commemoration ceremonies of her first death anniversary, glowing tributes were paid to Kalpana Chawla both in her native country and the United States. She was a crew member onboard the ill-fated Columbia space shuttle, along with Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown and Laurel B. Clark, which exploded midair on February 1 last year. To remember and honor the heroic Columbia cr~ a new memorial was built at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia (left). It features a CotJrtes NASA bronze replica of a mission patch designed by crew members. On the left a star field represents the constellation of Columbia (the dove) and was depicted to symbolize both peace on earth and the shuttle Columbia. The seven stars also represent seven crew members and honor the original astronauts who paved the way to make research in space possible. The names of the crew members of the mission are shown around the periphery of the emblem. NASA engineers mounted a plaque (top) commemorating the Columbia crew on the back of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's high-gain antenna. The astronauts are also honored by the new name of the rover land路 ing site, the Columbia Memorial Station.
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SPAN VOLUME
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America Welcomes Indian Nurses
NUMBER2
By Ashish Kumar Sen
Publisher Michael H. Anderson
From Brain Drain to "Brain Circulation"
Editor-in-Chief Gabrielle Guimond
By Ashish Kumar Sen
Editor Lea Terhtme
"We Are at the Cutting Edgeof History"
Associate Editor
An Interview with A mbassador David Mulford by Lea Terhune
A. Venkara Narayana
Hindi Editor Govind Singh
Primaries, Caucuses and Beyond
Urdu Editor AnjumNaim
Copy Editor
By Lea Terhune
Dipesh K. Saraparhy
When Gardens Grow Wild
Editorial Assistant 1(. Murhukumar
By Cynthia Berger
Art Director Hemanr Bhamagar
Bread Loaf
Deputy Art Directors
A Place for Writers
By Lea Terhune
Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi
Taking the Low Road
Production/Circulation Manager
By Valerie Miner
Rakesh Agrawal
Valerie Miner on the Art of Revision
Printing Assistant Alok Kaushik
By Lea Terhune
Business Manager R. Narayan
Harvesting Nature's Boon By Prabhu Ghate
Front cover: This is the first color image of Mars taken by the panoramic camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. It is the highest resolution image ever taken on the surface of another planet. Photograph courtesy NASAlJPUCornel1. See article on page 30.
On the Lighter Side Celestial Sightseeing By Michael Benson
STATEMENT FORM IV The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars about SPAN magazine as required under Section 19D(b) of the Press & Registration of Books Act, 1867, and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, 1956. I. Place of Publication:
2. Periodicity of Publication: 3. Printer's Name: Nationality Address
4. Publisher's
Name: I ationality Address
5. Editor's Name: ationality Address 6. Name and address of individuals who own the newspaper and panners or shareholders holding more than one percent of the total capital:
Public Affairs Section American Embassy American Center 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 11000 I Bi-monthly GP. Todi Indian Ajanta Offset & Packaging Ltd. 95-B, Wazirpur Industrial Area Delhi 110052 Michael H. Anderson American 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg ew Delhi 11000 I Lea Terhune American 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg ew Delhi 110001 The Government of the United States of America
Focus on the Blues By David Friend
Country Music Meets Lok Sangeet An Interview with Steve Young by Dipesh Satapathy
Citizens' Diplomacy An Interview with Edy Kaufman by A. Venkata Narayana
The Diamand Wars Have Begun By Joshua Davis
Who Was Deep Throat? By William Gaines
I, Michaell-!. Anderson, hereby declare that the particulars above are true \0 the best of my knowledge and belief. (Signed) Michael H. Anderson Signature of Publisher
given
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his spring we welcome Ambassador David Mulford and his wife Jeannie to New Delhi. Trade and the economy have long been important in the relationship between the United States and India, and Ambassador Mulford's experience in international business can only enhance the dialogue. He kindly took time out to talk to SPAN, and that interview is one of the highlights of this issue. A two-way exchange of expertise is going on right now between our two countries, and Ashish Kumar Sen has the story on both counts. Medical personnel, especially nurses, are in great demand all over the United States. Fewer people are choosing careers in the profession, yet these critical healthcare positions must be filled. Hospitals are now recruiting health workers from India, among other countries, as we learn in ''America Welcomes Indian Nurses." Going the other way are information technology professionals who have solid work experience in the United States, but who have been hit by the slow economy and downsizing of many companies. They are now headed for Bangalore and other places where ties to U.S. companies are shaping up to be big business. Read "From Brain Drain to 'Brain Circulation.' " Looking forward to potential business, "The Diamond Wars Have Begun," by Joshua Davis, describes a refined method to manufacture perfect synthetic diamonds that has De Beers worried, but promises faster computing as synthetic diamonds become more affordable. Our cover story is a celebration of the latest good news from the heavens, via NASA's sophisticated satellite photography. Michael Benson elaborates in "Celestial Sightseeing." Some of the extraordinary photos are digitally enhanced by Benson, while others are direct from Mariner 10, the Hubble Space Telescope and other satellites.
