The U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige announced in May names of 137 high school seniors, including nine students of Indian origin, as 2003 Presidential Scholars. These young scholars were selected out of 2,600 nominations across the country on the basis of their academic achievements, essays and transcripts, proven leadership qualities, community service and commitment to high ideals. The Presidential Scholars program was established in 1964 to honor most distinguished graduating high school seniors. The nine Presidential Scholars of Indian origin this year are:
Hari Prabhakar
is a student at S1, Mark's School in Dallas, Texas. He won second place in the 2002 St. Lawrence University Young Writers contest in fiction. A national-level merit scholar and an effective public speaker, he enjoys singing bhajans. He won numerous awards in math and science competitions and essay, short story and fiction writing contests.
UmaSundan Tadepalli, an Indian
classical dancer, graduated from Charles E. Jordan High School, Durham, North Carolina. She honed her Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dance skills at Laasya School of Music and Dance and Sanskrithi School of Dance and Music in Naperville, Illinois. She paJ.1icipated in the 2002 World Arts Festival held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Ravi Chanderraj Kanhik Sridharan is a senior from Nashua High School North, New Hampshire. He has been selected for Columbia University's C.P. Davis Scholars program. He is president of school's chapters ofJunior Statesman of America and National Honor Society and a member of the student senate.
Nigar Shaikh is a senior from Lawrence High School, New York. She scored a perfect 1,600 in Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). She is president of the Student Government Association of her school and Distribution Education Club of America chapter. She is the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper.
Parmita Dalal
is a senior at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School in Lenexa, Kansas. The only student from the Johnson County area selected for this honor, she is president of the math and science Olympiad clubs.
is from the Meadows School in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was president of the senior class and captain of the football team, which last year won many trophies. He was Student of the Year several times in various subjects.
Ravi U. Sharma
is a senior of Jenk High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A valedictorian and a national merit scholar, he bagged the first position in the Mathfax competition last year. He is president of the National Forensic League.
Pia Shivdasani is a senior at Wood River High School in Sun Valley, Idaho. She is recipient of numerous awards, including Idaho Scholar for 2002 and Outstanding Student of the Year in many subjects and is involved in ballet and drama.
Neel B.Srikishen is a senior at Bob Jones High School in Madison, Alabama. He plans to study bioengineering and medicine. A Boy Scout for the past seven years, he works as a volunteer with Huntsville Hospital's rescue mission. He is the first violinist in the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra in Huntsville.
SPAN
Digital Railroad By Don Phillips
Publisher
Riding High in Delhi
Michael H. Anderson
By A. Venkata Narayana
Editor-in-Chief David Kennedy
StridesToward a Cleaner City
Editor
By Dipesh Satapathy
Lea Terhune
Associate Editor
To Fly!
A. Venkata Narayana
By James Tobin
Hindi Editor
Stars & Stripes for Indian Americans
Govind Singh
By Ashish Kumar Sen
Urdu Editor
Serving His Country
AnjumNaim
An Interview with Captain Ravi Chaudhary
Dropping Anchor in Kochi
Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy
Editorial Assistant
Think Tanks & U.S. Foreign Policy
K. Muthulnunar
By Richard N. Haass
Art Director
Can Economic Diplomacy in South Asia Work?
Hemanr Bhatnagar
Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi
Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal
Business Manager
By Ashish Kumar Sen
Muscle & Magic: Snowy Owls Text by Lynne Warren Photographs by Daniel J Cox
R. Narayan
Research Services
The New Economy Was a Myth, Right? Wrong.
AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center
By James Surowiecki Front cover: American Justin McCarthy faces his Shri Ram Bharatiya Kala Kendra dance troupe during a performance at Kamani Auditorium in New Delhi in May 2003. The piece is "Raas Leela." McCarthy teaches at the Kendra and maintains his own performance schedule-not only dance but western piano. Photograph by Avinash Pasricha. See story on page 40.
An American Gharana? By Reena Shah Harris Wofford: An American Gandhian
"1 Favor Living Dangerously ... " By Lea Terhune
Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manu-
scripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted. Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 23316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Ajanta Offset & Packagings Ltd., 95-8 Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi 110052. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission ofthe Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.
Out of the Deep By Michael Kimmelman
The Ancients Among Us By Charles W Petit
What Is Nature Worth? -Part I By Edward 0. Wilson Spotlight
Pulitzer for Geeta Anand By Ashish Kumar Sen
A LETTER
W
FROM
e are used to seeing members of "think tanks" holding forth on a wide range of topics every day on television news. Some of the experts are conservatives, some liberals, some in-between. What many people may not know is how important think tanks have become in the formation of U.S. Government policy. This issue of SPAN offers two articles about think tanks. The first, by seasoned analyst and former diplomat Richard N. Haass, gives a brief history of how think tanks developed in America and how they are used as resources. The second shows think tanks in action, as Ashish Kumar Sen reports on a panel discussion among a few well-known experts hosted by the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. The subject under scrutiny was economic diplomacy in South Asia. Another angle on economics is explored in "The New Economy Was a Myth, Right? Wrong," by James Surowiecki, a positive take on the fallout of the boom-and-bust of the 1990s. He predicts that fundamentals of the New Economy will endure and grow. Our cover story, "An American Gharana?" strikes a lighter chord as Fulbright scholar and dance student Reena Shah writes about American students of Indian dance. Indian classical dance has long attracted American disciples. Now that many authentic Indian dance gurus have established themselves in the U.S. to cater to the swelling Diaspora, interest has grown appreciably. But how will the traditional disciplines be translated across the seas? Transportation is an issue everywhere, whether it concerns goods or people. "Digital Railroad," by Don Phillips, tells of new advances in technology that are being introduced into U.S. railways. A high tech transformation is also on the rails in Delhi. American management expertise is part of the global team developing the New Delhi Metro. See "Riding High in Delhi" by A. Venkata Narayana. And in "Strides Toward a Cleaner City," Dipesh Satapathy relates how a switch to CNG-fueled vehicles helped India's capital city win a U.S. clean air award. Two kinds of flyers are showcased in this issue: man and bird. The upcoming 100th anniversary of the
THE
PUBLISHER
first motorized, manned flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, makes excerpts from James Tobin's new book about the Wright brothers timely reading. "To Fly!" tracks events on the days leading up to that historic flight in December 1903. "Muscle & Magic: Snmvy Owls," by Lynne Warren, featuring images by wildlife photographer Daniel J. Cox, zooms in on the Wright brothers' chief source of inspiration: birds. The snO\"')' owl is seen in its habitat in remote Alaska. "Stars & Stripes for Indian Americans," by Ashish Sen, profiles a few more fliers-along with some sailors and marines. All are Indian Americans in active service in the U.S. armed forces. One such son of India, turned U.S. naval officer, just visited India in his capacity as commander of the navy frigate, the USS Gmy. Commander Tito P Dua made a three-day port stop in Kochi in June as part of the growing military cooperation between India and the United States. Harris Wofford-Gandhian, co-organizer of the Peace Corps, civil rights activist who worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther IGng, Jr., former U.S. senator-is still going strong. He is now co-chair of America's Promise: Alliance for Youth, an organization that promotes citizen service. He spoke to Lea Terhune about his long relationship with India, his eventful life in public service and his current work. Nature's worth is something that is often not appreciated until species and habitat are lost. In the two-part "What Is Nature Worth?" Edward O. Wilson makes a powerful case for preserving the biosphere, our living natural environment. An example of nature's boon is the subject of "The Ancients Among Us," by Charles W Petit. Ancient trees in the U.S.some of which are as many as 4,600 years old-are studied to learn about the history of climate change and along the way solve some mysteries. These stories and more are offered for your reading pleasure. We hope you enjoy the monsoon and our monsoon issue.
oone had intended to make railroad history on May 5, 1998. It's just that there was a sholiage of locomotives in Phippsburg, Colorado. Instead of the usual five locomotives, only four were available to pull a 108-car coal train up Union Pacific Railroad's steep Toponas grade on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. What followed is, among locomotive builders, legendary. The locomotives were brand new General Electric behemoths with a twist: their traction motors operated on alternating current rather than direct current. Climbing the Toponas grade that day, the trains slowed to a barely perceptible six meters per minute. No self-respecting engineer would have tried such a foolhardy trick with conventional direct-current motors: wheels would have slipped, the train would have stalled, and the motors themselves would have been fried like an egg. But none of those things happened. Indeed, later investigation showed that the locomotives had been producing more pulling power than was thought possible at that speed. This feat of strength initiated a radical transformation of railroading-a revolution that stems directly from advances in information technology. Technologically speaking, it is difficult to find anything in railroading that has not changed in the last decade. Dozens of microprocessors in today's diesel locomotives run almost all of their systems, from fuel feed to cab air conditioning. Pole lines that once flashed past the windows of speeding passenger trains are disappearing in favor of microwave or fiber-optic communications. Experimental new dispatching and control systems may soon tell engineers if they are using the most fuel-efficient throttle settings. Say "trains" to most people and they think about the passenger variety. But in the United States, the railroads with the greatest economic impact are those that transport cargo. Railroads haul 25 percent of U.S. freight. They are easily the most efficient way to move coal, grain and bulk chemicals. But the railroad compa-
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Tracking trains digitally at Union Pacifics Harriman Dispatching Center in Omaha, Nebraska. Union Pacific pioneered development and implementation of computer systems for train management. Dispatchers at the Omaha hub control freight movement on nearly 27,000 kilometers of Union Pacific tracks in 23 states. They use map-based displays that receive electronic signals .Fom tracks ide sensors. Small electronic transponders are embedded in different types of labels and are used in various applications as tracking railroad cars, luggage and toll road usage.
nies have long had a sort of love-hate relationship with cuttingedge technology. They only abandoned coal-fired steam locomotives, for example, when General Motors developed the diesel-electric engine and gave demonstrations to railroads around the country in the 1940s. And even then, many railroads stuck with steam for years. However, over the last decade, railroads have been engaged in their own version of an information revolution. The combination of computers and wireless systems gives railroads greater customer service capacity and better dispatching and cost controlsas well as dispensing with armies of clerks. Charles Dettmann, executive vice president for operations, research and technology at the Washington, D.C.-based Association of American Railroads, argues that railroads' competitiveness-perhaps even their existence--depends on their use of information technologies. "Railroad companies are a very hard sell. 1am usually in the po-
Incoming and outgoing: Loaded cars exit silo as empty cars queue up to be filled at Black Thunder mine in f.1Iyomings Powder River basin. One of the worlds most productive coal mines, Black Thunder employs digital technology to ship about 65 million tons of clean-burning, low-sulfur coal each year.
sition of pushing them farther than they want to go," says Carl D. Martland, senior research associate at MIT's Center for Transportation Studies and a consultant to the railroad industry. "They insist on knowing there's going to be a productivity benefit and will only go as far as that benefit takes them. They have done a very good job of saying, 'Does this technology do me any good?'" MODEL
RAILROAD
Just two decades ago, eastern Wyoming's Powder River basin was a barren, treeless outback with few people and no industry. But the region had something that as of the early 1990s the United States suddenly needed: lots of low-sulfur, relatively clean-burning coal. In fact, a thick seam of coal stretches under the eastern third of Wyoming. And the only practical way to move so much coal out ofthe remote Powder River basin is by rail. The two railroads that serve the area-Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe-have spent more than $5 billion to build the biggest, most modern industrial rail system in the country. Driven by tightening air pollution regulations, demand for low-sulfur coal is now booming beyond anyone's wildest dreams; one section ofthe line has become the first stretch of rail in history to support more than one billion kilograms a day. And because the railroad and the mines are new, the Powder River operation provides a clean slate for the creation of the most efficient operation possible-without the burden of older infrastructure and the outdated technology that railroads have often kept running. Nowhere to be seen are the workers who once labo-
riously copied down all car numbers and faxed them to headquarters. As each empty train enters the mine, and as each loaded train leaves, scanners read automatic-identification tags, recording each car number and reporting the data to Union Pacific's Harriman Dispatching Center in Omaha, Nebraska. The Harriman Center is the heart of an ambitious effort to direct an entire railroad system from a central location-to dispatch trains using a computer program that chooses the points at which they meet or pass. The Harriman system controls traffic on more than '" 27,000 kilometers of Union Pacific ~ track in 23 states-though human dis!patchers can intervene at any time if ~ they disagree with the computer's 8 choices-and it allows for the coordination, days ahead oftime, of movements over the entire railroad rather than on a single line or division. Empty trains enter the Powder River basin's coal-containing silo under the railroad equivalent of cruise control. Trains creep in at around 1.5 kilometers per hour, speeds that only the most skillful engineer could match by hand. Computerized loading chutes fill each car with the planned weight of coal-l 00,000 kilograms, accurate to within about 0.2 percent. A train can be filled with coal in 45 minutes, or about twice as fast as previous automatic loaders could manage. As coal trains pull out of the Powder River fields, the locomotives constantly "talk" to Union Pacific headquarters in Omaha. The stream of data gives a running narrative of the train's condition, as rep0l1ed by an array of sensors that monitor, for instance, the oil pressure, operating temperature, horsepower output and the rate offuel usage. In the old days (say, the early 1990s), engineers knew that something was amiss with a locomotive only when it was already in serious trouble. That's when alarm bells would ring, or the engine would suddenly shut down or start smoking. Union Pacific is outfitting its entire fleet with onboard computers that constantly track the locomotives' location and health, then report this information to a maintenance desk at headquarters. Once the fleet is equipped, a given locomotive will signal the Omaha center that it has a problem long before it tells the engineer. The sensors should usually catch problems hundreds or thousands of kilometers before they become severe enough for
the engineer to care. Information that an engine is using IS percent more fuel than normal, for instance, is oflittle concern to the engineer but of great interest to the maintenance technicians monitoring the locomotive. Installing computers on locomotives is not exactly like putting them in the controlled environment of an office. Dirt, vibration and extremes of hot and cold are part of everyday railroad operation. Union Pacific experimented for months with various types of shock mountings and vibration-controlling material. According to chief teclmology officer Lyden Tennison, lessons were drawn from another enterprise that knows a thing or two about adapting high-tech equipment for inhospitable conditions. "We learned a lot from the military," he says. Locomotive technicians were at first amused, for instance, to learn that the military kept processors plugged into their sockets under constant vibration by tying them down with dental floss. Amused, but impressed: Union Pacific adopted this solution. AC/DC
Throughout the diesel age, locomotives worked according to a simple principle: a diesel engine turned a generator that produced alternating electrical current, which was then convetied to direct current to run the traction motors that drove the axles. The leap forward that made possible that pull up the Toponas grade depended on a fundamental shift in technology during the ] 990s from DC motors to AC motors. This change has been enabled by the availability of fast, inexpensive microprocessors. Power for both a DC locomotive and an AC locomotive starts its path to the wheels in the same way. In both types, a diesel engine turns a generator that produces AC power, which is then converted to DC. (The starting AC power, at a constant 60 cycles per second, could run the locomotive at only one speed.) Here, though, the technologies diverge. In a DC locomotive, the DC power goes directly to motors that turn the wheels. In an AC motor, the direct current passes through a series of computer-controlled components called inverters, which "chop" the DC power into AC power. This AC is in turn fed to the motors. Computer chips make AC motors practical by regulating the flow of power with a precision impossible by any other means. The chips monitor and control the DC entering the inverters and make sure that they deliver the proper amount of AC to the traction motors. This is no small feat: each inverter may require as many as 500 on-off commands per second to regulate the AC flow. And while 500 commands per second may seem unimpressive in a day of gigaheltz chips, the proper comparison is Hard at work at Harriman: Providing uninterrupted service requires a fill! complement of IT professionals to manage railcar scheduling, shipment tracking, customer service and train dispatching.
not with other computers but with human beings. Imagine a train engineer trying to make 500 changes in throttle position every second. AC motors are more robust than their DC cousins. They've been put through brutal tests that demanded maximum possible power production, sometimes for days on end. Those tests went far beyond anything the worst railroad environment could produce, and the motors never came close to overheating, according to Michael E. Iden, Union Pacific's general director of car and locomotive engineering. As long as the equipment is operating properly, AC motors "really should never burn out," Iden says. Many railroads are even usingAC locomotive power-instead of air brakes-to hold trains stationary on heavy grades, Iden says. This technique, which avoids the time-consuming process of pumping off air brakes, would fry a DC motor in minutes. Beyond their ability to pull heavier loads, AC motors improve overall efficiency. Each locomotive wheel makes contact with an area of rail no larger than a nickel. The percentage of weight on that wheel that is converted into pulling power is called "adhesion." While the best DC motors can muster an adhesion of about 30 percent, AC locomotives take advantage of precise computer control of the traction motors to achieve adhesion averaging 34 to 38 percent; each percentage point gain in adhesion provides the pulling power for five additional fuJly loaded coal cars. MAKING
TRACKS
Trains must run on tracks, of course. And once laid, the rail and ties must be maintained and inspected. Information technology is playing a transforming role in this traditionally labor-intensive affair. The last two or three years, for instance, have seen the advent of rail alignment systems that use lasers to gauge distance and direction. Computers then figure a track's correct curvature and angle of elevation and feed the information to machines that put the rail and ties into place. "The important thing is the ability to measure track geometry rapidly, without depending on human sight," says Louis Cerny, an independent railroad consultant in Gaithersburg, Maryland. One particularly time-consuming rail maintenance job--spreading rock ballast between tracks-is also getting a shot of adrenal ine. In June 200], Herzog Contracting-a railroad construction company based in St. Joseph, Montana-delivered a new ballast train to
The sun may set, but work goes on at Black Thunder mine, enabled by computercontrolled locomotives. Comings and goings are constantly monitored.
Union Pacific. Unloading 60 cars of ballast normally takes at least two days; Herzog's train does the job in 30 minutes. As the train chugs along, computers guided by global positioning system satellites decide which car doors to open and how much ballast to pump out (even interrupting the flow at road crossings). Similar advances are aiding track inspection. This job was once the domain of a lone trackwalker, carrying a few heavy tools, who walked along the track to see if it was shifting, or if spikes were pulling out or rail joints flexing too much. The ultimate in automated track inspection is a system delivered in 1999 to the Federal Railroad Administration by Plasser American, a maker of inspection cars, and Ensco, a manufacturer of railroad inspection hardware and software. This self-propelled mass of sensors and computers, rolling along at up to 145 kilometers per hour, generates readouts of track condition and dispatches crews to the locations of any problems. Most of the major freight railroads in the United States are either using such cars now or have ordered them. Ensco has also developed remote monitoring systems that can be fitted to any railcar or locomotive. The systems, now in service for Amtrak and several commuter railroads, continually assess track anomalies, ride quality and a locomotive's mechanical health. When a problem appears, the monitors send an alarm via satellite or terrestrial wireless link. Detailed information on the problem and its exact location can then be accessed through the Internet. Other new inspection equipment uses computerized vision to look for defects in air brake hoses between cars. Pulsing lasers, fanning out in a pie-slice shape, can accurately produce an image of the wheel as it rolls-registering surface defects better than an experienced inspector can when the wheel is standing still. All of these detectors are designed to report trouble spots to the train crew or the dispatcher before a small problem grows and causes a wreck. DOWN
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LINE
With the cost of technology constantly falling, railroads may be poised for another round of automation. The first candidate is an idea railroads have so far shunned called positive train control. The computers that control a locomotive's throttle and brake would be equipped with global positioning system receivers that tell them precisely where they are and how fast they're going. The modification was originally proposed as a safety enhancement, to prevent collisions: if an engineer sped past a stop signal, the system would signal the computer to slow or stop the train. That application failed to win over the railroads, though. "It would have cost a lot of money for a minimal safety improvement and so wasn't cost effective," explains MIT's Martland.
But many railroad officials are beginning to understand the business case for positive train control: the same technology provides continual updates on the location of every locomotive on the rai lroad. Advanced tracking and control technology is already in place on high-speed passenger trains such as those on the Boston to Washington line. The technology is also under development at a number of companies, most prominently Pittsburghbased Union Switch and Signal. Combining satellites with computers to govern a train's speed is only one step toward completely computer-automated operation. Subways routinely operate this way; the driver goes along for the ride. But a freight train is not as simple as a subway. A long train may be climbing one grade and descending another at the same time, for example. And every freight train has its own braking characteristics, which an engineer must quickly master; mishandling a train can cause serious damage, like tom couplers and perhaps even derailments. Some railroads, however, are experimenting with computers that can learn a train's characteristics as fast as an engineer can. For example, computers have taken control of heavy ore trains in Minnesota, operating efficiently and stopping smoothly at red signals. The next logical step is fully automatic operation, with an engineer on board only as a monitor. While the technology to implement this largely exists, other factors stand as barriers. The hefty up-front costs, for example, discourage railroads from installing new systems that don't provide an obvious bottom-line benefit. Safety is another concern; automated control systems must be proved extremely reliable before they can be trusted to replace human operators, and it is not until such a substitution is possible that the technology has much of an economic payback. Computerization has already made it possible for railroads to operate with fewer people. The newest developments represent an assault on the jobs of the two most important people who run a train: the engineer and the conductor. And deployment requires renegotiating contracts with labor unions representing workers whom new systems might displace. It is looking as if the long cl imb up the Toponas grade is just the beginning of an accelerating journey into a computer-automated future. Says Union Pacific's (den, "We're just starting to tap into the benefits of technology." 0 About the Author: Don Phillips is a financial staff writer covering national transportation with the Washington Post.
