SPAN: November/December 2003

nspired by a gift from Lill ian B. Disney, widow of the late animated cartoon pioneer and amusement park founder Walt Disney, the Frank Gehry-designed concert hall opened its doors in October. It is the new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mrs. Disney gave $50 million in 1987 to fund a conceIt haJIto showcase the orchestra. She only requested that it incorporate world class standards and feature a garden. Architect Gehry, whose many awards include the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, has been a resident of Los Angeles for most of his life. He won international accolades for his design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997. The Walt Disney Concert Hall bears the same Gehry space-age signature style. Working with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota of Japan's Nagata Acoustics, the hall was developed with the idea that music is a total experience that includes all sensory perceptions. The result is believed to be among the most acoustically perfect spaces for musical performance, enjoyment and recording.

It is, perhaps, the most breathtaking venue for the arts in America to date.

The Disney Concert Hall complex is also home to the Library of Congress/Ira Gershwin Gallery, funded through the generosity of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trust for the Benefit of the Library of Congress. Its purpose is to exhibit treasures from the vast Library of Congress music and architecture collections, highlighting Los Angeles-related influence on American music and architecture.

The Disney complex is part of the Music Center, and adjoins the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Ahan1anson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles, all funded by philanthropist patrons of the arts. The stunning Gehry creation caps the renaissance the downtown neighborhood has undergone in ~ recent years. The romantic garden, something of~ a tribute to Lillian Disney who died in 1997, has ยง; '" more than 100 species of flowering plants.

0 ~

SPAN

Partners in Design

By Lea Terhune

Publisher

E-mail Spam

Michael H. Anderson

How to Stop it from Stalking You

Editor-in -Chief Gabrielle Guimond

A.I. Reboots

Editor

By Michael Hiltzik

Lea Terhune

Associate Editor

Shadow Wolves

A. Venkata Narayana

By Mark Wheeler

Hindi Editor

Threshold of Transparency

Govind Singh

By A. Venkata Narayana

Urdu Editor AnjlUTINaim

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

Editorial Assistant

Countering Terrorism Two Perspectives Peter Burleigh and Dan Daly

K. Muthukumar

Hawai'i

Art Director

By Paul Theroux

Hemant Bhatnagar

Deputy Art Directors

A Volatile Mixture

Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi

An Interview with Amy Chua byA J VagI

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

On the Lighter Side

Printing Assistant Alok Kaushik

"Citizens Pollute More Than Governments"

Business Manager R. Narayan

An Interview with William Shutkin

by Dipesh Satapathy

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Bombay Natural History Society

120 Years of Tracking Natural Treasures

Front cover: April and Chris Cornell of Cornell Overseas/Cornell Trading, export garments and home furnishings to the United States and Canada. Photographs Š 2003 by Mick Hales/courtesy Cornell Trading. See article on page 3.

By Lea Terhune

Cat on the Cutting Edge

By Stuart Luman

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 lIOOOI (phone: 23316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi.

Printed at Ajanta Offset & Packagings Ltd., 95-B Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi lI0052.

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 of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor.

Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

Hindi Urdu 801 Chaal

By Ashish Kumar Sen

UC Berkeley Tops in Hindi

By Govind Singh

What's Love Got To Do With It?

By Anjula Razdan

Spotlight Devi Sridhar: Rhodes to Success

By K. Muthukumar

A LETTER

A

FROM

s another year's end quickly approaches, it is natural to reflect upon the past. It has been an eventful year for SPAN, because in it we launched our Hindi and Urdu editions. It has been a lot of hard work for the staff, who frequently put in overtime hours during the transition. A few months ago we welcomed some new staff members: Urdu editor Anjum Naim and Hindi editor Govind Singh, along with Urdu graphics designer Khurshid Anwar Abbasi and business manager R. Narayan. And with this issue, newly arrived American officer Gabrielle Guimond assumes the role of Editorin-Chief. Our new staffers bring fresh ideas and perspectives to an already creative team, and their energy will make SPAN better than ever in the year ahead.

It is always a pleasure to highlight sucessful people who share their success with those less fortunate. The subjects of our cover story are just such people. April and Chris Cornell founded an export business 30 years ago. It blossomed, and now they are giving back to India. Read "Partners in Design," by Lea Terhune, for the full story E-mail is used for business and pleasure, but both functions are sabotaged by ever-increasing cyber-junk 'mail called "spam." Acclaimed watchdog Consumer Reports analyzes the problem and offers some practical tips in ..E-mail Spam: How to Stop it from Stalking You." E-mail is just one area where technology and business are interdependent.

More new and useful applications are coming from an unexpected place, Artificial Intelligence research. Lofty dreams of replicating human intelligence have evolved into a more utilitarian focus, with benefits for all of us, from sorting e-mail to rescuing earthquake victims. Michael Hiltzik tells the story in "A.1. Reboots."

"Shadow Wolves," by Mark Wheeler, follows members of a native American Customs unit which monitors the U.S.-Mexican border. These skilled trackers daily fight the battle against drug smuggling with impressive success. In a related article, A. Venkata Narayana describes the role of the new Customs

THE

PUBLISHER

Attache's office in New Delhi. Along the lines of countering criminality are retired U.S. diplomat Peter Burleigh's comments on terrorism, and a companion interview with New York Fire chief Dan Daly in "Countering Terrorism: Two' Perspectives."

Our photo essay is a special treat: beautiful images of Anlerica's 50th state, Hawai'i, with text by Paul Theroux. Such beauty gives impetus to environmental activists such as William Shutkin, who is interviewed by Dipesh Satapathy Yale law professor AnlY Chua, author of World on Fire, brings us back to business with her comments to AJ Vogl in ''A Volatile Mixture." Chua faces head-on the controversy surrounding globalization, how backlash can result from the widening gap between rich and poor, and how to make free-market capitalism relevant to everyone.

Some people seem to go overboard caring for their pets, paying astronomical vet bills to save their animals.

But "Cat on the Cutting Edge," by Stuart Luman, shows how pet medicine is a proving ground for science that could save human lives, providing crucial data for treatment of diseases from diabetes to HIV/AIDS. It is no secret that the Indian Diaspora is having quite an impact in the U.S., from food to politics.

Ashish Sen in "Hindi Urdu Bol Chaal," and Govind Singh in "UC Berkeley Tops in Hindi," tell how NRIs and non-Indians alike are flocking to Hindi and Urdu lessons across the United States. And in "What's Love Got To Do With It?," American desi Anjula Razdan surveys arranged marriages in the West: the pros, the cons, the Internet, and how Indians aren't the only people who see it as a good thing.

These are just some of the features offered in this issue. We hope you enjoy reading it, and also have a Happy New Year!

April and Chris Cornell turned their enchantment with the color and crafts of India into a flourishing business that is designed to benefit everyone involved

..r

ike a fairy godmother at the gate of her enchanted garden, April Co~nell's warm welcome IS an ________ invitation to a vibrant world. Whether at the Cornell Overseas Limited headquarters in New Delhi, the Cornell Trading, Inc. hub in Burlington, Vermont, or at her home, one feels the magic of beauty in the making. Warmth is characteristic of April and Chris Cornell and the secret of their success may just be how they translate that win-

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One of April's favorite spots for painting is the garden of the Cornell home (above and far left) in Burlington, Vermont. In winter, her workplace moves inside, to her cozy study.

Left: Chris on the floor of Cornell Overseas Limited factOlY in Okhla, New Delhi.

t\

s an artist, I am always supremely critical of all I do. This is natural for artists-our tribe never seems to be satisfied with any of our work! And with good reason: a color is never clean enough, a leaf never quite perfectly proportioned, a flower not correctly posed, nothing lives up to expectations! I am this way and I know other artists are, too. Despite the best intentions, rarely do the results measure up to the vision.

In design (the companion of art), we are able to remedy mistakes; we can adjust color, correct balance or tilt a downward turned flower upward. Design can improve all aspects of one's effort so that the end result is pleasing and the desired qualities captured-the vision is maintained. Even though design is a chief collaborator of art, it cannot replace craft. Why is this so? The answer is apparent to me when I see

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the work of the very skilled craftsmen who make my fabric designs come alive. Without them, neither a single tablecloth could be printed nor a blouse made. Although the impetus comes from my watercolor sketches and though my inspiration may lead, drive the creation of our

Above: An artist at work copying designs for a new collection at the New Delhi office.

Right: Women prepare items for an order. Shipments are checked and double-checked before they leave the factory, neatly packed and labeled, for North America.

products, it is the many hands that complete the final printed fabrics that define our collection.

The textile printing process involves highly skilled technical artists who delicately separate amorphous, impressionistic watercolor skeJs;hes into distinct and separate color entities. Painstaking attention to detail creates the fine tracings that represent every color in a print. From these tracings, silk-screens are made. Accomplished craftsmen silk-screen our fabrics by hand. These artisans, so skilled, meticulous and practiced, have years of training. The highest level of achievement is to be called a master and these are truly master craftsmen.

People look at a printed fabric and ask me how I do it? The answer of course is, "Not alone."

Hundreds, even thousands of people make what we create. The ingenuity of their work lies in the handmade element, which is so important to me, the skill of the hand, the mark of the individual-these human attributes are priceless.

-APRIL CORJ'iELL (From April Cornell at Home)

ning trait into their hip yet nostalgic lines of apparel and home furnishings. Swirls of pleasing color, flowers, animals, adorn April Cornell tablecloths, bed throws and crockery. Flattering kimonos drape over silky dresses that feature motifs drawn from nature.

The name for the Cornell Fall Collection 2003, "Global Bohemian," could easily describe the Cornells themselves, who hit upon their career along the hippie trail 30 years ago. April and Chris Cornell were overwhelmed by the feast of colors and textures, as they roamed bazaars in Afghanistan looking for kilim carpetbags and other textiles. The first things they brought back to sell were socks. They opened up shop in 1975, "a funky little store, in a second floor walk up in Montreal, Canada." Fast forward to 2003.

Cornell Trading, now based in the United States, has 100 boutiques across North America-called La Cache in Canada and April Cornell in the U.S.-and 2,000 active wholesale accounts in the U.S. alone. Retail outlets carrying April Cornell products include Williams Sonoma and Peet's Coffee & Tea. Cornell Overseas has an office in Hong Kong, but its primary source country is India, where it ranks among the largest multinational textile export companies with an annual

turnover of Rs. 500 million. "India is as much our home as the U.S. is," says April, who makes several trips here every year.

It is a beautiful summer day. The picnic bench outside the canteen at the Comell Trading head office on the outskirts of Burlington overlooks a small strip of nature preserve that the Cornells take pleasure in maintaining. There is always a chance that a foraging moose, deer or other animal might wander past. ature is an important part of their lives and their chief source of inspiration. Over lunch, they talk about their work, a business that grew somewhat like one of the flowers April incorporates into her designs. "We started small and started young." She muses, "When you do something like this, it takes on a life of its own.

It's satisfYing, challenging." Particularly when you aim high. "We wanted to have a well-run business with quality productswe wanted to be known to have the best product out oflndia in the world." The business potential in India attracted them: "We liked the idea of vettical integration, liked the idea of controlling quality. We started small, in a basement with a few tailors. As we got bigger, we could start to incorporate modem production facilities and atmosphere." Their factory in Okhla, Delhi, is top of the line, the clean, open working conditions excellent. Ranks of zuki machines and power looms that can weave 175-centimeter-wide fabrics are kept humming. "We basically wanted the same standards that we have in Burlington," April explains. Chris chimes in, "When India opened to foreign investment in the early 1990s, we were the first foreign expOtt house to be registered."

It wasn't all smooth going but they persevered, and their main factory in Delhi and satel-

lite fabrication centers testifY to their dedication not only to a quality product but to the welfare of their employees. Health care and a provident fund are all patt ofthe package. In both Burlington and India, the watchword is respect: "Respect for people who work there, no office politics, respect for work and professionals," April says.

Chris, who prefers behind-the-scenes planning to public relations, excuses himself with a smile and heads for his unpretentious office. The India operation, April continues, adheres to high environmental standards.

Even effluent from their factories is cleaned before being released into the environment.

That is no small thing, considering they

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remember a cup of sweet tea-a small cup of "Chai," thick, milky, deliciously sweet teashared over a stack of handwoven blankets. I also remember the hazy dustfilled air, and the tented shop of a salesman-a handsome, mustachioed Rajasthani, with a tumbling turban. This scene has inspired a hundred print designs in a thousand different color combinations. I go back to it again and again.

-APRIL CORNELL (From April Cornell at Home)

print and dye fabrics as well as fashion them into goods for export. They opened a new printing unit in March 2003 which took nearly two years to complete, largely because of the built-in environmental protection measures.

A walk through the Cornell Trading UtctOty showrooms in Delhi or Burlington offers a similar experience, except that Delhi is rife with production. Scores of cutters and tailors are busy at their work, fabricating and putting the finishing touches on next season's line. Burlington has the bustle of goods incoming from abroad and outgoing to eager clients. But at both sites, fabrics and completed items stock tidy rows of shelves in a vast warehouse. A peek into offices reveals orderly stacks of samples and files at the fingertips of a competent and efficient staff working to meet seasonal shipping deadlines for thousands of products. A few steps away, an atTay of product lines are tastefully displayed in a room and designed to tempt buyers. The India side of the operation is labor intensive-Comell Overseas has about 250 direct employees in India to handle all the fabric sourcing, weaving, printing, embroidery, cutting, sewing, and shipping that is all done at their own factory. But about 400 more are employed indirectly. One of April's concerns is to encourage and reinterpret native aesthetics: "Updating crafts is important. It's a living activity that continues to have meaning," she says. If attisans are able to support themselves by appealing to affluent buyers abroad, their wlique craft won't die out.

Traditional Indian designs and skills are hat路nessed to embellish trendy cushion covers, rugs, or nice little blouse and trouser ensembles for the Westem market. And a new generation of Cornells joined the business when eldest son Cameron, who inherited the design talents of his mother, launched his Kit Cornell line a few years ago.

Social responsibility is an integral component of the Cornell enterprise. A few years ago Chris and April established the Giving World Foundation "to help the disadvantaged become self-reliant."

Why? "If you have a good business, you want to give back. India has benefited us terrifically. You look around to see where can you give back. The best way

to give back is to India," April maintains.

Through Concern India Foundation, the Giving World Foundation funds about 20 gali schools, Sai Shiksha Sansthan school for the disabled and Prayatn, a project to aid the elderly, all in New Delhi. Generous annual donations keep these small, low overhead undertakings on track. The COlllells are enthusiastic about the projects, including youngest son Kelly, who just completed a film documenting the schools for his high school media class.

Information about the Giving World Foundation is prominently displayed at the Cornell boutiques and on the April Cornell Web site. "It is very rewarding. One visit to one place will keep you high for a month," April says. She tells the story of a boy who was illiterate and on his way to becoming a petty criminal until he joined the gali school. Now he is at the top of his class. The best part, April says, is "making a difference. When parents saw their kids learning to read, they asked 'What about us?' Out of that we added adult education," she explains.

The Cornell influence is subtle, like a force of Mother Nature. When they moved into their comfortable c. 1893 home in Burlington, April, who disapproves of white walls, created bright color schemes: periwinkle for the exterior, warm coral for the kitchen, a special yellow for a fireside nook and living room. Benjamin Moore Paint Company got so many requests for that yellow, she says, they started calling it "April Yellow." The Cornells aim to please.

Their products include everything to make a body feel at home, from comfY gatments to bed linens, tea towels, tea sets and even hand made furniture. The fabrics may be plush velvets, soft cottons, gauzes or silks.

The colors, yummy, riotous, guaranteed mood elevators. In April Cornell at Home, recently published in the U.S., April writes about the odyssey she and Chris have made, from flower children in South Asia to parents of three grown boys and a growing intelllational business. "We have spent our professional lives building a concept, an idea and a business that focuses on design and beautiful products." And if they can help a few people's lives become more 0 beautiful along the way, they will.

Children at gali schools funded by the Giving World Foundation. More than 20 gali schools. a care center for elderly and a school for handicapped children are supported by Giving World through Concern india. "It's our way to give back to india, " April says.

E-mail Spam

How to Stop it from

•

You

Consumer Reports examines this growing-and annoyingpandemic

he battle between those who send unsolicited e-mail advertisements, commonly known as spam, and those blocking them has become an arms race. On one side are hordes of spammers who find ways, through technology and guile, to penetrate consumers' inboxes, for example by misspelling telltale words like "Vlagra" (for Viagra) or "0 E B T" (for debt).

On the other side are Internet providers with indus-

Who Sent It? It's very difficult to find out. Consumer Reports tried tracing one piece of spam promoting Life Quote Search, that offered life insurance quotes in return for personal information. They found a fictitious return address and got no response to queries.

After examining underlying programming for clues, they found an address traceable to Peter DeCaro, the head of BulkingPro.com, a New Jersey marketer of bulk e-mail services and software. Both are listed in the Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO), run by the Spamhaus Project, a London-based volunteer group that tracks spammers to help Internet providers block spam. To be listed, an operation must have had its service terminated by three Internet providers for violating their policies. Although fUliher research revealed references traceable to Jordan, the Slovak Republic, Ukraine, Singapore and China, they were never able to determine what the spammer did with the information received from consumers. DeCaro, who offered to help locate the spammer, couldn't either, although he did shut down the e-mail address the spammer had used.

trial-strength spam-blocking software, vigilante organizations that blacklist spammers, and consumers armed with retail spamblocking programs. This side is losing. Big time.

Between February and April 2003 alone, according to America Online (AOL), the maximum number of messages that spammers had lobbed toward the service's 35 million customers in a single day tripled, to 2.4 billion. A typical day's volume averages about 1.5 billion. And those are just the ones AOL blocks and deletes.

The service averages 7 million complaints daily about spam that reaches customers.

Indeed, spam volume throughout the Internet has grown so much that it is about to oveliake that of legitimate e-mail. It's even expanding beyond computers, invading cell-phone text messages. In Japan, cell-phone spam is widespread, according to the country's largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo. Roughly one-sixth of the customers the company surveyed said they receive one to five cell-phone spams daily.

At the heart of the spam slam is money: Spamming is far cheaper than conventional mail. Spammers can broadcast a million messages for as little as $500. If even a few recipients buy what's advertised, the campaign most likely pays.

But spam imposes heavy costs on most consumers, who must spend time sifting through all that junk and can feel violated when pornographic spam invades their home. They can miss out on legitimate e-mail that's mistakenly blocked from delivery by their Internet provider or that they themselves delete in the course of eradicating spam.

Most spam is also deceptive, the better to sneak past your provider, trick you into opening it, and separate you from your money. When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently examined spam forwarded by consumers, it found that nearly two-

thirds contained false information. Last year, the FTC found that only about one-third of requests to be taken off spammers' lists were honored.

Can anything stop spam and those who send it? Who is behind this pollution of the information superhighway?

Consumer Reports investigated to find out.

We ferreted out many of the ways in which spammers find you, then figured out how to elude them. We examined hundreds of spam e-mails received by our staff, tracked down some spammers online, set up decoy addresses to attract spam, and examined the spam-blocking practices of major Internet providers.

We attended government hearings, interviewed consumers who had experienced spam-related intrusions into their lives, and collected hundreds of spams in our labs to test blocking software for the home. We also tested the e-mail program that comes with every new Macintosh.

The best news our research unemihed is that spam-blocking software works, but to varying degrees: All II products we tested recognized at least 40 percent of the junk; the best identified 90 percent or more. We found, too, that a little ingenuity can go a long way.

But we also concluded that it may take years to control spam's overall growth. ot all companies have pol icies curbing their marketers from using spam. Companies with policies often can't enforce them because they can't monitor the mailing lists. As we went to press, 33 states had laws regulating spam.

Many, however, simply require messages to be labeled as ads.

An exception: Virginia's law, enacted in April, provides up to five years' jail time for those who send more than 10,000 deceptive messages in a day.

There is no U.S federal law against spamming. Three have been proposed, but even if passed those may not be effective.

That's because taking legal action against perpetrators can be extremely difficult.

The bottom line: Spammers need your money to stay in business.

Our advice to anyone who doesn't want spam is don't buy anything sold through spam. Don't respond to spam. Don't even open it.

Here are four common ways in which spammers get your e-mail address: Public Web pages. If your address appears on a public Web page, spammers can automatically "harvest" it using widely available software. Ads for one product say that it collects thousands of addresses hourly and is "so simple a 12-year-old could learn how to run it in 15 minutes."

The Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, recently posted 250 new e-mail addresses publicly. Within six months, it received more than 10,000 emails, mostly spam. We tried a smaller-scale test, putting four new addresses on public Web pages. One received its first spam within six days.

Chat rooms. Use your e-mail address in these groups and

you're a target. When we used a newly minted e-mail address in several AOL chat rooms, we received our first spam within 25 minutes.

"Dictionary" attack. Some spammers send e-mail to many addresses using combinations of names and numbers, such as John 10 1, John 102, etc. If you reply, or in some cases even read the e-mail, the spammer knows the address is valid. To determine how your e-mail address affects how readily such spamming can reach it, we created shOtt addresses and longer, harder-to-guess ones with five large Internet providers. Within six to 12 weeks, spammers had found some of our sholt addresses but none of the long ones.

