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SPAN

Mustering Resources: Defense Cooperation

Publisher James Callahan

Gears Up

By Rahul Bedi

Editor-in-Chief Angela Aggeler

Fighting the Network War

By John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt

Editor Lea Terhune

Rootsof Rhythm

By Marlane A. Liddell

Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana

Now Hear This

By Alan Burdick

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar

Spoken Words

By Dipesh Satapathy

A Swoopy, Funky Fun House of Rock Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center Front cover: To illustrate our package "Worlds of Sound," SPAN graphics designers Suhas Nimbalkar and Hemant 8hatnagar collaborated on this collage that pays tribute to the many vehicles of sound. Looming behind the SPAN logo is the unusual blue blob architecture of the Experience Music Project, Seattle's progressive museum of Rock & Roll.

8.8. King, Hank Williams, Thomas Dorsey and Dolly Parton appear with other, more pedestrian sound-makers: the typewriter, the insect, the dolphin. And of course, there is Nipper, the ReA hound who eternally listens to "His Master's Voice."

This is Suhas' last issue as SPA Art Director. He retires at the end of May after a long, productive career as designer-ill-chief.

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query leners are accepted.

Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, ew Delhi 11000 I (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No parr of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

Visit SPAN on the Web at usembassy.state.gov/delhLhtml/wwwh19.html U.S. Embassy Homepage usembassy.state.gov/delhLhtml

By Richard Covington

Together, in Sickness and in Health

By Natalie Angier

Ten Diseases on the Way Out

By Robert Mackey

Here Comes the Neighborhood Building

Houses in Partnership

By A. Venkata Narayana

The Green Conundrum

By Vadim Liberman

The Ergonomic Rocking Choir

By Marshall Jon Fisher

Powering the Future

By Peter Fairley

Consular Focus The Visa Interview:

Be Prepared

By Ray Baca

Spotlight Enthusiast for a Key American

By Dan Rodricks

Treasure

A LETTER

T

FROM

houghts about security are foremost in the minds of many in South Asia right now. The same is true in the United States. This n,utual concern has stimulated renewed collaboration between U.S. and Indian military estabJishillents at a time when security is no longer a local issue but has global scope. In our lead article "Mustering Resources: Defense Cooperation Gears Up," veteran defense correspondent Rahul Bedi surveys the new developments in military cooperation between the United States and India. These include not only swapping expertise but sales of military hardware. The recent deal with Raytheon for sophisticated firefinder radar systems is indicative of things to come. "Fighting the Network War," by RAND Corporation analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, defines a strategy for targeting and dismantling the diffuse terrorist and criminal networks.

These shadowy organizations often employ the latest technology to evade old-style counterterrorist organizations. Arquilla and Ronfeldt coined the term "netwar" in 1996 and edited the 2001 book, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terr01; Crime, and Militanry, which presaged the use of the Internet to plan the September 11 attacks in the U.S. Our cover package "Worlds of Sound," strikes a lighter note, although music often does contribute to significant social and political change in the United States. Folk and work songs of immigrants from Europe and Africa created what has been christened "roots music." Reminiscences and photos in "Roots of Rhythm," by Marlane A. Liddell and others, profile some of the leading artists who incorporated traditional themes into their distinctive styles. In "Now Hear This," Alan Burdick delves into a quirky archive of sound, the Smithsonian Museum's Center for Folldife Programs and Cultural Studies. Where else can one listen to the metallic thunk of a time clock, or the tapping of old manual and electric typewriters, now nearly as extinct as dinosaurs in the modern office? Or how about Sputniks, steam engines or stomach growls? Some sounds are truly extinct, and this thought provides a springboard for philosophizing about the transitory. Voices are as transitory as the lives of the speakers, but the India Field Office of the Library of Congress is doing its bit to preserve audio records of important Indian cultural figures for posterity. Dipesh Satapathy reports on the project in "Spoken Words." The ribbon on this sonic package is ''A Swoopy, Funky Fun House of Rock," by Richard Covington, about a wacky museum in Seattle, Washington, the Experience Music Project (EMP).

THE

PUBLISHER

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen started it as a modest gallery to enshrine his relics of Jimi Hendrix and then it just grew. The blue, bulbous Frank Gehry-designed. building has been described as "open heart surgery" and worse, to which Allen retorts, "Rock & roll doesn't fit into a square box."

It's a jubilee year for the Ford Foundation in India. Nachammai Raman gives the background of a unique relationship in "The Ford Foundation: 50 Years in India." A younger, yet surprisingly dynamic development organization is Habitat for Humanity. It began small, 30 years ago, in the United States. Its goal was to put roofs over the heads of the homeless.

It has since spread to 78 countries, assisted by its most famous patron, former President Jimmy Carter.

In "Here Comes the Neighborhood," A. Venkata Narayana and Connie Howard tell the story on Habitat's gift of helping people help themselves.

Increasingly, the environment is a factor in the 21st century company's bottom line. "The Green Conundrum," by Vadim Liberman, explains how and why, in the long term, it is in businesses' best interest to go green. Environmental considerations are critical in power generation. "Powering the Future," by Peter Fairley; explores new and powerful energy sourcesmicroturbines and fuel cells-that could ease blackouts, lower fuel prices and bring electricity to the powerless. What's more, the microturbine minimizes toxic emissions and can utilize whatever fuel is availablelandfill methane or coal mine gases.

We know there is direct link between health and environment. "Together, in Sickness and in Health,"

by Natalie Angier, discusses the links between globetrotting in our environment and the transmission and treatment of diseases. Fortunately, some killer diseases are waning. Find out what those are in "Ten Diseases on the Way Out," by Robert Mackey. The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is on the front lines of the war against life-threatening diseases, and the CDC now has offices in India. Read about it on page 41.

If your health problem is bad back, the solution could be a rocking chair. "The ErgonomiC Rocking Chair," especially. Marshall Jon Fisher recounts some of the history and the latest leaps in rocking chair design.

We wish you a good read and a pleasant summer.

uslering Resounces Defense Cooperation Gears Up Prickly, even before several years of sanctions, the relationship between India and the U.S. has transformed over the past two years. And now, a new mutuality on military matters.

External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Indian Ambassador to the us.

Lalit Mansingh at the Pentagon.

ndo-U.S.defense and security relations are on the upswing after Washington's decision to lift its three-and-a-half-year-old sanctions against New Delhi. Coming days will see not only strategic cooperation, dialogue, periodic policy reviews and reciprocal visits by senior officials and service commanders, but also an inflow of American military hardware.

After a 40-year gap the U.S. administration has cleared the sale of around 20 military items to India and agreed to hold joint military maneuvers. U.S. Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill said burgeoning defense links with India were "gaining more altitude." India was also one of the first countries to offer all operational help to the United States within hours of the September II attack on New York and Washington, D.C., and earlier unilaterally supported the American Missile Defense program.

"There exists a conclusive acceleration in Indo-U.S. defense cooperation," Blackwill said, adding that arms sales were a part of the bilat-

I

eral agenda. Military relations between Delhi and Washington, he declared, were underpinned by "overlapping interests" and would include strengthening the overall strategic framework, intelligence sharing and joint cyber-terrorism cooperation.

Military officials in Delhi said President George W. Bush's administration had approved the sale of 40 General Electric (GE) F404-GEF2J3 engines and advanced avionics for India's indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), Raytheon ANlTPQ- 37 fire finding/weapon locating radar and submarine rescue facilities in addition to ground sensors and electronic fencing for installation along northern Kashmir's line of control that divides the state from Pakistan.

In mid-April India signed a $146 million sale agreement with the U.S. for eight firefinding/weapon locating radars. It is the first military deal after Washington imposed sanctions on New Delhi for its 1998 multiple nuclear

tests. Ajai Vikram Singh of the Ministry of Defence signed the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreement for the ANI TPQ37 radar system built by Thales Raytheon Systems Corporation of El Segundo, California.

Pentagon officials described the alms deal as "a historic move" that further signals improving relations between India and the U.S. "Security cooperation between the world's greatest democracy and the world's most populous democracy is natural," a Pentagon spokesman said.

And there is more in the pipeline. The GE engine powered the LCA's technology demonstrator that made its maiden flight in January 2001. Defense and Honeywell Avionics officials said Washington's decision to resume supplying the engine, after the sanctions were lifted, would "hasten" the aircraft's development that is over a decade behind schedule.

The Los Angeles-based Cooperative

India's indigenous Light Combat Aircraft will get engines ji-om America's General Electric.

Monitoring Center of Sandia Laboratories is providing India Unaccompanied Ground Sensors (UGS) and electronic fencing for the porous border in northern Kashmir.

This will augment a joint venture of UGS by Texas-based Eagle Telonics and Mumbai-based Nelco Ltd., a Tata Group company. A pilot project is being initiated later this year for border security mechanisms that are sensor-based and satellitelinked. India accuses Pakistan of infiltrating armed insurgents into Kashmir to fuel the 13-year-old insurgency that has claimed more than 35,000 lives. Pakistan denies the allegation.

Faced with a shrinking global market,

U.S. armament makers have for years eyed India favorably as a potential growth area, as it lumbers toward modernizing its aging and obsolete military machinely.

And, though India has declared that it will continue to acquire basic military hardware from Russia and Eastern Europe due to competitive prices and assured supplies, service users are looking "positively" at U.S. manufacturers for force multipliers like radar, laser-guided bombs and various electronic items. The all-party Standing Committee on Defence in its latest report tabled in the Parliament in March said that though Russia would remain a "reliable source" of military

Sailors ji-om the USS Cowpens march through the streets of Mumbai during the 200i international Fleet Review.

equipment the government should float global tenders to enable the "emergence of competitive prices."

Expanding bilateral strategic cooperation in military affairs led, last December, to the reactivation of the Indo-U.S. Defense Policy Group, the principal military coordination body to further negotiations between the Pentagon and India's Ministry of Defence, that was stalled after the sanctions. Around this period, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Delhi twice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once.

The acceptance by both countries of the General Security of Military Infor-

mati on Agreement, that helps protect shared information, also paved the way for the exchange of defense hardware, joint production of weapon systems and sharing of military information. This agreement was signed during Defence Minister George Fernandes's visit to Washington on January 17 this year.

Subsequently, senior U.S. defense and security officers including the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers, U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Dennis Blair, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary (Policy) in the U.S. Department of Defense, visited Delhi for extended discussions.

Islamic terrorist actIvItIes and devise ways to crack down on their funding.

Details on a bilateral offensive against cyber-terrorism, that featured prominently during Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to Washington last ovember were also worked out.

A U.S. military team led by Major General Bruce Scott, head of the Army Security Assistance Command, resumed talks in February on arms sales to New Delhi and his team members opened negotiations on the sale of the Raytheon weapon locating radar. General Scott allayed Indian fears about the probability of another embargo as the international situation had radically changed after the September 11 suicide attacks on the United

The guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens ploughs through the Indian Ocean on its way to the International Fleet Review in Mumbai. The USS Cowpens also made a delivelY of relief supplies for Gujarat after the devastating earthquake last yeQ/~ The Australian ship HMAS Darwin can be seen in the background.

In the flurry of high level visits the Joint Working Group on Counter- Ten'orism led by Indian National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra and Francis X. Taylor, the State Depmiment's coordinator for counter-terrorism, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robeti S. Mueller also began a series of consultations in January. The Group that includes diplomats, intelligence and security officials discussed a "road map" to pool information, jointly investigate

States. "One can't predict the future j LiStas no one predicted the September 11 attacks.

However, the world has changed since then," General Scott declared.

General Scott said that recent high level visits to India by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Myers were indicative of the importance Washington is according to rebuilding military ties with India. General Scott also made a presentation on February 22 to the newly formed Integrated Defense

Staff on foreign military sales.

Earlier, General Myers said a solid military partnership is impOliant for India and the U.S. to achieve their common goal of defeating terrorism. "The U.S. sees its relations with India as central to maintaining long-term stability in Asia and in fighting tenwism. The transformation of our military relationship is essential to achieving these goals," General Myers said.

At its meeting in March in Delhi the Indo-U.S. Joint Technical Group explored opportunities for joint research, development and production of military systems.

The Technical Group's task is to identify the technology India needs, inform the U.S. Congress of the entities and determine from where they might be sourced.

Thereafter, senior Indian defense officials will attend the forthcoming Security Cooperation Group meeting in Washington to discuss the purchase of weapon systems and platforms besides the ANrrPQ-37s, export licensing procedures and cross-servicing agreements to enhance bilateral "military interoperability."

Meanwhile, an eight-member team, led by DIA chief Vice Admiral Wilson, visited Kashmir to assess the security situation there following the deployment of more than one million Indian and Pakistan soldiers along their 3,312-kilometer-long common border. The military build-up followed last December's suicide attack on Parliament for which Delhi blames Islamabad.

Vice Admiral Wilson offered India advice on establishing its tri-service DIA as part of overhauling its defense apparatus that is now headed by Lt. General K. Davar. India's DIA was formed following intelligence failures that led to the ll-week-Iong border war with Pakistan in Kashmir's mountainous Kargil region in 1999 in which 1,200 soldiers died.

In April Indian Army Chief General S. Padmanabhan visited the U.S., hosted by the Army Chief of Staff, where he toured bases, camps and posts of various military branches around the U.S. in order to observe and exchange ideas.

Alongside, the U.S. and India decided to resume joint military exercises following the meeting of the army and naval

The USS Cowpens surrounded by ships of other nations at anchorage in Mumbai harbor during the 2001 International Fleet Review.

executive steering groups (ESGs) in ew Delhi and Chennai in the week ending February 7. The Air Force ESG met later that month at Hawaii, headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command, to finalize schedules for joint exercises and training, for reciprocal visits to each other's facilities and to exchange operational procedures. A five-person delegation led by Lt. General Pankaj Joshi, chief of Integrated Defence Staff, will hold a roundtable discussion with the U.S. Joint Staff, including both Pacific Command and Central Command representatives.

"This institutional ized dialogue (with Central Command) is a sign of growing mutual confidence between the two sides," one of the members of the visiting delegation said.

General Myers said the two navies had worked out a three-year program of "substantive" exercises including anti-submarine warfare, maritime surveillance and integrated training in continuation of the previous Malabar series of naval maneuvers that stopped after sanctions. The two armies will also cooperate on high altitude and cold weather training apart from expert exchanges on disaster management initiatives, jungle warfare training, special operations and subject matter expert exchanges in areas such as improvised explosive devices used by terrorists.

Indian soldiers are soon to leave for Alaska for joint exercises with the U.S. army and to attend specialized mine clearing courses.

The U.S. has acknowledged the Indian

avy is a "stabilizing force" in the Indian Ocean region and wants a closer working relationship with it that includes arrangements to patrol the sea-lanes from the North Arabian Sea to the Malacca Straits off the Singapore coast. The U.S. welcomes Indian support in policing the piracy-ridden Malacca Straits through which more than 70 percent of Japan's oil supplies from the Middle East pass.

Defence Minister George Femandes said Indian naval interests stretched from the Arabian Sea to the South China Sea and that Japan and Vietnam were emerging as Delhi's strategic pmtners in countering piracy at sea. India's Coast Guard rescued Alondra Rainbow, a Japanese merchant ship hijacked by pirates off the Indonesian coast in December 1999 after a chase lasting over 24 hours. "The navy is likely to gain the most from closer military relations with Washington," a defense official said, declining to be named.

Consequently, the U.S. is also exploring the possibility of India acquiring Sea Hawk helicopters to replace the aging GKN Westland Mk 452 Sea King fleet, P-3C multi-mission maritime reconnaissance aircraft and Harpoon anti-ship missiles, military sources said. The U.S. has also doubled to $1 million its funding for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) and will annually train 125 Indian military officers at its various defense institutions and colleges. Fifty million dollars are earmarked for Foreign Military Assistance (FMA).

Although Washington and ew Delhi were on opposite sides during the Cold War-India supported Vietnam and did not condemn the Soviet occupation of A fghanistan in 1979-and did not share a formal militalY relationship, defense ties between the two have blossomed since late 2000. The September 11 attacks gave greater impetus for focused cooperation.

"The entire geopolitical matrix of the region has changed after the attacks on the U.S.," a security official said adding that the implications of growing defense relations with Washington would be "far reaching."

After independence in 1947, India, allied as it was with the Soviet Union, did not offer the U.S. any serious strategic advantage while Pakistan's congruence to the Middle East did, leading to closer and sustained links with Islamabad. These were fmther cemented during the decadelong U.S.-backed effort to relieve the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. There was renewed U.S. interest, albeit limited, in India during the 1962 Sino-Indian war, .but relations during the Cold War years were strained, bordering on hostile.

The break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s triggered in Washington a renewed strategic curiosity toward India, leading to the Kickleighter proposals for greater strategic cooperation between Washington and Delhi. Named after Lt. General Claude Kickleighter, then head of the U.S. Army (Pacific), the proposals aimed at gradually strengthening military ties by the end of the decade. The visit by India's Chief of Army Staff General S.F. Rodrigues to Washington and the Pacific Command headquarters at Honolulu hastened the formation of the single service executive steering groups.

During the Gulf War India allowed the U.S. use of one of its air bases, a move that was widely criticized by almost all political parties and the military. But following the first Indo-U.S. Army Steering Committee meeting in early 1992, senior Indian army officers visited America as observers for specialized exercises. This was followed by a series of reciprocal visits by senior commanders from both (Continued on page 58)

Fi the JOHN ARQUILLA and DAVID RONFELDT

Conventional military power stands little chance against a band of nimble, interconnected terrorists. Here's a five-point plan to tear apart the terrornetwork.

K

now your enemy. It's the oldest military axiom in the world. As the United States takes action against the perpetrators of the September II attacks, this advice has never been more apt. The first step in defeating the type of terror invoked by Osama bin Laden's AI Qaida is figuring out how the organization operates.

Think of Al Qaida as a coalition of dispersed network nodes-linked, as PCs are, to one another and to databases of information. The network uses the Internet for real-time dissemination of instructions to wage its paliicular brand of asymmetrical warfare-favoring an attack on a soft civilian target like an airliner over a direct assault on U.S. forces in the field. Battling such a foe is tantamount to taking on a hybrid peer-to-peer network, in which a central source triggers the actions that are carried out by individual nodes. The good news is that the U.S. already knows a few things about such networks; structurally, AI Qaida is similar to Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, which also feature small, nimble, and dispersed units capable of penetrating, disrupting, eluding, and evading.

The bad news: The U.S. military is woefully unprepared to

fight a war against such an enemy. Transnational terrorists have shown it's possible to swarm together swiftly, on cue, then pulse to the attack simultaneously. Simply dropping bombs on Afghanistan will do little against this kind of a decentralized foe.

To win, this network must be isolated and ripped apart, node by node. The best hope is to redesign U.S. intelligence systems to anticipate how this new enemy thinks. The U.S. must build its own network-a quicker, more diverse, populous, and powerful organization that includes military and nonmilitary organizations around the world-in order to wage a full-on netwar.

The term netwar may evoke visions of 25th-century technologies deployed from the far reaches of space. But netwar is not techwar; it's far less sexy and more sweaty.

Al Qaida's power comes in its organization. Beyond access to the Net, the network has little in the way of technology-almost no military tech, and its members don't even use cell phones for fear of being tracked. As a result, defeating Al Qaida has less to do with technology and more to do with military doctrine. To win a netwar, the U.S. has to rethink some of its fundamental national security principles.

Be Smart About Intelligence

T

he recrafting of military systems to succeed in a protracted war on terrorism starts with intelligence. The U.S. system of central intelligence needs to evolve into a decentralized, transnational network that communicates in real time. Just as the swift movement of information has redefined business-stripping guesswork out of the supply chain, for example-it can alter the outcome in a netwar. All-channel data flow reduces the need for an explicit chain of command.

It's not that the military has failed to emulate business practices; it's just been disinclined to try. Unlike businesses, intelligence agencies measure bureaucratic power by the information they control. Such an approach can be fatally flawed.

This proved true in August, when a man suspected of being a member of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) was apprehended by U.S. authorities on illegal immigration charges in Minnesota.

He came to the FBI's attention when a wary flight instructor let them know the man wanted to use a 747 flight simulator to learn how to turn-not takeoff or land-a plane. During the September attacks, he was in his jail cell. With a bit of networking, the French, who closely follow terrorist movements in their former colony, might have informed U.S. officials that he was an extremely dangerous GIA member-warranting vigorous interrogation. The lesson: Sharing knowledge with partners enhances its value. This must become the norm.

Another way to boost the quality and quantity of intelligence is to cultivate more of an open source model-by including nongovernmental organizations, like Amnesty International, in the

network. This will make it possible to draw on the knowledge of activist groups already engaged in waging social netwars around the world. Much of the intelligence we need is openly available-it's just a matter of looking in the right places.

Adding NGOs to a sensory network will also help develop loyalty to a cause. The Al Qaida network draws its strength from the tight religious and kinship bonds among its members. To be effective, the United States' counternetwork will need to have its own binding, democracy-driven value system.

Manage the Memes

T

o win a netwar, the U.S. must control the battle of the story.

For stat1ers, that means the U.S. and its allies must agree on what story they're selling. Should America's response to the terrorism be phrased in terms of a war? Or should it be addressed through a law enforcement paradigm-with increased security in the streets? In the days after the attacks, American allies may well have preferred the latter. But a surge in U.S. nationalist sentiment made clear which way the American people wanted to go. President Bush called the terrorist attacks an "act of war"-against not only America but "the civilized world."

It was an effective rallying cry and a strong show of leadership-and Bush quickly won the support of queasy allies. But there's danger in allowing the netwar to devolve into a battle of civilizations or faiths. The attacks have intensified a broadbased clash ofrhetoric between Western liberal ideas about the spread of free markets, free peoples, and open societies, and Muslim convictions about the exploitative, invasive, demean-

ing nature of Western incursions into the Islamic world. But the war against terror must not be seen as one of Western values against Islam.

Instead, the story should focus on what Jeremy Rifkin refers to as a time war-in this case between an emerging global civilization of the 21st century and a xenophobic religious fanaticism of the 14th century (or earlier). Osama bin Laden and his coholis are tribal, medieval, absolutist, and messianic. The best way to expose them as such is to create a self-propagating meme-a winning idea or, in business parlance, a bit of viral marketing-that reveals them for what they truly are.

Here, the U.S. and its allies could use some help. Ideally, such a me me would be spread by respected Islamic imams who would repudiate the notion that the Koran sanctions terrorism. This is hardly far-fetched, as even Taliban imams have ruled that bin Laden has no authority to issue fatwas. The quicker this meme replicates-by way of the Net and other media-the more likely members of the Al Qaida network will be rejected by the majority of the Muslim world for which they purport to be fighting.