The long cherished dream of Delhiites, the Delhi Metro, is being realized with the help of a host of international contractors, including Parsons Brinckerhoff, and their Indian counterparts.
hile inaugurating the 24-kilometer-long Barakhamba Road-Dwaraka metro line No. 3 in the capital on June 4, Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani chose to emphasize how synergy between the central and the state governments has made Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) a model for the entire country. As a result of this, he said, cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Ahmedabad are keen to have metros. They are now relying on DMRC for guidance. The synergy is also evident among DMRC's thousands of planners, architects, engineers and builders. Working
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as a team for this gigantic, Rs. 106billion infrastructure project are a number of multinational civil engineering corporations from Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. To bid contracts, these corporations were required to pair up with Indian companies. "One ofthe preconditions for any multinational company to bid a Delhi Metro project is it should have an Indian partner," says Anuj Dayal, chief public relations officer ofDMRC. This element brought togetherness between the Indian and foreign partners which helped the metro present an authentic Delhi feel, argue DMRC officials. Even though American multina-
tional companies have failed to win a major construction or systems contract, DMRC honored Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) Asia, a subsidiary of New York Citybased PB International, by appointing the firm as general engineering consultants. PB Asia is responsible for the overall management and supervision of the architectural design of stations, track, parking facilities, transit centers and systems, including traction power, communications and fare collection. "One of the reasons for having consultants like Parsons Brinckerhoff Asia is to ensure that DMRC
in the world, is our natural choice as consultants," Dayal says. PB International, which has more than 9,500 professional and administrative workforce on board and 200 branch offices worldwide, is America's number one civil engineering firm. It has acquired multidisciplinary capabilities in all phases of project delivery, from planning and design through construction management and operations. PB has planned, designed and managed the construction of more miles of rail and transit systems than any other firm. During the current phase of activity with DMRC, PB Asia translates cl ient needs into a feasible design and construction plan and identifies and screens local companies and suppliers. "Our primary challenge was to meet the deadlines. DMRC Managing Director E. Sreedharan is an outstanding person and he sets goals that are hard to reach. We have to coordinate very carefully among contractors, both men and material, on time. We have to acquire all certifications that are necessary for running the metro. Through teamwork we have been able to meet the challenges. We worked very well as an integrated team," says Delhi-based John D. Triplett, deputy project director of PB Asia. a: "The New Delhi office has been estab~ lished to provide a base for develcping our ~ involvement in submban metro. It will beal j; come the focus of om enterprise in this deÂŤ ~ veloping market, utilizing all our special skills and knowledge from all areas of the Top: A worker busy at the construction site business. It will be multidisciplined. We have of an elevated railroad. Above left: Delhi the capability to provide today's solutions for Metro Managing Director E. Sreedharan, tomon'ow's problems," says Triplett. known for keeping a disciplined staff. PB Asia is working with DMRC and Above: John D. Triplett, deputy project its contractors on a plethora of small dedirector of Parson Brinckerhoff Asia, tails that will help make the metro rail engineering consultants of Delhi Metro. journey smooth and safe. It supervises and monitors the work of more than a dozen maintains international standards. We contractors who have been working on would like to build the best metro but various corridors. The design and construction of -civil works and ventilation we are not very familiar with the best technology available in the world. PB and air conditioning contracts have been International, which has experience in awarded to Kumagai Gumi Company, Shimizu Corporation, Itochu Corporation, every kind of rail and mass transit project
A state-of-the-art tunnel boring machine used by the Delhi Metro. Huge and robust, this machine uses trenchless technology to bore tunnels between two points without digging the entire route. Earth and rocks are instantly pulled out of the tunnel using big conveyors.
all Japanese companies; Skansaka International Civil Engineering, Sweden; Dyckerhoff & Widmann, Germany; Samsung Corporation, Korea; and IRCON International, Hindustan Construction Company, Larsen & Toubro, Indian companies. PB closely monitors construction work by these companies and informs them if any defects are found. The rolling stock contracts were given to ROTEM, Korea, and Mitsubishi Corporation and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Japan. Four international giants working on this project-Alstom Transport, India; Alstom Transport, France; Alcatel Portugal; and Sumitomo Corporation, Japan-get suggestion and feedback from PB and DMRC. Traction power, power distribution and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are being installed by India's IRCON International and two Spanish companies, Corba and ELIOP. The automatic fare collection system is being set up by Thales Company of France. SCADA systems have also been contracted to ABB Ltd. and India's Best & Crompton Engineering. Track work went to IRCON International and MVM Rail, Australia. PB International provides specialized services for virtually every component of rail and transit systems, including track work, traction power supply, overhead and third rail contact systems and operations. It was a responsible contractor of New-York subway, which was built more than a hundred years ago. PB has worked
on many of the world's great transit systems and has been involved in virtually every major rail system in the United States. It was instrumental in the renaissance of rail transit in the United States. PB International was involved in building San Francisco's BART and Atlanta's MARTA systems, and it continues to play a key role in the extension of those systems. Currently, PB is engaged in projects such as the Cairo Metro, Salt Lake City's light rail system, Tren Urbano light rail transit system in San Juan and Los Angeles Metro Rail. By using the world's best technology, PB Asia has been able to merge the various state-of-the-art systems which ensure safe and smooth travel on metro rail lines. PB Asia has handed over the maintenance work of the first section of Line leight-kilometer stretch from Shahdara to Tees Hazari-to DMRC's operation's department. This section was commissioned by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee last December. PB is currently helping systems and communications installations for the II-kilometer-long underground Secretariat to section of Line 2-Central Delhi University. "We are here as general consultants, and my role is coordination of civil works and the systems work, from tendering to the installation test and commissioning. Once commissioned we hand over to DMRC's operating department," says Triplett. The first phase ofDMRC, consisting of three lines and measuring 62 kilometers,
is to be completed in September 2005. All the agencies working on the project have tight schedules. They finished one line on time, and have commissioned a palt of this line for public commuting as per timetable. With energetic Managing Director Sreedharan at the helm of affairs who motivates his staff and the contractors, DMRC is expected to meet the challenge and the schedule. Since the metro project has won acclaim from within the country and abroad, DMRC now plans to expand its operations and help fulfill the dream of efficient rapid transit in other cities. It acts as a nodal agency for metro rail projects of Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. It has already submitted detailed project reports for metro systems in these cities, and if everything goes to plan, projects in Hyderabad and Bangalore are likely to get under way by January 2004. Speculation is rife that general consultants like PB Asia will be partners in these metro projects as well. A classic example of a fast-paced, large-scale techno-intensive project being undertaken through foreign collaboration under local supervision, Delhi Metro aims at reducing traffic snarls and air pollution for about 2.8 million commuters daily by 2005. Chief Minister Shiela Dikshit has rightly summed up its impact: "In the years to come, the metro rail is going to change not only the face of Delhi and its transport system, but also the capital's work culture." 0
Delhi bags he
u.s. award for its eNG initiative
Delhi Government has initiated several measures to reduce pollution levels in the city and one such program is major success: conversion of public transport vehicles from diesel to compressed natural gas (CNG), a non-polluting fuel. These vehicles have indeed turned environment friendly and the air is cleaner, with the suffocating fumes from automobiles significantly reduced. ' Delhi's efforts to curb air pollution and support alternative fuel initiatives received recognition this May when the city was awarded the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) first Clean Cities International Partner of the Year award. Delhi bagged the award, according to the DoE, for its initiatives "to build a progressive and successful CNG program that the world can look to with pride." "This award is being presented in conjunction with the U.S Clean Cities National Partner awards and represents our true appreciation for the work the city of Delhi has done to fruition a multi-stakeholder, progressive and successful CNG transport program," wrote Richard F. Moorer, DoE's deputy assistant secretary, technology development, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, in a letter to Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. "For Delhi, the change has meant that you can jog, walk and run without having to put up with this eternal smell of diesel, sulphur and petrol," said Delhi's Chief Secretary Shailaja Chandra at the Ninth National Clean Cities Conference and Exposition in Palm Springs, California, where she received the award on behalf of Delhi state from DoE director Tom Gross on May 21. "The award gave us an opportunity to look back on how we actually achieved what was a huge and daunting task," she said later. Modeled after DoE's domestic Clean Cities Program, Clean Cities International (CCI) is expanding the successful U.S. program to assist other interested countries in developing public-private sector partnerships in alternative fuel vehicles (AFV) market. The Clean Cities Program fosters the development of AFV markets through partnerships among federal, state and local governments; fuel suppliers; vehicle fleet operators; and private sector manufacturers. During President Bill Clinton's visit to India in 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh issued ajoint statement on energy and environment. As a result of that the DoE sent a seven-member delegation to India to discuss the development of cooperative programs to deploy clean energy technologies. One area included the use of alternative fuels in the transportation sector. Vehicles account for 70 percent of emissions in India and constitute the country's fastest growing emission source, according to CCI. Vehicle emissions have increased by eight
times in the past 20 years compared to a fourfold increase for industry emissions. India is the world's fifth largest emitter of carbon, largely because it uses low-quality domestic coal in inefficient power plants to produce electricity. Even so, the per capita carbon emissions in India are about one-fourth of the world average and 22 times less than the U.S. national average. About 66,000 CNG vehicles, including 9,000 buses and 53,000 taxis and three-wheelers ply on roads in Delhi, which has the world's largest CNG fleet. The conversion program was the result of Supreme Court's 1998 proactive ruling mandating the conversion of the entire Delhi bus fleet to CNG. But CNG use was kicked off a decade ago in an experimental program initi-
ated by the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL) in 1992, whereby the gas was made available in Delhi, Mumbai and Vadodara. The supplies of CNG in Mumbai and Delhi are now managed by two joint ventures: the Mahanagar Gas Nigam Limited and the Indraprastha Gas Limited respectively. As a result of the efforts, carbon monoxide concentration in Delhi's air has been reduced by 32 percent and sulphur dioxide by 39 percent in the last five years. The U.S. Energy Department started the program in 1995 for its own cities and later extended it to other countries. India is one of the ten members in the initiative, some others being Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and the Philippines. According to the Clean Cities Coalition, the success of the program in Delhi "is extremely important because other Indian cities may be asked to comply with tough emission regulations and will look to New Delhi as a model." D
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One hundred years ago this winter two eccentric brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, became the first men to fly. Their meticulous design and attention to detail created the aerodynamic underpinnings still utilized in aviation today.
(CrTf look back now) and it)s so obvious that December 17) 1903) was the date flight happened. It wasn)t so obvious back thenÂť))says] ames TObin)author of To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight, published this April. ((The Wrights were just two people) really) among a large number of tinkerers) scientists and adventurers around the world who were fascinated by the problem offlight.Âť) At the time) the brothers) claim that they had flown 260 meters in 59 seconds that chilly day at Kitty Hawk was merely one of many reported attempts tofly. It wasn)t until Wilbur)s historic 1909 flight over Manhattan that the world finally understood what the pair had achieved six years before:
ley) who held the office from 1887 to piloted flight in a powered airplane. The fierce rivalry to befirst in the air 1906. Since 1886) Langley, then 52) had included far more prominent) better been consumed with the raw science of funded men than the Might brothers) aeronautics. By 1899) with a large enbachelors who owned a bicycle shop in dowment from the U.S. War DepartDayton) Ohio) and lived with their fa- ment, he was directing an entire staff on ther. Alexander Graham Bell (not satis- the design and construction of his piloted fied with having invented the telephone) ((aerodromes.)) Langley and the Wrights) says TObin) promoted his tetrahedral-cell kites as (1Jossess ring] automatic stability in the ((defined the problem very differently) air.)) Newspapers followed Brazilian and Langley got it wrong.)) He and his Alberto Santos-Dumont as he steered young engineer, Charles Manly) concengas-powered airships over Paris begin- trated on designing a light) powerful enning in 1898. gine; theframe to which they attached it) Most enthusiasts would have predicted however, lacked a method for steering. that the innovator of piloted heavier- Wilbur and Orville Might believed that than-air flight would be the third balance and steering defined the probSecretary of the Smithsonian Institution) lem; it was almost as an afterthought the astrophysicistSamuel Pierpont Lang- that they added an engine to one of their
gliders) which they had been testing since 1900. Ultimately) what separated the Wrights from their more illustrious rivals) wrote TObin)was ((theirparticular aptitude for learning how to do a difficult thing.Âť Of Wilbur, the author says: (7 can)t think of anyone who stuck to a plan so carefully) who figured out what he needed to do) and just did it.Âť The excerpt that follows begins in Dayton in August 1902 as the brothers frantically prepare to turn over their bicycle shop to mechanic Charlie Taylor, 34) and return for their third summer in Kitty Hawk) North Carolina. Wilbur, 35) and Orville) 31) hoped the newglider design they had worked on all winter would finally solve their problem of lift and control.
ll the parts they needed had to be planned correctly in advance and none could be forgotten. Once they reached Kitty Hawk, it wOl\ld be too late to buy or order anything left behind. They could not make the curved wingtips and ribs themselves. This was work for specialists who made parts for the carriage industry and had the equipment needed for steaming strips of ash, then bending the pliant wood to the required curvature. The Wrights would have handed over sketches with precise dimensions, all based on data from the wind tunnel they built in their shop workroom in the fall of 1901. They planned to reuse the uprights from their 1901 glider, but everything else had to be new. Most parts they could make themselves frOITspruce lumber they had ordered
A
By the fall of 1902, the Wright brothers (near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in October of that year) had solved the most vexing problems of human flight, namely lift and control, with a succession of gliders. Now they were finally ready to focus on propulsion.
cut up into pieces of roughly the right length and shape. Then they went at them with drawknjves and spokeshaves, rounding the corners to preserve the wood's essential strength while reducing weight and wind resistance. When this was done, the pieces were ready to be drilled and notched, to make holes for screws and mortises for joining. Then the brothers brushed all the wood parts with several coats of varnish, to protect against the humid North Carolina air. Now the wooden skeleton of the wings
December 17, 1903: Day after day the brothers put their new and improved glider through its paces until they at last achieved what was considered impossible. Orville (at the controls) would describe the flight as "the first ... in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power. "
could be assembled. In place of screws or nuts and bolts, the brothers used waxed linen cord, an all-purpose twine that conveniently stuck to itself and the wood, making it easy to tie tight lashings and knots. In a jolting landing, the lashed joints gave a little, then snapped back, minimizing the possibility of broken joints. Next came the skin, made from yard upon yard of Pride of the West white muslin. This was the trickiest part of the entire job, and it depended entirely on the sewing skills that Susan Wright had taught her sons. Kate, 28, watched, aghast, as her brothers pushed furniture out of the way and filled the first floor of the house with ribs and spars and endless yards of linen. "Will spins the sewing machine around by the hour while Orv squats around marking places to sew. There is no place in the house to live," she wrote to her father, Milton.
They scissored the fabric into strips, then machine-sewed the pieces back together so the threads would run "on the bias" at a 45-degree angle to the ribs. Thus each thread acted as a tiny cross-brace, helping to hold the wing together under the pressures of flight. With painstaking measuring, stretching and sewing, the Wrights created a long, snug pocket for each rib, to keep the fabric anchored and to preserve the wing's precise curvature when it was subjected to the forces of lift. Then, inch by inch, starting at the trailing edge of the wings, they slipped the tightfitting cloth skin over the wooden skeleton. The tips of the wings were covered separately and required an artist's touch at folding, tucking and stitching.
In search of a remote place where they could test their gliders) the Wrights had first camped at Kitty Hawk) a village in North Carolina)s Outer Banks) in September 1900. In July 1901) at Kill Devil Hills) about 6.5 kilometers south of Kitty Hawk) they built a shed near a la1J:Jedune they called the (big hill. Âť The brothers returned to camp August 28) 1902.
