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THE INDIAN ENGINEERING TRADE FAIR

12·17 FEB. 1999 NEW DELHI, INDIA AN ALL INDUSTRY FAIR I:,., ;j.~I~;11(-lIJ~i.jf. :<-l;li,.,

1998 INDIA

ASIA'S lARGEn All·INDUSTRY FAIR

ASIA'S lAlGEn AITO.OIIVE SHOW

12th IETF '97 - in retrospect Highlights of Auto Expo '98

• Japan - Partner

• Spread over an area of 60,000 sqm • 800 leading corporations from 20 countries single Indian vehicle facturer

• Over 2.00.000 focussed visitors

• Every

• 3 Concurrent Fairs

manu13th IETF'99 with The Republic of

• 17 Global Auto

Majors • 400 Auto Component manufacturers

Country

• Exhibitors from 35 countries

For more details please contact:

Confederation

of Indian Industry

23, Institutional Area, Lodi Road, New Delhi 110003. India.

Tel: 91-11- 4629994.

Fax: 91-11- 4626149, 4633168. email: Indus%cii@sirnetd.ernet.in

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Korea as the partner

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promises to be an even bigger show.

A LETTER

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FROM

his September/October issue of SPAN seeks to continue the magazine's tradition of excellence, but it also marks changes in our staff. Mter two years of outstanding service as SPAN publisher and USIS India's Minister-Counselor for Public Mfairs, E. Ashley Wills has become the Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge d'affaires at the American Embassy until a new Ambassador arrives later this year.

In June, veteran SPAN Editor Stephen Espie completed his assignment after his brilliant swan song, the special issue commemorating India's 50th anniversary of independence.

Steve hopes to continue his association with India. Longtime and much-valued SPAN staffer, Managing Editor Krishan Gabrani will retire at the end of September after completing 37 years with USIS. His tenure began the same year SPAN began. Energetic Krish is evaluating various options for his second career after SPAN. Our new team has had the opportunity to work closely with each of these three giants of SPAN, .~ and we look forward to continuing in their tradition. Donna Roginski, Deputy Press Attache, assumes the role of Editorin-Chief. Lea Terhune is the new SPAN Editor. I am Frank Ward and I will be moving into Ashley Wills's office as SPAN publisher and Counselor for Public Mfairs. We look forward to your sug- Donna Roginski gestions on the future of SPAN. SPAN's tribute to India's 50th anniversary continues in this issue with a special photo essay taken from the recently published Aperture book, India: A Celebration of Independence, 1947 to 1997. An exhibit of the photos comes to India in October. The book features the work of Indian and foreign photographers, but the focus of our essay is on India through an American lens.

Another American lens featured in this issue is attached to NASA's Pathfinder vehicle, the Sojourner explorer on Mars.

The Pathfinder mission's accomplishments lead to thoughts of the 21 st century, and economic analyst Ben B. Boothe considers power wielders in the coming millennium in his article "Who Will Own the 21st Century?" Will they be superpower nations or superpower multinationals? Also looking ahead is

THE

PUBLISHER

the chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Reed Hundt, who discusses the future of global broadcasting.

The state of race relations and the utility of affirmative action policies stimulate much debate in the United States today, 30 years after the Civil Rights Movement brought reforms giving minorities equal rights and opportunities in education and the marketplace. Randall Kennedy's "My Race Problem-and Ours," examines the place of racial pride and kinship in interracial and intraracial dealings. Mrican American Ken Cooper, South Asia bureau chief of the Washington Post, offers his views on the state of race relations in America, and compares them to caste relations as he has observed them during two years in India.

Vinod Chhabra: takes us on a ramble through America's Green Mountain state, Vermont, capturing the flavor of what has become the favorite getaway for many East Coast An1ericans. Another view of the United States comes by rail, as Constance Bond takes a look at a unique -traveling art museum. Back in New England, Sukhbir Singh pursues novelist John Updike to his Massachusetts home for an interview. In "Me and My Books," Updike ruminates about close encounters with old novels.

A story of serendipitous business cooperLea Terhune ation between Indian company Sundram Fasteners and America's General Motors is told by Krishan Gabrani. James Krohe Jr. proposes ways for managers to deal with their "wild and woolly" thinkers in "Managing Creativity," while W Seymour Holt argues that attitude counts most.

The attitude here at SPAN is definitely upbeat, with new staff and old committed to carrying on the traditions that have made SPAN a part of people's lives in India for the past 37 years-and to making the changes that will keep SPAN relevant well into the next century. To borrow a quote of Henry Ford, cited in Holt's article: "Enthusiasm is at the bottom of all progress. With it, there is accomplishment; without it, there are only alibis."

MY RICE PRaBLEM Harvard law professor and author Randall Kennedy has long encouraged and engaged in debate on racial issues. His commitment to dialogue led him to the recent launch of Reconstruction, a quarterly magazine which he edits. In the following article, Kennedy explores the uses and abuses of racial pride.

W

hat is the proper role of race in determining how I, an American black, should feel toward others? One response is that although I should not dislike people because of their race, there is nothing wrong with having a special-a racial-affection for other black people. Indeed, many would go further and maintain that something would be wrong with me ifT did not sense and express racial pride, racial kinship, racial patriotism, racial loyalty, racial solidarity-synonyms for that amalgam of belief, intuition and commitment that manifests itself when blacks treat blacks with more solicitude than they do those who are not black.

Some conduct animated by these sentiments has blended into the background of dai Iy routine, as when blacks who are strangers nonetheless speak to each other-"Hello," "Hey," "Yo"-or hug or give each other a soul handshake or refer to each other as "brother" or "sister." Other manifestations are more dramatic. For example, the Million Man March, which brought at least 500,000 black men to Washington, D.C., in 1995, was a demonstration predicated on the notion that blackness gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society.

I reject this response to the question. Neither racial pride nor racial kinship offers guidance that is intellectually, morally or politically satisfactory.

Racial Pride I eschew racial pride because of my conception of what should properly be the object of pride for an individual: something that he or she has accomplished. I can feel pride in a good deed I have done or a good effort J have made. J cannot feel pride in some state of affairs that is independent of my contribution to it. The color of my skin, the width of my nose, the texture of my hair and the various

other signs that prompt people to label me black constitute such a state of affairs. I did not achieve my racial designation. It was something I inherited-like my nationality and socioeconomic starting place and sex-and therefore something I should not feel proud of or be credited with. In taking this position I follow Frederick Douglass, the great 19th-century reformer, who declared that "the only excuse for pride in individuals ...is in the fact of their own achievements." If the sun has created curled hair and tanned skin, Douglass observed, "let the sun be proud of its achievement."

It is understandable why people have often made inherited group status an honorific credential. Personal achievement is difficult to attain, and the lack of it often leaves a vacuum that racial pride can easily fill. Thus even if a person has little to show for himself, racial pride gives him status.

But maybe I am misconstruing what people mean by racial pride; perhaps it means simply that one is unashamed of one's race. To that I have no objection. No one should be ashamed of the labeling by which she or he is racially categorized, because no one chooses her or his parents or the signs by which society describes and sorts people. For this very same reason, however, no one should congratulate herself on her race insofar as it is merely an accident of birth.

I suspect, however, that when most black people embrace the term "racial pride," they mean more than that they are unembarrassed by their race. They mean, echoing Marcus Garvey, that "to be [black] is no disgrace, but an honor." Thus when James Brown sings "Say It Loud-I'm Black and I'm Proud," he is heard by many blacks as expressing not just the absence of shame but delight and assertiveness in valuing a racial designation that has long been stigmatized in America.

There is an important virtue in this assertion of the value of black life. It combats something still eminently in need of challenge: the assumption that because of their race black people are stupid, ugly and low, and that because of their race white people are smart, beautiful and righteous. But within some of the forms

--lID DUIS that this assertiveness has taken are important vices-including the belief that because of racial kinship blacks ought to value blacks more highly than others.

Racial Kinship

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I reject the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels "the unencumbered self." The unencumbered self is free and independent, "unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself," Sandel writes.

"Freed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status, unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice, the self is installed as sovereign, cast as the author of the only obligati ons that constrain." Sandel believes that the unencumbered self is an illusion and that the yearning for it is a manifestation of a shallow liberalism that "cannot account for certain moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize"-"obligations of solidarity, religious duties and other moral ties that may claim us for reasons unrelated to a choice," which are "indispensable aspects of our moral and political experience." Sandel's objection to those who, like me, seek the unencumbered self is that they fail to appreciate loyalties and responsibilities that should be accorded moral force partly because they influence our identity, such that living by these attachments "is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are-as members of this family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic."

I admire Sandel's work and have learned much from it. But a major weakness in it is a conflation of "is" and "ought." Sandel privileges what exists and has existed so much that his deference to tradition lapses into historical determinism. He faults the model of the unencumbered self because, he says, it cannot account for feelings of solidarity and loyalty that most people have not chosen to impose upon themselves but that they cherish nonetheless. This represents a fault, however, only if we believe that the unchosen attachments Sandel celebrates should be accorded moral weight. I am not prepared to do that simply on the basis that such attachments exist, have long existed, and are passionately felt. Feelings of primordial attachment often represent mere prejudice or superstition, a hangover of the childhood socialization from which many people never recover.

One defense of racial kinship takes the shape of an analogy between race and family. This position was strikingly advanced by the 19th-century black-nationalist intellectual Alexander Crummell, who asserted that "a race is a family," that "race feeling, like the fami Iy feeling, is of divine origin," and that the extinction of race feeling is thus-fortunately, in his view-just as impossible as the extinctionoffamily feeling.

Analogizing race to family is a potent rhetorical move used to challenge those who, like me, are animated by a liberal, individualistic and universalistic ethos that is skeptical of, if not hostile to, the particularisms-national, ethnic, religious and racial-that seem to have grown so strong recently, even in arenas, such as major cosmopolitan universities, where one might have expected their demise. The central point of the challenge is to suggest that the norms I embrace will, or at least should, wobble and collapse in the face of claims on familial loyalty. Blood, as they say, is thickerthan water.

One way to deal with the race-family analogy is to question its aptness on the grounds that a race is so much more populous than what is commonly thought of as a family that race cannot give rise to the same, or even similar, feelings of loyalty. When we think of a family, we think of a small, close-knit association of people who grow to know one another intimately over time. A race, in contrast, is a conglomeration of strangers. Black men at the Million Man March assuredly called one another brothers. But if certain questions were posed ("Would you be willing to lend a hundred dollars to this brother, or donate a kidney to that one?"), it would have quickly become clear that many, if not most, of those "brothers" perceived one another as strangers-not so distant as whites, perhaps, but strangers nonetheless.

However, I do not want torest my argument here. Rather, I want to accept the race-family analogy in order to strengthen my attack on assumptions that privilege status-driven loyalties (the loyalties of blood) over chosen loyalties (the loyalties of will). In my view, many people, including legislators and judges, make far too much of blood ties in derogation ofties created by loving effort.

A vivid illustration is provided by the following kind of childcustody decision. It involves a child who has been separated from her parents and placed with adults who assume the role of foster parents. These adults nurture her, come to love her, and ultimately seek legally to become her new parents. If the "blood" parents of the child do not interfere, the foster parents will have a good chance of doing this. If, however, the blood parents say they want "their" child back, authorities in many jurisdictions will privilege the

blood connection and return the child-even if the initial separation is mainly attributable to the fault of the blood parents, even if the child has been with the foster parents for a long time andis prospering under their care, even if the child views the foster parents as her parents and wants to stay with them, and even if there is good reason to believe that the foster parents will provide a more secure home setting than the child's blood parents. Judges make such rulings in large part because they reflect the idolatry of "blood," which is an ideological cousin to the racial beliefs I oppose.

Am I saying that, morally, blood ties are an insufficient, indeed bad, basis for preferring one's genetic relatives to others? Yes. I will rightly give the only life jacket on the sinking ship to my mother as opposed to your mother, because I love my mother (or at least I love her more than yours). I love my mother, however, not because of a genetic tie but because over time she has done countless things that make me want to love her. She took care of me when I could not take care of myself. She encouraged me. She provided for my future by taking me to the doctor when appropriate, disciplining me, giving me advice, paying for my education. I love her, too, because of qualities I have seen her exhibit in interactions with others-my father, my brother, my sister, neighbors, colleagues, adversaries. The biological connection helped to create the framework in which I have been able to see and experience her lovable qualities. But it is deeds, not blood-doing, not beingthat is the morally appropriate basis for my preference for my mother over all other mothers in the world.

Solidarity with Viola Liuzzo Some contend, though, that "doing" is what lies at the foundation of black racial kinship-that the reason one should feel morally compelled by virtue of one's blackness to have and show racial solidarity toward other blacks is that preceding generations of black people did things animated by racial loyalty which now benefit all black people. These advocates would contend that the benefits bestowed-for instance, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and affirmative-action programs-impose upon blacks correlative racial obligations. That is what many are getting at when they say that all blacks, but particularly affluent ones, have a racial obligation to "give back" to the black community.

I agree that one should be grateful to those who have waged struggles for racial justice, sometimes at tremendous sacrifice. But why should my gratitude be racially bounded? Elijah Lovejoy, a white man murdered in Alton, Illinois, in 1837 for advocating the abolition of slavery, participatedjust as fervently in that great crusade as any person of my hue. The same could be said of scores of other white abolitionists. Coming closer to our time, not only courageous black people, such as Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer and James Chaney, fought white supremacy in the shadow of death during the struggle for civil rights in the Deep South. White people like James Reeb and Viola Liuzza were there too, as were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Against this history I see no

reason why paying homage to the struggle for racial justice and endeavoring to continue that struggle must entail any sort of racially stratified loyalty. Indeed, this history suggests the opposite.

"One's People" Thus far I have mainly argued thata black person should not feel morally bound to experience and show racial kinship with other blacks. But what do I say to a person who is considering whether to choose to embrace racial kinship?

One person who has made this choice is Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale La w School and a well-known author. In a con tribution to an anthology titled Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation, Carter writes about his racial love for black people, declaring at one point that "to love one's people is to crave a kind of familyhood with them." Carter observes that this feeling of racial kinship influences his life concretely, affecting the way in which he values people's opinions of him. "The good opinions of black people ...matter to me more," he writes, than the good opinions of white people. "That is my choice, and I cannot imagine ever making another." In Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Carter gives another example of how racial kinship affects his life.

Each December, my wife and I host a holiday dessert for the black students at the Yale Law School...our hope is to provide for the students an opportunity to unwind, to escape, to renew themselves, to chat, to argue, to complain-in short, to relax.

For my wife and myself, the party is a chance to get to know some of the people who will lead black America (and white America, too) into the twenty-first century. But more than that, we feel a deep emotional connection to them, through our blackness: we look at their youthful, enthusiastic faces and see ourselves. There is something affirming about the occasion-for them, we hope, but certainly for us. It is a reminder of the bright and supportive side of solidarity.

I contend that in the mind, heart and soul of a teacher there should be no stratification of students such that a teacher feels closer to certain pupils than to others on grounds of racial kinship.

No teacher should view certain students as his racial "brothers and sisters" while viewing others as, well, mere students. Every student should be free of the worry that because of race, he or she will have less opportunity to benefi t from what a teacher has to offer.

Friends with whom I have debated these matters object to my position, charging that I pay insufficient attention to the complexity of the identities and roles that individuals assume in society, and that I thus ignore or minimize the abil ity of a black professor to be both a good teacher who serves all his students well and a good racial patriot who feels a special, racial affection for fellow blacks. These friends assert that I have no valid basis for complaint so long as the professor in his official duties is evenhanded in his treatment of students. By "official duties" they mean his conduct in the classroom, his accessibility during office hours and his grading of students' academic performance. If these duties are

met, they see no problem ifthe black professor, paying homage to his feelings of racial kinship, goes beyond what is officially required in his dealings with black students.

T see a variety of problems. For one thing, I find it inconceivable that there would be no seepage from the personal sphere into the professional sphere. The students invited to the professor's home are surely being afforded an opportunity denied to those who are not invited-an opportunity likely to be reflected in, for instance, letters of recommendation to Judge So-and-So and Law Firm Partner Such-and-Such.

Another problem is that even in the absence of any tangible, dollars-and-cents difference, the teacher's racial distinctions are likely to make a difference psychologically to the students involved. T have had the great benefit of being taught by wonderful teachers of various races, including white teachers. I neverperceivedaracial differ-

ence in the way that the best of these teachers treated me in comparison with my white classmates. Neither John McCune nor Sanford Levinson nor Eric Foner nor Owen Fiss ever gave me reason to believe that because of my color I took a back seat to any of my classmates when it came to having a claim on their attention. My respect for their conduct is accompanied by disappointment in others who seemed for reasons of racial kinship to invest more in white than in black students-who acted, in other words, in a way that remains unfortunately "normal" in American society.

Am I demanding that teachers make no distinctions between pupils? No. Distinctions should be made. I am simply insisting that sentiments of racial kinship should play no role in making them.

Am I demanding that teachers be blind to race? No. It seems to me bad policy to blind oneself to any potentially useful knowledge. Teachers should be aware of racial differences and differen-

tiations in our society. They should be keenly aware, for instance, that historically and currently the dominant form of racial kinship in American life, the racial kinship that has been best organized and most destructive, is racial kinship mobilized in behalf of whites. This racial kinship has been animated by the desire to make and keep the United States "a white man's country." It is the racial kinship that politicians like Patrick Buchanan and Jesse Helms openly nurture and exploit. This is also the racial kinship that politicians take care to avoid challenging explicitly. A teacher should be aware of these and other racial facts of life in order to satisfactorily equip students with knowledge about their society.

The fact that race matters, however, does not mean that the salience and consequences of racial distinctions are good or that race must continue to matter in the future. Nordoes the brute sociological fact that race matters dictate what one's response to that fact should be.

Assuming that a teacher is aware of the different ways in which the race problem bears down upon his students, how should he react? That depends on the circumstances.

