

For several years Indians and Pakistanis have been holding seminars on conflict resolution under the auspices of the U.S. Information Service.

The most recent of these meetings took place earlier this year between Indian and Pakistani journalists in Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi, Mumbai and New Delhi. Arthur Charity, an active member of the new publicjournalism movement in the U.S., was the moderator of these meetings.

y second conversation in South Asia took place on an earlymorning flight from Karachi to Lahore, last February. A college 路professor had the seat next to mine. As we chatted it became clear she was gracious, accomplished, a family woman; properly modest but also strongly self-confident. I told her I had flown over from the United States to moderate a set of seminars in Pakistan and India for journalists of the two countries, on what role the media might play in resolving the Indo-Pak conflict. At this she put aside the airiness we had fallen into when talking about family and the Pakistan countryside and the strangeness of my . hometown, New York; her brows knit, and she said: "Of course we're all very worried about this problem; we'd all like things to become normal-after 50 years! But I feel very good about the things Nawaz Sharif is saying, and [then] Foreign Minister I.K. Gujral in India. I think we may have reached the point where matters are going to change."

It was a sentiment that, by the end of the day, I would hear a few dozen times at least from every Pakistani who broached the subject at all. "But why do you think so?" I asked her, because it didn't yet make sense to me. "Whatis it about Sharif? He was prime minister before; and he left the Indo-Pak situation exactly where he'd found it. What's changed?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. I can't say specifically." She shrugged, a strange, frail gesture for someone so confident in everything else. "I just hope he has changed, that is all. And the Indian leaders, too. You have to have hope, and this is our only hope."

In one way of looking at it, the two-week-Iong "traveling seminar" I was going to join that morning in Lahore had been convened to test whether this college professor was right, whether people like Sharif and Gujral were her only hope. She was locked into a world view that was very familiar to me as an editorial writer on foreign affairs, one that's so widely shared it often seems to go without saying: a belief that the solutions to the wars and

M

near-wars that embroil whole peoples are held hostage to the vision, the talents and the personal quirks of that small coterie of politicians, intellectuals, generals and tycoons whom the social scientists call "elites." If elites rise to great statesmanship, if they educate their people about peace and outmaneuver their rivals, then conflicts may end. If, as is more often the case, they fail to rise so high or be so lucky, the wars and arms races and worries persist.

All of which leaves ordinary people, from illiterate vi llagers right on up to lady college professors, with no power to control their future at all, except on election days when they can choose new "elites" and (as my seatmate was doing) try to hope these will succeed w here the last ones failed.

The dozen men and women I met in Lahore that day and the next-editors, reporters and media professors from the gamut of Indian and Pakistani cities-had been assembled by the seminar's sponsor, the United States Information Service, because they seemed open to the idea that the media could playa more active role in bringing about peace between the two countries. This necessarily meant that the public could playa greater role, because while the press often writes as if it's holding a private conversation between its pundits and the powers-that-be, the only real audience a newspaper has the power to move are the thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who read it, or have it read to them in tea stalls all across South Asia. Writers know that words, by themselves, can do nothing to end a war or an arms race unless someone with more power than ajournalistpicks them up and uses them. And anyone who's written for a newspaper long enough knows that public officials will do what they choose regardless of the wisdom or foolishness they find on the editorial pages.

The public, however, is something else. For most ordinary people, unlike for their leaders, newspapers, magazines, radio, television and, to a minuscule but growing extent, electronic mail and the Internet are the only windows they have on the world beyond their daily lives and extended families: the only connection most

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Indians have with most Pakistanis. If they have to come to terms with one another, they have to do it through the media. And even if public officials can't be swayed by jingoistic reporting or editorials preaching tolerance and accommodation, they will most assuredly have to take account if the public, with the press's help, forms some kind of clear and stubborn opinion of what to do about the Indo-Pak conflict. Public outrage can block presidents and prime ministers from doing all sorts of things; pub Iic tolerance and conciliation can sometimes prod them to be bolder. It's conventional wisdom in the United States that President Richard Nixon was forced to end tbe Vietnam War because Americans, saturated with pictures of dying U.S. soldiers and napalmed children on the television news, had turned against it. Equally, that the speeches of Martin Luther King, J r., broadcast on TV and radio, and the many news clips of dogs and water cannons being turned on peaceful black marchers in the American South, created the public sympathy that enabled Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to enact the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. he first thing all the journalists participating in the seminar in Lahore agreed upon was that if Indians and Pakistanis haven't been able to exercise similar power over their governments, it isn't because of any tragic flaw in their democracy, but because they have no equally sy.mpathetic exposure to one another's country or equally vigorous scrutiny of their own shortcomings. They live, in fact, in two worlds almost hermetically sealed off from one another. As the very first person to speak, Javed Iqbal of the Pakistani magazine Thirdworld, pointed out, newspapers and magazines don't travel across the border, except on very rare occasions when (in Pakistan) they can sell on the black market for 10 times their cover price. Although satellite television fares better, much of it is government-controlled.

Pakistanis gobble up news from the Indian stations that aren't, such as Zee TV -half-adozen people told me it was the source they most trusted for news on Pakistan. But because these stations serve up entertainment first and journalism only incidentally, and because they still see the world from an Indian viewpoint rather than a subcontinental one, they can't yet serve as the neutral forum India and Pakistan need.

This might not be such a problem if journalists themselves traveled across the border and brought back unprejudiced reports, but they don't. Neither country grants visas easily to the other's press; the Indian delegates to the seminar in Lahore got across the border only through the good offices of the United States. One of them, Shahid Siddiqui, editor of Nai Duniya and Nai Zameen in New Delhi, had to leave our Karachi sessions early because our single night in that city was the first chance he had ever had to meet his first cousins, whose parents came across during partition. Going in the other direction, to India, one of the most prominent and respected Pakistani editors in our entourage, Mahmoud Tariq Sham of the daily lung, was made to wait three hours at the New Delhi airport before he was let in the Indian capital. Whether this was official policy or the petty intimidation of il. small-minded bureaucrat

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"One thing that had struck me about the men and women we met at our public meetings was that they did want to make peace, rather than wait on the 'elites' to do it for them."

hardly matters. The unwelcome signs are posted at the border, facing in both directions, even for those few journalists who manage to slip across.