Online registration. Disclosing your address when shopping onl ine can unwittingly bring spam. The riskiest sites are those with no privacy policy, a statement that tells you what information the site collects on you and with whom it may share it. But even a site that posts a policy can be risky if the policy allows for sharing your address with unnamed "partners."

Much of the spam that consumers receive is sent by bulk email services on behalf of clients selling everything from credit cards to Viagra. To prevent their outgoing transmissions from being blocked, bulk e-mailing services sometimes use computers based abroad.

In April 2003 we visited the Web site of, and reviewed promotional literature distributed by, one such service, BulkingPro.com. A third party had used the New Jersey-based company to spam a staff member.

One BulkingPro.com sales pitch tells prospective customers: "Don't expect to make large profits if you aren't mailing 1-3 million emails/daily (at least!)." The company says it will send bulk e-mail for customers from its own computers based outside the U.S. Clients receive technical SUppOltvia a toll-free number; online chat-based support via systems like AOL and MSN Messenger; and monthly improvements to the e-mailing system, such as the ability to "penetrate tough domain filters and spam blocking techniques."

BulkingPro.com's head, Peter DeCaro, told us that his company's services are not intended to be used to hide identities or abuse Internet resources. But BulkingPro.com's Web site and literatme offered precisely what spammers want: updated lists of Internet-based relay and proxy servers, the kind of computers spammers commandeer to transmit e-mail anonymously; e-mail address "harvesting" software; the ability to insett random characters into e-mails to foil spam-blocking software; and, the literatme says, "other new tricks to get past aggressive domain filters."

BulkingPro.com's site offered a $299 "Bulkers Bundle" featuring 50 million addresses ("We harvested these and verified them ourselves!"), including those of 12 million AOL users ("verified twice in past four months") and 8 million MSN users.

Not all spam is sent by anonymous marketing companies using offshore computers for clients whose products you've never

What you can do • Don't buy anything promoted in a spam. Even if the offer isn't a scam, you are helping to finance spam.

• If your e-mail program has a "preview pane," disable it to prevent the spam from reporting to its sender that you've received it.

• Use one e-mail address for family and friends, another for everyone else. Or pick up a free one fi'om Hotmail, Yahoo!, or a disposable forwarding-address service like www.SpamMotel.com.

When an address attracts too much spam, abandon it for a new one.

• Use a provider that filters e-mail, such as AOL, Eatthlink, or MSN. If you get lots of spam, your Internet service provider (ISP) may not be filtering effectively. Find out its filtering features and compare them with competitors'.

• Report spam to your ISP. To help the FTC control spam, forward it to uce@ftc.gov. ("uce" stands for unsolicited commercial e-mail). · If you receive a spam that promotes a brand, complain to the company behind the brand by postal mail, which makes more of a statement than e-mail.

• If your e-mail program offers "rules" or "filters," use one to spot messages whose header contains one or more of these terms: html, textlhtml, multipattlalternative, or multipattlmixed.

This can catch most spams, but may also catch most of the legitimate e-mails that are formatted to look like a Web page.

• Install a firewall if you have broadband so a spammer can't plant software on your computer to turn it into a spamming machine. An unsecured computer can be especially attractive to spammers.

• Posting your e-mail address on a public Webpage, such as eBay. If you must post it, you can thwart spammers' harvestingsoftware by using "janedoe at isp.com," not "janedoe@isp.com." Or display your address as a graphic image, not text.

• Using your regular e-mail address in a chat room. Instead, use a different screen name. If it attracts too much spam, discard it.

• Using an easy-to-guess e-mail addresslike ..JimSmith@isp.com.•.

Instead, choose a harder-to-guess one with embedded digits, such as "Jim8mith2@isp.com."

• Clicking on an e-mail's "unsubscribe" link. That informs the sender you're there. Don't do it unless you trust the sender.

• Disclosing your address to a site without checking its privacy policy.And don't forget to uncheck "check boxes" that grant the site or its patiners permission to send you anything nonessential.

• Forwarding chain letters, petitions, or virus warnings. All could be a spammer's ploy to collect addresses.

heard of. Some marketers, we found, send spam on behalf of household name brands, a number of which have policies prohibiting spam marketing. But the chain of contractors and subcontractors linking the promotional e-mails to the brand-name company can be so long and tenuous that the company can't enforce its own policies.

For example, a member of our staff received an unsolicited e-mail promoting a MasterCard from Morgan Beaumont, a Sarasota, Florida, marketing company.

MasterCard International, whose brand name appeared in the e-mail, ought to have a tough, effective anti-spam policy. After all, the company is a member of the Council for Responsible Email, within a subsidiary of the Direct Marketing Association.

In fact, Veronika Clough, a MasterCard spokeswoman, said the company has no spam guidelines. She said that it relies on those that market MasterCard to "follow local laws. If someone thinks there's a violation, they should go to law enforcement."

Cliff Wildes, Morgan Beaumont's president, said its contracts with Internet marketers prohibit spamming and that it will terminate its relationship with any it finds spamming. But Wildes also noted: "We can't trace who gets the ads. I get an ad for a Sony Walkman, I can't call Sony and ask how they got my name."

Wildes couldn't identifY who had sent the unsolicited e-mail we received. He noted that Morgan Beaumont works with "three big marketing companies" and as many as "10,000 agents and affiliates."

Other high-profile companies we contacted about unsolicited mailings that our staff had received have policies against spammingo But they were unable to trace those mailings with enough precision to identifY any business relationship with the recipients. A spokeswoman for AT&T Business, in whose name a marketing firm had sent e-mail to an address that, we believe, could have been obtained only through spammer-style Web-site harvesting, attributed the mailing to a processing error.

Will lerro, the CEO of ReliaQuote, an insurance service that had e-mailed a Consumer Reports editor, traced the message in question to a partner that had contracted with another company, which actually sent the e-mail. "We have relationships with hundreds of different companies," he said.

But control is an issue even when relationships are more limited. For example, Consumers Union (CU), the publisher of Consumer Reports, deals with only a handful of vendors. CU opposes the use of spam and does not knowingly spam consumers.

CU makes its e-mail marketing policies known to vendors who communicate with consumers bye-mail on our behalf. Still, we are currently undertaking a thorough review of our contracts with outside companies to strengthen our controls and to ensure that spam isn't sent in our name.

Your Internet provider Here's how:

is your first defense against spam.

AOL. It automatically blocks billions of spams daily. You can sort your mail into those from senders you know and those from strangers. There's also an onSCl;eenbutton that removes offending e-mail.

EarthLink. Optional blocking lets you inspect blocked mail; with an optional system, someone sending you an email must respond to a system message before the e-mail goes through. This helps stop computer-generated spam, but it requires more effort from you and those sending valid e-mail.

MSN. You can tell the service to block spam automatically.

There's an onscreen button that removes spam.

Some e-mail programs can weed out spam that your provider doesn't catch. Two widely-used ones that we tested, Microsoft Outlook and Apple's Mac OS X Mail-which comes with new Macs and Apple's OS X operating systemwere good overall. But Outlook was only fair at recognizing spam, and Mac OS X Mail was only fair at recognizing legitimate e-mail.

Ideally, spam-blocking software should do both tasks well.

Several add-on programs we tested, which work in tandem with most popular e-mail programs, fared far better than Outlook or Mac OS X Mail.

Blocking the daily spam consumers now receive is only a temporary fix. A long-term solution requires a combination of technological, legal, and consumer action.

Without strong federal laws, authorities face formidable obstacles. Few state laws have been used to take action against spammers. Delaware, whose law has been on the books since 1999, has yet to press charges against anyone.

"It's extremely difficult to investigate and prosecute spammers," says M. Jane Brady, Delaware's attorney general. "You get multiple servers; anonymizers; mail coming from Korea, Russia, the Islands-and no one at the end of the trail when we got there." Her office, she said, plans to "follow the money" instead, pursuing those receiving fees for referring people to the Web sites promoted in spam.

One Senate bill, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, requires unsolicited commercial e-mail to be labeled as such and carry truthful information. But in April 2003, 44 state attorneys general wrote Congress opposing the bill because it might pre-empt even tougher state laws.

In April 2003, Consumers Union joined a coalition of antispam advocates in opposition to the bill because it lacks two provisions included in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (which banned junk faxes): an opt-in rather than opt-out policy and a provision allowing consumers to sue spammers for damages up to $500.

D

t was the spring of 2000. The scene was a demonstration of an advanced artificial-intelligence (AI) project for the U.S. Department of Defense; the participants were a programmer, a screen displaying an elaborate windowed interface and an automated "intelligence"-a software application animating the display. The subject, as the programmer typed on his keyboard, was anthrax.

Instantly the machine responded: "Do you mean Anthrax (the heavy metal band), anthrax (the bacterium) or anthrax (the disease)?"

"The bacterium," was the typed answer, followed by the instruction, "Comment on its toxicity to people."

"I assume you mean people (homo sapiens)," the system responded, reasoning, as it informed its programmer, that asking about People magazine "would not make sense."

Through dozens of similar commonsense-ish exchanges, the system gradu-

ally absorbed all that had been published in the standard bioweapons literature about a bacterium then known chiefly as the cause of a livestock ailment. When the programmer's input was ambiguous, the system requested clarification. Prompted to understand that the bacterium anthrax somehow fit into the higher ontology of biological threats, it issued queries aimed at filling out its knowledge within that broader framework, assembling long lists of biological agents, gauging their toxicity and strategies of use and counteruse.

In the process, as its proud creators watched, the system came tantalizingly close to that crossover state in which it knew what it did not know and sought, without being prompted, to fill those gaps on its own.

The point of this exercise was not to teach or learn more about anthrax; the day when the dread bacterium would start showing up in the mail was still 18 months in the future. Instead, it was to

demonstrate the capabilities of one of the most promising and ambitious AI projects ever conceived, a high-performance knowledge base known as Cyc (pronounced "psych"). Funded jointly by private corporations, individual investors and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, Cyc represents the culmination of an 18year effort to instill common sense into a computer program. Over that time its creator, the computer scientist Douglas B. Lenat, and his cadres of programmers have infused Cyc with 1.37 million assertions-including names, abstract concepts, descriptions and root words.

They've also given Cyc a common-sense inference engine that allows it, for example, to distinguish among roughly 30 definitions of the word "in" (being in politics is different from being in a bus).

Cyc and its rival knowledge bases are among several projects that have recently restored a sense of intellectual accomplishment to AI-a field that once inspired dreams of sentient computers like 2001: A

Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 (HAL stands for Hyper Algorithmic Logic) and laid claim to the secret of human intelligence, only to be forced to back offfi路om its ambitions after years of experimental frustrations. Indeed, there is a palpable sense among AI's faithful-themselves survivors of a long, cold research winter-that their science is on the verge of new breakthroughs. "I believe that in the next two years things will be dramatically changing," says Lenat.

It may be too early to declare that a science with such a long history of fads and fashions is experiencing a new springtime, but a greater number of useful applications are being developed now than at any time in AI's more than 50-year history. These include not only technologies to sort and retrieve the vast quantity of information embodied in libraries and databases, so that the unruly jungle of human knowledge can be tamed, but improvements in system interfaces that allow humans and computers to communicate faster and more directly with each other-through, for instance, natural language, gesture, or facial expression. And not only are miificialintelligence-driven devices venturing into places that might be unsafe for humansone fleet of experimental robots with advanced AI-powered sensors assisted the search for victims in the World Trade Center wreckage in September 2001they're showing up in the most mundane of all environments, the office. Commercial software soon to reach the market boasts "smart" features that employ AIbased Bayesian probability models to prioritize e-mails, phone messages and appointments according to a user's known habits and (presumed) desires.

These and other projects are the talk of artificial-intelligence labs around the United States. What one does not hear much about anymore, however, is the traditional goal of understanding and replicating human intelligence.

"Absolutely none of my work is based on a desire to understand how human cognition works," says Lenat. "I don't understand, and I don't care to understand. It doesn't matter to me how people think; the impol1ant thing is what we know, not

how do we know it."

One might call this trend the "new" AI, or perhaps the "new new new" AI, for in the last half-century the field has redefined itself too many times to count. The focus of artificial intelligence today is no longer on psychology but on goals shared by the rest of computer science: the development of systems to augment human abilities. "I always thought the field would be healthier if it could get rid of this thing about 'consciousness,''' says Philip E. Agre, an atiificial-intelligence researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. "It's what gets its proponents to overpromise." It is the scaling back of its promises, oddly enough, that has finally enabled AI to start scoring significant successes.

Brilliance Proves Brittle To a great extent, at1ificial-intelligence researchers had no choice but to exchange their dreams of understanding intelligence for a more utilitarian focus on real-world appl ications. "People became frustrated because so little progress was being made on the scientific questions," says David L. Waltz, an at1ificial-intelligence researcher who is president of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. "Also, people started expecting to see something useful come out of AI" And "useful" no longer meant "conscious."

For example, the Turing test-a traditional trapping of AI based on British mathematicianAlan Turing's at路gument that to be judged truly intelligent a machine must fool a neutral observer into believing it is human-eame to be seen by many researchers as "a red herring," says Lenat. There's no reason a smart machine must mimic a human being by sounding like a person, he argues, any more than an airplane needs to mimic a bird by flapping its wings.

Of course, the idea that at1ificial intelligence may be on the verge of fulfilling its potential is something of a chestnut: AI's 50-year history is nothing if not a chronicle of lavish promises and dashed expectations. In 1957, when Herbert Simon of

Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) and colleague Allen Newell unveiled Logic Theorist-a program that automatically derived logical theorems, such as those in Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, from given axioms-Simon asselied extravagantly that "there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create." Within 10 years, he continued, a computer would beat a grandmaster at chess, prove an "important new mathematical theorem" and write music of "considerable aesthetic value."

"This," as the robotics pioneer Hans Moravec would write in 1988, "was an understandable miscalculation."

By the mid-1960s, students of such artificialintelligence patriarchs as John McCarthy of Stanford University and Marvin Minsky of MIT were producing programs that played chess and checkers and managed rudimentary math; but they always fell well short of grandmaster caliber.

Expectations for the field continued to diminish, so much so that the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s became known as the "AI winter." The best expert systems, which tried to replicate the decision-making of human experts in narrow fields, could outperform humans at certain tasks, like the solving of simple algebraic problems, or the diagnosis of diseases like meningitis (where the number of possible causes is small). But the moment they moved outside their regions of expertise they tended to go seriously, even dangerously, wrong. A medical program adept at diagnosing human infectious diseases, for example, might conclude that a tree losing its leaves had leprosy.

Even in solving the classic problems there were disappointments.

The IBM system Deep Blue finally won Simon's 40-year-old wager by defeating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, but not in the way Simon had envisioned.

"The earliest chess programs sought to duplicate the strategies of grandmasters tlu'ough pattern recognition, but it turned out that the successful programs relied more on brute force," says David G. Stork, chief scientist at Ricoh Innovations, a unit of the Japanese electronics firm, and the

editor of HAL S Legacy, a 1996 collection of essays assessing where the field stood in relation to that paradigmatic, if fictional, intelligent machine. Although Deep Blue did rely for much of its power on improved algorithms that replicated grandmaster-sty Ie pattern recognition, Stork argues that the system "was evaluating 200 million board positions per second, and that's a very un-humanlike method."

Many AI researchers today argue that any effort to replace humans with computers is doomed. For one thing, it is a much harder task than many pioneers anticipated, and for another there is scarcely any market for systems that make humans obsolete. "For revenue-generating applications today, replacing the human is not the goal," says Patrick H. Winston, an MIT computer scientist and cofounder of Ascent Technology, a private company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that develops artificial-intelligence applications. "We don't try to replace human intelligence, but complement it."

similar to that of the anthrax dialogue above. Surprisingly, despite the conversational nature of the interaction, the staff seems to avoid the layman's tendency to anthropomorphize the system.

"We don't personalize Cyc," says Charles Klein, a philosophy PhD from the University of Virginia who is one of Cycorp's "ontologists." "We're pleased to see it computing commonsense outputs from abstract inputs, but we feel admiration toward it rather than warmth."

That's a mindset they clearly absorb from Lenat, a burly man of 51 whose reputation derives from several programming breakthroughs in the field of heuristics, which concerns rules of thumb for problem-solving-procedures "for gathering evidence, making hypotheses and judging the interestingness" of a result, as Lenat explained later. In 1976 he earned his Stanford doctorate with Automated Mathematician, or AM, a program designed to "discover" new mathematical theorems by building on an initial store of 78 basic concepts from set theory and 243 of

A greater number of useful applications are being developed now than at any time in AI's more than 50-year history.

Commonsense Solutions "What we want to do is work toward things like cures for human diseases, immOliality, the end of war," Doug Lenat is saying. "These problems are too huge for us to tackle today. The only way is to get smarter as a species-through evolution or genetic engineering, or through AI" We're in a conference room at Cycorp, in a nondescript brick building nestled within an Austin, Texas, industrial park.

Here, teams of programmers, philosophers and other learned intellectuals are painstakingly inputting concepts and assertions into Cyc in a Socratic process

Lenat's heuristic rules. AM ranged throughout the far reaches of mathematics before coming to a sudden halt, as though afflicted with intellectual paralysis. As it happened, AM had been equipped largely with heuristics from finite-set theory; as its discoveries edged into number theory, for which it had no heuristics, it eventually ran out of discoveries "interesting" enough to pursue, as ranked by its internal scoring system.

AM was followed by Eurisko (the present tense of the Greek eureka, and root of the word heuristic), which improved on Automated Mathematician by adding the ability to discover not only new concepts but new heuristics. At the 1981 Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, a

sort of intellectuals' war game, Eurisko defeated all comers by outmaneuvering its rivals' lumbering battleships with a fleet of agile little spacecraft no one else had envisioned. Within two years the organizers were threatening to cancel the tournament if Lenat entered again. Taking the cue and content with his rank of intergalactic admiral, he began searching for a new challenge.

The task he chose was nothing less than to end AI's long winter by overcoming the limitations of expert systems. The reason a trained geologist is easier for a computer system to replicate than a six-year-old child is not a secret: it's because the computer lacks the child's common sensethat collection of intuitive facts about the world that are hard to reduce to logical principles. In other words, it was one thing to infuse a computer with data about global oil production or meningitis, but quite another to teach it all the millions of concepts that humans absorb through daily life-for example, that red is not

sumptions about hacker activities to identify security flaws in a customer's network before they can be exploited by outsiders.

Lenat expects Cyc's common-sense knowledge base eventually to underpin a wide range of search engines and datamining tools, providing the sort of filter that humans employ instinctively to discard useless or contradictory information.

If you lived in New York and you queried Cyc about health clubs, for example, it would use what it knows about you to find information about clubs near your home or office, screening out those in Boston or Bangor.

Numerous other promising applications of the new AI-such as advanced robotics and the "Semantic Web," a sophisticated way of tagging information on Web pages so that it can be understood by computers as well as human users-share Lenat's focus on real-world applications and add to the field's fresh momentum. Searching the World Trade Center wreckage, for example, provided a telling test for the work of

Artificial-intelligence researchers are finding new ways to automate laborsaving devices, analyze information about our physical world or make sense of vast reserves of information. pink or that rain will moisten a person's skin but not his heart. "It was essentially like assembling an encyclopedia, so most people spent their time talking about it, rather than doing it," Lenat says.

And so Cyc was born. Lenat abandoned a tenure-track position at Stanford to launch Cyc under the aegis of Microelectronics and Computing Technology, an Austin-based research consortium. Now, I9 years later, Cyc ranks as by far the most tenacious artificial-intelligence project in history and one far enough advanced, finally, to have generated several marketable applications. Among these is CycSecure, a program released last year that combines a huge database on computer network vulnerabilities with as-

the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue in Littleton, Colorado, a nonprofit organization founded by West Point graduate John Blitch, who believes that small, agile robots can greatly aid search-and-rescue missions where conditions remain too perilous for exclusively human operations.

Having assembled for a DARPA project a herd of about a dozen robots-with lights, video cameras and tankJike treads mounted on bodies less than 30 centimeters wide-he brought them to New York just after September 11. Over the next week Blitch deployed the robots on five forays into the wreckage-during which their ability to combine data arriving from multiple sensors helped find the bodies of five buried victims.

Sending Clippy Back to School The deployment of AI in applications like robotic search and rescue is at an early stage, but that's not true on other fronts. One of the busiest artificial-intelligence labs today is at Microsoft Research, where almost everything is aimed at conjuring up real-world applications.

Here several teams under the direction of Eric Horvitz, senior researcher and manager of the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group, are working to improve the embedded functions of Microsoft products. Several of the group's AI-related advances have found their way into Windows XP, the latest iteration of Microsoft's flagship operating system, including a natural-language search assistant called Web Companion and "smart tags," a feature that automatically turns certain words and phrases into clickable Web links and entices readers to explore related sites.