Learn to Swarm

T

he Al Qaida network recognizes the effectiveness of swmming. It exploits the nonlinear nature of the battle space and sees the value of attacking from multiple directions with dispersed units. The more geographically diverse the targets, the more unpredictable and effective the terrorist network. Witness Al Qaida attacks on targets in Arabia, Africa, and the U.S. during the past five years. In September, widely dispersed operatives converged on four separate targets simultaneously. They likely had the capability to strike at even more sites, and almost certainly are holding some units in reserve.

The United States military doctrine, on the other hand, is based on mass-and-maneuver concepts. The Pentagon must establish a new plan based on small-unit swarming. The U.S. should learn to strike the enemy from many directions, in different places, all at once. This will keep terrorists on the run.

To make it work, the counternetwork needs special-force maneuvers, not industrial age methods suited for fighting in Europe's Fulda Gap or in the Persian Gulf. Updated battlefield intelligence practices and internetted battlefield sensors could aid in the coordination of the attacks-allowing commandos to relay information in real time without scrubbing it through the National Ground Intelligence Center or other spy shops. This isn't about war at standoffrange.lt's about using information to get small strike teams in the enemy's face.

Rethink Technology

I

every n war the U.S. has waged, advanced technology has generally served as a big advantage. In World War II, the first computers-used in a project code-named Magic--cracked Japanese encrypted communications and helped win the battle

for the Pacific. More recently, in Kosovo, electronic warfare devices spoofed Serb radar, allowing the U.S. to wage an 11week air campaign while losing only one plane.

In a netwar, military technology is not such an obvious advantage. The U.S. possesses an array of sophisticated systems, like the Global Command and Control System and the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System. Al Qaida, on the other hand, has relatively few. But against dispersed, networked terrorists, the Pentagon's high-tech spy equipment is of limited value. Satellites may be able to look down on specific buildings-or tents-but they can't reveal who's in them. Same with smart bombs, which can be guided to a target-with no guarantee that anyone will be inside. This was exactly the case with the failed U.S. missile strike against bin Laden at an Al Qaida camp in Afghanistan three years ago.

Instead of spending roughly $30 billion a year on such technology, the U.S. military should create a range of lower-cost, Web-based intelligence tools to take on the 60-country terror network. Al Qaida operatives communicate over the Internet by using low-tech word-substitution codes rather than sophisticated encryption. They should be tracked, perhaps with more powerful versions of a marketer's cookies. Such devices could even be planted as "taggants" at sites frequented by terrorists, or as lures to attract them to "honey pots." This would also lessen reliance on the FBI Carnivore snoop system and other initiatives that undermine civil liberties.

Attack the Core

O

vercoming a widely dispersed, multihub network with no center seems nearly impossible. But AI Qaida has a center.

The removal of bin Laden means that the network could crumble. And therein lies hope for the West.

In some ways, AI Qaida is to terrorism as Napster is to filesharing. True, declawing Napster did little to put an end to the swapping of MP3 files; smaller, even more decentralized P2P networks have popped up in its place. Taking out bin Laden could splinter Al Qaida into similar networks-the Gnutellas of terror. But while Gnutella can effectively operate as a file-sharing mechanism, it wouldn't be nearly as effective as a terror network. Without bin Laden at its core, Al Qaida could turn out to be a network without a mobilization mechanism.

In the end, terrorism is much bigger than Osama bin Laden. A true win in this netwar means confronting a scourge that's bigger than even Al Qaida. It means battling anyone in the world who shares these terrorists' mind-set and modus operandi. It means, eventually, taking on every node in the entire terrorist network.

D About the Authors: John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt are analysts at RAND Corporation, a policy and decision-making think tank based in Santa Monica, California. They co-authored Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (RAND, 2001).

of The origins of American music are the songs of European immigrants and the dynamic rhythms of African slaves. Be it blues or jazz, country, rock 'n' roll, or zydeco, "roots music" is there. Here are some of the stars who reflect that heritage.

ithout roots music, there would be no American music or modern popular culture today. No jazz, no rhythm & blues, no pop music, no rock 'n' roll, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, no MTV, no rap," writes singer Bonnie Raitt in American Roots Music, published recently by Harry N. Abrams.

Roots music is the old work and folk songs brought by European immigrants and African slaves to the United States. It includes the sounds of our musical heritage-the blues, gospel, country, bluegrass, Cajun, zydeco and Tejano-that influence today's popular music, especially rock 'n' roll.

The legacy of roots music has filled our lives with styles as diverse as the twang of Bob Dylan and the smooth harmonies of Motown, from venerable crooner Tony Bennett to crossover pop artist k.d. lang, with whom Bennett toured in 2000. A century ago, folk music was an oral tradition passed from one generation to the next. After World War I, Americans migrating to cities took their music with them, and radio stations broadcast it to wider audiences. Musicians listened to one another, and gradu-

W

International blues icon B.B. King:S first publicity photo was taken in 1949, when he was 24, at the Beale Street Studio in Memphis. By 1951, "Three O'Clock Blues," his first hit, had made him a stm:

m ally their sounds inteliwined and changed to create new music.

"People-like young Elvis Presley-began listening to gospel and black music on Sunday morning radio programs, while at the same time young future rock ' n' roll and soul singers in Detroit, St. Louis, and Philadelphia were tuning into the Grand Ole Opry broadcast," writes Raitt, who was just 14 years old when she heard a record called Blues at Newport '63. "It changed my life. I got it as a gift, and as a young guitar player I learned every single note on the record and played them until my fingers bled."

American Roots (a documentary film and book) resulted from a unique collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Experience Music Project (EMP) [see story on page 30]. American Roots tells the stories of the songwriters, musicians and entrepreneurs who kept the music changing.

"Musical strains cross boundaries and influence one another," writes Robert Santelli, one of the book's editors and deputy director ofEMP. "One aliist borrows from another, who borrows from yet another. Songs are reshaped with altered lyrics and fresh solos. Reinventions are plentiful, even unstoppable." He adds that the term "American roots music" was created in the 1980s to replace "folk music" and is used "to describe any American music form that had influenced pop music and was a 'root' of rock 'n' roll, or as a simple substitute for folk." In the book, icons Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald are conspicuous in their absence. But jazz as a genre was intentionally omitted, says Santelli. American Roots Music is "not an exhaustive version of this country's roots music history." Instead, it presents "overviews of the major roots music genres, featuring artists whose work is emblematic of their times and whose stories are meaningful and historically significant." It is, finally, the story of that uniquely American gumbo of sounds that welcomes all to the table.

0 About the Author: Marlane A. Liddell is on the editorial board o/the Smithsonian magazine.

Ma Rainey and Thomas Dorsey (on Piano) Rainey sang the blues with raw passion, using an uncut, almost primitive vocal delivety that impacted a young Bessie Smith and other up-and-coming female blues artists in the early 1920s.

-Robert Santelli, Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame archivist At the heart ofgospel's evolution in the Depression era was Thomas Dorsey, a former blues piano player. According to gospel authority Bishop Kenneth Moales, the young Dorsey "would steal away with other friends and relatives and go to the juke joints when Ma Rainey would come through Atlanta. " -Claudia Perry, author and critic

Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim and Big Joe Williams Willie Dixon, who often played bass behind Muddy Waters, was a big, round man with a warm heart and a comforting smile. He also had the best ears in the blues business-the quintessential behind-the-scenes Chicago bluesman. "The blues is actually some kind of documentmy of the past and the present and something to give people inspiration for the jilture, " said Willie Dixon. "Blues has wisdom. It:S always been there. " -Robert Santelli

Bessie Smith Bessie Smith was accorded the title "Empress of the Blues, " not just because she, more than any other female blues singer of the 1920s, personified the blues but also because her remarkably expressive vocal delively influenced nearly evelY other singer who followedfrom Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin-with her uncanny ability to wrap her blues essence around nearly every note she sang.

Woody Guthrie Woody Guthrie was a folksinger in the classic sense of having a large repertory of traditional songs learned from his family and community. But he also became a prototype of a "folksinger" in the emerging popular sense. A compulsive writer with a keen eye and a shmp wit, he began composing songs on contempormy issues, drawing on classic folk tunes. By the time of his death at age 55 from Huntington's chorea in 1967. Guthrie had become a legendOly model for singer/songwriters of the next generationnotably Bob Dylan, but also his own son, Arlo Guthrie. America has inherited .Fom Guthrie the image offolksinger as troubadour of the people, composing songs in a roots style that helps grassroots people reflect on their lives and lots.

-Alan Jabboul; former directol; American Folklife Center

Hank Williams Williams's vocal style and the contending impulses of sin and guilt that lent an appealing tension to his music grew out of the churches and honky-tonks of south Alabama. He rode to the top of the country charts in the early 1950s with a haunting voice and a body of songs, both joyous and anguished, that reached across geographic, class, and stylistic categories. Williams wrote songs that did much to shatter the tenuous walls that had separated countly and pop music.

-Bill C. Malone, country music radio host, Wisconsin

The Weavers From left: Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman (at their 1979 reunion re-creating their 1950 publicity photo). Thefolk music revival, as it turns out, was merely gathering its energies before bursting onto the public stage again in the late 1950s. The Weavers 'version of Leadbelly s "Goodnight Irene" found its way into the pop market, keeping alive a sense of the revival as a movement.

-Alan Jabbour Pete Seeger was a hero and mentor, not just in terms of what he did with his music, but the way in which he incorporated his own values and dreams, and his activism, into a musical setting.

-Peter Yarrow, singer and musician (Peter, Paul and Mary)

Bill Monroe Bill Monroe crafted a sound like no one else's in American music. With his high-lonesome singing, dynamic mandolin style, relentless energy, and talent for finding gifted musicians, he introduced and popularized a style that enabled acoustic string-band music to survive and prosper in a music business increasingly given over to electronic sounds. Between 1945 and 1948, he and others created a supercharged style of music that folklorist Alan Lomax described as ''folk music with overdrive ... We now call that sound, and its many derivatives, bluegrass.

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From left: Jeny Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.

A telling moment for the Sun Records legend came on December 4, 1956, when a Perkins recording session, with Lewis sitting in on piano, was interrupted by a surprise visit from Presley. Cash, too, was hanging around. Elvis sat down at the piano, and in short order they were into a community sing. They essentially toured their roots in songs that reflected their mutual immersion in the spiritual life and were reflective of their rural upbringing and values.

1t was a short course in the roots of rock & roll.

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Bob Dylan The most important artist to come out of the New York coffeehouse scene was Bob Dylan, who shaped his performance style around Woody Guthrie s model, and composed new songs based on folk genres such as ballads and talking blues. Dylan s songs both tapped the folk reservoir and exhibited a creative knackfor capturing the issues and spiritual rhythms of the times. Many, like "Blow in ' in the Wind, " were picked up by Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as by other singers, and became their era s anthems. Today, they sound like musical posters of the 1960s.

-Alan

Jabbour

Janis Joplin In the folk revival of the early 1960s, with a group of artists whose bible was Hany Smith s Anthology of Folk Music (an eclectic record collection so popular among musicians it achieved near cult status), a new generation of artists was bringing folk music to mainstream prominence. In San Francisco, the Grateful Dead was led by guitarist Jerry Garcia, who had cut his musical teeth on the Anthology. Also in the Bay Area, beginning in 1966, Janis Joplin, with her band Big Brother and the Holding Company, added rock & roll backbone to 'a repertoire jilled with traditional and contemporary blues.

Dolly Parton A select array of women singers exhibited their links to southern working-class culture while also breaking new ground for their sisters. Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton sometimes seemed willing to play the role of simple mountain girls, but their masterful performances, rapport with their audiences, and shrewd promotional acumen gave them an edge that most men could only enry. In such songs as Lynn s "The Pill" and Parton s "To Daddy, " the pair voiced a plea for women s freedom. Best of all, they emboldened young women to pursue their own independent paths in show business, suggesting in the subtext of their lives and songs: "We made it, and so can you. "

Hear This Listening back on a century of sound

he archives of Smithsonian Folkways Records occupy an inner chamber of the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies, an office tower two blocks from the Washington Mall. Exit the elevator, follow a carpeted, auricular corridor to a glass door with a keypunch lock, continue through and down a hall littered with the carcasses of obsolete computers, turn left at a bronze bust of Woody Guthrie, enter a small room. One wall is all steel shelves lined with vinyl LPs, thousands of them. Against another wall stand several tiers of audio equipment: amps, mixers, recorders, black boxes of uncertain purpose woven together by thick audio cables. The floor in between hosts three desks, countless stacks of papers and books, cardboard boxes overflowing with blank compact discs-everything spilling into everything else, the whole place exhibiting the frailty and barely contained order of an overly active human brain.

That brain belonged most recently to

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Cable cars, calliopes, frog calls, Jupiter rockets, surgical banter, steam locomotives, punch clocks: the work songs of the whole carbon-based enterprise

Moses Asch, legendary music producer, ethnographer, social activist, and allaround audio visionary. In 1948, after several years working in radio, Asch started the Folkways Records label. Its modest mandate: to assemble a complete acoustic document of, well, everything.

Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, whom Asch was the first to record, became signatures for the label, along with other classic folksingers like Pete Seeger and Ella Jenkins. Eventually the Folkways catalog came to embrace more than 2,000 titles and an ever widening definition of what Asch called "people's music," everything from black gospel, mountain ballads, and sea chanteys to Native American ritual songs, Caribbean dances, and avant-garde poetry. Asked at one point what exactly the term "Folkways" encompassed, Asch replied: "Anything that is sound."

Just before his death in 1986, Asch agreed to donate his label to the Smithsonian, on one condition: every recording, no matter how obscure, must

remain in print and commercially available. "Do you delete the letter Q from the alphabet," he once said, "just because you don't use it as much as the others?"

To Asch, Folkways was no mere repository: it was a bastion against aural oblivion. Times would change, distinctive sounds would disappear. And the more commonplace the sounds were-the more indicative of their moment-the more likely they would disappear without notice or acknowledgment. Accordingly, the catalog came to include several dozen recordings of various sounds so mundane that few people but Asch would think to preserve them, sounds that I found myself absorbing with fascination for several days not long ago.

The 20th century was built for the ear.

Sound was first recorded in 1877 on Thomas Alva Edison's phonograph. The subsequent age of industry brought new sounds, newer ways of capturing them, and an increasing urgency to do so.

Forget the images, forget the abstract paintings and stuttering newsreels, forget all the visual jetsam that millennial enthusiasts recently forced us to revisit. To appreciate the 20th century, it seemed to me, I should leave my eyes behind, plug in the headphones, and listen-to cable cars, calliopes, frog calls, Jupiter rockets, surgical banter, steam locomotives, punch clocks: the work songs of the whole carbon-based enterprise.

Historically, we are creatures of vision, slaves of the iris. The elements of our selves--our loves and labors, arts and letters, our past and its presentation-are assembled largely through our eyes. "The keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight," Cicero wrote. "Perceptions received by the ears or by reflexion can be most easily retained if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes."

The memory palace that Asch built, and that continues to expand and advance into the 21st century, is founded on the opposing premise: that what matters most is what is heard, not what is seen; that sonic memories are at once more primal than visual ones (a dog recognizes his master's voice, after all, not the photograph of him)

and more evanescent.

"Sounds are like smells," Anthony Seeger, curator and director of the Smithsonian Folkways label since 1988, told me in his office on my first afternoon there. "They're tremendously evocative, but they tend to get left out of discussions, of histories-of museums." He waved in the general direction of the Mall. "Walk around the Smithsonian: you don't hear anything."

Before joining Smithsonian Folkways, Seeger ran the anthropological archives at Indiana University, whose collection of field recordings is surpassed only by that owned by the Library of Congress.

Seeger's mission, as he saw it, was to integrate the disparate media-audio, video-into a unified whole, what Seeger and his colleagues refen'ed to semi-seriously as the Archive of Total Human Experience.

Central to his scheme was a contraption called the Aroma Disk. Marketed briefly in the early 1980s, the Aroma Disk was a tabletop odor factory. Pop a disk-"Italian Bistro," say-into the toasterlike device, heat it up, and, voila, your living room would be transformed into a Florentine bistro. That was the idea, anyway. The problem came when Seeger tried to play back the archived odors.

"I played one, and this greasy aroma stalied coming out," he said. "The smells were just oils that would coat everything else in the archive."

Sound, thankfully, is easier to preserve and safer to revisit. Sound is energy: anything that moves, however slightly, emits it. A wing beats, a leaf flutters, the surrounding molecules of air or water reverberate with waves that reach the ear as a surf of noise. Ifit can be seen, ifit exists, it can be heard-you just have to listen closely. With the proper set of amplifiers, for instance, you could tune in to the atoms ofEaIih's outermost atmosphere as they crackle and vibrate in the heat of the sun. If so inspired, you might then record an entire album of it, like Smithsonian Folkways title C-5013, produced in 1955: Ionosphere: Synchronized Ionosphere Observations. Or, following the example of audio engineers at the Naval Research

Laboratory in 1952, you might drop a microphone into the ocean and record Sounds of the Sea, Volume One. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I heard. I listened with eyes closed, immersed. Rockfish, toadfish, sea robin, croaker-their eerie cries rose from the depths: rasps and bleats, roars and clicks, an aural corona as teeming and alien as the upper atmosphere.

In 1960, Albro T. Gaul, a former entomologist for the New York City Department of Parks, recorded for Folkways an entire album of the sounds of insects. Here is the desperate buzz of a fly caught on flypaper, here the horrible rasp of a wasp scraping meat from a fish bone. Here is the thrum of a flying hornet: more rapid as Gaul attaches tiny weights to the insect, slower as it depletes its 11minute store of glucose. For comparison's sake, Gaul recorded various insects in flight: mosquito, bumblebee, May beetle, warble fly, dragonfly-a panoply of roars and hums that brought to mind a Folkways recording from 1956, Sounds of the Annual International Sports Car Grand Prix of Watkins Glen, New York.

mithsonian Folkways is both an archive and an active record label, which makes Seeger both a curator and a record manager. It is a peculiar combination, for which Seeger seems specially bred: he is a member of the extended Seeger clan of folk musicians (a nephew of Pete, Mike, and Peggy), and a respected scholar of ethnomusicology. Seeger's main task is to contain Folkways within manageable boundaries. He doesn't acquire many new recordings, despite the enticing offers that regularly cross his desk; his budget is limited and his staff is overworked.

Whenever possible, he acquires by donation, and in bulk. "I collect record labels," he said. In the past 10 years, Folkways has absorbed the catalogs of five smaller independent companies, including DyerBennet Records (15 albums by 1960s folk musician Richard Dyer-Bennet) and Paredon Records, publisher of such leftist

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classics as Che Guevara Speaks and I Hate the Capitalist System. With the absorption of the Cook Laboratories and Sounds of Our Times labels, both founded in the 1950s by audio engineer Emory Cook, Smithsonian Folkways added German drinking songs and belly-dancing music to its catalog, as well as valuable documents of pure sound like Voices of the Sky: Propellers and Jets and Music of the Carousel. One of the most requested titles in the catalog was released with some fanfare four years ago: Sounds of North American Frogs, compiled for Folkways in 1958 from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History.

The task of physically maintaining the Folkways collection falls to Jeff Place, the principal archivist. He rolled in around noon-affable, with a paunch, a thick beard, and a head of dark hair. He wore a green T-shirt with the logo ORPHEUS RECORDS. His answering machine held a message from a filmmaker. Does Folkways have any songs about chickens? Place called back: Yes, 338. He hung up, then looked over at me from behind his computer.

"To me, the weirdest cut is on the Sounds of Medicine record."

He stood up from his desk and went to the shelf, riffled through the LPs, and extracted the title in question, Sounds of Medicine: Operation Body Sounds, recorded in 1955. The jacket cover was orange and black and was illustrated with a close-up photograph of.. .something: stalactites, it looked like, but biological and internal, the insides of a lung, maybe, or a clogged artery.

"Check out band lIon this one."

There were 12 tracks in all; number 11 was entitled "Sounds of the Bowels-A Normal Hungry Man Smoking a Cigarette Before Dinner." Who could say no?

I slipped the album from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, and set the needle on the proper track. Presently the voice of a physician intoned that now we would be listening through a stethoscope placed against a man's belly. "The sounds that are heard here are the normal contraction and movement of the intestines."

There followed an unsettling array of noises: groans, rumbles, gastrotectonic burblings, like thunder on a distant plain or a volcano erupting underwater. At one point I swore I heard the cry of whales.

I skimmed the other tracks: "A Woman with Valve Disease of the Heart Before Surgical Operation."

"A Man with Inflammation of the Heart due to Active Rheumatic Fever"-metronomic tales of urgency and arrhythmia. It seemed gratuitous, and slightly obscene, until I read the liner notes and grasped the purpose: the sounds were diagnostic. Normally blood passes through the heart smoothly and in silence. Diseased valves, however, cause the blood to churn and eddy with a murmur audible to an attuned physician.

An obstructed bowel gurgles at an abnormally high pitch; a bowel with peritonitis suffers in ominous silence. According to Hippocrates, an infection of the pleural space surrounding the lung produces the sound of "bubbling vinegar." I was hearing code.

Inspired, I returned to an album that had captivated me all morning: Sounds of the Office, recorded in 1964 in the Warren, Pennsylvania, offices of Eltronics Inc., by one Michael Siegel, an audio engineer with an ear for pending extinction. What did they produce at Eltronics Inc.? Who knows. What matters is how they sounded-and that those sounds, once prototypical, have largely ceased to exist. The scratch of pencil on paper, a metallic thunk: "Time clock," the liner notes read. A clacking and a rapid-fire mechanical chugging: "Calculator." A deep, thrumming hum: "Thermofax," whatever that device was. The sounds unfurled into images, took tangible shape, evoked their visible source: the creak of cabinets made unmistakably of wood, the clink that announces-yesterday, today, forever-the meeting of coffee mug and spoon. At one moment in my reverielost in a flutter of paper, a rhythmic clacking of keys, the tiny-bell ping of an approaching margin-the spell broke and I opened my eyes to the cluttered modem office around me. My ears flooded with banalities: computer keyboards tapping in

hushed monotone, telephones buzzing like locusts. Quickly I tried to shut them out, clamp my eyes tight, turn the present off. Quiet, I wanted to shout. I'm listening to a typewrita

oW, with the coded message from Normal Hungry Man's internal organs echoing in my head, I tumed again to the "Manual typewriter" track on Siegel's recording. I listened through again, then again, and again, each time more closely and with growing excitement. The keys made different sounds, I noticed: some were higher or lower in tone than others.