A year in the wind had so buckled the Wrights' wooden shed that the roof sloped sharply at either end and the interior, Wilbur reported to their sister, Kate, "strongly resembles the horror of an earthquake in its actual progress." Wilbur and Orville bolstered the shed's sagging floors and built a 4.9-by-4.9-meter addition. With a device of their own invention, they drilled the best well in Kitty Hawk, finding "good water" about five meters down. In Elizabeth City, the mainland town nearest Kitty Hawk, they had picked up an oven and a barrel of gasoline. Orville had brought a rifle to shoot small waterfowl, so they had occasional fresh meat. To ease the long round-trip between the village and the camp, they had brought a bicycle, in parts, and fussed with the gears so they could ride it over sand. Their shelves were soon stocked with precise rows of canned goods. "We fitted up our living arrangements much more comfortably than last year," Wilbur wrote to colleague George Spratt. "There are ...improvements too numerous to mention, and no mosquitoes, so we are having a splendid time." By this, their third summer, the Wrights
"The bird's wings are undoubtedly very well designed indeed, but it is ... the marvelous skill with which they are used," Wilbur observed. "The soaring problem is apparently not so much one of better wings as of better operators." were now treated as familiar and welcome guests in Kitty Hawk, though they had not been the easiest men to get to know. "They didn't put themselves out to get acquainted with anybody," said John Daniels, one of the regular lifeguards at the nearby Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station. "Just stuck to themselves, and we had to get acquainted with them. I never saw men so wrapped up in their work in my life. After their day's work was over they were different; then they were the nicest fellows you ever saw." The brothers shared good food and asked questions about the land, the weather and the families of the vi llage. They were good with the children. That surely scored points, as did their "uniform courtesy to everyone." The flying proposition remained dubious among the villagers. Two years earlier, they had regarded the Wrights as "a pair of crazy fools," Daniels said. "We laughed about 'em among ourselves." Sometimes the lifeguards would look over from their post and see the Ohioans standing near the beach, faces upturned, watching intently as gulls soared and banked overhead, even spread-
ing their arms and twisting their wrists in imitation ofthe birds. An hour later the lifesavers would look again, and there the brothers would be, still watching the birds. In fact, the brothers spent less time watching the gulls than they did watching the eagles, hawks and buzzards that soared some distance inland from the crashing waves, above the dunes where the brothers themselves flew. The soaring bird enjoys a perfect balance among the forces of lift, drift and gravity. It was what the brothers aspired to. Wilbur's favorites were the buzzards, which soared more often than the others. Aptitude and perseverance separated the One day, atop the swnmit of the West Hill, Wright brothers (Wilbur, left, and Orville, he watched a buzzard at eye level only about facing camera) from other would-be 23 meters away. It hung all but motionless conquerors of the sky (1909). over the steep slope. Wilbur believed his own artificial wings were--or could be-as is apparently not so much one of better good as this bird's. He was less sure he could wings as of better operators." To develop that skill remained the brothers' chief desire, develop the buzzard's skill. "The bird's and they could attain it only with the prowings are undoubtedly very well designed longed practice that long, safe glides could indeed, but it is...the marvelous skill with afford them. which they are used ....The soaring problem In the shed at Kitty Hawk, the brothers took apaIi their old glider from the summer Orville (left) and Wilbur are shown making of 1901 to make room for their new one. repairs on one of their early aircraft路 Over 1I days, the machine took shape. It was an extraordinary work of art, science and craft. It was created to serve a function, so the form, following the function, took on its own ungainly beauty. The leading corners of the wings were quarter-circles, the trailing corners shaped like scoops. Tn cross-section, the wings humped in front and trailed away in a graceful curve to the rear. The linen skin was taut, the wires tight. Viewed directly from in front or from the side, there was hardly anything to see but a spare collection of lines-horizontal, vertical, diagonal and curved. Only when viewed fi'om above or below did the craft seem substantial, owing to the wings, about 10 meters tip to tip and 1.75 meters front to back. Yet the glider weighed only about 50 kilo-
The villagers, who had regarded the Wright brothers as "a pair of crazy fools," remained dubious about the lIying proposition. "Welaughed about 'em among ourselves:' said John Daniels, one of the regular Kitty Hawk lifeguards. grams. Three men could pick it up and carry it with little trouble. "It was built to withstand hard usage," Wilbur said, and though it looked thin and spare, it felt sturdy. When they faced it into a steady breeze, it no longer seemed ungainly. Suddenly they were no longer holding it up but holding it down. Their first gliders, especially the one built in 1900, had flown as any child's kite flies, with the line at a slanting angle of about 45 degrees. The closer a kite's line ascends to the vertical, the greater the kite's efficiency. One whose cord runs on a vertical line down to the operator is, in effect, soaring. It is aerodynamically perfect. If it could move forward under its own power, it would beflying. On Wednesday, September 10, 1902, the brothers tested the upper wing as a kite. Two days later they tested the lower wing. They found that these curved surfaces, flown by themselves, exerted less pull on the Iines than had their 1901 machine. This meant the wind was guiding the wing into a flatter angle of attack, which promised flatter, longer glides. Next, the brothers assembled the entire glider and carried it to a slope they measured at about seven degrees. In a steady wind, they let out their lines. The glider rose. The lines stood nearly straight up and stayed there. On the morning of Friday, September 19, Wilbur made the first 25 test glides of the season, with Orville and their assistant, Dan Tate, running alongside with a hand on the wingtips. That day and the next, Wilbur found that slight adjustments in the angle of the new front elevator, a smaller pair of movable wings, offered him control of the glider's fore-and-aft movements. But the new control device was tricky. To turn up, the operator had to push the elevator-control bar down-the reverse of
the 190 I controls. With this movement not yet instinctive, Wilbur found himself aloft in a cross-gust that caught the left wingtip and pushed it skyward "in a decidedly alarming manner." Wilbur, in confusion, turned the elevator up instead of down and found the glider suddenly "bent on a mad attempt to pierce the heavens." He recovered and landed without damage. But he continued to have problems keeping the wingtips level in crosswinds. For a long, rainy Sunday the brothers stewed and debated, "at a loss to know what the cause might be." What new forces had they summoned by lengthening the wings and adding a tail? The next day, they retrussed the wings so that the tips dipped slightly below the level ofthe center section. With this slight arch, the glider took on the droop-winged look of gulls, which fly well in high winds. Kite tests vindicated their intuition. ow crosswinds, if anything, seemed to improve their lateral balance. "The machine flew beautifully," Orville wrote that evening, and "when the proper angle of incidence was attained, seemed to soar." He began the morning after the wings were retrussed, practicing assisted glides to get the feel of the controls. The tips were so responsive that in one flight he "caused the machine to sway from side to side, sidling one way and then the other a half dozen times in the distance of the glide." Orville managed one respectable flight of about 49 meters at an admirably low angle of descent. Then, while concentrating on a wingtip that had risen too high, he lost track of the elevator controls and rushed upward to a height of 7.6 or 9 meters. Wilbur and Dan Tate cried out. Orville stalled, slid backward and struck the ground wingfirst with a crackle of splintering spruce and ash. "The result was a heap of flying machine, cloth, and
sticks, with me in the center without a bruise or a scratch," he wrote in his diary. This "slight catastrophe" meant days of repairs. But that evening the brothers were so pleased with the glider that "we are ... in a hilarious mood." Orville wrote Kate: "The control will be almost perfect, we think, when we once learn to properly operate the rudders." The control was not perfect. The winds of the Outer Banks blew in turbulent swirls, and on the dunes there was no lift balance to hold the glider's wings safe and steady. In the next few days, the repaired machine made many more glides under good control. But every so often, "without any apparent reason," one wingtip would rise and fai I to respond when the pi lot pulled the cables that warped, or twisted, the wings-the key to the Wrights' system of staying balanced in the air. Tilting heavily to one side, the machine would go into a sickening slide sideways in the direction of the tilt. One side of the glider rose and gathered speed, the other side dipped low and slowed, and the whole craft spun into a frightening, out of control circle. The problem was dangerous and bewildering, and they could not claim control of the glider until they had solved it. To the brothers' delight, their older brother, Lorin Wright, 40, walked into camp on the last day of September, and, equally welcome, George Spratt arrived the next afternoon. The barren expanse of sand increasingly took on the look of a sportman's camp. Spratt and Lorin snagged crabs for bait and caught an eel and some chubs. The three brothers competed in target shooting with Orville's rifle. To the rhythm of the nearby surf, they talked over the evening fire, Lorin lending his own assessments of the glides. Wilbur climbed to his bunk early, often by 7:30. Orville stayed up later. On the night of October 2, Orville drank more coffee than usual and lay awake for a long time. The glider's curious geometry floated through his mind-and a perception dawned. In the out of control episodes, he saw that as the glider went into its sideways slide, the fixed vertical tail in the rear not only failed to keep it straight, but it also collided with stationary air, and pushed the ma-
chine into its dangerous spin. Orville glimpsed a solution-make the tail movable. If the pilot entering a turn could alter the tail's angle, then pressure would be relieved on the lower side of the glider and exerted on the higher side. The machine would turn under control and neither slide sideways nor spin. In the morning, Orville presented his idea. Wilbur saw the point-yes, the tail should be movable. By shifting his hips, the pilot would twist the wings and alter the tail's angle at the same time. Suddenly it was clear to both of them. The two movements were intimately connected and ought to be perfonned simultaneously. Wing and tail and wind would act in concert. The skies cleared and the wind blew steady and strong. Spratt had to leave on October 20, leaving the brothers alone with only Dan Tate to help. Wilbur and Orville now looked to see what this glider could do. In five days they made hundreds of glides, stretching their distances to about 90, 120, 150 meters in buffeting winds up to about 48 kilometers per hour. On October 23, Wilbur traveled 190 meters in a glide lasting nearly half a minute. Orville bubbled with excitement and pride. "We now hold all the records!" he wrote Kate on the night of October 23. "The largest machine ever handled ...the longest time in the air, the smallest angle of descent, and the highest wi nd! !!"
Their long glides had grown out oftheir aptitude for learning how to do a difficult thing. It was a simple method but rare. They broke a job into its parts and proceeded one part at a time. They practiced each small task until they mastered it, then moved on. The best example was their habit of staying very close to the ground in their glides, sometimes just inches off the sand. "While the high flights were more spectacular, the low ones were fully as valuable for training purposes," Wilbur said. "Skill comes by the constant repetition of familiar feats rather than by a few overbold attempts at feats for which the performer is yet poorly prepared." They were conservative daredevils, cautious prophets. "A thousand glides is equivalent to about four hours of steady practice," Wilbur said, "far too little to give anyone a complete mastery of the art of flying." angley and Manly had spent most of four years building an extraordinary engine to lift their heavy flying machine. The Wrights had spent most offour years building a flying machine so artfully designed that it could be propelled into the air by a fairly ordinary internal combustion engine. Still, they had expended a minimum of thought and energy on their power plant. At first they hoped simply to buy an engine. But when they sent inquiries to manufacturers, specifying one
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of less than 90 kilograms that would make at least eight horsepower, only one manufacturer said he had such an engine, and the brothers concluded he was overrating its power. So, back in Dayton in the winter of 1902, they sketched a design of their own and handed it to their bicycle shop machinist Charlie Taylor, who did most of the work in the back room. After six weeks, he produced a simplified fourcylinder auto engine without a carburetor, spark plugs or fuel pump. In February 1903, the engine block cracked in a shop test. When a new block was delivered and the engine reassembled, it made 12 horsepower at 1,025 revolutions per minute. With four more horsepower than the brothers believed they needed, and nine kilograms fewer than their maximum, the engine, said Orville, was "a very pleasant surprise." The brothers had assumed that propellers would cause them less trouble than the engine, but they soon learned that ships' propellers were designed by trial and error, vessel by vessel. No one knew exactly how they worked, so no one had worked out a theory of propeller design, least of all for flying machines. So the brothers had no choice but to plumb the mystery themselves. They began to consider the problem seriously soon after their return to Dayton from Kitty Hawk in 1902, and "it was not till several months had passed," Orville recalled, "and every phase of the problem had been thrashed over, that the various reactions began to untangle themselves." Naval engineers had proposed that a marine propeller cuts through water as a screw cuts through wood. The brothers conceived a different image. To them, "it was apparent that a propeller was simply an aeroplane [that is, a plane surface in the curved shape of a wing] traveling in a spiral course." The problem sounded simple. But, wrote Orville, it "became more complex the longer we studied it. With the machine moving forward, the air flying backward, the propellers turning sidewise, and nothing standing still, it seemed impossible to find a starting-point from which to trace the variLined with foods "selected to [their} own tastes, " the shelves of their 1902 camp kitchen testified to the Wrights' obsessive attention to detail.
On display at the Smithsonian since 1948, the Wright Flyer-sometimes called the Kitty Hawk Flyer-may be seen at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. 1t has a wingspan of 12.3 meters and is 2.8 meters high, weighing in at a mere 274 kilograms. 1t "literally changed the world, " says director Jack Dailey.
ous simultaneous reactions." "We worked out a theory," Orville wrote in a June letter to Spratt, "on the subject, and discovered, as we usually do, that all the propellers built heretofore are all wrong, and then built a pair of propellers 2.48 meters in diameter, based on our theory, which are all right! (till we have a chance to test them at Kitty Hawk and find out differently). Isn't it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them!!"
After waiting days for calm weather, Langley)syoung engineer, CharlesManly) catapulted his boss)s aerodrome off a houseboat moored in the Potomac River near Q;tantico) Virginia) just after 10 a.m.) October 7) 1903. Manly)s ((indescribablesensation of beingfree in the air) gave way to ((theimportant fact ...that the machine was plunging downward at a very sharp angle. The front wings struck the water and disintegrated.)) Soon afte1) back in Kitty Hawk for theirfourth season (they returned September 25) 1903)) "Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute) a distinguished civil engineer and aviation authority he had befriended: (CJ see that Langley has had his fling) and failed. It seems to be our turn to throw now, and I wonder what our luck will be.)) Until now, construction of what would become their famous "Flyer" had pro-
odds of success at no more than even. It grew colder. The sky turned winter white. After Chanute left the camp on November 12, the Wrights devised a new mechanical test. The results confirmed "- their own earlier predictions of the en~ gine's efficiency, and they breathed easier. ~ Orville wrote to Milton and Kate of ~ Chanute's worries, but also wrote that "he o ~ nevertheless had more hope of our ma~ chine going than any of the others. He seems to think we are pursued by a blind ceeded smoothly. But in a test on ovemfate from which we are unable to escape." bel' 5, a misfiring engine conspired with loose propellers and loose sprockets to make a disaster. The propeller shafts tore For Langley) it was now or never. After October)s debacle) he told skeptical reloose from their mountings and twisted. The Wrights had no choice but to send the porters that the crash was caused by a launching failure. Federalfunds that had shafts back to Charlie Taylor to be repaired. been set asidefor the project were almost Without them, there would be no powered flight for many days, and Chanute, who exhausted. On December 8) the aerohad arrived in Kitty Hawk November 6 for drome skimmed off the 18-meter track) a visit, said he couldn't stay that long. For over the choppygray river and hit the air. ((Theenormous wings) wrote 'Ibbin) ((aphis benefit the brothers labored up the slopes to make a few more glides in the parently could not withstand their sudden introduction to the forces of flight. They 1902 machine. But the wood had grown dry and rickety in the heat of the shed, and crumpled assoonas they were asked tofly. )) they decided the glider was no longer safe. The aerodrome plunged into the water For most of their friend's stay the weather and descended into the soft mud at the remained so bad the three men did little but bottom of the PotomacRiver. sit close to the stove and talk. It took the brothers less than a day to install the new shafts. But on the first day Chanute questioned the brothers closely the machine was ready, December 12, the about the mathematical calculations they had used in building their engine, and he wind was too slack for a start from level ground-a requirement, they felt, for a didn't like what they told him. Engineers usually allowed for a 20 percent loss of an true powered flight. They practiced runengine's power, yet the Wrights had only ning the machine along the track. On Monday, December 14, the breeze allowed for five percent. This won'ied the brothers. Unable to work because of the blew at a listless eight kilometers per hour, missing shafts, "We had lots of time for but they were impatient for action and dethinking, and the more we thought, the cided to run the machine down a slope. harder our machine got to running and the They laid a 18.2-meter wooden launch rail. The aeroplane's skids would rest atop less the power of the engine became," Orville wrote to Milton and Kate, "We are a small, one-wheeled truck that would roll now quite in doubt as to whether the engine down the rail at the urging of the engine will be able to pull [the Flyer] at all with the and propellers. A man at either wingtip present gears." The brothers estimated their would keep the machine balanced as it Âť)
rolled. If all went as planned, it would lift off the truck and fly. Together the men trundled the machine up the sand hill on its creaky truck and maneuvered it into position on the rail. One of the brothers tossed a coin. Wilbur won the toss. He fit himself into the hip cradle, ducking under the chain that led from the engine, on the operator's right side, to the propeller shaft on his left. The machine began to roll before Orville, at the right wingtip, was ready to steady it properly. It raced downhill for 10.6 or 12.1 meters and lifted away from the rail, but the elevator was cocked at too sharp an angle, and the machine rose abruptly to 5.22 meters, stalled and thunked into the sand after only three seconds in the air, breaking a few parts. But Wilbur was encouraged. "The power is ample, and but for a trifling error due to lack of experience with this machine and this method of starting, the machine would undoubtedly have flown beautifully. There is now no question of final success."
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pairstook a day and a half Late on the afternoon of December 16, with e machine finally ready for another try, the brothers felt the wind fade. They waited futilely on the beach, tinkering and still hopeful. Overnight a northerly wind put a new skim of ice on puddles and ponds. In the morning the brothers bided their time for a couple of hours. Then, convinced the wind would stay strong for a bit, they went to work. It was so cold they had to run in and out of the shed to warm their hands. The wind was blowing at about 40 kilometers per hour,' strong enough for a launch on level ground. The launching track was relaid to face north-northeast, directly into the wind. The machine was hauled into its starting position. To the south, the hump of the big hill loomed over their shoulders. Ahead, the machine faced a blank, barren plain. Now it was Orville's turn. The brothers padded through the sand around the machine, checking things. They cranked the engine and let it run for a few minutes. A camera was put in position, and the brothers asked John Daniels to pull the cord to the shutter
The men at the launch rail realized Wilbur was not going to come back to the ground right away. The machine was leaving them lar behind-GO, 120, 180 meters, the noise 01 the engine lading, the wings on an even keel. He was llying. if the machine got into the air. At 10:35 Orville inched into the cradle. He released the rope. With Wilbur jogging alongside, his left hand on the right wingtip, the craft lumbered forward, reaching a speed of I0 to 12 kilometers per hour. Between the two spruce skids and the one-wheeled truck running along the rail, a space appeared. An inch became a foot, two feet, three feet. A long shadow ran across the sand. John Daniels squeezed a rubber bulb to open the camera's shutter (see page 14 for the only photograph taken of the flight). Wilbur, still jogging, saw the Flyer rise abruptly to a height of about three meters, then dip just as suddenly, then rise again. Spread-eagled on the wing, Orville struggled to keep the elevator controls level. The craft dipped a second time, a wing tilted, and he was back on the ground, 36.5 meters from where he had left the launch rail. A couple of parts were cracked, so an hour passed before Wilbur could take the next turn. He bettered Orville's distance by about 15 meters. Orville, on his second try, went a little farther still, and kept the machine steadier than on his first try. A gust came at him from the side, lifting the tip. When he twisted the wings to bring the tip back to level, he found the lateral controls strikingly responsive, much better than on the glider. But the forward rudder was too sensitive. The machine bobbed and dipped in an "exceedingly erratic" path. At noon Wilbur tried again, and the bobbing and dipping continued. But somehow he found the proper angle for the forward rudder, and the men at the launch rail realized he was not going to come back to the ground right away. The machine was leaving them far behind~ 60, 120, 180 meters, the noise of the engine fading, the wings on an even keel. He was flying. The machine approached a hummock in
the plain. Wilbur moved to adjust the forward rudder "and suddenly darted into the ground." He had gone about 260 meters, a quarter of a kilometer, in 59 seconds. The rudder frame was cracked, but otherwise the machine was fine, as was the operator. This fourth flight had been the most impressive, the fulfillment of the brothers' hope for sustained, powered flight. But they also realized that Orville's brief first try could also be described in words that applied to no previous effort by any experimenter. Orville himself, who took excruciating care in later years to express their hjstory in precise terms, fashioned a description of what the first trial of the day had acmeved. It was "a flight very modest compared with that of birds," he said, "but it was nevertheless the first in the mstory of the world in whjch a macmne carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from wmch it started." That wasn't an exciting or inspiring way of saying that two human beings had learned how to fly. But it was the way the Wrights thought about things. Hyperbole about events of this day would come from others~although not for years. The magnitude of what they had done could be appreciated only by those who fully understood the steps they had taken and the problems they had solved through four years of work. That included the two of them and no one else in the world. They had flown, barely. They were utterly alone in their comprehension of all that that really meant. 0 About the Author: James Tobin is a reporter for the Detroit News. His first book, Ernie Pyle's War, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Stars Stripes
Indian Career-oriented Indian Americans head for IT or the medical profession, don't they? Not always. ostyoung Indian Americans don't answer the call to join the military. Many of their parents don't consider such a career a "good option" for their children and, unsurprisngly, there are low numbers of Indian Americans in U.S. armed forces. Yet some Indian American families have had to come to terms with changing interests. Jimmy Paul is unlike most Indian Americans his age. "All parents see is the fact that a career in the armed forces is not the stereotypical doctor, engineer jobs that they hope for their children," says Paul, a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps. Paul says his parents did not know that he had joined the Marine Corps till it was almost time for him to report to boot camp. "They were extremely shocked and taken aback. They could not believe that T would go and do such a thing without first consulting with them." But no matter how much they protested, Paul's parents knew that it was too late. "Now after serving my country for four years they realize it was the right decision for me," he says. "Now my parents would recruit for the Marine Corps if they could!" As a young man growing up in India, Paul's father was keen to join the Indian Army. Dr. Panavelil Paul was on the verge of enlisting before a successful attempt in a medical college entrance examination drew him to a career in medicine. "For us it's just another career," says Dr. Paul, a resident of Silver Spring, Maryland. For Biren Oberoi of Alpharetta, Georgia, a career in the Air Force was more than just another job. "It's his way of saying thank you to America for the opportunities this country has given him," explains his mother Madhu. Biren was a young boy when his family decided to move from New Delhi to Georgia. A pilot flying KCIOs-the Air Force's refueling aircraftFirst Lieutenant Biren Oberoi was commissioned in 2000, soon after graduating as a mechanical engineer from Georgia Tech. "Our friends often remark that a career in the armed forces is a
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Above right: Binyamin Qamruzzaman joined the Marines because it was "the hardest force. " Right: Air Force Captain Varun Puri teaches aspiring pilots to fly the F-15E, or Strike Eagle, in North Carolina.
very unusual profession for a person oflndian descent," Madhu Oberoi says, laughing at the thought. In stark contrast to the suppOti Biren received from his parents, Sarada Nair admits she panicked when her young son informed her about his decision to join the armed forces. "I tried my best to dissuade him," she recalls, adding, "but there is a limit up to which you can keep your children from doing what they are really passionate about." Poor eyesight disqualified Sharad Nair from becoming a fighter pilot but it did not stop the young man from signing up with the Marines. His mother now seldom tires of recounting a conversation she had with a colleague at her Manhattan office. She says her friend told her that most Indians in America were either doctors, engineers or computer professionals. "She informed me that not many Indian American parents could say their kid was a U.S. Marine," Mrs. Nair recalls proudly. Captain Varun Puri says his parents didn't know what to make of his decision to join the Air Force. "They were kind of surprised that I was so involved in the Air Force. They didn't realize that my going to the Air Force Academy would ultimately mean a career flying planes," he chuckles. Over the years, a growing number of young Indian Americans have been breaking the mold and opting for non-traditional professions. Careers in medicine, law, engineering, finance and even
Serving His
Countrv
Captain Ravi Chaudhary always knew he wanted to be in the Air Force. "I regard aircraft in much the same way as others regard oxygen," he says. As Saddam Hussein's regime disintegrated, Captain Chaudhary took the time to share his war experiences. Excerpts from an interview with Ashish Kumar Sen.