To demonstrate where things are heading, Horvitz fires up the latest in "smart" office platforms. It's a system that analyzes a user's e-mails, phone calls (wireless and land line), Web pages, news clips, stock quotes-all the free-floating informational bric-a-brac of a busy personal and professional lifestyle-and assigns every piece a priority based on the user's preferences and observed behavior. As Horvitz describes the system, it can perform a linguistic analysis of a message text, judge the sender-recipient relationship by examining an organizational chart and recall the urgency of the recipient's responses to previous messages from the same sender. To this it might add information gathered by watching the user by video camera or scrutinizing his or her calendar. At the system's heart is a Bayesian statistical modeJ-capable of evaluating hundreds of user-related factors linked by probabilities, causes and effects in a vast web of contingent outcomes-that infers the likelihood that a given decision on the software's part will lead to the user's desired outcome. The ultimate goal is to judge when the user can

safely be interrupted, with what kind of message, and via which device.

Horvitz expects that such capabilities-to be built into coming generations of Microsoft's Office software-will help workers become more efficient by freeing them from low-priority distractions such as spam e-mail, or scheduling meetings automatically, without the usual rounds of phone tag. That will be a big step forward from Clippy, the animated paper clip that first appeared as an office assistant in Microsoft Office 97, marking Microsoft's first commercial deployment of Bayesian models. Horvitz says his group learned from Clippy and other intelligent assistants-which were derided as annoyingly intrusive-that AI-powered assistants need to be much more sensitive to the user's context, environment and goals. The less they know about a user, Horvitz notes, the fewer assumptions they should make about his or her needs, to avoid distracting the person with unnecessary or even misguided suggestions.

Another ambitious project in Horvitz's group aims to achieve better speech recognition. His team is building DeepListener, a program that assembles clues from auditory and visual sensors to clarifY the ambiguities in human speech that trip up conventional programs. For instance, by noticing whether a user's eyes are focused on the computer screen or elsewhere, DeepListener can decide whether a spoken phrase is directed at the system or simply part of a human conversation.

In a controlled environment, the system turns in an impressive performance.

When ambient noise makes recognition harder, DeepListener tends to freeze up or make wild guesses. But Horvitz's group is developing algorithms that will enable the software to behave more as hard-ofhearing humans do-for example, by asking users to repeat or clarifY phrases, or providing a set of possible meanings and asking for a choice, or sampling homonyms in search of a close fit. But this work veers toward the very limits of AI. "Twenty-five years from now," Horvitz acknowledges, "speech recognition will still be a problem."

Still Searching for the Mind Whether it takes 25 years or 50 to achieve perfect speech recognition, such practical goals are still far closer than understanding, let alone replicating, human consciousness. And embracing them has allowed significant progress-with far more to come. In corporate research departments and university programs alike, artificial-intelligence researchers are finding new ways to automate labor-saving devices, analyze information about our physical world or make sense ofthe vast reserves of information entombed in libraries and databases.

These range from the interactive Web- and computer-based training courses devised

by Cognitive Arts, a company founded by Roger Schank, the former head of the artificial-intelligence program at Yale University, to a system developed by the Centre for Marine and Petroleum Technology, a European petroleum company consortium, to analyze the results of oil well capacity tests.

But considering how dramatic a departure so much of this work is from traditional AI, it is unsurprising that some researchers have their reservations about the field's newly pragmatic bent.

Today's artificial-intelligence practitioners "seem to be much more interested in building applications that can be sold, instead of machines that can understand stories," complains Marvin Minsky ofthe MIT Media Lab, who as much as anyone alive can lay claim to the title of AI's "grand old man." Minsky wonders if the absence of a "big win" for artificial intelligence-what mapping the human genome has meant for biology or the Manhattan Project for physics-has been too discouraging, which in tum saddens him. "The field attracts not as many good people as before."

Some vow to keep up the fight. "I've never failed to recognize in my own work a search for the secret of human consciousness," says Douglas R. Hofstadter, whose 1979 book Codel, Escher, Bach.

An Eternal Colden Braid was constructed as an extended "fugue on minds and machines" and who evinces little patience

with those who would reduce AI to a subfield of advanced engineering. "The field is founded on the idea that if intelligence is created on the computer, it will automatically be the same kind of consciousness that humans have," says Hofstadter, currently director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. "For me it has always been a search for thinking." Hofstadter warns researchers against losing sight of this quest.

The elusiveness of the goal, Hofstadter and others stress, does not mean that it is unattainable. "We should get used to the fact that some of these problems are very big," says Stork, the editor of HAL s Legacy. "We won't have HAL in my lifetime, or my children's."

But even as artificial-intelligence researchers work toward the big win, many have turned their attention to more practical pursuits, giving us software that can sort our mail, find that one-in-a-billion Web page or help rescue workers pull us from the wreckage of an accident or terrorist attack. And their successes may be what will keep AI alive until it's truly time to rekindle the quest for an understanding of consciousness.

0 About the Author: Michael Hiltzik is a reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

n a brick-oven hot morning somewhere southwest of Tucson, Arizona, U.S. Customs patrol officer Bryan Nez holds up a hand in caution. Dead ahead lies a heavy thicket, an ideal spot for an ambush by drug smugglers. Something has rousted a coyote, which lopes away. Nez keeps his M16 trained on the bushes.

"Down, now," he whispers. We crouch on the hot, sandy desert floor. My heart is pounding, and I fully expect smugglers to step out ofthe bushes with guns drawn. Instead, Nez whispers, "Hear it?" I can't at first, but then I detect a faint buzzing. In seconds, a dark cloud of insects swarms by not a dozen feet from us.

"Probably killer bees," says Nez, getting up and moseying on.

False alarm. asty insects seem the least of our problems. The temperature will soon top 41 degrees Celsius. We've been out on foot for an hour tracking drug smugglers, and large moon-shaped sweat stains fomi under the arms of Nez's camouflage fatigues. He carries a Glock 9-millimeter pistol in a vest along with a radio, a GPS receiver and extra ammunition clips. On his back is a camel pack, or canteen, containing water; Nez will wrestle with heat cramps all day.

But the 50-year-old patrol officer doesn't have time to think about that. We're following the fresh tracks of a group of suspected smugglers he believes have brought bales of marijuana from Mexico into Arizona's Tohono O'odham Nation reservation.

A full-blooded Navajo, Nez belongs to an all-Indian Customs unit, nicknamed the Shadow Wolves, that patrols the reservation.

The unit, which numbers 21 agents, was established in 1972 by an act of U.S. Congress. (It has recently become part of the Department of Homeland Security.) "The name Shadow Wolves refers to the way we hunt, like a wolf pack," says Nez, a 14-year veteran who joined the U.S. Customs Patrol Office of Investigation in 1988 after a stint as an officer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Navajo Police Department. "If one wolf finds prey, it will call in the rest of the pack." What makes the Shadow Wolves unique is its modus operandi. Rather than relying solely on high-tech gadgetry-night-vision goggles or motion sensors buried in the ground-members of this unit "cut for sign." "Sign" is physical evidence-footprints, a dangling thread, a broken twig, a discarded piece of clothing, or tire tracks.

"Cutting" is searching for sign or analyzing it once it's found.

Nez relies on skills he learned growing up on the Navajo ation reservation in northern Arizona, and he cuts sign like other people read paperbacks. Between October 2001 and October 2002, the Shadow Wolves seized about 50,000 kilograms of illegal drugs, nearly half of all the drugs intercepted

by Customs in Arizona. The group has also been invited to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakstan and Uzbekistan to help train border guards, customs officials and police in tracking would-be smugglers of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

At home, the Shadow Wolves unit is responsible for the 122 kilometers of border that the reservation shares with Mexico. It's a difficult task for fewer than two dozen officers, and the events of September 11 have only made things worse. Beefed-up secu-

rity at Arizona's designated border crossings-Nogales and Sasabee in the east, tiny Lukeville in the west-has pushed smugglers, both on foot and in trucks, toward the remote and less guarded desert in between. Now, day and night, groups of eight to ten men move nOlih from Mexico toward the insatiable U.S. market, each individual carrying upwards of 20 kilograms of marijuana on his back. Funded by Mexican drug lords, the smugglers are often better equipped, better funded and more numerous than the Shadow Wolves, with lookouts on neighboring mountains armed with night-vision goggles, cell phones and radios capable of delivering encrypted messages to direct smugglers away from law enforcement vehicles.

Violence between pursuers and pursued has been minimal.

Until recently. In April 2002, a group of officers was making an arrest near Ajo when a smuggler tried to run down Shadow Wolves agent CUliis Heim with his truck. Heim, only slightly injured, shot the smuggler, who survived the wound but was arrested, his drugs confiscated. (That bust brought in a whopping 3,900 kilograms of marijuana, which could have sold on the streets for an estimated $8.5 million.) In August last year, Kris Shadow Wolves officers (such as Scout and Nez, left, above) battle heatstroke and cramps in summer temperatures that can exceed 47 degrees Celsius. They often give some o/their water to the groups 0/ undocumented aliens (left, below) that they run into almost daily while tracking drug smugglers. Over the past decade, increasingly sophisticated Mexican drug traffickers have made the work o/the Shadow Wolves (officer Nez, below) harder by smuggling smaller but more numerous drug loads across the border in a process known as shotgunning.

Eggle, a 28-year-old park ranger at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, just to the west of the reservation, was shot and killed by a Mexican fugitive he was pursuing.

Today's hunt got under way at 6 a.m., two hours after Nez's shift began, following a radio call from fellow Shadow Wolf Dave Scout, 29, an Oglala Sioux who had discovered fresh tracks 13 to 16 kilometers from the unit's headquarters in the Indian village of Sells while patrolling in his truck.

But now, at midmoming, and an hour after our encounter with the bees, we are still following the trail. The desert stretches endlessly in every direction. Paloverde trees, mesquite and dozens of cactus species, especially saguaro, barrel and prickly pear, dot the steep mountains and hills, plains and valleys. At 1.1 million hectares, southern Arizona's Tohono O'odham Nation reservation (population 11,000) is four-fifths the size of Connecticut.

There are no cities on it, only small and widely scattered villages.

Nez stops and points to a patch of desert near my foot. "See that square shape and those fine lines you're almost standing on?" he asks, directing my attention to some nearly indeterminate scratches in the sand. I hastily step back. "That's where one ofthem took a break. That mark is where he rested a bale of dope.

I'm guessing we're a couple of hours behind them, because you can see that spot is in the sun now. This guy would have been sitting in the shade."

The tracks continue north into an open area, cross a powdery road, then head off toward another thicket. Nez observes that the smugglers probably crossed here during the night; otherwise they would have avoided the road or at least used a branch to cover their tracks.

Fortunately, they didn't. "There's our friend Bear Claw," Nez says, referring to a man they've been tracking whose footprint looks like a bear's. "And over there? See the carpet shine?" To hide their tracks, smugglers will tie strips of carpet around their feet, which leaves a slight sheen on the desert floor. I can just barely see what he's talking about.

These footprints are fresh, says Nez. "We look for fine, sharp edges on the imprint made by the bottom of the shoe, and whether the wall is starting to crumble." Tracks of animals, bugs or birds on top indicate a print has been there awhile. But "if the animal or insect track is obscured by a footprint as it is here, then the tracks are recent." Also, says Nez, after a few hours "there would be twigs or bits of leaves in them."

He moves to another set of tracks. "This one is a female UDA," he says, using the acronym for undocumented alien, a person who entered the country illegally. Nez has deduced the hiker's sex and status from the lightness of the print (the person is not carrying a bale) and its shape. "The footprint is more narrow, and there are more steps because she has a shorter step than the men," he explains.

UDA tracks are more numerous than smugglers'. In the first place, there are a lot more ofthem. Then, too, if they get separated from their guides or are abandoned by them, UDAs can wander in circles for miles, lost and looking for water. In summer, when temperatures can hit 48 degrees Celsius, many die.

Between January and October 2002, 76 UDAs died from the heat in southern Arizona alone. Shadow Wolves officers carry extra water and food for their almost daily encounters with them. (When they do meet up with UDAs, they call the Border Patrol or just let them go.)

We push through some scrub, and Nez points to a broken bush I hadn't noticed. "Someone stepped on it. Look at the direction it's bent." He steps on the bush, and sure enough, it points like an arrow in the same direction as the tracks.

A few minutes later, Nez draws my attention to a branch of a mesquite tree. Squinting, I finally make out a single, dangling

thread. "That's a fiber from the sugar sack they use to carry the dope in," he says. "And here," he points a foot farther, "see where this branch has snapped? One of these guys plowed through here.

Look at the break. See how the wood inside is fresh and moist?"

As a broken twig ages, the wood darkens and the sap thickens.

The smugglers cannot be far ahead.

Now Nez pays even closer attention to the tracks. He is looking for "shuffle" marks, which would show that the quarry knows they are being pursued. "Shuffle marks indicate that they've stopped to turn around and look behind them," says ez. "That's when you move off the tracks and come up the side of them."

Thirty minutes later, we find ourselves at the base of a steep incline. At this point, Scout drives up in his pickup truck. In contrast to Nez's easygoing manner, Scout looks serious and taciturn. He says he thinks the smugglers have holed up somewhere up the hill, waiting for dark before they move. Scout radios AI Estrada, his supervisor in Sells, who says he'll send two more Shadow Wolves-Sloan Satepauhoodle, a Kiowa from Oklahoma (and one of only two women in the unit), and Jason Garcia, an O'odham who grew up here.

An hour later, Satepauhoodle and Garcia show up in a pickup, unload a pair of all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and head up the hill. Scout and Nez drive to the other side of the hill and resume tracking.

Over the next two hours, neither Scout, Nez nor the officers in

W

ith trade booming in recent years between South Asia and the United States in the new climate of globalization and free markets, it has become imperative to ensure that deregulated economies do not become safe havens for some unscrupulous businessmen.

To provide information to the business community on bilateral trade issues, and to check any devious means that the exporters and importers might resort to in evading the tariffs, the U.S. government opened the Customs Attache office in New Delhi in August last year. The role of the New Delhi office is to coordinate international investigations with foreign counterparts pertaining to transnational violations. This office has jurisdiction for customs issues related to India, Bhutan,

Drug lords will pay locals between $400 and $1,200 to carry burlap sacks, filled with up to 20 kilograms of marijuana across the bordel; where Shadow Wolves officers (like Satepauhoodle and Garcia, right) are often waiting.

the ATVs pick up even a hint of the smugglers' trail. It is now past I p.m., an hour after the end of the agents' shift. Satepauhoodle and Garcia pack up their ATVs and drive home. But Nez is fidgety. "I just have a feeling they're up there," he says to no one in particular. Scout and Nez agree to go back to the ridge where the trail was lost and try again.

The slope of the ridge consists mostly ofloose rock and small pebbles, and Nez and Scout notice some faintly discolored stones. These were probably turned over by a passing foot, revealing a damp, slightly darker side.

Thirty minutes later, Nez holds up a hand. We freeze. He and Scout creep forward, firearms at the ready.

"We found the dope," Nez calls out, wiping his face with his handkerchief and summoning me to join him next to a large mesquite tree. 1 don't see any drugs. ez tells me to look more closely. Under the tree, obscured by broken branches and hidden by shadow, I make out a number of bales. The agents on the ATVs had driven right by this spot. "Smell it?" Nez asks, smiling. Oh, yeah.

A few meters away, more bales are stacked under another tree.

I help Nez and Scout pull them into a clearing. There are nine in

Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Prior to opening the office in South Asia, India was covered by the U.S. Customs Attache office in Bangkok, Thailand. As the Customs Attache from Bangkok could not devote the necessary attention to India and nine other countries under its purview, an office to address issues of mutual interest was opened in India.

After the September 11 attacks, a new role has been assigned to the already existing traditional functions of the Customs Attache office. Along with immigration services, customs has become a primary agency to guard the nation's bordersAmerica's frontline. Because of the increasing terrorist activities all over the world, the Customs Service was moved from the Department of TreasUlY to the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on March 1, 2003. The legacy of United States Customs Service was split into two newly formed agencies within DHS under the Directorate of Border and Transportation Security (BTS), the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). ICE primar-

ily consists of customs special agents, immigration special agents and immigration detention and removal officers. CBP consists of agriculture, customs and immigration inspectors.

"Terrorist activities are a very integral part of what we do now, especially since September 1I. The prevention of terrorists entering the United States via smuggling and clandestine means and the investigation of criminal enterprises that seek to raise and transmit funds in suppOli of terrorism is an integral function of our job," says James L. Dozier, the Customs Attache at the New Delhi office.

Traditionally, the primary job of the Customs Attache office has been to investigate any type of customs violation involving international money laundering, illegal export or diversion of controlled U.S. technology and weapons of mass destruction, trade fraud, child pornography, cyber-smuggling, interdiction of drug smuggling and illegal import and export of cultural property. It fosters lawful international trade and travel via liaison with host government officials and business and industry personnel. It prevents illegal merchandise, contraband and prohibited items from entering the United States and enforces more than 400 laws for other federal agencies.

The Customs Attache office investigates trade fraud violations with a focus on international trade agreements and enforcement of criminal and civil laws and regulations regarding specific commodities as well as undervaluation or false description of imported merchandise to avoid duty, illegal transshipment of imported goods, etc. It also investigates fraud involving copyrights, patents and trademarks.

In addition, CBP has ongoing inspec-

tion programs pertaining to passengers and containers of goods entering the country that enable the agency to validate the knowledge of current and changing smuggling trends and patterns.

Another major role of the Customs Office is in the new Container Security Initiative (CSI) program developed by legacy U.S. Customs. Under the CSI program, a small number of CBP and ICE officers are deployed to work with host nation counterpatts to target high-risk cargo containers.

The primary purpose of csr is to protect container shipping from exploitation by terrorists. "For example, if a weapon of mass destruction was placed in a container and detonated at sea or any port in the world, it would cause immense damage to human life and property. An event of this type would temporarily shutdown the mat路itime industry," says Dozier. CSI acts as a deterrent to terrOlist organizations that may seek to target any foreign POlt. This initiative provides a significant measure of security for the participating port as well as the locations in the United States. "We work closely with the host government by sharing infOlmation with our counterparts in all

customs-related issues and via the CSI program. State-of-the-art equipment is used for conducting inspections," adds Dozier.

According to Dozier, a primary objective of the Customs office is not only to promote trade by providing customs related information (regarding various U.S. Customs regulations, policies and procedures) to the business community, but also to promote fair trade. "Trade with India has increased and is expected to continue growing.

Cooperation between my office and our Indian law enforcement counterparts is consistently growing. We hope to sign a Customs Mutual Assistance Agreement (CMAA) with Indian Customs by the end ofthis year. The CMAA will establish a formal mechanism for intelligence and information sharing," says Dozier.

Dozier has also traveled a lot across India to do presentations for expOlters with regard to the latest 24-hour vessel manifest regulation that was introduced last year by the Customs Service.

In the new business environment, the Customs Attache office has a vital role to play and acts as a threshold of transparency for thousands of Indian business houses. 0

Once Shadow Wolves officers locate suspected smugglers, they often call in a special aviation team (top), which flies from Tucson on a Blackhawk helicopter, to help them make arrests.

Last year this strategy helped contribute to the unit:S more than 400 apprehensions. The officers caught the two men (above) carrying several hundred kilograms of drugs on a mule.

all, each wrapped in plastic sheets and duct tape, and stuffed inside a burlap sugar sack to form a three- by four-foot package.

To carry the drugs, the smugglers had rolled empty sacks into rudimentary shoulder straps and fastened them to the bales to make crude backpacks. Scout calls in GPS coordinates to the office in Sells.

We sit on the bales and wait for reinforcements to come take them, and us, back to Sells. I ask Nez ifhe gets frustrated by the job. He answers no. "I like the challenge. But mainly I think about the young kids," he says. "It's satisfying to know that we are keeping at least some of the drugs from getting onto the streets and into the hands of children."

As we are talking, Scout leaps up and sprints into some nearby bushes, his gun drawn. Nezjumps up and races after him. I see a quick flash of a white T-shirt and watch as Scout and Nez disap-

pear into the mesquite and greasewood.

Minutes later, the pair returns. Two smugglers had stayed behind with the drugs. Nez and Scout had to let them go-the chances of a violent encounter were too high in the thick foliage, and Shadow Wolves officers are under orders to remain with any drugs their unit turns up.

Twenty minutes later, Nez points to a spot about 300 meters straight up, at the top of the ridge. The two smugglers are looking down at us. They scramble over the top and disappear.

"Those guys are starting to annoy me," says Nez. "Yeah," Scout agrees. "I want them." He makes a call on his radio and reads out some coordinates. In 15 minutes, we hear the pulsing thwacks of a Blackhawk helicopter, which has flown out from Tucson and now heads over to the other side of the hill.

After several minutes, the helicopter disappears behind the ridge. We learn by radio that the two men have been caught and taken to headquarters in Sells.

"These guys were pretty beat," says David Gasho, an officer on board. "They didn't even try to hide." The helicopter had landed on a flat patch of desert. The Customs officers inside the helicopter, Gasho relates, had simply waited for the two men to reach them. They had offered no resistance.