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To our readers who frequently ask us for more literary focus, we offer several articles. The first is "Bread Loaf: A Place for Writers," by Lea Terhune, a profile of America's most venerable annual literary event. Then, novelist Valerie Miner shares excerpts from her novel The Low Road, and some observations on "The Art of Revision," which she made at a SPAN-sponsored mini-workshop in New Delhi in January. Staying with the arts, "Focus on the Blues," by David Friend, offers unique views of famous blues singers, taken by one-time manager Dick Waterman over 40 years of his association with the artists. Dipesh Satapathy talks with folk music singer Steve Young in "Country Music Meets Lok Sangeet." In the political sphere, track two diplomacy is the subject of an interview with expert Edy Kaufman by A. Venkata Narayana. See "Citizens' Diplomacy." Preparations for the U.S. presidential elections are explained in "Primaries, Caucuses and Beyond," by Lea Terhune. "Who Was Deep Throat?" by William Gaines, tells of how an enterprising group of journalism students may have figured out who supplied the information that precipitated the Watergate scandal. Water availability is a critical issue in India and elsewhere. Good work is being done with sustainable technologies to conserve it, and Prabhu Ghate, in "Harvesting Nature's Boon," writes of one such project coordinated by the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. United States-Asia Environmental Partnership is a major funder. Environmental conservation can begin in your own backyard, as "When Gardens Grow Wild," by Cynthia Berger, demonstrates. Happy reading.
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Ian urses merica is everything Shanthi Margoschis dreamt of. Until last year, Margoschis was teaching maternity nursing and women's health at Christian Medical College, .. VeIIore, while her husband was working as a medical records officer in Muscat. When the Margoschis', who have a three-year-old daughter, decided it was time for them to settle tin one place as a family, America provided the perfect opportunity. "l.had seen a lot of documentaries about the tremendous scope for nurses in the U.S.," Margoschis says. Within a year she had taken the qualifying examination in Virginia. Now, green card in hand, she works as a nurse at the Delano Regional Medical Center in California. Margoschis is one of many international registered nurses being greeted with open arms by America. And this warm welcome is not without reason. The American Nursing Association estimates there are ",currentlY 126,000 unfilled nursing jobs in hospitals across the country. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' statistics predict this shortfaIIwi1l grow to 800,000 within the next decade. Some hospitalshave already been forced to reduce the number of beds and divert patients to other hospitals. An aging population-nine percent of nurses are under the age of
Fewer Americans . are pursuing . nursing careers, so hospitals are looking to India to fill critical healthcare positions
30, and 51 percent are over the age of 45-combined with declining levels of enrollment in nursing schools, and difficult working conditions have forced hospitals to look overseas to fill vacancies. India came into focus when the flow of nurses from Canada, Ireland and the Philippines dried up. President ofRN India, a nurse recruitment firm based in Costa Mesa, California, Lalit Pattanaik explains the low level of enrollment in U.S. nursing schools. "They [Americans] just don't feel that nursing is necessarily the best option-the amount of work that is involved, the pay, and the social status is not as great as in other professions." But for Indian nurses, the dream of working in the U.S. has spawned training centers in India that churn out "ready-to-go"
nurses. RN India has centers in Cochin and New Delhi and every two months the firm takes U.S. hospital representatives to India to interview candidates. "The opportunity of a good life is tempting," says a Bangalorebased recruiter. Indian nurses recruited to the U.S. get paid salaries comparable to those offered to their American colleagues. (This is in marked contrast with many Indian IT professionals who willingly worked on fractions of the salaries offered to their American counterparts.) In addition, nurses coming to America are not charged any fees by recruiting firms. The slot fee charged to hospitals by the recruitment agencies covers all expenses. Margoschis was recruited by Richmond, Virginia-based GlobeMed Resources. "I didn't have to pay for anything-they even bought me a phone card so I could call India," she says. GlobeMed has centers in eight Indian cities. According to Paul Nimitz, GlobeMed president and chief operations officer, 70 percent of the nurses coming from India are from South India-most are from Kerala. "Given its abundance of trained nurses, India is an untapped goldmine," he says. Not all experiences are as positive as Margoschis'. It took Neetha Saggurthy eight years to realize her dream of working in America. After completing the qualifYing examination in 1991, she spent years working through an agent in Chennai who, she says, "took a whole lot of money and did nothing else." When things finally began to work out for her, Saggurthy moved with her husband, Stalin, and their young daughter. Her first job at a nursing home in Chicago was an unfulfilling one. "I didn't like the job .. .1 am basically an operating room nurse and this was not something T wanted to do," she says. Now clinical manager for orthopedics and bone marrow at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, she is much happier. "Georgetown is a teaching hospital and a nurses hospital which creates an environment that attracts and retains professional nurses from different Anticlockwise from left: Neetha Saggurthy discusses a case at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.; Paul Nimitz, president and COO of GlobeMed, a top healthcare recruiting firm; Shanthi Margoschis, with husband and daughter, moved from Vellore to Delano, California, and is happy with her career choice.