Judging from the length of the subsequent pauses, I could distinguish punctuationcommas, periods-from normal letters.

There was an overall, discernible rhythm to the clacking, a cadence entirely absent from the robotic "Old electric typewriter" track later on the album. With the punctuation to guide me, I could make out sentence length. I could, I was almost certain, decipher the words being typed.

They were the same words Siegel had spoken to the typist earlier on the "Dictation and transcription" track: "On behalf of Folkways Records, I want to express my sincere thanks for the kind cooperation you gave me in recording the sounds of the office ...."

The machines were speaking to me.

What else to hear next but Voices of the Satellites!, recorded in 1958 by Haverford College professor T.A. Benham. By that year, five artificial satellites were orbiting Earth. Benham was one of thousands of shortwave buffs avidly tracking the satellites' radio signals, analyzing the changing pitch and tone for indications of the crafts' speed and whereabouts, as one might judge the speed and distance of a moving car from its Doppler effect.

Sputnik, launched years before I was born, was audible again four decades after its death: a tinny whine that reminded me only of all the Saturday afternoon spaceship movies that formed my understanding of the 1950s. And here, speaking again, was Sputnik 2, launched in

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November 1957 with the first live payload, a young German shepherd named Laika. The Soviets had attached a microphone over Laika's heart. Benham had caught its signal too, and now it beat out at me: blip blip blip, a faint radio pulse, the distant hammering of a bygone tool.

The ancient Romans envisioned the human mind as a wax tablet; memory was the inscription engraved in it by physical experience. What they envisioned was the phonograph.

The first incarnation of Edison's phonograph in fact was a rotating cylinder of tinfoil. (Wax soon replaced foil as the more sensitive recording medium.)

You spoke into a mouthpiece, your words vibrated a small metal diaphragm attached to a tiny chisel or needle, which traced a series of indentations-more or less deep depending on the amplitude of the sound-into the foil. Run it backward and your voice spoke back-thereby enabling, Edison boasted, "the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive, and their reproduction at will."

Sound without sight: for the first time ever, the voice was disembodied. Edison toured with his invention, conjuring the voices of absent orators and public figures. Audiences flocked as if to a seance.

Scientific American glowed: "Speech has become, as it were, immortal."

And it was recorded speech, not music, that most concerned Edison in the early years of the phonograph. He believed fervently in an afterlife and the possibility of communication between the living and the dead. A primary use for his invention, he wrote in 1878, would be "to preserve for future generations the voices as well as the words of our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Gladstones"-as well as "the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family." (Also high on the list: letter writing, dictation, and books for the blind.) Edison would etemalize the human voice, the word, the very soul. Alas, from the outset, mechanical memory proved only as trustworthy as the original gray matter. At five 0' clock on the afternoon of December 12, 1890, a small group gathered at Edison's

lab to mark the first anniversary of the death of Robert Browning. A white wax cylinder-the repository of Browning's voice, recorded only eight months before his death-was placed on the phonograph. The ensuing soliloquy would mark "the first time that Robert Browning's or any other voice has been heard from beyond the grave," as one audience member later recalled. And what did the dead have to say? In a cheery voice, Browning began reciting his work, but soon stumbled. "Speed echoed the ...! forget it! er."

A second voice on the cylinder prompted him to continue, and he did, briefly.

"Then the gate shut behind us, the lights sank to rest. . .I-I am exceedingly sorry that I can't remember my own verses."

By the late 1940s recorded sound had ceased to be a spooky novelty. It was an obsession, and a new medium, magnetic audiotape, was available to accommodate it. The first generation of audiophiles was born, amateur documentarians with portable recorders and a passion for ephemera. Seeking to capture "the audible expression of life around us," Tony Schwartz, a New York artist now in his seventies, carried his microphone everywhere, recording everything: the sounds of a printer's shop, interviews with bus drivers, cocktail parties, jump-rope rhymes, conversations at an all-male luncheonette. From hundreds of reels of tape, he compiled numerous albums for Moe Asch and Folkways, including New York 19, a collection of sounds overheard in his postal code, and 1, 2, 3 and a Zing Zing Zing, the songs and stoop games of the children in his neighborhood. It was the era of the ear. Television was still a novelty; the home stereo reigned supreme. Sounds abounded and drew passionate recorders and listeners. In a 1956 interview with The Saturday Evening Post, record-store mogul Sam Goody described his more avid customers. "It's pitiful, sometimes, if they've got it bad.

Their eyes get glazed, they go white, their hands tremble .... As I watch them I often feel that a dope peddler is a gentleman compared with the man who sells records."

The mania for high fidelity grew so pronounced that a clinical psychiatrist at Sainte Anne's Hospital, in Quebec, felt compelled to address it. "Many recording companies have started to cater to the vast demand for esoteric sounds from an eager public," wrote Dr. H. Angus Bowes. His article, "Psychopathology of the Hi-Fi Addict," appeared in a 1957 issue of Diseases of the Nervous System; it described the doctor's efforts to treat more than a dozen audio junkies. "Let me emphasize that there is nothing abnormal in the enjoyment of these novel noises.

The audiophile may play them once or twice and then will usually shelve them for the diversion of visitors. The addict may play them ad nauseam. One I know continually plays a recording of the waves breaking on the sea shore ... .l tried to help in his emotional growth by interesting him in Debussy's 'La Mer' but he found its shimmering crescendos too frightening." Among the favorite sounds of the hi-fi addict, adds Dr. Bowes, are those produced by "that aggressive phallic symbol, the train."

I confess that for some time I had looked forward to getting my hands on Smithsonian Folkways' titles F-6152 through F-6156: Sounds of Steam Locomotives, volumes 1 to 5. When I did, 1 devoted an entire afternoon to them. In 1952, Vinton Wight, a railroad aficionado from Colorado, realized with alarm that the age of steam engines was nearing an end. So he began recording it, ultimately editing his tapes into four albums-Steam, Steel and Action; Make-up of a Train; Colorado Narrow

Gauge; The Stack Music Spectacularthat he convinced Asch to print. Fifty years later the sounds filled my headphones.

Caressing my ears was the heavy exhalation of Union Pacific #9052, a locomotive with a 4-12-2 wheel arrangement, as it eases into the station in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Now came #801, a high-stepping 4-8-4, hissing out of Omaha with passenger train #7. Every engine expressed a personality as individual as the men who drove and tended it. "If you have never heard an 0-6o switcher start out to do its evening chores," Vinton writes in the accompanying notes, "here is your chance." Volume 4, released in 1958, was contributed by a retired Bell Telephone employee who found the train sounds on a competing label "too limited in variety." The first track opens with his quavering voice: "These recordings were made by Harold S. Ludlow of Vermilion, Ohio, through which passes the main line of the ew York Central between New York and Chicago.

Every steam locomotive of the New York Central system has now been junked."

I was unprepared for the emotional weight of these recordings. These were

ghosts like no others: lonely, haunting, they spoke of dark, rainy platforms, of aimless couplings and decouplings, of the vastness of plains and passengers hutiling toward unremembered ends. Proust describes rounding a bend in the road: he sees a stand of trees he's seen before, but whether he first saw them in a dream or in the distant real past, he can't say. "I watched the trees gradually recede, waving their despairing arms, seeming to say to me: 'What you fail to learn from me today, you wi II never know. If you allow us to drop back into the hollow of this road from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of yourself which we were bringing to you will vanish forever.'" But what ghosts were these train sounds to me? What memories were they evoking? I am too young for steam engines-barely old enough for manual typewriters, for that matter. Into whose past were these engines pulling me? I've heard steam locomotives before, of course, in films, on television. Was I resonating to a hand-me-down sound? And was that cinema sound even real? Often as not these days, a slammed door in Hollywood is not a door at all, merely the sound of a phone book dropped to the recording-room floor with a bang more convincing than the real thing. Perhaps I was not resonating to a true sound at all, merely to a simulacrum, to a studio sound jury-rigged from bastard noises.

Or perhaps, I'm thinking now, what vibrates in the listener is not some literal recollection of the sound's source but simply the memory of raptness. The most evocative sounds-field crickets, distant trains, the master's urgent voice-are sounds heard from afar, produced by things unseen; in the mind's eye they are an absence. What you recall instead is the listening. The message of the trees to Proust was not Remember us but rather: Remember that you noticed us. Remember how. To hear is to recall every cherished moment of attention, to experience again every act of hushed audition. What I heard at the Smithsonian was the passage of time: the heart-rending space between one tick and the next, between a

sound and its echo. I heard the eternal now, and in that moment I was ageless.

The golden age of sound never ended: it continues, occluded by the visual hegemony. Technology provides ever more sensitive methods of hearing, ever more accurate means of recording, and an ever changing suite of sounds to assimilate.

One scientist has recorded the hiss of snow on open water; another, the faint and eerie murmurings produced by the aurora borealis. A third has developed an equation to describe the sound of rain falling on the ocean's surface; with it, he can deduce the size of the raindrops, the amount of rainfall, and, ultimately, the progress of climate change. Marine biologists have discovered a compressed layer of seawater, deep down, that transmits the songs of whales for thousands of kilometers along its length, like a transoceanic Dixiecup telephone. (Navy submarines have employed it for decades.) With the same low-frequency microphones used to study earthquakes, scientists have found that elephants track the movements of other elephants dozens of kilometers away through delicate seismic sensors in their toenails. I once spent a day with an entomologist who has discovered an array of albino insects that live only in the tunnels carved out by the underground flow of lava. The insects, mere flecks of life, sing: not audibly to humans-the scientist could hear the insects only after he placed them in a balsa-wood sounding box-yet very clearly to one another.

They live exclusively on tree roots that hang, interwoven, throughout the cave.

Vibrating their bodies, the insects drum mating calls and territorial warnings through what amounts to a web of telegraphy. But the trees above are being crowded out, or cut down, or paved over, the scientist told me; the roots of song are disappearing.

More sounds born, more sounds passing, always faster than ever. I find it impossible now not to dwell on this: at my desk, in a meadow, on the bus. Siren, blue jay, Greyhound: which of these sounds wi II not exist next century, next year, next week?

"Sometimes we play the sounds of the typewriter to visiting schoolchildren," Seeger said to me at one point. "They don't know what it is."

hadtaken a break on my last afternoon in the archives. Seeger and I sat across the street, in the woodpaneled dining room in the former Smithsonian Library. Seeger is a child of sound. At age one he was carried in a basket by family members to sing Christmas carols at Lead Belly's apartment in Greenwich Village. At age six he met Woody Guthrie; he regularly accompanied Uncle Pete to the Newpoli Folk Festival. In sixth grade he bought a Folkways album of the music of India; in eighth grade it was African music; in ninth grade, Japanese. "In college I decided that there were so many Seegers making a living by performing music that I'd do something else," he said. "Something fun, of course, so I became an anthropologist who studies music. I was interested in the relationship between what people believe to be the structure of their universe-their cosmology-and the music that they make."

Seeger's academic specialty is a remote Amazonian tribe called the Suya. On the wall of his office is a photograph of him conducting fieldwork: a balding, unmistakably white man of middling girth, naked but for his undershOlis, he is painted and befeathered to resemble a hummingbird and is dancing in a line of native hummingbird-men all a head sholier than himself. The Suya, Seeger learned, spend almost as much time singing and dancing as they do hunting and gathering; aural and even olfactory cues are more central than visual ones to the Suya worldview. Seeger said: "You explain something to me, I say, 'I see.' A Suya says, 'I hear.' So we got along fine; we both understood the importance of sounds." The social hierarchy of the Suya, Seeger discovered, is organized around the expression of sound. For example, adolescent men are permitted to sing tribal songs only patiway through, and only in a high, tense voice; older men are

I

permitted the full song and a relaxed tone.

"How you sing signals who you are and your place in the community," Seeger said.

Sound is the medium ofSuya identity. One tribe member lamented to him: "When we stop singing, we will really be finished."

Seeger was poking his salad with a fork. "I like sounds," he said. "The Science of Sound series is as fascinating as anything else. What's changed a lot is recording technology. Some of those Science of Sound recordings were well conceived, but we could do better today with higher fidelity. Insects, for example: I'd love to do more. But there's very good portable video now, so some of what would have been sent to a record company is now sent to ational Geographic or some place like that. The real question is, what can sound tell us that other mediums can't?" Smithsonian Folkways hopes to tap into the National Air and Space Museum's collection of space noises: astronauts' voices, radio signals from gamma-ray bursters. At Cornell University, scientists are assembling an enormous archive of birdsongs and whale songs; some ofthose might find their way into the Smithsonian Folkways catalog.

"I hear new sounds all the time," Seeger said. "The sound here is an interesting sound." He cocked his ear to the restaurant babble. "Of course, it's associated with having eaten welL" The alarm on his wristwatch began beeping: time to return to the office and take a call from Paris. Seeger said, "I often like silence, or what passes for it."

In 1861 a French anatomist named Paul Broca discovered that a filament of cortex in the left frontal lobe ofthe brain is essential to human speech and memory. Thomas Edison read of the discovery and was fascinated with its implications. "Eighty-two remarkable operations upon the brain have definitely proven that the meat of our personality lies in that part of the brain known as the fold of Broca," he wrote. In Edison's mystical cosmology, the human soul consists ofa swarm of microscopic monads, or "life units": busy little homunculi that take up residence in the cerebral groove identified by Broca. "Everything we call memo-

ry goes on in a little strip not much more than a quarter of an inch long," Edison wrote. "This is where the little people live who keep our records for us."

The soul of the Smithsonian Folkways archive, it turned out, was not the room where I sat conjuring the sounds of the century from vinyl grooves. That was just the listening room, the read-only memory, open to visitors willing to make do with plastic copies. That room held a door to another room, the sanctum sanctorum where the original recordings are stored: wax discs, aluminum discs, discs made of glass, acetate reel-to-reel tapes, all stowed on movable shelves at a carefully controlled temperature and humidity. These are the master recordings, the records that Jeff Place keeps.

It is all he can do to keep them.

Recording technology is constantly evolving; each advance dooms the current format to obsolescence. Place pulled out an early album, a recording on an aluminum disc that can be played only with a cactus needle. "A metal needle on a metal disc: that doesn't sound too good."

The turntable I was stationed at was a marvel capable of playing a record at any speed-74 rpm, should you need such a thing-and correcting for those records whose speed and pitch change over the span of the disc.

What doesn't fade away decays. Wax discs are frangible: a lost flake is an irretrievable snippet of sonic memory. Place works with wrinkled reel-to-reels from the 1950s that can be played only with utmost care. Even the reel-to-reels from the 1970s are becoming sticky and unplayable. Place showed me his solution: a Farberware Convection Broil Oven that sits on the floor near his desk. "Put the tape in the oven for six hours and the stickiness goes away, at least temporarily." That's long enough for Place to copy it into the latest recording format, digital. Disc by disc, tape by tape, Place is transposing the contents of the archive into the irreducible chorus of ones and zeros. It is not a task undertaken lightly. Recorded memories weaken with repeated listening. With each listen, each run of the stylus, every rub of

the tape head, the original source is degraded slightly, reduced further into pure noise. To replay is to destroy.

What is the human ear to do? The more we come to rely on mechanical memory-the more we seek out, capture, squirrel away-the harder it is to keep up with the contents. How many ones and zeros are there ultimately room for? "Men are becoming so vastly ingenious in finding the means of magnifYing and embalming every little ripple of human energy, that we tremble for the consequences," the editors of The Spectator lamented in 1888, a decade after Edison unleashed the phonograph. "The earth will soon be made a museum of odds and ends of form and speech; and unless man suddenly takes a great leap into a moral greatness worthy of all this storing, we may have future generations drowned beneath the accumulated scraps of ancestral voices and expressions .... Shall we not come to regard it as a singular vil1ue when men obliterate voluntarily traces of themselves which, instead of being useful to posterity, would only serve the purpose of the dust in which useful things are so often smothered? Are we not discovering a great deal too many means of defeating the benefits conferred by oblivion?"

Seeger said: "There was a moment, when I was first invited to run the archives, when I asked myself, 'Why should there be any archives at all?

Sounds are evanescent, they run out-the waves run out.' I spent a few months thinking about it. But I was impressed by the number of people who came here to listen to old sounds so that they could carry them forward: Native Americans who'd say, 'We'd like to hear this song so we can perform it again.' Marx said that the past 'weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.' Just when they are about to transform themselves in an entirely new way, they look to the past and conjure up the ghosts of past eras. He was absolutely right. At momems of social transition, people are often trying to see the past in order to move forward.

By saying that these recordings should be available, it's because I think we have a

role in shaping the future."

And the sounds of typewriters, of propellers, of a coffee spoon clinking on a cup-what conceivable role might they have in shaping our future? What are they saying as they recede? What part of ourselves do they wish to bring us before it vanishes entirely?

Seeger thought for a moment, then smifed. "I have no idea."

Memories fade, or flake away, or are subsumed under the accumulating weight of new sensations and the relentless pressure to remember. Who knows where they go. Maybe they wait down there forever, primed to blossom again at the least prodding. Or maybe they just disappear, return to some molten state of neurochemistry, relinquish their wiring. That's how it works in the real world anyway.

Locomotives, typewriters, calliopes, punch clocks: they all end up in the scrap heap, to be chewed up and recycled by other machines built expressly for the task and with halos of noise all their own.

Naturally, Folkways preserved those sounds too.

ounds of the Junk Yard was recorded in 1964, the same year that Sounds of the Office was recorded, in the same Warren, Pennsylvania, by the same Michael Siegel. I took my seat, set the needle in the groove, and donned the headphones once more. A symphony of decomposition greeted me. The first minute and 16 seconds were dominated by a harsh, gurgling hiss: "acetylene torch, cutting apart an automobile engine," the liner notes said. There was a brief pause, then a rattling hWll and weighty clunks of metal falling against metal ("loading pickup truck by hand with 400 lb. bales of aluminum scrap"). Then another growling engine (a forklift) echoing in a warehouse, some banging (empty fiber drums), a discordant orchestra of clangs and thuds, scrapes and clatterings, threaded through by a faint buzz of human voices, all of it gaining speed and volume and reaching a momentary climax at minute 22: one voice decipherable now-"pull it

S

out! pull it out!"-then a deafening clatter as what sound like a thousand pots, pans, and Christmas ornaments (in fact, countless sheets of aluminum scrap) fall to a concrete floor.

At some point, attempting to match unfamiliar noises to the descriptions in the liner notes, I realized I was utterly lost. What 1 thought was Side I was actually Side 2: that paper baler was actually an alligator shear, the crunching of cartons in fact was a barrel being emptied of aluminum chips, the fiber drums were heavy pipes. And then, suddenly, I could hear it all: buzzing wasps, gurgling bowels, propellers, race cars, rockfish, thermofaxes, the singing ionosphere, and Laika's capsuled heart beating down through it.

In his waning days, Edison concocted a design, never realized, for the ultimate recording device, what he referred to as a spirit catcher. Held to the lips of a dying person, this supersensitive microphone would capture the sound of the human soul-that swarm of microscopic recordkeepers-as it departed the body. What did Edison expect to hear? Warbles, whispers, roars? A murmur of librarians?

Whatever it was, it swirled now in my headphones: the vital force, the xylem and phloem through the stem oflife. I felt giddy. I was beyond sound, beyond silence. I laughed out loud. Place glanced over at me like I was nuts.

I started over. I flipped the record to the correct side and found my proper place in the liner notes. Only then did I notice the notes themselves. Siegel's descriptions were terse and time-coded; the segments stood apari from one another in stanzas.

phone; last autumn he stepped down from the curatorship of Smithsonian Folkways to take an academic post at University of California at Los Angeles, where he has resumed his anthropological work with the Suya. (The new curator, Daniel Sheehy, is also an ethnomusicologist, and the former director of folk arts at the National Endowment for the Arts.) Seeger related the story of a Suya tribesman named toni. One day, after a long illness, toni woke to discover that he had lost his spirit. In a place like New York, a loss of one's spirit is an unenviable plight; among the Suya, however, it is a mark of distinction, for the loss enables the individual to commune with the spirits of the forest. Ntoni watched as animals removed their skins; he saw the trees wave their arms; he met the spirit of the armadillo and learned its song: "I am the armadillo, leaping, dancing, singing." The woods sang to him and to him alone. Ntoni listened closely to the songs, learned them, translated them, and repeated them to his community; he helped incorporate them into the tribe's ceremonial and social fabric. Ntoni became the primary source of new songs for the Suya, the only tribe member with an ear to the ground. Siegel, Seeger, Place, Edison, anyone with headphones or a functioning ear or a moment to be still and listen-they seek a similar knowledge.

26:52-30:46 burning out an old car.

26:55 windows crack out.

27:30 metal crackling.

27:54 fresh draft.

29:25 sizzles.

I've pinned these koans on my wall. I revisit them, turn them over like stones. I know now where sound goes when it dies. It comes back again, reborn: language.

0

I read them all, then read them again.

They were astonishing little documents: poems-onomatopoems.

It was as though I'd uncovered a map. Of what? To where?

Recently I spoke to Seeger on the

About the Author: Alan Burdick is a freelance science writer based in New York City.

He contributes to Harper's Magazine and the ew York Times Magazine. He won the American Association for Advancement of Science awardfor science journalism in 1995.

37:12-39:05 dump truck unloading sheet metal scrap.

37:12 lifting up dump carriage.

37:50 move truck to start sheets sliding out.

38:40 removing what is left by hand.

Copyright © 200 I by Scon Arthur Maesear. All rights reserved.

Originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists May/June 200 I.

Copyright © The New Yorker Collection 2000 John Caldwell from Cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

ON THE LIGH'IER SIDE

Copyright © 200 I by Jack Corben. All rights reserved.

Originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/August

2001.

he voice is a second signature."

This view of American publisherjournalist Robert Irvine Fitzhenry could easily characterize a groundbreaking project of the New Delhi office of the Library of Congress (LaC). To mark the LaC's bicentennial the New Delhi office initiated a project to preserve cultural heritage by recording the voices of those who have enriched and who continue to enrich the literature of India and other South Asian countries.

Similar projects have been undertaken earlier by the LaC in other countries. The Library's Hispanic division has been a pioneer in that field in Latin America, Spain and Portugal. LaC's Islamabad office has recorded voices of some literary figures in Pakistan. In the I980s, LaC had recorded the voices of four Indian authors~Ashok Vajpeyi, AX. Ramanujan, Uma Shankar Joshi and Gieve Patel. It was high time to expand the archive.

"We thought of it as something that was really worth doing, a fitting celebration of

T

The South Asia Literary Recordings Project of the Library of Congress

the Library's bicentennial," says Lygia M. Ballantyne, field director of New Delhi office. She says the current project is an enormous and complex task in a country like India which has more than two dozen languages and scores of dialects.