The men claim not to be smugglers, mere UDAs who got scared and ran when they saw the officers. But interrogated separately back in Sells an hour later, they quickly confess. The men, ages 24 and 22, say they'd been hired right off the street in Caborca, Mexico, some 100 kilometers south of the border, and had jumped at the chance to make $800 in cash for a few days' work-a bonanza considering that top pay at the local asparagus plant is $20 a week.

Because the men confessed, says an O'odham police department sergeant, they'll be prosecuted at the federal court in Tucson. As first-time offenders, they'll probably get ten months to one-and-a-half years in a federal prison. Then they'll be sent back to Mexico. Chances are high that the seven smugglers who got away, including Bear Claw, will be back humping bales of marijuana in a matter of days.

Nez and Scout look beat, but they are smiling. It has been a good day, better than most. The officers can go for weeks at a time without making an arrest. Rene Andreu, the former resident agent in charge at the Sells office, speculates that Shadow Wolves capture no more than 10 percent ofthe drugs coming into the reservation. "In recent years, we've averaged about 27,200 kilograms a year," says Andreu. They all agree that they need greater resources.

It will take more than a few reinforcements, however, to have any real effect on drug traffic. The Shadow Wolves know this dismal fact all too well. Still, without their dedication and that of other Customs officials, smugglers would be bringing drugs over the border, as one officer put it, "in caravans."

D About the Author: Mark Wheeler is a science writer with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Photographer Scott S. Warren is based in Durango, Colorado.

COUNTERING TERRaRISM Two Perspectives: Peter Burleigh and Chief Dan Daly

Ambassador Peter Burleigh, a career diplomat, was three times an ambassador and

served in other senior State Department posts during 33 years in the U.S. Foreign Service. He focused on South Asia and the Gulf, with postings in Nepal, India and Sri Lanka, among other places. He also headed the U.S. mission to the United Nations. Counter-terrorism, intelligence and related policies have been areas of his specialization. He retired in 2000, but occasionally does consultancy for the government and the private sector. Recently in India, he spoke to the Delhi Policy Group about the trends in U.S. policy after the September ! ! terrorist attacks. The following are excerpts from his remarks about the domestic reaction and the evolving controversy about laws and procedures relating to the balance between civil liberties and national security.

he basic question that Americans faced after September 11, 200 I, was: what accommodations do we have to make, if any, to our laws which relate to constitutional protection and rights of citizens and residents in U.S. as a result of the kind of attack we experienced on September 11. I have a quotation here from one of our leading legal analysts in the U.S., which reminds you what it was like in the U.S. immediately after these shocking events, which really caught us-our public, our government and our media, of course-completely unawares: "Stalked in our homeland by the deadliest terrorists in history, we are armed with investigative powers calibrated largely for dealing with drug dealers, bank robbers, burglars and ordinary murderers. We are also stuck in habits of mind that have not yet fully processed how dangerous our world has become, or how ill-prepared our legal regime is to meet the new dangers."

Immediately after the events of September 11, our administration and our executive proposed and our Congress passed by end

T

of that month, the now very controversial piece of legislation called the USA Patriot Act. Among other things, questions were raised about the treatment under American law of the following categories: of American citizens who were accused of some level of association or involvement with telTorist groups; the treatment of non-citizens but legal permanent residents in the U.S. who are accused of some level of association or involvement with terrorist groups; the treatment of non-citizen illegal residents in the U.S., of which we have millions, including those who have overstayed their visas, and those who never had visas; the treatment of foreign nationals who were seized during combat, as in Afghanistan. Who is now a PoW, who is a criminal, who is a terrorist, and what difference may there be in dealing with these different categories? And finally, questions were raised about the treatment of foreign nationals who are arrested in foreign countries, with or without the involvement of U.S. law enforcementusually the FBI or U.S. intelligence agencies-but who are subsequently delivered to U.S. control either in the U.S. or some

third place in the world. All of these categories of people have been impacted in one way or another by events of September 11.

There are probably some other categories that I haven't thought of, but those five will suffice for introducing the issues here.

The U.S. government asserted authorities which are unusual, and even controversial. The U.S. administration arranged for incarceration, for example, in places not believed to be subject to traditional U.S. constitutional oversight, as in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and vigorously asserted that traditional methods of criminal or civil prosecution were inappropriate, inadequate or dangerous. National security and/or the confidentiality of intelligence sources and methods are cited. The right of access to civilian defense lawyers, of access to the charges to the evidence

"As far as Americans are concerned, the inter路 nal debate continues about how best to react to the threats of terrorism with two things in mind: protecting the country and citizens from terrorist attacks and protecting civilliberties." underlying the charges, of access to traditional legal proceedings with civilian judges and the right of appeal, the protection against self incrimination, all these and more were thrown into question in the U.S. In general the government has argued that in the war against terrorism and terrorists often the traditional processes are too reactive. For example, law enforcement and judicial actions only take place after a terrorist event. They are reactive in that sense and they are therefore potentially very dangerous to national security, or they are inadequate to deal with the threats to national security.

In a normal civil court proceeding, with which you all are fam iIiar, the government wi 11be expected to present its information. Access to that information will be guaranteed to the accused and his lawyers. The government will assert that the public exposure of such information might undermine future law enforcement or intelligence activities or even compromise the lives of those involved. In the U.S. critics of the government, including many civil liberties advocacy organizations, reply that the government, by invoking special privileges and procedures, much of which are secret by nature, undermines the fabric of American justice and fundamental constitutional protections. Further, such organizations often argue that civil court proceedings are competent to try accused terrorists and that procedures exist for protecting national security information, if necessary, in civil courts. The government, on the other hand, in general is unpersuaded by these arguments, asserting that the challenge and primacy of protecting American citizens from

terrorism and terrorists is such that it justifies unusual and, in some cases, unprecedented government actions. After all it is a core responsibility of the democratic government to provide protection and security to its citizens. Some argue that this governmental responsibility trumps other responsibilities, certainly during time of traditional war and now during the time of war on terrorism. Thus far, I would like to point out, that the courts in the U.S. have deferred to the President on most of the issues that have been brought before them. In his role, especially as commander-in-chief, the President has been able to order procedures and detentions which have now become controversial, but they have not effectively been challenged in any court proceeding yet.

T want to take as authoritative, statements of the two main sides of the current debate in the U.S.: formal statements by our Department of Justice and our Attorney General on the one side, and opinions of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is our oldest private NGO, in effect, which has been prominent for decades with regard to civil liberties issues. Briefly, here are some of the basic authorities created by the USA Patriot Act. It allows investigators to use tools that were already available to investigate organized crime and drug trafficking, but not terrorismrelated issues. It allows law enforcement agencies to use surveillance against more crimes of terror including chemical weapon offences, use of weapons of mass destruction, killing Americans abroad and financing of terrorism. It allows federal agents to follow sophisticated terrorists trying to evade detection including roving wire taps which track an individual rather than a particular phone number or other communication device.

It allows law enforcement agencies to conduct investigations without tipping off terrorists, including use of delayed notification of search warrants. It allows federal agents to ask the court for an order to obtain business records in national security cases.

It facilitates information sharing and cooperation among government agencies so that they can better "connect the dots." It removes the previous legal barriers that prevented law enforcement and intelligence agencies from coordinating their investigations and work. It also increased the penalties for those who commit terrorist acts, prevents the harboring of terrorists and hands maximum sentences for those convicted of such acts. All these steps, I think, to most Americans sound reasonable-even necessaryand a lot of Americans were surprised to learn that such steps and penalties are not legally authorized previously.

However, major criticisms of some patts of the USA Patriot Act have now erupted and have been growing over the past year.

In an unusual development in American politics, the critics of the Act come from both the right wing of our politics and our left wing. So we have our very unusual coalition of critics who are now raising questions both through judicial proceedings and politically through the parties and indirect discussions with the Congress and with the administration. And these criticisms focus on the rights of the individual, the freedom of speech and its related freedoms, and concern over the sanctity of individual privacy. All of the issues are of extreme importance, by ideological

history, I would say, especially to the very conservative wing in the American political spectrum. Overweening govemment, especially law enforcement and intelligence agencies within the U.S., is a concern shared by many critics and, it would appear, a growing number of Americans. As of September 2003, three of our 50 states and more than a 150 cities and municipalities had passed laws or resolutions critical of the Patriot Act. Alaska, a state usually considered very conservative in the American political spectrum, has actually passed a law forbidding its state law enforcement agencies from implementing the act within the territory of Alaska. This is unheard of in contemporary America. But it also is a reflection of how serious some of the conservative criticism is of the act.

Briefly the critics' concerns focus on the following: they argue that the accused should be guaranteed access to civilian lawyers, access to all the charges against the person, access to the facts of the government case and treatment in traditional civi I court proceedings not military or secret tribunals. The government position is articulated repeatedly and firmly by the Attorney General is that special procedures and rules of proceedings are required because of the special threat the entire political system which terrorism constitutes.

Separate from the issues flowing from the USA Patriot Act are a series of executive decisions made by the President and the Attorney General. One issue of special concern is the treatment of immigrants to the U.S., both those who are permanent residents in the U.S. and those who have become citizens.

Questions of racial and ethnic profiling have proliferated, in particular the police and judiciary's, handling the people who are of Arab or Muslim heritages. Prior to 9/11 the question of "profiling" had largely been focused on urban police treatment of African Americans. Now that focus has shifted. Civil libertarians point out that the U.S. has a regrettable history including the enforced incarceration of the Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens during World War II. This is an action which was politically popular at the time, promoted by the government of President Roosevelt and approved by the courts of the time, but for which the U.S. has now apologized to the Japanese Americans who are still alive from that period and their descendants. In another example of a current controversy, as I was preparing these points in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which is where 1 now live, my local newspaper which doesn't focus a lot on national or international legal affairs, ran a very strong editorial which is entitled "Habeas Corpus Respects the Rights of the Accused." The thrust of the commentary by the editors of this rather small local paper, was that a U.S. citizen detainee, the man named Jose Padilla, whom you may have read about, was and is being held as an "enemy combatant"-a formal term used to describe him by our administration. He has been in a navy jail for more than a year. The editorial points out, "He has not been formally charged, he has not had access to a lawyer, he has not been able to challenge his detention in a civilian court." Now I want to underscore that he is U.S. citizen, born in the U.S.

Another controversy focuses on the military tribunals which are planned to be held for those enemy combatants who are incarcerated in the U.S. naval base in Cuba. Most of those held in Guantanamo are AI Qaida or Taliban-associated individuals arrested in Afghanistan. While our government has argued that these tribunals are fully justified both in historical terms-that is that they have been used earlier in World War II-and in the light of the special threat to national security which the individuals represent, editorials, civil liberties groups and lawyers' associations have criticized the rules of procedure as proposed

by President Bush and the U.S. Department of Defense. For example, the American Bar Association (ABA) unanimously passed a resolution that criticized restrictions on lawyers representing the accused enemy combatants before the tribunals.

In particular the ABA cited government monitoring of conversations between lawyers and their clients, not providing defense lawyers with evidence that might help their cases as is required in ordinary criminal cases and preventing civilian lawyers from consulting with others to build their cases.

At least as far as the U.S. is concerned, the internal debate continues about how best to react to the threats of terrorism with two things in mind: protecting the country and citizens from the terrorist attacks, obviously, and protecting civil liberties. I think my own view for what it's worth is that terrorists and terrorism do present special challenges to democratic society, certainly to the U.S. And thus it may be necessary to construct special procedures for coping with these challenges.

But it seems clear to me that as far as the U.S. is concerned, this is a process under way that is now eliciting a substantial political debate. And one way out of this dilemma may be for the U.S. Congress to get more involved. Since the passage of the USA Patriot Act in September 2001 Congress has been uncharacteristically inactive. There are now some signs that Congress may be engaged in the question. For example, it could legislate a temporary prevention/detention authority. At the same time it could enact limits to that authority and put in place safeguards against any possible abuse by the executive branch.

That's just one example, and I would guess that is what the controversy is heading.

My observation about American society is that as a people, we'd largely thought that we're immune to the kinds of threat that other countries like India deal with almost routinely, or at least frequently. And I think that in general both the U.S. government, but more particularly our public and our politicians, were truly shocked, deeply shocked by the events of September II and as a result both support for this idea of preemption as well as the spontaneous spread of fear in the American public took place willy-nilly after September II. I think that helps to explain a lot of what happened in terms of U.S. law and this Patriot Act. What has now been triggered is a very active debate getting louder rather than softer. It's not completely clear where that debate will lead. But my guess is that it will try to strike a balance between protecting the citizens both in terms of their physical protection but also protecting the civil liberties.

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Twenty-five years ago Dan Daly switched his careerfrom teaching to firefighting, after a friend on the force talked him into taking the training. As captain of Engine 52 in the Bronx, he was on the scene of the World Trade Center minutes after the Twin TOwerscollapsed on September 1 I, 200 I. "Sadly, the person that talked me into staying in New York and training and studying for the test died at the Trade Center, " he said. Out of the 343 firefighters who died there, Daly knew about 50, some of them well. During his tenure at the New York City Fire Department he Was a firefighter, commanded the fireboat, was a fire safety education instructor and directed the office of Equal Employment Opportunity. He has been a goodwill ambassador to cities across the United States and in South America. He retired last year to continue public speaking about the September 1 1 attacks and related topics. While in India he met students, firefighters and had a moment to spare for SPAN.

SPAN: How do you recall the morning o/September II? DAN DALY: In the middle of this beautiful, crystal clear morning, the sun was blocked out by all the smoke and dust and debris. Everything was covered with thick dust. Everything was unrecognizable. There were people running around covered with blood. One fellow I ran into, a lieutenant, had a very shocked look on his face and was splattered with blood. I said, "How are you doing?" He said, "My men, my men." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "All my men, they were in the collapse." He lost his whole company.

But that was only the beginning/or you and others who worked the site, wasn't it?

I worked there for about six months after that in various capacities. I was on the original task force. A lot of the work was incredibly, emotionally draining. I mean, we were picking up body parts in buckets, with shovels. It seems that when the buildings fell, they fell with such force that it vaporized everything that was on the floor. I worked there for a while and never found a telephone, a typewriter, a computer, anything. And this is an office building. No furniture, no chairs, no tables. What happened to it all? It seems that when the floors hit they fell pancake fashion, one on top of another. And they fell in 11 seconds. It took seven years to build it and in 11 seconds it fell down. Fourteen hundred people are still totally unaccounted for. It was a very hopeless feeling arriving down there and looking at this mound of twisted, mangled steel and thinking there could be thousands of people inside it.

One of the few beautiful, success stories of rescue was Ladder Company 6. They were up on the 30th floor when they heard the "evacuate the building" radio call. So they are exiting the building and telling people along the way to get out. When they hit the 4th floor they ran across a lady who couldn't walk anymore. She had chest pain. She was sitting down. And they stopped to help

her. She said no, go ahead, and they said no, we're not going out without you. So they stopped and picked her up and started to walk down the stairs. And shortly after that the building collapsed, but they didn't realize the building collapsed. They thought it was a localized collapse of part ofthe stairway. So anyhow, they survived. There was a little triangle of space about six feet around that they were caught in, but they didn't know what happened. So they were on the radio trying to contact someone outside. Finally they got through to somebody who asked, "Where are you?" And when they said, "Well, we're between the 3rd and 4th floors in building Number One," the person on the other end said, "That's impossible. Building Number One is gone." They didn't even know it had collapsed. So they gradually were able to get themselves out. They were on TV subsequent to that, and the woman said, "These firefighters are my guardian angels. They saved my life." And the firefighter said, "Oh, no. This woman is our guardian angel, because if we didn't slow down to help her, we would have reached the lobby and everybody in the lobby died. Everybody else in the entire building died." That was the only spot. It was a miracle.

Can you say more about esprit de corps that developed at Ground Zero?

Something happened as the volunteers stmied to come in from around the world. There was a spirituality that arose at Ground Zero, a sense of community. And it really was a community.

There were hundreds of volunteers coming in. And you could see them with their multicolored hats. One night, up comes this college-age girl marching on to the top of the pile with a box of cold drinks as if she were selling cold drinks at the beach. And she said, "Guys, just have a drink." And she passed the box around to those who were digging. There was a tent city that emerged right across the street from the site of the Trade Center where you could get chiropractic adjustment, massage, a hot meal. There

was a priest's table, with priests lined up from different denominations, where you could say a prayer. It was an interesting dichotomy. On one half you had this hellish scene, with the scent of decaying human flesh and the smoke coming out. It was the longest burning building fire in history. It burned for four months. And then you walked across the street to the city of tents, where it was OK to laugh, and you could say a prayer, sit down, have a meal or take a nap.

Then a cruise ship came in and tied up there. It stayed for the duration. It was called The Spirit of New York. It wasn't just the spirit of New York, but the indomitable human spirit. People coming together and saying, "We can get through this with love."

We can rebuild this with love. There was a lot of caring displayed by everybody there. To me that is the legacy of 9/11. It really takes a positive, concelied effort to do something constructive, form a team and express love. There was a sense of community of the world-because people really responded from around the world with prayers and various types of SUppOli. Didn't you want to avenge the innocent people who died?

I was very angry. I lost a lot of good fhends, and Ijust wanted to pick up a gun and join the army or the Marines and go in and do something. But that was only my initial reaction. I wanted to make a contribution. Instead of picking up a gun I picked up a microphone. And I started talking to the school kids-they took a major hit, I think-to let them know that this is really a good world, that there are a lot good people doing a lot of great things, and that we shouldn 'tjudge the entire world by the acts of criminals.

The message is: let's use this as an opportunity for all of us to align ourselves against terrorism and for peace. And there are a lot oflittle things that can be done in our lives. On a personal basis, practicing tolerance is one. And as I tell the students, just being a good student, you have a piece of clay in your hands. You can either mold it into a masterpiece or throw it away. Your life is like that. You can impact the decisions this world makes in a positive way by practicing tolerance and leadership. And all of us should, I think, use this as an opportunity to think about that. The story I like to tell is about a geography teacher in South America.

He's at home preparing a lesson for the next day. But his sevenyear-old son is distracting him. So he thinks of this ingenious method to keep him busy. He rips a page out of a magazine that has a picture of the world on it. And then he cuts it up into the various nations and gives to his son and says, "Put this back together." It is like a puzzle. He figures he is off the hook for a half an hour or an hour. Five minutes later his son comes back with it fit together perfectly. And the father in his amazement asks, "How did you do that, son?" And the son says, "Easy, Dad. There was a picture of a man on the other side of that page, and when I fixed the man, the world fixed itself." And I think there's some wisdom for all of us in the words of that little boy. That is how we change our world. We start from here, outward. Children have been a big part of my trip. They are the hope of the future.

Here in India, there are a lot of questions. Like, "You talk about how terrible 9/11 was, but we've been facing terrorism for

a long time. So what do you have to say about that?" Or they say, "Terrorists killed some civilians, but you kill civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan." And I said there's a big difference between intentionally going out to kill innocent civilians to create shock value and citizens dying because there is a war going on. We made a firm commitment to fight terrorism. And I hope that we are making the right decisions.

How do you answer questions about intolerance toward Asians andArabs?

After 9/11, the municipal authorities reaffirmed their policy that prohibits discriminating against anybody according to race, creed, color or religion. You are always going to have some people who are ignorant in the society, and they'll be the people who judge others on their religion or their race or their sexual preferences. But the vast majority of people, fOliunately, judge you for who you are.

In the fire depatiment we are very lucky because ofthe nature of our work. You are judged by the capability of your work at a fire. If our butt's in the fire getting cooked, we don't care what color hand comes in the door to pull us out. Because of that, it creates this kind of attitude that we don't care what you look like, what color you are, what persuasion, what kind of religious ceremony you go through-just if you are here to do the job and be a fellow firefighter. That's all you have to do. We I~ve, sleep and work and sometimes die with each other, so we're very close that way. It's a great lesson on humanity and being non-prejudiced. But we still have, and every country has a long way to go in treating people equally, and getting that message out to the citizenry. I just come fi'om the place of being a citizen and a firefighter. And I have the same concerns about what my country is doing that other people do. I hope we are doing the right thing. I know sometimes tough decisions need to be made. People can interpret them in different ways. But I know one thing we can't do is sit back and not make any decisions. Because then the decision will be made for us.

If terrorists are not sought out where they are, the next could be an atomic strike and it could be any city in the world. I have a little bit of a unique perspective. I picked up body patis for six months. I don't want that to happen to anybody again.

What would you like to see come out of the September 11 terrorist attacks?

I'd like it if the world community united to work together to eliminate terrorism, because it is not an acceptable method of protest. If you have to stati fi'om the grassroots level, which is education and bringing the living conditions of the people up, that helps as well in eliminating terrorism. I would like to see nations get together and realize that there is a tremendous amount that can be done as a team. We can feed the entire earth. The billions of dollars we are sinking into killing each other is really appalling. At Ground Zero, I saw people coming together. And my wish is that none of us forget the possibilities of goodness that are there as we remember 9/lI-that each of us in our own lives change a little iota to impact that bigger, global change.