cultural backgrounds," she says. Nurses from India do not require additional qualifications to work in the US. as the Indian education and training system is comparable to the U.S. program. They are, however, required to pass a licensing exam-the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN). This test is only conducted in the United States. or on US. territories. Once the nurses pass the NCLEX-RN, they need to then receive State Licensure to practice. The Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS) also conducts an exam designed for first-level, general nurses educated outside the US., who want to work in the US. Forty U.S. states require that these nurses pass this exam before they are authorized to sit for the NCLEX-RN. The commission has set up test centers in Delhi, Bangalore and Cochin where the exam is held in March, July and November. In addition, U.S. law requires that nurses seeking permanent work visas must obtain a VisaScreen certificate from CGFNS. This certificate verifies the nurses' education and training; ability to speak and write English at an appropriate level; and possession of a currently valid and unencumbered nursing license in the home country. Assuming that the nurse passes the CGFNS, the English exams, and her education credentials are verified, the U.S. government will grant an 1-140 to the nurse with proper sponsorship, prior to passing the NCLEX-RN. This, recruiters say, is a risk they are willing to take. "The nurse could come over here and fail the exam but still have a pelmanent residency status," says Nimitz. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has "fasttracked" green cards for foreign nurses. These new immigrants have slipped into America and their new lives virtually unscathed by a recession-induced anti-immigrant sentiment. Nimitz says: "I haven't seen any resentment toward the nurses. The thing about IT professionals is that there are plenty of willing IT workers within the U.S. who just need to be retrained. In the case of nurses, there just aren't enough American candidates to fill the vacancies." Pattanaik, who also works as an immigration attorney, agrees there are "way too many openings." He adds: "Even ifthese nurses come in huge numbers they will not be able to fill up all the jobs." Andy Downing, CEO of GlobeMed, previously worked in a company that brought Indian IT professionals to the U.S. "Given my experience, I went into this [working with Indian nurses] with a lot of confidence," he says. Downing's confidence in Indian professionals has been reaffirmed by the slew of requests his firm has received for Indian nurses. At present, GlobeMed has 200 nurses in various stages of fulfilling requirements to move to the United States. "Some are here, some are alTiving literally evelY day. Next year we're on target to deliver between 250 and 300 more nurses," says Downing. While Indian nurses have carved a niche for themselves through their diligence and professionalism, Pattanaik says there are some language concerns. "This is especially true for hospitals where speaking proper English may Nerally mean the difference
between life and death." The U.S. is fast becoming the top destination for Indian nurses. While many are still attracted to hefty pay packets being offered by hospitals in the Middle East, those who have worked there complain about the restrictions on their personal freedom. Sheila Kadalakkat worked in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, for two years. She says, "The pay was very good, but we had no freedom." She recalls being followed by mindel'S in grocery stores and being forced to cover her head with a headscarf whenever she went outdoors. In November last year, Kadalakkat moved to Dayton, Ohio, where she got a job at the Good Samaritan Hospital. "Nurses are paid well here," she says, "And they tell me it's a nice place to live. They pay well but you have to work extremely hard." Her husband, Sudesh, and their 10-month-old child help keep homesickness at bay. "Life is much more comfortable than in India or the Gulf," she says. Saggurthy was keen move to America for "the same reasons that everyone else wants." "The salaries here are considerably higher than what nurses get paid in India," she says. Besides, she adds, "There is a lot of respect for nurses in the U.S.-in India they think the doctors are God-here anyone who is good at their work is treated well." Apart from the financial incentives, the reason why the United States is emerging as the preferred destination over the UK. and the Gulf is that nurses here are given permanent resident status before they alTive. Shanthi Margoschis moved with her husband and daughter Annette. "It has not been difficult getting adjusted to life here," she says. "Everyone has been so helpful. It is the ideal way to practice; you get your green card immediately, it really is greener on this side!" While Margoschis has been enjoying her first few weeks in the United States, there is one downside, she confesses: "It's so cold here!" As for India, she says: "I do miss Vellore ... America is a different place, a different world, but I have to find a balance." Saggwthy adds, "It's hard to adjust to this culture-but I think we have done quite well. We have a good mix of friends." Indian nurses are not immune to concerns that dog new immigrants. "They also WOITYabout exploitation," says Pattanaik. "A lot of them are still not convinced that they will be making so much more money." He says he's had some concerned fathers ask him whether their daughters will actually be working as nurses in America. "Unfortunately there have been a lot of shady operators in this business." "The opportunities that they can provide their spouse and children are much higher," says Pattanaik, adding that nurses also have a sense of professional satisfaction in America. He adds: "In India, they say no one thinks of them as professionals-they feel like, in a sense, lower class citizens. Whereas here, 90 percent of the patient care is dependent on them. They feel like they are pmt ofa team." 0 About the Author: Ashish Kumar Sen is a Washington, D.C-based journalist working with the Washington Times. He also contributes to Outlook and Times of India.