The project was kicked off at a glittering ceremony at Roosevelt House in April 2000 with active assistance from the U.S. Embassy's Public Affairs Section.

The primary objective of the project is to complement the rich, written paper collection that the Library has in Washington by archiving authors' voices. Ballantyne explains, "When we listen to an author reading from his own work, we have a different feel for the work as the author's interpretation and feelings come into play."

The recordings showcase various tones, styles, moods and characters. One can grasp the subtlities. In poetic verses, especially, one can experience one of the navarasas or the nine flavors of Indian literature~love, courage, loathing, anger,

Spoken lIVVrds

mirth, terror, pity, disgust and surprise.

How are the literary figures for voice recordings selected? The library consults the Sahitya Akademi, academics and literary critics and gathers suggestions from its own specialists in various languages. National awardees and prominent literary personalities are among those considered. "It is a selective sample of the best of the literature, that really gives a good picture of the whole country," says Ballantyne. The Library staff keeps track of literary figures visiting New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai-where the Public Affairs Section has excellent facilities for recording-so that they can be invited.

They are also invited for recording during their visits to book fairs or literary festivals, like the recent literature festival at New Delhi and Neemrana organized by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (lCCR), and Sahitya Akademi's annual meetings. Studio recordings are a must to ensure quality and a clear rendition of the author's Jines.

The authors' list, however, has gaps.

Some languages like Nepali, Konkani, Manipuri and Kashmiri are yet to be represented. "We plan to record as many of the languages as possible. The program is to be as comprehensive of the languages as possible but selective of whom we invite. As there are so many good writers, we have to be representative of different styles-poets, playwrights, novelists and

short story writers. We would like to have people from different cultural backgrounds," says Ballantyne.

Among the dialects, only Rajasthani has been included so far in the collection.

More will be added later.

Ballantyne admits that catching literary figures only in the four main cities of India is a handicap. "That's what we have been doing for the time being. There are some writers who do not travel much. We will see what we can do in the future," she says. In spite of funds limitations, the Library plans to add recordings every year to its repository; there is no fixed time period.

Apart from the Library's Archive of Recorded World Literature in Washington, D.C., the Library's policy now is to make available on the Internet many of its unique voice collections. The Indian voice collection is being digitized and will be placed on the Web. A prototype of the Web interface has been prepared by the LaC headquarters at Washington, D.C., and the job will soon be taken over by the New Delhi office. When the Web site is completed, netizens will be able to listen to either MP3 or Realaudio files on the Internet. The Library will not copyright the recordings. However, people cannot download the voice recordings from the Web site and use them for noncultural purposes without the consent of the authors who retain the copyright on their works. Copies of the recordings will

be deposited with the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi and each participant gets a copy of his or her own recording.

Seventy-nine voices have been recorded to date which include four from Bangladesh and six from Sri Lanka.

Noted Hindi writer Nirmal Verma was the first to record in New Delhi for the project on August 4, 2000, followed by Malayalam novelist M. Mukundan the same day. Malayalam poet K. Satchidanandan was the third.

Other voices recorded include Khushwant Singh, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Mulk Raj Anand and Arundhati Roy in English; Vairamuthu, Ashokamitran, Rajam Krishnan and Sivasankari in Tamil; Ram Karan Sharma, Rewa Prasad Dwivedi and Rama Kant Shukla in Sanskrit; Kaifi Azmi, Nida Fazli and Qurratulain Hyder in Urdu; Varsha Adalja in Gujarati; Sunil Gangopadhyay, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Mahasveta Devi and Bani Basu in Bengali; Gopal Chhotray, Pratibha Ray, Manoj Das, Kishori Charan Das and Ramakant Rath in Oriya; Indira Goswami in Assamese; Arjan Mirchandani 'Shad' and Popati R. Hiranandani in Sindhi; Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Krishna Sobti and Bhisham Sahni in Hindi; and Mangesh Padgaonkar, Gangadhar G. Gadgil and Laxman Maruti Gaikwad in Marathi. Library of Congress's New Delhi office Web site <www.1cwebloc.gov/acq/ovop/delhi.html> provides an updated list.

0

Text by RICHARD COV! GTON Photographs by STEVE GOTTLIEB

Seattle's new Experience Music Proj ect is a $100 million, technology-enhanced repository of American pop music where anyone can be a rock star

ere's my chance. 1 am sitting at a drum set, ready to play live at the "on stage" exhibit at Seattle's Experience Music Project. Through billowing smoke, the lights sweep the stage. The filmed audience roars in front of me. 1 glance left to the guitar player, right to the singer-we're on. The right pedal pounds the padded hammer into the bass drum and my foot follows. The tom-tom lights up and I try to slap it on the beat. "Wild thaang," wails the singer as she reads the lyrics off a TelePrompTer. The guitarist struggles to keep up with the frets as they, too, light up to indicate the melody. "You make everythang grooovy." Boom-boom, boom-boom. I hit the snare almost on time. We're moderately terrible, but thanks to the computer program automatically playing the instruments and voice track, we sound like rock stars. The crowd is on its feet, cheering on this ersatz three-part karaoke to heights of greatness and embarrassment.

Who knows?

Maybe we'll even get lucky and hit a note on time and on key. Only later do I realize we could have switched off the autopilot and winged it on our own. Now that would've made history. Wouldn't it?

"I want to give people a taste of what it's like to be onstage performing in a rock and roll band, even if it's only for a few minutes," says veteran guitarist Paul G. Allen, front man for the Seattle rock group The Grown Men. "The idea is you'll make music a bigger part of your life if you can make your own music."

Allen, better known as the cofounder of Microsoft and one of the world's richest men, and his sister Jody Allen Patton have created not so much a monument to rock and roll as a $100 million hands-on fun house and technology-enhanced repositOly of American pop music that may well point the way for the evolution of museums in the 21st centmy. What began as a modest gallery to pay tribute to native son Jimi Hendrix has mushroomed into a 13,000-square-meter museum celebrating and demystifYing musical creativity.

Designed by Frank Gehry, the nonprofit, privately financed Experience Music Project, EMP for short, that opened on June 23, 2000, on the grounds of Seattle Center, the site of the 1962 World's Fair and home to a sports stadium, opera house, theaters, children's center, amusement park and an abundance of music festivals. Gehry's wildly experimental building, shimmering in vivid gold, silver, red, purple and blue, colors inspired by guitar finishes, dominates the landscape.

Just inside the entrance a towering 12-meter kinetic sculpture made of 600 guitars, keyboards and drums welcomes visitors. Video kiosks equipped with remote-control knobs beckon everyone to pluck some of the automated instruments poking out from the sculpture.

From there visitors can bang on the psychedelic Jam-O-Drum-cumlight-show or watch videos ofBo Diddley vie with Little Richard for the title of godfather of rock and roll. After comparing the sound of the white Fender Stratocaster Jimi Hendrix played at the Woodstock festival in 1969 with Byrds guitarist Roger McGuinn's 12-string Rickenbacker, they can trace rock's family tree from its blues roots up Reflections fill the view up the "canyon" formed by wildly shaped exterior museum walls. It is the creation of architect Frank Gehry who made 100 models of the Experience Music Project building during the design process.

Copyright Originally

Š 2000 Richard Covington. appeared in Smithsonian, June 2000.

through hip-hop and punk via Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Eric Clapton. After playing "Wild Thing," onstage visitors can teach themselves a tune on keyboards, guitars and electronic drums, using computer tutorials, as bass shakers built into the floors literally vibrate the ground beneath their feet. They can remix the Eurythmics' anthemic song "Sweet Dreams" on a professional sound mixing board. There's a massive 20-by-12-meter LED screen showing videos; an intimate theater for master classes; a nightclub to showcase local and touring bands. There's even a wild ride called Artist's lOUll1ey, where the audience is strapped in for a motion-platfOlm ride that drops them into the middle of a filmed block party. The ride then whooshes them into a concert audience getting down with funkmeister George Clinton and his band. "It's like something you might see in a theme park, but instead of a spaceship shooting over craters of lava, we're giving people a peak experience in a cultural area," explains Allen.

To enhance the museum experience, in a technological breakthrough driven by Allen's determination to plug visitors into as much information as possible, museumgoers are given a magic wand, a handheld multimedia device equipped with a small screen, headphones and four-megabyte computer hard drive so each person can call up an unprecedented amount of music and text on vittually every object on display. The objects can be bookmarked like a Web browser, and visitors can follow up their tour by mining the motherlode of musical history, audio and video clips in the museum's Electric Library, drawing on one of the largest computer servers ever built. Even after they've left the museum, visitors can access their bookmarked material at the EMP Web site, an exhaustive resource in itself (www.emplive.com).

Beneath the quaintly nostalgic, Jetsons-era Space Needle, Experience Music Project is about as quiet an architectural statement as Hendrix's ear-piercing feedback on "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Essentially a massive envelope of curving concrete blown over wire mesh and wavy steel ribs, the museum is divided into five separate sections in various stages of meltdown, each covered by an ornamental roof shell, or "skin," as Gehry calls it. Two of the sections are covered in aluminum-one painted a fire-engine red and the other a robin's egg blue. The remaining sections are stainless steel-one finished in mirrored purple, one in brushed silver and another in bead-blasted gold. Composed of some 2 I ,000 eccentrically shaped shingles, the iridescent metal canopy buckles, bends and flows like a dozen overlapping waterfalls. There is little question that EMP is Gehry's most far-out concoction to date.

"I want people to get high without substances when they look at it," Gehry explains in his Santa Monica, California, offices.

The 7 I -year-old Gehry, the white-haired, cigar-chomping iconoclast renowned for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, prefers Haydn and Coltrane but immersed himself in Hendrix's wailing guitar licks to help him translate rock and roll into architecture.

He sought inspiration by chopping up used guitars into pieces and studying them with his guitar-playing colleagues, Craig Webb and Jim Glymph. The eclectic Gehry also gleaned color from Bosch and Vermeer paintings, jumbled roughness from Rauschenberg collages and ornate detailing from the column capitals of Istanbul's Hagia Sophia cathedral.

"Look at the folds in these robes," he instructs me as we pore over

a book of angels from Dijon by 14th-century Flemish sculptor Claus Sluter. "See any similarities?" he asks rhetorically, impishly raising his eyebrows and bringing the photographs alongside the undulating tucks and creases of the EMP model.

In early conversations with Gehry, Allen said he wanted a building that was "swoopy." "Swoopy?" the architect playfully replied.

"That's not an architectural term I'm familiar with. Why don't you come to my office and point out a project of mine that you think is swoopy?" he suggested.

"When Allen got here, he picked out this," says Gehry, as he slides out of his chair and walks over to a silvery, undulating model of a conference room for a German bank under construction in Berlin.

"That's the best thing I've ever done in my life. It was like, man, I could just keep going in the same direction."

"There were a couple of instances where lody and I reined Frank in a bit," Allen recalls, "but there were more cases where we said, 'Make it more rounded or swoopy or outrageous. We're talking about guitars with feedback here, Frank!'"

Using CATIA, a sophisticated system of three-dimensional computer modeling initially conceived for French Mirage jet fighters, GehJy's team was able to ensure that the building's radical curves and soaring ribs would stay up. Since there is hardly a right angle in the building, each steel rib had to be individually tooled to connect at odd angles with other SUpp0l1S. Without CATIA modeling, says Gehry, the idiosyncratically "swoopy" design would have been impossible.

In Seattle, reaction to the building has been mixed. The city council and the mayor were dumbfounded when Gehry's finished model was unveiled but were ultimately won over by the design commission that had earlier approved the plans. Irate local critics lambasted it as "the blob," "open-hem1 surgery" and worse. Both Allen and Gehry play down the virulent attacks. "There are always people who would prefer to have a square box," says Allen, "but rock and roll doesn't fit into a square box." reaking out of boxes has defined Allen's career from the start. For the teenage Allen, hearing Hendrix was as much a revelation as being introduced to his first computer. From the moment he first heard "Are You Experienced?" he decided to shift from classical to electric guitar. He may not have slept with his guitar as Hendrix did, but he became almost as passionate about practicing as he was about toying with the newfangled computer terminal at Seattle's Lakeside High School with his buddy Bill Gates.

In 1991, when Allen saw an auction catalog advertising the sale of the high-crowned black felt hat Hendrix wore on his "Smash Hits" album cover, he jumped at the chance. Buying Hendrix's hat, along with record albums and other at1ifacts, was a way to revisit his own musical awakening.

"We opened the box and went, like, wow!" recalls EMP executive director Patton in her Bellevue offices. "The power of the al1ifacts was astounding. Paul said if I get a charge out ofthem, surely other people will, too." From the initial impulse to share the Hendrix aura, the project rocketed off into an ambitious exploration of musical creativity using rock and roll as the launching pad.

"Paul's motivation is to provide a place for people to discover the

things that excite them," says Patton. Allen and Patton want museumgael's to emerge from EMP with the awareness that making their own music is well within reach. All along, Allen has relied heavily on advice from rock innovators Dave Stewart, Robbie Robertson, Peter Gabriel and others who have made breaking down the barriers between perfOtmers and listeners a crucial part of their careers.

From the beginning, Allen and Patton decided to focus on the music rather than the lifestyles of the musicians. "People were concerned that the museum might be seen as glorifying sex, drugs and rock and roll," observes Patton. "But we're not condoning any lifestyle choices; we're dealing with the musicians and their contribution to the American music scene."

At the same time, EMP curators did not want to censor or sanitize the sexual, political and social rebellion that has defmed and energized rock fi'om its earliest roots in blues and protest music to nihilistic punk and grunge. "You can't talk about race music and not mention racial discrimination," says multimedia director Jon Kelizer. "You can't talk about 1960s rock and not bring up drug use."

While the museum has devoted a gallery to Hendrix and maintains an exhaustive archive of Hendrix memorabilia, Allen's evergrowing collection of musical instruments and audio equipment, records, original lyric manuscripts, costumes, posters and album cover art ranges across the history of rock. Among the 1,200 pieces selected from the 80,000-object collection for the opening are the world's first electric bass, Hank Williams' Jumbo Gibson guitar, an Elvis Presley 1950s black leather jacket, a harmonica Bob Dylan played in the 1960s folk revival, the audio mixing board from Hendrix's Electric Lady studio, Eric Clapton's "Brownie" guitar from the "Layla" album, hip-hop artist Afrika Bambaataa's satin cape-and of course the Hendrix hat that started it all.

Apal1 from auction houses, the curators scoured flea markets, attics and garages around the country for key pieces. One of KUli Cobain's guitars was spotted in a local pawnshop. The "Wheels of Steel," hip-hop deejay Grandmaster Flash's iconic turntables, tumed up in a closet in his mother's house on Long Island.

In addition to landmark rock "alii facts," the museum is chock-full of multimedia, video and film, some gleaned from archives, but much of it specially conm1issioned for the exhibitions. From hip-hop concel1s staged in Harlem to interviews with Les Paul, Chet Atkins and other pioneers, and recording sessions with veteran studio players like bassist Carol Kaye and guitarist Brent Mason, the EMP staff is painstakingly documenting rock's past and present.

In the emerging EMP building, Kertzer and Ann Farrington, exhibits director, give me a preview. We begin in the Guitar Gallery, where visitors switch on their handheld audio guides to hear sounds from an 1834 MaIiin acoustic, a 1936 Audiovox electric bass, a 2000 Parker Fly, and 52 other guitars and basses, as well as narrative about the instruments. The displays include photographs of the guitars' inventors, text explaining how the various designs originated, and touch screens providing access to still more information about guitar manufacture and construction.

"The theme of this exhibit is the search for volume," Kertzer explains, "how the rise in popularity of big band jazz, for instance, forced inventors to come up with louder guitars."

In the nearby Hendrix Gallery, the rocker's white Woodstock gui-

tar is flanked by a shard from the guitar he smashed and burned at a concert in Monterey, a kimono he wore for a performance in NewpOti, California, and a video screen with blues musician John Hammond explaining how the guitarist got his big break in London.

Visitors also listen to selections from Hendrix's own blues collection, recordings that influenced his musical evolution. A multimedia touch-screen presentation of Hendrix's handwritten lyrics leaps ahead three decades, with music by P.J. Harvey and Metallica and others, who, in turn, drew inspiration from Hendrix to etch their own riffs on the blues period.

"We're trying to gather the gestalt of audio, film and aI1ifacts in one place," Kertzer explains. "We want people to become more educated listeners, so they can see and hear the connections among musicians that they might not otherwise be aware of, to understand that there would not have been a Prince if there hadn't been a Hendrix or a Hendrix ifthere hadn't been a Muddy Waters."

Chronologically, the next exhibit, the Milestones GallelY, traces the origins of rock and roll from its roots in gospel, rhythm and blues, and Western rockabilly, Farrington explains. As dancers jitterbug on a movie screen and a burbling Wurlitzer jukebox spins out 45-rpm records from the 1940s and 1950s, visitors amble through a room of curving bright-red walls covered with albums and photographs of everyone from Fats Domino to Chuck Berry. Bo Didley's square scarlet-red guitar vies for attention with blues legend Big Jay Mc eely's screaming tenor sax. With his audacious syncopations, Mc eely injected a blistering brashness into emerging rock. On a video screen, Mc eely blushes as he explains how watching the luminescent "costume" of a hoochie-koochie dancer glitter under black lights inspired him to paint his signature "honking" sax in eye-catching fluorescent colors.

Farrington, who designed exhibits for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the ewseum, a Rosslyn, Virginia, museum devoted to journalism, finds the most daunting aspect of the project is capturing music in a museum setting. "Our primary subject matter is not objects, it's sound," says Farrington. "Maximizing the visitors' ability to focus on the music, and at the same time, have them move through such a richly embellished textual and visual environment has been enormously challenging."

Pal1 of that challenge has been sound bleed from one exhibit space to another and from headphones within each exhibit. It doesn't help that the rough concrete ceiling and exposed steel ribs-intended to make an aesthetic statement about the urban grittiness of rock and roll-are exceptionally effective reflectors of sound. Because the unusual curved shapes of the steel and concrete cause so much reverberation, acoustic engineers had to devise new techniques to deaden the sound in some places and encapsulate it in others.

Following the rock origins gallelY, the next exhibit spotlights Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Eric Clapton at decisive junctures in their careers, then-skips ahead to punk and hip-hop highlighted by a flashy graffiti-covered subway car suspended from the ceiling. To those who object that huge chunks of rock history are being ignored, Ketizer responds: "We're not trying to be comprehensive; we're focusing on the turning points."

Downstairs, a giant doOtway shaped like a clown's head, salvaged

from Moe, a local rock club, frar!1es video images introducing the Northwest Passage exhibit. With narrations by musicians, producers and critics, the exhibit begins with the early Seattle music scene where Quincy Jones, Ray Charles and prerock crooner Bing Crosby got their starts. It continues past the FBI file investigating the Kingmen's 1964 song "Louie Louie" for obscenity, and then into grunge territory-Kurt Cobain and irvana, among others.

"We're not establishing a cut-off point," Farrington Right: Called "the blob" by critics, the EMP under construction as observed from the vantage point of the Space Needle. "There are always people who would prefer to have a square box, " says Paul G Allen, guitarist and Microsoft cofoundel; "but rock and roll doesn't fit into a square box. " Below: EMP s "A Team" gives white glove treatment to "A" artifacts (from left): Peter Blecha with Clapton s "Brownie"; Jim Fricke with "Renegades of Funk" staff; Ann Farrington with afragment of Jimi Hendrixs guitar, smashed and burned at the 1967 Monterey festival; Jon Kertzer with Big Jay McNeely s tenor sax; Andrea Weatherhead and Chris Bruce brandish '60s vintage street signs.

explains. "The last portion of the Northwest gallery is presented as if you're walking past a poster wall right now in downtown Seattle."

Throughout the museum, FatTington says she plans to change 20 percent of the exhibits per year, rotating in completely new ones evelY five years, except for a few pivotal pieces that will remain in place.

Upstairs we walk into an entirely new kind of museum settingSound Lab, an area devoted to visitors creating music on their own.

Fan'ington ducks into a pitch-black, soundproof room about 2.5 meters wide and 3 meters long. When she speaks, her voice booms forth as if we were inside a cavernous rock arena. She pushes a button on the wall and her voice sounds as though we were in an intimate concert hall. A third button push shrinks her voice to normal timbre.

Unraveling the mystery, Farrington explains that the room has speakers and microphones concealed in the walls that add reverberation as if you were mixing a record. "Each room has an electric guitar, a bass and acoustic drums so people can jam and pretend they're performing live onstage or in a recording studio," she says.

In addition to the dozen performance rooms, there are platforms with hands-on mixing boards, computer tutorials and electronic instruments with frets and keys that light up to tell you where and when to play them. A singing program encourages experimentation with voice sampling. Waiting in line for a crack at "Wild Thing" and their five minutes of fame, rock hopefuls get a glimpse of life backstage as they view a time-lapse film of Elton John's stage crew preparing for a concert and hear interviews about the grueling routine of the roadies.

At the top of a broad staircase flanked by gold, blue, yellow and silver walls that ripple by like waves sits a mirrored stainless steel pod that museum staffers jokingly call "Frank Jr." A chip off the old EMP block, Sound Lab's demo theater, which resembles a curvaceous spaceship hovering above the main entrance foyer, will host visiting performers.

"Throughout Sound Lab, we're trying to shorten the distance between rock stars and novice musicians," project manager Andrea Weatherhead explains later. Like an astonishing number of EMP's designers, Weatherhead has played music professionally and is zealous about eliminating the fears and misperceptions surrounding musicmaking. "You may not be able to teach people how to play like Hendrix in three minutes," she continues, "but you can certainly train them to become critical listeners. The next time they hear a drum solo, they'll be able to identify a high hat sound. If we can help people to become better listeners, not just in music but also in their daily interactions, they will collaborate better, create more readily, sharpen their perceptions, and their world will change."

Turning on novice musicians is the driving force behind Artist's Journey, a motion-platform ride that mixes futuristic technology from Titanic's special effects wizards with concerts by James Brown, Herbie Hancock and George Clinton, among other funk and jazz greats.

Taking a break in his trailer from filming one of the portions of the 18-minute ride film being shot in Los Angeles, producer Michael Caldwell explains the dizzying scenario. Strapped into their seats, audiences will feel as if they are on a roller coaster as hydraulic lifts move the floor beneath their feet and the 70mm film projected on a 120degree screen envelops them. The audience follows two aspiring young musicians as they jump through a swirling gate into a block party set

into inesistible Not James at a youthful nique using

motion by James Brown.