Consider a case, for instance, in which white students were receiving considerable attention from teachers while black students were being widely ignored. In this case it would be morally correct for a professor, with his eyes focused on race, to reach out with special vigor to the black students. In this circumstance the black students would be more in need than the white students, whose needs for mentorship were already being abundantly met. This outreach, however, would be based not on racial kinship but on distributive justice.

Our Problems The distinction is significant. For one thing, underthe rationale of giving priority of attention to those most in need, no racial boundary insulates professors from the obligation to attend to whatever maldistributions of mentorship they are in a position to correct.

White professors are at least as morally obligated to address the problem as are black or other professors.

This is a point with ramifications that reach far beyond the university. For it is said with increasing urgency by increasing numbers of people that the various social difficulties confronting black Americans are, for reasons of racial kinship, the moral responsibility of blacks, particularly those who have obtained some degree of affluence. This view should be rejected. The difficulties that disproportionately afflict black Americans are not "black problems" whose solutions are the special responsibility of black people. They are our problems, and their solution or amelioration is the responsibility of us all, irrespective of race. That is why it is proper to object when white politicians use the term "you people" to refer to blacks.

This happened when Ross Perot addressed the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) annual convention during the 1992 presidential election campaign. Many of those who objected to Perot's reference to "you people," however, turned right around and referred to blacks as "our people," thereby

No one should be ashamed of the labeling by which she or he is racially categorized ...however, no one should congratulate herself on her race insofar as it is merely an accident of birth. replicating the racial boundary-setting they had denounced.

A second reason why the justification for outreach matters is that unlike an appeal to racial kinship, an appeal to an ideal untrammeled by race enables any person or group to be the object of solicitude. No person or group is racially excluded from the possibility of assistance, and no person or group is expected to help only "our own." If a professor reaches out in response to student need, for instance, that means that whereas black students may deserve special solicitude today, Latino students or Asian-American students or white students may deserve it tomorrow. If AsianAmerican students have a greater need for faculty mentorship than black students, black professors as well as other professors should gi ve them priority.

Some will argue that I ignore or minimize the fact that different groups are differently situated and that it is thus justifiable to impose upon blacks and whites different standards for purposes 'of evaluating conduct, beliefs and sentiments. They will maintain that it is one thing for a white teacher to prefer his white students on grounds of racial kinship and a very different thing for a black teacher to prefer his black students on grounds of racial kinship. The former, they will say, is an expression of ethnocentrism that perpetuates racist inequality, whereas the latter is a laudable expression of racial solidarity that is needed to counter white domination.

Several responses are in order.

First, it is a sociological fact that blacks and whites are differently situated in the American polity. But, again, a brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice-constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. In choosing how to proceed in the face of all that they encounter, blacks should insist, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., that acting with moral propriety is itself a glorious goal. In seeking to attain that goal, blacks should be attuned not only to the all too human cruelties and weaknesses of others but also to the all too human cruelties and weaknesses in themselves. A good place to start is with the recognition that unless inhibited, every person and group will tend toward beliefs and practices that are self-aggrandizing.

This is certainly trueofthose who inherita dominant status. But it is also true of those who inherit a subordinate status. Surely one of the most striking features of human dynamics is the alacrity with which those who have been oppressed will oppress whomever they can once the opportunity presents itself. Because this is so, it is not premature to worry about the possibility that blacks or other historically subordinated groups will abuse power to the detriment of others.

Moreover, at long last blacks have sufficient power to raise urgent concerns regarding the abuse of it. Now, in enough circum(Continued on page 49)

RACE RELATIONS A CONVERSATION WITH KEN COOPER

Currently South Asia bureau chief for the Washington Post, Ken Cooper won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on race relations during his stint with the Boston Globe in the 1980s. As an African American himself, he has a unique perspective on the challenges of racial interaction.

He has been based in New Delhi fornearlytwoyears.

During that time he has paid particular attention to the Indian caste system and its social and economic effects. In this interview given to SPAN Editor Lea Terhune, he makes candid observations about race relations in the United States. He also draws parallels and cites differences between the American racial divide and the caste system in India, as he perceives it.

My contribution was to look at the hiring of professors at 30 private colleges, including very well-known institutions like Harvard and MIT. The second part of the study compared and contrasted several citiescomparing economic success, income, education, business ownership and freedom of mobility through ethnic neighborhoods. We concluded that African Americans in Boston had a harder time than in any other six places we looked at.

What is your opinion of the caste system and its effects, as you have observed them during your time here in India? Is itpossible to compare or contrast race relations in the United States to the way the caste system works in India?

I never thought that there could be anything worse than racism. But the caste sys-

SPAN: First of all, tell us about the work that won you the Pulitzer Prize.

KEN COOPER: In 1983 I was on a team of reporters who wrote a 13-part series on race with a Boston frame of reference. There were two parts to the series. The first evaluated hiring and employment by race in major sectors of the Boston area economyhigh-tech industry, banking, construction labor unions, state and local governments.

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tern is, for a couple of reasons: It's older, going back 3,000 years, whereas the Western notion that certain races are inferior is only several hundred years old and basically arose to justify the West African slave trade.

Secondly, the caste system has the explicit sanction of a religion, whereas in the case of racism, although some people produce strained interpretations of the Bible that justify this sort of subjugation, there is nothing explicit about it in the Bible.

Thirdly, though American slavery was a horrible thing, an offense against mankind as far as I am concerned, in some ways some of the things which have happened with the sanction of the caste system were even more degrading. The Untouchables can be permanently trapped in degrading occupations.

Now when it comes to what each country conceived of as remedies to historic injustices, once the injustices got to be acknowledged, I think there is a pretty clear contrast again. The Indian Constitution-with the benefit of some research and the benefit of experience of some other places including the U.S.-incorporated some provisions that made their way into our Constitution because of the racial issue. The equal protection clause is there almost word for. word, for example. But India went beyond this "do not discriminate on the basis of" and "all are equal" clauses to making a constitutionally explicit plan for remedying thousands of years of discrimination. It is what India calls reservations-what we would call in the United States quotas, or, more loosely, affirmative action. In the U.S. there has never been such an explicit commitment or such strong measures in the Constitution. There have been some statutory and executive actions: first, after the Civil War, during the reconstruction

period, which lasted about 20 to 30 years; and then, since the 1950s, actions inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. And so you had deliberate attempts to hire more African Americans and other racial minorities-let them go to school, support them through school, financially and otherwise.

Butwhatis happening in the U.S. today is a backlash. And that has made a lot of African Americans think they are going into a second period of Reconstruction, where all the rights of citizenship and participation that were conferred after the Civil War, and in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, have been slowly taken away. Now, as then, this is being done by the Supreme Court. Certain decisions have caused frustration, disillusionment and distress in my community. Looking at it from a broad perspective, I think this makes it harder forthe U.S. to ever get overraci sm if it never commits itself to a deliberate program ofrepair. I don't mean to say it needs to commit itself to the same things that India has done-but a deliberate, conscious effort to make redress, make things closer to equal is needed to get over racism.

How could that happen?

Partly through mechanisms and partly through changing attitudes that frustrate the mechanisms. If you are convinced in your mind that African Americans are inferiorhardly anyone would say it that way anymore-but if the idea rested firmly in your head, then you will assume automatically that anybody who gets a job or gets a placement in the university under the affirmative action plan is therefore inferior. I sit here today as South Asia bureau chief of the Washington Post only because of affirmative action. These jobs were not open to my parents' generation.lfit weren't for affirmative action I wouldn't have gotten all the jobs which gave me the experience and qualifications for a demanding job like this. And I say this with no shame or regret or apology.

I often think of a former Vice President of the United States, who is a wealthy white man from Indiana, who went to law school under the provisions of an admissions plan which could basically be described as affirmative action. I've never heard the critics of affirmative action say that this former

in their beds. This fear is there. And it's a Vice President was inferior because of the way he got into law school. fear because of guilt, and I feel that if the More than anything specific to be done, I sources for that guilt are confronted honwould settle for a United States that, for estly that would be a start. That happened to some extent during the Civil Rights once and for all, confronted this issue and Movement. But with the S0ft of tentative acknowledged that this is a problem that commitment the nation has made, that attiwas created by the very nature of the United States in the beginning. Go back and look at tude is inconvenient and out offashion now. the original Constitution which sanctioned The other thing I would say is more in the slave trade on a temporary basis, which terms of economics. There is a larger black middle class in the United States today than counted African American slaves as threethere ever has been, and that's partly the refifths of an individual for census purposes, and denied them the right to vote. Look at sult of what we have been talking aboutthat squarely and then ask an honest quesaccess to education and affirmative action. tion: in 30 years, are people who have been But in a general sense, the economic posidenied for 300 years going to catch up? Is tion of African Americans is the same as it that a reasonable proposition? has always been, and that's been a supply of cheap labor. They would be hired when the Also I wish, quite frankly, that attitudieconomy expanded and dismissed when it nally a lot of white Americans would give up their guilt and fear about the race issue. I contracted. And American economy is not think they can relieve themselves of the contracting, but the labor market has exguilt by first of all acknowledging what panded greatly. More women are going to happened in a straightforward way. And I work, African Americans are facing less think they can get over their fear if they get discrimination, women are facing less disto know African Americans better, know crimination, more Asians are coming in and that we are cut from the same people as a ' this has created tremendous anxiety among people who got used to presuming that all Nelson Mandela. He hasn't sought retributhe best jobs belonged to them by right. It is tion in South Africa, and, by and large, neither have African Americans. It's not what hard for them to accept. we want. We want opportunity. There is an If you're a white American male, particadage about immigrants being more. ularly, who has presumed, however unAmerican than the Americans they join. consciously, that you are superior to all Some people say that about African these people, and you find yourself in a Americans, too. As a minority you have to peer situation where you have to compete, believe in the creed, you have to believe in and you lose in the competition to your the rule of law, because you don't have the supposed inferior. ..now this is, psychopower or protection anywhere else. logically, a mighty upsetting thing. You have to either come to grips with your own Fear of African Americans is pretty po- limitations, or you have to decide that the tent in some places in the United States, competition wasn't fair. Now a lot of critpartly because of their involvement in big ics of affirmative action criticize it as a city crime, and because black culture is way of saying this wasn't a fair competidifferent and there are memories of past tion in the first place; the game was rigged against me, and that's why I didn't get that race riots. Whataboutthisfear?

I think it's deep-seated. You can go all the promotion or that job. way back to, again, slavery, and you know the tremendous fear the whites in the South Do you see economic parallels or differhad of a slave revolt-that the slaves would ences in India? rise up, seize arms, kill "massa," kill India, historically, has a problem with too whites, you know. In modern times it's much surplus labor, which has held down the value of labor. In the United States, bemore like a fear that those poor, black people in the urban ghettos will pick up arms, fore there was an expansion of the labor market with previously excluded groups, march to the nice, comfortable white subthe problem was the shortage oflabor. urbs and kill nice families while they sleep

Here, a person's caste is defined at birth, and traditional occupation is part of that. I have heard some upper-caste Indians defend it simply as a division of labor, where initially everybody chose to do what jobs they wanted to do. This is a bit self-justifying for people at the top who got the nice jobs. But it was a way of al1ocatingjobs, and I think that's one reason why the reservation system was acceptable to an Indian public, whereas in the United States, where there is a strong individualistic creed, such concepts really inflame people. The surplus labor in India either leaves the country or settles for minimum wages.

Have you observed that the reservation system in India is having an effect on attitudes and practices, making caste less of an issue? Can this ancient system change?

It's harder to change, but I don't think it's impossible. I did a story about India's reservation system and the quotas that uses Kerala as an example. I was struck by how attitudes about caste are so different there than those in North India. I'll just tell you one anecdote. I met six college students from what is now a backward caste-who maybe 100 years ago were regarded as Untouchables-whose traditional occupation was toddy tapping, taking the sap from palm trees. I started asking them questions about whether they had ever experienced discrimination based on caste and so forth, and they started laughing at these questions. Their attitude was, "What are you talking about? This isn't North India. All that stuff you're talking about, that's before independence." And, in fact, there was an upper caste student whom I asked to put together a group of students of this particular low caste. He didn't know which of his classmates fit into this caste until he started asking around. It is interesting.

I think of Kerala-which also has all these other attributes in terms of literacy levels, education levels, health levels, low birth rate, low population and the like-as in some ways representing what the rest of India can become. These caste distinctions haven't gone away there, and they still come up, predictably in the question of arranged marriages, but they are not nearly as pervasive as in other places.

Back in the fine university I attendedbecause of affirmative action-one of the things I learned is that a system of discrimination has three phases. The first is identifying the group to be discriminated against, the second phase is separating and the third phase is subjugation. In India, so many Indians from different castes look pretty much alike, and it's harder, once you move them outside of the village context, to identify them visually as being from this casteor that caste. It frees them in a way that won't happen in the United States very easily, where you can look at someone, and 90 percent of the time, you know what race they are. This is one of the advantages India has

I would ask that they don't believe everything they see on satellite television about African Americans. I find for most Indians there has been limited exposure to African Americans, unless they have been in the United States for extended periods. We are a very internally diverse people. We are not all alike. We don't think alike. We come in all colors.

There was a connection between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Gandhi led a majority to national freedom through nonviolence and passive resistance. Martin Luther King studied those methods at Boston University, in graduate school, and adapted them to his own pur-

"African Americans are facing less discrimination, women are facing less discrimination, more Asians are coming in and this has created tremendous anxiety among people who got used to presuming that all the best jobs belonged to them by right." in dealing with this question.

My understanding is that in South India the caste system is not nearly as confining and pervasive, probably because there were few Brahmins in that part of India to begin with, and even fewer after the antiBrahmin movements. In this one caste I was looking at, I had no trouble finding members who were wealthy, who were middleclass professionals, who were working class. That kind of differentiation within a caste, that is what you want: a chance to exercise talents, a sense of fairness. People feel they have a clear shot at the good things.

You mentioned that Indians have expressed curiosity about you as an African American since you have been in India.

How would you inform Indians about the African American ethos?

poses. And it served African Americans well. I think it's also true, by the way, that African American newspapers were editorially very strong supporters of Gandhi and the freedom struggle out of a sense of Third World solidarity.

Another source of mystification forsome people are the Black Muslims in the U.S., who in many cases do not practice Islam as it is accepted in Asia. Could you give some background on this?

You need to see Louis Farrakhan and the Nation ofIslam in a historical context, and in an ideological context. Traditionally there have been two ideological strains within the African American community, which some people think even go back to slavery. One strain was integrationist or accommodationist, which would include (Continued on page 58)

A Celebration of Independence) The Philadelphia Museum ofArt celebrates India)s Golden Jubilee with a photo exhibition opening in New Delhi later this year.

he Western fascination with India has manifested itself in a myriad ways in the postcolonial era.

Numerous writers, artists and thinkers have sought to dwell in her ancient heritage-the arts, literature and spiritualism. Through words or images they have tried to capture a glimpse of the country's

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1947-97 immensity, variety and complexity.

On the occasion of the nation's Golden Jubilee, the Alfred Stieglitz Center of Photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Aperture, the reputed publishing house and photography foundation, has put together a traveling exhibition of photographs, titled

ROSALIND SOLOMON, Family near the Hoogley River during Festival, Calcutta, 1982

It is a beautiful country) my country.

Never has nature manifested herself with such abandoned pride) never has the earth borne the traces ofpassionate love with such splendor. Caressed) repudiated) and loved in turn) my country stands: lushly verdant) heartbreakingly arid) and awesomely majestic. Many-hued is my country) and many-hued are my people.

Creamy white) honey skinned) ebony black) and golden brown are my people) and the earth is alive with echoesof their many moods. It echoestheir gaiety) their sorrow;their anger; their restraint. Lush green vines with somber brown) awesome white towers above the rush of blue waters. It is a beautiful country) my country.

-SALom

NARAJ."!G,1984

"India: A Celebration of Independence, 1947-1997." From October, the exhibition will tour several U.S. cities, including Chicago and Richmond, Virginia, and London, U.K. The American leg of the exhibition is sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. At the same time, an identical exhibition, sponsored by Mahindra Ford India Ltd., Eastman Kodak and USIS, will open at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and also travel to Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai.

As the main sponsor of the photo exhibition in India, John Parker, president and managing director, Mahindra Ford, is keen to involve the company "with India, her cultural heritage and her progress into the next millennium." Says he: "The 50th year of independence is of special significance to everyone connected with India and we have tried to express this by being part of significant cultural activities that are a tribute to India and her people. The photo exhiTHOMAS L. KELLY, India Gate, New Delhi, February 1995

India is a nation of extremes) its often violent political and ethnic sentiments-easily charged and never far from erupting-playoff the countr/s sombe~ thoughtful and contemplative moods. The spectrum of extravagant colorsviewed with crisp light in a village or city are contrasted with bleached landscapes and the pallo~ dust and impermanence of urban sprawl.

India)s disparate millions move one foot cautiously into the modern world) keeping the other firmly stuck in a variety ofpasts.

-ROBERT

NICKELSBERG

bition is Mahindra Ford's way of commemorating India's 50th anniversary."

The exhibition is accompanied by a large-format book published by Aperture featuring exquisite black-andwhite duotone and four-color reproductions of the works of 23 renowned photographers, both Indian and foreign, taken during the past five decades. They include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mary Ellen Mark, Steve McCurry, Robert Nickelsberg and Sebastiao Salgado, Sunil Janah, Raghu Rai, Dayanita Singh, Sanjeev Saith, Ketaki Sheth and Prashant Panjiar.

On these pages SPAN presents a selection of images ofIndia by American photographers. In the words of Michael Hoffman, executive director of Aperture and adjunct curator of the Alfred Stieglitz Center, the images of the exhibition "honor a people who give so liberally of their life and culture, who make an offering to something greaterto work, to family, to a sense of the larger universal order."

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MITCH EPSTEIN, Qutab MinGl; New Delhi, 1981

ROBERT NICKELSBERG, Crowded political rally, Jaipur, Rajasthan, 1991

WHO WILL OWN T Not America, China, India or Japan, says the author.