The upshot is that Indians and Pakistanis are left to figure one another out by hearing one side of the conversation alone, or else reacting to the snippets of official news that creep over from the other's capital. When (during our trip) theindian defense minister said Kashmir belonged to India, its fate was not a core Indo-Pak issue, and there were no concessions to be made on it, Pakistanis heard that, but they didn't hear a whisper of contradiction from the Indian public. Khaled Ahmed, editor of the Friday Times of Lahore, said there's no particular reason for Pakistanis to assume India is a monolith of opinion, slavishly agreeing with whatever official policy says, or for Indians to assume the same of Pakistanis. Ahmed's colleagues from India, speaking of the Indian press, said the situation was much the same there. They have no firm alternatives to go on. The Indian participants may not have been startled when Ahmed's described a recent survey of Pakistani public opinion that revealed a multiplicity of views on how to resolve the tension with India, and on whether Pakistan's official policies overthe past decades had been right or wrong. But until that moment they had no concrete idea of what the dissenting public opinions might be.

There's a strong feeling, partiqllarly within India, that because the press is an independent, nongovernmental voice, that also means it's a fair or broad-seeing one. But the journalists in Lahore were able to come up with dozens of examples of pure unadulterated jingoism, emanating from both sides of the border, without even pausing to think. Most of these examples, I felt, operate on the level of symbolism. But there are dozens more that operate on the level of substance, where Indian journalists dismiss Pakistani policies or sensitivities as self-serving, wrongheaded, unrealistic and worse. And Pakistanis do the same oflndian policies.

I said my second conversation in South Asia was with a lady professor. My first conversation had been with a very gentle easygoing man at the Karachi airport who said he didn't particularly like Indians because he felt they hadn't made as much effort for peace as Pakistan had, nor were they as honest. At luncheons and receptions all over New Delhi and Mumbai I listened to his counterparts in India, who argued that the two-nation theory was flawed and unsustainable. When I told them that Pakistanis didn't care a whit about the two-nation theory, that they simply felt comfortable in their separateness and distinctness as a people, the words came as a shock to them. This is the natural parochialism we all fall into when we have only ourselves to talk to. We see the chain of events and thoughts and interpretations that explain why we believe what we do-our opinions just make so much sense; everything points to them! But have no clue to the chain of events and thoughts and interpretations that have formed and shaped the other person. And so the other person just seems wrong. It's no wonder that most Indian editorialists think, on a whole range of Indo-Pak issues, that India is basically right. Most Pakistanis

think Pakistan is basically right. Arguments with only one side are always right.

As our "traveling seminar" began to move-taking us to public meetings in Islamabad and Karachi, Mumbai and New Delhi- we learned some very interesting thi ngs about the two publ ics as well.

On both sides of the border, the overwhelming majority of the local reporters and ex-officials, retired generals and students, actors and scholars who turned out to ask us questions were die-hard pragmatists. They willingly accepted their own country's responsibility for worsening Indo- Pak relations. They thought greater efforts at understanding could bring about peace. They wanted peace. They were pragmatic on the details, not wedded to any particular position on any contentious bi lateral issue, and on a whole range of other issues. They felt politicians had used the Indo-Pak issue to furthertheirown careers. They felt those in power were far less flexible oreven interested in a solution than the general public would be. They were appalled at the money wasted on the arms race. They would leap at the chance to bypass the government and come to terms with one another directly. But they didn't know how to do this, and they ran up against that same wall of ignorance that we'd been talking about in Lahore. They always asked the question, in one form or another: Are people on the other side of the border as willing to settle this as we are? And why do they believe the strange things they do?

W

hen we wound up our private sessions in Mumbai, the Indian and Pakistani journalists, by now a pretty collegial group, laid out a program for helping the people in their countries start a constructive conversation. First, they planned to petition the foreign ministers in Islamabad and New Delhi to allow more media people to cross the border and report on "what the ordinary person really feels on ties with the neighbor."

To this they would add more exposure to what was already being written in one another's press. Several editors offered to print articles from the other country alongside articles from their own whenever a controversial issue was being discussed, as a kind of virtual face-to-face dialogue. Javed Iqbal suggested creating a quarterly "peace page"-a compilation of writings, from both India and Pakistan, aimed at increasing mutual understanding and creating a truly subcontinental dialogue on shared problems; every three months editors from Calcutta and Lahore, Bangalore and Karachi, and a half dozen other cities in India and Pakistan would send him material, and he'd transmit the finished, edited page to each of them so it could be published across the subcontinent all at the same time. The faith was that if space was reserved for a truly Indo-Pak perspective, editors would begin to look for truly South Asian-rather than parochial Indian or Pakistanimaterial to fill it.

But everyone realized the problem was more than just exchanging articles: It was the jingoism itself, the tone of the writing, the complacency of the reporting. Suman Chattopadhyay, executive editor of Calcutta's Ananda Bazar Patrika, said: "We have only

one responsibility as journalists-to tell the truth, to be objective.

And our problems are coming because we're failing to do that."

Newspapers printed inflammatory statements of prominentjingoists, described demonstrations of their followers, but the more tolerant and measured opinions of the majority-opinions we had seen again and again in our public meetings-were ignored. We trotted out the same tired shopworn "positions" on Siachen and Kashmir and the Prithvi missile, and the same histories and myths supporting those positions, but ignored the dissenting thinkers who had fresher and possibly more fruitful things to say. To go even farther, why were we printing Indian and Pakistani "positions" at all? Was that the whole story? We never bothered to ask our sources instead to offer potentially viable solutions that might be acceptable to all parties involved. The press wasn't taking a snapshot of the whole community as it claims to; more often it was reporting the loudest, the tiredest, the most strident and least deliberative side of the community. No wonder that men and women who depended on the press to understand the world couldn't make peace out of the pieces they were being given. ne thing'that had struck me particularly about the men and women we met at our public meetings was that they did in fact want to make peace, rather than wait on the "elites" to do it for them. When we opened the floor for questions, always, in both countries, at least three orfour people would stand up to describe the peace initiatives they themselves were immersed in: Peace colleges, study programs and exchanges, any number of things ranging from the sober to the quixotic that they hoped would have an impact on solidarity on the subcontinent. One of the most dynamic journalists on our team, Teesta Setalvad, the young Mumbai co-editor of Communalism Combat for whom journalism is only one aspect of a much more ambitious career in activism, informed us that she knew of human rights groups, women's groups, environmental groupsgroups that often faced identical problems on both sides of the Indo-Pak border-that would love to learn from one another and work together toward common goals, if only someone could put them in contact and the larger world be made aware of their work.