hetan Raghavan is ecstatic. He's landed an "awesome" job. An enviable pay package, a company car and a posh three-bedroom apartment are just some of the perks. But what this California resident is more excited about is the prospect of soon being surrounded by family and friends. He's moving to Bangalore. "We always knew we were going to go back some day," says Raghavan, his wife, Sarita, nodding her head in agreement. The Raghavans are trading their American dream for a one-way ticket to India. And they're not the only ones. In a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, 40 percent of the foreign-born respondents said they would consider returning to their native countries. Over the years, the so-called brain drain from India has been transformed into a more complex two-way process of "brain circulation" linking California's fabled Silicon Valley to urban centers in India, says AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and one of the authors of the study. Saxenian found nearly threefourths of the predominantly Indian and Chinese immigrants interviewed said they knew between one and 10 immigrant professionals who had returned home. "This 'brain circulation' is likely to expand in the future with profound consequences for economic development in other countries," she says. "In the United States, there are economic opportunities but also policy challenges. Trade, immigration, and intellectual property-rights policies all assume more limited one-way flows of skills and technology, largely within multinational corporatipns. There's a new reality today."
Sushil Bhikhchandani, Agoura, California-based head of operations at Naukri.com, an employment portal offering jobs in India, says the migration of Indian expatriates to India is a "recent phenomenon." The people who are returning, he says, are predominantly those who were either laid off from their jobs in the U.S. or had planned to go back in a few years but decided to speed up their plans. Three factors have made India attractive, Bhikhchandani says. "Availability of good employees in India-from computer scientists, engineers to call center personnel-at a fraction of the salary of comparable U.S. employees; improved telecommunication which makes it easier for U.S. companies to do some of the work offshore; and tremendous competitive pressure to cut costs." Karthik Sundaram, managing editor of California-based Silicon India, organized a series of back- to-India job fairs last year. "Many Indians living in America dream of returning to India but they are nervous and don't know how to go about making that transition," Sundaram says. Through the fairs, he provided a venue for people to explore opportunities as well as air apprehensions. The fair, planned as a two-city event, rapidly expanded to more locations aCrOSSthe U.S. "The demand for similar events in other cities was overwhelming," says Sundaram. So was the turnout, with some venues packed to capacity. The interest to return home is matched by U.S. firms' keenness to move jobs overseas. Multinationals including big names such as Microsoft, Intel and Oracle Corporation are actively scouting for talent to manage their offices in India. "They no longer look at their operations in India as a back office," says Sundaram.
Rafiq Dossani, director of the South Asia Initiative at Stanford University, notes the acceleration of outsourcing or business process offshoring is intertwined with increasing willingness by firms to outsource what formerly were considered core activities. "It is significant that a substantial number of service activities might move offshore, because it was once thought that service jobs were the future growth area for developed country economies," he writes in a working paper. While they have adapted to America's business environment, Indian entrepreneurs in the U.S. have maintained close ties to India. These ties are contributing to the growth of global business networks and stimulating economic change in cities like Bangalore, according to Saxenian.