Ifpresent trends continue, the giant multinational corporations will hold the power in the 21st century.

The key for governments is to successfully learn how to work with these companies in ways that will help th~ir people, according to Ben Boothe, an economic and business consultant for dozens of American corporations,

international organizations and governments.

ndianow faces an important crossroads as the nation tries to make the decision of how best to engage in the new global economy. Americans and U.S. businesses have long had good relations with India, and want to help with the development and the growth of the country. But Americans want India to develop in a balanced way that is good for India. We know that if the giant multinationals come in too aggressively, it can create transition problems for India. And corporate America also knows that if we work in a reasoned, gradual and long-term way, we can help India develop from within. This can be a foundation for good, long-term economic relations, good for all participants.

The question "Who will own the 21st century?" has several facets. What nations will control the 21st century?

Who and what power entities will control those nations?

What will be the impact upon India? How can India best work in this new global scenario?

As we look at the world economy we see interesting economic developments and shifts of income and power. For example, look at the GDP growth rates of the United States, Germany, Britain and Japan, vs. the growth of India and China. The U.S. shows about a 2.3 percent GDP growth, Germany 2.4 percent and Japan 1.9 percent. Small potatoes when you see India's 6.5 percent GDP growth, or China's 9 percent (the fastest in the world). Some economists project that by the year 2015, at present growth rates, China may have an absolute economy that is larger than that of the United States and Germany combined. This has important implications for all of Asia, and Japan is especially looking at this new competitive dragon which has taken away a huge percentage of what was formerly Japan's export business.

Another indicator is the net reserve balance that each nation keeps on hand. As of this writing, Japan has $210 billion, China is second with $110 billion, and the United States and Germany have $60 billion and $80 billion, respectively.

What nations have the cheapest labor and a large labor pool available? Certainly India and China are the world leaders in this realm. So we see that, if current trends continue, China and India will be major players, especially during the second half of the 21 st century.

But look specifically at India. Here is a nation with great capital and infrastructure needs. And this is the point where the great crossroads question comes into play. How should India engage in the new global economy? Should it embrace totally unregulated free market supply-and-demand capi-

I

E 21s1 CENTURY? talism, with no restraints whatsoever?

Should India invite the giant multinationals in and give them free reign to build, develop and exploit its cheap labor and huge consumer pool? Or should India take a reasoned approach, with slow and moderate development, continuing to recognize the importance of government planning and regulation?

The two choices have great implications. IfIndia feels the need to "jump start" the economy and see an immediate injection of billions of dollars, it would choose "free trade" and invite the mega-monopolies in. Some voices call for total deregulation, total freedom and no restraints whatsoever on the multinationals. That on the surface seems to be the "politically correct" thing to do. But on deeper study, we see that it is a shallow, "quick fix" that could create more problems than it solves.

For example, our studies of global economics definitely show that economies almost without exception have experienced the following "cycle of deregulation": Deregulation causes consolidations, then monopolization, then globalization, then dehumanization, then social and economic destabilization, and this normally forces the return to regulation. For example, in the agricultural sector of India with millions of small farmers, an influx of global giants with the ability to import foreign, mass-produced grain, could possibly put great strain on India's agricultural sector.

The nation cannot absorb millions of farmers who would be without work in this scenario. It is possible that India then would no longer be self-sufficient in agriculture, and would become a net importer of grains, poultry and other key products. There are several precedents for this in other nations that have followed similar policies.

The other alternative for India is to develop with a more thoughtful approach.

Carefully putting in place regulations which will protect the Indian population, and allow the companies to build their capital internally. India is diverse with millions of small businesses, industries and companies that are gradually evolving and building expertise and skills. The "moderate" approach is not as rapid as total globalization, but it avoids the destruction ofIndia's internal industry and millions of businesses, which cannot compete with the efficiency, capital and productivity of global giants. This approach is not without precedent. Indeed, Japan rebuilt its economy by protecting its internal industry while exploiting the trade markets of the world.

China has become the world's fastest growing economy with a similar approach and Malaysia is another "success" story. The World Bank has documented many economies in Asia which have shown sustained growth with a strong government regulatory involvement.

There is another alternative that is ideally suited for India, as well as the United States. That approach is to say to the multinationals: "Yes, we invite you to come to India, but on our terms, with these rules." And then set forth the needs India has. American corporations have shown that when asked, they can be very responsive to social, infrastructural and economic development needs. American corporations historically have a rich heritage of responding to social needs by building schools, roads, hospitals and dozens of "people-oriented" institutions in the areas where they serve. Of course, if they are not asked, and if there are no regulations, big business will always try to produce with a minimal amount of investment. But when asked, American corporations can be not only great sources of economic development, but social development as well. The French, Germans and

Japanese do this to some extent, but to a far lesser extent than American corporations.

By use of this approach, the American attitude toward India would be this: "You (India) have inexpensive labor, we (U .S.) have capital, you have infrastructure needs, we need broader markets, let us work together in partnership so that both nations can profit. Furthermore, we will put in place checks and balances to try to insure a minimal negative impact on local industry and jobs."

My observation, as an economic and business consultant for American corporations in some 18 nations, is that this would be readily received by most CEOs of major U.S. corporations, and would be an excellent manner for India to pursue growth to become one of the leading powers of the 21 st century.

Who will own the 21st century? Not China, America, Japan or India. The giant multinational corporations will hold the power in the 21 st century, if present trends continue. The key for governments is to successfully learn how to work with these companies, in ways that will help the people of involved nations. We have found that corporations, when properly approached with comprehensive plans can respond most generously to the needs of a region. And it fits our preferred image, as Americans-whether true or not-of a generous nation, brilliant in economics, but with a heart for people as well.

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About the Author: Ben Boothe is an independent economic and business consultant. He is adviser to more than 50 corporations as well as the World Bank, the USIA and governments. He has worked in 18 nations, and advised some additional 23 nations. He is the author of six books. He recently visited India on a lecture lOur.

Managing Cre~!R!yity

How can you get the best out of your wild and woollies without driving yourself crazy? o people who know a little about both, the phrase "managing creativity" seems an oxymoron. The aim of corporate management, after all, is to control process, while the essence of creativity is that process be allowed free rein. The freedom to try new things and the freedom to fail-two things that creativity probably needs most of all-are as alien to the traditional corporate mindset as folk music or Luddism.

Consider the advice offered by Michael Brill and his colleagues at the Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation Inc. (BOSTI): "Serendipity fosters creativity." In BOSTI's model Creative Office for the Future, the enlightened manager will be free to "allow unpredictability, spontaneity and exceptionality to enter work."

The problem is that unpredictability, spontaneity and exceptionality can subvert work. Creativity tends to be a messy process-the lab and the studio are littered with discarded assumptions and worn-out methods-and the purpose of the business organization is to keep things tidy.

Alas, while the sane company may not want creatives around the shop, every sane company needs the new ways of thinking about and handling markets, processes, products and personnel that creatives uniquely provide. Creative people flourish in ad agencies or cutting-edge start-up firms.

But in such settings the absence of traditional corporate culture is the cause of creativity, no mere byproduct of it.

Corporations are more creative to the extent they are less corporate.

But then you knew that, didn't you? Thus the questions for the day: Can the large business organization liberate the Beethovens that lurk inside every bean counter without loosing anarchy in the accounting department? How can a firm indulge in "out-of-the-box" thinking without wasting the billions spent on the management systems that put things into the box?

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Are Creative People Like Lepers?

Both the nature of creative work and the nature of the creative worker differ from those of the typical office grunt.

Christopher K. Bart directs the Innovation Research Centre at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business at Ontario's McMaster University. "Do creative people-and I include here people put in charge of creative projects-need to be managed differently from people who run the day-to-day stuff?" Bart asks. "They do!"

Most firms manage their "crazies" as sanitariums used to manage lepers, setting them apart in their own departments, isolated from the healthy. Many disdain having creatives on the premises at all, preferring to hire ad agencies or freelance product designers or interior designers to do the dirty work.

In turn, creatives often find large business corporations to be alien in both ambience and values. That does not mean that such firms are always bad places for creatives. The stereotypical lonely genius slaves away in a garret, but creativity is understood today as a social act. The successful project team is only one of the creative communities whose output depends on eliciting and (just as crucially) supporting new thinking by their members. Indeed, social settings such as corporate research labs offer therapeutic support to fragile creative personalities of the sort that is denied writers, painters or composers working alone. Perhaps this is one reason why large businesses tend to be most successfully creative in the realm of engineering, which of all creative disciplines fits most cozily in a corporate context.

Happy or not, most creatives remain hopelessly eccentric by corporate standards. Managers accustomed to employees eager to please th~ boss are put offby creatives, who are more eager to please themselves. Creatives tend to respond to incentives that are personal and emotional rather than institutional and financial. Just as one does not appeal to his sense of adventure if one wishes to get the best out of an accountant, one does not dangle the prospect of a corner office in front of an inventor.

Such unconventional personalities respond best to unconventional rewards. "In general, [creati ves] work for three things," explained then-Lotus senior Vice President Jeffrey Beir at a conference two years ago in Chicago. "First, the fun of creation itself. Second, admiration-especially from their peers. Third, the excitement and glory of taking part in a successful creation."

The chapters in most personnel handbooks on fun, admiration and glory are not lengthy. Managers thus must be prepared to learn from their creative workers as well as teach them. For example, Beir-now founder, president and CEO of Boston-based Instinctive Technology-urges reliance on informal feedback (from E-mail messages to rumors in the halls) to keep creative team members focused on tasks in spite of the species' tendency to go off on tangents, or to bog down in perfectionism.

The new "How to Manage Creatives" handbook reads as

Most experts agree the degree of creative every person if she

(if sometimes grudgingly) that while potential varies from person to person, can be creative to some degree is given an opportunity.

if it was rewritten by Lewis Carroll to managers trained in finance, where things always add up. Because even the brightest creatives fail more often than they succeed, they are insecure; praise for unsuccessful effort often is more crucial to creatives' morale than praise for successful effort.

Conventional management wisdom holds that the best manager is the one who eliminateS mistakes, but the handbook for creatives urges managers to cultivate them by freeing them to take risks. Allegheny Ludlum, a billion-dollar steelmaker, got written up in Harvard Business Review for successfully blending creativity and control by not counting managers' poor short-term results in performance evaluations, as long as the risk undertaken falls within broad company guidelines.

Another example: Instead of minimizing conflicts among staff, managers of creatives often encourage it. "Creativity is achieved most when you have blue-skyers and practicals on the same team," says Watts Wacker, who as resident futurist with SRI Consulting's Westport, Connecticut, office is a specialist in blue-skying. Creativity has been described as the productive resolution of tension between different forms of perception, different states of mind or mood and different scales of perception. Some firms exploit this phenomenon by deliberately assigning staffers of disparate skills and personalities to the same office or team; usually such pairings are serendipitous, as when engineers sit down with stylists to design a new car. Planned or not, the result is "creative abrasion"-a nice phrase for people rubbing each other the wrong way.

The catalog of creativity cures is crammed with nostrums that will make a glassy-eyed manager feel a little better even ifhe cannot cure the condition-from "mind-mapping" and "back-burner thinking" to juggling, wearing colored hats and telling jokes.

Sure, some of the people trying to sell you tips on how to get a "wild duck" to fly in formation may well be quacks.

However, the best of the cures for the creativity blahs are based on sound (and usually obvious) principles of human nature and business organization.

J. Daniel Couger is distinguished professor at the University of Colorado's Center for Research on Creativity and Innovation in Colorado Springs. Couger and colleagues performed a Herculean sweep of the academic stables, reviewing more than 4,000 articles on creativity

and innovation in the fields of basic science, education, architecture, engineering and psychology for reports of creativity-enhancing techniques. They identified 50, 22 of which Couger labeled as "useful in the business environment," including intuitive vs. analytical idea-generation techniques such as wishful thinking, interrogatories, boundary examination and progressive abstraction.

The last is a variation on group idea-generation, which first was in vogue in the 1950s as brainstorming. The early enthusiasm for brainstorming faded when it became apparent that many people find being creative in a social setting to be more inhibiting than inspiring. Couger has facilitated many brainstorming sessions. "I never knew how many different body positions there were to express disapproval," he says. "People work better alone than in brainstorming sessions because of tHe deficiency of the brainstorming technique." But anonymous idea-generation (using computer groupware, for example) allows one to brainstorm without the inhibiting behaviors of colleagues-in effect, to work alone and with a group at the same time.

Some firms swear by homeopathic treatment. Many companies underwrite cheaper kinds of creative flights by paying for classes in which employees learn to paint or sculpt, or treating them to showings of inspirational movies and plays.

Hallmark Cards proved that it cared enough to send the very best when it began organizing junkets so that its creative staff might attend art exhibits in faraway cities.

New technologies are breathing new life into some old wheezes. "Inspiration Software," touted by one critic for its ability to help the user develop ideas, is the computerized version of a pen and blank paper, only with a Window to gaze at instead of a window to gaze out of.

Playing Patron of the Arts None of the old models for manager-employee relations-parent and child, seller and buyer, master and servant, mechanic and machine, hammer and nail-fit the new employment paradigm. The old cog on a wheel is being replaced by the artisan, a worker who is multi skilled, self-directed, entrepreneurial. A creative shop filled with such whizzes shouldn't be organized as if it were a white-collar factory but as an atelier. The relationship between art patron and artist thus may be a more appropriate model for the creative corporation. Like the patron, the boss's role is to sup-

Open Collars and

Closed Minds he defiance of conventional corporate dress by the new generation might be as Oedipal as sartorial in impulse. "Clothes make the man" is a psychological as well as a social truth. When one wears the clotbes of tbe boss, one begins to think and act like the boss-or so the boss bopes.

Many people resent this imposition, but the creative personality resists this work-a-day acculturation on principle. To him, going along means surrendering one's unique personality. Thus, the principled rejection of The Suit by bastions of the non-conforming conformist such as ad agencies, Hollywood, the laboratory and academe has occurred.

In short, it is the liberation from the company dress standard that makes the creative difference, not liberation from tbe suit or the necktie or the hosiery that express that standard. "Today they don't wear ties at IBM," says SRI futurist Watts Wacker. "But even if it's casual, it's still a uniform." And even if tbey're merely gestures, dress-down days and other sanctioned departures from business attire as usual continue to proliferate.

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The desire to doff one's suit is usually justified in terms of the three C's: comfort, cost and-surprisecreativity. "When Ivisit a company," says J. Daniel Couger of tbe University of Colorado's Center for Research on Creativity and Innovation in Colorado Springs, "I ask people to identify the things that ruin creativity for organizations. On top on everyone's list is the need for formal dress."

American office workers,

port (and occasionally inspire) the artist, who in turn dedicates her best work to the patron.

Any new management model will have to meet the expectations of younger workers in particular. Many creative types do their best work when the dew is still fresh on their laptops, before youthful creative reflexes are dulled by preconceptions, doubts or debt. Generation Xers, for example, are at home in the brave new world of information in ways

clearly, are fit to be untied. The Economist and the chairman of the BIC Corp. are among those who have publicly pointed to tbe necktie as a creative noose, perhaps because the necktie limits the flow of blood to tbe brain. Women say the same about pantyhose, although the complaint is less anatomically plausible.

If constrictive clothing is the culprit, then one ought to feel most creative when least clothed, and indeed, many people report that the shower at home is the place where they are their most creative. Or maybe i~is only in the shower that they are exposed to new ideas.

Perhaps to comfort, cost and creativity, we should add a fourth C, for conformity, for if everybody's doing it, how creative can it be? A paradoxical question, but one ignored by the Silicon Valley . wannabes, who use the same logic their fathers used to imitate IBM: Silicon Valley workers are creative; Silicon Valley workers wear blue jeans; therefore, blue jeans make workers creative.

-J.K.

that their graying supervisors can never be. As consultant Bruce Tulgan writes in his new how-to, Managing Generation X: How to Bring Out the Best in Young Talent, "Xers see new connections where prior generations see confusion and noise."

Today's just-turned-thirties also are widely derided as self-involved, inattentive, indifferent, even hostile to corporate ways. If Xers focus on themselves, however, it may be

Assigning one type of creative to a job better suited to one of the others makes no more sense than using a forklift to deliver a cup of coffee. because they see personal creativity as a form of capital and see work as an opportunity to invest it. The returns on that investment are the foundation of their hopes for what Tulgan calls "self-based" career security. In exchange, such workers will demand room to learn and grow and ownership (emotional if not financial) of their work. Oh yes, and enhanced self-esteem-the eight-hour day ofthis generation's lunch-bucket set.

It's the Red Tape, Stupid Ought not a wise manager provide a stimulating and supportive environment to all classes of employees, granting them freedom appropriate to their tasks and within the context of clearly stated company policies?

The question raises a key point: Is creativity a difference of degree or of kind? Most experts agree (if sometimes grudgingly) that while the degree of creative potential varies from person to person, every person can be creative to some degree if she is given an opportunity and a little encouragement.

Many firms don't lack creative ideas to manage as much as they lack creative ideas about managing. Future managers are taught to control, while nurturing creativity is all about letting go. Managers of creati ves must be able to tolerate high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty; for example, it isn't always easy to know when an employee has done a good j ob ifthat job hasn't been done before.

Delay, paperwork and second-guessing can also fatally divert energy and attention from the creative process.

Creativity gurus thus recommend cutting company red tape the way dentists recommend flossing. "It's bureaucracy which really thwarts creativity," says Colorado's Couger.

Thomas F. Morgan and William M. Ammentorp, academic behavioral scientists from Minnesota, coauthored a recent paper on what they call "practical creativity." "Creative managers are able to ignore the complexity of their organizations and to visualize the essential flows of work and control," they wrote. "They generally picture corporate dynamics in simple models and metaphors."

This is called not mistaking the forest for the trees, although lots of consultants have more expensive names for it.

Christopher Bart addressed the issue recently in Business Horizons, the journal of the Indiana University Graduate School of Business. "The view that large-scale innovative organizations are characterized by decentralized decision-

making and individual freedom is a myth," Bart wrote.