Some wonderful human rights work was being done in Pakistan, she let us know-a fact most Indians would probably find surprising.

Teesta herself, in her role as a schoolteacher, had started a pen-pal network among Indian and Pakistani children, which was later written up in the Sunday Times of India.

Of course, none of this could end the arms race or solve the Kashmir problem; those were things only ejected officials and generals could do. But they could erode the foundation of separation and mistrust and noncooperation upon which the official tensions were resting; and at some point, those tensions might then collapse under their own weight. They were in any case, to many Indians and Pakistanis impatient for peace, a better alternative than just consuming the news passively, waiting for the next election and hoping for a change.

This was all very familiar to me. My whole reason for being in-

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vited to the subcontinent was that I' d written a book, Doing Public Journalism, on a movement now rolling through the news community in the United States. Since the beginning of the decade, newspaper and broadcast journalists in the U.S. have been trying to make sense of the growing alienation Americans feel from both government and the press. The alienation from government is famous: People think the government eats up money without solving any problems, and they have been electing conservative public officials for more than a decade to try to undo this. The alienation from the press is newer and perhaps even deeper. In a 1994 national poll, more than two-thirds of respondents said the press gets in the way of solving public problems, rather than making it easier.

And the reason turned out to be that the press fails to help ordinary people take an active hand in solving those problems themselves.

A new breed of "public journalists" started, as an experiment, to offer their readers and listeners practical chances to get more involved, and the public leapt to take them.

In Akron, Ohio, for example, the Beacon Journal printed a coupon on which readers could make a New Year's Day pledge to improve racial relations in the coming year; 22,000 readers filled out the coupon. This generated such enthusiasm that the paper went on to make a further offer: If an organization of black Americans anywhere in the city wanted to do a specific practical project in partnership with an organization of white Americans, a coordinator hired by the newspaper would match them up. Within months, black and white churches, school groups, theater societies, charities-lO,OOO to 15,000 people in all-were actually working together, holding discussions and doing civic projects. A few hundred miles away, in Dayton, the Daily News invited citizens to hold public roundtable discussions, three times over the course of a year, to figure out how to reduce violence and crime among teenagers. Nearly 2,000 men and women took part in each set of forums, while tens of thousands more monitored the talks and the very intensive reporting on the roots of crime in the paper, and both city officials and private groups started acting on the decisions the citizens made. In Huntington, West Virginia, ordinary people formed task forces to revive the economy. In Portland, Maine, they met in freezing winter weather to come up with improvements in education. In Charlotte, North Carolina, they fed reporters from the Observer questions to ask candidates in national elections.

All because a newspaper made it easy for people-made it imaginable, made the opportunities visible-to take a hand in sol ving their problems, rather than, like the lady professor on that morning flight to Lahore, having to watch those problems grow worse and wait years for someone else to do something about them.

0 About the Author: Arthur Charity isafreelance

writer who has reported

on democratic renewal in the United States, including the public journalism movement, since 1992. His book, Doing Public Journalism,

by Guilford Press.

is published

My View of the Seminar

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hursday, March 6,1997, Hilton Hotel, New Delhi. It's three in the afternoon. There's still about half an hour for the seminar to begin. The participants, both Indian and Pakistani journalists, are already seated. Several Indians in the audience are surrounding the Pakistanis, trying to make small talk.1'eople are still walking into the hall, which is almost already full to capacity.

Over the clinking cups and cookies, old friends greet each other. Some introduce themselves, exchange their business cards. Still others, reticent and reserved, take a seat and wait for the seminar to begin. So do I. My mind wanders back to the days just before partition. I think of my hometown, Vera Ismail Khan, on the banks of the Ri ver Sindh in the N ortb West Frontier Province of)Vhat is now Pakistan, where I spent the first 11 years of my life. The longforgotten landmarks come racing back, first sluggishly and then quite distinctly.

Then the senseless riots, killings, rapes. To save life and limb, we, like millions of others, left behind our hearths and homes and fled to Delhi to begin our lives all over again. At 11, to help my family, I sold soap, gur and balloons on the roadside. I sold bales of cotton in the katras of Chandi Chowk.

All thatis past-and forgotten, fortunately. What remains is the nostalgia, a desire in the deeper recesses of my mind to go back,just visitmy hometown, meet people there. I hope someday that will happen.

Back to the seminar, which is about to begin. After a brief introductory speech by Wi Iliam Parker, the Cultural Counselor at the U.S. Information Service, Arthur Charity, the moderator, introduces himself and lays the ground rules for the meeting.

The first speaker is a Pakistani journalist, Mahmoud Sham, editor of lung-but .who the speaker is really doesn't matter.

What matters is whether he or she is a Pakistani or Indian. Each speaker speaks from his or her own vantage point, and the vantage points here are essentially two: Indian and Pakistani. This is natural. A man becomes who he is by what he perceives. And ~nthe case ofIndia and Pakistan, so near yet so far apart, the perception has been grounded in animosities and mistrust. In speeches, you perceive cleverly concealed attempts to score a point, to blame each other. You also perceive anger, sadness, pain.

Yet, as we put the bits together, it is like watching a single consciousness emerge: India and Pakistan cannot forever remain fractured in their relations, they must come closer for their mutual good. Almost every speech is laced with phrases like "We have a legacy of hatred. Let's change our attitudes." "Only if we forget our bitter past, can a new beginning be made." "Our press has been speaking at each other so far, let us now speak to each other." "Let's move forward and not backward, move beyond the 50 years of confrontation." "Let's shun sensational copy, hosti Ie propaganda directed against each other."

To bring home the truth of how sensationalism can twist the

facts, a Pakistani journalist narrates the story of the Pope's visit to a foreign country, which is relished by everyone present: "00 arrival at the airport, a reporter asked the Pope: 'Are you going to visit any of the nightclubs here?' The Pope turned around and said: 'Are there any?' Can you believe the next day front page news was: 'Pope enquires about nightclubs.'"

An interesting aside is the allusion by several Indian and Pakistanijournalists to the presence of Americans at the seminar.

Says one: "Why can't we, the Indians and Pakistanis, meet without the need to have the Americans?" Adds another: "It's for us to set the agenda, their [American] agenda" may converge with us today but it may differ tomorrow. Itis very important politically for us to emphasize that this is our agenda." Says still another: "The role of USIS has been a facilitative one. For aoy one of us who otherwise would not get a visa, US IS provided us with ways of getting that visa and meeting with each other."