Brown as he appears today, at age 67, but the singer 37, when he created funk. In a ground breaking techinfrared photography, Digital Domain, the special

effects studio, captured the precise movements of Brown's face and scanned them into a computer, creating a face with lips, eyes and pores that look and move like the godfather of soul of nearly three decades past. The computer-generated face was then virtually grafted onto the filmed image of a younger perfOlmer who dances while Brown's voice sings the funk.

"With a computer monster or space creature, there is no real counterpaJ1 for comparison, but evelyone knows what James Brown looks like," Caldwell says. Besides, the digitized face will have to look realistic when blown up to 30 times life-size.

In one panoramic scene, multiple cameras

seep across

300

extras, 75 dancers and 30 musicians, landing at last on the two wannabe funk stars as they play their hearts out. The 70mm camera then follows them on a wild slide through the "funkhose," a psychedelic dream sequence of a tornado filled with flying guitars, keyboards and stage lights that deposits the boys onstage with a regally robed George Clinton and the all-stars of the P-Funk band as waterfalls of light spill and whirl around them.

"If the boys want to take the at1ist's journey, the truth is, it's a scary process," Caldwell explains. "We want the audience to ride the music along with them and feel as if they, too, have taken that fi"ightening leap offaith into the unknown that it takes to become a true at1ist." lthough plans for films on other rock genres are in the works, Patton says she chose funk first because the 1970s style has inspired hip-hop at1ists. "Plus, funk just makes you feel like getting up and MOYING," she declares in a booming voice that would do James Brown himself proud.

With a musical thrill ride, a host of cool instrumental toys to play with, demonstration workshops, endless films, videos and text to dig into, a restaurant, a store and a nightclub, EMP has one major headache.

"We do worry that people may never leave," says Allen. "Maybe we'll have to limit the time visitors spend playing instruments. It's a big challenge for us." According to projections, EMP is expected to draw from 800,000 to a million visitors a year.

But Allen and Patton are already looking to the future.

"We think that EMP can be a model for a new kind of learning institution," says Allen. "Whether it's in science or other creative arts, you could apply tools similar to what we've developed for EMP to unlock people's imaginations."

But I'm not waiting for the next project. It's time to drum my way to stardom-till closing time at least. "Wild thaang, you make my heart saang, you make e'verythang grooovy." Boom-boom, boom-boom.

Clang!

D

About the Author: Richard Covington is a Paris-basedfreelancejournalist who contributes to The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Reader's Digest, Art in America, Elle and Salon.

Together. in Sickness and in Health

Today, when . someone III Bhubaneshwar sneezes, an American catches a cold. And someone III Lima may have the cure.

otlong ago, my older brother, Joe, flew in from Los Angeles for a family gathering at my home outside Washington, looking paler than a dieting vampire and muttering that he might be "coming down with something." The rest of us eyed him warily, washed our hands compulsively and broke out the echinacea and vitamin C. By the time my brother-in-law, Dave, had flown back to Oregon, he was too sick to return to work. My daughter and I also took to bed for a day or two, but then gamely pulled ourselves together to attend a big party at my mother's apartment in Manhattan-after which we collapsed once more in fevered, achy neardelirium. Later my mother told me that patiy guests from two different states had called to complain that I had given them some sort of "bug."

And so from one humble plucking of the kinship bond came an Attila-scale distribution of the season's flu virus, itself a strain that most likely had its genesis in Asia. My story is hardly unusual, and that

N

is exactly my point. Today, diseases as common as the cold and as rare as Ebola are circling the globe with near telephonic speed, making long-distance connections and intercontinental infections almost as ifby satellite. You needn't even bother to reach out and touch someone. If you live, if you're homeothermic biomass, you will be reached and touched.

Microbes are, after all, members of the most ancient, zealous and Darwinically gilded 24-7 delivery consortium. They travel by land, sea, air, nose, blows, glove, love, sewage, steerage, rat backs, hat racks, uncooked burritos, overlooked mosquitoes.

And, oh, how they love the global village. How readily, for microbes, that village feels like home. Whether it's the outbreak of cholera in Buenos Aires, after years during which Latin America was free of the disease, or the debut in the emergency rooms of Manhattan of an African-born illness like West Nile fever, the globalization of disease is an unavoidable by-product of the high holy multicul-

Copyright Š 200 I by Natalie Angier. From The New York Times Magazine.

Distributed by the The New York Times Special Features.

tural hustle. And though microbes have always had the traveling bug, in centuries past, it at least took a few weeks or months for sailors to deliver a ship of rats bearing fleas with bubonic-plague bacteria from the Orient to Europe. Nowadays, a mosquito infested with the malaria parasite can be buzzing in Ghana at dawn and dining on an airport employee in Boston by cocktail hour.

Every day brings fresh evidence of how intimate are the links that lash together nations, peoples, bodies, species.

One land's meat, for example, seems every land's poison, as hapless Britain has struggled with a double whammy on its livestock. Since 1988, nearly 180,000 cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy-aka mad cow disease-have been reported in British cattle, along with several thousand cases elsewhere in Europe, raising fears that we're eating tainted hamburgers capable of delivering into our brains the deadly agent of CreutzfeldtJakob disease, and prompting the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ban animal protein products from Europe. Vegetarianism has beckoned even more brightly with the televised images of macabre mass barbecues, as Britain, the etherlands and a number of other countries have struggled to combat the recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among their livestock. Nearly five million animals in Britain and hundreds of thousands elsewhere in Europe have been killed or await execution, resulting in meat, dairy and leather shortages worldwide, not to mention the tanning of the political hide of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

"The globalization of health and disease is an incontrovertible fact," said Christopher J. Murray, a policy director with the World Health Organization in Geneva and an author of an influential report, "The Global Burden of Disease."

"The travel and interaction between continents, and the exchange of people, animals, animal products, food products, disease vectors, are all vastly greater than in the past, and so is the potential for pathogens to move quickly from one place to another."

"Today I can be in a place like Mecca, where there's an outbreak of meningitis, and I would not know I was sick with it until I got home," said David L. Heymann, executive director in charge of communicable diseases at the World Health Organization in Geneva. "And think of all the people I'd expose on my trip back." Especially given the robustly recycled vaporous substance that passes for air in a modern jetliner.

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he United States can give as well as it gets. In 1998, nearly 1,500 athletes from around the world competed in a triathlon in Springfield, Illinois, where they were exposed during the swim pOliion of the event to leptospirosis bacteria, which can cause fever, chills, jaundice, meningitis and kidney failure. Of these, 72 sought medical attention, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent many weeks tracking down all the pat1icipants to warn them of possible symptoms and to seek immediate treatment should they arise, before permanent organ damage set in.

Moreover, there was some risk of infected people releasing leptospirosis microbes into local water supplies through urination, fWiher dispensing America's inadvertent gift to the spirit of international competition. "There's no epidemic in even the smallest comer of the globe that the world can afford to ignore," said Jacquelyn C. Campbell, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and a fOlmer member of the Institute of Medicine's Board on Global Health. "We're so interconnected that an isolationist's perspective is no longer an option."

A true understanding of that growing interconnectedness has to include the developing world, where most of the people on the planet Iive and where infectious diseases account for almost half the deaths each year. Half of those deaths can be attributed to three "pedestrian" yet persistently devastating diseases: malaria, HlV/AIDS and tuberculosis. Malaria kills more than one million people annually, the overwhelming majority of them chil-

dren in sub-Saharan Africa. Many millions of other people living in more than 90 countries suffer from malaria, sometimes contracting it repeatedly year after year. Though they don't die of the disease, the debility and cost are enormous.

By one estimate, Africa's gross domestic product would be $100 billion greater today than it is if malaria had been eliminated. And the warming global climate is carrying those malaria-bearing mosquitoes nOI1h.So is the 2:43 out of Kinshasa: planes landing in Charles de Gaulle Airpol1 have recently been found to be carrying more than a few nonpaying passengers, leading European airlines to step up their preflight extermination efforts.

Sub-Saharan Africa also has taken the most brutal jackhammering from the AIDS epidemic. Of the 35 million people living with HIV or AIDS in the world, 25 million are in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 5.4 million people who are newly infected with the virus each year, 4 million live in sub-Saharan Africa. Helen Epstein, a former instructor at Makerere University School of Medicine in Uganda, wrote recently in The New York Review of Books that "the AIDS epidemic in Africa may turn out to be the worst health crisis in the history of the human race." Thanks to the effectiveness of new drug regimens, Westerners have developed the false sense that AIDS is no longer a lethal disease. But apart from the fact that nobody knows how long patients on the new drug regimens will survive before the virus finally outmutates the current armamentarium, these drugs are expensive and difficult to take.

Moreover, the AIDS epidemic in Africa is unlikely to remain confined to Africa: the strains of HIV running rampant there, if left unchecked, are sure to gain novel malevolence that would allow them to spread elsewhere and overwhelm whatever resources we have devoted to defeating our Western-bred strains. And keep in mind that other highly populous countries like China and India are just beginning to feel the brunt of the disease. There's a perversely poetic loopiness at work: a disease that presumably had its origins in

Africa made its first angry mark in America, then exploded in Africa, and is now moving onward, outward and back again, cat's-cradle style. It's not "Africa's" health crisis alone.

The only sane response to the world's AIDS crisis remains prevention-a response that hardly attracts an ounce of attention, let alone pounds, dollars or rubles. In 2000, a total of $165 million from all sources was devoted to AIDS prevention in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with the $2.5 billion estimated as necessary to do even a perfunctory job.

"When you see $9 billion going into the response to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, where you would expect a few hundred or maybe a few thousand cases at the most, while other, far greater public health problems are seriously neglected, we have to ask if we're getting the bang for our health bucks that we ought to get," said Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel-laureate infectious-disease expert at Rockefeller University. Don't look to the United States to swoop in and fix it: of the top 20 industrialized nations, the United States devotes the smallest percentage of its gross domestic product to battling these international epidemics.

But disease isn't the only thing moving around the globe with increasing speed, binding far-flung countries together in a mutual medical destiny. Medicines and methods of treatment are also part of the worldwide exchange. Pharmaceutical companies in the United States and Europe export a vast array of medications-from penicillin to protease inhibitors-to the developing world. And by seeking out alternative, local solutions from around the world, those companies, along with the best-endowed Western hospitals and research facilities, are beginning to level the balance of trade.

Where their citizens' health is concerned, some developing nations clearly have the edge over the United States on doing much more at fire-sale prices. In Chile, for example, the per-capita income today is about $5,000, the same as it was in the United States in the year 1900. But while the average life expectancy in the

United States a century ago was 47, in Chile today it is 76-pretty much the same as ours is now. And while Cuba remains an economic backwater, Castro's commitment to universal health care has paid off: the infant mortality rate there is the lowest by far in Latin America.

(Meanwhile, the United States, which has the finest available health care, was ranked 54th by the World Health Organization in terms of equality of access.) Whatever our squeamishness over methodology, we have a lot to learn from these countries and from others that have demonstrated successes in treating disease with a fraction of our resources.

e also have a lot to learn about the potential medical applications of herbs and extracts native to obscure corners of the continents. Seeking them out and bringing them back to the lab for study-bioprospecting, as these hunting expeditions have come to be known-has become a big business unto itself, incorporating the quest not only for flora, fauna and fungi, but even for exotic human genes to which biotech companies now routinely purchase the rights in hopes they will yield some insight, and some profit.

Globalization has also underscored a potentially universal source of human strength: in the tribe. We are c1ansfolk at heart, hardly past the mutual flea-plucking stage, and evolved to traffic comfortably with a few scores of people at best.

As a result, global health care workers have found that the most effective health programs are local and inclusive. For example, says Patricia L. Rosenfield of the Carnegie Corporation in New York and a former member of the Board on Global Health, "Thailand has one of the most effective AIDS programs in the world because they take the power of the community seriously." Their education efforts are concentrated locally on individual villages, schools, groups of prost itutes. The lesson of "think global, nag local" can work here too: when doctors in Minnesota took the time to contact

W

families whose children need follow-up booster shots, the overall effectiveness of the local vaccination program rose markedly. And tuberculosis outbreaks in both Africa and New York have been tamed by keeping an eye on infected people and ensuring that they take their medications every day.

The world is moving beyond the old polarities of ancient and modern, global and vernacular, high-tech and no-tech.

We're not just mixing our microbes; we're hybridizing our medical traditions.

A promising treatment being used at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center was developed by a folk healer in rural China; a tribal doctor in South Africa dispenses Western analgesics along with his herbal potions.

In the end, then, the great global agora of medicine is all about barter: buying, selling, swapping, titting, tatting, seducing and swindling. We import a malign parasite here, we export a rotten fast-food franchise there. Merck donates medicines for river blindness to Africa. Americans fly to Thailand for discount plastic surgery. Through the Internet, too, we've become an obligate if virtual superorganism, busy bees without borders, compulsively foraging through a billion sites for sensation, guidance, palliatives or cures for lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, nailbiting, insomnia, narcissism.

There is something unnerving about the distending volume of health information ricocheting through our cyberhive, much of it unexpurgated, unedited and unconfirmed. At the same time, there is something glorious-OK, I'll call it miraculous-about anybody anywhere having free, instant computer access to Medline and all the papers published in thousands of medical journals around the world. Our modems have become medical devices, and as fast as microbes can move nowadays, ideas, Google willing, will always outrun them.

About the Author: Natalie Angier is a science writer with The New York Times.

Her latest book is Woman: An Intimate Geography.

Ten Diseases on tile Way Out

By ROBERT MACKEY

3. MEASLES With all the high-tech medical research currently under way, new cures for disease seem to roll out of the laboratory at an everfaster pace. But actually eliminating diseases-getting the proper cure or prevention to every last person who needs it-is a slow, low-tech business. To date, only one disease, smallpox, has been completely eradicated. There are many others, however, for which the necessary treatments are widely available and for which a plan of attack has already been drawn. With the right financing, the following illnesses could soon be consigned to history.

I. POLIO . What it is: A virus that attacks the central nervous system Where it's found: Africa and Asia When it could be conquered: 2005 Projected cost: $1 billion

Status report: In 1988, the World Health Organization began a coordinated campaign to administer the Sabin vaccine. Since then, the number of cases has fallen by more than 95 percent. (In India, 134 million children were vaccinated in a single day.) But in many areas, total vaccination has not occunoed, and as long as the virus survives anywhere-in Chechnya, say, or Sierra Leone-it can spread anywhere else on the globe. Human beings are the only creatures affected by polio, however, so scientists believe that once the virus is eliminated from evety community, the disease will disappear, and

What it is: A virus that causes rash and high fever Where it's found: Evelywhere, though now rare in the Americas When it could be conquered: 2010 Projected cost: $3 billion

vaccination will no longer be necessary.

The vaccine costs 20 cents; administering it can cost up to $3.

2. GUINEA路WORM DISEASE What it is: A parasitic worm that grows to about a meter Where it's found: Africa and Yemen When it could be conquered: 2005 Projected cost: $40 million Status report: Since there is no vaccine against this disease, and no safe way to kill the worm during the year that it inhabits its host, the goal is to disinfect the drinking water in which it's transmitted. In remote African villages, where even boiling the water is too expensive a solution, international agencies are handing out low-tech filters (made of finely woven nylon) and educating people who are already infected on sanitary procedures. As a result of these efforts, the number of reported cases since 1986 has fallen by 97 percent to fewer than 100,000.

Most of the remaining cases are concentrated in Sudan, where the protracted civil war has hampered the eradication campaign.

Status report: Each year 30 million children-the vast majority of them in developing nations-eontract the disease; about 900,000 of them die. It is biologically possible, using existing technology, to wipe out measles entirely. But it would be difficult: since the virus is so highly infectious, it would be necessary to achieve high levels of immunity in almost the entire world population at the same time.

And the regions where that would be most difficult-urban slums-are those that are most conducive to outbreaks. The World Health Organization has not yet targeted measles for eradication, but it hopes to cut infections in half by 2005 and to cut the rest thereafter.

4. LYMPHATIC FILARIASIS What it is: A parasitic disease of the lymphatic system Where it's found: Africa, Asia, South America When it could be conquered: 2020 Projected cost: $800 million

• .' •/'

•

ices of groups like the Calier Center, the WHO estimates that onchocerciasis can be so severely reduced that it will be "eliminated as a public health problem."

6. BLINDING TRACHOMA Status report: According to the WHO, 120 million people in tropical areas of the world are currently infected with the mosquito-borne parasite; as many as one billion are at risk. Many who are infected suffer a terrible secondary effect: grotesque enlargement of arms, legs, breasts or genitals, known as elephantiasis. The pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline and Merck actually give away effective anti-parasite drugs, but the end of the disease is still years away, since many people who are infected are not yet aware that they have contracted the disease.

An additional challenge is getting people to keep taking the drugs year after year even when they have no obvious signs of illness.

5. RIVER BLINDNESS What it is: A parasitic infection that causes blindness Where it's found: Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Yemen When it could be conquered: 20 I0 Projected cost: $135 million Status report: Onchocerciasis, which affects more than 17 million people, is caused by a worm and spread by black flies that bite humans. Previous containment efforts relied on spraying larvicide, which had qualified success in reducing the fly population. In 1987 Merck introduced a new drug, Mectizan, that attacks the young parasite directly. Although the drug does not kill the adult worms already inside victims, it can prevent blindness and alleviate skin disease. Merck has agreed to give away whatever quantity of the drug is needed. Using these donated supplies, and the serv-

What it is: A bacterial disease that can lead to blindness Where it's found: Africa, Asia, South America, Australia When it could be conquered: 2020 for blindness Projected cost: $4 billion to $28 billion

Status report: A new multidrug antibiotic therapy is highly effective against this disfiguring disease, but there are still 500,000 new cases per year-in part because its years-long incubation period stymies efforts at early detection and treatment.

Seventy percent of these cases are in India, Myanmar and Nepal. With drugs donated by Novartis, the WHO hopes to reduce the disease to obscurity. But because some other species (including armadillos) can carry the bacteria, the disease will probably never truly be eradicated.

8. HEPATITIS B Status report: According to the WHO, more than 15 percent of people who are blind today could have kept their sight if their trachoma infections had been treated with antibiotics in time. At present 146 million people-concentrated in areas with scarce water and poor hygieneare affected. The bacteria will never be completely eradicated, but their dangerous effects can be eliminated with the use of antibiotics like tetracycline or azithromycin, the latter of which is being donated by Pfizer. A 10-minute surgical technique can save the sight of those already infected but not yet blind.

7. LEPROSY What it is: A chronic bacterial infection Where it's found: Asia, Africa, South America When it could be conquered: 2005 Projected cost: $250 million

What it is: A virus that can lead to liver cancer and other diseases Where it's found: Everywhere, but mainly in Asia and Africa When it could be conquered: 2010 Projected cost: $3 billion to $5 billion

Status report: As many as 360 million people are chronic carriers of the hepatitis B virus, which is transmitted from mothers to infants at birth, between young children and via unsafe sex or unclean needles. The great majority of those cases are in Asia. There is no cure, but there is a vaccine, which costs just $1.50. Even

that, however, is too expensive for the countries worst affected. As a result, eradication is possible, but particularly difficult, since many carriers infectious for life.

CDC in India

remain

9. MATERNAL/NEONATAL TETANUS What it is: A bacterial infection

T

that

causes muscle

seizures Where it's found: Everywhere

When it could be conquered: 2005 Projected cost: $130 million

~ n,e ~l..

~~ , / I ~~ I 0째/

J V' /

Status report: UNICEF estimates that 215,000 deaths are caused by neonatal tetanus every year, and the infection also leads to an additional 30,000 deaths in mothers. Since the bacteria will always exist in the soil, tetanus can never be completely wiped out. But vaccinating women of childbearing age and keeping newborns' umbilical cords clean will all but eliminate the disease.

10. IODINE DEFICIENCY DISORDERS What it is: A deficiency

that affects the system Where it's found: Every continent When it could be conquered: 2010 Projected cost: $75 million Status report: Close to 1.5 billion people have iodine-poor diets, which can afflict entire populations with reduced intellectual capacity, impaired motor functions or goiter. The strategy for conquering this disease is relatively simple: add iodine to salt and get people to use it. The iodizacentral

nervous

tion program is relatively inexpensive must be maintained permanently.

but

D

About the Author: Robert Mackey is a staff writer with The ew York Times Magazine.

he Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the leading agency for health protection and disease prevention in the United States, is now officially in India. In these days of vastly increased disease transmissibility, the CDC plays a cooperative role with health agencies internationally. It offers strategies and technologies to countries facing lifethreatening epidemics, and helps develop sustainable programs for disease control.

This spring the CDC opened its first field office in New Delhi and one in Chennai.

The CDC in India has, for many years, functioned under the auspices of the World Health Organization: CDC specialists have been and still are seconded to WHO to work on elimination of polio, TB and other emerging diseases. In fact, the current WHO country representative Robert J. Kim-Farley is from the CDC. But until now the CDC had no independent office in India. Dora Warren, the new CDC field director in ew Delhi, is busy charting its programs. Warren was chief technical advisor for the USAID-funded HIV/ AIDS outreach and surveillance programs developed

by AIDS Prevention and Control (APAC) and Voluntary Health Services (VHS) in Tamil Nadu for the past two-and-a-half years. She explains that the new office has a specific objective mandated by the U.S. Congress: HIV/AIDS. A Congressional initiative in 2000 set aside funds to develop prevention, care, suppoti and infrastructure-building in India and 14 countries in Africa that are threatened by an explosive AIDS epidemic. "It came as a direct result of people visiting countries and seeing the devastating effect that AIDS has on economies and national security and on the health infrastructure-and recognizing that CDC has a unique technical role that it can play." This international program involves 24 countries in all.

U.S. agencies, particularly USAID, have been working with Indian state and national governments and NGOs for a number of years to develop programs to raise awareness, monitor and control the spread of HIV/AIDS. ow the CDC will bring its expertise to the fore. Warren says, "The one area that we were mandated to work in and that other donors were not yet focusing

on was care and support, and the links between prevention and care." That means "strengthening information systems so that we can have better care programs; strengthening laboratories, so that we get better diagnosis; developing training programs for all of the myriad aid people who provide care for people living with HIV And then linking that to prevention programs."

Work has already begun at the Government Hospital for Thoracic Medicine, a TB sanatorium in Chennai, which Warren says is perhaps the largest such facility for HIV/AIDS patients in Asia. "On any given day, it has between 250 and 500 inpatients with HIV and about an equal number of outpatients." Here the CDC is helping the medical staff turn unwieldly paper-based case records into an easy-to-use computer database that will enhance research and treatment. Computers and training are being provided. Soon the laboratory will be renovated, making it a reliable diagnostic center.