"Failures of innovation occur not because bureaucracy is bad per se," he concluded. "Failures happen because the wrong bureaucracy is in place."

Motorola is a good example. One of the nation's most innovative firms, Motorola is also one of the more assertively managed. It succeeds because its team-based, egalitarian, cross-functional management system is appropriate to the creative tasks the company sets for itself, such as kicking corporate Japan's butt in the cell-phone market.

In a nutshell-pardon the expression-managing unconventional corporate citizens does not mean abandoning the hope of managing them. It means abandoning most conventional management techniques. Taylorite management precepts, for' instance, are as useless in the contemporary creative shop as is a Dictaphone.

Personnel management used to mean fitting people to jobs, but maximizing creativity means fitting work to the talents (and temperaments) of the people available. Assigning one type of creative tQ a job better suited to one of the others makes no more sense than using a forklift to deliver a cup of coffee. A manager of creatives must know her people as individuals-not just what they can do, but what kind of people they are.

What Beir says about managing creative teams is echoed by just about everyone who's survived doing it: Hire a star player. Articulate a clear and exciting goal. Keep the team small and in the same shop. If possible, pick people who like each other, or at least respect each other-that may seem to go against the creative abrasion mentioned earlier, but your team can't be formed only from abrasives.

Discard the distinction between bosses and workers.

Listen patiently to every idea, no matter who it belongs to.

Finally, encourage intramural contact with other teams to erode tribalism.

"Most organizations have creative juices that are stifled," says SRI's Wacker, "because management does not know how to tap them and let them flow." Until it learns, the typical business will remain manifestly less than the sum of its parts in human potential terms.

D About the Author: James Krohe Jr. is a contributing Across the Board magazine.

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Asia Is a Region of True Importance" Says Karl F. Inderfurth, the new Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs

mbassador Karl F. Inderfurth, the new Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, visits India and other South Asian countries in early September. He was confirmed by the Senate on July 21,1997, and was sworn in on AugustS. Prior to his presidential appointment as Assistant Secretary, AmbassadorInderfurth worked from 1993 to 1997 with the then U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Madeleine Albright, in New York. His portfolio included UN peacekeeping, disarmament and security affairs. He also served as Deputy U.S. Representative on the UN Security Council. Ambassador Inderfurth appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 10 for his confirmation hearing. At that ti me he said, "I am eager to begin working on representing U.S. interests in South Asia and developing more productive ties with the countries of that region. South Asia is a region which, for the most part, has not received the measure of attention from the international community that it merits. There are good reasons for the United States to be engaged in South Asia-a fact which Congress recognized when it created a South Asia Bureau within the Department of State-and I look forward to that engagement. U.S. interests in the region run the full gamut of our foreign policy goals: promoting peace and security, particularly by supporting the Indo-Pakistani dialogue; containing proliferation; improving economic and commercial interaction and relations; enhancing conventional security cooperation; and promoting sustainable development and mai ntaining the region's environ men t.

"South Asia is a region of true importance to the United States. Home to nearly one-quarter of humanity, South Asia presents a deep and complex set of pol icy challenges, which collectively inspire both optimism and concern. I would also note that South Asians have emigrated to the United States in increasing numbers in recent years, and have established an exemplary record in professional and business endeavors and as fine new citizens of our country."

He cited democratic rule and economic progress as significant developments holding American interest in South Asia. "Of particular promise is the fact that the vast majority of South Asians live under democratic rule, and increasingly are enjoying the benefits offree-market economic systems. During the past decade alone, more than a quarter billion South Asians have seen their systems of government change or be restored by peaceful, democratic means.

India's democratic system remains robust after 50 years of independence. This is quite a remarkable achievement. The region's democratic course is complemented by its growing adherence to free market principles. During the past several years, nearly all of the countries of the region-large and

A

small-have adopted significant economic and fiscal reforms, which have raised living standards and have prompted significant increases in the exchange of goods and services-particularly with the United States. We are the largest trading partner and foreign investor in both India and Pakistan, and as both countries continue to liberalize their economies, the outlook for even greater increases in trade looks quite promising. Elsewhere in the region, U.S. companies have begun to make significant investments in the burgeoning energy sector in Bangladesh, and have demonstrated interest in the enormous potential for hydropower in Nepal."

Inderfurth admitted there are "some very serious and difficult issues" to be dealt with in South Asia: population growth; environmental problems; disturbances affecting regional security and stability; and areas of tension such as Kashmir.

"We are encouraged, however, by recent positive developments on this front. Bangladesh, India and Nepal, for instance, have concluded important water-sharing agreements, and Sri Lanka and India have signed a trade agreement. These agreements are as significant for the cooperation they represent as for the issues they address. And most importantly of all, India and Pakistan have resumed a dialogue at the highest levels of government to begin to reso Ive thei r differences.

"While the United States encourages and supports the dialogue between India and Pakistan-in both official channels and informal ones such as the so-called 'track two diplomacy' -we must not underestimate the depth of the challenge before them. Their work is of particular import as a result of the nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs that both countries have chosen to pursue. In South Asia, this continues to be a particularly difficult issue, which goes to the heart of the national security concerns of the countries involved. The United States has worked hard to discourage the further development of these systems, as part of our global efforts to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Resolution of our proliferation concerns will continue to be a top priority for us in the region.

Real progress, however, will come only when both India and Pakistan are confident of the intentions of their neighbors.

We also believe that global nonproliferation arrangements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a convention to ban the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons would offer Pakistan and India meaningful steps to enhance their security interests.

"Clearly South Asia is an increasingly important part of the world, and though it faces serious problems, there is good cause to be optimistic about the future."

0

The Green Mountains and verdant valleys of Vermont hide some of the best-kept secret gateways on the East Coast of the United States. Sparsely populated by people who are dedicated environmentalists, Vermont's quaint country inns and popular ski resorts provide soothing respite for the world-weary. avinglogged 23 years and more than 80 countries as a travel editor based in New York, I was stumped for an answer every time I was asked about my favorite destination. After all, more than a combination of a beautiful setting, good food, things to do and springlike weather, at the end of the day what counts most is the people there, and how much you feel at home.

I had several "favorites," but none of them quite had it all, until I took a vacation from travel writing and spent a week trolling my own backyard-the idyllic "Green Mountain State" of Vermont.

Located just off the beaten path favored

by Indians, Vermont is conveniently close to it-a three-hour drive north of New York City, barely 90 minutes northeast of Boston and less than an hour from Albany, New York, and Montreal, Canada.

This Northeastern wonderland is ideal for a three-day weekend. That's because any-

H

thing more can be dangerously addictive. der, and gave his estate a Hindustani Soon after my week in Vermont, I cleaned name-"Naulakha"-because it cost so out my life's savings, borrowed from a bank much. and bought my little slice of nirvana-a This influx of creative thinkers and doers modest cottage at Sugarbush. Views from has continued ¡unabated, in recent years my cast-iron wood stove were of ski trails widening to include some of America's weaving through the pines. From the bar by most exciting new chefs, restaurateurs, the fieldstone fireplace I had a tree-top view architects, gourmet food manufacturers and of the eighth fairway of the Robert Trent craftsmen.

Jones Jr. golf course.

"It's bit of the best from all parts of the Vermont (from the French, verd mont for world," says restaurateur Michael Ware, "green mountain") has it all. This pictureowner of the Country Gentleman, a conpostcard country with the verdant, pastoral . verted century-old cattle barn with an enorsetting of northern Switzerland, has its own mous fireplace and chandeliers. He is one of distinctive stamp of endearing ways and several Brits who have settled in Waitsfield pure Yankee ingenuity. (population 2, 100) in central Vermont to run Quite possibly the reason why the State inns and restaurants. Or, like several transof Vermont-250 kilometers long and 145 . plants from Australia, Argentina, New kilometers at its widest (wedged between Zealand and metropolitan America, they are Canada, New York, Massachusetts and here for the good and simple life.

New Hampshire )-is relatively unknown is The dollar still goes a long way here. You because it has no big cities and is sparsely still can buy a pretty cottage on an acre for populated. Fewer than 565,000 people re$100,000, which is no more than you'd pay side in the entire state, along with two milfor a modest two-bedroom apartment in lion cows, sheep and horses. But with good Bangalore or Pune. reason it is one of the most-photographed Small as it is, Waitsfield has two polo parts of the world. fields, a chamber music orchestra, five There are more than 600 spring and bookstores, several gourmet shops and snow-fed lakes here, each invariably surFrench-style bakeries, at least a dozen exrounded by lush, rolling meadows and cellent restaurants and country inns, and Vermont's trademark plump, patchwork even a cricket team. cows, red barns, ancient wooden bridges At the Mad River Flicks, the only movie spanning gurgling trout streams and cheery theater in town, you don't line up for popcountry inns brimming with wildflowers. corn and Coke; you can sit in a love seat and be served quiche and wine.

This has been a land of artists, musicians and writers, including Robert Frost, Four employers in this small town are known internationally-Mad River Canoe, Rudyard Kipling and, until recently, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Albert celebrated Soviet emigre and Gulag Kunin's Green Mountain Chocolates Archipelago author, Aleksandr Solzhe(Kunin, an Austrian, is a former White nitsyn. Kipling settled in the charming town of Brattleboro, near the Massachusetts borHouse pastry chef) and RSVP Pizza. Its in-

Top: The mist lifts to unveil the pastoral setting with its trademark red barn and silo of northern Vermont. Above: A country inn in central Vermont. Clean and cozy, inns are thefavored accommodations of visitors. Right: An aerial view of the Inn at the Round Barn Farm and the Valley at Waitsfield.

Top: The perfect drive through lVoodsa Vermont backroad ablaze with color in the fall. Above: Men in white. Student chefs walk to class at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier. Left: Cycling along the Green Mountains is a popular pastime in Vermont.

Opposite page, top: Schussing down the slopes at Sugarbush Resort.

Bot/om: The Inn at Essex, a refurbished sprawling inn near Burlington.

Top, left: The common lounge, with books and afireplace, at the Inn at the Round Barn Farm in Waitsfield. Above: One of hundreds of pristine trout streams in the Green Mountain State.

Left: Nature-friendly. A birdhouse affixed to a woodshed.

novati ve pizzas (including the square "crazy quilt" with 32 different toppings) are featured in the Neiman Marcus mail order catalog, and have been "home delivered" at the Vatican!

Such a cosmopolitan and worldly mix isn't unusual in the small towns of Vermont.

After all, its capital city, Montpelier, with its bustling cafe-lined streets, art galleries and home of the celebrated New England Culinary Institute, has a total population of just over 8,000!

Here, the land is its people-somewhat reserved, soft-spoken, but unassuming and warm. They are family and communityoriented. A Vermonter is as likely to be a transplanted physician, fashion designer or company chairman, working internationally via his laptop, as a sixth-generation farmer who produces some of America's best maple syrup, raspberry jam, and goat and cheddar cheese.

They look and think remarkably alike, wear colorful checked shirts and thick corduroys to work, drive Volvos and Subarus, ski in winter and take food, town meetings and Fourth of JuIy parades serious ly.

"The good go to heaven, the more fortunate go to Vermont," says 21-year-old Vikram Singh, a second-generation IndianAmerican who recently left New York to become a full-time Vermonter. "It's like changing your citizenship," he recalls.

"Vermont is another nation altogether." A budding entrepreneur, the college student already thinks like a Vermonter-he plans to start a cooperative mail-order business of foods and gifts from Vermont, which have considerable cachet value.

Vermont is a land and a law unto itself, a lot like the America portrayed by artist Norman Rockwell. Few here lock their homes or cars. Several towns offer bus service-free.

Downtown means Main Street, thri ving with third and fourth-generation family businesses. At the post office, they greet you by name and hand out homemade cookies.

Politically aware and socially active, the otherwise thrifty Vermonters readily pay relatively high taxes in return for some of the highest standards of education, health care, environment protection and public services in the United States.

By law, Vermont State Police cars are stocked at all times with teddy bears and candy for children, and blankets and hot coffee for adults, who may be traumatized in road accidents.

Other examples of Vermonters' warmth are their corporations which, as a matter of "corporate responsibility," earmark a fair portion of profits for American and international child welfare and environmental programs. The deservedly famed Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters are two multimilliondollar operations that are typical Vermont success stories. harity is delivered with dignity here. Outside a free soup kitchen in Montpelier supported without fanfare by area restaurants, a menu board on the lawn simply reads: "TODAY'S LUNCH: Cream of Broccoli Soup, French Bread, Salad, Beef-Barley Stew, ApplePie." In Waitsfield, I was puzzled by the public phones which have no slot to deposit coins.

The reason: all public phones for local calls are free. "We don't want to risk profiting from what may be an emergency," was the simple explanation from the company president.

But when it comes to the natural environment, watch out. The laid-back Vermonter is uncompromising. No billboards are allowed anywhere in the state. Even the handful of McDonald's permitted in the state have to display their "golden arches" in the form of flower beds instead of plastic marquees. Neon signs, loudspeakers, stripmalls and chain general stores are shunned.

Garbage is treated and compressed into safe and sound construction materials. Old tires are pulverized with waste glass and used to resurface the roads.

Recently, when it was discovered that a proposed building would interfere with the view of a lake from a public park, construction approvals were withdrawn. Meanwhile, the Town of Manchester gladly surrendered a prestigious annual ATP international tennis tournament to New Haven, Connecticut, rather than mar its landscape by building a permanent tennis stadium.

"Smokestack industries are not permit-

C

ted, and the state goes all out to assist entrepreneurs and the family business," says David Perlman, a transplanted Wall Street executive who now runs a lakeside cafe in Vermont's largest city, Burlington (population 39,000).

"I made $400,000 a year in New York. I make a quarter of that here, but I wouldn't trade this for the world," Perlman says.

"In ten minutes I can be back home with the kids"-in a restored five-bedroom Victorian mansion, on two hectares ofland, where the deer come out to play. He smiles, and watches the lake steamers and expensive sailboats glide past outside his window, on the 220-kilometer-long Lake Champlain, one of the continent's purest bodies of water.

In the background, the high peaks of the Adirondacks of upstate New York soar into the paint-blue sky. Just to the east of the city, the rolling meadows and thickets of birch trees, gradually rise into the Green Mountains and on toward the beautiful valley of Stowe. Like many transplanted, wellheeled Europeans, the late Baroness Maria Von Trapp (of Sound of Music fame) made Stowe her home because it reminded her of her native Austrian Alps.

For its small population, Burlington is one of America's safest and prettiest cities, remarkably cosmopolitan, and with a vibrant European air about it. It is a city of bookstores and sidewalk cafes. Restaurants range from French to sushi bars, Thai to Moroccan and delightfully eclectic Vermont fare. Theaters and fashionable boutiques line streets in the historic district that ha ve been cIosed to vehicu Iar traffic.

In poll after poll, rating a number of factors and the overall quality of life,' Burlington has been rated as one of "the best places to live in the United States."

It also is the on Iy city in the nation to have elected a Socialist mayor who now serves as the only Socialist in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Meanwhile, Vermonters elected an outspoken social activist and a Jewish woman, Madelin Kunin, as their governor.

Burlington's biggest employers include IBM, the University of Vermont, high-tech medical centers, colleges, Rossignol Skis and the Vermont Teddy Bear Co.

One of New England'sfamous wooden covered bridges spans a Vermont stream.

What makes Vermont particularly attractive to the visitor is its engaging, pastoral charms. Seventy-five percent of the state is forested with pine, birch, majestic old oaks and maples-more than double the green cover a century ago, when the state was the logging center of the East.

Every autumn, when the nights turn crisp, log fires crackle and the apples take on a rosy blush, the foliage puts on a dazzling display of color-scarlet, gold, purple, orange-with an intensity unmatched anywhere else in the world.

Fortunately, Vermont also is one of the easiest and most affordable places to visit.

With most of the population living in communities of 2,500 or fewer persons, it is a land of historic towns, picturesque villages with enormous homes, charming bed-andbreakfast inns and white clapboard and fieldstone churches. Their classic spiresslender and tall, embedded with a clockare designed to be seen above the trees.

At the epicenter of each town is a spacious "village green" within sight of two essentials- Town Hall and a "country store" selling everything from cafe au lait with croissants, to gourmet foods, hand-knitted ski sweaters, hardware and groceries.

To truly enjoy Vermont, allow yourself plenty of time, more film than you think you'll need and lots of serendipity.

You'll probably find yourself stopping every few miles to take in breathtaking vis-

Head northeast to Woodstock-a detas, or to visit Vermont's falightful town with its historic, bustling mous cheese and herb farms, downtown. Then go on to Quechee, a lovely rustic country stores, riverlittle town with its classy village boutiques, side cafes, country museums, galleries, wood-fired pizzecutglass factory and veranda restaurant jutting over a waterfall by a wooden bridge. A rias, one-of-a-kind arts and crafts galleries and some of few minutes down the road, the spectacular the most creative restaurants Quechee Gorge, framed by steep slopes of in the Northeast. pine, silently gushes some 300 meters beVermonters live for low the bridge!

For a memorable re-entry to the eastern the outdoors. In summer, side of the Green Mountains, which run up the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and countless the spine of Vermont, from Middlebury take the Lincoln Gap Road that twists and string quartets and musicians shun concert halls and curls steeply through lush forests gushing with waterfalls, and you emerge in the Mad perform on grassy meadows or beside mountain lakes.

River Valley.

Then it's on to the capital, Montpelier, and While the dazzling autumn foliage justiwest through Stowe and Smuggler's Notch. fiably draws overflow crowds from as far away as Japan and Brazil, the only down This is the entrance to the wild, majestic "old time in this land of four distinct seasons is Vermont." Called the Northeast Kingdom, it is the dedicated outdoor adventurer's haven mid-April to May "mud season."

In winter, this is a magical wonderland bordering Quebec, Canada.