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8 Captain Ravi Chaudhary with wife Uma and son Krishan.
information technology, professions that many Indian parents actively encourage their children to pursue, aren't on the wish lists ofthis new generation. Captain Pw-i teaches aspiring pilots how to fly the F-15E-the Air Force's Strike Eagle-at the Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. As a flight instructor, he hasn't had the OPPOltunity to see action in Iraq. "There was a bit ofa feeling that I'm missing out because my fi'iends were going down range," he admits. While the younger service men and women are at times more gung-ho about seeing action, Dr. Alex Alexander, a retired 20year veteran reserve medical officer in the military, says, "The families left behind have to go through an unimaginable time." Corporal Jimmy Paul's mother Thankam confesses she is worried for her son. Uma Chaudhary echoes a similar concern for her husband-a C-17 pilot. Married to Captain Ravi Chaudhary for over six years, shejokes: "You would have thought I'd man)' a doctor like everybody else." In a more serious vein she adds, "With Ravi gone all the time I'm the dad and the mom! I'm the husband and the wife." Captain Chaudhary is well aware of the hardship his wife goes through in his absence. "Uma is a true American patriot, and like so many other military spouses, knew that canying our family forward would fall upon her. ..alone at times." Every night Uma tucks her two-year-old son Krishan into bed
Could you share some experiences from Iraq? Ravi Chaudhary: I remember landing at a forward operating base just hours after President Bush's 48-hour deadline had passed. Our whole crew was asking our maintenance folks whether or not the war had statted yet. Nothing new had developed so I stepped off the aircraft to file our return flight plan. Suddenly things got busy around the aircraft and I asked our ground maintenance what was going on. Apparently the war had started and Iraqi missiles were reportedly fired at Kuwait. Let's just say that suddenly our number one priority was to stmt engines and get our aircraft off the ground! What was a "regular" day in your life like during this time? Generally speaking, we spend a period of time in required "crew rest." Then we typically are aletted and perform flying duties, and return from our mission. Overall it's about a 24-hour duty day, then we re-enter crew rest, get some sleep, and start the sequence all over again. The days can be quite long, and you learn to appreciate your crew rest period. Did anti-war protests and the protracted Security Council debate affect your morale? Absolutely. When I had time to think about morale, that is! As airlifters, we've been in high gear for the past four months. But when I did catch a time-out to think about the lengthy debate and protests, it filled me with pride in the democratic system, and
strengthened my resolve to attain a high level of mission readiness, should the call come to execute. Isn't this what we are here for? There's a reason this operation was named Iraqi Freedom. When did you first get interested in the Air Force? Folks ask me that question quite a bit. For me it's a pretty simple answer ....! can't really think back to a day when I haven't wanted to be in the Air Force. I've had a burning desire to serve my country since I was a child. I think I've been even more blessed to have been given the opportunity to serve as an engineer and a pilot, two of my greatest lifelong passions. I've been building, tinkering, and flying airplanes-model or real-vittually my entire life. I regard aircraft in much the same way as others regard oxygen-much needed for survival. How did your family react to your decision? With total and unwavering support. How has your involvement in this war affected your family? Soon after 9/11, I sat down with my wife Uma and my son Krishan and let them know that things were going to change for a little while, and that this might be the biggest challenge our family may ever have to face. However, preparing a family for extended separation is a daunting task. Uma is a true American patriot, and like so many other military spouses knew that carrying our family forward would fall upon her. ..alone at times. Since the Iraq crisis started, I've had to once again ask them to hang on a little longer. D
ne of the U.S. Navy's seniormost Indian American officers, Commander Tito P. Dua, made a goodwill port visit aboard his frigate the USS GOIY, which dropped anchor for three days in Koehi in June. He declined to comment on political issues saying, "I'm not a politician," but he talked freely about his origins, his experiences in the U.S. Navy and the honor and pleasure he felt in being able to return to India commanding his own ship. He said he has been back to his hometown, Bareilly,
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twice over the years since he immigrated to the United States in 1964 and has fond memories of his grandmother's home, loeal festivals and food. Discussing his military career, the much-decorated Conunander Dua explained that many minorities serve in the U.S. Navy and all personnel are given equal opportunity without regard to ethnic background. Noting that "one can never forget one's mother country," he said his allegiance to America has never been questioned and he's been blessed with many oppoltuni-
she puts on a video of her husband reading bedtime stories. The tape is part of an "emergency kit" Captain Chaudhary put together for his son and includes him singing Krishan's favorite songs, or just talking to him. Captain Chaudhary's brother Satveer serves the country also, as a Minnesota State senator. Anoop Prakash's parents learnt of their son's deployment through the television. A former Captain in the Marine Corps, Prakash served in the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s as an intelligence officer for Marine Helicopter Squadron with the 24th Expeditionary Unit on board the USS Guam. "It was tough on my parents .... The most you could say about your location was 'Somewhere in the Gulf,''' says Prakash. For the Indian Americans serving in the U.S. armed forces, the experience has, by and large, been a rewarding one. The obvious question about racism in a force where tensions are magnified is brushed aside by most. Prakash says he never felt like he was different. "We used to say we all have one color and that's green. The only issue was to be able to pronounce everyone's names correctly!" Captain Puri's experience in the Air Force has also been a positive one. "Obviously, as an Indian, you're easy to recognize, but for the most part the Air Force has a fairly complimentary image of Indians," he says. Captain Chaudhary agrees, adding: "It's starting to get more and more commonplace for Indian Americans to be seen in the s armed forces." ~ Binyamin Qamruzzaman's story is different, however. A Muslim of ~ Indian descent, he always aspired to &o be a part of the Marine Corps because ';. it was the "hardest force." Now in his early twenties, Qamruo zzaman has mixed memories of his COlporal Jimmy Paul stint in the Marines. "It's not at all surprised his parents by what I had imagined it to be," he conenlisting in the Marine cedes. His voice trails off as he recalls Corps. After four years of racial taunts from fellow Marines: "I'd service, he sÂŁrys, "Now my be called 'Iraqi' or 'bin Laden' or 'terparents would recruit for the Marine Corps if they could. " rorist.' " Being an Indian, he says, he
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ties there. He said that U.S. Navy visits to India reflect increased Indo-U.S. military cooperation and the importance of promoting peace and stability along vital sea-lanes. He added that his ship's Kerala stop was "routine." They were en route to Japan after participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom in the Gulf. Prior to taking command of USS Gary, Commander Dua served as the South Asia Political-Military Affairs Desk Officer on the staff of the Commander, U.S. Seventh Fleet. -M.H.A.
had to deal with a lot of stereotyping. "It wasn't horrible, but one or two Marines would often bug me." Despite some bitter memories, Qamruzzaman says he also has a lot of great experiences to show for time spent in the Marines. Working as a field operator in Japan was a high point-"It was a whole new world; I enjoyed it." He later served in North Carolina where he was a communications technician on a light armored vehicle (LAY) and learnt a lot of technical specialties. Corporal Paul says he was never discriminated against. "During combat there is no race and no discrimination. Death is pretty equal opportunity-oriented and the last time I checked, bullets could not tell the difference between white, black or Asian." At the same time, he is familiar with the rigors of the job. "It isn't for everyone," he says. "There is a lot of hardship that must be endured .... The decision to serve this nation usually has nothing to do with having an easy job and getting a high salary." Corporal Paul left the Marine Corps in October 200 I. "To me it was just a stepping stone to the next level in my professional and personal growth." While in college, he received a letter to report back to the Marine Corps to support Operation Iraqi Freedom. The controversy surrounding Operation Iraqi Freedom-the protracted debate in the United Nations Security Council, and anti-war protests both in the United States and around the world- have done little to dent the morale of the troops. "My morale is just fme," says Corporal Paul, adding, "It would have been different if they were not allowed to protest. It would show me that I served a country that oppressed its citizens." "When you're out there you're just thinking of one thing-to get out alive," Qamruzzaman says matter offactly. Indian Americans who have been in the forces a while find themselves in the position of role models and mentors to new Indian American recruits. Captain Puri recalls his association with Captain Chaudhary in boot camp. "Ravi was a role model....There were no other Hindus and he made sure I had an oppOltunity to practice my religion. He even gifted me a copy of the Gita." "Any time people have something in common it is natural to share your experiences," explains Captain Puri. As a career in the armed forces gradually gains acceptance in Indian American households, Captain Puri can be assured that he will have many more young pilots with whom he can share his experiences and pass on his flying skills. 0
Once operating in ivory tower seclusion, think tanks have been projected into the public eye by the mass media. Experts on policy from these institutions devoted to analysis are now ubiquitous talking heads on news channels. Think tanks range from conservative to liberal, partisan to independent and study domestic and foreign policy issues. But how did think tanks originate and how do they influence policy? Richard Haass describes their genesis and importance to U.S. policy-makers, and Ashish Kumar Sen reports on a panel discussion with some think tank heavyweights.
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f the many influences on U.S. foreign policy formulation, the role of think tanks is among the most important and least appreciated. A distinctively American phenomenon, the independent policy research institution has shaped U.S. global engagement for nearly 100 years. But because think tanks conduct much of their work outside the media spotlight, they gamer less attention than other sources of U.S. policy-like the jostling of interest groups, the maneuvering between political parties, and the rivalry among branches of government. Despite this relatively low profile, think tanks affect American foreign policymakers in five distinct ways: by generating original ideas and options for policy, by supplying a ready pool of experts for employment in government, by offering venues for high-level discussions, by educating U.S. citizens about the world, and by supplementing official efforts to mediate and resolve conflict.
u.s. Forei A Policy-maker's
Origin and Evolution Think tanks are independent institutions organized to conduct research and produce independent, policy-relevant knowledge. They fill a critical void between the academic world, on the one hand, and the realm of government, on the other. Within universities, research is frequently driven by arcane theoretical and methodological debates only distantly related to real policy dilemmas. Within government, meanwhile, officials immersed in the concrete demands of day-to-day policy-making are often too busy to take a step back and reconsider the broader trajectory of U.S. policy. Think tanks' primary contribution, therefore, is to help bridge this gap between the worlds of ideas and action. The rise of modem think tanks parallels the rise of the United States to global leadership. They first emerged a century ago, during the progressive era, as part of a movement to professionalize government. For the most part, their mandate was avowedly apolitical: to advance the public
PolicV Perspective
interest by providing government officials with impartial, policy-relevant advice. Early examples included the Institute for Government Research (1916), the forerunner of the Brookings Institution (1927). The first think tank devoted solely to foreign affairs was the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910 to investigate the causes of war and promote the pacific settlement of disputes. These tasks assumed urgency with the outbreak of World War 1, which generated passionate debate over America's proper global role. During the winter of 1917-18, Colonel Edward House, an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, discretely assembled prominent scholars to explore options for the postwar peace. Known as "The Inquiry," this group advised the U.S. delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and, in 1921, joined with prominent New York bankers, lawyers, and academics to form the Council on Foreign Relations. The first generation of think tanks helped
build and maintain an informed domestic constituency for global engagement, keeping the internationalist flame flickering during the years between the American repudiation of the League of Nations and the coming of World War II. A second wave of think tanks arose after 1945, when the United States assumed the mantle of superpower and (with the outbreak of the Cold War) defender of the free world. Many such institutions received direct SUppOltfrom the U.S. Government, which devoted massive resources to defense scientists and researchers. The RAND Corporation, initially established as an independent nonprofit institution with Air Force funding in 1948, launched pioneering studies of systems analysis, game theOlY,and strategic bargaining that continue to shape the way we analyze defense policy and deterrence decades later. Over the last three decades, a third wave of think tanks has crested. These institutions focus as much on advocacy as research, aiming to generate timely advice that can compete in a crowded marketplace of ideas and influence policy decisions. The prototype advocacy think tank is the conservative Heritage Foundation, establ ished in 1973. The liberal Institute for Policy Studies plays a similar role. At the dawn of the 21 st century, more than 1,200 think tanks dot the American political landscape. They are a heterogeneous lot, varying in scope, funding, mandate, and location. Some, like the Institute for International Economics (lIE), the Inter-American Dialogue, or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, focus on particular functional areas or regions. Others, like the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), cover the foreign policy waterfront. A few think tanks, like Brookings, have large endowments and accept little or no official funding; others, like RAND, receive most of their income from contract work, whether from the government or private sector clients; and a few, like the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), are maintained almost entirely by government funds. In some instances, think tanks double as activist nongovernmental organizations. The International Crisis Group, for example, deploys a network of ana-
lysts in hot spots around the world to monitor volatile political situations, formulating original, independent recommendations to build global pressure for their peaceful resolution.
The Idea Factory From the perspective of U.S. policymakers, today's think tanks offer five principal benefits. Their greatest impact (as befits their nan1e) is in generating "new thinking" that changes the way that U.S. decision-makers perceive and respond to the world. Original insights can alter conceptions of U.S. national interests, influence the ranking of priorities, provide roadmaps for action, mobilize political and bureaucratic coalitions, and shape the design of lasting institutions. It is not easy, however, to grab the attention of busy policy-makers already immersed in information. To do so, think tanks need to exploit multiple channels and marketing strategies-publishing articles, books, and occasional papers; appearing regularly on television, op-ed pages, and in newspaper interviews; and producing reader-friendly issue briefs, fact-sheets, and Web pages. Congressional hearings provide another oppOltunity to influence policy choices. Unencumbered by official positions, think tank scholars can afford to give candid assessments of pressing global challenges and the quality of government responses. Certain historical junctures present exceptional opportunities to inject new thinking into the foreign policy arena. World War II offered one such instance. Following the war's outbreak, the Council on Foreign Relations launched a massive War and Peace Studies project to explore the desirable foundations of postwar peace. The palticipants in this effOlt ultimately produced 682 memoranda for the State Department on topics ranging from the occupation of Germany to the creation ofthe United Nations. Two years after the end of the war, the Council's marquee journal, Foreign Affairs, published an anonymous article on "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." The alticle, which was in fact authored by U.S. diplomat George Kennan, helped establish the intellectual foundation for the containment policy the United States would pursue for the next
four decades. Then in 1993 Foreign Affairs published Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations," a seminal contribution to the debate surrounding American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. Since September 11, 2001, studies by CSIS, Heritage, and Brookings have all contributed to the discussions within the government over the proper strategies and organizations needed to confront the terrorist threat at home and abroad. Presidential campaigns and transitions are ideal occasions to set the foreign policy agenda. As Martin Anderson ofthe Hoover Institution explains, "It is during these times that presidential candidates solicit the advice of a vast number of intellectuals in order to establish policy positions on a host of domestic and foreign policy issues. Presidential candidates exchange ideas with policy experts and test them out on the campaign trail. It's like a national testmarketing strategy." The most celebrated case occurred after the 1980 election, when the Reagan administration adopted the Heritage Foundation's publication, "Mandate for Change," as a blueprint for governing. A more recent instance was a 1992 report by liE and the Carnegie Endowment proposing an "economic security council." The incoming Clinton administration implemented this proposal in creating a National Economic Council (a body that continues today).
Providing Talent Besides generating new ideas for senior government officials, think tanks provide a steady stream of experts to serve in incoming administrations and on congressional staffs. This function is critical in the American political system. In other advanced democracies, like France or Japan, new governments can rely on the continuity provided by a large professional civil service. In the United States, each transition brings a turnover of hundreds of mid-level and senior executive branch personnel. Think tanks help presidents and cabinet secretaries fill this void. Following his election in 1976, Jimmy Carter staffed his administration with numerous individuals from the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign
Relations. Four years later, Ronald Reagan turned to other think tanks to serve as his brain trust. During two terms in office, he drew on 150 individuals from Heritage, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The current Bush administration has followed a similar pattern in staffing the upper echelons of its foreign policy apparatus. Within the State Department, senior officials with think tank backgrounds include the Undersecretary for Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky, previously senior vice president and director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Washington office; the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security, John R. Bolton, formerly vice president of AEI; the Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific, James Kelly, previously president of the Pacific Forum of CSIS (Honolulu); and the Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, Kim Holmes, fOlmerly vice president at the Heritage Foundation. At the Pentagon, meanwhile, Peter W. Rodman assumed his position as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs after a stint as director of national security programs at the Nixon Center. In addition to supplying experts for incoming administrations, think tanks provide departing officials with institutional settings in which they can share insights gleaned from government service, remain engaged in pressing foreign policy debates, and constitute an informal shadow foreign affairs establishment. This "revolving door" is unique to the United States, and a source of its strength. In most other countries one fmds a strict division between career government officials and outside analysts. Not so in America. Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell's predecessor as Secretary of State, once headed the Center for National Policy. Her deputy, Strobe Talbott, is now president of the Brookings Institution-where I previously served as vice president and director of foreign policy studies. Having divided my career between government service and think tanks, I can testify to the insights to be gained by combining ideas and practice. Over the past quarter century, I've alternated stints at the National Security Council, the Defense and State Departments, and on
Capitol Hill with time at Brookings, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Carnegie Endowment.
Convening Professionals In addition to bringing new ideas and experts into government, think tanks provide policy-makers with venues in which to build shared understanding, if not consensus, on policy options among what my former Harvard colleague Ernest May has labeled the "foreign policy public": the opinion makers and shapers drawn from across the professions. As a rule, no major foreign policy initiative can be sustained unless it enjoys a critical base of support within the broad foreign policy community. Among think tanks, the non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations has been most adept at this convening role, hosting hundreds of meetings annually in New York, Washington, and major cities around the country. For U.S. officials, events at major think tanks offer non-partisan settings to announce new initiatives, explain current policy, and launch trial balloons. For visiting foreign dignitaries, the opportunity to appear before prominent think tank audiences provides access to the most influential segments of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
Engaging the Public Even as they convene elites, think tanks enrich America's broader civic culture by educating U.S. citizens about the nature of the world in which they live. The accelerating pace of globalization has made this outreach function more important than ever. As the world becomes more integrated, global events and forces are touching the lives of average Americans. Whether the issue is ensuring foreign markets for farm exports, tracking the spread of infectious diseases, protecting U.S. software from piracy abroad, ensuring the safety of American tourists overseas, or safeguarding our ports against terrorist infiltration, the U.S. public has a growing stake in foreign policy. Eighty World Affairs Councils, scattered around the United States, provide valuable forums in which millions of adults and high school students can discuss international events. But
formal think tanks, too, are increasingly engaging U.S. citizens. In 1999, the Aspen Institute launched a Global Interdependence Initiative, "a la-year effort to better inform, and more effectively motivate, public support for forms of U.S. international engagement that are appropriate to an interdependent world."
Bridging Differences Finally, think tanks can assume a more active foreign policy role by sponsoring sensitive dialogues and providing third-party mediation for parties in conflict. As part of its congressional mandate, the U.S. Institute of Peace has long facilitated such informal, "Track II" negotiations, as well as training U.S. officials to mediate long-running disputes. But other, more traditional think tanks have also extended their mandates to participate actively in preventive diplomacy, conflict management, and conflict resolution. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the Carnegie Endowment hosted a series of meetings in Washington, bringing together leading South African politicians, clergy, businessmen, labor representatives, academics, and exiled liberation figures, as well as members of Congress and executive branch officials. These gatherings, occurring over eight years, helped establish the first dialogue and built understanding on South Africa's futw'e during a delicate political transition. Likewise, CSIS has launched projects to improve ethnic relations in the former Yugoslavia, to bridge religious-sewlar divisions in Israel, and to facilitate GreekTurkish dialogue. Such unofficial initiatives are delicate undertakings. But they have great potential to build peace and reconciliation in conflict-prone regions and war-torn societies, either as a complement to U.S. government efforts or as a substitute when an official American presence is impossible. In the darkest corners of the world, they can serve as the eyes, the ears, and even the conscience of the United States and the international community. 0 About the Author: Richard N. Haass, former director of Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings Institution and director of Policy Planning for the State Department, became president of the Council on Foreign Relations in June.
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ECONOMIC DIPLOMACY IN SOUTH ASIA WORK;Âť The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., is a leading graduate school which has its own affiliated think tanks, the Foreign Policy Institute being one. In May the SAIS South Asia Studies Program and the Foreign Policy Institute hosted a panel discussion with the theme "Testing Economic Diplomacy in South Asia: Can it Really Work?" Panelists were drawn from a range of institutions: Teresita C. Schaffer from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); Lisa Curtis from the Bureau of South Asian Affairs, U.S. Department of State; Ram Babu Dhakal, First Secretary, Permanent Mission of Nepal to the United Nations; Stephen P Cohen from Brookings Institution; Michael T. Clark, executive director, U.S.-India Business Council, U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Hussain Haqqani, a senior Pakistani journalist, once adviser to three Prime Ministers and now visiting scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Ford Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at SAIS Poonam Barua, who hails from New Delhi. All of them are experts with informed opinions on South Asia. Schaffer, now director, South Asia Program, CSIS, spent 30 years as a diplomat with a focus on South Asia, and was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, 1989-92. She also served as U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka.