The Tamil Nadu Government is solidly behind mY/AIDS programs. "The Chief Minister is very excited about this project.

She is very supportive," Warren says.

Andhra Pradesh is another state high on the priority list. About a third of the patients who come to the Chennai hospital are from Andhra. "One of the first things we want to do is strengthen health care and the confidence of physicians in Andhra to take care of patients." In Pune the CDC supports a program through Project Concern International to develop community-based care and testing. "Ninety percent of the people don't know they are infected. The important thing, if you are doing a care program is first to get people tested." CDC is collaborating with UNAIDS on another testing program, and with the American Red Cross on blood safety and youth outreach.

"When you come to HlV there is so much to do," Warren says. "We are trying to use our strengths. CDC comes with technjcal strengths, we come with strengths of surveillance and monitoring-how we can best use these resources in a way that will be of sustainable benefit." She adds, "As we learned in the U.S., any prevention program that doesn't address care has inherent weaknesses. You need to have both."

-L.T. Learn more about the CDC at <www.cdc.gov>

Since 1976 Habitat for Humanity International has been constructing decent and affordable houses for the poor in 78 countries. The key to its success is the involvement of people as partners.

A

dwelling of good standard is not only the need but also the right of every individual. Home buyers should not be exploited for excessive profit, either. These are basic principles at Habitat for Humanity International, an American GO that extends a helping hand to the impoverished at home and abroad.

The problem of inadequate housing is not just confined to developing countries such as India. Millions offamilies in the developed world are plagued with housing shortages, as well. According to a recent federal government estimate, more than 27 million Americans are in dire need of a decent shelter. Low-income housing units in the U.S. are in such short supply that two families are vying for each of the available dwellings in the country.

The housing scenario in India has become increasingly grim because of excessive urbanization. A large chunk of the workforce-marginal laborers, daily workers, artisans, etc.-migrate to towns and cities. This poses further challenges to the already depleted housing resources. Moreover, these deprived sections of society can neither afford to buy nor rent a decent house.

Since liberalization began in the early 1990s, central and state governments have tried to mitigate the problems and meet the housing shortages. Initiatives such as soft, easy loans and tax benefits have paved the way for families in middle income groups to buy a shelter of their own.

Financial institutions follow their own norms for advancing loans. Ironically, only the middle class or those employed in the organized sector, a miniscule percentage of the total population, can fulfill the requirements of these institutions. The poor segments of society are denied loans since banks view them as not creditworthy. Also, the low income, less educated groups find the complicated procedures of financial institutions difficult.

To bridge the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, and to address the housing issue comprehensively, an American self-made millionaire Millard Fuller and his wife Linda founded Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI) in 1976. Established at Americus, Georgia, the focus of HFHI was to ameliorate the sufferings of the poor by providing adequate shelter. The motto was simple: by building houses HFHI wants to build better and stronger communities. The housing was offered with an important proviso: each house must be built in partnership with the beneficiaries. Their participation would lend dignity and a sense of accomplishment to the families, according to HFHI. The concept of "partnership housing" began at Koinonia

Farm in Americus in 1942, and Fuller developed the thought after he visited the farm in 1965. Now Habitat is a prominent NGO with operations in 78 countries. It builds housing units collaborating with the homeless, regardless of sex, caste, creed or religion. On an average, HFHI calculates, it builds one house every 38 minutes. By 2005 it expects to dedicate the 200,000th Habitat house, which means this 25-year-old organization will have provided housing to about one million people all over the world. Commending the selfless effort of the Fullers, President Clinton said: "Habitat is the most successful continuous service project in the history of the United States. It has revolutionized the lives of thousands."

Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn have been closely associated with Habitat International since 1984.

Both of them, in spite of their time commitments to social justice and human rights, spend a week every year with Habitat projects. They work side by side with hundreds of volunteers.

The former President-a trained carpenter-and his wife gained a lot of experience with Habitat. Now the Jimmy Carter Work Projects in the U.S. and abroad are important dates in the Habitat's international calendar. The 2002 project is coming up in June in Durban, South Africa. One hundred houses will be constructed in five days with help from about 2,000 volunteers.

"We have become small players in an exciting global effort to alleviate the curse of homelessness," Carter said about his involvement with Habitat.

Habitat for Humanity International opened its India chapter in Bangalore in 1983. The following year, an independent affiliate Former President Jimmy Carter, a dedicated Habitat project volunteer since 1984. likes the hands-on approach.

Here he applies his carpentry skills on a housing project.

HABITAT FOR HUMANITY

H

abitat for Humanity International was launched 25 years ago in the United States by Millard and Linda Fuller and a small group of friends dedicated to building houses with people who desperately needed them.

Today, from its roots in the poor, rural South of the United States, the organization has built more than I 10,000 simple, decent houses providing shelter for more than 550,000 people.

Before founding Habitat for HUlllanity, Millard Fuller was a wealthy young businessman and lawyer, but his wife decided to give away their wealth to the poor and dedicate the rest of their lives to serving others. Eventually, following successful house-building projects in America and Africa, Habitat for Humanity International was born to take the idea of partnership housing worldwide.

Habitat for Humanity came to India in 1983 and since then more than 6,400 houses have been built, including more than 1,100 in the last year alone. The organization's goal is to complete 10,000 houses in India by the end of 2002. Potential homeowners must own the land where their house will be built and also must actually work with Habitat on the construction of the house.

Friends, neighbors, and other Habitat homeowners donate their time to help build the house, keeping the cost much lower than if the house were built by a professional construction company. Yet it has the appearance

and quality

-,.. of a professionally

built house.

Because Habitat is a nonprofit organization, the houses are built and sold at no profit. No interest is charged on the mortgage. The mortgage is for three to eight years and the monthly payment is low enough so that even the very poor can afford a simple, decent home.

Each country within the Habitat for Humanity organization has a national office which works with a variety of districts where houses are built. And, in each district there is also an affiliate that selects future homeowners and supervises the actual buildings of the houses.

The national office of Habitat for Humanity India is in Bangalore with affiliates in Rewari, Hyderabad, Trichy, Chennai, Trivandrum, Pune, Koovapally, Kanyakurnari, Tirunelvelli, Cuttack, Bhongir, Eluru, Khanunam, Raichur, Mumbai, Palakkad, Hubli and Madurai.

Serious steps are being taken to establish affiliates in Gujarat, Delhi and Kolkata.

Located in New Delhi is Habitat for Humanity's South Asia Regional Office which supports its programs in India, epal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This Christian organization has from the very beginning worked comfortably and effectively with all religions and ethnic groups.

Homeowners come fr0111 many reI igious traditions, as do volunteers. Those who

was formed to look after construction of houses, and in 1994 a national body, called the Habitat for Humanity India, was founded in Bangalore. Since its inception Habitat India has been working with laborers, artisans, fishermen, widows and destitutes, focusing primari Iy on the weaker sections of the society.

Habitat has received positive and enthusiastic responses from its target groups since its houses typically are economical.

Building houses in paltnership with the recipients of these dwelling units reduces costs. Habitat calls this "sweat equity," that is, the labor of the family and their neighbors. Habitat also encourages the support of outside volunteers.

The Delhi-based American Women's Association (AWA) has sent several volunteers to earthquake-ravaged Gujarat to help in the construction of houses there. Wendy Dwyer, an AWA volunteer, worked for a week alongside workers at the disaster site in

build a Habitat house often represent a variety of religions but they work happily together, focused on helping to build a house that is desperately needed.

When Millard Fuller first organized Habitat, he said that he was doing so on the basis of "the economics ofJesus" which is the basic belief that those who are economically well off should do what they can to assist the poor. Starting with that goal, Habitat has built a record of success in serving the poor in America and throughout the world.

Anyone who would like to help Habitat continue its work Illay do so by donating building materials, money or time and talents toward construction.

For more information about Habitat for Humanity International in South Asia or India, contact regional office in New Delhi at hfhisa@nda.vsnl.net.in or India office at hfhindia@bgl.vsnl.net.in.

0 About the Author:

Connie Howard

is a

Feelance writer based in Pennsylvania. She has authored In the Footsteps of Gandhi: The Manibhai Desai and BAIF Story on the NGD BAIF Development Research Foundation.

Shikara. "It was a worthwhile effort. I hope to go at least twice a year to work as a volunteer," says Dwyer.

The cost of a modest house ranges between Rs. 50,000 and Rs. 70,000, depending on the location. Urban areas are more expensive than rural areas. In either case the land cost is not included. Habitat works with families who do have land for the construction. It looks for people who do not have other funding options. "If these group members qualify for a bank loan for housing, then we really would not be interested in working with that group," says Todd C. Garth, South Asia regional director of Habitat International based in New Delhi.

Todd C. Garth, Habitat International director for South Asia region.

"However, we work with families who do earn some income because we are asking for repayment of the cost of the house within three to eight years. But if there is a government program we are not really interested to enter the pa11nership since we have focused our attention and want to reach those people who do not have access to government assistance," adds Garth.

The key to the success of Habitat International is decentralized decision making. It places decision-making as close to the community as possible. The India chapter, which currently has 20 affiliates, chooses its board members and volunteers who decide about projects in their regions. The administrative staff suppol1s the smooth functioning of the affiliates. This local initiative has resulted in efficient and timely implementation of the ongoing projects of all the Habitat India affiliates.

Habitat International receives major funding from the very beneficiaries of its program. It offers interest-free loans to the homeowners who are given three to eight years to repay.

Installments of loan repayments go into the revolving fund. The money is then ploughed back into more construction projects.

Also Habitat requests the local corporations, small businesses, institutions, churches and municipalities to donate land or provide basic infrastructure. Very often the homeowners become donors. For example, at a commemorative function at Trichy, Tamil Nadu, organized to honor the first visit of founder-president Millard Fuller in January 2000, the members of the village donated enough money for one house ofRs. 60,000. Habitat also raises funds from thousands of volunteers and supporters around the world, especially from New Zealand, the Netherlands, Australia and the United States. "Our fundraising in the United States is through average individuals who contribute small amou'nts of $1 0 to $20 at a time. That is how we sustain our program," says Garth.

Habitat's new venture in Gujarat began last year with construction of 664 houses in two quake-affected villages of Shikara and Kumbhariya. This project is funded by USAID, which offered a direct grant to World Vision, and Habitat is working as a subgrantee. "We have been receiving tremendous local suppol1, and the local affiliates and committees have been working with vigor and enthusiasm. If there is no local interest we wouldn't be there," says Gat1h. Habitat has also entered into pal1nerships with youth groups and churches who want to send volunteers for the program.

Gujarat is a new challenge for Habitat India. It is its first experience in post-disaster situations. However, Gujarat has provided Habitat an oppo11unity to learn many new things.

Habitat builds houses in compl iance with government requirements. It plans to build houses in two stages. In the first phase an area of about 150 square feet will be constructed so that families can be rehabilitated as quickly as possible and given a safe and dry place to store their belongings. In the second phase the houses will be completed.

Unlike other Habitat projects, the first phase of the Gujarat project is fully subsidized. During the second stage the situation

will be assessed. Habitat plans to involve pm1icipants in funding the project. "We will certainly take into consideration the economic status of the people as we move forward. We don't want to scare poor people and put them in a difficult situation. On the other hand, we believe that the broad segment of the community, which does have some financial resources, may be persuaded to fund the construction. We would like to engage them in the second stage of construction, because we think that they have a responsibility to the community," says Garth.

Habitat does not want to give the impression that it is a charitable organization, but one which works in partnership with people who are trying to improve their own lives. It wants to instill the spirit of "do-it-yourself' among the beneficiaries.

Commenting on the Gujarat experience, Garth feels that providing housing in a disaster situation is a huge task. It is certainly going to be a growth area for all NGOs involved.

Habitat International has introduced a new, exciting model called the micro-credit partnership scheme in Sri Lanka. It plans to introduce the same scheme in India with some modifications.

Under this scheme a group of about 12 women is formed and each woman contributes Rs. 10 a day for six months. The group's savings raises enough money for one house. Habitat then matches that with funds for two more houses. So three families then have

A. Arulsamy, an agriculturallaborel; here with his wife and children, owns a Habitat house in Narimedu village, Trichy district a/Tamil Nadu. houses of their own. The women choose who should get houses first and all the beneficiaries have to build each other's house.

They start saving again. After six months they have enough money for one more house and again Habitat will contribute for two more and so on. In two years everyone in the group of 12 receives a house. It's women who run the program and they engage the whole community. "We don't want to be an outside NGO that comes in and tries to fix a local problem," says Gar1h.

Habitat for Humanity International was recently voted as one of America's 100 Best Charities by Worth magazine. Habitat strives to usher in a new era when one of the primary needs of life-a dignified shelter--ean be more than just a dream for the poor. D

ince the first Earth Day in 1970, environmentally friendly products have come a long way, from trash bags and cars to clothing, even pioneering new standards of eco-awareness like the wash-basin-and-toilet-in-one.

But try convincing consumers to leap to the greener side of the fence. According to a recent Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll, only 50 percent of Americans consider themselves to be environmentalists, as opposed to 76 percent in 1989. "A lot of misperceptions that green products are inferior still linger, even though most reviews suggest otherwise," points out Jacquelyn Ottman, founder of New Yorkbased J. Ottman Consulting.

Compounding this negative attitude is the fact that green products don't come cheap.

At eco-friendly California-based manufacturer Real Goods, many of the company's products are more expensive than their nongreen competitors' due to higher wages for labor and the use of better materials. For instance, the company's battery-free flashlight, which works by means of a builtin wind-up mechanism, costs $75. Furthermore, Roper Starch Worldwide reports that only 5 percent of Americans were willing to pay extra for green products in 1996, compared to 11 percent in 1986. Real Goods' product specialist Susan Power responds: "Today, consumers don't have to pay extra just because a product is green. They pay extra for products like ours because they are of better quality."

Steve Mojo, executive vice president of marketing at Biocorp USA, manufacturer of

Itmavlook expensive at first, but factoring in the environment will save companiesas well as the planet-in the long run plates, cups, cutlery, and bags made from compostable cornstarch, admits that his company's products cost two to three times more than nongreen competitors' offerings. Yet he remains confident that more people will eventually catch on to this trend. Echoing Power's remarks, Mojo predicts, "The market will have a bright future as people realize that environmentally friendly products are of better quality."

One way companies are turning green is by creating an efficient cycle of renewability.

For instance, Eastman Kodak has replaced the plastic parts in some of its copiers with more expensive steel components that can be reused, because, in the long run, it's less expensive to reuse rather than to recycle parts.

Additionally, Xerox's "waste-free products from waste-free facilities" philosophy has inspired the company to undertake major remanufacturing efforts, including the recycling of copier parts from leased machines, saving the company more than $300 million a year in raw materials, labor, and waste disposal. In fact, 90 percent of Xeroxdesigned equipment is remanufacturable. Automakers are also making sure that new cars they sell are "used," as they design cars for eventual disassembly to reuse parts (BMW's vehicles are 80 percent recyclable).

Other organizations are developing energy-efficient products.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency bestows approving labels on 29 different product categories, including a line of GE light bulbs, that employ one-tenth the energy gobbled up by conventional ones by some competitors, and Rayovac's Renewable Rechargeable Alkaline batteries and charger. But you won't need such batteries to listen to Real Goods' Freeplay AM/FM Radio. Simply wind it up for 20 seconds to yield 45 minutes of play time.

Still other firms are sprouting less toxic products. Sun and Earth's "gentle" household cleaners, for example, are made with water, coconut oil, and citrus oils. And P&G offers customers an agglomeration of eco-friendly products, such as the Swiffer cleaning mop, which attracts dust with electrostatically charged cloth rather than polluting sprays, and the Dryel home dry-cleaning system, which not only saves consumers money but also avoids the use of the harmful chemical perchloroethy lene.

Other companies are taking steps to create more "natural" products. Instead of using petroleum to manufacture crayons, Prang uses soybeans. They're formulated to go on smoother and brighter, and, as a beneficial side effect, they create a new market for one of America's largest crops. In addition, Real Goods manufactures blankets from textile wastes and dishes from recycled pieces of glass, Dow and Cargill concoct plastics from corn (also forging a

new market for farmers), and Crane produces paper made from old blue jeans ("Denim Blues") and dollar bill scraps ("Old Money"). Says Crane spokesman Peter Hopkins, "We've always been eco-friendly in producing tree-free paper, and this is just the newest innovative way of doing it. Tree-free paper lasts longer and is of better quality."

And quality is precisely what needs to be stressed in order to sell green, since few consumers are buying green in order to save the planet. As Ottman explains: "Most consumers will pay a premium for a product only if it fulfills their needs and delivers a direct, tangible benefit. They won't pay up-front for down-the-road benefits." In fact, Ottman suggests that because of consumers' lingering, incorrect perceptions that green products are shoddy and pricey, "companies should not position these products as green. The greenness of a product should only be used as a secondary, supporting benefit."

Keith Zook, group manager of corporate sustainable development at P&G, agrees: "We don't market the environmental aspects of our products because we've found that, in the past, focusing on them hasn't been successful."

Anne Stocum, Xerox's manager of environment, health, and safety market leadership, also adds that although IS to 20 percent of Xerox's consumers care about environmental issues, "The eco aspect of our products isn't stressed. For consumers who are interested, there are Energy-Star labels and other eco-Iabels on many of our products."

"Companies must go green in order to survive," claims Ottman. Why? As Mojo explains, "A green production method is more efficient and will wind up costing less in the long run." Indeed, less means more for manufacturers of green products: Fewer raw materials, less energy, lower disposal costs, and less liability yield more profits, new markets, greater efficiency, differentiated products, and a socially responsible platform.

D About the Author: Vadim Liberman is assistant to the editor of Across the Board.

The Ford Foundation

Years In India â&#x20AC;˘

around the $321 million in estate taxes that their heirs would nThe Alchemist's Diary, Hayan Charara, a young Arab have to pay when either of them died. With legal advice, they American poet, writes about the experience of having been born in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, eight houses from the created two classes of Ford Motor Company stocks: the voting birthplace of Henry Ford: "Carlin Street, Detroit. 1972. Arabs, stocks would remain in the family's hold while the non-voting gypsies, the old Polish ladies and the black families that would stocks would be endowed to a foundation. Thus, the Ford Foundation was born as a small-time local family charity in rise each day and ride the bus to Miller Road to build cars ...."

Perhaps the Rs. 17-billion state-of-the-art Ford plant in January 1936. Among other things, it helped cover the operating Maraimalai Nagar, set up in 1995 in the Chingleput District of costs of Greenfield Vi IIage, which is a reproduction of the town Tamil Nadu, will inspire young Indian poets in 20 or 30 years from in Michigan where Henry's wife was born and the Ford Hospital, now. But ironic as it is, India knew the Ford name much before the where Henry received treatment for a few days.

Edsel had said, "The Ford Foundation will take care of the josh machines hit our roads because the Ford Motor Company, which celebrates its centennial next year, wasn't the only thing that various charitable, educational and research activities that I don't care to personally. It will be on a small scale and I have no Henry left behind; there was the Ford Foundation.

Henry was somewhat of a maverick. If he wasn't in the vOliex intention of making it larger." However, larger the foundation inevitably did grow as the Ford Motor Company stocks appreciof controversy for his unorthodox business moves such as hiring former criminals to give them a new life and instituting a mini- ated. Soon, the Ford Foundation became one of the richest philmum wage standard of $5 a day when the existing norm was about anthropic organizations. half of that or for his infamous anti-semitic views which he later Henry 11, who took over the helm of the company after the retracted, he was developing sociological plans to improve the lot death of his father Edsel and grandfather Henry, called together a of his workers so that they in turn would boost production and study group on policy and program in 1949 to chali out ways to profits for the company. As controversial as he was, Henry was spend the Ford Foundation's money on "human welfare." also a humanist. He was interested in seeing his employees being Headed by Rowland Gaither, the study group recommended cerable to afford some of the cars they built. "Every man should make tain areas of action such as promoting peace, strengthening enough money to own a home, a piece of land and a car," he said. democracy, developing economies and advancing human develWith all the incentives that his employees were given, it opment through education in countries outside the United States. wasn't surprising that in 1921 the company's earnings were as The foundation evinced an interest in India, which was newly high as $78 million. Around the end of 1923, 41 percent of cars independent and struggling with poveliy and inadequate food production. Jawaharla1 Nehru, the then on the Detroit roads were those built by the Prime Minister oflndia, was attracted to the Ford Motor Company. So, given the pheThe goals and ideals idea of receiving assistance from the founnomenal financial success of the 1920s, dation especially since Paul Hoffman, its during the next decade Henry had to think of Ford Foundation about protecting his gains for future generpresident at the time, was a former Marshall struck a chord with Plan Administrator. Devised to restore the ations of Fords. Henry, together with his Prime Minister son Edsel who had been groomed to take agricultural and industrial productivity of Jawaharlal Nehru, who over the company, tried to find a way to get European countries that had been ravaged

I

invited its participation in India

Far left: A Ford Foundation engineer explains the storage system/or a village irrigation reservoir to Prime Minister Nehru and his young grandsons Rajiv and Sanjay. Irrigation here relied on a bullock-driven pump.

Left: A village immunization program in Karnataka.

by World War II, the Marshall Plan had proven extremely successful.

In 1951, Nehru invited Hoffman to tour India. After meetings with ehru and his senior cabinet, Hoffman secured a fund of $3.7 million to support India's rural development program and sent Douglas Ensminger, a rural sociologist, to set up the Ford Foundation's first overseas operation office in Delhi in 1952.

To date, the Delhi office remains the Ford Foundation's largest overseas operation. As to why this is, Barry Gaberman, the senior vice president of the foundation, says, "For us, it is an easy and obvious answer. First, it's the scale of the subcontinent. Second, there is great diversity here. One would learn so much here that is relevant to other places. Third, it's the pool of talented individuals. The number of world-class scholars and artists is very large.

Therefore, we have an easy set of paJtners to draw from here."

The Ford Foundation's partners in India make an impressive list. At the outset, it was the Indian Government itself. Ensminger headed the Delhi office for the first 17 years, during which he developed a close personal rapport with Nehru and supported the central government in modernization and poverty alleviation programs. Soon, this support was extended to individual state governments to help them with their planning departments. The early years were also marked by support for capacity building, particularly in the Planning Commission and in academics. In fact, it was with the foundation's recommendation and assistance that the Indian Government established the reputed Indian Institutes of Management as a high priority national asset.