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Honi. It's on ancient greeting that was almost lost in Hawai'i. Leon forward and look into a person's eyes, a person's soul. Touch foreheads, touch noses (below), then inhale deeply, shoring the ho, the breath of life. Little more than a century after the U.S. toppled the peaceable kingdom of Hawai'i, sending its culture into a tailspin, honi thrives again as islanders rediscover their Polynesian heritage, using the wisdom and teaching of their elders.

unrise in Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island ofHawai'i filled the deep coastal valley with a watery glow. The rays lighted the Hawaiian double-hulled canoe, Makali'i, riding at anchor in the bay. Dawn touched Ka'awaloa Point at the edge ofthe sea, where Captain Cook was bludgeoned and stabbed to death by indignant Hawaiians in J 779. The slender Cook monument casts a long shadow: It marks the spot where aliens broke into Hawaiian historyfor many Hawaiians the most serious assault on a culture that had flourished for more than a thousand years.

Camped onshore on the south curve of Kealakekua Bay, Ihad been awakened in the predawn darkness by the 19 temporary crew members of the Makali'i. They were high school students representing all ethnic groups in Hawai'i, leaming Hawaiian values and seamanship on a week-long cruise. The Makali'i's Hawaiian skipper was Clay "Kapena" (Captain) Bertelmann, renowned seaman

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Left:The haunting tones of a bamboo flute-played by exhaling through the nosedrift over the edge of Halema 'uma 'u Cratel; on the Big Island, Hawai'i, at dawn as Hawaiian human rights activist Mililani Trask pays homage to Pele, goddess of the volcano.

Above: Young hula dancers pelform on the beach at Waikiki, on Oahu. While hula has become a tourist attraction, it is also a statement of Hawaiian identity and a link to ancient traditions.

Suppressed by missionaries for many years, today the hula is done with pride, and is a focal point in the movement to preserve Hawaiian cultural heritage.

and veteran of many Pacific crossings in traditional Hawaiian canoes. ow having broken camp, the young crew stood in ranks on the shore, greeting the day with a traditional chant, beginning E ala e! (Awaken! Rise up!) / Ka la 1ka hikina (The sun rises from the east) / 1ka maana (From the ocean) / Ka maana hohonu (The ocean's great depths).

As early as the 1820s, not long after the first missionaries arrived from ew England, cultural suppression was formalized with the banning of hula, because hula with its dancing and chanting extolled the Hawaiian gods-among them Kane, the creator; Lono, god of harvests; and Ku, the god of war-regarded by the Christian evangelists as pagan. But hula was the heart of Hawaiian culture, an art form that retold the history and the creation myths of the islands. Later, the Hawaiian

language was also banned.

By the time Hawai'i gained statehood in 1959, the culture had been seriously eroded. Many Hawaiians were angered by a longtime requirement to prove that they had at least 50 percent Hawaiian blood as a qualification for land grants, leading to agitation in favor of land for all Kanaka Maoli, Original People, no matter how little blood they had. In the new state the language continued to be forbidden in schools, and people were demoralized and sidelined by high crime rates and poor health.

The Hawaiians never lost their voice in the two centuries since the missionaries came ashore, but only in the past two decades have people stalied paying close attention to them. Today the old telm "pali Hawaiian" is often considered derogatory, and of the 1.2 million people now resident in the is-

lands, nearly 250,000 identifY themselves as "native Hawaiian," wholly or in combination with another etlmic group.

The Hawaiian chant, the pure voice of the Pacific, is one of the most haunting and evocative sounds in the world, partly prayer and partly a dramatic proclamation. The Makali 'j crew next chanted "E Ho Mai, " which asks for understanding "Of the things and skills that are hidden/Of things Hawaiian." After that they chanted and stamped out "E Ala Makali 'i," praising their canoe.

With the recital of these chants, they were given the blessing of the local kupuna, Gordon Kanakanui Leslie, Kupuna-a lovely word for elder or ancestor-means "emerging from the source," the source of traditional knowledge.

"Ten thousand Hawaiians greeted Cook here," Gordon told the young people gathered around him.

"The god Lono came from this place-but he was first a man who was made a god. The bay is Kealakekua-Pathway of the Gods. We had to fight to keep developers out of this valley. They wanted

to put a luxury resort and golf courses here. Prepare for the future by perpetuating the history."

After this pep talk the crew bid farewell in the respectful Hawaiian way, not saying aloha but exchanging the ha, or breath. They lined up and one by one touched foreheads and noses with Gordon, at the same time taking a breath-a ritual that seemed a metaphor for keeping Hawaiian culture alive.

The formalities complete, the crew entered the water, swam about 100 meters out to the canoe, and hoisted the sail for a full day's cruise up the coast to Right: Streaks of quicksilver in a tumbling emerald landscape, streams and waterfalls shimmer through the Big Island's isolated Waimanu Valley, fed by more than 375 centimeters of rain annually. Such lush, windward slopes boast abundantfi'esh wate}; but urban development is concentrated in the state's dry, leeward regions, where supplies of groundwater are fast nearing their limits.

An ahu, or altai; caps the highest point on Kaho 'olawe, beckoning rain clouds from nearby Maui. A lodestone for ancient voyagers as well as the Hawaiian renaissance, this bomb-blasted island has captivated the imaginations of elders and children alike. It was recently returned to the Hawaiian public after decades as a u.s. military weapons test site.

Makati'i's home port of Kawaihae. Watching the sail bellying in the wind, Skipper Bertelmann said to me, "This canoe represents family. It's about sharing-history, values, culture, kuleana [responsibilities], kokua [help]. Sailing a long distance, the canoe becomes our island. We have to learn to live and work together in harmony. These are values that are translated to land. On land, think 'canoe.' " "My introduction to the culture was through hula," Clifford Nae'ole, a respected figure on Maui and Hawaiian cultural adviser at the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua, told me, explaining that hula taught not only the Hawaiian language but also histOly, genealogy, and spirituality. Most of all, he said, because of the necessity for the dancer to understand the Hawaiian identity, hula taught respect for the culture.

"Hula is life," Leimomi Ho told me the day her halau perfOlmed at the 39th Men'ie Monarch Festival, an annual week-long celebration of hula held in Hilo on the windward side of the Big Island. Leimomi is a kumu hula, or hula teacher. Her mother had taught her hula before she could walk, and she had taught her daughter. Leimomi's halau (dance troupe) was going to perform a hula that night in praise of King Kalakaua, who reigned from 1874 to 1891 and was called the Merrie Monarch for his exuberant lifestyle and his love of champagne and music. "Kalakaua is

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At the opening of the festival I talked with George Na'ope, a man in his late seventies, splendid in a wide-brimmed red hat and red shirt and the many lei bestowed on him by attendees. Uncle George (kupuna are universally called Uncle or Aunty) had helped launch the festival in the early 1960s, when he was director of parks and recreation, to reintroduce the kahiko, or ancient hula,

Molten lava spews ji-om the Kilauea Volcano during an eruption. This active volcano on the Big Island continuously steams and bubbles, adding to the coastline as the bright red lava that flows toward the sea cools into porous black stone.

Graceful as the swaying trees, Sabra Kauka and fellow kupuna, or elders, dance and sing for "Uncle" Pepito Makuaole, who lives the old way-off the land-in remote Makvveli valley with his 33 dogs. "In Hawaiian culture the highest compliment you can pay someone is to write a song about them or sing a song for them, " says Kauka. "To give them the gift of voice, the gift of life. "

"Kahiko tells of the history of Hawai'i-it's unwritten literature," Uncle George said. It survived in spite of the missionaries "because in the rural areas they were doing it. Tradition stayed alive in the rural areas, not downtown." After almost 40 years the Merrie Monarch Festival has not only brought about a revival of old forms of hula but has seen the emergence of new ones. The kahiko is done these days with gusto by groups of 20 or 30 young men or women, and the 'auana, or modern hula, involves more melodic music and more sensual moves.

Attempts to suppress the hula only made it stronger. In 1964 it was the subject of Gladys Brandt's first cultural battle at Kamehameha School, the largest and most important private school for Hawaiians. Established in 1887, it seeks to admit only children of Hawaiian ancestry. (The acceptance of one haole, white, student earlier last year created a furor.) Aunty Gladys, who is 96, is acknowledged as a powerful and respected kupuna in Hawai' i. The recently opened Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i bears her sonorous middle name, Kamakakuokalani, which means, literally, the Upright Eye of Heaven. As principal of the girls' school, she was sensitive to hula because her father wouldn't allow her to perform it-he thought his daughter would

be more likely to succeed if she adopted Western culture in place of her own. But she learned the hula anyway.

"There was a rule at the school against girls standing and doing the hula," Aunty Gladys said.

"They would sit and use their hands, but they couldn't stand up. When I said they could stand, I was told that the trustees should be given an opportunity to approve of this change." Only one objected. At the thought of swaying bodies, he said, "Woman, when we hired you, we had no idea we were getting someone to promote indecency."

That seems a quaint response now, but she had made her point, and when the girls stood up in their hula, it was considered a triumph. Aunty Gladys had fulfilled her role as a kupuna, and the memory of that early battle is sti II a source of pride to her.

Since for most of the past three centuries Hawaiian culture has been undermined by the contending cultures of immigrant groups from places such as China, Japan, the Philippines, and, of course, the U.S., it is thanks to people like Gladys Brandt that Hawaiianness still exists at all. "I had always felt to be a Hawaiian was junk," she said. "I felt there was a society beyond my reach and that a lot of doors were closed to me." But, she went on, "I stopped thinking it was junk to be Hawaiian when I

became principal." At Kamehameha School, in addition to putting girls on their feet to do the hula, Aunty Gladys promoted awareness of music and other facets of Hawaiian culture.

In its most intense forms, Hawaiian culture is found in places visitors seldom see. One of these, about 45 minutes from Waikiki, is Wai 'anae, at the foot of O'ahu's highest peak, Mount Ka'ala. The sight of homeless people camped on the beach, streets of substandard housing, and a reputation for xenophobia, drugs, and crime have tended to deter vis路itors. Yet Wai' anae has the sunniest, prettiest beaches on O'ahu, sweeping westward toward Ka'ena Point, where Laysan albatrosses nest on the ground; it has the deepest valleys and some of the most hospitable people. I arrived there at roughly the same time as a prized 10-meter log of koa hardwood, sent by Hawaiian well-wishers on the Big Island. The log was destined to become a six-meter outrigger craft, a traditional

fishing canoe.

"This is the first time in 150 years that a koa fishing canoe like this will be made in Wai'anae," said Eric Enos, director of the Wai'anae community group Ka'ala Farm, Inc. He added that a century ago there had been trees this size growing all over Wai'anae, but they were cut down by sugar planters who cleared the land for cane fields.

"We're building a community as much as a canoe," Enos said. Working on the canoe would be a constructive, unifying activity that would also teach the Hawaiian youth something of their history. He said it might take a year and that hundreds of people would be involved-mainly high school students but also Wai'anae families, as well as the people, mainly Hawaiian, from local foster homes in the Adolescent Day Treatment Program and the Wai'anae rehabilitation centers, who are recovering from alcohol and substance abuse.

Ka'ala Farm is high above the beach in Wai'anae Valley. Leased from the state, the land

Eric Enos is cofounder of the Cultural Learning Center at Ka 'ala Farm, inc., in the drug-ridden Wai 'anae Valley on the island of Oahu. For 30 years he has striven to instill ''pono. " the ancient Hawaiian concept of balance. in his troubled community. Students, exconvicts and recovering drug addicts are taught traditional values, such as care and respect for the community and the land Here Enos leads a morning "pule" or prayer. "We don't have all the answers, " he says, "but ifwe have the correct attitude and spiritual connection, our solutions will be ponobalanced and correct ..

proved to be rich in ancient habitations-including many taro terraces, known as lo 'i. Over the years these terraces have been unearthed and replanted.

Enos's community-building strategy was simple enough in theory. First it was to teach traditional values of pono (righteousness), self-respect, knowledge of Hawaiian history, and care for the environment.

To this end Ka'ala has begun a program of ref 01'estation and the replanting of traditional species. In the nursery Enos showed me an array of cuttings, many of them "canoe plants"-species brought here by the Polynesians who settled the islands.

Considered essential by Hawaiians for their wellbeing, canoe plants include various types of taro, from which the Hawaiian staple food, poi, is made and such a key plant that it is part of their creation mythology; the wauke, or paper mulberry, which was made into bark cloth; the 'mva, or kava, which was made into a ceremonial drink and is still used for medicinal purposes; and the kukui (candlenut), mai 'a (banana), niu (coconut palm), 'awapuhi (wild ginger), 'uala (sweet potato), and 'ulu (breadfruit).

Explaining his philosophy in a simple motto, Enos says, "Plan for a year and plant taro. Plan for ten

In its most intense forms, Hawaiian culture is found in places visitors seldom see. years and plant koa. Plan for a hundred years and teach the children aloha 'aina "-to love the land.

Early one morning at Ka'ala, I watched while a visiting group from a local rehab center stood and chanted a greeting. Reciprocating with the Ka'ala chant was Butch DeTroye, chanting 18 verses in welcome, beginning, E mai, e mai, e kipa mai i ke awawa 0 Wai 'anae-kai (Come, come, welcome to Wai'anae-kai Valley).

Although originally from Wisconsin, DeTroye is Hawaiian, by marriage, in his ability to chant, in his spirit and sympathy, and in his dedication to the revival of native culture. His 25 years in Wai'anae have given him the authority of experience.

DeTroye and Enos reminded the nine youngsters that smoking and lazing around are not allowed and got them busy clearing brush and building the stone foundation for a small house site. I saw further proof of a comment DeTroye had made ("the Wai'anae Valley is a vortex of energy of Hawaiian culture") a week later at the blessing of a new center for alternative health in Wai'anae. The Wai'anae Coast

Comprehensive Health Center was celebrating its 30th anniversary, and the new enterprise would enlarge its scope with a Hawaiian dimension-herbal cures, ancient methods of massage, and traditional healing techniques.

One of those present was Terry Shintani, a physician and Harvard-trained nutritionist who has been instrumental in reviving interest in the traditional Hawaiian diet. His book HawaiiDiet has sold in large numbers, the proceeds going to Hawaiian health organizations. Shintani's theory is that the old Hawaiian diet based on fish, fi'uit, and unrefined and unprocessed carbohydrates such as taro is inherently healthier than what most people eat now.

Shintani said his diet was much more than an aesthetic exercise in cultural awareness: One-third of Hawaiians die of heart disease, a quarter of them from cancer-just about the national average. Because many Hawaiians possess the "thrifty gene" (allowing them to retain calories and survive famine and food deprivation), they suffer obesity more than many other people, and diabetes has increased 50 percent since 1959.

"We've proved my hypothesis that the people on the traditional diet would do better," Shintani said.

"Cholesterol went down, weight went down, blood pressure was improved. We had diabetics who got off insulin as a result of the diet."

I watched with Shintani while the kahu, or priest, led the blessing of the center. Of Japanese ancestry, Shintani is not Hawaiian by blood but in attitude and belief, having been raised under hanai, the traditional system of adoption, by his foster mother, the kupuna Aunty Agnes Cope. He seemed to me a perfect illustration of what could be accomplished in Hawai'i in a spirit of peacemaking. As Eric Enos had said, "Under the hanai system you become part of the 'ohana, the extended family. We don't ask who people are. Everyone is welcome here if they're willing to work."

In the front row of the blessing were four kupuna, seated under an awning, saying nothing, smiling benignly. "If you have the kupuna on your side you can move the community," Shintani said. "They need to be there at the beginning."

D About the Author and Photographers: Paul Theroux is a freelance writer and novelist who divides his time between Cape Cod and Hawaiian islands. His novels include Waldo, The Family Arsenal and My Secret History and travel books include The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express. Photographer Richard A. Cooke lli lives in the Hawaiian island of Moloka 'i. Adriel Heisey is a Tucson, Arizona-based, commercial pilot who specializes in aerial photography. Lynn Johnson, freelance photographel: has worked for Life, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times Magazine.

hile globalization's proponents see it as the main road to worldwide peace and prosperity, opponents view it as exacerbating class conflict and widening the gap between rich and poor. According to Amy Chua, both views neglect a critical point: that introducing free markets and democracy globally also can aggravate ethnic hatred, which in turn often lead to violent backlashes. These backlashes occur when there exists what she calls a "marketdominant minority," as in Indonesia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and the Philippines.

For the last decade, Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, has considered this problem, and the fruits of her thinking are contained in World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (Doubleday).

Chua, 40, comes to her thesis from a patiicularly appropriate background. She was born in Illinois to high-achieving academic parents, but most of her family remains in the Philippines, part of that nation's wealthy Chinese minority. And the violence against such minorities was brought home to her in a peculiarly poignant way when, several years ago, a favorite aunt in Manila was killed by her chauffeur, an ethnic Filipino. His motive, according to the police report, was "revenge"-apparently simply because she was a well-off Chinese-born citizen. AJ. Vogi interviewed Chua at her office in ew Haven, Connecticut.

W

A.J VOGL: Most Americans naturally assume that free markets and democracy go together.

AMY CHUA: They do-but not in societies that have market-dominant minorities. Markets tend to make a resented minority richer and richer, while democracy em powers the poor, frustrated, indigenous majority. This creates an extremely unstable and explosive situation, and the result is almost invariably a backlash.

A very stark example is Indonesia.

Free-market policies in the ] 980s and '90s led to a situation where the three percent Chinese minority controlled an astounding 70 percent of the private economy. People blamed it on crony capitalism, but the Chinese were dominant at just about every level of society, down to the rural areas, where people were not beneficiaries of favoritism.

Free and fair elections in 1998-hailed with euphoria in the United States-pro-

duced a violent backlash against the Chinese. Five thousand ethnic Chinese shops and homes were looted; 2,000 people died; 150 Chinese women were raped. The wealthiest Chinese left, along with $40 to $100 billion of capital, and that plunged the country into an economic crisis that still continues.

Interestingly, there's a backlash even if all boats are lifted, which is often the case.

Markets create growth, and in Indonesia during the ] 980s and '90s, the majority

Free markets and democracy may have much to offer, but backlash is predictable, and increasingly evident

vides a good illustration: The blacks there don't want socialism, they just want the wealth that the whites-the market-dominant minority-have.

And in Indonesia, which is almost a nationalized economy right now, the government is sitting on $58 billion of assets formerly owned by Chinese, and it doesn't know what to do with the money. It's just stagnating.

The contest between a poor majority and a rich minority results in the second kind of backlash: a pro-market backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. It's what most people would call crony capitalism. Almost evelY major example of crony capitalism involves a market-dominant minority: Marcos in the Philippines protected the Chinese, who were forced to payoff Imelda and kick back but were otherwise pretty much allowed to make money. And Suhat10, obviously, in Indonesia. And Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya-until recently, when he was voted out-had so-called business arrangements with the very small Indian population. The Lebanese minorities occupy this position in West Africa, including Sierra Leone, where they were called "the invisible government" for a while. So that's a situation where the market-dominant minority kind of wins. The most extreme example of that is when the minority actually takes power, as in apat1heid South AfJ-ica.

The final kind of backlash is actually the most horrendous, and that is where tlu'ough a terrible coincidence of factors we get a demagogue like Siobodan Milosevic, who acts to eliminate the hated minority or we get the mass slaughter ofTutsi in Rwanda.

So it's not just a matter of rich getting richer and the poor getting a little better oft. were better off in terms of average income-maybe only a few cents per capita income, but there was definitely growth.

That was not the perception, however, because of the glari ngly disproportionate wealth in the hands of this outsider group.

Is a backlash inevitable?

The patterns I identifY are very predictable when a poor, uneducated majority is pitted against an outsider group. One is a backlash against markets. Zimbabwe pro-

Right. In countries with a market-dominant minority, the real problem is that class and ethnicity overlap in a really dangerous way that we don't have here. When the government went after Bill Gates, many Americans wanted him left alone. A poor person in Arkansas or Tennessee may think that his son will grow up to be Bill Gates, so let him make his money. We don't have a market-dominant minority in the United States. But it's different when all the rich people belong to one ethnic group. Then the

majority's feeling of possibility or mobility is cut off. That's what happened in Indonesia: People thought free-market policies didn't benefit any Indonesians except for the politicians and the Chinese. When the majority doesn't have a stake in markets, you get these anti-market backlashes.

Which makes me think of Venezuela, which you wrote about in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.

That op-ed produced a personal nightmare for me. While most U.S. readers saw it as a description of the dangers of democratization in the face of a market-dominant minority, many Venezuelans saw it as a defense of Hugo Chavez. I received hundreds of furious e-mails from Venezuelans who misunderstood me. I was not saying that race relations were the source of the current problem; I was not saying that the people who currently oppose him are all white. Absolutely not. And I was cenainly not defending him. I think he's a horrendous and incompetent leader-he was attempting to seize control of the oil industry with no ability to manage it. My only point was that Chavez, like Milosevic in Yugoslavia or Mugabe in Zimbabwe, came to power in democratic elections in the face of exn'eme concentrations of wealth and enough of what may be loosely described as manipulable ethnic differences to allow him to play the ethnic card. He played on the idea of: vote for somebody who looks like you.