"It's not without reason that people often joke that the United States actually sells more to the Dominican Republic, and even Costa Rica, than it does to India," Michael T. Clark points out. Speaking at a session on testing economic diplomacy in South Asia at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., on May 29, Clark noted that according to World Bank statistics, India is the world's fourth largest economy but only accounts for a fraction of one percent of the world's trade. "The reason for this is that the Indian economy is structured in a way that India feels uncomfortable allowing what happens naturally when you trade to happen-assets get reallocated, ownerships get reallocated, jobs get reallocated and economic dislocation takes place," he explained. Panelists were split down the middle on whether recent indicators of a thaw in IndiaPakistan relations would translate into real Michael T Clark time gains, but one thing they did agree on was that an increase in trade between the two South Asian neighbors would be mutually beneficial to both nations. Reiterating that there were economic benefits of trade between India and Pakistan, Clark maintained that while trade alone could not create conditions for peace, it could in fact reinforce them. He cautioned that if Pakistani jobs went to India, and Indianjobs to Pakistan, trade could actually make things worse. He suggested
both India and Pakistan would do well to first get ready to trade with the outside world and then talk about trading with each other. The panel was moderated by recent Ford Fellow Poonam Barua. In her paper, Barua noted that economic diplomacy has always been an important tool for conducting international relations and enhancing strategic interests of nation states. However, the speed with which the world's geopolitical definitions have been changing and the momentum set by new economic relationships has changed the way in which business and economics will influence the world for future success, she added. In particular, this new economy has given way to a recognition of the important role that economic diplomacy can play in opening windows of opportunity for building national, regional and global relationships between countries, their people, and their constituencies. Barua says that over the past few years an opportunity has presented itself for India and Pakistan to move beyond a focus on traditional commodity trade items and harness the economic benefits of business cooperation in high-end value adding areas. These areas include natural gas, electricity and power sharing, telecommunications infrastructure; communications technology; training and
manpower development; information technology development; and joint projects for foreign investment. Barua said the business community in Pakistan was not wary of improving trade relations with India-"They are just waiting for the government to give the green signal." Once this signal is given, she added, there are actual gains to be made between India and Pakistan. She preTeresita C. Schaffer dicted these gains would come in areas like trade in raw cotton ("India and Pakistan make 50 percent of the world's cotton"), small machinery ("much of which Pakistan buys from the West") and rubber tires ("India controls 80 percent of the tire industry in Pakistan, but all these tires come via Dubai."). Calling the India-Pakistan relationship to date a story of "one success, a whole lot of failures or at least under-performances and a potential success at the end," Ambassador Teresita C. Schaffer noted that the Indus Water Treaty was that one success story. The 1960 agreement provides for equitable, cooperative sharing of water resources between India and Pakistan. "The Indus Water Treaty responded to a real need," Schaffer said, adding that the interesting feature of this treaty was that it had quite workably solved the short-term water problem in the region. Underperformance, she said, lay injust about every other aspect of India-Pakistan relations. Noting a dramatic drop in trade interconnections between the two nations, Schaffer pointed out that when added up, India and Pakistan trade about one percent of their overall foreign trade with one another. India has granted Pakistan most favored nation treatment. "It's what we know in the U.S. as normal trade relations," Schaffer said. "But the fact that trade remains so low suggests that there are other issues at work." She noted that it seemed reasonable to expect that if both India and Pakistan really applied normal trade relations to one another, there would be an increase in a factor of at least 5 to 10 percent in the volume of trade. "The business communities in general are pro-trade in both countries, but in their own political system there is always an asterisk next to the-'please liberalize trade, but not in my sector.' This just shows that there is not an unfettered push coming from the business community," she observed. Clark was appreciative of the improvement within the Indian system. "The system in India today is far more liberal, more transparent and more regular than it was five years ago." But, he added, it was not where everyone, especially people in Indian industry, would like it to be. He said it was undergoing a positive change because of pressure from investors who came in and ran into trouble.
Noting a policy of systematic isolation practiced by both India and Pakistan in the years following independence, Schaffer said both nations tried hard to avoid impOlts. "Both India and Pakistan have a tendency to regard any agreement reached with the other country as a favor 'we are doing to them,' rather than a strategic move as a favor 'we are doing to ourselves' in opening up these economic possibilities," she noted critically. And while India traditionally has wanted to move more rapidly on non-Kashmir-related issues in its discussions with Pakistan, Schaffer said Pakistan has felt even more strongly the other way-that if trade and other issues move too fast, Kashmir will be forgotten. "This is a problem that has not been forgotten, it is very much alive as we watch the efforts of the Indian and Pakistani leaderships to try to figure out where they can go in their peace initiatives," she said. Welcoming the nascent India-Pakistan peace agreement, Lisa Curtis from the Department of State, said these moves had raised hopes of peace in the subcontinent. "Many South Asia watchers were worried that we were heading toward another period of escalating tensions," Curtis observed, adding that future challenges should not be underestimated. "Dr. No" According himself the pessimistic label of "Dr. No or Dr. Doubtful," Stephen P. Cohen, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted five factors that made it difficult for economic relations, especially between India and Pakistan and to a lesser degree with the rest of the countries in the region, to get any traction in South Asia. "In the long run, hopefully these obstacles will be worked around, but I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future. Nor do I see the prospect of closer economic ties having any impact on these factors," Cohen said. These five factors, he said, were "the psycho-pathological problems between India and Pakistan; the discrepancy in Stephen P Cohen size between the two countries; the possession of nuclear weapons in both nations' arsenals; the increasing presence of non-state actors and the absence of outside interest in the region." "In India and Pakistan you have two countries that are obsessed with what they might lose," he said. "The psychology of the leadership in both countries is that there is a lot to lose and if they lose a little bit they might lose a lot more. Both sides see themselves as threatened and vulnerable." He pointed out that India's significantly larger size and power added to the strains in the relationship. As for nuclear weapons, Cohen said, "They have had a curious impact on the prospect of normalization of relations." He added: "In both countries it was thought that having nuclear weapons
would make them very able to deal with the other. But nuclear weapons have also had the consequence of making war between the two states impossible-no rational leader would contemplate a nuclear exchange." And so India and Pakistan find themselves stuck in what Cohen calls a "never, never world" where they cannot have peace and they cannot have war-not unlike the U.S.-Soviet relationship during the Cold War. "If either side thought having nuclear weapons would enable them to solve their strategic rivalry, it has proven to be incorrect," Cohen said. Highlighting the lack of outside interest in South Asia, Cohen said: "The rest of the world does not view this as a serious engagement. There are no economic stakes involved in South Asia-a more prosperous India or Pakistan would be trivial as compared to American investments in East Asia." The only thing that has driven the U.S. and other countries, to intervene, Cohen pointed out, has been the fear of a nuclear war. And that has largely been a sporadic intervention and a preventive one rather than addressing any specific issue. Outsourcing Not everyone shared Cohen's pessimism. Clark, while joking that "if Steve is Dr. No, then I will be Dr. Hell No," added, "but I don't agree that there is not much outside interest in India." Outsourcing, he said, was the biggest example of outside interest in India. With many American companies relocating work sites-call centers, back offices and technical support-to India, Clark noted that there was actually a "very sensitive kind of trade which deals with real-time business functions." The growth ofIndia's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry has corresponded with a rise in resentment within the U.S. against companies that are sending jobs overseas. "We are already beginning to see the signs of how big this is going to be in the form of blowback in the U.S. political system," Clark admitted. Legislation is pending in the New Jersey state legislature that, if passed, will ban outsourcing of jobs from the Garden State. Several other states across the United States are contemplating similar action. Arguments have also been made to scrap the L-l visa that allows intra-company transfers, and reduce the cap on the H-IB visa. Political Will Lacking Echoing Cohen's pessimism, senior Pakistani journalist Hussain Haqqani noted that the real challenge in the area of economic cooperation in South Asia was the lack of political will. He noted that until 1965, Indian banks had branches in Pakistan and Pakistani banks had branches in India. Several hotels in Pakistan were also run by Indian entrepreneurs like the Oberois. All that changed after the 1965 war.
"What changed it all was politics," said Haqqani, adding, "so if there is going to be a change back, it's also going to have to be political." Comparing India and Pakistan to a divorced couple that could not sit together without recalling instances when one or the other let each other down, Haqqani predicted political issues would continue to dominate this relationship. He warned that there were several elements that would try to undermine the nascent political will "at every stage in the days to come." He was optimistic, however, that the required political will could be created and once done, the present peace dividend would materialize. Haqqani said it was interesting that 16 items which were not on the India-Pakistan list of tradable items accounted for close to $2 billion of trade in smuggling between the two countries. Pakistan's largest selling brand of truck tires, Apollo, is an Indian brand. Yet, Pakistan does not legally import tires directly from India. "If illegal trade were to be legalized there would be benefits to the Government of Pakistan in terms of revenue," he said. Curtis agreed, adding, legalizing such trade would also cut transportation costs and time. But, like all illegal rackets, there are political dimensions to this as well as vested interest. Comparing the militant-smuggler nexus to the mafia networks in some of the seedier neighborhoods of New York, Haqqani said people involved in illicit trade were also political players. "They have an ideological, political and economic agenda. They are potential spoilers." Pipeline of Peace Noting that India's energy demands are growing at a rate faster than any other country in the world, Curtis made the case that the energy sector held the greatest potential for economic cooperation between India and Pakistan. There is room for similar cooperation between India and Bangladesh. "The big prize in India-Pakistan trade relations ought to be energy and energy-related trade," agreed Schaffer. She suggested that a gas pipeline between India and Pakistan originate either in Iran or Turkmenistan. "India is deeply suspicious about becoming more dependent on Pakistan," she said. Pakistan, on the other hand, now has an economic objective and is eager to build a pipeline from Iran through Pakistan and on to Northern India having figured out it would be more economical to do it that way. "This pipeline could be a peace builder in the manner of the Indus Water Treaty," said Schaffer. "The hitch is how do you deal with India's very understandable concerns about political risk-there is a deal here for the making that requires a political breakthrough. We have seen the beginnings of this breakthrough, but I think we need to see a few more steps before this kind of deal making becomes viable." Schaffer is confident that there are ways of solving this problem and added that the economic benefits of doing so would be huge.
The U.S. Government would not, however, look favorably on a pipeline that originates from Iran. "We understand and support measures that build cooperation between India and Pakistan, but we have legislation in place that prohibits contributing to Iran's economy ....We have some serious policy concerns about an Iran pipeline," Curtis said. Lisa Curtis Clark noted that several questions would also be asked about the advantages of such a project. "One has to ask just how competitive from a price stand point, will gas obtained from such a pipeline be as compared to gas available locally. Will the costs of building the pipeline be built into the price of the gas delivered?" If these costs are to be included, he suggested that for India it might make better sense to run a pipeline from Bangladesh because of lower delivery costs. It would also be politically easier to do this.
The Ghost of Enron Clark voiced his concern that parties involved in such projects would find it difficult to collect dues owed to them. Past American experience in India has been that sovereign commitments made by the Government ofIndia are extraordinarily good when they are made to other sovereigns. However, when these commitments are made to private parties, any disputes are commercial disputes and do not invoke sovereign guarantees. Indicating that this has been true more so in the energy sector, Clark was quick to add, "I don't mean to say that whatever happened in the Enron case was all because ofIndia ... [but] that experience has made it very difficult for people to raise money for such kinds of projects." Qualified industrial zones in Jordan have been developed as a way of creating employment with some value addition through labor. Investment in these areas is encouraged by designating zones which will have preferential access to U.S. markets and other markets in the world. The Taiwanese have invested in many ofthese Jordanian zones making them a huge success. However, Clark admitted, "What you can do for Jordan is probably not what you can do for India." Incidentally, a similar project-special economic zones (SEZs)-was started in India. "We were very excited about it, but it hasn't gone anywhere," Clark said. "It is very difficult to do trade and investment in India. That is going to change-in the last 10 years there has been a remarkable change." SAARC Role While many analysts and economic experts have been quick to blame political tensions between India and Pakistan for holding
back economic ties, Barua says solutions should be explored to keep South Asia engaged in the process of globalization. In her paper she wrote: "The success of SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) in achieving its stated goals for enhancing economic cooperation and delivering prosperity and well-being to one-sixth of the world's population has remained unfulfilled, even after more than a decade." SAARC's Vision 2020 envisages a South Asian economic union in successive stages. Nepalese diplomat Ram Babu Dhakal said people mistakenly expect SAARC to also solve political issues. "One of the organization's stated guidelines is that no contentious bilateral issues will be discussed by it," he said. "In general, part of the context for opening up India-Pakistan economic relations is SAARC," Schaffer suggested. Terming SAARC's trade goals "ambitious" and the organization "a very weak one," she said the trade agreement between India and Sri Lanka was SAARC's small success story in trade liberalization. "Liberalizing trade within SAARC, or between India and Pakistan, doesn't mean it will result in balanced trade, but it does mean that the smaller party has a chance to gain proportionately more," she said. Curtis concurred, "Many Pakistani and Indian business leaders understand the benefit of better trade, however, no strong equities have been built around this." Haqqani explained the reason for this, saying politics in the subcontinent was not driven by economics. "We have to bear in mind that at the per- Ram Babu Dhakal sonal level people always make economic decisions. But the debate on Partition was all about ideology and politics, not about economics. Back home, it is identity and ideology that drive South Asian politics," he said. The boom in the Indian economy coupled with an urgent awareness in Pakistan of the need to revive its economy and attract foreign investment has added impetus to enhancement of trade relations between India and Pakistan. In the current context of a thaw in diplomatic relations between India and Pakistan, panelists were cautiously optimistic about the potential for opening new avenues of trade between the two countries. However, they all agreed that this initiative was still vulnerable to derailment if the broader political issues in the subcontinent were not addressed. Cohen ended on a hopeful note saying that these potential road blocks to peace and prosperity were not insurmountable. D About the Author: Ashish Kumar Sen is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who contributes to India Abroad and Outlook.
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cientists know just a few places where snowy owls breed regularly: Barrow, Alaska, is the only one in the United States. Perched between the Chukchi Sea-thick with ice even in July-and the hummock-and-pond vastness of the tundra, Barrow (above) has a population of roughly 4,600 people and serves as the municipal center for the state's huge oil-rich North Slope Borough. A decade ago biologist Denver Holt, founder of Montana's Owl Research Institute, came here, drawn by the "mythic lure" of big white birds. Though many individual snowy owls winter on the Great Plains of the U.S. and throughout Canada, to observe Nyctea scandiaca in significant numbers, Holt says, "You have to come to Barrow." Much of his summer fieldwork has focused on links between owl reproduction and lemming numbers. But as Barrow homes and businesses have expanded into snowy owl habitat, Holt has become increasingly concerned with owl-human relations. "There's a long histOly of the native Inupiat people and owls living together here," he says. "The question is, will those traditions continue to be respected? Will Barrow make choices that work for people and owls?" Where do snowy owls go when they leave summer breeding grounds? Tested on Barrow owls, a new satellite tracking system-using transmitters that weigh about an ounce and record data for more than a year-
reveals that individual birds range through as much as a third of the Arctic. But before Holt's Owl Research Institute team could start collecting data, owls had to be caught. Dodging a snapping beak and sharp talons, Holt and colleague Law路a Phillips gently untangled a female from a lenuning-baited trap, then fitted her with a transmitter backpack. After release tagged birds preened, then flew undisturbed by the device's antenna, and rejoined their chicks. "We've worked on adults and young from 142 nests," Holt says. "Handling causes some stress, but we're extremely careful. Our research has never caused an owl to abandon a nest." Most owl species depend on camouflage and stealth to survive, but "snowy owls seem to defY all the conventional owl wisdom," says researcher Mat Seidensticker. "They don't hide. During the breeding season they're flashing white beacons" against the treeless greens and browns of the tundra, hlmting in Arctic summer's 24-hour daylight. Adult females
c;;;r-or award-winning photographer Daniel 1. Cox, photography is more than capturing the beauties of the natural world. "It S a concern for the environment and the earth all living creatures must share. " Twenty years of braving all kinds of weather to get the best shots has resulted in an extraordinary collection of wildlife images which may be viewed at Coxs Natural Exposures Web site. His work has appeared in several publications, including National Geographic, Audubon, National Wildlife and Sierra and he has produced seven solo books. He lives in Bozeman, Montana. See www.naturalexposures.com.
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weigh as much as 2.5 kilograms and hurtle through the air on wings more than 1.5 meters across. Males are smaller and sleeker, with a top weight of about two kilograms, but they're equally powerful fliers. Lemmings aren't their only prey: Snowy owls kill weasels and foxes, and even feed on other birds, including jaegers, eiders, and gulls. Diving out ofthe sky with long legs and talons outstretched, a snowy owl can drive away humans, dogs, even caribou that wander too close to its young. Birds that remain in the polar north through winter manage to find
food despite three months of total darkness. These stoic owls rarely seek shelter, even from roaring winds. Their plumage protects them so effectively that adults can endure temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero. "Snowly owls," Seidensticker says, "are as well insulated as arctic foxes." The pure white feathers of a male delivering a lemming to his mate do more than keep him warm. They also show that he's fully mature. Males don't lose the gray-brown banding that marks females and j uveniles until they're three to four years old, and rarely breed before that.
Their range is so big, so inaccessible-we don't really know how many snowy owls there are. Above left: A nestful of chicks in sight of a natural gas pumping station. Left: A research scientist releases a tagged snowy owl.
In years of peak lemming abundance, Holt and his team have observed older, highly aggressive males establishing nests with two different females. They hunt for both, and protect two territories that may each extend a kilometer from their central nest mounds. Females typically lay eggs two days apart; chicks hatch at roughly the same interval. In a clutch of six or seven eggs, the first chick hatched may be two weeks old before its youngest sibling emerges. "We've seen no signs of competition or favoritism in the nest," Holt says. "Snowy owls nurture all their chicks, even the smallest." Harry Potter novelist J.K. Rowling cast a snowy owl as her orphaned hero's courier and companion. That seems perfectly fitting: Swift, strong, beautiful, and dauntless in caring for their young, these
winged icons ofthe Arctic are magically fascinating-to boy wizards and scientists alike. Peering at the world between cotton grass blossoms, this fourweek-old (above) has already left the nest. Parents keep close watch and provide regular food deliveries until chicks are eight to nine weeks old and can fly and hunt on their own. By the time such brighteyed fluff-balls become fully fledged, the brief Arctic summer is ending, and most of Barrow's snowy owls disperse to face winter's icy challenges-alone. D About the Author: Lynne Warren is with the editorial team of National Geographic magazine.
The New Economy Was a Myth, Right? ,,rong. "The new economv
of the late 1990s was an invention of the media and Wall Street." So writes Jeff Madrick in a paper recently published by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. As Madrick sees it, the "new economy" was an ill-defined concept used to justifY a stock market bubble. Proponents exaggerated changes in the American economy, overestimated the benefits of technology, and abandoned careful analysis in favor of bliss ed-out utopianism. By the end of the decade, he argues, new economy thinking had degenerated into "a frenzy of half-truths, bad history, and wishful thinking." Was it all a dream? Certainly Madrick isn't the only one who thinks so. With the collapse of the Nasdaq in 2000 and the onset of recession in 2001, the new economy's critics took center stage. Not only had the bad old days-rising unemployment, declining profits-returned, but the good old days hadn't really been so good. It wasn't just the stock market; the whole late-1990s economy had been a bubble, thanks to overinvestment by business, reckless spending by debt-laden consumers, and cheap money from the Fed. Although the economy has emerged from recession far sooner than anyone expected, the bears remain dour. Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stan-
ley, insists that the U.S. can look forward only to "very subdued growth" until it works off "the bubble-induced excesses of the late 1990s." Don't COWlton it. In fact, the overall shallowness of the recession and strong productivity growth during the downturn show that the skeptics are wrong. Call it the myth of the myth ofthe new economy. The naysayers ignore the economic fundamentals that drove the boom, emphasizing instead the over-the-top rhetorical flourishes-and outrageous stock prices-that accompanied it. Because wild-eyed optimists once said technology would change everything, it must have changed nothing. But if it's 2002 and you're still saying that things aren't fundamentally different than they were a decade ago, you're living in a dream world at least as fantastic as anything a new economy fanatic could conjure.
In realitV, 1995 marked
the beginning of a long-lived shift in U.S. economic performance. Productivity growth accelerated due to what economists call secular, rather than cyclical, factors. That is, the pace of productivity growth didn't start rising in 1995 because the business cycle had turned upward. It started rising because crucial aspects of the economy had changed. As a result, today's economy can expand much faster than previ-
ously thought possible. Between 1972 and 1995, productivity rose a paltly 1.4 percent a year. Between 1995 and 2000, it rose 2.5 percent a year-an increase of 79 percent. "There has absolutely been a sizable change in the secular growth rate of both labor productivity and total factor productivity," says Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson. Many of the truisms of the boom, it turns out, were true. No doubt, some advocates of the new economy went overboard touting its revolutionary impact. The business cycle is still with us. And consider the claim that the 1990s were the first time in history that products got cheaper as they got better. In fact, delivering higher quality for lower prices is the story of most technological revolutions. The price of industrial dyes fell more than 90 percent in just a few years at the end of the last century, transforming the chemical and clothing industries. Automobiles were much cheaper and better in 1920 than they had been in 1905. The television, a household necessity by 1970, was a high-priced luxury when it first appeared. The climate of exaggeration and hype made it easy for sober-minded observers to dismiss the new economy. Yet for all their excesses, the prophets of the new order understood what was happening better
than the grumbling bears did. If, in 1995, you were trying to predict the future, you'd have been better off paying attention to BusinessWeek-which was already proclaiming the arrival of the "Age of Productivity"-than to people like, well, Jeff Madrick, who published a book that year titled The End of Affluence.