In his speech, Karan Sawhny of the International Centre for Peace Initiatives, which is the seminar's cosponsor, points out that there's no instant solution to Indo-Pakistan problems. "The confidence-building process," he says, "requires that we both countries must have four capacities: dedication to reality; capacity for patience; dedication to seek balance; and, the most fundamental, we must take responsibility for ourselves. The Americans can only help us facilitate our dialogue. We won our independence from the British 50 years ago, if we don't take responsibility for ourselves we'll never be independent of the Americans. So we must take responsibility for ourselves."

At the end of the seminar, Arthur Charity invites questions from the audience, which includes such luminaries as veteran journalistPran Chopra; retired chief of the Indian Army Staff General V.N. Sharma, retired Lt. General Satish Nambiar and retired Lt. General A.M. Vohra. Although a few from the audience ask direct, straight questions, many talk nostalgically of their past and present associations with the Pakistanis ("some of my best friends are Pakistanis"). They express their anguish, distress at the "adversary" relationship between India and Pakistan, and fervently hope that the new changing political climate will bring the two countries closer.

In his concluding remarks, William Parker, while thanking everyone present, says that the role of USIS is simply to facilitate dialogue between India and Pakistan. "We'll be too happy to pull out of this whenever you want us."

What did the seminar achieve? Although the meeting itself gave no answers or solutions, it provided a forum for the interaction of thoughts and ideas. As Karan Sawhny said: "We are not here to solve problems. We don't have the authority. But such events can and do contribute toward the creation of an environment for better appreciation and understanding of each other's point of view, and that is an important step forward in bringing India and Pakistan closer."

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INDIAANDAMERICA

"In Constant Need of a Companionable Adversary" For this Special Issue celebrating India's Golden Jubilee, SPAN asked a renowned humorist to write something "on the lighter side" about Indo- U.S. relations. The result is a spoof on how an Americaphobic journalist with stereotyped ideas would handle this assignment! part the collective animus of the residual Lower Fourth as repreave L~ne was tall, blond, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered, sented by the Third World from London to Lucknow, Bombay to earnestly bespectacled, orthodontically-braced, cleanBandung and back. Everyone loved to hate the Americans, each in cut, crew-cropped, good humored, well-meaning, allhis own way.

Everyone's favorite foe, America had much to answer American-and cordially detested by all his fellow for, almost all things great and small: The all-mighty dollar, PLinmates of the Lower Fourth, La Martiniere for Boys, Calcutta.

480, the Peace Corps, the CIA, the termination with extreme prejuDaveLane lived with his parents in the Grand Hotel. dice of the English language, tomato ketchup, soap operas, the Ku This one overriding fact, like some monstrously extravagant Klux Klan, radical chic, bubble gum, Bermuda shorts, changing stigmata, some flagrantly outrageous quirk of eccentricity, invested Dave Lane with a nimbus of repellent fascination. When his horn-rimmed lenses flashed in the sun they seemed to reflect the dazzle of the Grand's glacial facade of plateglass. The gleam of his dental braces mirrored the wink of polished cutlery arranged for sumptuous delectation. The springy nap of his crew cut borrowed buoyancy from deep carpets untrodden by down-at-heel foot. To us, Dave Lane was the Grand, a transubstantiation that made him eminently eligible for our detestation.

People-real people, people with whom you shared home-made guava jelly sandwiches and ink-stained cog sheets, broke bounds to go see MGM "Cub Club" shows on Saturday morning at the Metro cinema with alternate licks at an ice-candy in the interval-went to the Grand, jf ever at all, for a once-on-a-birthday treat of stuffing themselves with chocolate cream cake till it was coming out of their eyeballs, already surfeited with the opulent ambience. But to actually live in the Grand, as Dave Lane did? It was too gross. Worse, it was too unfair. Worse sti II, it was too ...enviable.

"They were determined to take back home Dave Lane vacated the Grand more than 35 years a treasure trove of clay cups to distribute to friends ago when he returned home to America with his parand to decorate their flat with." ents. But for a long while after he left he had yet to de-

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the fork from the left hand to the right while eating, Wall Street brokers, ten-gallon hats, putting Roman numerals after last names, Big Macs, cultural arrogance, anti-cultural arrogance, wearing white socks with black shoes, the ozone hole in the center of the doughnut. And of course Da ve Lane, whose after-i mage of abidi ng affl uence continued to haunt the Grand long after he'd gone.

The Americans' god of small things, particularly ethnically cute small things, often passed understanding. I remember a young couple from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco who stayed with us while passing through Calcutta. Yes, they had seen the Taj Mahal. But what had struck them the most were the humble bhars, tiny earthenware cups, in which roadside vendors served tea. They felt they were authentic expressions of a timeless folk art. "You mean they're thrown away after just one use? Such classic, simple lines. And you did say they were all hand-made, didn't you?" They were determined to take back home a treasure trove of clay cups to distribute to friends and to decorate their flat with. I had no idea where one bought bhars in bulk, so we set out to find an obliging chai-wallah who would sell us some.

We soon found one on a busy thoroughfare and the man, galvanized by the prospect of foreign customers, began to make a great clatter with his pots and pans, assuring us his was the most ispeshal, fuss kila~ chai (special, first class tea) in town. I informed him that it was not tea, but bhars we wanted. He looked nonplussed and replied that he sold tea, not bhars. "I know that," I assured him, "but my friends want bh.ars, not tea. They are prepared to buy all your bhars." He thought this over and then shook his head. "1fT have no bhars left, in what shall I sell my tea?" When this was put to the visitors, they said they would buy the tea as well and pour it down the gutter. But this would not do either. Tea was the vendor's livelihood and he would consider it an affront and an inauspicious act if it were thrown away. Finally we ordered three bhars of the sweet, gingery tea and solemnly drank them. Then the empty containers were carefully dried with Kleenex, wrapped in more tissues, and stored away in the visitors rusksacks while a curious crowd watched on.

For the restoftheir stay, the couple drank prodigious amounts of roadside tea in order to add to their growing bhar collection. By the time they left, they had a hoard of almost three dozen bhars.

Sometime later, I got a card from Haight-Ashbury: "Home safely.

Bhars intact. Love."