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angalore tops the list of prefer.red destinations for people who are thinking of returning. Hyderabad and Pune are next. The state-of-the-art Intel campus in Bangalore is one of the reasons why the city is a top attraction. Intel offers competitive salaries and employee benefits and stock options on par with those offered at its offices in the United States. . Arjun Batra's job is to ensure that the right people make the move to India. A business development and project incubation manager at Intel India Development Center in Santa Clara, California, Batra says: "I respect my heritage and am motivated to help people for whom the opportunities to return to India are right." A decision to relocate is a big one. "Everyone has to consider their personal circumstances ... families in which the children are older and working may not be as well suited to move as those with
With good employers, attractive working conditions, improved telecommunications and the entrepreneurial climate in India today, young professionals are moving backand strengthening business ties in the process younger children. For some people it's just not the right time," he says. Susheel Chandra, senior vice president of Santa Clara-based Sequence Design, is encouraged by the interest companies like Intel are showing. Intel isn't the only firm seriously entrenching operations in India. In 1998, IBM set up its India Research Laboratory on the Indian Institute of Technology (lIT) campus in New Delhi. People there are working on the same cutting edge of technology as anywhere else in the world, including America. "Today, you are not sacrificing your career if you decide to move [to India]," says Amit Zavery, senior director at Oracle Corporation. "There isn't an urgency to just rush back to any job. People want to do good work, close to their families ... and they want to continue moving ahead in their careers." Most people returning to India have a preference for jobs with U.S. companies over outsourced call-center duties. But, says Bhikhchandani, outsourcing by U.S. companies is "the biggest factor" that contributes to a person's decision to return to India. "At the same time, there is a very entrepreneurial climate in certain parts of India, nurtured mostly by Indian businessmen." For many young families weighing a retum to India, being close to parents and grandparents is a priority. For American firms, moving their operations to India means, among other things, cutting costs. "That costs are lower in India is a given, it's not rocket science to figure that one out," says Batra. At Oracle it's the 24/7-work atmosphere that is the "chief motivator" to relocate jobs. "If we have a similar skill set in both places it's a win-win situation for our customers ... and for us," says Zavery.
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o longer are people asking "why India?" In most U.S. firms there are enough Indians in the higher echelons to drive an interest in India. Firms are keen to relocate employees who are familiar with their work culture and operations. "If you were to send people from Australia to India you'd want them to know how things work in Australia," Zavery explains. One of the biggest concerns for U.S. firms is maintaining parity in company culture. Officials at U.S.based firms agree it would be velY hard to make a success of a venture if this factor is ignored. Batra says training people in India from scratch is an unattractive proposition, largely due to the time and costs involved. Recruiters in the U.S. are often inundated with concems about the quality of life in India. Electricity, roads, pollution and weather are the main source of apprehension. It's the first generation of immigrants that, according to Batra, are better equipped to cope with relocation. "We know traffic conditions in Bangalore and Mumbai will be bad, but we also know it's the same in Santa Clara. The drivers may be more disciplined here, but bumper-to-bumper traffic is the same all over the world." The packages offered allow people going back to live a lifestyle equivalent to the kind they have in the United States. While some firms provide their employees with services and oncampus facilities, Zavery cautions against creating an "oasis." "You have to be aware of the local lifestyle," he says. Over the past couple of years that he has been visiting India, Zavery has noticed a "positive" change, especially in Bangalore.
"If you go back with reasonable expectations you are not going to be disappointed," says Susheel Chandra. There is always a possibility that people may not like the new situation, but the decision to return should not be cast in stone-"you've got to keep your options open." Many of those contemplating a return are green card holders or U.S. citizens. These people have the option of keeping a foot in both worlds. Those on H-lB visas cannot afford a similar luxury. But, says Shalini Roy, a New Jersey-based software programmer and an H-IB visa holder, "I want to return because I had never planned on staying on for the rest of my life. This isn't home." Not everyone shares Roy's point of view. Many people are returning to India out of desperation, says Chandra. "If they are offered a job in the U.S. they will be back." Of the resumes he's reviewed, 50 percent have been from people who have been laid off jobs in the United States. Twenty percent were from those serious about returning to India. Given the present state of the U.S. economy, is India just the lesser of two evils? "Although the U.S. economy is improving, there has been velY little job creation," admits Bhikhchandani. "The main reason people are going back is that good jobs are available in India." He says the factors that make India look good will remain even as the U.S. economy improves. "In the end, people will go where the jobs are ... There are exciting new opportunities opening up in India." Regardless of the motivation, Batra says: "It's comforting for people to know that they have the opportunity to return .... There really is no time like now in India." 0