If, as Virginia Woolfmight have put it, "on or about October 1995 the U.S. economy changed," what caused it? How did an economy that seemed to be stuck in neutral suddenly slip into high gear? The short answer, as Harvard's Jorgenson has argued in a number of seminal papers, is that 1995 was when the semiconductor product cycle quickened from three years to two. Competition from Advanced Micro Devices pushed Intel to step up the pace of development, causing semiconductor prices to plummet and processing power to rise more quickly. Information technology became cheaper and brought a higher return. Naturally, companies responded by pouring money into IT. The story, though, is more complicated, and more interesting. After all, information technology alone didn't guarantee higher productivity. Had U.S. corporations still been the top-heavy, oligopolistic giants they had been in the 1970s, falling
semiconductor prices might have had little impact. But in 1995, U.S. firms had just come through two decades of wrenching changes, emerging stronger than they had been in years. The most important change was wrought by the arrival of Japanese corporations as major players in the world economy. U.S. companies entered the 1970s facing little foreign competition at home. By the end of the decade, American television manufacturing was effectively dead, the U.S. steel industry had been eclipsed, and everyone wanted to know how the Toyota Production System worked. Competition had the predictable effects of eliminating the weak and making the survivors leaner and more efficient. American businesses underwent a second traumatic restructuring during the Reagan years. Venerable companies that had become fat and lazy were easy prey for corporate raiders, who promptly focused on restoring profitability (often to payoff debt). Meanwhile, companies at risk had little choice but to shape up in short order. The demand that corporations maximize shareholder value forced them to shed layers of bureaucracy, excise unprofitable businesses, and shrink workforces. A decade later, the economy as a whole became the primary beneficiary.
These trends began in the late 1970s, but it wasn't until the late 1990s that they took full effect. They primed the pump for the IT explosion by making businesses better able to reap the benefits of technological innovation.
Consider
a tale of two companies. WalMart is among the most efficient corporations in the world today. In fact, a late-2001 McKinsey Global Institute study of the boom found that "Wal-Mart directly and indirectly caused the bulk of the productivity acceleration" in its category. How? Information technology, for the most part. Wal-Mart uses IT to help it store and transport goods more efficiently. (You'll never find a half-full pallet in a Wal-Mart.) It relies on forecasting tools to ensure that there are never too few or too many employees on the floor at anyone time. It encourages suppliers to stock the stores themselves, using an elaborate data interchange system to make sure suppliers know when inventories are running low.
that all you had to do was introduce a new technology and everything would change overnight. The Wal-Mart example suggests instead that technology's value is inseparable from the manner of its deployment. The microprocessor is good for everyone, but it becomes a transformative force only when it's used in the right way. That's why IT's impact varies dramatically not just across industries, but within them as well. Companies that can reinvent themselves to take advantage of new technologies-by, for instance, streamlining supply chains-perform better than those that don't. As MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson and his Wharton colleague Lorin Hitt put it in their paper "Beyond Computation," "Firms that adopt decentralized organizational structures and work structures do appear to have a higher contribution of information technology to productivity." The singular example is Dell, which has a corporate structure designed around IT. In theory, any of Dell's competitors could do what Dell does-
SURPRISE: WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY IS NOT NECESSARilY GOOD FOR CORPORATE PROFITS. And it takes advantage of economies of scale by building stores in a hub-andspoke pattern around giant distribution centers. As a result, Wal-Mart has become one of the largest companies in the world while earning returns on capital that are the envy of its peers. By contrast, its competitor Kmart has been plagued with stockouts and is hooked on sales and markdowns. Both Wal-Mart and Kmart have access to roughly the same technology. Supplychain management software is not difficult to come by. It has been almost a decade since Procter & Gamble introduced its "efficient consumer response" technology, which transmits sales information directly from a retailer's scanner to the manufacturer, letting the latter know when the store needs to be restocked. Yet Kmart has failed to use technology to improve its business in any meaningful way. An important tenet of first-wave new economy thinking was what might be called technological determinism, the idea
build computers to order, carry almost no inventory, and rely heavily on suppliers to deliver components on a just-in-time basis. None does, though, in large part because all of them are stuck with out-ofdate business models and organizational structures. Note that information technology's benefits increase over time. If you study the relationship ofIT spending to productivity over a single year, you'll find that computers deliver benefits roughly equal to their costs. If you look at the same relationship over longer periods, write Brynjolfsson and Hitt, "the measured benefits rise by a factor of two to eight." Consider the ASAP system designed by Baxter, a medical supply company, to let hospitals order from wholesalers electronically. Initially, all it really did was save Baxter's sales reps the cost of writing up orders. Once the system was in place, though, Baxter realized it could use the data it generated to take charge of the
whole operation, from stockroom space to inventory tracking to replenishment. Eventually, the company opened ASAP to other suppliers, creating an electronic marketplace. This evolution wasn't anticipated and probably couldn't have been. Companies learn by doing. They need to restructure operations, shift resources, tear up charts, and reallocate personnel. "Information technology is certainly a crucial part of the productivity story," says Kevin Stiroh, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "But it's a complex process. Without complementary innovations in organization, changes in the way companies use human capital, and changes in the workforce, the story would look very different." As a result, one of the keys to the new economy has been the U.S. labor market's tremendous flexibility. The declining power of unions, the lax enforcement of strict work rules (even when unions are present), and the rising use of temporary labor-none of these changes has been uniformly beneficial, and the virtues of the free-agent economy have celtainly been exaggerated. But if there's one reason why the U.S. has reaped greater benefit fi'om technology and managerial innovation than Europe has, it's that most European countries have tightly regulated labor markets and elaborate work rules within firms. (As a measure of how far Europe has yet to go, last March an Italian government adviser was assassinated for proposing to make it easier for employers to fire and hire people.) "You don't see IT investment leading to real productivity gains in countries with rigid labor markets," Jorgenson says. "If you're committed to permanent employment, you're doomed. And the thing is, it's only going to get worse over time. Either you adapt to the new world, or you fall further and further behind."
Corporate
restructuring, IT investment, increased competition, and flexible labor markets were the drivers of economic change in the late 1990s. By the end of the decade, however, the new economy was associated-at least in the public imagination-with one thing: the stock market, and in particular, the Nasdaq. Not surprisingly, then, the Nasdaq's subsequent crash
set the critics crowing. What's more, the revelation that Enron, the quintessential new economy darling, was a house of cards led some observers to conclude that the entire U.S. economy had become a giant Ponzi scheme. The stock market at the tail end of the 1990s was, of course, a bubble, based on unsustainable expectations and driven by the theory of the greater fool. While investors recognized that the U.S. economy was in far better shape than it had been for a long time, they didn't grasp that what's good for the economy is not necessarily good for corporate profits. Each individual corporation may be more efficient, but if overall efficiency is higher, improvements in productivity may not add to the bottom line. Similarly, rapid growth and ceaseless innovation are wonderful for consumers, but greater levels of competition make it harder for any company to retain dominance for long. The short-term rewards of controlling a market are perhaps greater than ever-but so too is the chance of being displaced by technological or organizational change. At the height of the bull market, investors focused only on the upside. Everyone was going to be a winner. In fact, the real winners were not greedy investors or Wall Street hucksters. The victors were consumers and workers, who reaped the benefits of inflation-free prices, low unemployment, rising wages, and a booming GDP. Wages for the average private-sector worker rose 10 times as much between 1991 and 2001 as they did in the 1980s. And those numbers include the slow-growth period of the early 1990s. Between 1997 and 2001, wages climbed faster than they had at any time since the 1950s. That's some Ponzi scheme.
Of course, even if you accept that the U.S. economy has been fundamentally healthier since 1995 than it has been in decades, it's no guarantee that the good times are here to stay. So the most important questions are: Can productivity continue to rise rapidly, and if so, for how long? The short answers are yes, and for the foreseeable future. The best evidence that the gains of the late 1990s are sustainable appeared during
the recent recession. The rate of productivity growth fell, as it always does when the economy slows. But it fell considerably less than it had during previous recessions, suggesting a rise in the underlying trend. Moreover, with the economy on the rebound, productivity is once again rising
Consider the trucking business. A familiar analysis ofIT's limitations is that, no matter how many computers a trucker owns, he'll never be able to drive more than one truck. But as economist Tom Hubbard showed in a 2002 study for the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research-
THE RATEOFPRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IS STill RISING-AND UNliKElY EVERTO ROURN TO ITS PRE-1995 STAGNATION. briskly-up a remarkable 8.6 percent in the first quarter of 2002. The clear implication: Productivity growth is unlikely to return to its meager pre-1995 pace. A recent paper by Jorgenson, Stiroh, and Mun Ho, an economist at the Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C., think tank, wrestles with the question of productivity growth. The authors conclude that 2.2 percent growth annually is a reasonable guess for the next five to 10 years. Others are more optimistic. At a Fed conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, two years ago, economists Brad DeLong and Lawrence Summers announced that three percent was feasible. This doesn't mean that overall economic expansion will match the spectacular climax of the late 1990s. But unless you bel ieve that competition, greater labor flexibility, and more powerful technology are going to make companies less efficient, the days of stagnant productivity are behind us. Jorgenson suggests that the faster semiconductor cycle will continue to power the economy through 2006. The McKinsey Global Institute study, perhaps the most detailed examination of the boom, offers further reasons for optimism. Six sectors-retail, wholesale, securities brokerage, industrial machinery and equipment, electronics, and telecommunications-accounted for most of the productivity increase. In a number of these areas, opportunities remain for dramatic improvement. More to the point, other sectors-banking being the most obvious-seem ripe for organizational and technological innovation. Information technology frequently proves its value in unanticipated ways.
a fascinating look at how trucking companies use onboard computers and wireless networks-technology has dramatically boosted productivity by decreasing the amount of time truckers drive around without cargo. It's not that they are working more hours. It's that they're able to get more done in the hours they work-the very definition of labor productivity. As processing power increases and networks improve, efficiencies will appear that aren't on the horizon today. Finally, there's the Internet to consider. Perhaps the most striking thing about the performance of the new economy is, in retrospect, how little it had to do with the Net per se. Companies were able to reap enormous benefits from IT before the Net was widely used, and some of what the Net allowed companies to do, they were already doing via dedicated electronic networks. The Net remains relatively young; following the logic of Brynjolfsson and Hitt, it makes sense that companies are only beginning to figure out how to best take advantage of it. Clearly some companies-Amazon, Dell, Cisco-have already made the Internet integral to their operations. But they're exceptional. It remains to be seen whether the Net can live up to the promise that companies like GE believe it has. If it can, and thereby make a significant contribution to further productivity growth, that impact is bound to be powerful. You can even imagine it creating a new new economy. There we go again. D About the Author: James Surowiecki writes for Financial Page column of The New Yorker. He also writes for Motley Fool and Slate.
She has also become a mentor to foreigners wanting to study classical forms. In 1989, Sharon began a dance festival in Delhi solely aimed at featuring dancers of non-Indian origin from outside India. "When I came in the '70s, the only way for a foreigner to get performances was if he or she was being promoted by a guru. I started this dance festival to offer committed foreign dancers an opportunity to develop professionally." One of the artists featured in Sharon's first festival was Justin McCarthy. Another fellow Michigan resident, Justin came to study Bharatanatyam in 1979. He ended up studying Bharatanatyam under Leela Sampson, returning to the United States for only weeks at a time. Since then he has become not only a respected Bharatanatyam dancer, but also a teacher and choreographer at New Delhi's Shri Ram Bharatiya Kala Kendra. While also interested in the vast abhinaya tradition of Indian dance, his productions (performed by a troupe he trains himself) veer from the conventional Bharatanatyam repertoire. With names like "The Great Oriental Circus" and "Filmistan" ("a piece inspired by everything from Shakuntula to Walt Disney's Snow White") his themes are loosely mythological with an element of fantasy, but outside the typical Hindu religious context. "I wanted to get away from the religious heaviness of themes while still concentrating on the aesthetic content," Justin says. "I'm not religious but I'm attracted to religious dance and music because ofthe richness ofthe mystical imagination." By dedicating their lives to mastering their respective dance forms, making their homes in Delhi, and even-in McCarthy's case-taking on Indian citizenship, both Sharon and Justin have become highly regarded members ofthe dance community. And yet they have not cauterized their roots entirely. Instead, they carved out transnational identities and, in different ways, maintain their connections to their American backgrounds, returning every year, keeping their names, and looking at their forms through distinct lenses. While Sharon teaches at the American School, Justin, who trained extensively in classical piano before coming to India, continues to give recitals and lessons. As inspiration for many Americans coming to India, Sharon and Justin illustrate that these dance forms are not limited to certain ethnicities and do not require a surrender on one's own identity. However, while old skepticisms abate, new doubts are also arising. With the expanding cultural crossover, many traditional gurus and teachers harbor fears that the forms themselves ~ will become diluted. In particu~ lar, the concept of "fusion" is ~ of great debate. Kumudini
Lakhia, a renowned Kathak guru and choreographer, notes, "As the global dance community becomes closer, classical Indian dance must take an active role in the world dance arena." But she also gives a note of caution, saying that an open mind should not replace rigorous training. "Before you can experiment with the form you must understand the tools with which you experiment." Considering the great philosophical differences in approach between Western and Indian dance traditions, fusion between these two mediums often results in patchwork productions. I have seen both Indians and Americans attempting such obvious fusions with little success-the modern dance looks forced in the Indian productions and the classical dance movements look awkward in the American shows. However, not all modern dancers are coming to India for "movement shopping." Cynthia Lee, a dancer from California, is currently studying Kathak dance with a very different approach in mind. For the past year she has been traveling to Brazil, Thailand, and now India on a Thomas J. Watson Scholarship to study religious dance forms. She says, "My quandary is the desire to learn dances from other cultures and observe how in different places you move in different ways. Some aspect of the physicality of culture is always reflected in the dance form." For Cynthia, her objective in studying Kathak is to see how her training will naturally effect her movements. Just as Parul's environment affects her dance style, Cynthia feels that her own training in classical Indian dance will eventually manifest itself in her creations. "I am not thinking about using Kathak movements in modern dance. But by learning another form and trying to really understand it, it naturally influences the way you move." In the parallel world of music, Bret Battey and Samita Sinha, two American Fulbright scholars, are also struggling in very different but corresponding ways
Parul Shah lives in New York, and has seriously studied Kathak there and in India. While she has a traditional repertoire, she has developed unconventional pieces that reflect American influence.
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Opposite page: Reena Shah, the author, performing Kathak.
Kumudini Lakhia puts a student through her paces at her Ahmedabad schoo!'
with the complex and vague notion of "fusion" in their own work. Bret, a composer of computer music, came to India to develop "Khayal Computer Modeling," an effort to adapt the richness ofIndian classical music to his own compositions. "I didn't want to 'imitate' Indian classical music. Rather I wanted to make the melodic language part of me so it could be naturally synthesized with other parts of my musical personality and result in something new." To develop this understanding he not only worked on computer tools to examine Khayal, but also began training in the vocal style himself under Vikas Kashalkar in Pune. Samita, on the other hand, began studying Khayal as a child at the insistence of her parents, abandoning it for Western music and then returning to it later on her own. Her musical influences are vast, including jazz, gospel, soul, pop, choral, and musical theater. While rigorously studying the classical art from Alka Deo Marulkar in Goa, she is also performing with her guru's troupe in a production that draws on her diverse musical background, looking for points of intersection with the Khayal tradition. With regards to fusion Sam ita says, "To be technical, every art form is fusionclassical Indian is an amalgam of various Persian and North Indian styles. Of course the fusion projects I work on are different because they are deliberate. I love the idea of making different musical languages jive and hope to help give a better name to fusion." My own involvement in Indian classical art does not fall neatly into any of these categories. Though I came to India to seriously study Kathak, I am not, like Parul, aiming to make it my career. Nor am I involved in the fusion process of performance. Instead, I began studying Kathak out of curiosity and eventually developed a connection with the form, both as a dancer and as a writer. Even the most basic hand movement-the arm rising in the air guided by the wrist, the hands making a small circle and then returning to the center-impressed me. Its simplicity was striking, and yet its difficulty was shocking. I knew I had found something I wanted to do. In addition to the aesthetic quality of Kathak, as a creative writer I was drawn to the form's history and the sto-
ries behind contemporary Kathak dancers. Just as many writers have been inspired by music and painting to create compelling prose and poetry, the dance form became something I wanted to explore through language as well. I finally came to India, also as a Fulbright scholar, to pursue Kathak as both a student and writer. At times, explaining to people my "reason" for coming to India becomes complicated. When asked, "Are you a dancer?" I usually reply in the negative. But when asked, "Are you a researcher?" r feel like highlighting the fact that r also dance. r am not an aspiring scholar or critic. Nor am I a professional dancer or studying to become one. My purpose is multi fold and, in many ways, shaped by my outsider status. A major reason for these varied approaches is that Indian performing arts have become viable pursuits in the United States. As venues for Indian dance and music in America diversify beyond "cultural events," these forms are finding a wider audience. Images of "traditional" Indian dance and music are expanding beyond ornamental costumes and a man strumming a sitar, just as "fusion" is becoming more than a cut-and-paste process. While the West Coast has typically been regarded as the hub for Indian performing arts with the eminent Ali Akbar College of Music, established in 1974, an increasing number of artists are emerging in places like Chicago and New York. More and more college dance and music programs are developing curricula to include Indian classical forms. Slowly, these forms are becoming known beyond the generalized umbrellas of "ethnic dance" or "world music." Those of us involved with Indian performing arts form a motley group. Our interests-ranging from contemporary Kathak to dance writing to Khayal algorithms-not only lead us to India but also return us to America. As we look for appropriate connections and affinities with the forms with which we are involved, the tradition stretches its bounds. It is, of course, a fine line between exploration and exploitation. But what characterizes many new American students is the desire for creative expression is complimented by extensive training. Not all of us are becoming Indian classical masters, but we are attempting to understand the depth of these forms. How this training eventually manifests itself in our work and lives is a constant question. When thinking about her future as a Kathak dancer, Parul openly admits her uncertainty. "I am in the process of discovering what feels right, and if that means going beyond the parameters of Kathak, as long as it comes from a place that's honest, I think it's okay." D About the Author: Reena Shah is a writer and 2002-03 Fulbright fellow studying Indian classical dance.