Latin America has a velY different society from that of the United States or Africa or Asia, because there's been so much racial and ethnic intermixing. Many of these e-mails accused me of imposing a North American view instead of their view: we may have political and economic problems, but we have no racism here, they said-evelybody's mixed.

Latin America is so different fi'om country to country. Argentina has no marketdominant minority, because its immigration was much more like the United States. The same is true of Uruguay. But in the other counn'ies I've visited in Latin AmericaEcuador, Peru, Guatemala-the skin-color phenomenon is much starker. To the N011h American eye, the elite classes are what we would describe as white.

It struck me that, once you layout its parameters, your thesis seems almost self-evident. yet it is one not widely acknowledged or written about. How do you account for that?

First, the tension between markets and democracy has been around for a long time.

Adam Smith and James Madison and our founding fathers were vety much aware of it, which is why they didn't favor universal suffrage. Don't let the poor vote-they'll confiscate our property. Political scientists and economists have written about that tension, but never with the ethnic angle.

People in the United States have forgotten about that tension because we've so successfully negotiated it; fi'ee-market democracy has worked well in our country.

Second-and I've thought about your question a lot-I think the idea of marketdominant minorities initially seems taboo.

Given the politically COITectworld we live in, we feel there must be something wrong with the concept. But I don't think it should be taboo. I'm not saying market-dominant groups are inherently superior. In some cases, like South Africa, a large p31i of the explanation is that if you disenfranchise the majority for 100 years and don't let them go to school, you're going to be market-dominant. But I do think there's a tendency in the United States and in the West-for good reasons, actually-to be terrified of anything that smacks of ethnic generalization.

Still, it's one thing to write about whites in South Africa and quite another to write about Jewish economic success in presentday Russia, and how, during the 1990s, seven oligarchs-six of them Jewishcame to control most of Russia's newly privatized economy. That's really loaded.

VelY loaded. I wrote many 31iicles about market-dominant minorities and never once mentioned the Jewish minority, because I never wanted to touch that one. But somebody finally pointed out that it was a glaring omission. The same was true of what I wrote about Jewish economic success in Weimar Germany. Even though I put in many caveats, I got some reactions at first that made me want to take out that section.

But in the end, my editor suggested submitting that section of the book to three or four

Weimar scholars from Harvard-one of them Daniel Goldhagen-to see what they thought. If they were negative, he said, we'll take that section out. Their responsenot to my thesis but to the facts-was that the facts were right. So we kept it in.

Has anybody picked up on that issue in reviews or interviews? ot in interviews. But I was at a book party when a person, not having read the book but having heard about it, said, "These are just the arguments that have fueled anti-Semitism for generations." I disagree. The anti-Semitism is out there; I'm not the one making an issue of it. My task is to be very objective and careful about the facts and to explore different possible causes, not just one.

I was similarly careful about my Middle East chapter; September 11 occurred while I was in the middle of writing the book.

The situation over there is obviously complicated, but I pointed out that, while the Arab-Israeli conflict can't be reduced to economics, it is accurate to say that Israeli Jews are a market-dominant minority in the Arab-dominated Middle East. I showed this chapter to six different Israelis, none of whom agreed with each other, and six people of Arab origin fi'om the Arab countries. They didn't all approve of my interpretation, but I tried to air both sides.

Do you think you're given more latitude to say the things you say because you're Chinese American?

Yes. But in the book I try to be balanced. Market-dominant minorities can be an engine for growth, a source of entrepreneurialism-incredibly impOliant factors in these developing countries. On the other hand, I see their presence as creating instability, especially when combined with democracy and laissez-faire markets.

It's easier for someone like myself, a member of a market-dominant group, to make certain statements, which is why at first I didn't want to write about Jews.

let's talk some more about the Middle East. since for obvious reasons it's very much on our minds these days. You say that in the short run, marketization and rapid democratization would be a highrisk proposition.

Free-market democracy is the optimal long-run solution, but how do we get there?

We could hold overnight elections right now, and in many countries we might see fundamentalists voted in-regimes that would be more anti-U.S., more anti-globalization, and more anti-Israel than what we already have. It's not at all clear that if the Palestinians voted for a leader, they'd pick somebody more moderate than Yaser Arafat. I think people in the United States are aware of this problem, in particular with respect to Pakistan or maybe Egypt.

But, remember, the Arab states also contain some of the most entrepreneurial groups in the world, and you could argue that could be a great way to lift all boats quickly. Given entrenched ruling regimes and U.S. oil interests, however, I don't see how we can change the structure of those countries so fast. If you just say, "Let's have laissez-faire markets," you're not going to see wealth redistributed, because there's so much illiteracy in those countries. Also, given the extent of corruption, the trickledown effect would take a long time. If we could get good markets in there and clean out all the corruption, then I'd be all in favor, because the individual Arab countries do not have market-dominant minorities.

One of your observations is one I hadn't thought of before-that the United States is a market-dominant minority with re-

spect to the rest of the world.

Even the numbers work out nicely.

We're four percent of the world population, but like the Lebanese in West Africa and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, we wield wildly disproportionate wealth and power relative to our size and numbers.

And you see many of the same kind of dynamics-the envy, fear, and resentment of the rest of the world. A friend of mine recently summarized the feelings of many of the poor in other countries: "Americans, get out-and take me with you."

The one inconsistency on the part of the United States is this: When people in the United States call for global democracy, we envision lots of well-functioning countries who have gotten rid of their brutal dictators. But like other market-dominant minorities, we don't trust our interests to be served by the majority. The last thing we want is to be pati of a true global democracy, having our interests governed by a majority of the world's people or a majority of the world's countries. The last thing we want is to have the U. . General Assembly put restrictions on foreign investments. It's a good analogy, although all Americans don't belong to the same ethnic group.

But you point out that what makes America look cohesive is that we're thought of as white.

Yes, that's how the world perceives us, because of our supermodels and George W. Bush. But many Americans would oppose the idea of our countty being a melting pot.

Many minorities themselves oppose the melting-pot idea and work to build discrete business empires of their own. As an example, you point to the Koreans in New York City and how they dominate produce and grocery stores, dry cleaners, nail salons-and, nationally, even the African American beauty business.

Although we don't have any marketdominant minority on the national level here, there are certainly pockets in the United States, especially the inner cities, where you see exactly this dynamic: Not only ethnic Koreans but Vietnamese and Orthodox Jews controlling a widely disprOpOtiionate amount of wealth and com-

metTe. The majority in inner-city neighborhoods is often African American or Latin American; because they were there first, they feel these newcomers don't belong-that "we're the 'indigenous' people, and these outsiders are stealing away what's ours." We hear the same language used all over the world.

Meanwhile, the ruling class, observing from afar, asks these indigenous minorities: You were here first; why aren't these businesses yours? Which makes them feel even worse. But let's talk a bit about the future. You're in favor of some form of market-generated growth and democracy, but how do we get there from here without the backlashes you've spoken about? You talk of leveling the playing field.

This is the most politically correct answer, but it's one that is too easy to fall back on. When I give talks, people ask, "Why isn't education the answer?" Along with rooting out corruption, I do think education is a crucial thing in the developing world. But the head start these marketdominant minority groups have is amazing, and catching up is going to take a lot of time. People with capital use it to make even more money. So while leveling the playing field is something we should all shoot for, it's not a strong enough answer.

Related to that: I think people like to steer away from controversial issues by saying, "It's all crony capitalism, it's all corruption. The only reason the Chinese in Southeast Asia are so dominant is because they got political favors from Suharto. All we have to do is get rid of corruption and cronyism, and the Indonesians will be just as wealthy as the Chinese." That's copping out. The Chinese succeeded despite being the object of discrimination over generations. In the book, I make the same point about Jews in Russia. People like to say that the only reason those Jewish oligarchs have power is because they employ mafioso techniques. But that's too simple. They were not nice people-it was a free-for-all-situation-but, again, many of the people who came to be oligarchs started off with discrimination against them. They were very entrepreneurial. They became millionaires on

their own and, through that, bought the media and then were able to have this symbiotic thing with Yeltsin in which they did get political favors. It's too simplistic to say they succeeded only because of crony capitalism.

I talk about lots of different kinds of market-dominant minorities, but the ones that are not former colonizers are the trickiest group, because these are groups that have shown themselves to be very entrepreneurial wherever they go in the world.

A question you don't touch on in your book: Is it possible that some nationalities-like the Chinese-are simply by their nature more entrepreneurial?

Yes. Also the Lebanese. Indians. And the Ibo in Nigeria, who are also successful all over the United States. They're a small minority in Nigeria and very entrepreneurial-they're called the Jews of Nigeria. It appears that some minority groups, for whatever reason, seem to share cetiain characteristics. My family and most of the Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia came over with nothing. It took one generation for them to become well off, and a second generation for them to become tycoons.

Your background notwithstanding, are you taken to be anti-globalization?

Some people who look just at the title of my book will think that, but if they read it they'll see I'm vety much in favor of globalization. First, it's a/ail accompli; it's futile to be against it. Second, I think people are bored with the subject. I don't even know who's really anti-globalization. Look at those anti-globalization people-presumably they use the Internet, love long-distance phone calls, like foreign films-and you'll see that they are against just some aspects of globalization. They have concellls about the environment or consumerism or so-called "savage capitalism."

I think many in the anti-globalization contingent are in favor of global democracylocal empowerment of the majority-but their view is simplistic. My point, which represents neither the right nor the left, is that seeing local democracy as a panacea is dangerous. There are many different versions of free-market democracy, and [ think we've

been exponing a caricature of it.

I'm a product of globalization. If not for globalization, I'd be on a farm in China right now. And global markets offer the best hope for developing countries-if there's a way of giving the poor majorities a stake.

funds and stocks, and that's just not the case in Nigeria or Indonesia, where so many people are outside the functioning global economy. The question is how to get them inside.

As pan of privatization schemes, there should be a redistribution component.

What have we been doing wrong?

To create a sense of ownership?

So far, basically-and simplisticallywe've been promoting laissez-faire capitalism. There are good reasons for that-to try to generate as much growth as possible-but there's often a bad outcome.

Right. [1' you're a conglomerate, why not give employees some shares and some dividends? Then, when things go through the roof, they won't want to nationalize or confiscate. Tax and transfer schemes

tion programs haven't managed to undelllline them-nor have they been successful in eliminating poveliy. Interestingly, the prime minister is velY frank, saying, "It's true that affmnative-action policies tend not to favor the poorest Malays, but this is good for psychological purposes. It enables the poor Malay to look up and see that the tycoons of the countly include some Malays, too, notjust Chinese." Compare Malaysia to Indonesia, which is in much bigger trouble because they have laissez-faire crony capitalism.

You also mention "voluntary generosity" on the part of market-dominant minorities.

[n combination with politicians who raise the expectations of the poor to an unrealistic degree-with the fall of apaliheid in South Africa, or with the introduction of privatization in Mexico, or with freemarket policies in Southeast Asia-suddenly you get people watching television and thinking: Great, now we have markets, as the politicians promised, and we're all going to be wealthy like the people we watch on American TV. But two years later, with unemployment and growing crises because subsidies have been removed, they are horrified and, over time, envious and resentful and angry.

The right approach toward giving poor people a stake would stati off with realism.

Don't tell them they're going to get rich overnight. Korea did a good job of this a while ago after their financial crisis. They basically said: We need to buckle down; we're going to be going through a hard period here.

So people were well-prepat路ed. Expectations were managed. But also, in the United States, our middle and even lower-middle classes have a stake in markets, tlu'ough pension

would be even better, but given the weak institutions and amount of corruption, they're hard to get into place very quickly.

What about affirmative action of some sort?

Affinllative action is really a misnomer.

In the United States, it's for our poorest minorities, but we're talking about affirmative action for majorities. The situation in Malaysia is worth noting. It has a marketdominant minority of something like 30 percent. But it's also had an affirmative-action plan in place for the last 20 years or so. It's the kind of thing that would tum our stomachs here: ethnic and religious quotas on employment, for example, and on corporate ownership. But the fact is that it's given ordinary Malays a stake in the market economy.

After the govemment privatized a given entity, there was a requirement that the Chinese owner had to give 30 percent of equity to a Malay patiner. The Chinese glllmbled about it, regat'ding it as nothing more than a big tax, but they have not left and continue to be market-dominant. The wealthiest people there still include Chinese tycoons, so affirmative-ac-

Critics have charged me with being naive, but I don't expect people to give up their wealth. My point is a little different. A lot of market-dominant minorities, including the one I' m 拢"0111, spend an awful lot of money on electric fences and bodyguards and ways of securing themselves fi'om the anglY masses.

Given that you're spending that money anyway, I'd tell them, wouldn't it be more productive to contribute to infi'astlllctme, to build a hospital, to do something to combat the idea that you're outsiders stealing the wealth? The United States is a great model for this. We have tremendous philanthropy here, which is completely foreign to developing countries, where there is almost zero charity work. We also have a healthy social safety net; that's something else we could promote overseas instead of the stuff we've been pushing.

To the extent we're telling people that they should have democracy, we need to think harder about what we mean by democracy-and it can't just be shipping out ballot boxes. We have to watch that we don't sound hypocritical, that we like democracy when it serves our purposes but not when there's a fundamentalist elected.

In the 1980s and '90s, when the markets were working so well, we were asking why people were complaining. Today, because of September I I, because of what's happening in Latin America-not just Venezuela but also Argentina and Brazil, because of what's happening in the Middle East and in Africa-this is an Oppoliune moment to be more thoughtful.

D About the Interviewer: tor of Across the Board.

AJ

Vog! is the edi-

"What did people do before they could read about the same handfitl of famous people over and over again? " Copyright © 2002 The Saturday Evening Post Company.

Reprinted by permission.

Copyright © The New Yorker Collection 2000 Bruce Eric Kaplan from Cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

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Reprinted by permission.

"CITIZENS

POLLUTE MORE THAN

GOVERNMENTS" Citizens share far more responsibility and liability for environmental pollution than governments, says environmental activist William Shutkin.

sk him who is primarily responsible for environmental pollution and he replies, "It's we, as ordinary citizens, who are the culprits; not the government." Getting more specific, he says, "American citizens pay very little for their addiction to oil and we are highly subsidized by our own government to continue to pollute the air. We drive around in huge gas-guzzling automobiles. We must be required to pay more for the costs ofthat kind of/ife." William Shutkin, a leading voice in environmentalism and sustainable development in the United States, is an attorney and president of New Ecology, Inc., an GO based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that promotes sustainable development in urban communities.

He was in India recently on a U.S. Public Affairs speaker program.

Shutkin says pati of all environmental activity should be voluntary. "We have to rely on the civic will and initiative of citizens that may not necessarily be compensated monetarily. It would be compensated in other ways-through improvements in living conditions and standards." Money will never be enough to pay for all necessary actions, be it a wealthy country like the United States or a less affluent country like India, as countries have competing priorities and needs in education, infrastructure and the like. So significant voluntary action is needed. Local citizens have to be much more adamant and demanding on budgetary priorities of the government, he feels.

Who influences environment policy making? Corporations are made up of individuals. Individuals can have a lot of influence, especially in a democracy. But, according to Shutkin, corporations have a reach that extends around the world and individuals within celiain institutions, namely private and corporate ones as opposed to civil society ones, have been able to wield too much power by vit1ue of their economic clout. So much so that money becomes a COtTuptinginfluence. That is a huge problem, not only in environ-

A

mental policy making but social policy making. Some individuals have more influence than others. That's the reason, he believes, his work as an environmentalist should not involve pointing fingers at corporations and individuals who run them. "That's easy to do and to date hasn't proved all that effective," he says.

But what about environmental regulation and governance?

"We are at the cusp of introducing really innovative and exciting approaches, not only in the United States but all over the world.

We still inhabit the model onO-40 years ago, which is command and control," says Shutkin, who aims at engaging citizens, environmentalists, politicians and businesspeople to take on the environmental challenges in their communities.

The focus is on individual pollutants in the elements-air, water and soil-and sources of pollution, i.e., the smokestacks, the outfall pipes and the like. The more dynamic and innovative approaches take a more systemic approach to the problem of pollution and see neighborhoods designed in such a way that waste and pollution become words without meaning or substance.

"Provide regulations and ways which promote the kind of industrial production, recycling and replenishing functions that natural systems provide," says Shutkin. This kind of approach is seen in the development of agro-industrial parks, which are business parks where individual firms are co-located within a park setting and share waste streams and energy streams. One firm's excess ash emissions are used to power the production process of another. Excess plastics from one firm can be recycled at a co-located firm into value-added products.

Shutkin says these exciting initiatives proved very difficult to get off the ground but are very much in the early stage. Other kinds of initiatives that take this systemic approach involve environmental zoning. Local municipalities, rather than segregating waste by type, take a much more holistic approach to create communities where land usage is integrated into an urban village. A scientific approach ensures that important ecological functions and natural services are preserved. New kinds of materials are encouraged so that rainwater can be captured, harvested, or can be allowed to drain tlu'ough soils and pervious surface materials as opposed to impervious asphalt. "The idea is to design our economy or communities around the ways of natural systems. The core is the same for all-preserve, protect and not resist," he says.

Coming back to the point of environmental activism and awareness, Shutkin cites the case of the U.S. defense budget.

"The militaty is one of the worst polluters in the United States and the pollution leads to all sorts of security problems. We have major military industrial sites that pose significant public health hazards. The question of security in the United States must be reframed, reunderstood to meet much more these sort of environmental issues, to pay for those priorities," he says.

It is not that all environmental regulations in the past were flawless. Shutkin cites the example of the Superfund Statute, under which abandoned, accidentally spilled or illegally dumped hazardous waste that pose a current or future threat to human health or the environment are cleaned up. In this statute, says Shutkin, both the land use and spatial aspects of environmental regulation are emphasized. The law included a very severe set of legal measures to encourage the clean up of these sites by the socalled responsible parties. The law uses a strict no-fault liability scheme penalizing responsible parties even if they contributed little to the site's pollution. They can be held responsible for the entire cost of clean-up. The result of this liability scheme and its enforcement, according to Shutkin, has been that very few sites have been cleaned up in the last 25 years. About 500 Superfund sites-which are federal sites-have been cleaned up out of tens of thousands. Twelve hundred and forty-two sites are officially listed. Due to the very imposing and severe liability clauses, most parties, public agencies, private businesses, have shied away from any kind of involvement in these sites, says Shutkin. One consequence of that deterrence effect has been that many businesses and developers, including many who were completely innocent, who had nothing to do with the pollution on a particular site, have looked to the so-called "Greenfield" sites for redevelopment. These are sites in the suburbs or in the rural areas or farm fields and woodlands that haven't seen the kind of industrial production and development that the Superfund sites have seen.

"Superfund is an example of a law designed with best intentions but it did not consider the spatial effects, the ramifications of severely penalizing the potentially responsible parties and causing them to look elsewhere for redevelopment," says Shutkin.

Do amendments to environment laws and redressal of litigation in the United States take the same slow route as they take in

many other countries like India? "Certainly," says Shutkin, "at the federal level, the reauthorization, amendment, revision of our large federal programs is a slow and difficult progress."

Environmental policy change is a slow and difficult process owing to several factors-the complexity of these programs themselves, the scientific issues, the engineering challenges, the legal questions, but also the politics, he says.

Adjudication of environmental disputes is also a slow process by nature, especially if there is an appeal, the cases are high profile or it involves a significant question of law and policy. It may be litigated for many years.

Shutkin cites a few examples of animals or habitats which have been saved due to timely environmental activism. One of the important success stories in bringing back a dangerous species from the brink of extinction is the bald eagle, the national symbol of the United States, which was seriously endangered in the mid-20th century because of chemicals like DOT in the environment. DOT weakened egg shells of these birds as they consumed contaminated fish. Production and sale of those chemicals were banned in the United States although these are being sold in other countries which is a major problem, feels Shutkin. "We saw the resurgence of this species; and this was inspiring and a cause for great celebration." The Endangered Species Act, enacted into law in 1973, according to him, has been very controversial but also quite successful in that it looks at a retired habitat as an object of protection and not just at individual species and the habitat those species depend upon. There are now landscape-scale biodiversity species preservation efforts that span entire states in the United States and indeed cross borders. The Yellowstone Project aims at preserving the habitat for many species in the nOl1h, the Rocky Mountain West and Canada and has so far been quite successful, Shutkin feels. "Species conservation should be the model for [human] preservation, i.e, we should be looking at pollution and environmental issues in developed settings, where Imman communities are central as opposed to remote areas. We should take the same kind of holistic and habitat approach as we have taken for non-human animal conservation," he says.

He also talks of the Community Fund Concept, that links several key issues that go to the heart of people's life, not just in the U.S. but across the globe-cultural and historic preservation, housing and its affordability and environmental conservation.