"We Are at the Cutting Edge of History" arly in February Ambassador David Mulford and his wife Jeannie arrived in New Delhi to take up residence in Roosevelt House, and they lost no time in getting acquainted with the embassy, the staff, and getting down to work. Born in America's heartland, in IIIinois, Ambassador Mulford is noted for his breadth of experience. His strong academic background began at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he majored in economics. After a year at Capetown University in South Africa, he went on to take his master's degree in political science from Boston University and a doctorate from Oxford University (UK.). In 1965-66 he spent a year at the U.S. Treasury in the first year of the White House Fellowship Program and then left academia for
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international finance, where he quickly became managing director and head of International Finance at White, Weld & Co., Inc. Between 1974 and 1983 he served as senior investment adviser to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA). While living in Saudi Arabia, he was responsible for managing the investment of Saudi oil revenues and developing a comprehensive investment program for SAMA. Following this, from 19841992, Ambassador Mulford was Under Secretary and Assistant Secretary for International Affairs in the US. Treasury Department, the senior international economic policy official under Treasury secretaries Donald T. Regan, James A. Baker and Nicholas F. Brady. He was involved in coordinating various economic policies with other G-7 industrial nations. After
SPAN: How do youfeel about being in India? AMBASSADOR DAVID MULFORD: I'm very excited about the appointment. When 1 was contacted about it I was very surprised, but immediately took the view that among all the countries ofthe world, ifI was going to do ajob like this, India would be the country I would want to serve in, for the simple reason that I think, first of all, India is an important country and a great culture in its own right. But also it is at an historic moment in its development, in the sense that it is already emerging as a major political and economic power in the world. At the same time, the President very early in his administration decided that the US.-India relationship is of prime strategic importance. That is already reflected in the significant attention given in the administration to strategic issues. Therefore it seems, from my standpoint, that to arrive on the scene at this moment in time is particularly opportune. Is this your first visit to India? No, 1 came to India a number of times in the period between 1995 and 2000 on business, and then I came here with my wife a couple of times and saw something of the country. We were so enthused about what we saw that we soon brought Mrs. Mulford's mother to India for her 75th birthday, along with her sister, and her niece, and went to Agra, Jaipur and Delhi. So we've seen a little bit of the country, not a great deal, but I've had contact with the business and-government community here.
leaving government service, Ambassador Mulford joined the Credit Suisse Group in 1992, where he was Chairman International of Credit Suisse First Boston, based in London. During the past II years he has worked on worldwide, large-scale privatization programs among other corporate and government work. He left this post for the assignment in India. The Mulfords have visited more than 60 countries and frequently lived outside the United States. They look forward to being in India, where they intend to combine work with the enjoyment of gaining a comprehensive knowledge of the country. "The way that we perceive the job is on a very broad basis," Ambassador Mulford says. "There are going to be very few areas of activity that are not going to be of interest to us."
How do you see the relationship between the United States and India developing during your tenure as ambassador? Once the President made the decision that there should be a transformed strategic relationship between the United States and India, and once that process began, and accomplishments were forthcoming, it's natural to think about broadening that initiative to incorporate the full scale of relations between the two countries. If you look at the relationship between the United States and its major allies, you immediately realize that only a relatively small percentage of the total relationship is government-to-government activity. A far larger part is the full range of other activities: private sector, business, universities, health and all sorts of other fields of human endeavor. And I think it's fair to say that i~ India, the scope for expanding these other elements of that relationship is great. There's obviously a lot of excitement. A lot of people are busy making initiatives in India. But there is still enormous potential for an expanded relationship between the two countries on a comprehensive basis. What's exciting, I think, is to feel that in addition to carrying out the developing strategic relationship, which has been well publicized, there is this other part ofthe comprehensive relationship where engagement needs to be intense, and where there are all kinds of opportunities for expanded cooperation in economic development, and activities in all sorts of human endeavors. And it's that broad-based, full engagement that really has got me very, very excited.
doing so, unleash the power that is inherent in the Indian economy by making refOlms, opening up and raising the level of all economic activity. This, in turn, spells opportunities for the United States, for U.S. business and for all kinds of other groups that are engaged in India. It also means, presumably, more open trading and foreign direct investment regimes, both of which are areas in which there is tremendous scope for future development in U.S.India relations. So, again, this is a top priority. It is clear that the President wants to engage India in a comprehensive relationship. That's one of the reasons I was asked to serve as U.S. Ambassador here. The mix of government and private sector experience I have accumulated over a long period of time might prove very useful in this period of expanding U.S. relations with India.