Harris Wofford An American Gandhian
algeraus V..." A colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement, co-organizer of the Peace Corps at the behest of John F. Kennedy, U.S. senator and now co-chair of America's Promise: Alliance for Youth, Harris Wofford has devoted his life to citizen service. His primary inspiration? Mahatma Gandhi. arris Wofford's sense of purpose was set early. Ironically, his concern for minorities and the disadvantaged sprang from a grand tour that was a prerogative of the privileged. At the impressionable age of 12, as World War II was brewing, his grandmother took him around the world. During that trip Harris Wofford-who later became a co-organizer of the Peace Corps, a civil rights activist and a senator-fOlmed opinions that colored his entire life. "It connected me with the world and alerted me to the fact that the world was being torn apart by Hitler and the Japanese imperialists." He related this story recently in New Delhi, where a busy Wofford gave talks and visited NGOs. His own grandchild, 16-year-old Gabriel, was in tow, thoroughly enjoying himself. Young Harris Wofford saw Shanghai after its devastation by the Japanese, he saw Mussolini speak fj路om a balcony. "As a little 12-year-old, 1 came back an interventionist. I thought we should be rallying with England to stop
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Hitler." India was on his itinerary as well. Although "I was not enlisted in the cause of nonviolence at the time," he says, while in India he glimpsed a man who would later influence him profoundly: "I saw Gandhi go through the streets of Bombay." A sore throat and fever prevented him fj路om attending Gandhi's speech at Chowpatty Beach. "How I wish I had heard him," Wofford recalled, "because later when I got a fellowship to come to India to study Gandhi, we were hoping he would be here, and he was killed before we got here." Deeply interested in the Quit India Movement, Wofford, with his late wife Clare, wrote India Afire (1951), about the independence movement. In it they proposed a Gandhian strategy for the American civi I rights movement. "Very early I was captured by Gandhi as a political artist, as a master of democratic politics, as a teacher of how to make democracy really work in a complex new century. And it wasn't just civil disobedience, it was also the constructive service
side," Wofford said. After India, where he formed lasting bonds with freedom fighters such as Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Ashok Mehta and Yusaf Meher Ali, the Muslim mayor of Bombay, Wofford returned to America. He took law degrees at traditionally black Howard University-a daring choice in the segregated 1950s-and Yale Law School. Wofford followed up India Afire with a series of papers "to make the case why we needed the Gandhian dimension in civil rights." The response from civil rights leaders was mixed, with many, including late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall who led the civil rights litigation efforts, feeling that it was either a good idea or a very bad one that could backfire on the civil rights movement. Wofford described how a group including "one of the great Gandhi lovers, Stuart Nelson, who worked with Gandhi," requested Gandhi in 1935 to come to America. Gandhi said, "How I wish I could, but you must bear the privilege of the struggle in America
Harris Wofford with General Colin Powell in 2000. Powell was then co-chair of America s Promise and Wofford, CEO of the COIPOration for National Service. Wofford has strong links with India, which he visited as a boy and later as a young scholm:
because I have not made my message good in India, and it may be that you, the American Negro, may bring the unadulterated message of nonviolence to the world. That is almost a direct quote from Gandhi," Wofford said, adding, "Stuart Nelson bad yearned for Americans to adopt Gandhi,- and he wrote me this sad letter saying, I've sadly concluded after years of promoting this idea there is no Gandhi among us. Then within a few days of getting that and other letters, I read in the newspaper that a woman named Rosa Parks had said no." Fate and events took the ideal of Gandhian passive resistance out of the realm of discussion and into action when a young black woman in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, po-
litely refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and was arrested in 1955. Wofford said, "The little group of civil rights champions in Montgomery, Alabama, went to this new, young preacher, a promising, well-educated, articulate young preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and said would you chair a call for the boycott of the buses? King said yes. Rosa Parks said no and King said yes." The story of Rosa Parks and "this young preacher" who was leading the boycott in Montgomery made the front pages of the newspapers. "My heart leaped up," Wofford said. King had read one of Wofford's papers before the boycott, "and we started corresponding and then phoning and finally meeting." Soon Wofford was working alongside Martin Luther King. He smiled at a memory of King: "He said I was the only lawyer who was working with him helping him go to jail instead of using all the tricks of the trade to keep him out," elaborating, "A good lawyer is supposed to
keep someone out of jail. But being imbued with the Gandhian ideal that on occasion, the way you say no has to be all the way, and you say no peacefully, disobeying the law, but doing it respectfully and accepting the consequences." What was King like? "King was thoughtful. You could almost see him thinking when he was presented with a challenge. He wasn't just quick and flashy, with a glib phrase. He thought very hard about not just the goal of what he called the "beloved community"-Gandhi would call it Rama Rajya. But above all, he thought about the ways and means of achieving it, whether what you do in struggling and in protest will actually bring results. It seems to me, King and Gandhi were interested in using nonviolence in ways that would persuade people, that would reach people, that would move people and would change things. It was that quality that I yearned for in the American civil rights movement. And one day along came Martin Luther King." As a personality, Wofford said of King, "He was very human. No one would think of Martin Luther King, in dealing with him, as a saint. He was very much a collaborator. It was wonderful to be in a brainstorming group with him. He didn't care about hierarchy, if somebody had a good idea. He listened at least as much as he talked. I'd say he listened more than he talked. Which is why I think of him as someone who you could see thinking, because he's pal1ly listening and partly reflecting. He didn't have the gaiety, the almost comic spirit that I sense in Gandhi." During his India fellowship, Wofford said, "1 had a wonderful session with Gandhi's most perceptive son, Devdas, the year after his father was killed. He, like others, said the most notable thing about Gandhi was his hem1y laugh, his real sense of comedy and the human condition, including the comedy of the little man in the dhoti standing up to the great leviathan
Wofford (center) chats with President John F Kennedy on August 9, 1962. Wofford worked with Sargent Shriver to set up the Peace Corps. Below: Wofford escorts Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., at a Bryn Mawr commencement ceremony in 1972.
of the British empire. Gandhi, when he went to Europe, put Charlie Chaplain at the top of the list of whom he wanted to meet because, Gandhi said, I'm trying to do on the political stage what Charlie Chaplain did in the film, take on the great machine, modern society, and expose it. King definitely had a sense of humor, but very different. He was a preacher. Gandhi took that year of silence when he came back to India. I'm not sure Martin Luther King would have ever taken a year of silence. (Laughs). It isn't like Jessie Jackson or Hubert Humphrey, that he wanted to talk all the time, but a year of silence, that would have been hard for King." Martin Luther King adopted Gandhian peaceful resistance and civil disobedience as his principal tool in the civil rights struggle. A month-long visit King made to India in 1959 was like a seminar for him, as he met chief leaders of the independence movement and had a four-hour session with Nehru. (In his 1980 book Of Kennedys and Kings, Wofford quotes King's words upon arrival in New Delhi: "To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim. This is because India to me means Mahatma Gandhi.") King had already read Gandhi's works when he met Wofford. "At the time I was at his side trying to help, he was trying to think through how you apply active forms of nonviolence to win the right to vote and end public segregation, and to go on from that to begin creating the kind of
were maybe even harder to climb than just acting against the scandal of denying the right to vote by race, or denying people a cup of water by race." King and Robert Kennedy, with whom Wofford also worked, were both killed in the same spring of 1968. Wofford reflected, "It's very hard to think about. It's painful to think what might have happened if that high spirit had carried forward, rather than the great depression of c .1l the spirit that came. And it came in part, .::J not just the assassinations but in a very ,:;J significant part because of the Vietnam ~ War, which I think most Americans now -'? agree was a tragic mistake. We got deeper ~ and deeper in, and our resources went in, 8 and the War on Poverty got emasculated." The War on Poverty, launched in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson, was an idea which had its inception during the Kennedy years, when the Peace Corps was founded to deliver American aid and expertise abroad in a very personal way. Volunteers of all ages, but mostly young idealists, were sent for two-year stints in developing countries where there was the need and the invitation. They taught in schools, started village health care programs, worked to develop more efficient farming methods. The other purpose of the Peace Corps was to let young Americans broaden their horizons through experience, to form a leadership that ultimately could develop informed, responsi'" ble foreign policy. Harris Wofford worked ~ with Sargent Shriver to organize the Peace ~ Corps at the request of President Kennedy 8 in 1961. Thanks to B.K. Nehru, then Indian Ambassador to the U.S., who concommunity that would be good for everyveyed an invitation to them to visit India, one," Wofford said. He added, "And it's Shriver and Wofford organized a Peace quite amazing that in 10 years, basicallyif you take it to the end of his life, 13 Corps public relations trip in the Third World. In Of Kennedys and Kings Woffyears-the two goals he set out to focus ord wrote "India was the hardest and most on, winning the right to vote and ending critical test of the trip." There he and public segregation were both achieved." Shriver toured villages in rural Punjab and Wofford drew another comparison, "He, tried to convince leaders that the Peace like Gandhi, was pointing to the much more complex problems of how you, in Corps was not a "neocolonial enterprise." response to education and economic institutions, cre- Prime Minister Nehru's ate ajust community, and all the social in- Shriver, as recorded by Wofford, was mild: "I am sure young Americans would learn a vention that would be needed in that. And that the mountains ahead, before there was good deal in this country and it could be an important experience for them. The govany chance of reaching a promised land,
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"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
~rty years ago, on August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 people converged on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C., in a peaceful demonstration to demand legislation ensuring civil rights for African Americans and other minorities. The March on Washington was a watershed. It was there that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., made his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. The following year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. From the Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, through 10 years of attempts to make desegregation a reality, the laws that improved the status of blacks, women and other minorities were dearly won. As King observed, these laws were "written in the streets." Civil rights remains an important issue today. 0
j
ernment ofthe Punjab and the minister for community development apparently want some of your volunteers, and we will be happy to receive a few of them-perhaps 20 to 25. But I hope you and they will not be too disappointed if the Punjab, when they leave, is more or less the same as it was before they came." More than 40 years later, sitting at Claridges Hotel in Delhi, Wofford mused, "By the end of the 1960s the Peace Corps was almost 1,000 strong in India. Nehru had talked about it
being very small, and very valuable for young Americans to learn about India, but the more they worked in the Punjab and the Green Revolution, the more governments in the states and institutions were asking for Peace Corps workers." Although Peace Corps volunteers contributed to the Green Revolution, the rise of the swadeshi movement and a tilt toward the Soviet Union resulted in the Peace Corps being asked to leave India. Eunice Kennedy, Sargent Shriver's
wife and founder of Special Olympics, was keen on a domestic version of the Peace Corps. She talked with her brothers John and Robert about it. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and Head Start programs finally emerged as part of the War on Poverty in 1964. Wofford, who served as U.S. senator from Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1994, has devoted much of his career to making citizen service a common experience for all Americans. His current role as head of the
Corporation for National and Community Service and co-chair of America's Promise: The Alliance for Youth, is a natural one for him, after decades of creating such programs. VISTA was a precursor of Americorps and America's Promise. The latter was founded in 1997 to give people the chance to serve their community. It is a bipartisan effort. Its first chairperson was General Colin Powell, and when he became Secretary of State, his wife Alma Powell agreed to co-chair with Harris Wofford. Defining its aims, Wofford said, "America's Promise is trying to show that in this complex modern world, you can achieve great goals, for children and youth, by a form of collaboration that brings all levels of government together with the corporate world, with the education community, with the religious communities, with youth-serving organizations, with nongovernmental organizations in a collaboration around specific goals in the community." The five goals of America's Promise are that "Every young person should have a caring adult in their life, a mentor or a coach. Second, everyone should have structured activities in
safe places in non-school hours. Third, every young person should have a healthy start-the mother should have prenatal care and health education and immunization and access to health care. Fourth, children should have an effective education. Extra tutoring should be provided for children who can't read independently by the end of grade three. Finally, every young person should have not only opportunities to serve and give back, but should be asked and challenged to work in the community on hard problems, and learn citizenship by doing it." Communities, schools and various organizations collaborate on these efforts, which are targeted at the poorest young people. "There are some 800 partners of America's Promise nationally, of whom about 400 are corporate partners and another 400 are nongovernmental organizations," Wofford says. Large youth orgaInteracting with children at a Kansas City Missouri school which is part of the America Promise network. Wofford is dedicated to citizens 'service by helping young peopleand young people giving back.
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nizations such as Boys and Girls Clubs, Girls Scouts, YMCAs, Big Brothers and Big Sisters are partners. The Red Cross and other community services organizations also participate. Besides disadvantaged youngsters, the program focuses on "the 15 million kids who are not getting after-school programs and tutoring and need a mentor in their lives. All young people need these promises," Wofford maintains. They also need to "become active duty citizens," and give back to the community. But people often see citizen service as a time-intensive endeavor requiring the dedication of a Gandhi or a King. Wofford's view is uncompromising: "We all, in different ways, should be little Gandhis and little Martin Luther Kings. Not expecting to enter the world stage, anymore than young people who discover the excitement of sports and have role models who became world stars and multimillionaires should think that ifthey pursue sports they are going to be world stars and multimillionaires. But having that as a challenge is a good thing." He adds, unsurprisingly, given his own track record, "I am on the side of very high expectations, even at the risk oftension and strain in the gap between the ideal and the reality. And American history at its best has set-for example in the Declaration of Independence-the high goal of liberty and justice for all, stating as a 'self evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.' Seeing that as a selfevident truth when it was obviously then, and now, very controversial, I think was a great thing." Wofford acknowledges the danger in the gap between the goal and its accomplishment, "But T favor living dangerously. I guess the much greater frustration for me is not that we have too high expectations and we don't live up to them, but there is too great a sense that there is nothing you can do about it, and you can't control anything. So I would like people ~ to be educated to believe that they can ~ change things. And if they become heav~ ily strained in trying to do it and being ~ disappointed, it's better than the value~ lessness that comes in saying, well, we ~ can't do anything about that." D
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Copyright Š The New Yorker Collection 2002 Alex Gregory from Cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.
"Do you have any reference letters other than the one from your astrologer?"
ON
THE LIGHTER SIDE
Copyright Š The ew Yorker Collection 2002 Sidney Harris from Cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.
"If that resume doesn't impress you, I have a couple of others. "
avid Stahle's pulse rises when he spots a stand of beat-up old trees. To him, twisted trunks, fire scars, splays of dead, bleached branches and various burls, holes, and other tolls of time are beauty marks. "Old trees are like old people," he says. "They have character. A grove of gnarly trees is like a Japanese garden with a lovely, understated beauty." He is dendrochronologist, an expert on the imprints that rhythms of climate, fire, and pestilence leave in a tree's year-by-year layers of growth. Director of the Tree-Ring Laboratory at the University of Arkansas, Stahle is also a leader of a project to map North America's old-growth forest-woodlands that have never known the ax or the saw. What he is documenting will surprise many. For most people "old-growth forest" evokes images ofrare, remote groves of tall timber such as California's redwoods, where shafts of
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Uncut tracts of primeval forest still survivejust about everywhere
sunlight illuminate massive columnar boles like the pillars of a cathedral. But by drilling core samples and counting the rings, Stahle and others are finding that ancient trees-often small and scraggly ones-grow much closer to home. From small pockets to millions of acres, tracts little altered for 300 years or more survive in just about every state, often on steep slopes or marginal land that has escaped logging or farming. His preliminary map already shows hundreds of spots, and he expects that, guided by satellite images, he will find hundreds more. "People just don't recognize what they're looking at," he says.
Survivors. These old trees have tales to tell. For reasons not fully understood, trees growing under harsh conditions often live longer, yet also are more sensitive to fluctuations in weather than larger trees on better land. As a result, they can provide a better climate record. Stahle, for example, recently concluded from rings in baldcypress trees that a severe drought could explain why the so-called Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, died out by 1590. But many of these hardy old trees are now threatened by development, fire, and an invasion of pests from other countries. Old trees "are still vulnerable. They really are part of the patrimony of the United States," says Thomas Swetnam, director ofthe Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Recently, during a break from a meeting ofthe American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, where he outlined tree-ring evidence of past North American droughts, Stahle spent a day in the ravines and hills of the Nature Conservancy's 13,350-hectare Simon g' Newman Ranch in central California. Z From the driver's seat of a four-wheeldrive truck, conservancy naturalist Larry Serpa pointed out golden eagles overhead, packs of wild pigs bolting through the brush, and coyotes trotting ridgelines. Stahle's eye, however, was on the blue oak, a species that resembles live oak but loses leaves in winter. It is California's standard foothill oak. Many specimens dotting this landscape took root long before anybody ranched the land. At one point, he jumped from the truck and scampered over to a scrawny tree no more than 5 meters tall, its trunk hardly 30 centimeters wide. "Look at this bark!" he exclaimed at its gray, scaly skin. "This is an old tree, 150 years, I bet." Up the hill loomed bigger, craggier specimens, their branches dropping to the ground. Stahle has drilled pencil-thin cores from such oaks and found them to be up 500 years old. He estimates that the state has nearly 1.2 million hectares of surviving oldgrowth blue oak in its coastal ranges and along the Sierra
foothills, perhaps the nation's biggest expanse of old growth and a detailed archive of local climate. So sensitive are the ring widths to each year's rain that Stahle has used them to estimate how rivers swelled and ebbed in centuries past. That caused the salinity of San Francisco Bay to fluctuate in ways unknown today, now that the rivers have been dammed and diverted.
Land of ancients.
Five hundred years is no great shakes in California, long known for ancient trees that include 3,000-year-old giant sequoias and the record-holding, 4,600year-plus bristlecone pine that lives 3,048 meters up in the White Mountains near Nevada. But when Stahle was a student in Arizona in the early '70s, the prevailing wisdom was that no old growth survived east ofthe Mississippi. "I love those professors, but, boy, were they wrong," he says. He and fellow tree experts have found 500-year-old pitch pines only 7.6 meters tall in the Shawangunk Mountains, just 80 kilometers from Times Square. Chestnut oaks along high ground in the Delaware Water Gap are 300 to 400 years old. Some of the scrawny northern white cedars clinging to cliffs along the Niagara escarpment, which runs through New York, New England, and Canada, exceed 1,000 years. Stahle is proudest of the discovery of ancient baldcypress trees along the Black River in North Carolina. When he and fellow University of Arkansas tree-ring man Malcolm Cleveland checked out the cypresses on a whim, they expected to find ages of less than a century. The trees are instead 1,700 years old, the oldest in eastern North America. Farther west, wide expanses of Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma along the prairie margin are "wall-to-wall old growth," Stahle says. Most is post oak, red cedar, and blackjack oak up to 500 years old, which form tangled thickets in the "cross timbers" country (so named by pioneers who had to force their way through). More than 51,800 hectares of cross timber in eastern Oklahoma alone, he says, appears from an analysis of satellite imagery to be old growth. Bulldozers clearing land for grazing are gnawing away at it, however. Where such trees are threatened, the University of Arizona's Swetnam says, "we have to get in and sample them before they are gone." Landowners don't mind. "You might think we'd get run off," Stahle says. But when he and his colleagues tell ranchers they're from the university and want to find out how old their trees are, the gates open right up. And if the trees turn out to be old, "the owners are ecstatic." D About the Author: Charles W Petit is a senior writer with the U.S.
News
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World Report.
What
Is
Worth;l By EDWARD O. WILSON
There's a powerful economic argument for preserving our living natural environment: the biosphere promotes the long-term material prosperity and health of the human race to a degree that is almost incalculable. But moral reasons, too, should compel us to take responsibility for the natural world.
the nearly 19th century, the coastal plain of the southern United States was much the same as in countless millennia past. From Florida and Virginia west to the Big Thicket of Texas, primeval stands of cypress and flatland hardwoods wound around the corridors of longleaf pine through which the early Spanish explorers had found their way into the continental interior. The signature bird of this wilderness, a dweller of the deep bottomland woods, was the ivory-billed woodpecker, Campephilus principalis. Its large size, exceeding a crow's, its flashing white primaries, visible at rest, and its loud nasal call-kent! ... kent! ... kent!-likened by John James Audubon to the false high note of a clarinet, made the ivorybill both conspicuous and instantly recognizable. Mated pairs worked together up and down the boles and through the canopies of high trees, clinging to vertical surfaces with splayed claws while hammering their powerful, off-white beaks through dead wood into the burrows of beetle larvae and other insect prey. The hesitant beat of their strikes-tick tick ... tick tick tick ... tick tick-heralded their approach from a distance in the dark woods. They came to the observer like spirits out of an unfathomed wilderness core.
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Alexander Wilson, early American naturalist and friend of Audubon, assigned the ivory bill noble rank. Its manners, he wrote in American Ornithology (1808-14), "have a dignity in them superior to the common herd of woodpeckers. Trees, shrubbery; orchards, rails, fence posts, and old prostrate logs are all alike interesting to those, in their humble and indefatigable search for prey; but the royal hunter before us scorns the humility of such situations, and seeks the most towering trees of the forest, seeming particularly attached to those prodigious cypress swamps whose crowded giant sons stretch their bare and blasted or moss-hung arms midway to the sky." A century later, almost all ofthe virgin bottomland forest had been replaced by farms, towns, and second-growth woodlots. Shorn of its habitat, the ivory bill declined precipitously in numbers. By the 1930s, it was down to scattered pairs in the few remaining primeval swamps of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. In the 1940s, the only verifiable sightings were in the Singer Tract of northern Louisiana. Subsequently, only rumors of sightings persisted, and even these faded with each passing year. The final descent of the ivorybill was closely watched by Roger Tory Peterson, whose classic A Field Guide to the Birds had fired my own interest in birds when I was a teenager. In 1995, the year before he died, I met Peterson, one of my heroes, for the first and only time. I asked him a question common in conversations among American naturalists: What of the ivorybilled woodpecker? He gave the answer I expected: "Gone." I thought, surely not gone everywhere, not globally! Naturalists are among the most hopeful of people. They require the equivalent of an autopsy report, cremation, and three witnesses before they write a species off, and even then they would hunt for it in seances if they thought there were any chance of at least a virtual image. Maybe, they speculate, there are a few ivorybills in some inaccessible cove, or deep inside a forgotten swamp, known only to a few closemouthed cognoscenti. In fact, several individuals of a small Cuban race of ivorybills were discovered during the 1960s in an isolated pine forest of Oriente Province. Their
current status is unknown. In 1996, the Red List of the World Conservation Union reported the species to be everywhere extinct, including Cuba. I have heard of no further sightings, but evidently no one at this writing knows for sure. Why should we care about Campep hilus principalis? It is, after all, only one of 10,000 bird species in the world. Let me give a simple and, I hope, decisive answer: because we knew this particular species, and knew it well. For reasons difficult to understand and express, it became part of our culture, part of the rich mental world of Alexander Wilson and all those afterward who cared about it. There is no way to make a full and final valuation for the ivorybill or any other species in the natural world. The measures we use increase in number and magnitude with no predictable limit. They rise from scattered, unconnected facts and elusive emotions that break through the surface of the subconscious mind, occasionally to be captured by words, though never adequately.
The ivory-billed woodpecker, an extraordinary species with a 75-centimeter wingspan, has not been sighted since the 194 Os and is presumed extinct. Today many other species teeter on the edge of extinction.