Such cross-cultural comedies of error were enacted on both sides of the fence which separated America from the rest of the world. When my wife, Bunny, and I visited the U.S., Oman, Bunny's college-going Yankee cousin, gave me a crash course in idiomatic American. "Lesson number one: Say aah-some," said Omarr. "Aah-some," I duly repeated. "Congratulations, you've just learnt to speak American," said Omarr. "You mean that's all there is to American?" I persisted. "Yup, that's about it," said Oman. "Sure, you got guys who also say 'Hi,' and 'How're you doin?,' and 'Have a nice day,' but that's like dialects, you know?

Youjust stick to aah-some, you'll get along fine." "But what does aah-some mean?" I asked. "It means anything you want it to: Big, huge, great, fantastic, fabulous, terrific, wonderful, real cool,

groovy, humongous, super excellent like in really bad, you know?" explained Omarr. "Aah-some," I muttered the magical mantra in wonderment." ow you're rapping, man," said Omarr.

"Go get' em, Tiger."

As I went to go get 'em, I reflected that America was indeed an aah-some place. Other nations strive to be regional powers; the U.S. is Globo-cop. Other countries flex their nuclear arsenals; America flexes Amold Schwarzenegger. Other economies owe money to the World Bank; America is the World Bank and the money it owes to itself has created a fiscal chasm after which the Grand Canyon is modeled. Aah-some.

Everything about America is aah-some. We went to a sandwich bar in Stamford, Connecticut. The girl behind the counter placed in front of me something that looked like the entire contents of the larder of the Titanic which had made it the Titanic, with dill pickle on the side. "I asked for a sandwich, not a year's food supply to R wanda," I said. "It is a sandwich," said the girl. "It's our regular 12-inch Hero Subway." "Aah-some," I said by way of grace.

As I ingested my regular 12-inch Hero Subway I pondered on the truly aah-some part of America. America is a big countrythree times the size of India-yet wherever you go in this huge great land, from sea to shining sea, everything seems aah-somely the same. McDonald's seems the same as Subway which seems the same as Pizza Hut which seems the same as Kentucky Fried Chicken which seems the same as Taco Bell which seems the same as 32 Flavors of Baskin Robbins Ice-cream, all mass-produced in the same eternal shopping mall, forever and ever, aah-men.

"Can't we go someplace in America which is different from America?" I asked. "Try the Rockies," suggested Juju, Omarr's mom. The Rocky Mountains. Of course, that was it. If American sandwiches looked like mountains, what would American mountains look like? Imagination boggled. So packing bag, baggage and boggled imaginations, Bunny and I caught a plane to Denver, Colorado, the famous Mile High city, so called because it stands

exactly 5,280 feet above sea level.

Divide where, theoretically, if you peed on one side of a pine tree part of From the 17th floor of the Comfort you would end up in the Atlantic, Inn in downtown Denver we looked at the towering stone canyons of the and if on the other side of the tree, in Wall Street of the West, where the TV the Pacific. I was about to try this out series Dynasty is said to have been when Bob asked me if I was feeling shot. There was something odd about the altitude, and I said no, I was used to it, and soon we got talking about Denver, and it took me a moment to place it. The city had hotels, offices, the Himalayas. It turned out that Bob in his younger days had been to mansions, parks, museums and hisTibet. He told me about one time in toric sites, but seemingly no people.

Maybe they were all playing golf at Lhasa when it was so cold you could Denver's 38 golf courses. "It's drink boiling tea and not feel it, hardly. And I told him about a blizSunday," said Bunny.

"Wait'll zard at Fotu La, on the Srinagar-Leh Monday morning rush hour." highway, where the snow fell upThe next morning we went down ward, so high were we above the to look at Denver's rush hour. Three storm clouds. Pretty soon the other cars stopped on our left at a red light; three cars passed on our right at a passengers stopped looking at the "Not only do all roads lead to the U.S. green light. Then the lights changed Rockies to listen to us, as our tales but all roads are the U.S." got taller and taller. and ,Denver's rush hour was over.

Back in Stamford, people asked "Aah-some," said Bunny. It was me about the Rockies. "Must have catching. been aah-some," they suggested. "They were indeed," I replied.

We took a coach tour of the Rocky Mountains. We drove through Cripple Creek, which started the Colorado gold rush in "More some than aah."

1890, and passed Golden where liquid gold is produced by Coors This sense of anticlimax about sums up America in today's supposedly unipolar world in which the global magnetic field has got who, in the world's biggest brewing plant, make two million gallons of beer a month. so skewed that not only do all roads lead to the U.S. but all roads The road wound upward through woods of aspen and pine, high are the U.S. Good-bye Columbus, here's your retrospective reabove the dusty plains which Bob, our driver, told us were once dundancy pay. The New World can't be discovered-or decriedif everywhere is the New World. covered by a seething, hairy sea of buffaloes. Pioneer wagon trains How unfair. How infinitely boring, for all concerned. What's coming west had to halt for eight to ten days to let a single herd pass, all 200 miles of it. We didn't see any buffalo. "What hapthe use of being the toughest-and richest-kid on the block if you're the only kidon the block? pened to them?" asked a passenger. "They got kilt," said Bob and told us how Buffalo Bill Cody once shot 4,400 of the animals in a Then I think of Sir Peli nore and the Questing Beast, in The Once and Future King by the novelist T.H. White. For years, Sir single month, supplying meat to the railroad being built.

Pelinore rode in dogged pursuit of the Questing Beast. His armor The legend of buckskinned Buffalo Bill Cody-archetypal frontiersman and tamer of the wilderness-looms.higher grew rusty, his beard became white, his joints got stiff and old, but than the never once did he get within bows hot of his quarry. Finally he deRockies. Wells Fargo rider, buffalo hunter, Native Indian fighter and cavalry scout, William F. Cody, who toured Europe "and cided to hell with this knight-errantry, and took off his armor and put up his feet for a spot of wassailing in Camelot. One night Sir England with his Wild West show and who was presented to Queen Pelinore heard a sad sniffling outside. There in the moonlit forest Victoria, died in penury. In exchange for his debts being discharged by a Denver businessman, he agreed on his deathbed to be was the Questing Beast, disconsolate because no one was questing buried on nearby Lookout Mountain. The good citizens of the it anymore. With a sigh, Sir Pel inore accepted the sacrosanct symtown of Cody, Wyoming, however, took exception to this exprobiosis of pursued and pursuer, and once more set off on the endless priation of the mortal remains of their favorite son and one night a hunt, the Questing Beast gamboling gleefully ahead.