After about 20 years of activism, several states, in particular Massachusetts, have launched interesting and important local policies in the form of local referenda and citizen's initiatives, that establish new funding mechanism for local governments to establish revenue, to pay for these important public goods, for community housing, historic preservation and open space park for development and preservation. They allow local governments to impose extra charge on existing property taxes, from one to three percent in the case of Massachusetts, and in term the revenue created by that surcharge is matched by the state government 100 percent, so that the money is instantly doubled and is required to be spent across those three areas-in prop0l1ions that can Vaty according to each community.

D

\-

.1t.,

Bombay Natural History Society

Natural Treasures India's premier conservation organization Sarus crane (Gms anti gone) "Said to pair for life, and conjugal devotion has wonfor the species popular reverence and protection resulting in tameness and lack of fear of man, ,. Salim Ali recorded.

Habitat degradation has dangerously reduced their numbers.

celebrates more than a century of protecting Indian wildlife through research and education.

lmost anyone interested in Indian wildlife has a soft spot for the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). Its name conjures thoughts of the beautifully illustrated, entertainingly written bird guides by the great ornithologist Salim Ali and his American counterpart S. Dillon Ripley that set the standard for later such works. This year the society marks its 120th anniversary, and at the same time the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society celebrates its centelmial. The United States joins in the celebration, also, after nearly 50 years of collaborative projects with the society.

Although the B HS was established under the British Raj in 1883, after India's independence in 1947 the unique wildlife of the subcontinent began to attract international attention. It was at this time that a relationship between the BNHS and the United States' Smithsonian Institution began, when Ali and Ripley produced the classic, 10-volume definitive Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan. Ripley, who died in 2001 at the age of 88, changed the face of the Smithsonian during his 20-year tenure as its head, expanding it to include 18 satellite institutions. Ali was connected with BNHS for 78 fruitful years, and its president when he died in 1987, aged 91.

During the intervening years, from that early collaboration to the present, an ongoing, evolving exchange has en-

A

Himalayan griffon vulture (Gyps himalayensis) "Virtually the lmgest bird in the Himalayas, " wrote Salim Ali. "Normally seen singly or in twos and threes sailing majestically on outspread motionless wings over mountaintop and valley, or sweeping round the rugged contours with astonishing speed and grace .. , In recent years, the population has drastically-and inexplicably-fallen.

sued between India and the United States in the area of wildlife research. Many projects have been funded by grants from U.S. government and nongovernment agencies to various wildlife institutions in India, the BNHS being the most venerable. Expertise has been shared and new methods of evaluation jointly explored. Around the same time the first bird study began, George Schaller of the ew York Zoological Society did path breaking research on the behavior of cheetal and tigers at Kanha ational Park in Madhya Pradesh. Later, and for the past 25 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), whose primary aim is to conserve fish and wildlife within the United States and support conservation efforts abroad, has consistently worked with the BNHS. The USFWS has channeled about 264 million U.S.-owned Indian rupees in support ofIndian conservation projects generally, with an additional 2 million for outside advisers, equipment and U.S. training. Many institutions in India have benefited from these programs targeting relevant conservation issues, including collection of biological data, strengthening capacity and management options for conservation organizations and agencies. Some ofIndia's top biologists have participated in BNHS-USFWS research projects at one time or another. There have been 16 projects in all, and more are in the pipeline.

Focused collaborative studies include the endangered Sarus crane, beginning with the 1983 international conference and crane count. Studies of pesticide residues in tissues of dead Sarus cranes revealed that the contaminants were responsible for the cranes' high mortality rate. Studies of key wetland, grassland and mountain ecosystems that support migrant wildlife populations have proved the importance of habitat for the preservation of endangered species such as the Sarus crane, the Great Indian Bustard and the Asian elephant.

Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, the Western Ghats, the Himalayan foothills and Dudhwa have all been BNHSUSFWS research sites. A three-year research project on the shola and alpine grasslands of India concludes this year. An important, year-long project in 2002-03 monitoring nest sites of vultures was funded under the USFWS Wildife Without Borders-India program to determine the factors responsible for the mysterious and alarming attrition of the Gyps vulture population.

In addition to research, visits of experts are funded, as are documentary films for educational programs. One such film, Birds of the Indian Monsoon (1979), by Stanley Breeden and Belinda Wright, continues be shown to educate villagers bordering parks, students and others.

India continues to be an important focus for future joint ventures. The .S. Congress, through legislation, provided an annual budget for Multinational Species Conservation Funds which include rhinos, tigers, Asian elephants, and Great apes (gibbons), all species that are found in India.

-L.T.

nfull scrubs and armed with a scalpel, Clare Gregory hovers over an anesthetized light-brown tabby named Wink. He cuts through the vessels connecting the cat's kidney to its circulatory system and drops the walnut-sized organ in a dish of ice. A nurse sets the hands of a large timer on the wall of the operating room, which begins the countdown from 60 minutes. That's the amount of time the vets have to connect Wink's kidney inside Binky, a very sick kitty, whose own kidneys have failed.

In the operating room, the two cats are tied down on adjacent tables, paws taped back in spread-eagle fashion. Breathing tubes are stuck down their throats, and drip tubes deliver anesthesia through veins in their wrists. Their tongues hang out of their mouths, and their eyes are open and glassy.

I

They seem dead except for their opened chests, which move up and down in a slow rhythm controlled by expensive machinery.

They look nearly identical.

In fact, though, they're quite different.

With Binky's kidneys failing, his blood chemistry has gone haywire. At 11 years old, he's highly anemic and unable to flush his own blood of nitrogen, urea, and other respiration by-products. His emaciated and shaved body looks more like a skinned rabbit than a cat that once weighed a hefty 7.25 kilograms~he's now shrunk to four. Wink, on the other hand, is downright porky. Just two years old, he's spent his entire life as a research animal in a nutrition study at the University of California (UC), Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, where he did nothing but eat and sleep. Now he's been

selected to donate an organ. The deal is that in exchange for one kidney, the recipient's owner must adopt donor pet Wink, liberating him from the lab. So to save one cat, you get two. ow, sitting over Binky's draped body, Gregory and fellow surgeon Lynda Bernsteen peer into the patient's abdominal cavity through a giant microscope built for two. Gregory asks that no one bump the table as he begins cutting into the aOlia and vena cava to plug in the new organ.

"Time?" Bernsteen asks between careful incisions and minute sutures. She moves so quickly it almost looks easy. A quick cut here, an expert stitch there. The doctors work the miracle of modern surgery, and it's hard to remember that the patient is a cat. After what seems like only moments, a nurse reports that 32 minutes

Household pets are being used to refine advanced cloning and surgical techniques, and to pinpoint DNA trouble spots.

have passed. That leaves only 28 to finish.

All this energy to save poor Binky might seem a gross indulgence. But Binky's owner, Gayle Roberts, a vet herself, would willingly part with one of her own kidneys for any member of her family. That clan-in addition to Binky, a husband, and two kids-includes Blackjack, Bedbug, Dark Crystal, Penelope, Helen, Kiwi, and Lucifer. It's hard to remember who is who. Is Dusty her son or the Australian shepherd? Although Binky's kidney transplant will set Roberts back $9,000 for surgery, drugs, and post-op care (for canines, the cost runs upwards of 15 grand), when it's close kin, it's hard to say no. Forced to choose between Binky and mortgage payments, Roberts chose her cat. Since then, her bank has threatened to foreclose on the house.

One hundred years ago, Americans considered cats 1ittle more than rat catchers and

and MRl into the vet lexicon. Surgeons at Davis School of Veterinary Medicine now complete 25 kidney transplants a year and are trying out experimental drugs on pets with terminal brain tumors. At Iowa State, dogs are getting artificial elbows, and at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, vets are saving damaged limbs by implanting the bones of dead animals. Over the years, the passion of pet owners has created a discipline poised to inform medicine as a whole.

"Our pets have this huge veterinary profession scrutinizing them, with thousands of observers of disease graduating from veterinary schools each year," says Stephen 0' Brien, chief scientific officer at the ational Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity.

All this data provides a window into human medicine that researchers otherwise wouldn't have. For starters, vet science gathers information that policy or mores make inaccessible in human science.

Advanced cloning technologies, for instance, have allowed vets to begin using

Pet medicine is a booming business. It's also a proving ground路for science that could save your life.

gave even beloved dogs almost no medical treatment. But as the middle class grew wealthy enough to include animals in their families, and as the automobile displaced the horse in the early 20th centUlY, urban veterinarians began looking for new markets. They gradually found work spaying, neutering, and fixing the broken bones of a growing population of household pets: cats and dogs. The growth proved contagious.

In 1950, there were roughly 9,000 members of the American Veterinary Medical Association; that figure is now 70,000.

As pet owners pour more and more money into advanced treatments, it's not just the Binkys who are benefiting.

Animal medical procedures are pushing vets into the most experimental regions of science. Demand for sophisticated pet care has brought terms like gene therapy

embryonic stem cells in ways that are against the law in human medicine.

Then there's the quality that drew humans to these animals in the first placetheir emotional dimension. Drugs and other therapies affect moods in cats and dogs much as they do in humans. "The dog can look at you, and you can see if he's anxious or uncomfortable," says Stanford medical researcher Emmanuel Mignot. "You can see the side effect of a drug immediately.

You can't see that in a mouse."

But a happy patient's wagging tail reveals only a fraction of what pets' congenital health problems can teach medicine in general. In our carefully propagated companions, there's a huge reservoir of diseases and mutations that result from efforts to breed the most skin folds in a shar-pei, the best eye color in a Siamese,

perfect contours in a boxer, and herding qualities in a border collie. Generations of refinements have created extremely inbred populations, much more distinct than any found in the human species. Which means: Doberman pinschers get heart disease, schnauzers develop cataracts, and English bulldogs suffer from sleep apnea.

By linking mutations in pets to their breed-specific ailments, scientists can find out which genes are active in certain disorders and apply that knowledge to the human model. Animals also share many of humanity's more common ills: Cats suffer from diabetes, hemophilia, retinal degeneration, and more than 250 other human diseases. Veterinary medicine has been cataloging these ailments for decades, creating a massive library of data that's applicable to people.

When it comes to the study of genetics in particular, vet knowledge of animal diseases and inherited traits is invaluable. For 0' Brien and other medical researchers, every disease, every autopsy, evelY breedspecific disorder might be a clue to pinpointing a gene responsible for similar diseases in people and even to finding a cure.

It took completing the sequencing of the human genome to fuel cross-species genetic research. Suddenly, the costly labs and equipment designed for decoding human D A were out of work, and scientists began proposing all types of organisms to be next in line-the dog, the chimp, the cow, the honeybee. This emerging field, which promises everything from better tasting chicken to the end of incurable diseases, is called comparative genomics. By contrasting the DNA of various species and then locating mutations among 3.2 billion base pairs that make up the genome of most advanced organisms, geneticists can directly increase their understanding of human genes.

That's where Stephen O'Brien comes in. Think of him as the publicly funded Craig Venter of kitties. O'Brien, 58, stal1ed paying serious attention to cats 30 years ago when he began decoding the feline genome, which, in some ways, is closer to the genome of humans than to that of other nonprimate mammals like mice, elephants, and dogs. (Cats and humans each have

â&#x20AC;˘ Clare Gregoly pe/forll1s a kidney transplant at the University of California, Davis, VeterinalY School, where surgeons are also using e.;,perimental drugs tofight brain hlmors. UC Davis is one of the top veterinary schools in the us.

roughly 35,000 genes, long segments of which are in the exact same order for both species.) O'Brien looked at a family of37 feline species-including lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, ocelots, margays, and the common house cat. Because these lean predators are on display in almost every zoo in the United States, it was easy for O'Brien to get the samples he needed to build a complete record offeline DNA. So far, he has collected blood and tissue from 10,000 cats. His team has already identified 1,881 genes, half of them with direct human parallels.

O'Brien's biggest payoff has been his work on feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV), the first cousin of HIV Discovered in 1988 by a veterinarian in Petaluma, California, FlV is transferred through saliva, bite wounds, and at birth from mother to offspring, and it appears in roughly 10 percent of domestic cats. What O'Brien found-that wild cats are resistant to the virus-could have profound implications for HIV research. Although they can get infected, they don't get sick.

Once O'Brien and his colleagues identified the mechanism that made the wild animals immune, they began looking for genes that would predispose people to similar resistance. That's when they found CCR5, the gene that codes for proteins residing on the surface of cell membranes.

HI V uses this protein, like a key in a lock, to gain access to cells. When a person has two mutated CCR5 genes, the cell can't create the protein, and HIV basically bounces right off.

A similar comparison of genomes led to breakthroughs in the treatment of narcolepsy, which affects more than 150,000 people in the U.S.; those who suffer from it can fall asleep at inopp0l1une moments.

Some patients experience a condition called cataplexy where extreme states of emotion make them instantly fall into a deep REM

(rapid eye movement) sleep and collapse.

In the 1970s, William Dement at Stanford found that dogs too suffered fi'om the disease. He visited veterinary schools throughout the U.S. to learn more. In 1999, the Stanford group then led by Emmanual Mignot found that narcoleptic Labradors and Dobermans have a mutated gene that produces damaged receptors for hypo cretin, a chemical that tells the brain to stay awake.

When they looked for a similar problem in humans, they came across a logical variation on the theme: In people, rather than damaged receptors, there's a lack of hypo cretin itself. "The beauty of it," says Mignot, "is that when we found the gene in canine narcolepsy, it led us directly to the cause of human narcolepsy." Without the study of dogs, researchers would have had little idea where to look.

Mignot sees his J 0 years of work on a single gene as a small triumph presaging great advances to come: "Vet science is a huge field where there are tons of animals with various diseases and disorders that could be used for the common good-to find new treatments, to cure disease."

After a three-hour procedure to put in a kidney, surgeons Gregory and Bernsteen felt Binky's prognosis was excellent. His blood-urea-nitrogen levels were good, and the kidney appeared to be working. In fact, his doctors recommended he go home early. When Roberts took Binky back to Southern California in a carrying box, wedged under her airplane seat, the cat still had a feeding tube in his side.

Two weeks later, Binh.')' took a tum for the worse. He was rejecting the organ. His doctors shifted him from oral to intravenous cyclosporine, the immunosuppressive drug that helps the body accept transplanted organs. But something was going wrong, and the vets weren't sure if it was a reaction to the drugs, an infection resulting from the cat's drug-compromised

immune system, or something else entirely.

As Binky convalesced at home, the catheters and continual blood tests took their toll. Like a heroin addict's veins, Binky's blood vessels were hardening and closing, and there were barely any more to tap. Several days after his arrival, Binky's gums turned blue, and he became heavily congested. That evening, Roberts rushed him to the local emergency clinic. At 1:30 a.m., he went into cardiac arrest. The medics spent 20 minutes fighting to keep him alive, and then his heart stopped again, and they let Binky go.

The night he died, Robe11s had Binky's body put in a freezer. Then she packed him in a Styrofoam box and sent him by U.S. mail to Davis. The results from Binky's autopsy will be added to the growing encyclopedia of data created by vets and pet lovers everywhere.

Sitting on her sofa days later, Robel1s reflects on the loss. The room is a study in anthropomorphism: On one wall is a painting of cats as cowboys, complete with bandanas, guns, and 10-gallon hats.

It's titled The Magnificent Seven. The ashes of Roberts' late dog, Lucy, fill a cedar box above the wet bar.

Then Roberts picks up Wink, the onekidneyed tabby who has become the newest member of the menagerie of humans and animals she calls her family.

Wink's body hangs from her hands, which are wedged into what on a human would be armpits. The long incision down his stomach is healing nicely, and he seems to have found his place in the Roberts' home.

Blackjack, the Australian shepherd, has decided to terrorize him all through the house, and the racket is incredible. But for Bedbug, the suddenly lonely littermate of the late Binky, Wink is a new companion.

Wink, for his par1, got a great deal. He's a $9,000 alley cat who's totally unaware that he's been sprung from the lab in a failed attempt to give another kitty a second chance. And Roberts, who is well aware of the cost and the failure, has no regrets. It was, she says, the least she could do.

0 About the Author: Stuart Luman is an assistant research editor at Wired magazine.

Hilld class: Darshan Krishna , (center, ill sari) has enthusiastic students ill Amber Howell, rOllt row, white top, and Kathryn Klose, behind her ill red.

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Life can be hectic for a New York City psychologist. But packed schedules notwithstanding, Esther Loewengart always manages to set aside time for the one activity she confesses she wouldn't miss for the world.

Several times a month, Loewengart attends Hindi classes at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Manhattan. Five visits to India had her hooked on Hindi. "It is essential to know the language in order to understand the culture of a country," says this New Yorker who prefers to go by her Indian name, "Kalpana."

Fluent in French and German, Kalpana says Hindi is a much more difficult language to master. "It has a different alphabet, and that poses a challenge." When she first enrolled in Hindi classes at the Bhavan, Kalpana had five classmates. She now has 30.

The director of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, P. Jayaraman, says there has been a "peculiar upswing in the nwnber of Americans who are genuinely interested in leal11ingHindi." He says there are many reasons for this. "Some want to understand Bollywood films. Others are interested in Indian literature, or are fi'equent travelers to India."

Many of Darshan Krishna's students are learning Hindi because they have an Indian spouse or, she adds with a laugh, "they want an Indian spouse!" The director of Bethesda, Marylandbased India School, Krishna says: "Many Americans love Indian films and Shah Rukh Khan. For them learning Hindi is a way to enjoy a Bollywood movie." For others it's religion, spirituality

and yoga that draws them to Indian languages.

It was a taunt from a snack vendor in Kolkata that steeled Amber Howell's determination to learn Hindi. "I really love puchkas [Bengali for golgappas]," Howell confides with an embarrassed laugh. "And then one day the puchkawalla complained to my Indian host, 'these dumb Americans come here and only want to speak in English, but make no effort to learn our languages.' " A resident of Rockville, Maryland, Howell enrolled in a 16-week Hindi course and says she is determined to continue until she is fluent.

Krishna's past pupils include U.S. diplomats on their way to postings in South Asia. These days many of her students are on their way to India to work in private firms.

A recent Yale graduate, Ryan Floyd is currently working in Mumbai. Prior to leaving for India, Floyd enrolled in a Hindi class saying he wanted to learn as much about Indian culture, politics and civilization as possible. "I surfed the Internet and found that Hindi is the most widely spoken language, even though in Maharashtra it isn't as big as in the orth," he said.

Hindi is taught in over 30 universities across the United States,

including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

Harvard offers its students five levels of "Urdu-Hindi." Urdu 10 I: Introductory Urdu-Hindi, is an introduction to the lingua franca of the subcontinent in its "Hindustani" form. Students are introduced to both the Perso-Arabic and the Devanagiri script systems.

"In this system students can learn both literary traditions," explains Professor Ali Asani, head tutor and director of graduate studies in the Depal1ment of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard.

"Traditionally, American universities have taught one or the other [language]. We view this as an al1ificial divide and try to cultivate a more pluralistic approach to language study.

Teaching Urdu-Hindi breaks down all the stereotypes between Indian and Pakistani students," says Asani. At Harvard, conventional teaching materials are supplemented by popular songs and clips from contemporary Indian cinema. "This makes it very attractive for students."

A majority of Asani's students are Americans of South Asian origin. Many have em-oiled in the course in order to get in touch with their roots. Some have staI1ed writing letters to relatives in

DC Berkelev

f the many American universities that have faculties for Hindi, the University of California at Berkeley ranks among the best for higher studies. During her recent visit to India, Vasudha Dalmia, a native of Delhi and now professor of Hindi at Berkeley's Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, spoke about the new rage for learning Hindi. "The enthusiasm among students to learn Hindi in itself is a pleasant surprise," she said.

She cites two reasons for this: "The new generation of nonresident Indians is energetic and is dying to maintain its ethnic identity. Language gives them a distinct cultural identity."

While non-Indians may learn Hindi for reasons ranging from love to curiosity, according to Dalmia Hindi and other Indian languages have taken over the position of Sanskrit for those who

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India and Pakistan, and very often bring these to Asani to check for spelling and grammatical errors. Asani also has what he calls "nonheritage" students.

Caleb Isaac Franklin's exposure to Hindi started with a dare.

Franklin and a friend were flipping through a Harvard course guide when they came across the Urdu-Hindi course. "My friend dared me to take the course. We laughed at the time, but I did go to the class," he says.

What Franklin saw amazed him. "I learnt about a culture I didn't know existed," says the Los Angeles native who has been studying rdu-Hindi at Harvard for more than two years.

"I read and write Urdu a lot better than I can speak it," he confesses. He prefers it to Hindi of which he says "every Devanagiri word to me is a puzzle."

Franklin's parents didn't know what to make of their son's decision to enroll in the course, but, he says proudly, they enjoyed watching Hindi films with him over the summer vacation. "They loved Lagaan." Knowing Hindi and Urdu has opened up the whole South Asian scene to Franklin. "I have been approached to act in South Asian plays."

want to know about India. "Hindi is the national language, the language of Bollywood fi Ims and represents India.

There was a time when without knowing any modern Indian language one could be called an expert on India, but the situation is different now," she says.