Have you a specific goal in the economic sphere? I think India is already demonstrating a much greater preoccupation with economic growth, and raising the level and diversity of economic activity, which clearly over time will advance the prosperity of its people, reduce overall levels of poverty and integrate India more fully into the global economy. These things are already happening. And the political process at the moment is in fact generating, during the period of this election, the approach-as I understand it-where the BJP is making economic development a main plank of their campaign program. This emphasis is a relatively new phenomenon compared to past elections when other issues dominated the scene. This is a sign that political leaders bel ieve there is a growing publ ic consensus in this country in favor of sustained, solid and continuous growth, and development. In my experience, when the political process arrives at the point where there is this consensus that stronger, sustained economic performance is the highest priority, with all its benefits to the public at large, by implication the country is embracing an aggressive refonTIprogram. These reforms often prove to be quite comprehensive, both macro and micro reforms-often called structural reforms-specific to pal1icular areas of the economy. A growing and open market economy is what usually accounts for 7-9 percent annual growth on a continuing basis, not a heavily managed, statedominated economy. So it's exciting to see the political decision in India that the right way forward is to develop this consensus and in
In other strategic relationships between the United States and India, say military or counter-terrorism, India:S relationship with Pakistan is in the background. How should the United States approach this issue? Clearly the U.S. relationship with India as I've described it is based on the inherent value of that relationship. It is not a relationship that is driven solely by Indo-Pakistan history or current animosities. No doubt our relationship will be greatly enhanced ifthere is continuing progress between India and Pakistan in re- . solving their issues. However, the United States, in my view, should not become the manager of that process or insert itself as referee, but it should do everything it can to encourage the process. And I suspect, that among the various impediments to economic development that India is in the process of removing, or reducing, to encourage stronger economic performance, the long-standing disputes with Pakistan could be seen as a distraction and a drag to eCQnomic activity. So to the extent India and Pakistan can advance the peace process, and bring that to a successful conclusion, they are going to enhance their attractiveness to each other in economic terms. There are a lot of potentially common areas of economic interest. So it's a win-win situation, and the U.S. position is surely best served by expanding the relationship with India, encouraging the breadth of that relationship to expand, and finally to encourage the peace process because of the benefits that it will bring, both political and economic. You are obviously enthusiastic about relationship building between the United States and India, but how far can it go? I fully understand the potential for this relationship, which I view as really historic in its implications. It is between two great powers, both democracies, rather different democracies, but democracies which, ifthey can build this kind of relations hip, will find it to be of very great benefit down the road to both countries in a changing world. We are all very fOl1unate to be here at this time. We are all in a way engaged at the cutting edge of history. It's a time to be proud and excited about the opportunity, and a time to achieve things. I think it's possible to do that. This is not a ceremonial post. So we are very happy to be here, very excited about the opp0l1unity, looking forward to working with people in the Indian government and the private sector in general. 0
PRIMARIES, CAUCUSES AND BEYOND ALL ROADS LEAD TO NOVEMBER 2004 rule India is at the height of election frenzy, so is the United States-where the frenzy lasts considerably longer. Thanks to pervasive media hype and redistribution of primaries and caucuses to earlier in the calendar year, election stumping begins more than a year ahead of the election, from the time when the first tentative presidential candidates throw their hats in the ring until the day of decision in November 2004. Some details of the election process in the United States may seem arcane to outsiders, even irrational, when it comes to entities such as the Electoral College. But there is logic to this largely two-party system and its election practices, which have evolved over 225 years of trial and error. First things first, and in the United States those are state primary elections and caucuses. From the beginning of every presidential election year, opposition presidential candidates, who are serious about winning the party nomination, work day and night to get the exposure that will get them votes. This year the Democrats are the opposition party, so these preliminary races are critical for them. Because there is little serious dissent within the Republican Party about President Bush standing for a second term, there is no need for Republican primaries or caucuses to nominate a presidential candidate. These mechanisms would be employed, however, if the party leadership was in question and there were declared contenders for the nomination. The incumbent party also becomes active in primaries after their President has served the maximum of two terms. Party meetings, or caucuses, are where a representative group of registered Democrats or Republicans fJiom a state discuss and vote for their favorite. As was
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reported in the media, the Iowa caucus cunently is thought to represent the trend among "real" American voters, serving as a barometer for poll observers. It used to be Maine: "As Maine goes, so goes the nation," was the old saw, but that changed in recent years as Maine switched from nominations by caucus to primary elections and back to the caucus again. "Caucus" is an interesting word that, perhaps appropriately, invokes the sound of crows in an uproar. While its etymology is uncertain, an early source gives as its origin a North American Indian word "cawcawwassough," or a promoter, one who pushes ahead. It has come to have a special connotation in American politics, and is most often applied to political meetings to nominate a candidate for public office. At a party caucus people discuss, argue, shout, in their effOlis to win others over, but eventually they settle down to vote tor the candidate they feel is best. This form of nomination dates from the earliest days of the original ] 3 states. Today, more states employ the primary election than the caucus to determine the people's choice. It is a process unique to the United States, in which voters go to the polls to directly nominate partisan candidates for state and federal offices. The primalY election evolved after corruption entered caucuses in too many states, and vested interests virtually nominated their own candidates, often by unscrupulous means. Voting by citizens was usually done orally or by a show of hands, which left voters who opposed those in power vulnerable to coercion. After the Civil War in the mid-19th century the secret ballot was introduced, eliminating much coercion in the states that adopted it. Corruption reared its head again when political patiies printed the ballots, violating confidentiality because each paliy's ballots were in differ-