If you turn west at Montpelier, in 45 right out of a Currier & Ives painting, with candles flickering in windows and horseminutes you're in delightful, downtown drawn sleds jingling down Main Street, . Burlington, and a stone's throw from Shelburne-a must-visit 400-hectare forwhich is ankle-deep in fresh, powdery snow. mer railroad baron's estate. Set in a formal Spring is heralded by boiling sap from the maple trees into maple syrup and maple English garden and perched on a bluff above Lake Champlain, the giant mansion now candy, and of mountaintops brushed with snow rising from lush meadows, golf. serves as the $200-a-night Inn at Shelburne. courses and gushing mountain streams.

The expansive grounds have been turned into an experimental farm and environmenSummer (mid-June to mid-August), with tal center, and concerts are held on the lawns. average daytime highs of 27 OC, is ideal Designed by the guru of landscape archifor outdoor concerts, country fairs, bake sales, barn auctions, wine-and-cheese and tects, Frederick Law Olmstead, peaceful, verdant Shelburne is the essence of Vermont. gourmet food festivals, sailing, biking, While beautiful and expensive country long walks through the woods, polo matches and lakeside barbecues. Even the inns abound, don't ignore the smaller ones most exclusive golf courses are open to the that go by typical Vermont names and sum up the ambience-"The Peeping Cow Inn," public. No pretentious rules or raised eyebrows. This, after all, is Vermont.

"Beaver Pond Farm Inn," the "Inn At Long While just about any route takes you Last." Similarly, accept the simple roadside "B&B," "Antiques," "Pick through the thick of the state, a personal fa- invitations: Your Own Berries," "Bake Sale" and vorite is to enter the state from the southeast "Country Fair." Visitors are welcomed. It is comer on Interstate 91 at the New England here where indelible memories are made. D town of Brattleboro. If you want to reward yourself, give yourself a week, rent a Jeep Cherokee (about $50 a day) and poke around About the Author: Vinod Chhabra,for 23 years this classic Vermont setting of prim Victorian travel editor and restaurant critic with Hearst and Queen Anne-style houses set around Newspapers in New York, now splits his time Town Hall and the "village green." It is a fa- as president of Asia America Marketing in vorite hideaway for former U.S. Ambassador Bangalore and copublisher of Today Magazines Group in Ocala, Florida. to India John Kenneth Galbraith.

The Novel According to John Updike I always had some idea about what kind of man John Updike would be. My image of him wasformed partly by photos on thejackets ofhis books and partly by the protagortists in hisfiction. I was anxious to meet him, to corifirm the accurary ofm:y mental picture, and to ask several questions which could be answered by Updike alone. The opportuniry came when I won a Fulbright Fellowship to do research at the Joseph Regenstein LibraJy of the Universiry of Chicago.

I wrote to Updike. Updike responded rather evasively, suggesting I consult one of the "tons of interviews" he had given over theyears. I did not like to be put off even in such a subtle fashion. I had read all of his earlier interviews but still had questions for him. So I wrote back pressing nry case. The second time Updike took a little longer to reply. I had a hunch that the writer who had lavished such craft on human contacts in his books would not refuse to meet me foreva And I proved to be right with his next letter:

SUKHBIR SINGH: Do you have a prior idea about the shape of your novel, or does the novel gradually acquire a form as you writeitdown?

JOHN UPDIKE: Both. You begin with some sense of the shape and roughly whether it's going to be a big novel or a little novel. I never begin without knowing what the ending is going to be, so I have some sense of the total curve of the novel. But, of course, surprising things happen. I don't

"I hate to think ofyou going back to India frustrated by a cranlry old American writa What isyour schedule for April or May? }OU can come to the house here and 1'll give you a cup of tea. " I was thrilled, and agreed to meet him at his home in the Beverly Farms outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a crisp April afternoon. TOgether with a fellow Indian Fulbrighter studying at Harvard, R. Narayanan, I traveled by suburban train froin Boston, enjC!Jlingthe gorgeous view of the woods, villages, small waterpools and narrow creeks spread all around on the way. As we alighted from the train, I saw Updike walking tow.ard us. On coming closer he inquired, "Is one ofyou M7: Singh?" I nodded. He smiled pleasantly and, extending his hand to me, said: "I am John Updike. " Updike drove us to his house, located closeto the Massachusetts Bay. It is a big mansion, reminiscent of colonial times. Soon, with each oj us sipping steaming tea, the interview began.

plan every detail in advance. I hope that a certain vitality will take over, that the characters will surprise me. So, yes, as compared to many writers, I don't begin until I know where I'm going. And then I let the novel acquire a form. It's like T build the branch, and then little leaves appear as we go along.

Your novels do not have the neat structure of the novels of Thomas Hardy, Henry

James, or E.M. Forster. Do you believe that a rigid structure is detrimental to an accurate, objective delineation?

Well, they don't seem that "un-neat" to me, really. Perhaps they're not quite as neat as James's and Forster's, but I think they're as neat as Thomas Hardy's. As I say, I do have an overall sense of the structure of the novel. As I go along, I try to remember what I have written so that, as in a symphony, things echo, things happen again, things

come around. So there is perhaps more form than there may seem at first glance. I am by no means of the school of Thomas Wolfe or Jack Kerouac or other American writers who just wanted to letit all spill out. I generally do have a shape in mind; it may not seem that way to you, but to me it does.

Were you influenced by European novelists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence in the beginning of your literary career?

The English novelist who meant the most to me was one you may never have read-a man called Henry Green. I read Forster when I spent a year in England at Oxford, living for the first time in my life away fr'om the United States. All sorts of English influences, no doubt, came into my head, and I did read a fair number of English novels.

I read some Woolf and some Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Dickens, of course. But, really, it was Henry Green whose peculiar style excited me and made me try to write in the same fashion, only about American subjects. So, yes, I think we all measure ourselves, to some extent, against the great modernsagainst James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, perhaps above all. We want to be that good, but we can't really imitate them, you know.

We have to do our own thi ng.

Your first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, suggests that there is no goodness without belief in God and no salvation without a spiritual life, even in the modern times of scientific materialism. Is this hypothesis the main thrust in all your subsequent novels?

Yes, although perhaps less as we go on.

And I would phrase it a little differently. I would say that we all have a spiritual hunger.

We all want something more than material satisfaction. You can satisfy this hunger with a form of religion, or with a political belief, or with some kind of mysticism. I think man is to some extent a religious ani mal. He is on a kind of search. He is looking for something. Ithink all of us really wanta little more than just what we can see.

In "Pigeon Feathers," David Kern desperately needs a clue to the presence of God, which'canfill his life with faith and alleviate

his fear of death. Ironically, he realizes the when Harry makes love to her. Are you sugpresence of a divine reality only after he gesting that sex can act as an apt remedy for shoots the pigeons and takes a closer look at the spiritual malady of modern man? Or are the colorful patterns on their feathers. In his you merely juxtaposing the sacred and the profane with a view to creating an image Journals, the English poet G.M. Hopkins also talks about a similar process for the re- suggestive of the inherent irony of Rabbit's situation? alization of the divine through external pheI think you could say that-the second nomena in the universe. Did you have the British poet in view while writing your short part. Rabbit is aware of the tension. On the one hand, there is the church of his childstory? hood, on the other, the body of this volupI might have, you know. I did read Hopkins in college. I was an English major, tuous woman who is not his wife and who herself does not believe any of it. So he is and I specialized in poetry. In British poaware; he wants to keep his innocence, as it etry, actually. So Hopkins was certainly one of the poets I had read. Butl wouldn't say he were. As to sex being an apt remedy for the spiritual malady of modern man, it cerwas the only influence behind David Kern.

David Kern blunders upon the so-called ar- tainly seems to ease the pain. I think in the gument from design-that is, the world is last hundred years, the gospel of Freud has replaced the gospel of austerity. The so beautiful and so intricate that there must Puritan gospel has been replaced by the behave been a maker, things must have been created. And this we don't find just in lief that we must be sexually active to be even halfway happy. But it's not a remedy Hopkins, but in many Christian and relithat lasts; it wears off like many other pills gious thinkers. David invents this himself. you take. Sex wears off, but for the time you To him it's a new thought. But not from I think, it does fill our Hopkins alone. A wonderful thought, of are taking it-yes, 'void, fill a need for something more than course. just eating and sleeping and earning money.

In Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom also Some commentators say that Couples is wants to feel the presence of God. But, unabout sex as a substitute for Christianity in like David, he does not stumble upon "somethe Western world. But I think that there is thing" which can assure him about the existence of God in his universe. Is it be- a Christian allegory implicit in the novel.

Relationships disintegrate with two dicause Rabbit has lost his Edenic innocence vorces, one death and one abortion. At this and David, as a young boy, possibly still repoint, Piet Hanema experiences a transfortains it? mative moment as he witnesses the burning Yes, Harry is older. David, I think, is only 14. Harry is 20, and then 26, and then 36 and 46. So the older he gets, the more weight there is to lift. But to the very end, there is a kind of mystic in Harry, even in Florida when he has much to be discouraged about and he is kind of falling apart. Nevertheless, he loves the world. He loves finding the black section of that city; he loves seeing black boys play basketball the way he used to. So I don't think he is cynical ever. He always retains a little bit of in nocence. On this, I guess he is like many Americans. He's like me. I'm 63, but even I have some innocence.

You repeatedly project the church building against the naked body of Ruth

church. He becomes aware of God's presence in the world. Thereafter he starts a new life with Foxy, and they are accepted by other people as another couple. Have I got it right?

I saw it as a kind of fairy tale, with Piet and Foxy being the only real Christiansthe only real believers, in a way, in this group. Among their attractions is this attraction of faith. In some sense, they try to break out of the corrupt, pragmatic environment of this set of couples and make their own couple somewhere else. So, yes, what they do is not meant by me to be bad. In fact, it's kind of a happy ending as I see it.

In Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom shows predictable signs of maturity and growth in his outlook. But reversals in his personal relationships make him realize that sex is not everything. "There must be something else." Does Harry at this point acknowledge the presence of a supernatural power that governs our lives? He seems to be acting with such awareness in Rabbit Is Rich.

I wouldn't phrase it quite that way. As I remember, my thought in Rabbit Redux was to show Harry brought to an acceptance of his wife, and she of him, through their adventures. It's like a moon shot. Just as the rocket went up and the man came back, so they go out into other worlds and then come back to this earth and, in the end, you see them reconciled. And then in Rabbit Is Rich, they are so reconciled. In some way, Harry becomes a happily married man. And Rabbit Is Rich is very much a portrait of happiness. So, yes, that is how I would describe the spiritual events that happened in Rabbit Redux.

I find The Coup somewhat different from your other novels which deal primarily with the problems relating to love, sex, marriage and religion in Western society. Here you have an African monarch questingfor the ultimate truth to fill the vacuity at "the bottom of his soul. " Ellellou's spiritual disbelief and sinful activities bring political instability, social chaos and barrenness to his land. Things improve when he ceases to be king. Do you want to convey in this novel that politics and belief are universally inseparable? The Puritans believed it while creating a new po-

litical system in the New World.

It was the idea of the bad leader, the bad king, being bad for the land. This is quite an ancient idea. It's in The Waste Land, of course. The Waste Land is just about this.

There are African tribes who would actually kill the king when he grew too old to give vitality, because he was the conduit through whom God's vitality went down to the people and the land. That was in my mind more than the Puritans. Also, remember this was written just after the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resigna-

"Hinduism seems one with nature ....1wound up almost a Hindu after the end of writing, but not quite. It was alotoffun." tion. In a way, it was about that. It was a kind of an allegory about the Nixon years, how we had a poisoned President and we had to get rid of him before we could again achieve national health.

In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry shows further growth ofhis beliefin the supernatural reality. He seems to have overcome his crazefor sex and disbelief in Christianity with the passage of time. But in Rabbit at Rest, he unexpectedly falls by having sex with his daughter-in-law. Isn't it inconsistent with his character, even though he is not wholly responsiblefor the reversal?

He is a mixture, Harry is. Just as I am. On the one hand, he has many good instincts and wants order and wants family happiness. On the other hand, he can't really resist the invitation to live. Pm offers herself to him when she's in a desperate mood, in a desperate state of mind, and he's just come out of the hospital. So he's in a desperate state of mind, too. In a way, it's their way of saying yes to life. They are trying to climb back on to the life wagon. It is, you could say, a terrible sin and Janice is very upset.

It's a breaking of the social order. But always in the Rabbit novels, there is a tension

between doing what feels right and feels vital, and staying within the social bounds.

This is the basic human conflict that T tried to dramatize in all of these books.

Harry dies in shame, guilt and ignominy.

One really feels sorry for him. Why did you bring about such an unpleasant end for a charming character like Rabbit?

Well, I'm glad you find him charming. I found him charming, of course. But all men die, and T thought Harry should die whi Ie I was still alive. I didn't want him to be like a comic strip character who just goes on and on. Like any man, he has a youth and a middle age. Death comes rather early to him. I think I wanted to show him rounding out his life. In a way, he shapes his death. He goes out on that basketball court and plays even though it's going to give him a heart attack.

In a way, he chooses to go out in a place that makes him happy. So, I don't see his death quite as darkly as you do.

Some of your works such as A Month of Sundays, Roger's Version and S: A Novel are known as the Hawthorne novels. Do you merely parody Hawthorne in these novels or do youfind his moral ethics still relevant?

I think Hawthorne remains a very interesting writer and has a lot to say to modern writers. He was not himself a pro-Puritan, as you know; his ancestors had been Puritans and he didn't really like them. The Scarlet Letter is in many ways a stern indictment of the Puritan world. His vote is with Hester Prynn, an anarchic, vital woman who resists the order. I think what made me write A Month of Sundays, which was the first of these Hawthorne novels, was the di fference between the way we treat¡ adulterous clergymen now and then. Then, Dimmesdale's sins made him dead to the world; he dies of shame. Now you send errant clergy off to a retreat in the desert for therapy. A month of recreation, of getting their act together, and back they go into the fray. So this is a kind of joke in that way. I'm saying that what in Hawthorne was so very serious has become not so serious now. But these weren't just jokes, these novels.

Roger's Version has very much of my thought in it; so do the other two novels.

(Continued on page 40)

ME AND MY BaaKS here is a moment in the movie Lawrence of Arabia when a tiny black dot on the shimmering desert horizon slowly enlarges into a galloping sheikh, played, if memory serves, by Omar Sharif. A book you write is like that-a small vibrant blur that gradually enlarges into a presence, preferably dashing an4 irresistible. When people ask me how many books I have written, they may think I am being coy when I say I do not exactly know. But do I count just the 40 hardcover volumes that the obliging firm of Alfred A. Knopf has published? What about the five slim books for children, and the out-ofprint paperback Olinger Stories, or the peculiar but precious quasi novel entitled TooFar to Go in this country [USA] and lOur Lover Just Called in Great Britain, containing linked short stories not all of which have appeared in other collections? And what of the many limited editions, binding together material, often, that is not between hard covers anywhere else?

The bookmaking process-fussing with the type, the sample pages, the running heads, the dust jacket, the flap copy, the cover cloth-has perhaps been dearer to me than the writing process. The latter has been endured as a process tributary to the former, whose envisioned final prod-

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Reprinted by permission; Š 1997 John Updike. Originally in the New Yorke,: All rights reserved.

uct, smelling of glue and freshly sliced paper, hangs as a shining mirage luring me through many a gray writing day The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed. One collection of stories, Pigeon Feathers, had developed in the printing too narrow a top margin, and another, Problems, too exiguous a bottom margin. The jacket I had designed for The Coup, based upon a photograph of Timbuktu's boxy dried-mud houses, had been spurned by higher-ups a~ making it look too much like a nonfic-' tion book, and the solid-green jacket achieved as a compromise became, thanks to a tinting effect of the coated stock, not at all the clarion green I had seen in proof. Such inevitable blem~ ishes, though extraliterary, inaugurate my estrangement from the book, which becomes distasteful to me before its life with the public has so much as begun.

The first flurry of this life, marked by hopeful arrays in bookstores, by advertisements in the plucky organs of the print trade, by inexorably mixed reviews, by blushing interviews with the giddy author, is brutish and short. Very quickly the book, scarcely news in the first place, becomes old news. Seeing an unbought stack glimm ering patheti-

cally in a window, the author averts his eyes and, like the bad Levite in the parable of the good Samaritan, passes byon the other side. The books call out with little surface details-a title type once fervently debated, a topstain tenderly selected-for a recognition now stonily denied. Soon, like a chorus of cries from a sinking ship, the books die away; they eddy into the back shelves of bookstores, and thence into the mountainous return piles, to reappear a year or two later in the discount catalogues and in a paperback version. The royalty statements, by the time they appear, are like shreds of wreckage which float to the surface of a cruel, inscrutable sea.

And yet the books do not quite vanish. The author retains some copies, and spies others in the homes of his children and his friends, where he has bestowed them. Occasionally he sees a stranger scowling into one on an airplane or in a hospital ward. My instinct is to tear the book from the reader's hands; I wonder if this reaction is abnormal or generally shared within the neurotic literary profession. One has sought this silent intimacy and then is shocked by it; it seems so naked and out of control. The stranger, with his or her grimy fingers and glassy gaze, is so clearly not the ideal reader, all-forgiving and miraculously responsive, whom I vaguely courted as I wrote. My sly, greedy wish to have my books bought and read cannot stand up to

even a Iittle experiential reali ty.

Once a year, I do duty at a church book fair, and stand an1id table after table, receding to the horizon, of the discarded works ofJohn P. Marquand, Thomas B. Costain, A.J. Cronin, Mary Ellen Chase (who gave my first novel a generous review, ages ago), Pearl Buck, Frank Yerby, John Gunther, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, and those innumerable others who, in the long middle of our finally terminating century, studded the best-seller lists and the sunporches, bedrooms and dens of the local bourgeoisie.

Death and demolition have released these books from the crannies of their sequestration. A few of my own yellowing titles crop up among them; their purchasers, startled to find me alive and standing there, ask me to sign them, and thus I touch for a moment, as they surge toward me and then away again, battered copies of Couples, rubbed and rain-damaged Rabbits, and foxed, dog-eared Witches ojEastwicks, the diabolic purple I chose for the cover cloth faded by the passingyears to an innocent mauve. These books of mine have been through the mill. They have traveled in the ill-mapped wilderness of the reading public. Their scars of use shame me. While I cowered unseen, these books bravely ventured forth and took their chances.