The history of Hindi at Berkeley began with the visit of renowned Hindi poet S.H. Watsyayan ("Ajneya") in the 1960s. Until then, Sanskrit was the only Indian language taught there. His presence was a boost for Hindi language and literature. Inspired by him, Usha Jain prepared the syllabus for Hindi and thus started the Hindi course. Jain is still a senior lecturer at Berkeley. Since California is home to many Hindi-speaking people, especially Punjabis, there is always a rush for the Hindi course.

Dalmia joined the department in 1998 and started the PhD course in Hindi.

According to her, about 70 students enroll themselves every year for the Hindi undergraduate course. But only about ten of them continue tlu'ough the masters degree. Still fewer pursue the doctoral course. C Berkeley periodically organizes seminars on Hindi literature, language and script.

Harvard studenl Caleb Isaac Franklin has been studying Hindi and Urdu for the past two years. He says his parents enjoyed watching Lagaan with him over summer vacation.

Franklin is hesitant about practicing his Urdu with the Indian or Pakistani students on campus. "I am an African American, and if a non-African American comes up to me and uses (African American) slang I get offended, so I don't want to go up to an Indian and say kaisey ho bhai'"

For Anita Anantram, who is pursuing her PhD at Berkeley, it all started in 1996, while completing her masters at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

There she became involved with some organizations working for women in distress. Many women were South Asians arrested for violating immigration laws.

Anantram says, "Knowing their language was necessary to appreciate better their pain. That prompted me to learn Hindi and I started fi-om the basics."

Born in the United States, Anantram's mother speaks Kannada and father, Malayalam. She is currently in India to give final shape to her doctoral thesis.

Shovana Nijhawan did her initial studies in Hindi in Germany, but selected UC Berkeley for higher studies in Hindi because of its excellent reputation. She is a PhD scholar and teaching assistant under Dalmia, and is researching the influence of women's magazines in India in the early 20th century. Scott Schlossberg, another of Dalmia's students, has no Indian roots. When he was an undergraduate in Developmental Studies at UC Berkeley, he read about the life and society of N0l1h India. After attending a seminar on "Religious Identity" with

Dalmia, he decided to study Southeast Asian rei igions. Learning a language was a prerequisite. "We can know better about any country by learning its language. That was the reason why I visited Delhi and Indonesia," says Schlossberg, who completed his masters degree in Hindi last year. He now wants to study the cultural politics of India and Indonesia. Currently there are eight students at UC Berkeley pursuing PhDs in Hindi.

The university also offers courses in Sanskrit, Urdu, Punjabi and Tamil.

Research scholars may be a few, yet the appeal of learning practical Hindi has resulted in the department offering special Hindi courses in the summers, popular with Indians and non-Indians alike. "People of Indian origin in California have mingled with American citizens there to such an extent that they do not envy their cultural identity. I have stayed in Germany but the extent of Indianness that I've seen in America hardly exists anywhere in the world. To become more effective, research in Hindi has to adapt the same level of standard, depth and sincerity for which American universities are famous," adds Dalmiya.

0

Over the 25 years that Asani has been teaching at Harvard he says he has seen a marked increase in the size of his classes. He had 10 students in his first class, and has now had to split up his class into four sections to deal with the growing interest.

"We get people coming out of curiosity. Some graduate students want to learn the language for their research. We've had students who have traveled to India and fallen in love with the place and want to study the language. We've had students with South Asian boyfriends, girlfriends. We deal with a mixed clientele," jokes Asani.

Jason Crosby, a graduate student of law and international studies at the American University in Washington, D.C., started studying Hindi while working as a consultant in Pune three years ago. "It wasn't necessary for me to learn Hindi, but it did make life easier," he admits, adding he was confident enough to speak in Hindi with rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers in India.

These people were at first surprised by Crosby's ability to speak Hindi. "Once they figured I could speak it [Hindi], they wanted to continue talking to me in Hindi!" Crosby says he enjoyed his 20 months in India and eventually hopes to return.

Maggie Cummings, a program specialist in the undersecretary's office at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., doesn't consider herself a "typical" student of Hindi.

Growing up, her best friend in seventh grade was from Pakistan. "I wanted to learn Urdu but they didn't teach it at my college so I picked Hindi." She majored in Hindi at Brown University, Rhode Island.

Cummings credits a one-year stint at an Indian restaurant in Providence for her proficiency in Hindi. "If anyone wants to learn Hindi I highly recommend Indian restaurants," she says with a laugh.

Cummings, who graduated from college in 1987, says her Hindi had turned "a little rusty" from disuse. She has enrolled in Hindi classes in Maryland where she is pleasantly surprised to find herself "way ahead" of other students.

She did eventually get a chance to study Urdu while at the University of Wisconsin. She learnt the script from a calligraphy specialist whom she gives credit for her beautiful handwriting.

"But I can't read the script anymore. It's a beautiful script, but much more complicated than Devanagiri."

While in Boston she did some private tutoring for Hindi students. "Indians have an interesting reaction when they hear me talk," says Cummings. "Some will completely ignore the fact that I'm speaking Hindi and continue to speak to me in English.

Others will ignore the fact that I am an American. Many of the Indians I speak to say they have never heard Americans speak Hindi and are shocked at how good my Hindi is."

Kathryn Klose says she is always a little hesitant about how Indians will react to her interest in their culture. "It's more about

Indian culture being so much about a religion, I don't want to feel like we are offending anyone. There is always a fear about intruding," says Klose, an accountant and controller for a software development firm in Gaithersburg, Maryland, by day, and a self-confessed Bollywood junkie by night. But every Indian she has met has been excited by her interest.

Klose started teaching yoga three years ago. "Once you're into yoga, you want to pronounce the postures correctly," she explains. Her final push into Indian culture came when a video store attendant in her neighborhood suggested she watch Lagaan.

"I watched it .... It was beautiful. I was hooked!"

Besides Hindi and Urdu, Sanskrit is also taught at universities and in private courses across the U.S. Saudamini Deshmukh, a Hindi teacher at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., teaches Sanskrit at her home in Bethesda, Maryland. Five of her six students are Americans who do not have a South Asian background. "It is not an easy language, and so only people who are serious enroll in the class," says Deshmukh.

One of her students is a serious student of languages, while the others are yoga practitioners.

Deshmukh's student Jane [she didn't want her last name published] has been a Bharatnatyam dancer for the past seven years. She enrolled in a Sanskrit course to "better understand the mythology behind the dance."

"I am also interested in languages. The more obscure the text and script the better. .. I love a challenge," says Jane, who has also studied Classical Greek. "People who invest time in lea111ingSanskrit are either doing it for academic reasons or, like me, just for fun," she explains. Jane has been reading the Ramayana with Deshmukh. "She is an excellent student," says her teacher appreciatively.

Cummings also tried learning Sanskrit, but says the experience was a "traumatic one." "It's a really hard language ... words cannot express how difficult they made it, I was traumatized by that experience."

Whether inspired by Bollywood films, a fascination with all things Indian or a need to reconnect with an Indian heritage, more and more Americans are enrolling in Indian language courses.

For Kalpana, her knowledge of Hindi has opened up many new worlds. "I now understand Hindi movies. The next frontier is literature," she says.

In parting, she adds a promise: "Next time we'll do this interview in Hindi!"

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Hindi and Urdu students enroll for a variety of reasons: some by accident, some for fun, some for academic, business or personal interest in India.

Some just want to understand Hollvwood films.

About the Author: Ashish Kumar Sen is a Washington, D. C. -based journalist working with The Washington Times. He also contributes to the Times of Jndia, Outlook and the Khaleej Times.

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ne of the greatest pleasures. of my teen years was SIttIng down with a bag of cinnamon Red Hots and a new La Vyrle Spencer romance, immersing myself in another tale of star-crossed lovers drawn together by the heart's mysterious alchemy. My mother didn't get it. "Why are you reading that?" she would ask, her voice tinged with both amusement and horror. Everything in her background told her that romance was a waste of time.

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Jlre arranged marriages hea(thier than romantic attraction?

Copyright Reprinted

© 2003 Anjula Razdan. of the author.

with permission

Born and raised in III inois by parents who emigrated from India 35 years ago, I am the product of an arranged marriage, and yet I grew up under the spell of Western romantic love-first comes love, then comes marriage-which both puzzled and dismayed my parents. Their relationship was set up over tea and samosas by their grandfathers, and they were already engaged when they went on their first date, a chaperoned trip to the movies. My mom and dad sti II barely knew each other on their wedding dayand they certainly hadn't fallen in love.

Yet both were confident that their shared values, beliefs, and family background would form a strong bond that, over time, would develop into love.

"But, what could they possibly know of real love?" I would ask myself petulantly after each standoff with my parents over whether or not I could date in high school (I couldn't) and whether I would allow them to arrange my marriage (l wouldn't). The very idea of an arranged marriage offended my ideas of both love and Iiberty-to me, the act of choosing whom to love represented the very essence of freedom. To take away that choice seemed like an attack not just on my autonomy as a person, but on democracy itse If. And, yet, even in the supposedly liberated West, the notion of choosing your mate is a relatively recent one. Until the 19th century, \,yrites historian EJ. Graff in What Is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 1999), arranged maniages were quite common in Europe as a way of forging alliances, ensuring inheritances, and stitching together the social, political and religious needs of a community. Love had nothing to do with it.

Fast forward a couple hundred years to 21 st-century America, and you see a modern, progressive society where people are free to choose their mates, for the most part, based on love instead of social or economic gain. But for many people, a quiet voice from within wonders: Are we really better off? Who has-

n't at some point in their life-at the end of an ill-fated relationship or midway through dinner with the third "datefrom-hell" this month-longed for a matchmaker to find the right partner?

No hassles. No effort. No personal ads or blind dates.

The point of the Western romantic ideal is to live "happily ever after," yet nearly half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce, and the number of nevermarried adults grows each year. Boundless choice notwithstanding, what does it mean when the marital success rate is the statistical equivalent of a coin toss?

"People don't really know how to choose a long-term partner," offers Dr. Alvin Cooper, the director of the San Jose Marital Services and Sexuality Center and a staff psychologist at Stanford University. "The major reasons that people find and get involved with somebody else are proximity and physical attraction. And both of these factors are terrible predictors of long-term happiness in a relationship."

At the moment we pick a mate, Cooper says, we are often blinded by passion and therefore virtually incapable of making a sound decision.

Psychology Today editor Robert Epstein agrees. "[It's] like getting drunk and marrying someone in Las Vegas," he quips. A former director of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, Epstein holds a decidedly unromantic view of courtshi p and love. Indeed, he argues it is our myths of "love at first sight" and "a knight in a shining Porsche" that get so many of us into trouble. When the heat of passion wears off-and it always does, he says-you can be left with virtually nothing "except lawyer's bills." pstein

points out that many arranged marriages result in an enduring love because they promote compatibility and ra~ tional deliberation ahead of passionate impulse. Epstein himself is undertaking a bold step to prove his theory that love can be learned. He wrote an editorial in

Psychology Today last year seeking women to participate in the experiment with him. He proposed to choose one of the "applicants," and together they would attempt to fall in love-consciously and deliberately. After receiving more than 1,000 responses, none of which seemed right, Epstein yielded just a little to impulse, asking Gabriela, an intriguing Venezuelan woman he met on a plane, to join him in the project. After an understandable bout of cold feet, she eventually agreed.

In a "love contract" the two signed on Valentine's Day this year to seal the deal, Epstein stipulates that he and Gabriela must undergo intensive counseling to learn how to communicate effectively and participate in a variety of exercises designed to foster mutual love. To help oversee and guide the project, Epstein has even formed an advisory board made up of high-profile relationship experts, most notably Dr. John Gray, who wrote the best-selling Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. If the experiment pans out, the two will have learned to love each other within a year's time.

It may strike some as anathema to be so premeditated about the process of falling in love, but to hear Epstein tell it, most unions fail exactly because they aren't intentional enough; they're based on a roll of the dice and a determination to stake everything on love. What this means, Epstein says, is that most people lack basic relationship ski lIs, and, as a result, most relationships lack emotional and psychological intimacy.

A divorced father of four, Epstein himself married for passion-"just like I was told to do by the fairy tales and by the movies"-but eventually came to regret it. "1 had the experience that so many people have now," he says, "which is basically looking at your partner and going, 'Who are you')'" Although Epstein acknowledges the non- Western tradition of arranged marriage is a complex, somewhat flawed institution, he thinks we can "distill key elements of [it] to help us learn how to create a new,

~or manyyeÂŁP{e the Internet can ifjicient{yjacifitate rove and he[p to nudge jate a{ong. But, jor the diehard romantic who trusts in suryrise, coincidence, andjate, the cyber-so{ution to rove racks heart.

more stable institution in the West."

Judging from the phenomenon of reality- TV shows like Married By America and Meet My Folks and the recent increase in the number of professional matchmakers, the idea of arranging marriages (even if in non-traditional ways) seems to be taking hold in the United States-perhaps nowhere more powerfully than in cyberspace. Online dating services attracted some 20 million people last year (roughly one-fifth of all singles-and growing), who used sites like Match.com and Yahoo Personals to hook up with potentially compatible partners.

Web sites' search engines play the role of patriarchal grandfathers, searching for good matches based on any number of criteria that you select.

Cooper, the Stanford psychologist and author of Sex and the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians (Brunner-Routledge, 2002)-and an expert in the field of online sexuality-says that because online interaction tends to downplay proximity, physical attraction, and face-to-face interaction, people are more likely to take risks and disclose significant things about themselves. The result is that they attain a higher level of psychological and emotional intimacy than if they dated right away or hopped in the sack. Indeed, online dating represents a return to what University of Chicago Humanities Professor Amy Kass calls the "distanced nearness" of old-style courtship, an intimate and protected (cyber)space that encourages

self-revelation while maintaining personal boundaries.

And whether looking for a fellow scientist, someone else who's HIV-positive, or a B-movie film buff, an online dater has a much higher likelihood of finding "the one" due to the computer's capacity to sort through thousands of potential mates. "That's what computers are all about-efficiency and sorting," says Cooper, who believes that online dating has the potential to lower America's 50 percent divorce rate. There is no magic or "chemistry" involved in love, Cooper insists. "It's specific, operationalizable factors."

Love's mystery solved by "operationalizable factors"! Why does that sound a little less than inspiring? Sure, for many people the Internet can efficiently facilitate love and help to nudge fate along. But, for the diehard romantic who trusts in surprise, coincidence, and fate, the cyber-solution to love lacks heart. "To the romantic," observes English writer Blake Morrison in The Guardian, "every marriage is an arranged marriage-arranged by fate, that is, which gives us no choice."

More than a century ago, Emily Dickinson mocked those who would dissect birds to find the mechanics of song: Split the Lark-and you 'lljind the MusicBulb after Bulb, in Silver rolledScantily dealt to the Summer Morning Savedfor Your Ear when Lutes be old.

Loose the Flood-you shalljind it patentGush after Gush, reservedfor youScarlet Experiment! Skeptic Thomas' Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

other n words, writes Deborah Blum in her book, Sex on the Brain (Penguin, 1997), "kill the bird and [you] silence the melody." For some, nurturing the ideal of romantic love may be more important than the goal of love itself. Making a more conscious choice in mating may help partners handle the complex personal ties and obI igations of marriage; but romantic love, infused as it is with myth and projection and doomed passion, is a way to live outside of life's obligations, outside of time itself-if only for a brief, bright moment. Choosing love by rational means might not be worth it for those souls who'd rather roll the dice and risk the possibility of ending up with nothing but tragic nobility and the bittersweet tang of regret.

In the end, who really wants to examine love too closely? 1'd rather curl up with a LaVyrle Spencer novel or dream up the French movie version of my life than live in a world where the mechanics of love-and its giddy, mysterious buzz-are laid bare. After all, to actually unravel love's mystery is, perhaps, to miss the point of it all.

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1

About the Author: Anjula Razdan is associate editor ofUtne magazine.

Devi Sridhar

Rhodes to Success ormer President Bill Clinton and Devi Sridhar, a teenager from University of Miami, share something in common: both are Rhodes scholars. But what is special about Devi is that she is the youngest American recipient of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship, that brings outstanding students fi路om around the world to Oxford University, U.K. According to University of Miami president and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala, "She has accomplished so much for someone her young age and her outstanding academic record, combined with her musical and linguistic talents and concern for children, unquestionably satisfies the Rhodes criteria for leadership and character." Daughter of the late Kasi Sridhar, a lung cancer researcher at the University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, 19-year-old Devi is one of 32 scholars nationwide to receive the honor last year.

Devi started pursuing her studies in biology at University of Miami at 16 through a fast-track undergraduate program. Now she has graduated with honors and will be studying international relations at Oxford.

The Rhodes scholarship will support her education for up to three years.

Apart from academics Devi excels in other fields too. She is an

F

accomplished violinist and a good tennis player. She is fluent in five languages-English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Tamil. In high school, she tutored autistic children and started a multi-school organization to address autism. She is co-author of a book on Indian myths for children, Puzzle Your Way Through Indian Mythology. She has been commended

by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for her fundraising efforts for the Gujarat earthquake victims.

Her immense interest in politics led her, with several others, to found an organization called Voices of Young Americans for Global Engagement (VOYAGE) that aims at getting young people involved in political and international issues and show them how those issues affect their lives.

"Young people have a powerful voice," she says, "but since they don't use it for voting, they don't get listened to."

Her plan is to study medical anthropology with an international focus at Oxford. She also wants to pursue a law degree and hopes to be associated with the United Nations as a health-care advocate.

Even with all these achievements she modestly says: "It's all about having a balance in life, and it all comes down to what your priorities are. My family comes first, and then everything else."

She attributes her success to honesty and plainness in accepting her ignorance while faced with difficult questions in the field of biology pel1aining to cellular mechanism of AIDS during the selection process for the scholarship.

She says getting involved with VOYAGE is very much satisfying as it reflects what she believes in. "I enjoy keeping up with important issues, reading atticles and writing opinionsfor me, it's fun," she said.

Her father, who always encomaged her to chase her dreams, died of leukemia and lymphoma a few years ago. His death made her realize what was really significant to her in life and helped her gain a better perspective. Tn a philosophical note she says, "Material things don't matter. It's all about what you leave behind, what you do with your life."

She wants young people in the community to become more active in international affairs. "Many times we, young individuals, don't know what's going on, we don't challenge it, we don't think about it and we don't use our voice," she says.

"I found out what was important in life and that I wanted to make the world a better place, and the only way to see that happening is through knowledge and through using the power we have, which is to speak out," Devi says.

-K. Muthukumar

Remembering Edward W Said

fter long and eventful innings at Columbia University, New York, as an influential teacher, intellectual and, at times, controversial activist, Edward Said died in a New York hospital on September 5.

He battled leukemia for the past 15 years.

Said leaves behind a substantial corpus of writing and a living, thriving tradition that stresses "the vital importance of the battle for narrative, and struggle for discourse." This tradition of bringing a fresh reading of the text and establishing new contexts spawned a large global following that will likely continue his quest. The leitmotif of his narrative, "the politics of culture" and identities, has turned out to be an enduring strand in Western academic discourse.

Said was born into an Episcopalian Christian family in Jerusalem on November 1, 1935, and spent his early years in Egypt and Lebanon. Even after migrating to the United States in 1947 with his father, a prosperous businessman, Said remained emotionally close to the Holy Land.

A diligent student, he did his BA from Princeton University in 1957, MA in English from Harvard in 1960 and a PhD on Joseph Conrad in 1964. After 1963, he spent most of his time at Columbia University as a teacher of English and comparative literature with interludes at John Hopkins, Harvard, Yale and Cambridge as a visiting professor.

He lived, at least emotionally, the life of an exile, in his own words, "out of place" at every place he happened to be. Meanwhile, he tried to start and keep alive a dialogue between Jews and Palestinians to heal the schism and trauma of Palestine. He accepted Israel's existence, but did not favor the two-state solution for Palestine--Dne Jewish, the

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other Palestinian. What he pleaded for instead was a single, composite state in which both Jews and Palestinians live together as equal citizens.

Better known as a cultural critic, he was one of the leading figures among the post-structuralist literary critics who arose in America in the second half of the 20th century and had a global following and influence. Said was a colossus astride several worlds. He was a music critic with a finely honed sensibility, a pianist, an aficionado of opera, a political activist and analyst, and a formidably learned scholar.

His two books of later years, Musical Elaborations (1991) and Culture and Imperialism (1992) were widely acclaimed. But his fame largely rested on his epoch-making work Orientalism that started a debate in academic and political circles worldwide. This work questioned the very premises on which a vast body of Orientalist writing was based, and by so doing enriched post-colonial studies.

After that the Orient no longer remained the "other" whose sole purpose of existence was to help the Occident define itself by contrast.

Among his other books were The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), After the Last Sky (1984) and Blaming the Victims (1988). These books tried to get to the core of issues involving Palestine (to which he was fondly attached all his life). In Covering Islam, he tried to look into the inadequacies of Western media coverage of Islam, which he found too stereotyped, hurried and shallow.

Said has left an abiding legacy of intercivilizational dialogue, relentless quest for freedom of conscience, truthfulness and opposition to bigotry.