America is like the Questing Beast, in constant need of a comband of them raided the grave and took Buffalo Bill to bury him in their town. The Denverites went and fetched him right back, postpanionable adversary. So I guess it's up to me to get the game ing the National Guard over the grave. But the enterprising afoot once again: Come back, Dave Lane. Grand serious. All is Codyans zicked Buffalo Bill again, and the Denverites had to get unforgiven.

0 him back once more, this time pouring 16 tons of concrete on the grave to ensure that the itinerant incumbent stayed in place.

About the Author: Jug Suraiya is the senior editor of the Times ofIndia.

We reached Berthoud Pass, two miles high in the Rockies. We He has written many books including Interview and Other Stories, were smack in the heart of America, on the top of the Continental Homecoming, Calcutta Medley, Delhi Belly and A Taste of the Jugular.

SYMPOS The deadly disease called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), according to public health experts in the field, is assuming epidemic proportions in India. SPAN recently organized a discussion among, three public health professionals to explore the seriousness of the problem and its possible ramifications for India.

The participants were Geeta Sethi of the Delhi office of the Population Council, a worldwide NGO; Vidhya Ganesh of the Department for International Development of the British High Commission; and Gray Handley, science attache and U.S. Public Health Service Representative at the American Embassy. Below are excerpts of their discussion.

Geeta Sethi: Gray, you have studied the different patterns of the spread of AIDS in several countries-in the U.S., Africa, Thailand, and now in India. Perhaps you can help describe the Indian situation in the context of the worldwide experience.

Gray Handley: AIDS, as many people know, entered India in the mid-1980s. The earliest cases were identified in 1986-87 in

Chennai, Vellore and Mumbai. It was found first in female commercial sex workersprostitutes. Since that time HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has moved very quickly within the population of commercial sex workers and their customers, mostly young men who are migratory, such as truck drivers or seasonal workers who live away from home for periods of time.

What this means is that AIDS in India is primarily a heterosexually transmitted disease very much like the pattern in Africa.

However, we've also seen some things that are similar to the European and North American pattern. Specifically, in the northeastern states ofIndia we've seen a very rapid rise in HIV infection among those who use intravenous drugs. And, in addition, India has also seen considerable HIV transmission through the blood supply. India still relies heavily on professional blood donors, people who make their living by donating blood, and many of these donors are susceptible to blood-borne diseases, including HIY. When HIV -infected blood is transferred into another person, that person will get HIV and eventually AIDS. The Govemment of India estimates that up to 25 percent of donated blood is still untested for HIV and often tested blood is not properly disposed of.

When you add to that the fact that in India blood transfusions are more commonly used therapeutically, you get an elevated risk of HIV transmission through transfused blood.

Based on available data, the U.N. AIDS Organization esti mates there are approx-

UM imately three million cases of HIV -positive people now in India. Within the next decade, most experts anticipate, India will become the country with the greatest number of HIVinfected individuals, globally.

Sethi: We are now about ten years into this epidemic and since it is people in the reproductive age group that are most affected, we've started seeing the transmission of HI V from mothers to children as well. It appears that is going to be another emerging problem-children with HIY. Handley: That's true; children are being born with HIY. So there are, in fact, four ways one can get AIDS: mothers can pass it to children, during childbirth or by breastfeeding; sexual intercourse, male-to-female, female-to-male, and male-to-male; blood transfusion; and through unsterile needles or sharing injecting equipment. All of these forms of transmission are existent in India.

So even if the overall reported numbers of AIDS cases and HIV-positive cases remain low, we are pretty certain that the actual prevalence is at or above three million cases.

Sethi: I think in terms of advocacy we really need to convince people that AIDS is a problem we need to address urgently.

Handley: T think you are right. Why do you believe that AIDS is an important problem for India?

Sethi: First, it's an illness that doesn't have a cure right now, at least here. It is going to lead to repeated episodes of illness in people, each of which is a drain on them personally and on their families, not just economically

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but also the emotional drain of having someone who is constantly ill. There's emotional strain because of what it does to relationships when you know that about 80 percent of the time this illness spreads through multi partner sex. It is a strain on relationships and on society also. At the community level, it causes a kind of questioning of the mores. And economically, we can't cope with the burden it is going to have. It affects people in their most productive years when their familieswhether it is the young people or the old people-need them and society needs them.

It's just such a tremendous waste of human resource. So from all points of view, not just ethical, but also economical, social and emotional, it's a waste of people.

Handley: Do you think that the Indian people are convinced that HIV is a very serious problem in India?

Sethi: Well, people always take time to be convinced of anything. Whether it is the famine in some area, whether it is dengue fever or whether it is the traffic problem in Delhi where everyday we have to have C1,boutten people killed before people say: "Oh, we really do have a problem." I think we're cautious in recognizing and accepting and acknowledging that we have a problem in general.

AIDS is so much more difficult. One of the main things, I think, is it deals with sexuality and we Indians feel hesitant to speak of sex.

Look at our family planning program. We have had a family planning program for 45 years which never spoke about sex! So I think we have this hesitancy to acknowledge that sex happens. Even if you talk with married couples, if you talk about multiple partners, about sex outside marriage and about men having sex with men, they feel it threatens their concept of Indian culture and society and what's good about it. It's not easy for people to acknowledge that.

It also raises questions about the whole health-care delivery system-about safe blood, about health-care providers and about whether we follow antiseptic procedures, which we all know we don't.

So it targets and brings out in a negative light a system which everyone would rather believe is functioning well. AIDS is making us look at these realities that we don't want to look at, for as long as possible.

Vidhya Ganesh: Looking at the whole spectrum, on one end there is a failure in India to accept the fact of the epidemic, on the other end we are already beginning to see people who are actually dying of AIDS. So it's a very strange situation that India is in and we are trying to be advocates at both ends of the spectrum.

Handley: What do you mean by advocates?

Ganesh: When we say advocate, we mean advocate to the people to take up interventions very seriously. And we're trying to advocate to them that you don't need to isolate AIDS patients, that you need to develop the care components, develop the support systems. So who to advocate to, and what and when and how is, to me, the most tricky part. We're actually looking at all stages of the ailment. It's not that we're looking at an invisible infection. We are looking at a very visible infection. It is visible to those who look for it and it will soon become visible to the entire nation.