Ifin 1960 the Ford Foundation was spending 77.3 percent of its budget on making grants toward food production, poverty alleviation and sustainable agriculture, in 1970, this dropped to 22.2 percent. By this time, the grants were more or less evenly spread out across agriculture, education and culture as well as planning and management. International affairs loomed into the picture, accounting for 10.2 percent of the outlay in 1970. Population, child survival and reproductive health, which received only

1.5 percent of the outlay in 1960, now received 11.9 percent. In 1990, this allocation jumped to 23.9 percent after the United Nations had passed the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

"Nothing remains static," says Gowher Rizvi, who has been representative of the Delhi office since 1998. "We respond to the need of the hour, which is determined by our Indian partners."

That's not to say the Ford Foundation does not have its own programmatic priorities based on its own assessment. Currently, the single largest grant that has been ever made-$330 millionis toward the International Fellowships Program initiated by Susan Berresford, the president of the foundation. This program targets exceptional students from disadvantaged backgrounds to give them a higher education that will enable them to become future leaders in their respective fields. The Ford Foundation has proactively reached out to these individuals through extensive dissemination methods. According to Rizvi, this year alone, the foundation has had 7,000 applicants from "hugely disadvantaged" backgrounds.

In describing the program, Rizvi says, "It's not an ordinary fellowship program. It aims at addressing social justice, which is at the heart of the Ford Foundation." Social justice is not a new concept to India, he explains. "India invented affirmative action.

The Indian Constitution was the first constitution in the world that provided for affirmative action and social justice."

According to Rizvi, the thrust ofFord Foundation programming is currently to help the "bottom 20 percent of the population." For this purpose, the foundation is not defining disadvantage by any single criterion, but by a combination of social, educational and economic factors. Rizvi asserts that the foundation is not willing to "accept any predefined criteria" of disadvantage.

Also, among the disadvantaged groups such as dalits and adivasis, there are those who are worse off than others. More often than not, women suffer any disadvantage twice: once from the group they belong to and again from the second-class status accorded to their gender within this group. It's no secret that even

The rights of women to have a voice, adequate health care and employment are among the most consistent themes of Ford Foundation projects. Here women in a Maharasthra village are encouraged to become involved in policy-making in areas that directly affect them, such as agriculture. Besides running the household, women do much of the work on farms.

in a highly developed country like the United States, a woman still gets paid only 70 cents on average for every dollar a man makes. In a developing country like India, the gender disparity is even greater. "Working with women is one of our priorities. By and large, women are at the bottom ofthe heap," says Rizvi.

The Ford Foundation has a long-standing partnership with the Gujarat-based Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), which is primarily a grass roots trade union that works to organize women into a collective and build their capacity to access resources. The association's pioneering effOlts in microfinance and self-help have been so successful that they have been praised and emulated the world over. Another organization that has been a long-term partner of the foundation is Professional Assistance for Development Action Network (PRADAN), whose community banking model has made a name for itself. DHAN Foundation, a spin-off based in Madurai, has facilitated this model in South India.

According to P. Premanand, a project executive at the Pondicheny office ofDHA , women tend to show more dedication to the projects that they are involved in than men. In some ways, this is understandable because among disadvantaged groups the care of the home and children often falls squarely on women's shoulders. At a DHAN project site in Rajankulam, a village offPondicheny, the scheduled tribe women ofthe self-group there identified getting out debt, investing in a brick house and educating their children as their priorities. Their children, too, were keen on getting an education so that they could go on to become professionals.

Just as the emphasis of Ford Foundation programs has changed over the years, so have the partners. Direct collaboration with the Indian Government has diminished. Central and state government ministries and programs are no longer allo-

cated 81.5 percent of grants as in 1960. The foundation shifted to working with nongovernmental organizations on a large scale in the mid-1970s. In recent years, the trend has been to make smaller grants to independent institutions, voluntary organizations and networks.

On how grant applications are decided, Gaberman says, "We're large enough that we have the personnel to spend time getting to know the institutions. The leadership structure of an institution is vety important to us. When we place our bets, we place it on the quality of leadership. Then we look at the track record of the institution: what it does and whether it has succeeded at what it does. We're interested in whether an institution manages to work in an effective way and uses resources well.

With young institutions, we take some risks and hope that it will work out. And we should take some risks."

One such young institution is the National Folklore Support Center (NFSC), which is just three years old. This institution took shape when the Ford Foundation shifted its focus in arts and culture from heritage and preservation to folklore and the cultural diversity of marginalized groups. According to Gaberman, folklore was recognized as a way to bring about the development of marginalized groups.

To coincide with the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Ford Foundation, NFSC held a festival in March that showcased folk musical instruments, a.Jt and theater. According to NFSC director M.D. Muthukumaraswamy, the festival brought "many rarest of rare fonns, which have never traveled outside their immediate regions" to an urban audience, thereby widening the audience base of the folk arts and giving exposure and respectability to folk artists.

As for the artists, they were happy for the opportunity. "We've been longing for more performances. Acting is the only thing we know. We always look forward to expressing our creative energy. It's a kind of personal development for us," said Thambi Payiappilly, the leader of the Chavittunatakam troupe from Kerala that performed at the festival.

Over the years, many things at the Ford Foundation have changed. The focus and the partners are different. The Ford Foundation no longer owns Ford Motor Company stocks; it is financed by a diversified investment portfolio. But two things haven't changed. The first is that the foundation functions not simply as a charity but as a catalytic philanthropic organization.

"We do not hand out bread, but try to eliminate hunger," says Rizvi. This is exactly how Henry would have liked it because if there was one thing he did not believe in, it was doling out money for free. The second is that the Ford Foundation remains committed to supporting new institutions, social movements and exceptional individuals with innovative ideas for the future.

Reflecting this commitment, Berresford, the president of the foundation, said at a lecture she delivered in India, "It takes determination to find them. Business as usual doesn't do it." D About the Author: Nachammai Raman is a freelance writer based in Chennai.

The Ergonomic

In handmade rocking chairs, and mass-produced ones as well, beauty is as beauty does

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hen Mike Richter, the New York Rangers' All-Star goalie, had back problems a couple of years ago, he flew to Los Angeles to see a specialist. He also started spending more time in his handcrafted rocking chair, made by Robert Erickson, a woodworker in Nevada City, California. The chair, which Richter showed me recently, is a sculpture of soft walnut curves, with swooping ash back slats and dark-oak dowels set so smoothly into the arms as to seem a part of the original wood. The chair's elegant form suits its function: the seat curves beneath one's thighs, and the back slats gently press against the lumbar region as one rocks. How many objets d'aJi can provide a lower-back massage?

Richter's back is much better now, and though he wouldn't give all the credit to his chair, he doesn't discount its effect entirely. "The chair gives some relief for that palt of your back that takes the biggest beating in hockey," he told me. "I just love the thing."

Erickson makes "studio furniture"pieces designed to be artistic as well as

Chair

functional. In 1975, when Erickson was 28, he built-and immediately sold-his first rocking chair. Ever since, rockers have been his mainstay. Like any selfrespecting studio-furniture aJtist, he built his shop himself, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and Erickson and five assistants make about a hundred pieces of furniture there each year. Half of these are rocking chairs, most tailored to the customer. "Building rocking chairs has been a fascinating experience," Erickson told me recently. "People are very intimately engaged with their rocking chairs, so all of a sudden I'm getting intimately engaged with them."

A quintessentially American object, the rocking chair has, surprisingly, been around only about as long as this country has. Records of rocking cradles made of hollowed-out logs date back about a thousand years, but apparently no one thought to apply the idea to furniture for adults until the 18th century. It is unknown who first bolted curved "skates" onto the legs of a regular chair, but such primitive rocking chairs first appeared in the American Colonies in the 1740s.

The revolutionary design caught on quickly, and rocking chairs soon came to symbolize the practical and inventive spirit of the new land. To the English they also represented the declasse nature of the upstaJt colonists. One 19th-century woman visitor wrote of a group sitting "lazily in a species of rocking-chairwhich is found wherever Americans sit

down-cradling themselves backwards and forwards, with a lazy, lounging, sleeping air, that makes me long to make them get up and walk." Another Englishwoman wrote, "How this lazy and ungraceful indulgence ever became general, I cannot imagine; but the nation seems wedded to it."

Indeed, rocking chairs had by the 19th century become a fixture on Appalachian porches, in western ranch parlors, and in the homes of Presidents. John Adams's house in Quincy, Massachusetts, prominently displayed two rockers. The last chair Abraham Lincoln ever sat in was a well-worn cushioned rocker from the manager's office at Ford's Theater. Chairs in this upholstered Grecian style, with curved backs and scrolled arms, are now known as Lincoln rockers.

Other Presidents, including William McKinley, both Roosevelts, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, have been associated with rocking chairs, but none more so than John F. Kennedy. A doctor suggested that Kennedy use a rocking chair to ease back pain resulting from a war injury, and duplicates of the Appalachian oak rocker he bought soon graced the White House, Camp David, and all the Kennedy estates; the President even dragged one around the world on Air Force One. Kennedy also inspired a renewed interest in rocking chair design, notably on the paJt of an aJtisan named Sam Maloof.

Maloof, who has been called the greatest woodworker in the world, and who was

one of a handful of craftspeople who sparked the studio-furniture movement, was 45 in 1961 and already a pre-eminent furniture designer in Los Angeles when a friend suggested that he create a rocking chair for the new President. Kennedy was assassinated before Maloof finished the project, but a decade later he developed the first major innovation in rocking chair design in a century.

In the 1800s several now-classic rocking chair forms appeared, among them the spindle-back Windsor rocker; the Boston rocker, with its curved seat and arms and decorated crest; the Shaker rocking chair, with a slatted back and woven seat; and the platform rocker, which rocks or glides on a stationary base. For much of the 20th century, however, the rocking chair received little attention from the design world.

Then, in the early 1970s, Sam Maloof began to experiment. He designed long, elegant skis that curve inward at the back like an antelope's horns. To make them strong enough he used seven laminated strips of wood for each ski: the result is both visually striking and as hard as iron.

He had sold only a few chairs before he met a potential customer with a lowerback problem, Maloof told me recently. He took a piece of wood, held it against his own back, and curved it to fit, creating what has become his trademark ergonomic spindle. He lowered the seat to relax the angle of the sitter's legs; raised the arms, which encourages deeper breathing; and completed a design that has found its way into the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, the White House, the Vice President's mansion, and President Jimmy Carter's office in Atlanta.

"Malooftook the rocker to a new plateau of expression," says Jonathan Fairbanks, an art consultant who was for many years the curator of American decorative arts at Boston's MFA. Jeremy Adamson, a curator at the Smithsonian, calls the chair "among the most comfortable ever devised-and a creature ofrare beauty." At 85, Maloof still builds chairs in a workshop next to his house, in the foothills of California's San Gabriel Mountains. If you have $20,000 to spend and don't mind waiting years, you

Right: A platform rocker

by Peter Handla Far right: Robert Erickson :s jloatingback "Chan Rockel~ "

can own a new Maloof rocker.

This is a steal compared with the early Maloof (nonrocking) chair that went for $120,000 at auction in 2000.

Maloof's design has been copied by countless mundane furniture makers, and it has also inspired the work of younger artists. Among these is Erickson, who has added his own innovation: the flexible, or "floating," contoured back. For years Erickson used cold-laminated slats that had some give I in them, to provide lumbar sup- ~ :2 port and also adjust to the shape m of each sitter. In 1996, howev- ~ er, he met an archery-bow maker and had "an epiphany"; soon he had developed a technique much like one that has long been used in making bows. He now takes three thin strips of wood and flips the middle one over to offset the grain and "counteract the natural forces of the wood." This and a coating of Teflon enhance the strength and flexibility of his curved back slats.

M

aloof used his own body as a universal measure and achieved spectacular results, but Erickson gives his customers fittings, measuring various physical dimensions and observing each person's preferred "angle of repose." The depth and height of the seat, the height and width of the arms, the back shape, and the "mouth" of the chair-the angle between the seat and the back-all affect comfort. "Even half an inch," Erickson told me, "can make a real difference."

His handiwork has made its way into the Smithsonian, among other museums, and into the homes of people willing to pay $5,000 for a supremely comfortable work of art.

The Shakers, a religious sect that val-

ued asceticism and simplicity, raised furniture making to an art form of their own in the 19th century. In a handsome riverside studio next to a covered bridge in West Cornwall, Connecticut, Ian Ingersoll keeps their tradition alive. In the early 1970s Ingersoll was looking for inspiration to start his career and found it close to home, in the Shaker furniture of upstate New York and western New England.

Thinking of the work as a form of apprenticeship, he put out word in the antiques world that he was willing to repair Shaker chairs. Over 12 years he learned firsthand how the Shakers gradually found the simplest and lightest design that would hold up under heavy use. It was Brother Robert Wagan, in the 1860s, who designed the ultimate Shaker chair-what Ingersoll calls "the best-designed rocking chair that has ever been made, in terms of comfort and ability to withstand human use."

Today Ingersoll designs his own contemporary furniture but also continues to reproduce that Wagan chair, exactly. "I wanted to make a state-of-the-art rocking chair," he says, "and it doesn't seem reasonable to make any changes to some-

we've been," he says, "but while I had the idea, I had no image. I spent a year or two knocking my head against the wall, taking wrong turns." Then he tried machining and discovered anodizing, an electrochemical process that builds a hard, dyeable oxide coating on the surface of metal. "Suddenly," he says, "I had a vocabulary that I could speak with, and develop."

Handler built tables, sofas, armchairs, and dining-room chairs.

The chairs were comfortably and colorfully upholstered, and everything bore his trademark: a brightly colored futuristic metal c frame. Then, a couple of years ~ ago, he came across a Victorian Lb ~ platform rocker at an antiques if. store. "It had a spring, an adjustable back angle, and a footrest 8 that came out: it was essentially a Victorian Barca-Iounger," he told me. Handler became fascinated with platform rockers and decided to create one.

"The question was, how do I take this design and make it into my own 2 Jstcentury platform rocker?"

The answer is here, in the fonn of a $4,500 extraordinarily comfortable rocker that looks like a friendly insect lit by a rainbow. The fi'ame is bright red, purple, blue, and yellow, with soft cushioned upholstery. And the chair is simple and compact-a minimalist response to the antique piece it is based on.

f

thing that's already been done perfectly."

When Ingersoll started out, a Shaker original could be bought for $J 00, cheaper than he could make a chair. But then Shaker artistry was "discovered," and during the J980s prices shot up to the vicinity of $2,500. Suddenly Ingersoll was able to sell his replicas for far less than the cost of originals. As his reputation grew, his prices rose, and today an Ingersoll- Wagan rocker costs $800-but that's still a fraction of the price of an original. And the replication is so fine that Ingersoll has found his own chairs being auctioned off as Shaker originals.

As Edward Cooke, a professor of American decorative arts at Yale, impressed upon me, however, fashioning a fine rocking chair doesn't necessarily mean making it out of wood. In a cavernous warehouse studio on the northwest side of Philadelphia, Peter Handler makes rocking chairs and other furniture out of anodized aluminum. After working as a jeweler for a decade, Handler turned to furniture making in the early J980s. "I knew I wanted to create work that looks like where we're going rather than where

he craftsmen mentioned so far typically make their chairs to order, and such care and expertise are expensive. Of course, relatively cheap massproduced rocking chairs have long been available too. The first widely manufactured rocking chair was probably the Boston rocker, which came along in the 1820s. Later in that century the Shakers built a furniture factory in Mount Lebanon, New York, and turned out rockers in eight standardized sizes, ranging in price from $3 to $8. The chairs were even sold in a Chicago department store.

Today you can buy contemporary variations on the Boston, Shaker, and Appalachian "settin' " rockers for $200 or Jess at any number of furniture stores. For greater comfort but less aesthetic presence, there's the Dutailier Glider Chair ($250-$370), pm1icularly popular with nursing mothers. And at the upper end of mass-produced ergonomic therapy, BackSaver's FlexRock platform rocker can be had for $995. There's probably nothing better for your back, but although the FlexRock's creator, Nathaniel Smith, who studied design in Denmark, hopes his chair has a pleasing look, he's the first to admit that "it's a long way from art."

Perhaps the highest nexus of art and ergonomics is the Erickson chair. Mike Richter, not only a National Hockey League (NHL) star but also a new father, says his chair "really cradles" him: "The angle and contours of the chair are such that it carries you like you'd carry an infant in your hands." The imagery is appropriate, because rockers not only reinvigorate us by promoting blood flow and keeping pressure off anyone point in the back but also soothe us simply by rocking. Erickson speaks of "the magic of rocking, of rhythmic movement, like for babies," and Handler of "the almost selfhypnotic effect of the rocking chair."

Bruce Chatwin wrote in The Songlines (1987) of experiments demonstrating that an automatic cradle, rocking at a rate of at least 50 cycles a minute, silences a crying baby. (Parents today carry out similar experiments for $99.99.) He went on to theorize that this reflects an atavistic yearning for humankind's nomadic beginnings on the African savannah.

This may be a bit much to claim, but perhaps as we sit in rocking chairs, comfOtting our children or reading, we are transporting ourselves at least back to our own pendular infancy. We require more lumbar support now, but the need to rock remains.

D About the Author: Marshall Jon Fisher is a fioeelance writer and the co-author with David E. Fisher a/Tube: The Invention of Television (1996).

Fuel cells and microturbines could turn everybody into a power producer, easing blackouts, lowering prices, and bringing electricity to the powerless

t's mid-afternoon in sunny California and your team is scrambling to finish a deal clinching presentation when BAM! the power goes down. You've been caught in a rolling blackout that state regulators have ordered as a heat wave brings on millions of air conditioners. Backup batteries will give you enough time to shut down yom system, but you can forget about finishing that presentation. Lights out, right?

Not when a pair of refrigerator-sized tmbines in back of your office jump to life, transforming natural gas into a steady stream of electrons to keep the office humming. Systems like these "microturbines," along with fuel cells that extract electrical power from fuel without burning it, are changing the rules in the power game. No longer must you rely on a monopolistic utility that can take you-and your power needs-for granted.

These "micropower generators" aren't just about emergency backup, either. They can provide higher quality power 24/7 than you can buy from your local utility. Plug into one of these systems and you'll avoid the computer-crashing voltage spikes and sags that mar the electricity coming out of a garden-variety wall socket. And micro power means you can forsake the grid when power prices surge, or even make an extra buck by exporting power to your neighbors. Spread enough micro power throughout the grid, and the grid itself will begin to learn tricks that could make regionwide power outages an unpleasant memory.

I

s our reliance on electric and electronic systems increases, many businesses-and consumers-need better performance than the 99.9 percent reliability the local electric power grid provides. These demanding users need what utilities call "premium power"; pure, top-grade electrical juice that flows without fail. Manufacturers, banks, telecommunications providers-just about any company that depends on computers or digital equipment such as Web servers and routers-need premium power. And the only sure way to get it, energy experts agree, is to generate it yourself.

Industrial operations have long done just that, but residential or commercial users couldn't fulfill their needs using the available small power systems: the diesel generators that keep hospitals alive are too loud and dirty for a suburban neighborhood.

Solar power keeps getting cheaper, but it can't always deliver the kilowatts. Not that these technologies were capable of making much difference, since state laws kept most power consumers shackled to their local utility. Deregulation is changing all that, freeing consumers and unleashing a torrent of investment and innovation. The first products of this wave oftechnology development are clean, quiet and dependable microturbines, developed in the 1960s to provide electric power for air condi-

A

tioning and circulation systems on aircraft. They descended toward the consumer market in the early 1990s thanks to Rosen Motors, the company created by Compaq Computer cofounder Ben Rosen to build turbine-powered hybrid electric cars.

Rosen's company was ahead of its time, though, and it paid the price, folding in 1997 just before Toyota and Honda rolled out gas-electric hybrids in Japan. In 2000, the Japanese auto giants brought hybrids to America, forcing Detroit to lay hasty plans for its own hybrid cars.

Although the company's automobile venture collapsed, its microturbine power source lives on in another Rosen venture: Chatsworth, California-based Capstone Turbine. Capstone's 30-kilowatt microturbine functions just like the several hundred-megawatt natural-gas-fired power plants that prop up the electrical grid. Ignite the fuel (natural gas, gasoline, kerosene-just about anything that burns) and rapidly expanding combustion gases push the turbine blades to spin a rotor and generate electricity. Exhaust from the microturbines contains only about three parts per million of smog-forming nitrogen oxides-about a hundred times less than diesel generatorsand virtually no soot.

And the microturbine is ready to go the distance without burning out, thanks to air bearings that float the turbine on a turbulent film of air just two micrometers thick. The air bearings experience no friction and no wear, even at punishing speedsmore than 1,500 revolutions per second in the Capstone turbine-that would burn up lubricated bearings.

Fuel-cell power plants will run even smoother and cheaper because they are solid state: rather than burning hydrocarbons, fuel cells employ steam and catalysts to release the fuel's hydrogen atoms and strip away its electrons. Eschewing combustion and bypassing mechanics makes this technology clean and efficient: fuel cells running on natural gas release virtually no nitrogen oxide and convert 40 percent of the fuel's energy into electricity (a third more than the microturbine). Capturing the wasted energy by using the fuel cell's hot water by-product to warm a building's air and water pushes the overall energy efficiency to 80 percent or more.

At least halfa dozen types offuel cells are under development for electrical power generation. The best hope for smaller, more affordable units lies in a light, compact version based on a structure known as a proton exchange membrane. This is a technology for which we can thank the auto industry; Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Toyota are inve;;ting billions to make this variety of fuel cell powerful and cheap enough to replace the internal combustion engine.

As the technology spreads from the auto industry, a host of startups, including Ballard Power Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia, and Plug Power of Latham, New York, are pushing proton exchange membrane technology for stationary power production. The goal is 1 to IS-kilowatt power plants to enable a family to declare independence from the electrical grid;

larger units, 60 to 250 kilowatts, would do the same for offices.

Though these companies have aggressive marketing plans, reality-in the form of engineering obstacles-has begun to intrude. Plug Power and its marketing partner, General Electric, planned to be the first to market with thousands of residential units this year. Engineering the units for continuous, glitchfree operation is proving to be unexpectedly complex, however, and Plug Power now expects to introduce commercial fuel-cell systems this year.

An Electrical Safety Net icropower is finding some of its first applications in remote operations that have inadequate access to centrally generated electricity. Microturbines have been a hit on oil-drilling rigs in Alberta, Colorado and Texas, for example. These rigs sit above reserves of energy-rich liquid gold, but lie either beyond the grid or at its edge, where the trickle of electricity can't support heavy equipment. Modernday wildcatters are also under pressure from environmental regulators to curb the flaring of the sulfur-laden gases associated with many wells. Microturbines will run on just about anything, including this "sour gas," so haul one to the well head and you can put this environmental nuisance to work powering the pumps.