The literary business, with its fitful attempts to imitate the vastly betterfinanced glamour of the movie and television and music businesses, comes down to books, the humble, durable dregs of reading. My wife has taken up genealogy, and at her side I visit in summertime the small towns of Connecticut and New York. She gravi-

tates to the local-history section of the perbacks in a new format all come to trim little libraries of brick and iron- the door and beg to be cherished. My own books have crowded all the others stone, and I drift into the general stacks, sneakily seeking out, between out of one room and have pressed on the massed best-sellers of Anne Tyler into another. Boxes of them weigh and Leon Uris, my own tomes. There down the attic joists and molder in the basement and the barn. Their swelling are usually a few there, son-Ie written so long ago that my connection to bulk threatens to push me away from them seems grand paternal. The con- the point of it all. The thin edge of the dition of their spines, and the dates wedge-my very first book, just barely stamped on the checkout cards, tell a book, a collection of mostly light me more than I want to know about verse, with its thrifty pale-gray boards a bright purity my readership or lackof it. Some, usu- and black spine-had slowly swallowed by the subsequent ally those written when I was youngRabbit, Run, The Centaul; Pigeon Feath- thickening. In the backward glance, I tend to lose sight of content and, asked ers, with its pinched top marginsto name favorites, think most fondly of have worn enough to win a staid, stamped second binding. On one steel those volumes that, like Hugging the shelf, in a Hudson Valley town with its Shore and Buchanan Dying, came out esown tributary creek gurgling over a pecially well, to my mind, as examples margins, dam and under a bridge near the li- of book production-good brary door, I saw that S., in its saucy nice cover, pleasant heft.

A n,aster set of the 40 Knopf hardpink cloth, had a spine distinctly more row aslant than the others: it had been read covers sits in a polychrome more. The reviews, as I recalled, had opposite my desk. They are stripped of their jackets and marked up with been sour; there had been feminist typos and second thoughts toward muttering, though I had put my heart and soul into my heroine, who leaves some ultimate perfected edition.

Somewhere in their several million her posh home for a raffish ashram. pondered, proofread, printed words I The publisher had evinced high hopes for sales; the generous first printing . must have done my best, sung my had proved to be more than enough. song, had my say. But my panicked Here, years later, while water audibly awareness, as the cutoff age of 65 aprushed over the nearby dam, none of proaches, is of all that isn't in themthat seemed to matter. What mattered almost everything, it suddenly seems. was that, to judge from the book's con- WOrlds are not in them. In the face of dition, the readership of this small this vacuity arises the terrible itch else?-write another book, town, mostly female, as readership is to-what eve rY'",here, had recognized in S. my a book that, like one more ingredient attempt at a woman's book, a book for sprinkled into a problematic batter, women. A sort of blessing seemed to will make the whole thing rise. The litarise from the anonymous public; I tle black dot on the horizon begins to quiver. Squinting, T can almost see the had been, mutely, understood. jacket, and make out the title page, in Meanwhile, the books multiply.

0 Foreign editions, revised editions, pa- 36-point Perpetua.

They are meant to be somewhat playful, but also serious about religion and sex, religion and adultery, basically. These great themes were tackled by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Leftel; but not by too many other American writers. Hester Prynn remains one of the few really big women in American fiction. I think maybe that's what attracted me, above all, to this particular classic.

In S: A Novel,you talk about kundalini, which is a part of the Hindu yoga system.

Where did you learn about it?

When I was a young man, at Oxford especially, but in my New York years also, I read a lot of religious books. Not just Christian, but also Hindu and Buddhist. I worked them into the teachings and into the novel, which made it a long glossary about yoga.

It's all very attractive, you know.

Especially to a Christian. Itdoesn't have the sort of twist, 'the pain, of Christianity. In some ways, it's a very natural religious set of precepts.

Buddhism doesn't ask a terrible lot of you, really. Hinduism also seems one with nature in a funny way. So I wound up almost a Hindu after the end of writing, but not quite. It was a lot of fun for me to read those things and try to work them into a novel. [Sarah Worth] is the essence, whatever you call it-the mystic life-and she ascends in the novel to the highest levels of Sukhbir Singh (right) with John Updike outside the latter :\.home near Cambridge,Massachusetts. 'f

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what is in the Buddhist phrase, disengagement. She comes above it all. I like that novel, actually. I was surprised that so many women did not like it. But I meant it to be in praise of women.

Unlike many of your novels, your short stories in The Music School, The Same Door and Afterlife and Other Stories are neatly constructed. The stories convey your ideas more quickly, whereas the novels are a bit slow in delivering your views. Do youfeel more at ease writing your stories or your novels?

You know, you do feel at ease in a novel after a while. You arein itforsix months ora year, and it becomes like a home for you.

It's like this house as opposed to somebody else's apartment or a hotel room.

On the other hand, it may be that I'm a better short story writer than a novelist.

When I'm writing a good short story, it feels very compact and very central-very much out of my inner self. That may make them seem a little more immediate, a little more punchy. The short stories collected in The Afterlife, which is my last collection, are very much outofmy essence, as it were. I'm glad I can write both, actually, because one offers a relief from the other. You can go from writing a novel to writing some short. stories and back again. It would be harder to be able to do only just one of them.

You very frequently use the words "transparent" and "opaque" in relation to your characters. What do you mean by them?

Have you borrowed themfrom Emerson?

I wasn't aware of them in Emerson, but certainly, in a way, all Americans are Emersonians. His credo is very much part of the fabric that we try to live. The notion of things being "opaque" or "transparent," I suppose, goes back to the Puritans and the general Protestant sense of there being an inner light; you look through things to either God or to the underlyi ng pattern. I have no conscious Emersonian intention when I write "transparent" or "opaque," but you're probably right that I do use them a fair amount. I hope not too much.

Saul Bellow calls you a novelist of"sensibility" in his essay on recent American fic-

tion. In Bellow's view, you assume that "only private exploration and inner development are possible, and accept the opposition of public and private as fixed and indissoluble." I think Bellow implies that you do not engage your characters in the vital experiences of life. They remain isolated from the rest of the world and do not enjoy sufficient selfhood. How do you respond to Bellow's observation?

Well, it was made sometime ago, and I don't take quite the approach toward politics that he does. I would never write a book like Herzog, which is one long complaint against the Eisenhower years, or the Eisenhower ethos. I try to accept what is around me, including the political structure. But my people did not exist independent of the society as a whole. The whole point of Rabbit, Run and others is that we can't get out of the social net. The social net is everywhere we are. There is no such thing as the isolated sensibility. Our ideas, both about ourselves and about other people, come from other people. So I don't think it's a very just description, though I understand why Bellow would say it. I really admire Bellow by the way. I think he's a terrific writer, and he has meant quite a lot to me as an example of what an American writer can do.

What do you think about the future of the American novel in the wake of the recent critical theories, feminism and postmodernism, etc.?

Big question. I don't know! I certainly will, for the rest of my life, try to write fiction. To me, it's still a terribly exciting, open, and plastic medium that can say things nothing else can. But I think it has taken a beating from these various trends. I think that general academic criticism has tended to belittle the novel and the short story as a means of expression. The novel is about the way we actuallylive. Ithinkit will go on.

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About the Interviewer: Sukhbir Singh is an associate professor of English at Osmania University, Hyderabad. He has authored one book, The Survivor in Contemporary American Fiction: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1991), and edited anothe/; Conversations with Saul Bellow (1993).

ITWITH SUCCESS Working in perfect harmony, Sundram Fasteners ofChennai and General Motors of the U.S. providejust a glimpse of what mutual rewards business partnerships founded on faith and trust can bring.

~ew months ago, a medium-sized, not-so-wellknown Chennai-based company, Sundram asteners Ltd. (SFL), did itself-and Indiaproud when it made the list of top competitive firms of Asia. In its recent cover story on Asia's 50 most competitive companies, the Hong Kong-based English monthly

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Asia Inc. ranked SFL 16th. Only four other Indian companies figured on the honor roll. They were industrial giants Reliance Industries (9th), Ranbaxy Laboratories (11 th), Arvind Mills (19th) and Bajaj Auto (20th). Others in the list included such world giants as Sony Corporation, Toyota Motor Corporation and Singapore Airlines.

SFL is no stranger to winning laurels, thanks to its almost fanatic faith in quality, that it alone could protect its brand name and uphold its reputation. In 1990 it became, as SFL President Sampathkumar Moorthy says, "the first company in India to receive the prestigious ISO 9000 certification, which is the benchmark of international quality."

A member of the TVS Group of companies, Sundram Fasteners began operations in 1966 with the manufacture of high-tensile specialty fasteners, nuts and bolts of all shapes, sizes and descriptions, used in critical applications by the automotive and engineering industries. SFL has since fanned out into several products and processescold extrusion and powder metal products, information systems engineering and radiator caps. And, since the early 1980s, it has been growing at an exponential rate, tripling its turnover every five years-from Rs. 100 million in 1980 to Rs. 300 million in 1985 to Rs'. 1,000 million in 1990 and Rs. 3,000 million in 1995.

Helping SFL power this prodigious performance is its

"What is remarkable is that GM has always treated us as an equal.

Never have we felt that they are such a giant and we are a very small company."

unwavering obsession with quality, which is enshrined in the company's concept of total customer satisfaction. SFL counts defects not by hundreds or thousands, or even by hundreds of thousands, but by millions of parts, what Moorthy calls "PPM"-parts per million.

Tripling its turnover every five years has become a habit for the Chennai company. But then around the end of the 1980s, although SFL was still sizzling, it realized that the Indian market may not grow in the coming years at a rate to absorb all its production. It must, therefore, look overseas if it were to sustain its prodigious growth. SFL set an ambitious target for itself: by the year 2000 at least 30 percent of the company's sales must come from exports. Says Moorthy, "Somewhere around '90 we realized that tripling our turnover from Rs. 1,000 million in 1990 to Rs. 3,000 million by 1995 will not be as easy as ithad been in the past, and even if we did achieve that, it was going to be an uphill task to further triple it to 9,000 million by the year 2000. That is when we decided, although we had been exporting our products in modest quantities for several years, to enter the export marketin a big way, to look at the world as our market."

To establish its foothold on foreign territories, SFL put into effect several strategies, not the least important of which was to make contacts, directly or through international industrial fairs, with prospective overseas clients.

The strategy worked. It brought SFL in touch with General Motors.

General Motors, or GM as the giant American automobile maker is popularly known, had two radiator cap-making plants in the U.K. that were no more economically viable for it to operate. GM scouted around the world for a possible buyer, who would buy the plants, set them up in his own country, manufacture radiator caps and then supply about four million of them a year to GM's North American division.

It was a big gamble for the American behemoth to depend on a single outside source. GM must ensure that whoever bought the plants had a proven track record, was financially sound, had technical capability, was able to meet its quality standards and, above all, was in a position to guarantee prompt, regular deliveries of the seemingly simple-looking radiator caps, which are a critical component in the efficient, smooth running of the engine by preserving the coolant in the system.

Their search for the suitable party brought GM people to India, which had just around then taken its first hesitant but unmistakable steps toward revamping its economy by removing several of the shackles on foreign investment that had cramped the country's economic growth and well-being. They visited Sundram Fasteners, which had already established contacts with GM's European subsidiary, GM-Opel..

What the GM people saw and heard at SFL greatly impressed them. SFL was financially sound, technically well-managed, had the ISO 9000 certification, and it counted some of the most fastidious European and ASEAN countries as its customers. But what perhaps most impressed GM was the Indian company's spotless record: It had never ever lost even one man-hour since its founding, a remarkable accomplishment even by the world's most stringent industrial standards and which, in turn, is a tribute to the excellent management-employee relationships at SFL. Yet, there was one last major hurdle for SFL to cross.

GM floated a global tender for the plants' sale, and SFL had to compete with bidders from around the world, which included companies from the U.S., U.K., South Africa and India.

SFL won. Says Moorthy, "We were indeed thrilled when we got the news that GM had selected us. Our bid was competitive, but what went in our favor was that, aftertheirvisit to our plant, GM was convinced of our capability to meet their requirements in every respect-quality, quantity, schedules. After all, GM wasn't merely interested in selling the plants to whoever offered the highest bid, but was

Above: A view ofSFL's radiator cap facility in Chennai. Left: Robert A. Burkhart, vice president, worldwide purchasing, General Motors, presents his company's "Supplier of the Year Award" for 1996 to Suresh Krishna, chairman and managing director of Sundram Fasteners Ltd.

looking for a reliable supplier." Moorthy adds, "We signed the agreement with GM in August '92. In October we began the process of dismantling and shifting the plant to Chennai. It arrived in December and by March '93 we had already started supplies to GM." GM, on its part, sent its engineers to help Sundram Fasteners in setting up the factory in Padi on the outskirts of Chennai, commissioning it, and getting it on full stream.

SFL supplies almost all of GM North America's requirements of metal radiator caps, some four-and-a-half million a year. To ensure timely deliveries, it has set up a warehouse in the United States, which is electronically connected with GM's 27 plants in North America. Says Moorthy, "What is a source of immense satisfaction for us is the fact that although we supply more than four-anda-half million caps a yearto GM~we make several types for GM's requirements in cars, buses, trucks~there has not been even a single rejection in the past one year." No wonder, GM presented SFL Chairman and Managing Director Suresh Krishna with its prestigious "Supplier of the Year Award" for 1996 at a ceremony recently held at Rio de Janeiro. Speaking on the occasion, Harold R.

Kutner, vice president for production control and logistics of GM North America, noted: "Winning this award is an awesome achievement since the recipients have exceeded the expectations of their toughest customers~GM buyers, GM engineers and GM plants."

SFL earned about Rs. 120 million in foreign exchange from export of its radiator caps in 1995. "In a year or two, we hope to double our export earnings from the caps to about Rs. 250 million," says Moorthy, adding, "What is satisfying to us at SFL is the fact that because of our allround growth in sales, we were able to maintain our record of tripling our turnover every five years. In 1995 we achieved ourtargetofRs. 9,000 million."

"Excellent" is the word Moorthy uses in describing his company's relationship with GM. "Right from the day we signed our agreement with them, they have been extremely helpful and supportive. What is remarkable is that GM has always treated us as an equal. Never have we felt that they are such a giant and we are a very small company. They deal in billions of dollars and have worldwide presence and we're a very small company with a turnover of a few millions of dollars."

The relationship with. GM has made SFL bold and brave. SFL has used it as a springboard, a testimonial to establish successful business ties with several other multinationals such as Caterpillar in the U.S. "We are having a dialogue with Ford and we're quite hopeful that we should soon break into Ford, North America," says Moorthy.

Sundram Fasteners has recently gone into manufacturing plastic radiator caps, keeping in tune with the changing world trends and increase its share of the global radiator-cap market. "Automobile manufacturers the world over are increasingly going in for plastic caps," says Moorthy. "For example, Opel Astra, which GM is manufacturing in India, uses plastic caps. As of now, they are getting them from Europe, but we are quite certain that GM will soon source these caps from us. We are also confident that our plastic caps will be a standard original equipment for many of the other foreign cars now being manufactured in India."

The relationship between the lilliputian Sundram Fasteners and the behemoth General Motors, the number one FORTUNE500 company, looks like the perfect transcontinental marriage, an eminently successful union that's a shining example to an entire industry. Working in perfect harmony, the two companies provide just a glimpse of what rewards business partnerships founded on mutual faith and trust can bring.

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It started in 1971 in Michigan. Since then Artrain has logged more than 2.5 million visitors, carrying 13 exhibitions to more than 500 towns and cities in the U.S. Currently this traveling show is carrying art from the Smithsonian Institution to eager audiences.

denton, North Carolina-population 5,300-has a lot going for it.

Nestled against the northwest corner of the huge and often unruly Albemarle Sound, the town has history: it was capital of the colony from 1722 to 1743, and its womenfolk held their own tea party not long after the Bostonians did; the governor is rumored to have made a deal with Blackbeard to allow the pirate to sail local waters. It has architecture: exquisitely restored houses with what must surely be the largest ratio of porch swings to residents of any American town. It has a local landmark: the old abandoned five-story, redbrick peanut company sits beside the tracks on the east side of town. It has an arts council: 21 years old this year, it sponsors dance and theater productions, and art exhibitions. But one thing Edenton doesn't have-yet-is a full-fledged art museum.

That's where Artrain literally comes in.

Artrain is an art-museum-on-rails that consists of five cars: three gallery cars, a studio car and a caboose. Founded in 1971 by the Michigan Council for the Arts to bring art exhibitions to the people of Michigan, it proved so popular that by the mid-1970s it was touring other states as well. A nonprofit organization, Artrain, doesn't collect art; rather, it borrows art from museums and other sources. In its quarter-century of existence, the train has logged more than 2.5 million visitors, carrying 13 exhibitions to more than 500 towns and cities in the U.S. Its visits have had a far-reaching impact on some small towns.

For example, on its first tour it pulled up in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with a show entitled

E

Artrain on the tracks in Edenton, North Carolina.

"Man Creates ... A Vision of Art and the Innovators" on board. The excitement it generated added momentum to local efforts to restore the rundown train depot area, and today "Depot Town," with its antique shops and its farmer's market-in the old railroad freight house-is a historic gem with strong community support.

On its current three-year tour, Artrain is carrying an exhibition from the Smithsonian Institution for the first time.

Entitled "Art in Celebration I" it consists of more than 30 limited-edition prints that' were commissioned by the Resident Associates Program to mark major events at the Smithsonian and in the nation.

Organized by SITES, the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition service, in coopera~ tion with Artrain, it includes works by Alexander Calder, Georgia 0' Keeffe, Sam Gilliam and other well-known artists. The newest work in the show, a print by glass artist Dale Chihuly entitled Basket Drawing, celebrates the "Art in Celebration!" tour itself.