We, Homo sapiens, have arrived and marked our territory well. Winners of the Darwinian lottery, bulge-headed paragons of organic evolution, industrious bipedal apes with opposable thumbs, we are chipping away the ivorybills and other miracles around us. As habitats shrink, species decline wholesale in range and abundance. They slide down the Red List ratchet, and the vast majority depart without special notice. Over the past halfbillion years, the planet lost perhaps one species per million species each year, including everything from mammals to plants. Today, the annual rate of extinction is 1,000 to 10,000 times faster. If nothing more is done, one-fifth of all the plant and animal species now on earth could be gone or on the road to extinction by 2030. Being distracted and self-absorbed, as is our nature, we have not yet fully understood what we are doing. But future generations, with endless time to reflect, will understand it all, and in painful detail. As awareness grows, so will their sense of loss. There will be thousands of ivory-
billed woodpeckers to think about in the centuries and millennia to come. Is there any way now to measure even approximately what is being lost? Any attempt is almost certain to produce an underestimate, but let me start anyway with macroeconomics. In 1997, an international team of economists and environmental scientists put a dollar amount on all the ecosystems services provided to humanity free of charge by the living natural environment. Drawing from multiple databases, they estimated the contribution to be $33 trillion or more each year. This amount is nearly twice the 1997 combined gross national product (GNP) of all the countries in the world-$18 trillion. Ecosystems services are defined as the flow ofmaterials, energy, and information from the biosphere that support human existence. They include the regulation of the atmosphere and climate; the purification and retention of fresh water; the formation and enrichment of the soil; nutrient cycling; the detoxification and recirculation of waste; the pollination of crops; and the production of lumber, fodder, and biomass fuel. The 1997 megaestimate can be expressed in another, even more cogent, manner. lfhumanity were to try to replace the free services of the natural economy with substitutes of its own manufacture, the global GNP would have to be increased by at least $33 trillion. The exercise, however, cannot be performed except as a thought experiment. To supplant natural ecosystems entirely, even mostly, is an economic-and even physical-impossibility, and we would certainly die if we tried. The reason, ecological economists explain, is that the marginal value, defined as the rate of change in the value of ecosystems services relative to the rate of decline in the availability of these services, rises sharply with every increment in the decline. If taken too far, the rise will outpace human capacity to sustain the needed services by combined natural and artificial means. Hence, a much greater dependence on artificial means-in other words, environmental prostheses-puts at risk not just the biosphere but humanity itself.
Most environmental scientists believe that the shift has already been taken too far, lending credit to the folk injunction "Don't mess with Mother Nature." The lady is our mother all right, and a mighty dispensational force as well. After evolving on her own for more than three billion years, she gave birth to us a mere million years ago, the blink of an eye in evolutionary time. Ancient and vulnerable, she will not tolerate the undisciplined appetite of her gargantuan infant much longer. Abundant signs of the biosphere's limited resilience exist all around. The oceanic fish catch now yields $2.5 billion to the U.S. economy and $82 billion worldwide. But it will not grow further, simply because the amount of ocean is fixed and the number of organisms it can generate is static. As a result, all of the world's 17 oceanic fisheries are at or below sustainable yield. During the 1990s, the annual global catch leveled off around 30 million tons. Pressed by ever-growing global demand, it can be expected eventually to drop. Already, fisheries of the western North Atlantic, the Black Sea, and portions of the Caribbean have largely collapsed. Aquaculture, or the farming of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks, takes up part of the slack, but at rising environmental cost. This "fin-and-shell revolution" necessitates the conversion of valuable wetland habitats, which are nurseries for marine life. To feed the captive populations, fodder must be diverted from crop production. Thus, aquaculture competes with other human activities for productive land while reducing natural habitat. What was once free for the taking must now be manufactured. The ultimate result will be an upward inflationary pressure across wide swaths of the world's coastal and inland economies. Another case in point: Forested watersheds capture rainwater and puritY it before returning it by gradual runoffs to the lakes and sea, all for free. They can be replaced only at great cost. For generations, New York City thrived on exceptionally clean water from the Catskill Mountains. The watershed inhabitants were proud that their bottled water was once sold throughout the Northeast. As
their population grew, however, they converted more and more of the watershed forest into farms, homes, and resorts. Gradually, the sewage and agricultural runoff adulterated the water, until it fell below Environmental Protection Agency standards. Officials in New York City now faced a choice: They could build a filtration plant to replace the Catskill watershed, at a $6 billion to $8 billion capital cost, followed by $300 million annual running costs, or they could restore the watershed to somewhere near its original purification capacity for $1 billion, with subsequently very low maintenance costs. The decision was easy, even for those born and bred in an urban environment. In 1997, the city raised an environmental bond issue and set out to purchase forested land and to subsidize the upgrading of septic tanks in the Catskills. There is no reason the people of New York City and the Catskills cannot enjoy the double gift from nature in perpetuity of clean water at low cost and a beautiful recreational area at no cost.
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here is even a bonus in the deal. In the course of providing natural water management, the Catskill forest region also secures flood control at very little expense. The same benefit is available to the city of Atlanta. When 20 percent of the trees in the metropolitan area were removed during its rapid development, the result was an annual increase in storm water runoff of 125 million cubic meters. If enough containment facilities were built to capture this volume, the cost would be at least $2 billion. In contrast, trees replanted along streets and in yards, and parking area are a great deal cheaper than concrete drains and revetments. Their maintenance cost is near zero, and, not least, they are more pleasing to the eye. In conserving nature, whether for practical or aesthetic reasons, diversity matters. The following rule is now widely accepted by ecologists. The more numerous the species that inhabit an ecosystem, such as a forest or lake, the more productive and stable is the ecosystem. By "production," the scientists mean the amount of plant and animal tissue created in a
given unit of time. By "stability," they mean one or the other, or both, of two things: first, how narrowly the summed abundances of all species vary through time; and, second, how quickly the ecosystem recovers from fire, drought, and other stresses that perturb it. Human beings understandably wish to live in the midst of diverse, productive, and stable ecosystems. Who, if given a choice, would build a home in a wheat field instead of a parkland? Ecosystems are kept stable in part by the insurance principle of biodiversity: If a species disappears from a community, its niche will be more quickly and effectively filled by another species if there are many candidates for the role instead of few. Example: A ground fire sweeps through a pine forest, killing many of the understory plants and animals. If the forest is biodiverse, it recovers its original composition and production of plants and animals more quickly. The larger pines escape with some scorching of their lower bark and continue to grow and cast shade as before. A few kinds of shrubs and herbaceous plants also hang on and resume regeneration immediately. In some pine forests subject to frequent fires, the heat of the fire itself triggers the germination of dormant seeds genetically adapted to respond to heat, speeding the regrowth of forest vegetation sti II more. A second example of the insurance principle: When we scan a lake, our macroscopic eye sees only relatively big organisms, such as eelgrass, pondweeds, fishes, water birds, dragonflies, whirligig beetles, and other things big enough to splash and go bump in the night. But all around them, in vastly greater numbers and variety, are invisible bacteria, protistans, planktonic single-celled algae, aquatic fungi, and other microorganisms. These seething myriads are the true foundation of the lake's ecosystem and the hidden agents of its stability. They decompose the bodies of the larger organisms. They form large reservoirs of carbon and nitrogen, release carbon dioxide, and thereby damp fluctuations in the organic cycles and energy flows in the rest of the aquatic ecosystem. They hold the lake
If humanity were to try to replace the free services of the natural economy with substitutes of its own manufacture, the global GNP would have to be increased by at least $33 trillion.
A typical beaver dam. Beavers, by building dams, create ponds, bogs and flooded meadows that foster species of plants and animals not usually found in running streams.
close to a chemical equilibrium, and, to a point, they pull it back from extreme perturbations caused by silting and pollution. In the dynamism of healthy ecosystems, there are minor players and major players. Among the major players are the ecosystems engineers, which add new parts to the habitat and open the door to guilds of organisms specialized to use them. Biodiversity engenders more biodiversity, and the overall abundance of plants, animals, and microorganisms increases to a corresponding degree. By constructing dams, beavers create ponds, bogs, and flooded meadows. These environments shelter species of plants and animals that are rare or absent in free-running streams. The submerged masses of decaying wood forming the dams draw still more species, which
terns these species compose. On the other hand, mathematical models that attempt to describe the interactions of species in ecosystems show that the apparent opposite also occurs: High levels of diversity can reduce the stability of individual species. Under certain conditions, including random colonization of the ecosystem by large numbers of species that interact strongly with one another, the separate but interlocking fluctuations in species populations can become more volatile, thus making extinction more likely. Similarly, given appropriate species traits, it is mathematically possible for increased diversity to lead to decreased production. When observation and theory collide, scientists turn to carefully designed experiments for resolution. Their motivation is especially strong in the case of biological systems, which are typically far too complex to be grasped by observation and theory alone. The best procedure, as in the rest of science, is first to simplify the system, then to hold it more or less constant while varying the important parameters ~ one or two at a time to see what happens. ! In the 1990s a team of British ecologists, ,3 in an attempt to approach these ideal conoccupy and feed on them. ditions, devised the ecotron, a growth Elephants trample and tear up shrubs chamber in which artificially simple and small trees, opening glades within ecosystems can be assembled as desired, forests. The result is a mosaic of habitats species by species. Using multiple that, overall, contains larger numbers of ecotrons, they found that productivity, resident species. measured by the increase of plant bulk, Florida gopher tortoises did IO-meterrose with an increase in species numbers. long tunnels that diversify the texture of Simultaneously, ecologists monitoring the soil, altering the composition of its patches of Minnesota grassland-outdoor microorganisms. Their retreats are also equivalents of ecotrons-during a period shared by snakes, frogs, and ants specialof drought found that patches richer in ized to live in the burrows. species diversity underwent less decline Euchondrus snails of Israel's Negev in productivity and recovered more quickDesert grind down soft rocks to feed on ly than patches with less diversity. the lichens growing inside. By converting These pioneering experiments appeared to uphold the conclusion drawn earlier rock to soil and releasing the nutrients photosynthesized by the Iichens, the from natural history, at least with refersnails multiply niches for other species. ence to production. Put more precisely, ecosystems tested thus far do not possess the qualities and starting conditions verall, a large number of indepenallowed by theory that can reduce producdent observations frOI11differing kinds of ecosystems point to the tion and produce instability as a result of large species numbers. same conclusion: The greater the number of species that live together, the But-how can we be sure, the critics more stable and productive the ecosysasked (pressing on in the best tradition of
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ducted during a two-year period by 34 researchers in eight European countries. This time, the results were more persuasive. They showed once again that productivity does increase with biodiversity. Many of the experimental runs also revealed the existence of overyielding. Over millions of years, nature's ecosystems engineers have been especially effective in the promotion of overyielding. They have coevolved with other species that exploit the niches they build. The result is a harmony within ecosystems. The constituent species, by spreading out into multiple niches, seize and cycle more materials and energy than is possible in similar ecosystems. Homo sapiens is an ecosystems engineer too, but a bad :;; one. Not having coevolved ~ with the majority of life ~ forms we now encounter 8 around the world, we eliminate far more niches than we create. We drive species and ecosystems into extinction at a far higher rate than existed before, and everywhere diminish productivity and stability. I will grant at once that economic and production values at the ecosystem level do not alone justify saving every species in an ecosystem, especially those so rare as to be endangered. The loss of the ivorybilled woodpecker has had no discernible effect on American prosperity. A rare flower or moss could vanish from the Catskill forest without diminishing the region's filtration capacity. But so what? To evaluate individual species solely by their known practical value at the present time is business accounting in the service of barbarism. In 1973, the economist Colin W. Clark made this point persuasively in the case of the blue whale. Balaenopterus musculus. About 30
To evaluate individual species solely by their known practical value at the present time is business accounting in the service of barbarism .... Of the species known, fewer than one percent have been studied beyond the sketchy anatomical descriptions used to identify them.
A blue whale glides through the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Overjishing caused the population to plummet from hundreds of thousands to a few hundred in the 1970s. They remain injeopardy because quick projits are still pitted against conservation for long-term benejits.
science), that the increase in production in particular is truly the result of just an increase in the number of species? Maybe the effect is due to some other factor that just happens to be correlated with species numbers. Perhaps the result is a statistical artifact. For example, the larger the number of plant species present in a habitat, the more likely it is that at least one kind among them will be extremely productive. If that occurs, the increase in the yield of plant tissue-and in the number of the animals feeding on it-is only a matter of luck of the draw, and not the result of some pure property of biodiver-
sity itself. As its base, the distinction made by this alternative hypothesis is semantic. The increased likelihood of acquiring an outstandingly productive species can be viewed as just one means by which the enrichment of biodiversity boosts productivity. (If you draw on a pool of 1,000 candidates for a basketball team, you are more likely to get a star than if you draw on a pool of 100 candidates.) Still, it is important to know whether other consequences of biodiversity enrichment play an important role. In particular, do species interact in a manner that increases the growth of either one or both? This is the process called overyielding. In the mid-1990s, a massive study was undertaken to test the effect of biodiversity on productivity that paid special attention to the presence or absence of overyielding. Multiple projects ofBlODEPTH, as the project came to be called, were con-
meters in length and 150 tons in weight at maturity, the species is the largest animal that ever lived on land or sea. it is also among the easiest to hunt and kill. More than 300,000 blue whales were harvested during the 20th centUlY, with a peak haul of 29,649 in the 1930-31 season. By the early 1970s, the population had plummeted to several hundred individuals. The Japanese were especially eager to continue the hunt, even at the risk of total extinction. So Clark asked, What practice would yield the whalers and humanity the most money: Cease hunting and let the blue whales recover in numbers, then harvest them sustainably forever, or kill the rest off as quickly as possible and invest the profits in growth stocks? The disconcerting answer for annual discount rates over 21 percent: Ki II them all and invest the money. Now, let us ask, what is wrong with that argument?
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lark's implicit answer is simple. The dollars-and-cents value of a dead blue whale was based only on the measures relevant to the existing market-that is, on the going price per unit weight of whale oil and meat. There are many other values, destined to grow along with our knowledge of living Balaenopterus musculus and as science, medicine, and aesthetics grow and strengthen, in dimensions and magnitudes still unforeseen. What was the value of the blue whale in A.D. 1000? Close to zero. What will be its value in A.D. 3000? Essentially limitless-to say nothing of the measure of gratitude the generation then alive will feel to those who in their wisdom saved the whale from extinction. No one can guess the full future value of any kind of animal, plant, or microorganism. its potential is spread across a spectrum of known and as yet unimagined human needs. Even the species themselves are largely unknown. Fewer than two million are in the scientific register, with a formal Latinized name, while an estimated five to 100 million-or moreawait discovery. Of the species known, fewer than one percent have been studied beyond the sketchy anatomical descrip-
tions used to identify them. Agriculture is one of the vital industries most likely to be upgraded by attention to the remaining wild species. The world's food supply hangs by a slender thread of biodiversity. inety percent is provided by slightly more than 100 plant species out of a quarter-million known to exist. Twenty species carry most of the load, of which only three-wheat, maize, and rice-stand between humanity and starvation. For the most part, the premier 20 are those that happened to be present in the regions where agriculture was independently invented some 10,000 years ago, namely the Mediterranean perimeter and southwestern Asia; Central Asia; the Horn of Africa; the rice belt of tropical Asia; and the uplands of Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America. Yet some 30,000 species of wild plants, most occurring outside these regions, have edible parts consumed at one time or other by hunter-gatherers. Of these species, at least 10,000 can be adapted as domestic crops. A few, including the three species of New World amaranths, the carrotlike an-acacha of the Andes, and the winged bean oftropical Asia, are immediately available for commercial development. In a more general sense, all the quartermillion plant species-in fact, all species of organisms-are potential donors of genes that can be transferred by genetic engineering into crop species in order to improve their performance. With the insertion of the right snippets of DNA, new strains can be created that are, variously, cold resistant, pest resistant, perennial, fast growing, highly nutritious, multipurpose, sparing in their consumption of water, and more easily sowed and harvested. And compared with traditional breeding techniques, genetic engineering is all but instantaneous. The method, a spinoff of the revolution in molecular genetics, was developed in the 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, before the world quite realized what was happening, it came of age. A gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, for example, was inserted into the chromosomes of corn, cotton, and potato plants, allowing them to manufacture a toxin that
kills insect pests. No need to spray insecticides; the engineered plants now perform this task on their own. Other transgenes, as they are called, were inserted from bacteria into soybean and canola plants to make them resistant to chemical weed killers. Agricultural fields can now be cheaply cleared of weeds with no harm to the crops growing there. The most important advance of all, achieved in the 1990s, was the creation of golden rice. This new strain is laced with bacterial and daffodil genes that allow it to manufacture beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. Because rice, the principal food of three billion people, is deficient in vitamin A, the addition of beta-carotene is no mean humanitarian feat. About the same time, the almost endless potential of genetic engineering was confirmed by two circus tricks of the trade: A bacterial gene was implanted into a monkey, and a jellyfish bioluminescence gene into a plant. But not everyone was dazzled by genetic engineering, and inevitably it stirred opposition. For many, human existence was being transformed in a fundamental and insidious way. With little warning, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) had entered our lives and were all around us, changing incomprehensibly the order of n~ture and society. A protest movement against the new industry began in the mid-1990s and exploded in 1999, just in time to rank as a millennial event with apocalyptic overtones. The European Union banned transgenic crops, the Prince of Wales compared the methodology to playing God, and radical activists called for a global embargo of all GMOs. "Frankenfoods," "superweeds," and "Farm ageddon" entered the vocabulary: GMOs were, according to one British newspaper, the "mad forces of genetic darkness." Some prominent environmental scientists found technical and ethical reasons for concern. D
(To be continued in next issue) About the Author: Edward 0. Wilson is Pellegrino University research Professor and honorary curator in entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.
SPOTLIGHT Pulitzer for Geeta Anand eeta Anand was "watching the wires" in her editor Elyse Tanouye's World Financial Center office in New York when she first heard about the Pulitzer. In an interview punctuated by strict Wall Street Journal (WSJ) deadlines and failing cell phone reception, Anand recalls: "We were excited and ran down the stairs to the floor below where the paper's editor, Paul Steiger, was standing on a desk with a glass of champagne preparing to give a congratulatory speech." A health and science reporter at the WSJ covering biotech companies, Anand shares the 2003 staff Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism with other members of the WSJ team for a series of stories about scandals in corporate America. "I felt very lucky because you can go through life writing good stories and never win big awards. But if luck and timing are on your side, you get recognized every now and then," she says modestly. Just the second person of Indian origin to win a journalism Pulitzer-Gobind Behari Lal was the first in 1937-Anand, a native of Mumbai and now a New Yorker, worked on two stories that caught the judges' eye. In an investigative report on the once celebrated immunologist and ImClone CEO, Sam Waksal, Anand wrote: "In the world of biotechnology, where sterling scientific credentials are critical to winning investor confidence, Samuel Waksal's bona fides seemed impeccable: a string of research positions at such prestigious institutions as Stanford and Tufts universities and the National Cancer Institute .... Missing from Dr. Waksal's official resume is that he was pushed out of each of those research institutions for what former supervisors and others say was misleading and, in one case, falsified scientific work."
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Waksal resigned from ImClone following charges of insider trading. "My Sam Waksal piece helped people understand the background of the CEO of ImClone and how someone with his questionable research past achieved recognition and success," Anand says with some satisfaction. In "Trial Heat: Biotech Analysts Strive to Peek Inside Clinical Tests of Drugs," Anand and her colleague Randall Smith probed several questionable tactics used by analysts and investors to get an edge in the volatile world of biotechnology stocks. Anand doesn't deny that her affiliation to the WSJ contributed toward winning the Pulitzer. "I'm sure it helped," she says, adding, "the paper has the resources to let reporters like me spend weeks and months on important stories. That has to have helped. It takes time to do the research to write ground breaking stories." Her memories of India are centered around Cathedral & John Connon School in Bombay, where she studied through to the 12th grade. At Cathedral, she edited the school paper and was also head girl. She went on to study at Dartmouth College at Hanover, New Hampshire, from where she graduated with a major in history and a women's studies certificate. While in college, she wrote for the campus daily, The Dartmouth, but was more of a campus activist in the South Africa divestment movement that was sweeping across U.S. campuses in the mid-1980s. Anand took off from school in 10th grade to spend the year in swimming camps around India. She has vivid memories of living in a "dilapidated old palace called Motibag" in Patiala for about six months with other athletes-"about 15 female swimmers shared a room, sleeping on cots a few feet from one other with their belongings stored under their beds." "In the summer, it was unbearably hot;
Geeta Anand with husband Gregory Kroitzsh and daughters.
in the winter, we froze," she recalls. Even in Punjab's chilly December days, the young girls practiced in an outdoor pool. "That was tough but fun. I made many good friends," says Anand. The hard work paid off. In 1982, at the age of 15, Geeta Anand represented India in the Asian Games in New Delhi and the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, Australia. She became a national champion and a record holder in women's lOa-meter and 200-meter breaststroke. After the Asian Games she decided to retire from swimming. "I never thought of swimming as a career," Anand explains, adding, "it was more of a hobby that grew because I found I was good at it. But I never wanted to devote my life to swimming. I do expect to spend much of my work life as a journalist." Anand worked at the Boston Globe where she spent four years covering politics. In 1998, she moved to the Wall Street Journal's New England edition. In her biggest story there, she exposed the cost overruns at the Boston's "Big Dig" public construction project that led to federal investigations and the resignation soon after of the chief of the Big Dig. In January 200 I, she moved to the WSJ's New York office to cover biotech and drug industry stories. As for the Pulitzer, Anand doesn't expect it will change her life in any way. "I just want to continue doing what I'm doing now-writing in-depth features and investigative stories," she says. 0