Handley: How will it be visible to the entire nation?

Ganesh: People will begin dying of AIDS. Hospitals will begin filling up.

Handley: That's an important point. What do people die of in India when they have AIDS and how can we recognize that they're actually dying of AIDS? Sethi: The increase in cases of tuberculosis (TB) has been documented fairly well and that's one of the diseases persons with AIDS will die of. Deaths will also be due to other common infections like diarrhea and dysentery. So it's very, very hard, especially in rural areas, to say that this person had mv/AIDS. As you know persons do not die of AIDS; they die of other infections because the immunodeficiency system is so weak. So it's very hard to document and say that we do have AIDS deaths happening.

Ganesh: Well, in India it is going to be mainly TB, which is not a surprise anymore.

The spikes that punctuate the outer envelope of the H!V路! virus are made of a sugar-covered protein-glycoprotein-called gp120. These spikes help the virus infect its host cell-the immune system's T helper lymphocyte-by attaching to receptors on the lymphocyte S surface. Developing an AIDS vaccine has been dijficult because some of the sugars located along these spikes prevent the immune system from mounting an effective response to the virus.

So when you're looking at taking care of people who are showing the symptoms, we're looking at different treatments that can be provided. However, such treatments are unaffordable to the common man.

HIV has very definite social and economic impact. We have to look at the economic impact at two levels: one at the individual/household level, and one at the sectoral level. Costs oftreatment and income loss have been calculated. We know the cost of the disease to a particular individual and therefore to the household. The family will earn less and will spend more in each stage of the disease. This is a very significant cost to the family and to society.

Sethi: I'd like to add something here.

There is the income loss because the sick person does not work. But there is also income loss because other people in the family have to look after this person. This may result in children being taken out of school because they have to take on some of the tasks that other people were doing. So the long-term impact is serious.

The other thing I wanted to highlight is that the problem disproportionately affects

women. There have been a number of studies showing that the way the family looks after a man and looks after a woman is very, very different-even if a woman was infected by her husband. And there is an impact on children as well. So it's something that is not just restricted to this one person who is ill. It has an inter-generational effect. That's really important and very sad.

Handley: One of the questions that is invariably asked is that in a country where so many people die every day of infectious diseases, why is AIDS more important than polio or malaria or tuberculosis?

Sethi: If we look at the other kind of data we have, which is not just AIDS-related, but is related more to people's behavior patterns and more to things like sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), both of which are indicators and markers of what AIDS is, it's pretty clear that AIDS is going to be very serious. There have been a number of studies done which point to this. Recently there was the Family Planning Association of India study and the Outlook magazine study, which looked at sexuality. One study was among college students and youth, and the other among young couples. Both of them clearly indicate that people are: (a) sexually active much earlier than we thought and (b) they have more partners than we thought.

And then if you look at the studies done by UNESCO and NACO [National AIDS Control Organization] and people doing studies with street children around the country, you find the same thing: They are sexually active as young as nine. Similarly, people working in slums on reproductive health, who are now looking at reproductive tract infections (RTIs) and STDs, also find that in a lot of the areas where they work, young people are sexually active, usually abused, by the time they are 10, 11 or 12. So what you discover is that people are getting sexually active much earlier than we thought and they're having many morepartners. And in spite of the kind of information we have on condom use and things like that, we still find that STDs and RTIs are major problems.

There are other factors. It is estimated that over 50 percent of Indian women of childbearing age are anemic, and more likely to need a transfusion during their many pregnancies than healthy women are. The

whole question of blood safety therefore Handley: Another important thing is that assumes greater significance than it many cities don't have an organized otherwise would. What we require is really commercial sex trade. There are women who setting up the kind of infrastructure where we have regular jobs or who are students or have intensive training of various kinds. housewives, who work, say, for three hours a But there is a difficulty. In a public hospital day as commercial sex workers in order to a doctor has to examine about a hundred buy clothes or send their children to school or patients in a few hours and he or she has only, buy uniforms. And that is occurring more say, three needles. If these and more in India and in were to be sterilized each other countries. time, it would take forever.

Sethi: And you don't "We assume that sex even have to do it every Whether we look at it in workers number day. Once in Bangalore we any of the four contexts around 500,000. The that you had mentioned, it met one woman who had estimate of the number of been rounded up by the is hard to tackle. clients of commercial Handley: It is estimatpolice and she was almost hysterical.

She was a ed that there are about sex workers is 500,000 commercial sex suburban housewife and 27.5 million. Many of workers all around India, she didn't do this often. But these are married and they about 100,000 of those in whenever there was a real return to their wives."

Mumbai. That's a number need for money and she that is growing because it didn't have any source of appears from various credit, she came to the city studies that commercial sex work is a and in a few hours she earned enough to pay booming area. the children's fees. But that day she got Sethi: I am against separating people caught by the police and she had the key to her into commercial sex workers and nonhouse. She said: "Nobody will know where I commercial sex workers. I was part of the am. My kids will come home from school and my husband will come from work. Where study which NACO did to look at behavior patterns. One of the thi ngs that came through will my children go? What will happen was it's so hard to say who's a commercial now?" Now, suppose once every six months sex worker and who's not. I'll tell you a story you do this, does that make you a sex worker or does it not? which really made an impact on me. I met Handley: It mayor may not make you a this lady in Coimbatore who was a "commercial sex worker." And she told me: sex worker, but it certainly puts you at risk "Oh, you've come to talk to me because I am for HIY. Sethi: In my opinion the fact that this a sex worker. I know people like you think exists is an even greater risk because it's I'm a bad woman. But before this I was a construction worker. I used to work much easier to reach women who are all day in the hot sun carrying loads of bricks "regular sex workers" than to reach women up and down. And at the end of the day if I like this. You know where to reach sex wanted to get paid, I had to sleep with the workers with information and services.

Handley: In addition to sex workers, thekedar or supervisor or with whoever he their clients constitute an even larger said. Now even though I'm still sleeping group. One Indian expert's estimate I've with people for money, at least I don't have seen of the number of clients is to work all day in the hot sun and I choose who I want to have as my customer." She approximately 27.5 million. Many of these added: "Yes, at that point of time, I was young men, or a good percentage of them, are married and they periodically return to considered a good woman. Now I'm a bad woman. But in my life what's the their wives throughout India's villages and smaller towns. These are often men who difference?" In a way she has more control over her life. So it is difficult to say who is a really don't define themselves as having sex worker and who is not, and why is it high-risk behavior. But, in fact, their only necessary? outlet for sex when they are away from

home is with commercial sex workers.