The logistics of any show are complicated, but when the exhibition is on a train, they're positively daunting. Always of concern, especially these days, is funding.

Although Chrysler is the primary sponsor for "Art in Celebration I" there are many sources of funding, from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs to a relatively modest payment from each of the towns on the itinerary. Scheduling of the tour is done months ahead of time by Jean Steppe, from her desk in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the Artrain headquarters is located. Above her desk hangs a detailed railroad map of the nation. It is not there for decoration. The train, which has no loco-

motive of its own, gets around the country through the good graces of local railroad operators. Then, there's the nuts-and-bolts stuff-such as making sure that adequate electricity will be available for the train at each stop and that the train will face in the right direction when it's parked (if not, it's a difficult glitch to remedy).

It's April when Artrain visits Edenton.

On this stretch of the tour, the five silverpainted cars have hitched a ride from Norfolk, the previous stop, with a Chesapeake & Albemarle (C&A) engine.

Now, on opening morning, Artrain sits just down the tracks from the peanut mill as seven young staff members, walkie-talkies in hand, bustle around, preparing for the onslaught of schoolchildren due to arrive at 9.

Of the staff members who travel with the train, only Ric Omans, a thin, compact fellow with a long arrowhead-shaped beard, rides on board; the others go by van. When the train is moving, the caboose is his home; at the stops it serves as the office for the whole staff. This morning the busy staffers pop in and out to make quick phone calls about such things as last-minute school bus schedules or voltage requirements.

"Voltage is big ... very big," laughs Arthur McViccar, who's in charge of crucial details like these for the tour. "We're running seven air conditioners, five dehumidifiers, lights, computer equipment, kitchen appliances and lots more, and many towns can't provide the power we need." On the way out, he pauses to refill his mug from the beat-up coffeepot that Omans is tending on the compact stove.

Omans has a cozy setup in his caboose home. On the wall above the phone is a detailed rai lroad map of the country, a twin of

Top: Pulled by a Chesapeake & Albemarle diesel, the silver cars of Artrain cross the North Carolina coastal plain.

Above: Children watch as local Edenton artist Paris Trail carves a leopard ray.

Left: Inside the train in Edenton, three schoolboys talk about Otto Piene print Centerbeam!

s

the one back at headquarters. Up above, in the cupola, an orange-and-yellow sleeping bag lies . neatly folded on a platform. Lying there at night, when the train is moving, Omans can look out through the cupola windows in all four directions without even raising his head. "There are worse places to sleep," he jokes with understatement, his beard bobbing on his chest as he talks. .

Among the local townspeople who have gathered on the grassy swath alongside the train this morning is the county arts council's executive director, Ann Perry, who was instrumental in bringing Artrain here. "We're celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Chowan Arts Council this weekend," says Perry, "and we're delighted that Artrain, with an exhibition from the Smithsonian Institution, will be a part ofthe festivities. Artrain provided fantastic education packets for the schoolteachers. A lot of the kids have heard of the Smithsonian, and they are thrilled that the Smithsonian is coming to them."

Beyond all that, says Perry, just the train itself-any train-is an event in this town.

"It's been years since trains have come here," she explains. "There's one lawyer in town who's a real buttoned-up type. When the C&A engine delivered Artrain, it had to blow its whistle at the intersections. All of a sudden, here comes this lawyer, running down the street, his tie flapping. It was hilarious. He's just one of those train buffs, and they are a breed!" Like Ypsilanti, Edenton has a restoration project that Perry hopes will benefit from Artrain's visit. It's a huge, brick cotton mill recently donated to Preservation North Carolina, which proposes to transform it into a major cultural meeting place.

Jugglers, Mimes and Hundreds of Kids At 9 a.m. the buses start to arrive. Bright yellow and blue, their sides painted with county names-Currituck, Bertie, Chowan-they rumble across the tracks in an endless procession, lining up along the

adjacent expanse of green. A huge tent has been set up, where the kids watch jugglers and mime artists as they await their turn to board. By the end of the day, 700 schoolchildren will have passed through the train; for most of them, it will be their first visit to an art exhibition. An equal number will come tomorrow, followed on the weekend by the general public.

In groups of 15, the youngsters climb a set of yellow metal steps into one end of the train, and after a short introductory video they funnel into the next car-the first of the galleries-where they are greeted by local volunteer Robin Sams.

Yesterday, Sams and the other volunteers met with the education staff to prepare to be docents. Sams, like many local volunteers on Artrain, is an artist; a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, the watercolorist lives with her husband on a nine-hectare farm that supports cotton, peanuts and corn.

Sams is a natural-born teacher. "Come on in! Find your favorite artwork on the wall," she tells the kids as they enter. They fan out. Along both walls they see prints, some beckoning and colorful, others more mysterious. A string bean of a seventhgrader in oversized shorts examines a pair of pictures by Elizabeth Catlett. Both depict the same smiling woman with her arms spread wide around three children.

The boy nudges his buddy. "Hey, those two pictures look exactly the same. Why would they put up two of the same thing?"

His words draw curious classmates like a magnet. Sams comes over, too. "Are they really the same?" she asks. "Can you find one thing that's different?"

A pony tailed girl with a tiny pink backpack studies the textured fence stretching across the foreground of the composition on the right, her nose almost touching the glass. "The fence in this one is, like, real...and the flowers in this one, they're sort of hooked on. In the other one, it's all completely ...flat." A classmate weighs in: "Their clothes are real in this one, too!" A sea of heads and pointing fingers jostles in front of the two pictures.

"That's right!" says Sams, explaining that the picture on the right is a collage, incorporating cutout raffia, fabric and other

materials; and the other is a copy made from the collage-a kind of print called a lithograph. The youngsters' eyes dart back and forth as she talks.

Sams walks them past other prints, explaining the different elements of art and the different ways prints can be made. One boy stops in front of Raphael Soyer's penetrating self-portrait, in which the elderly artist raises his eyes from something he's just written to gaze straight out at the viewer. "What does it say?" he asks Sams.

Again, the other kids gravitate over to see what he's talking about. "Those are Greek letters," she answers. "When you translate them into English, they say, 'Know thyself.' "The youngsters study the inquisitive face of the artist and the cryptic phrase he's written, then move on to the next printfilled gallery, where, again, a volunteer guides them along.

One thing about a museum in a train: it's long and skinny, so traffic jams inevitab~y occur. This morning it happens in the final car-the studio car-where two artists are at work: local sculptor Paris Trail, who is carving a leopard ray; and, beyond him, Artrain's resident artist for 1996, ceramist Kristen Bradley, who is molding handshaped forms. The rhythmic pounding of mallet against gouge reverberates in the small space, and the youngsters watch, transfixed, as the gouge bites out thick curls of hickory wood from the rough-hewn ray.

"See, you can use this as a paddle, too!" he jokes, picking up the foot-long form by the tail and waving it around. The kids cringe, giggling.

In twos and threes, they finally leave the studio car, where their teacher awaits them at the bottom of the steps. "Let's go, let's GO!" she says, hustling them along toward the bus.

And then she asks, "Did you enjoy it?"

"Yeah!" they answer in unison. "Let's go through again," one of them adds. But they can't; the buses have to get them back to school. Like Artrain itself, they're on a tight schedule. But for these youngsters, chances are that this particular stretch of rail, here on the east side of Edenton, will never look quite the same again.

D About the Author:

Constance editor of Smithsonian magazine.

Bond is art

stances to make the matter worth discussing, blacks are positioned to exploit their potential racial power effectively. Hence black attorneys wonder whether they should seek to elicit the racial loyalties of black jurors or judges in behalf of cl ients. Black jurors and judges face the question of whether they should respond to such appeals. Black professors face the question of whether racialloyalty should shape the extent to which they make themselves available to their students. Black employers or personnel directors face the question of whether racial loyalties should shape their hiring decisions. Were blacks wholly bereft of power, as some commentators erroneously assert, these and similar questions would not arise. Thus I evaluate arguments in favor of exempting blacks from the same standards imposed upon whites and conclude that typically, though perhaps not always, such arguments amount to little more than an elaborate camouflage for self-promotion or group promotion.

A second reason I resist arguments in favor of asymmetrical standards of judgment has to do with my sense of the requirements of reciprocity. I find it difficult to accept that it is wrong for whites to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of white advancement but morally permissible for blacks to mobi lize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of black advancement. I would propose a shoe-on-the-other-foot test for the propriety of racial sentiment. If a sentiment or practice would be judged offensive when voiced or implemented by anyone, it should be viewed as prima facie offensive generally. If we would look askance at a white professor who wrote that on grounds of racial kinship he values the opinions of whites more than those of blacks, then unless given persuasive reasons to the contrary, we should look askance at a black professor who writes that on grounds of racial kinship he values the opinions of blacks more than those of whites.

In some circumstances it is more difficult for blacks to give up the consolations of racial kinship than for whites to do so, insofar as whites typically have more resources to fall back on. But that should not matter, or at least should not matter decisively, if my underlying argument-that the sentiments and conduct of racial kinship are morally dubious-is correct. After all, itis surely more difficult for a poor person than for a rich one to give up the opportunity to steal untended merchandise. But we nevertheless rightly expect the poor person to give up that opportunity.

A third consideration is prudential. It is bad for the country if whites, blacks or any other group engages in the politics of racial kinship, because racial mobilization prompts racial countermobilization, further entrenching a pattern of sterile racial competition.

Beyond Racial Loyalty

0

I anticipate that some will counter that this is what is happening, has happened, and will always happen, and that the best that blacks can expect is what they are able to exact from the white power structure through hard bargaining. In this view, racial unity, racial loyalty, racial solidarity, racial kinship-whatever

one wants to call it-is absolutely essential for obtaining the best deal available. Therefore, in this view, my thesis is anathema, the most foolhardy idealism, a plan for ruination, a plea for unilateral disarmament by blacks in the face of a well-armed foe with a long history of bad intentions.

This challenge raises large issues that cannot be exhaustively dealt with here. But I should like to conclude by suggesting the beginning of a response, based on two observations.

First, it is noteworthy that those who have most ostentatiously asserted the imperatives of black racial solidarity-I think here particularly of Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan-are also those who have engaged in the most divisive, destructive and merciless attacks on "brothers" and "sisters" who wished to follow a different path. My objection to the claims of racial pride and kinship stems in part from my fears of the effect on interracial relations. But it stems also in large part from my fears of the stultifying effect on intraracial relations.

Racial pride and kinship seem often to stunt intellectual independence. If racial loyalty is deemed essential and morally virtuous, then a black person's adoption of positions that are deemed racially disloyal will be seen by racial loyalists as a supremely threatening sin, one warranting the harsh punishments that have historically been visited upon alleged traitors.

Second, if one looks at the most admirable efforts by activists to overcome racial oppression in the United States, one finds people who 'yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular racial group. One finds people who do not replicate the racial alienations of the larger society but instead welcome interracial intimacy of the most profound sorts. One finds people who are not content to accept the categories of communal affiliation they have inherited but instead insist upon bringing into being new and better forms of communal affiliation, ones in which love and loyalty are unbounded by race.

I think here of Wendell Phillips and certain sectors of the abolitionist movement. I also think of James Farmer and the early years of the Congress of Racial Equality, and John Lewis and the early years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. My favorite champion of this ethos, however, is a person I quoted at the beginning of this article, a person whom the sociologist Orlando Patterson aptly describes as "undoubtedly the most articulate former slave who ever lived," a person¡ with whose words I would like to end. Frederick Douglass literally bore on his back the stigmata of racial oppression.

Speaking in June of 1863, only five months after the Emancipation Proclamation and before the complete abolition of slavery, Douglass gave a talk titled "The Present and Future of the Colored Race in America," in which he asked whether "the white and colored people of this country [can] be blended into a common nationality, and enjoy together ... under the same flag, the inestimable blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as neighborly citizens of a common country." He answered: "I believe they can."

I, too, believe we can, if we are willing to reconsider and reconstruct the basis of our feelings of pride and kinship.

0

The six-legged, 60 x 30-centimeter Sojourner bombards alpha particles from its spectrometer to analyze the elemental composition of Yogi after completing chemical analysis of Barnacle Bill (left of the rover), two of several Martian rocks that have been named qfter famous cartoon characters. This photo and the one on the preceding page of Sojourner were downloaded directly from the Internet, which carried video sent by Sojourner and updates from NASAl] PL.

six-month journey on December 4, 1996, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, made an almost pinpoint landing on the Red Planet.

Pathfinder carried with it a tiny six-wheeled, microwaveoven-size dune buggy, Sojourner, which became the first ever man-made mobile explorer of another planet. Using infrared lasers to avoid hazards, the rover crawled at a stately pace of a centimeter per second to analyze Martian soil. Its Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer barraged the soil with alpha particles (two protons and two neutrons) from its supply of radioactive curium244. The alphas excite atoms in the soil, making them emit Xrays or protons. The number, and energy, of the emissions reveal which chemical elements go into Martian soil. Sojourner's analysis of a rock showed it rich in silicon dioxide-quartzit was as rich as any rock in Earth's continental crust, said geologist Harry McSween of the University of Tennessee. Quartz can be the result of a complex melting and remelting of rock-Hor of melting in the presence of a lot of water," says McSween.

But, it's too early to hazard a guess whether the arid, barren surface of Mars, which is half the Earth's size but which has terrestrial-like seasons, conceals a watery interior. If it does, there is a greater chance of finding life on the planet-and the real prospect that it may one day support terrestrial visitors. It will take the scientists at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) years to analyze the data the Mars probe has sent back to Earth before they can say with any accuracy whether the planet most similar to Earth ever harbored life orcan have life.

Pathfinder is a testimony to man's ingenuity. In these days of budget crunches, NASA wanted the Mars mission to be de-

signed, built and launched in one quarter the time, and at one quarter the cost, of space missions of the 1970s and '80s.

Pushing itself to astonishing feats of engineering, Jet Propulsion Lab in Houston, Texas, did exactly that. Pathfin'der and Sojourner cost $171 million, just a fraction of the $3,000 million (in today's dollars) it cost to design and build Viking, America's first spacecraft to land on the Red Planet in 1976.

The remarkably smart and unbelievably cheap Pathfinder and Sojourner have rekindled Americans' enthusiasm for space exploration that had somewhat dulled after the space shuttle Challenger tragedy claimed the lives of seven astronauts in 1986. NASA plans.to launch two spacecraft every 26 months to the Red Planet, one of which will bring back to Earth pieces of Martian rocks or samples of soil by the year 2005.

Pathfinder may prove to be the harbinger for a manned Mars mission. According to NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, the Johnson Space Center in Houston is close to designing a manned probe that would cost below $20 billion, be as safe for the astronauts as engineers can possibly make it, promise a big scientific payoff and be executed in collaboration with other countries. The first manned mission to Mars could, in fact, take off as early as 2011. If that happens, as it might well, those human pioneers may chance upon the still and silent Pathfinder and Sojourner-batteries long dead and mission long over-and salute them as the intrepid explorers that showed the way.

The Pathfinder mission is as much a triumph of technology as it is a triumph of our inborn inquisiti veness that forever urges human beings to explore to the limit-and beyond. As the eminent American historian Daniel Boorstin once said: "The creative consequences of the space enterprise are unimaginable now .... We should and will try to go as far as we can. People's humanity lies in discovering the boundlessness of our powers, which we can never define. To fail to do all we can do is to fail to be human."

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ON THE

LIGHTER SIDE "Mom says I got my hair and eyes from her, and she got her frazzled nerves from me."

Drawing by Chon Day. Reprinted with permission from the Saturday Evening Post Society, a division ofBFL & MS, Inc. Copyright © 1996.

"I'm not lying, Your Honor-l just ran out of available memory."

Broadcasting Into the Future Reed Hundt Looks at the Trends Cool and relaxed in Bermuda shorts as he strolled into New Delhi's Maurya Sheraton lobby, Reed Hundt, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), did not look like a man winding up a hectic few days of meetings in the Indian capital. His recent visit to India was his first, and he seemed to be enjoying every minute of it. He even managed to squeeze in ajaunt to Agra.

Hundt, FCC chairman since 1993, announced in early June that he would soon leave his post. During his tenure he supervised sweeping changes that liberalized regulation of telecommunications and cable broadcasting in the United States. His focus has been on promoting public service and making fair rules of competition in the communications sector.

A lawyer graduated from the Yale Law School, Hundt was partner in the Washington office of international law firm Latham & Watkins before becoming FCC chairman. His legal work included regulatory issues related to emerging technologies-cellular telephones, direct broadcast satellites and interactive television.

He brought the FCC into the information age in a big way by participating in online conversations with the public and establishing an FCC Internet site. The website allowed public access to information and also solicited public response to specific questions. He is the first FCC chairman to have a computer and Internet link on his desk.

Hundt sees the future of broadcasting as one of enormous potential worldwide. "I think it's very clear that on a global basis there is a tremendous unmet demand for more-more channels, more choices, more programs in different languages, more local content, more international content, more sports-you name it. We discovered this in

the U.S. We, traditionally, had three broadcast television stations per TV market. That was substantially inadequate, we discovered, as cable arrived. Now the average American community has 45 cable channels and two-thirds of the people in the country subscribe to cable. This tells us there is a tremendous demand for more.

"Everywhere I go in the world I see exactly the same thing. Belgium, Germany, the U.K., India-based on my limited experience-all offer significant evidence that there is a tremendous demand for more."

Reed Hundt sees special opportunities in countries which are just beginning to define' their regulatory authorities. The United States had to rethink regulation with the advent of satellite communications, because the regulatory agency was formed when broadcasting meant radio and terrestrial television. Countries new to high-tech communications have the advantage of a fres h start.

"One major opportunity is to combine the policies of different industries into one single policy for all communications and media. Technology is combining all of these different industries into one single ministry. For example, satellites will be

used on a global basis to provide voice communication, data communication and the broadcast of television signals.