The economics of generating power without incurring a fuel cost is so compelling that microturbines may turn many oil wells into remote power plants that generate surplus power for sale over the grid. The capacity for expansion is enormous: oil wells in Texas alone typically flare a billion cubic meters of sour gas a year. That's enough to generate more than 400 megawatts of electricity, equivalent to a mid-sized utility power plant.

Landfills and wastewater treatment plants may be the next to cash in. Since last spring, a Capstone microturbine has been digesting the methane that ferments forth from the world's second largest trash pile-Los Angeles County's Puente Hills landfill-while generating only 1.3 parts per million of nitrogen oxides. That's a lot cleaner than the 30 paliS per million released when the gas is flared.

But transforming waste gas is a niche opportunity, and companies like Capstone and Ballard are hoping for much more.

Their plan: catch the deregulation wave and transform millions of power consumers into power producers. Deregulation is sweeping away the monopoly protections that kept new power producers-particularly residential and commercial consumers-out of the market. "Under the monopoly environment it didn't matter if you had these wonderful technologies to selfgenerate because you were obligated to buy your power from the utility," says Wayne Gardner, manager of business development and strategy at Exelon Capital Partners-the Philadelphia-based venture capital arm of U.S. power giant Exelon.

As deregulation offers consumers greater freedom to generate power, it also gives them more reason to do so. The rocky tran-

M

sition to a deregulated market is casting a haze of unceliainty over the power industry, discouraging utilities from adding generating capacity and upgrading their transmission lines. Energy experts blame California's hesitating transition toward a competitive power market for its meltdown this winter. And one solution to an ailing grid, it is becoming clear, is micropower.

"Premium power is clearly the dominant near-term market for distributed power," says Dan Rastler, a distributed power expeli with the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. "The existing distribution system is not capable of meeting the reliability needs of that market."

Premium power is already a $7-$10 billion-per-year market in NOlih America, according to the research firm Frost & Sullivan.

Today, most of that comes from batteries and diesel engines serving as backup power sources. But the freedom to generate one's own electricity could blow this market open. Seekers of premium power who hook up microturbines and fuel cells to the natural-gas line are no longer limited to using their generators only when the lights go out. They can save money by powering up whenever the grid price exceeds the cost of fuel. Some states even permit micropower producers to sell surplus power back to the grid for a profit.

This ability to play the power markets will grow as utilities move toward real-time pricing, where the price of power from the grid reflects the cost to produce it. During times of peak demand, when utilities must fire up their least efficient plants, prices spike. Micropower units will monitor pricing through an Internet connection or via a digital signal embedded in the electricity itself. Using this information, they will compare quotes for gas and electricity and automatically turn themselves on when the spread is favorable.

Yet power generation is not a core competency for most businesses (let alone residential consumers), so it will be important to find the folks who can run micropower smoothly. With natural-gas prices rising, switching on micropower at the wrong time could cost a bundle. "The technology developers and a lot of the investors have placed more focus on getting the technology developed without thinking on the operations side of who's going to suppOli it, who's going to install it, who's going to warranty it," says ExeJon's Gardner.

Capstone's best answer is Williams International, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based energy giant that sold or leased 60 of the first 1,000 microturbines that Capstone produced through November 2000. Williams, whose pipelines carry nearly 20 percent of the U.S. natural-gas supply, provides a complete energy service package: financing the micropower unit, providing power from the grid, and helping consumers determine when peak shaving makes sense (the company is a leading trader of electricity and natural gas). Mory Houshmand, director of the Williams Distributed Power Services unit, says Williams expected its wholesalers in the United States, South America and southeast Asia to install about 1,500 m icroturbines last year, and another 2,000 to 3,000 this year.

Power from Everybody or the big energy companies like Williams, the lure of micropower goes beyond the selling and leasing of small generating plants. These organizations see an oppOliunity developing that will enable them to sell gas and electricity en masse. Aggregate the output of thousands of fuel cells and small turbines into a "virtual power plant," and peak shaving becomes power trading. If Williams could remotely activate thousands of microturbines on its customers' premises, the company could generate hundreds of megawatts for sale on the wholesale market. Houshmand says this could dramatically lower the cost of the microturbine, enticing companies like his own to bear a larger share: "Look at cell phones. A few years ago they were very expensive, and now service providers are giving them away.

Why? Because they're selling the service."

The notion of virtual power plants could also charm traditional utilities that, until now, have been lukewarm toward technologies that let consumers and businesses generate their own power. In the past, utilities erected barriers to distributed power, such as maintenance fees for emergency backup service. Ritchie Priddy, associate director for distributed energy at Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that utilities remain ambivalent about micropower. For example, many utilities now pay retail for surplus energy from solar panels or wind turbines-a trickle of energy that poses little competition. But the same utilities pay little or nothing for surplus power from microturbines and diesels, where the kilowatts could really add up. "Some utilities are embracing distributed generation, but quite frankly they do it on their terms," says Priddy, a former utility company manager.

Micropower advocates like Priddy want to convince power companies that the proliferation of micro power generators could aid their operations by helping to stabilize the grid.

There are some hopeful signs. Japanese utilities, for example, are subsidizing the development of residential fuel cells that heat water and churn out one kilowatt of electricity-nowhere near enough juice to power the household (a toaster alone consumes more than a kilowatt), but enough in aggregate to ease the strain on overloaded power lines. Virtual power plants could have a more dynamic effect on the grid: rather than asking consumers to turn off their equipment when power demand crests, imagine California's beleaguered grid controllers remotely activating thousands of microturbines and fuel cells to meet peak demand.

The communications equipment and power electronics to safely operate micropower units remotely is already here, and energy service firms have begun to test this virtual backup model using diesel generators. Their window of opportunity may be closing, however, as environmental regulators crack down on diesel pollution. Still, micropower enthusiasts hope these early experiments will clear the way for cleaner micro-

F

power technologies. "If fuel cells and microturbines come on heavy, the oppOliunity explodes," says Bill Saylor, chief technology officer at Encorp-a remote power control company in Windsor, Colorado, that is assembling one of the first virtual power plants.

The final element that will make micropower a killer app is scale. Gas-fired power plants have been shrinking since the early 1980s, when smaller factory-produced turbines began to replace the giant ones built on site; micropower could push that trend to the extreme. Capstone's 30-kilowatt unit now sells for about $27,000, but the company figures that if it can gear up for a manufacturing volume of 100,000 units per year, price could drop to $12,000. That works out to $400 per kilowatt of generating capacity, which is about what you would expect from gasfired power plants 10,000 times larger.

Fuel cells are a newer technology and have a longer way to go to reach economic parity: the first fuel cells will cost $2,500 to $5,000 per kilowatt. But the fuel cell industry has an ace up its sleeve: car-makers are expected to begin cranking out fuelcell cars by the thousands in 2003 or 2004. With the efficiencies that should accompany this mass-production, the cost of electricity from fuel cells should ultimately plummet to $100 to $300 per kilowatt.

At that point, micropower would begin to seize its most revolutionary opportunity: delivering electricity to the 1.8 billion people in the world who now have no access to centrally generated electricity. Ironically, many of the electrically deprived live in countries blessed with vast energy resources but lacking the capital needed to build a grid and distribute energy to their people. South African archbishop Desmond Tutu once noted that "one of the obscenities of Southern Africa is to see electric power lines strung across a rural landscape overshadowing communities where women spend most of their days walking kilometers to find firewood just to survive."

Micropower could end that disparity. In fact, one wholesaler Williams International is counting on to meet its ambitious microturbine sales targets is already installing its first units in China. The first application will be to provide premium power for an information technology-oriented industrial park in the southeastern city of ansha. But Williams's Mory Houshmand is confident that microturbines will filter out into the Chinese countryside, where extending the grid is costly and replacement parts for diesel generators rare. The microturbine will burn whatever fuel can be found. And with a little investment, China could find a bunch for free: only U.S. landfills release more methane than China's; and for coal mine gases, China is second to none.

Combining waste products with high technology to make electrical power: California, are you listening?

0 About the Author: Peter Fairley is a fi'eelance writer and editor on technology Columbia.

and environmental

issues

based

in Victoria,

British

Mustering Resources

continuedfi-om page 6

countries to study tactical, operational and strategic concepts in either country.

Before India's nuclear tests, U.S. Anny Rangers conducted a month-long coW'se for India's Special Forces and Air Force instructors in advanced commando techniques at the Parachute Regiment Centre at Agra. The four-man U.S. team instructed 60 Indian Special Forces personnel to infiltrate up to 30 kilometers behind enemy territory, 20 kilometers more than their penetration capability. They also taught paratroopers and air force pilots working closely with the parachute regiments in advanced High Altitude High Opening free fall techniques and, for the first time, pinpointing targets using lasers-a procedure that was effectively used during the recent Afghan campaign by U.S. Special Forces to bomb the Taliban.

The Indian and the U.S. navies conducted three rounds of Malabar maneuvers in the Arabian Sea-the last being in 1996. U.S. and Indian marine commandos also executed joint special operations exercises along the west coast in 1993 sharing tactics and strategy in the area of marine terrorism along Mirya Bay, around 500 kilometers south of Mumbai, shortly after the serial bombings in the city which killed more than 350 people.

Amphibious operations were the mainstay of the 20-day exercises which involved 45 SEALs (members of the U.S. Sea Air Land Forces).

Military equipment and technology were also beginning to trickle in. Until the May 1998 nuclear tests America's Texas Instruments (TI) supplied the Indian Air Force strap-on kits for laser guided bomb units (since 1997, Raytheon Company has acquired the defense systems and electronics business ofTI) while Day & Zimmermann of Philadelphia provided the entire equipment to make 125 mm, 155 mm shells, mines and detonators at the ordnance factory at Saintala in Bolangir, Orissa, Asia's largest munitions factory. The ordnance project was the first turnkey defense venture approved by the U.S. Government. It was also the first in which a U.S. ordnance manufacturer made 125 mm shells for Russian T-72 main battle tanks.

General Electric provided the GE 404 engine and Lockheed Martin the fly-bywire system for the first prototype of the Light Combat Aircraft. America's Honeywell supplied Hindustan Aeronautics Limited with the CTS 800 commercial turbo-shaft engines for the indigenously developed Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) and Singer Librascope provided the fire control system (FCS) for the Indian Navy's four German HDW Type 1500 SSK submarines.

India, however, has been wary of buying critical U.S. defense equipment as it was unsure of Washington's continued after-sales commitment and the supply of spares, especially in an emergency.

"America's resurrected strategic and military relationship with Pakistan is a disturbing factor for Indian planners which cannot be wished away," said a senior army officer, declining to be named.

CUlTently State Department clearance is required for U.S. arms manufacturers to export their wares to any outside nation.

U.S. defense suppliers can also approach the State Department for an "advisOly opinion" before opening negotiations with India to supply military hardware, subject to certain restrictions, however. But, in its eagerness to sell defense equipment to India, Washington wants to end all such limitations, an official declared.

"We have a lot to gain from each other," Lt. General S.S. Chahal, India's director general of military operations said. The coming together of the U.S., a technology superpower, and the Indian Anny, with its "exceptional experience" in combating terrorism, would be a "winning combination," he added.

India has also agreed to continue to provide the U.S. army access to its Counter Insurgency Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) at Virangte in the northeast. The CIJWS was established in 1970 and runs five-week-Iong courses for the Indian Army that are also attended by soldiers from neighboring countries. U.S. officers also attend various Indian defense estabIishments like the Staff College at Wellington in the south, tbe College of Combat at Mhow in Madhya Pradesh and Delhi's National Defence College where

officers of the rank of brigadier and its equivalent in the Navy and Air Force, spend a year attending courses and traveling the region.

The United States, however, wants access to the High Altitude Warfare School at Gulmarg and Sonamarg in Kashmir but has been stalled by Delhi, given the sensitivity of the vexatious Kashmir dispute. Washington has also expressed interest in availing of the servicing facilities at Mazgaon Dockyard Limited at Mumbai for its Seventh Fleet based in Japan.

After the Cold War years, U.S. naval doctrine has undergone a dramatic transformation. The doctrine of open-ocean war fighting at sea against Soviet naval and nuclear forces has given way to one of power projection and the employment of naval forces to influence events in the littoral regions of the world. "Littoral," however, continues to be nebulously defined as "areas adjacent to the oceans and seas within direct control of, and vulnerable to, the striking power of sea-based forces," a euphemism for the 1,500-ki lometer range of Tomahawk missiles. This strategic concept has been further expanded to encompass the employment of naval expeditionary forces and joint operation missions like the ones recently executed in Afghanistan and like the ones planned with the Indian Navy.

The 1998 U.S. missile strikes against terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan were carried out by warships of the U.S. Fifth Fleet operating from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. They clearly demonstrated the U.S. Navy's ability to exercise military power against littoral states deep inland as well as Washington's capability of successfully maintaining a forward deployment posture far from home base. These factors clearly constitute future trends in U.S. naval policy in the Indian Ocean and now are likely to include increasing interaction with the Indian Navy.

0 About the Author: Rahul Bedi is a Delhibased freelance writer on defense issues. He contributes to the Jane's Defence Weekly and The Daily Telegraph (UK.).

Consular Focus The Visa Interview: Be Prepared oyou need to go to the United States to attend a business meeting, negotiate a contract, or just to see old friends or relatives? Maybe the school year in the U.S. is rapidly approaching and it is time to start thinking about getting there? Obviously, the most carefully laid plans will come to naught if the traveler is unable to qualify for a visa to enter the United States. The purpose of this article, which will only briefly address the non-immigrant B-llB-2 visas and the F-I (or student) visa, is to give the applicant some idea as to what must be presented to the interviewing officer to qualify for the visa.

First of all, what does the non-immigrant visa do for you? It permits the traveler to apply for admission to the United States at the port of entry (poE), whether it be at New York City, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, or any other designated PoE. Remember that the visa represents an "application" for entry into the United States which must be obtained at a U.S. consulate before traveling. Actually the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officer at the PoE makes the final decision on whether the traveler can enter the U.S., under what conditions, and for what length of time. Although it is fair to say that the I S inspector will usually concur with the consular officer's visa decision and permit entry, INS has full authority to turn the traveler around if it appears he or she may not be in full compliance with U.S. immigration laws. When this occurs, it is usually because INS has additional information that was unavailable to the consular officer at the visa interview.

Which brings us to preparing for a non-immigrant visa interview. The B-IIB-2 is by far the most commonly sought non-immigrant visa. It is given to those going on a business trip or for training of short duration. The same visa category is used for those wishing to take the family to Disney World on vacation or just to see relatives. The legal requirements for qualifying are the same. The applicant must present convincing evidence that he or she intends to depart the United States upon completion of a temporary stay. It is important to bear in mind that U.S. law presumes that the applicant intends to immigrate. The burden of proof always remains with the applicant to demonstrate that the legal presumption that he is not returning does not apply to him. He must convince the consular officer of the intention to return.

How does the applicant meet this burden of proof? He generally does so by demonstrating strong economic and personal ties to India that will compel a return. Ownership of prop-

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erty, businesses, and family obligations are all taken into consideration. It is probably safe to say that historically most immigrants have sought new permanent homes for economic reasons. That being the case, the interviewing officer may focus principally on economic ties. Also, the officer must be satisfied that the applicant can afford the trip. So, it behooves the applicant to present all of his/her financial documents that support the intention to retum. Bank passbooks or monthly bank statements going back six months are particularly helpful. So too are credit cards. There is no specific bank balance or asset figure that the applicant must show, however. The applicant may present his property papers. An employment identification card or an employment letter, evidence that the applicant will return to a job, might also be helpful. If a student is applying as a general tourist, he or she may present a school letter and the most recent school transcript. Each case is reviewed individually and a decision made on the overall credentials of the appl icant.

The legal test for student visas is a little different. At the time of application, the student must demonstrate that it is her present intent to return upon the completion of her studies and give credible evidence that she will be able to pay for her education. At the interview, the applicant must present a completed 1-20 INS form that is issued by the school in the United States which has accepted the applicant and which she plans to attend. Among other things, the 1-20 gives the annual cost of attending the school.

The 1-20 does not mean that the applicant will get the visa.

The interviewing officer must first detetmine whether the applicant is a bona fide student by questioning the applicant about the school and why it was selected over others. The officer may ask about the student's plans in India upon completion of studies.

Obviously, the more specific and well-considered the reply, the more the intention to return will appear credible. Although failure to speak English at the college level is not a legal bar to a visa, the officer naturally assumes that a serious student will have English skills roughly at the level required to function in a college enviromnent in the U.S. Although the applicant may present TOEFL scores, the officer will make the detelmination by actually speaking to the applicant. And it is always a good idea to apply early to avoid the summer rush.

About the Author: Ray Baca is the deputy consul general at the Us. Embassy in New Delhi.

To register online, log on to usembassy.state.

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gov /posts/in I/wwwhareg.html

Enthusiast for a Key American Treasure few months ago, while enjoying a frothy ale at Swallow at the Hollow, NOl1hern Parkway and York Road, I was approached by a gentleman who spoke with an accent that I immediately recognized as Indian, but one that had been modified considerably by years of exposure to American English. He introduced himself as "Robbie," and, extracting folded papers from a pants pocket, he implored me to spread the word about a "hidden treasure."

"Many people do not know," he said, "that the original manuscript of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' by Francis Scott Key is in the Maryland Historical Society. Please tell people about this."

The Swallow's customers are an eclectic bunch whose conversations range from Orioles trivia to the recordings of Jussi Bjorling to the quality of asparagus at the farmers' market, so Robbie's interjection did not strike me as particularly unusual. But he was definitely more passionate than most about his point.

The papers he handed me contained enough information for a fifth-grade term paper on Key's poem, and Robbie spoke of the existence of the handwritten manuscript with the kind of enthusiasm most Swallowers reserve for discussions of the Ravens' defense.

Later, during another visit to the Swallow, I overheard Robbie talking up "The StarSpangled Banner" to another customer and handing out more of his home-made fact sheets. Perhaps it was the accent, suggestive of his bil1h in another nation, that made Robbie a little more intriguing than the average barroom proselytizer. I was curious about the gentleman and his passion for the poem that became the national anthem.

So I asked around and discovered that Robbie happens to be a security guard at the Maryland Historical Society.

I called him, and he agreed to meet again at the Swallow. He was painfully polite and determinedly deferential to the object of his crusade: Key's manuscript. That, he said, should be the subject of this column. (If a

A

photograph of Robbie accompanies this column, it will be owing more to a photographer's cajoling than to my efforts to get Robbie to pose.) It took some effol1 to get him to tell me about himself.

But he did, and this is what I learned: Born Rabindra "Robbie" Gupta in New Delhi 67 years ago, he came to the United States in 1960 to study city planning at Harvard. "I could not speak English at all," he said. "But in reading and writing in English I could compete with anyone." He worked as a janitor in Boston and took the subway to Cambridge each day. He received a master's from Harvard in 1962, then took a job with planning commission of Pittsburgh.

When he returned to India it was to help develop a master plan for Calcutta. But, surrounded there by human misery, Gupta felt irrelevant. It seemed pointless to try to create a master plan in the midst of such overwhelming povet1y.

So he found ajob in Canada, as a city planner for Toronto.

The work was rewarding, but Gupta felt out of place there. As soon as immigration rules loosened, Gupta entered the United States again. Though he arrived in 1968, a time of great social and political strife as well as severe racial tensions, Gupta felt accepted.

"I felt I had the same standing as anyone else," he said. "I felt, 'I am what I am,' and as good as anyone else."

He sought employment with the city of Baltimore because, after the spring riots of 1968, he did not anticipate a lot of competition for a job here. As things turned out, Gupta came at a perfect time. The Inner Harbor was nothing but "empty piers, old railroad tracks, a dark and dingy, frightening place with winos," hardly a destination for tourists. But prime for redevelopment.

Larry Reich, the late city planning commissioner, drove him around town and convinced Gupta that he would have a busy and exciting career in Baltimore.

It was also Reich who pointed Gupta toward historical sites, and the Key manu-

script at the Maryland Historical Society.

Gupta saw it for the first time a few months after moving to Baltimore.

"It really struck me," Gupta said. "1 read it carefully-I still read p311s of it everydayand I believe it gives a glimpse into the heal1 and soul of America. I think of the young man, the young lawyer, who wrote it and I wonder what did he see, what was he thinking when he wrote, 'the land of the free, the home of the brave'? It speaks to America's strength and its will. It is like a second Declaration of Independence. " And now, after a long career in city planing, Gupta, who became an American citizen in 1974, works at the historical society. At every oppot1unity he tells visitors to make sure they stop on the second floor and take a look at Key's hand-written poem. (He's been finding a lot of takers among the bored husbands of women visiting the society's current exhibition of quilts.)

More Americans probably know the whereabouts of the flag that inspired Key's poem during the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British navy in 1814. (It's being restored at the Smithsonian.) But Gupta believes Key's poem, written just after the bombardment, is what made the flag so legendary.

He is cenainly passionate about all of this.

"Some people say, 'Big deal,' or 'So what' when I tell them we have the original manuscript of "The Star-Spangled Banner,' " he said. "But this is an icon of one of the greatest civilizations in history. People know about Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the Statue of Liberty in New York, but have you seen the poem that became America's national anthem?"

No? Then go to the Maryland Historical Society some day. Ask for Robbie GuptashOl1 man, glasses, accent, folded fact sheets in his pocket, and velY, very proud.

D About the Author: Dan Rodricks is a columnist for The Baltimore Sun.

hen he first tried to shoot a picture of the devastated World Trade Center after returning to New York City a few days after the Twin Towers fell, Joel Meyerowitz promptly was told by a woman police officer, "Hey, no photographs, this is a crime scene." Even journalists had restricted access. "I realized there was no access and no photographs allowed ... and that meant no history," Meyerowitz recalls. In exchange for offering free photographs, the Museum of the City of New York helped him get into the site and, eventually, have unlimited access sanctioned by the Mayor's office.

The exhibition travels to eight cities in India-Delhi, Kolkata, Mwnbai, Pune, Chennai, Jamshedpur, Mysore and

Ranchi. It features 27 color photographs from a collection of more than 5,000 images taken by Meyerowitz. It will visit 60 countries in all. Most of the pictures were taken with an oldfashioned wooden view camera which uses big sheets of film, "because it gives more information, brings the subject to the viewer in a different way. It's more real, more immediate," the photographer explains. New York City Museum director Robert Macdonald was in New Delhi for the April inauguration of the show. Many of the photos are of firemen, rescue workers and ordinary citizens coping with the tragedy.

MacDonald and Meyerowitz agree that besides showing the destruction that was wrought, the main point of the exhibition is to show the resilience of the human spirit.

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