Another category of those most at risk are the intravenous drug users, most of whom are in the northeast. Experts estimate this group in the northeast numbers about 95,000 individuals.

Sethi: I feel that we probably need to amend it to a higher number, because increasingly, if you look at Delhi, at Calcutta, or Bangalore and even Mumbai, the studies show that there is a tendency to switch to injecting because it's cheaper, more convenient and not so hard to get.

Handley: And in many cases the needles that are used for these injections are shared by 10 or 20 men all at one time. So people may think that because they're not injecting heroin or other illegal drugs, they're not at risk. In fact any time a needle is shared without thorough sterilization between uses, that needle can move mv from one person to another.

Geeta, you h~ve made a good point. This number may be low as it's based only on the experience that we've seen in Manipur. I guess it is still useful to know that among these 95,000 people in the northeast, the estimates are that between 75 and 85 percent of them are now HIV-positive. So that population has almost reached saturation.

And many of them are married.

Sethi: I believe in the northeast, AIDS has now reached the next stage where it is being rapidly transmitted to their sexual partners.

Handley: Also in the northeast, we have begun to see the first cases of transmission from mother to child, which is called vertical transmission. Overall it is estimated that over 13.5 million individuals have been exposed to HIV over the last ten years.

This doesn't, of course, mean that all these people are infected, but in some of these populations very large percentages are infected. For example, some studies have found that 60 to 70 percent of the commercial sex workers in Mumbai are already mv -positive.

Another category we should discuss is infection from blood transfusion. The data that I've seen suggests that every year two million units of blood are transfused in India. Of those two million units, 25 percent still is basically untested for HIY. And, of course, there are other risk categories that we know almost nothing about, in

more about these populations. Though there particular, men who have sex with men. is some Indian research on sexual behavior, Sethi: In the West there is something called a gay identity. People self-identify as research networking is still problematic. And men who have sex with men. But a lot of it is very interesting because we have a social studies in India have shown that while men structure where certain kinds of exploitation, do have sex with other men, they don't especially of women, have always existed necessarily exclusively have sex with men. and have always largely been ignored. For Most of the men having sex with men in India example, there's so much evidence coming also have sex with women. And you know up now of sexual relations within the family and sexual abuse within the family, which marriage in India is not just a bond between two people, it's a social obligation. So a lot of has always been kept under wraps because people who may not have even wanted to family honor, etc., was far more important. marry and didn't really have a chance to And anyway, it was almost always explore their own sexual orientation, do get considered to be the woman's fault, no matter married. Plus, a man having sex with a man what it was. Also, there is the problem of often is not considered sex at all. It's being disadvantaged as a woman if you considered just one of the many things that belonged to a lower caste, in which case it men do together. It's considered play. So all was perfectly all right for your employer to the messages that focus on "safe sex" and take advantage of you; or if you were "condom use" don't cover that chain of disadvantaged because of your age; or behavior at all. because you were younger; or because you A lot of activities are segregated by sex were a widow, etc.

There is a lot of evidence showing that this here. Women do things together which they enjoy doing, and men do things together that happens, but, as you said, we really don't know enough. This whole issue of they enjoy doing, part of which is sex. It's intervention is also, I think, very pertinent complex. So we can't talk about people who because, as you said, India is a unique culture. have sex only with men, exclusively. But it's But it's not just one culture. I think each part another way AIDS can get into a family. of India has a different Handley: This points up culture. That makes it so a very interesting point much more important that which is that India is a "A lot of studies in India we have locality-specific unique culture.

That have shown that research. What worked in creates both advantages while men have sex with Calcutta might not work in and disadvantages. One men, they don't necessarily Mumbai.

I think an disadvantage is that exclusively have sex research done elsewhere to excellent example of that understand how HIV with men. Most of the men has been the whole transmission is prevented Sonagachi intervention having sex with men in is not necessari Iy program with sex workers, India also have sex which worked so well in applicable in India. with women."

West Bengal. I think it is Therefore, a great deal of the best intervention I've research needs to be done seen so far. It resulted in an in India to understand sexuality and how sexually transmitted empowerment of women so that they have diseases spread in Indian society. For India, now taken on not just control of their sexual we know almost nothing about what is now behavior but the enhancement of their own lives in many ways. It didn't work in Mumbai called "sexual networking." In other words, because the kind of relationships among sex sexual links between groups of individuals which determine the degree of indi vidual risk. workers, the culture of sex work, is different in Mllmbai than it is in Calcutta. The power One other area I'd like your comment on is: What do we know about interventions which relations are different, the relationships with clients are different. might slow the spread of mv in India among So, ultimately, one thing we really do know the risk population and the population at large?

Sethi: I think we really need to know a lot is that effective prevention interventions must

us, not just for some marginalized stigmatized group. That's one of the things I'm working toward.

The other thing is research. I want to see if it' s possible to at least collate what data we have and to be able to interpret them to various people so they can base their interventions on facts and not on impressions or beliefs. The third thing will be to carefully evaluate interventions in terms of effectiveness, to see what works where.

Handley: One last question. If you were in a seat of power, say you are the Prime Minister of India, what would you do about the HIY crisis in India?

Sethi: I think the kind of response needed

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is something that not only HIV/AIDS needs but the whole health system needs-a kind of social change. It is a great opportunity to introduce some of these changes. It requires looking at gender, at sexuality, at the way the health-care delivery system is working, at the way health functionaries are trained, at the logistics of handling a health problem. The kind of issues that AIDS raises need to be addressed, and I would use the opportunity to push things that are going to help improve the overall health status of everyone-for not just HIV/AIDS, but for a host of other illnesses.

The need is to have better sex education, better counseling services of various kinds,

better continuums of care between homes and communities, and greater mobilization of people to accept personal responsibility. The scope for achievement is great.

Handley: Vidya, I'll ask you the same question. What would be your approach if you were the Prime Minister of India?

Ganesh: I would see the challenge as a vehicle for positive attitudinal change at all levels of society. This is the time to act. There is an opportunity for every individual (not just professionals and healthcare providers) to playa significant role in the control of this fatal but very preventable disease.

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