Therefore, why should policies for satellites be materially different than policies for broadcast television or cable television or telephone? So one opportunity for all countries is to have a single set of policies for all these areas. And it's worth considering whether that means a single, unified, independent agency should be created in order to implement that single set of policies. With or without a single agency, I think, it will be increasingly obvious that in order to promote development and economic growth and also build democracy, countries will want a single harmonious, uniform policy for all these historically separate industries that are now converging."

According to Hundt, the Internet should also come under the purview of policies.

"The Internet is just a new technology called packet switch technology that permits one to communicate voice or data or video in a different way. It's essentially a version of voice communication or video distribution. It's marvelously cheap and wonderfully effective. It permits massive networking-and sort of humon- . gous conference calling-but these "The people in the are just technological nuances. It's best understood as a new cheap way communications to communicate, and the Internet part of government proves the necessity of having on a worldwide basis harmonious policies for all these have the greatest historically separate industries beopportunity that cause Internet access, Internet comexists at this time to munication can be provided by cable or satellite or telephony or provoke growth wireless." and development in Thinking more in terms of opportheir countries. " tunities than problems, Hundt says,

"The people in the communications part of government on a worldwide basis have the greatest opportunity that exists at this time to provoke growth and development in their countries."

One idea that particularly appeals to him is the opening, for countries new in the market, to license local terrestrial television stations. These are much less expensive than satellite cable channels. They are also more relevant since they may be broadcast in local languages and dialects and offer special regional programming. To do such selective broadcasting by satellite is cost-prohibitive.

During Hundt's tenure with the FCC, a great deal has been done to enable education to benefit from the communications revolution, an accomplishment he speaks of with enthusiasm.

"I would say that the most interesting thing we have done in the last four years since Bill Clinton has become President is commit to the goal of providing communications technology, including internal access, to every school in the country. And this means that world of information, the libraries of the globe, will be available to every child and every classroom in the country. That creates an equality of opportunity we've never had before in public education.

Furthermore, this is a goal that can be easily extended to the globe.

"This is a goal that does not need, in any way, to be limited to the richest countries, or the most developed countries, or the countries with the best school systems. In fact, whatI've just talked about could be provided to every school on the planet if governments permi tted the new generation of satelli tes to operate freely within their borders. That doesn't mean that these satellites need to download on different countries overwhelming culture-extinguishing American content, it just means that the satellites need to have the legal rights to send signals down and receive signals back up from every country. If that were permitted everywhere in the world, Internet access and a wealth of information could be provided to every school, literally, on Earth.

"What does this mean? It means that, among other things, hundreds of thousands of people in India could get the training necessary to build on the success in Bangalore

where already 200,000 people are employed in the software business serving a world market. It means that we could have, for the first time in history, a completely literate world in which everyone could read and write. That alone is a step forward. That is in the nature of the invention of the printing press, writing itself, or the so-called Green Revolution that developed new ways to feed the planet. It is at that order of magnitude to have global literacy. It can be provided by these wonderful new technologies because they are shockingly cheap-once you pay for the satellite to be launched in Guyana, and the rocket built somewhere else, and the satellite itself constructed in an airplane hangar in California. Once that's paid for, when the satellite sails over India or Myanmar or Thailand there's no extra cost involved. And the cost of sending a signal from that satellite whizzing overhead down to India or sending it back up is very, very low. So, consequently, a cheap investment and ahuge cultural payoff is in the offing."

On the question of mandatory uplinking-eiting what happened in some coun~ tries, where the avai labi Iity of satellite transmission receivers spawned a vibrant new market-Reed Hundt says leave it to commerce.

"I believe that governments promoting de.velopment will see that there's no need for governments to order that uplink facilities be inside a country's border or outside a country's border-just let them be placed by the businesses in the cheapest location. And let the satellite business offer its service according to market conditions. One thing I would suggest is that governments should ask that connections be provided to schools and to hospitals. But beyond that, let commerce drive the development of the global satellite system. That wi 11be best for everyone."

This, to Reed Hundt, is what regulation is about. "The purpose of regulation everywhere is to create equitable law that invites investment and permits fair competition and reasonable consumer choice, good information to subscribers, the right of consumers to complain, the ability of individuals to make and enforce contracts. Regulation should not be used to stifle investment or censor content or discourage development. The most importantchoice in my experience is the choice

of goals of regulation. And I'm pretty clear in my mind the right goal is to promote economic growth and social development. That can be done without question. The wrong goal is to limit entrepreneurship and diminish opportunity, and that mistake can be made also. So there's a choice.

"The difficulty in the communications revolution in each and every country, especially including the United States, is the difficulty of challenging the old world order and breaking down monopoly and status quo orientation. The difficulty is that political powers are associated with the existing economic power, whereas the new entrepreneurs, new ideas, new inventors, new employees do not have political power because they are just getting started. So government has to stand up for the new.

"In the absence of the rule of law there is something that will happen. Technology abhors a vacuum and people will copy software or ripoff cassette tapes if there isn't a rule of law that permits the distribution of these products in a commercially fair and reasonable way. So the purpose of a rule oflaw is in fact not to stifle anything but to create an opportunity for demand to be met andjobs to be created. That means that finance ministers and economic development agencies and education ministers have the biggest stake in the growth of the communications sector of anyone. And this is gradually being understood around the world."

Hundt is hopeful that the role of the United States in formulating international broadcasting policies might be one of mentor.

"We are the oldest agency of government with the duty of creating a rule of law for broadcast, satellite, cable, telephone and wireless. Therefore, we've had the opportu- . nity to make more mistakes than anyone else on a global basis-and we've made more than our share. So I think it's reasonable for us to explain those mistakes so that they don't have to be repeated. And these are mistakes of policy-where we guessed wrong about a technology or failed to understand the way markets would work, or thought we were promoting one particular social purpose and ended up getting an opposite result.

There is no reason for these mistakes to be repeated. So I think that there's a certain value to our confessions."

0

MANAGEMENT'S

KEY TO SUCCESS

"Enthusiasm is at the bottom ofall progress. With it, there is accomplishment; without it, there are only alibis."

uring my years in sales and management for a large pharmaceutical firm, I was fortunate to have some autonomy as marketing vice president for a sales and marketing division. This allowed me to practice a concept that was somewhat new to the top brass of the parent company. Namely, humor.

Lighteni ng up meetings with a joke or two had never been a part of this excellent company's management philosophy. In fact, it was viewed as a sign of weakness, and I was criticized for doing it, but I found that humor made a world of difference in the attitudes of those who worked with me.

Too many companies still rely on fear rather than more productive means to motivate their employees. A recent study bears out my belief that humor improves corporate efficiency. When researchers monitored the effect of humor on 322 employees of a Canadian financial institution, they found that the managers who used humor the most had the highest levels of employee performance.

Humor is the kinder, gentler approach, and it's undoubtedly better than humiliation for improving people's attitudes.

Changing attitudes, by the way, is the primary function of management. A sales manager's main responsibility is not to do all the selling himself, which would hardly

D

be possible, but to create a climate within the group so that each individual can be the best that he or she can be.

Someone once said that before learning can take place in a classroom, the students must view the professor as part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The same is true for managers. If the group wants the sales manager to fail, they wililiterally destroy their own careers to assure that he meets with little success. On the other hand, if they feel their manager is part of the solution, they will overachieve.

I have seen sales districts blossom overnight by changing only one person, the manager.

Accentuate the Positive Humor is one tool that can change attitudes. At the very least it can make a manager appear more human. Another method I recommend is that managers take a positive approach. For most new managers, the virtue of aggressiveness has more to do with their promotion than any other single factor. And ironically, this can be a handicap as they begin their management career. New managers are always eager to jump right in and start demonstrating to their group how to be successful. They are often surprised when I tell them that for the first few weeks they shou ld do little except

observe and listen. When they do start making suggestions, they should emphasize the positive, rather than simply point out mistakes.

I use this example: If a policeman were to follow me as I drive from the office to my home, even though I knew he was there, I would probably do things that he would consider traffic violations. His attitude toward me would not be very good. Why? Because he is only looking for what I do wrong. You all know the facial expression when he pulls you over-that "Aha-I'vegot-you" look. I've never yet been pulled over to be told what a great driver I am. The policeman's job requires him to focus on the negative. Effective managers, on the other hand, should begin by focusing on what people are doing right. When you are' looking for what is right, your mindset is completely different. If you concentrate on the positives, the negatives always fall away. You don't really have to spend much time dwelling on them because they become obvious.

Three Tiers of Performance I have found there are three tiers of people in every sales organization, and this may be true in other organizations as well.

The top performers represent about 20 percent of the total; the marginal perform-

ers represent another 15 to 20 percent, and the rest are in the middle. A manager should spend most of his time with the middle group, boosting enthusiasm and relating ideas and techniques learned from his top achievers. The two greatest motivators I have found are: getting those under you promoted (nothing makes a manager look better) and eliminating bad performers. A manager should investigate the problems of the lowest performing group and do what he can to help.

Sometimes low performance is the result of personal problems, but often those people just aren't as capable as others. My heart goes out to them more than anybody else, and I believe they should be humanely encouraged into other areas where they have a better chance of succeeding.

As for the top performers, I never needed to speak to them about increasing sales, but I had a technique for getting them to perform even better, which I admit I learned at the racetrack. What stimulates the top thoroughbreds is nothing more than the sound of thundering hoofbeats coming from the back to challenge them. When they hear this, the adrenaline starts flowing and they quickly distance themselves from the

sounds of the oncoming pack. Top performers love a challenge, and when someone from the middle group tries to catch them, they will do even better.

Stimulus and Response But managers cannot simply lump workers into specific groups. They must gain knowledge of each individual as itrelates to accomplishing the task at hand. When it comes to changing attitudes, not all people respond to the same stimuli. Managers must understand that everyone is different and has different talents, skills, interests, needs and wants.

Individuals can benefit from this, too.

Successful people make the most of those differences by building on their own special strengths.

Lou Holtz, the noted football coach at Notre Dame University tells many stories about his star players. In every case, they learned to excel not by measuring how well they performed in comparison to other members of the team, but by how well they performed in terms of their personal capa-' bilities. The army recruiting slogan, "Be all that you can be," is an example of this way ofthinking. Lou Holtz once said that he first

"We're looking for an agg ressive, tenacious salesperson, like, for instance, the one who sold you that suit. "

recognized one player's tremendous athletic ability when he saw him playing tennis-by himself! Not everyone can move like that player, but I am sure that you or I can do things that he could not do.

I learned the most important lesson about attitude from my father, a lifelong farmer who had little formal education.

Dad was pleased when my older brother went to college to study agriculture. 'But my brother had not been in school long before he violated the cardinal rule of education. Every time he came home, he would try to tell Dad how to farm better. He began urging Dad to attend local farm meetings put on by county agents. Dad made a few appearances at these meetings but never became a regular, and that frustrated my brother greatly. One day he finally came out and asked Dad why he didn't attend meetings, which he knew would help him.

I've never forgotten Dad's reply: "I don't go because I am not farming as well as I know how right now." In other words, "I'm not doi ng as well now as I can do."

Dad wasn't criticizing education. He was convinced that his own attitude or desire to do better could greatly improve his productivity, irrespective of additional education.

I have been observing people at work for more than 30 years, and I have yet to meet the person, including myself, who couldn't perform the job better if he simply had the desire. The major factors to increased performance are attitude, desire and beliefthat you can do it.

Roger Bannister refused to acknowledge that the four-minute mile was impossible.

In 1954 he set a new record of 3:59.4 by breaking through a self-limiting attitude that was held by many runners at that time. .

Some years back, our parent company transferred its largest pharmaceutical product to our marketing division to make way for a new antibiotic that they would be promoting exclusively. Selling the old drug would be our di vision's responsibility. This was not entirely good news, because the sales of the old drug were expected to decline over the rest of the life of the product.

It was a real challenge and an opportunity.

Not only did the sales not decline, they actually increased each year until the patent expired, at which time it was still the com-

pany's largest-selling product. This was a perfect example of what a motivated sales force can accomplish.

Three Sales Essentials What makes the difference between a good sales force and an outstanding one? In my experience, three things. First, outstanding sales representatives must see themselves as important persons. Selling is a tough job that requires a lot of self-confidence. Second, they must view their job as important. Third, they must feel good about their company and its products and most especially about their manager, who for most of them is the company. They must perceive that the company is solidly behind them and supports them in every way. If so, they will radiate what I choose to call "infectious enthusiasm." This makes people want to do business with them, and they will be seen as being different from most of their competitors.

Most of all, enthusiasm for the job, the product, the company or the mission makes the decisive difference. Henry Ford said, "You can do anything if you have enthusiasm.

It is the yeast that makes your hope rise to the stars. It is the sparkle in your eye, the wing in your gait, the grip in your hand, the irresistible surge of your will, and the energy to execute ideas. Enthusiasm is at the bottom of all progress. With it, there is accomplishment; without it, there are only ali bis."

Enjoy the Trip There is one other point that merits pondering. Often we take ourselves too seriously. We get so engrossed in our jobs that our energy is consumed, leaving little time for anyone or anything else. The Bible says it does not profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul. There is no comfort in achieving career success and losing one's family and other things one deems truly important. As my boss used to say, "Take time to smell the roses."

Life is a journey, not a destination. It would be terrible to arrive at the final goal without enjoying the trip. I firmly believe that you can't do anything very well for very long unless you are having at least a little fun along the way.

D

people like Martin Luther King or the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least in the later part of the century; the people who set up historically black colleges, people who thought the thing to do was join the mainstream and integrate. And there was another stream of thought-people who thought African Americans would never be treated fairly in America, and who wanted to escape its clutches. Those are the people who ran away during the slave revolts, who wanted to go back to Liberia, sort of a black nationalist kind of thinking. Some call it separatist. And the Nation of Islam springs out of this second stream. This black nationalist stream thought of self-sufficiency as a goal, and did not want to be dependent on white largesse, or America's welfare system.

TheNation oflslam was started in the 1930s by a man who disappeared after a while. The movement was taken over by Elijah Muhammad, whose most famous disciple was Malcolm X. Malcolm X's lieutenant when he was minister of a mosque in Boston and a mosque in New York was Louis Farrakhan.

Louis Farrakhan was originally from Boston. He's of West Indian descent. He was once a calypso singer. His name was "Calypso Louie," in fact. He grew up very much in a West Indian immigrant community in Boston, went to an episcopal church that had a West Indian congregation, and somewhere along the line got attracted to Malcolm X and ElijahMuhammad.

He's a very complex figure and gets reduced quite often because people know him in his later phase. He is a brilliant speaker with flights of rhetoric that go beyond the pale, but he often is popular with African Americans who are not faring well and who don't have a lot of hope. He speaks for their frustrations.

Classical Muslim scholars would say the Nation oflslam is not really Islam, with its making of racial distinctions, and Elijah Muhammad saying he was a prophet of God. In some ways it is a political group. It appeals to dispossessed African Americans who are in prison or on drugs, gives them a sense of self-esteem and discipline, makes them more functional and productive human beings than they would have been withoutthat.

Could you comment on the social and political significance of the Million Man March in October 1995?

I think there were several things that made it a very powerful symbol. On one level the Million Man March had power, because this was African American men offering their own image as dignified, as respectful, as orderly people.

The second level of the symbolism of it was political. African American men, thousands of them, faced America's Capitol where the United States Congress meets and was beginning to meet under a new Republican majority, which in some ways professed it wants to undermine black access to the mainstream by reducing or eliminating affirmative action. So in a sense it was African American males standing up to this new challenge. And they did it peacefully.

D

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Postscript: Gone Beats T

he late Iiterary inventor and poetJ ack Kerouac coined a phrase that named irrevocab~y a significant stream of 20th-century American literature. The Beat school was spontaneously generated in late 1940s New York by the chemistry of three wordsmith revolutionaries: Kerouac, poet Allen Ginsberg and writer William S. Burroughs.

In recent months both Ginsberg and Burroughs followed Kerouac-who died in 1969-on the indefinable path to the Beyond. Ginsberg, aged 70, died April 4 of liver cancer after a relatively painless, seven-day denouement during which he wrote poetry and said good-byes. He died at home with friends and family around him. Burroughs, whose self-destructive lifestyle was legendary, defied the odds by surviving until the venerable age of 83. He died of a heart attack on August 2. Both men pursued their innovations, which often strayed into visual arts and music, to the last.

Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac formed the core of the Beat generation writers, some of whom were immortalized in Kerouac's novels. Ginsberg's poem "Howl" became a rallying point for rebels of the awkward postwar period. Burroughs gained fame with his book Naked Lunch, which was, in part, a collaboration with Ginsberg and Kerouac. Spiritual precursors of the Flower Children of the 1960s, the Beats lived on the edge, daring to explore the heights' and depths of consciousness in their lives and in their works, defying social norms. They provoked controversies and court cases. They were iconoclasts who in the end, ironically, became icons themselves.

Allen Ginsberg had special ties with India. He lived in India for a year, during 1962 and 1963. His book Indian Journals was a product of that sojourn. An early interest in Eastern philosophy stayed with him, and during the last decades of his life he was a practicing Buddhist, in the Tibetan tradition.

Buddhism influenced his later poetry. He cofounded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He taught English at Brooklyn College, remained active on the lecture circuit for both literary and social causes, and was the recipient of numerous awards.

During the Beat era of the 1950s "gone" was a slang synonym for "the ultimate." Two thousand years earlierthe word also figured in an important Buddhist teaching, the Prajnaparamita Sutra. Ginsberg made his own use of it notlong before his death:

gone gone away yes it's gone gone gone it's all gone away won't be back today gone gone gone just like yesterday gone gone gone isn't any mo re gone to the other shore gone gone gone it wasn't here to stay yes it's gone gone gone From "Gone, Gone, Gone," Allen Ginsberg, November 1996

vve can be proud of thefact that for a long series of centuries beset with vicissitudes of stupendous proportions, crowded with things that are incongruous and facts that are irrelevant, India still keeps alive the inner principle of her own civilization against the o/clonicfury of contradictions and the gravitational pull of the dust.

-RABINDRANATH TAGORE, 1912

MARY ELLEN MARK, Street Acrobats, Bombay, 1981