ent colors. Adoption of the Australian system at the end of the 19th century, in which ballots are printed by the government, insured genuine secrecy. While each state is important, some of the most influential and populous states, led by California and New York, vote on "Super Tuesday," which falls on March 2. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland and Georgia also vote that day. By the time these votes a1'e tallied, it is usually clear who the strongest candidate is. Primaries end in June, There have been some new factors in this election campaign. The Internet has gained greater influence. 11catapulted the relatively
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President George W Bush
unknown former Vermont governor Howard Dean into the limelight when he won the first serious online primaly in June last year (see SPAN, September/October 2003). His frontrunner status faltered in preliminary polls, in part because of doubts about his ability to carry enough support nationwide to defeat Republican incumbent George W. Bush. Another factor may be the persona he projects on television. Slick "TV ready" presentation counts for a great deal in modern election campaigns. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, with his Lincolnesque earnestness, has led the pack in primaries and caucuses. Seeing the writing on the wall, several candidates dropped out early, including Joe Liebennan, who
was Al Gore's running mate in 2000. A new face has come out of the South, John Edwards, freshman "senator from North Caro- <C lina, and the strength of his z~ support makes him a good iJj z bet, at least, for the vice ~ presidential berth on the tn Democratic ticket. Like former President Bill Clinton, Edwards is a lawyer who came from a lower middle class "background and for this! reason appeals to grass- ~ o roots voters. '" That's not all there is to I~ the preliminary election ~ process, however. This summer the two main political parties will meet for their national conventions. The Republicans currently in power, and the Democrats who must select the candidate most likely to bring them back to power, hold conventions to put the official party seal on the two names that will be on their party's ticket. The Democratic National Convention will meet in Boston in late July. The Republicans convene in New York in late August. When there is an incumbent still eligible for a second term, as is George W. Bush, choosing a ticket is usually a mere formality, and the party cal) spend their convention focused on
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campaign strategy. most they might change a vice-presidential candidate. The Democrats, however, will be under much more pressure, having to choose the candidates for their ticket and then develop a winning campaign strategy. After the conventions, the field will be narrowed to two candidates for president, one from each party, each with a vice-presidential running mate determined by delegates at the party conventions. There are a few small parties apart Howard Dean from the Democrats and Republicans, none of which have constituencies large enough to win an election. But as the 2000 election demonstrated, such candidates can influence outcomes. If Ralph Nadar had not run on the Green Party ticket, psephologists say Al Gore would have received an unquestionable majority and won the election. For this reason, Nadar's reentry in the race worries some Democrats. The last three months running up to the federal elections on November 2 are the most intense, during which every word or action of a candidate will be scrutinized and skeletons in closets aired in the slugfest for the big prize, the presidency ofthe United States. D
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ardens row ,1~I路' ~ W' t III By CYNTHIA BERGER
For 30 years, the National Wildlife Federation's Backyard Wildlife Habitat program has helped people turn small gardens and terraces into small oases for wild creatures
arbaraand Fred Feldt have two gardens-a sun garden and a shade garden-and the birds and butterflies flock to both. But don't picture a halfacre in the suburbs. Welcome to Backyard Wildlife Habitat No. 20895, an Art Deco apartment building in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. The Feldts' shade garden blooms in the dim, cement-floored space between their building and its neighbor. Their sun garden is on the roof, six stories up, with views ofthe East River and Times Square. . The Feldts' home is one of more than 36,000 U.S. properties certified by the National Wildlife Federation's (NWF) Backyard Wildlife Habitat program, which took root 30 years ago. And like the nectar flowers and berry bushes planted by participants, it has grown bigger and branched out. Today, other programs complement its original mission. The Habitat Stewards program, launched in 1999, trains volunteers to create wildlife habitats in their communities. The Schoolyard Habitats program, which began in 1996 and includes almost 1,800 schools throughout the United States, offers workshops and educational materials. There's also the Community Wildlife Habitat project, which encourages entire communities-residences and businesses-to make green space a haven for wildlife. And for more than a decade, NWF's Campus Ecology program has helped transform some of the nation's college campuses into living models of an ecologically sustainable society while training a new generation of environmental leaders. The programs' roots date back to 1973 r:--'"' when America's environmental movement was still in relative infancy. That's when NWF leaders noted a striking statistic: 70 percent of Americans lived in cities and sub-
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Habitat without borders: this backyard in White Rock, British Columbia is one of hundreds of certified mini-refuges in the NWF Backyard Wildlife Habitat program. Outreach extends to Europe, the Far East and South America.
urbs. "As we become more and more urbanized," wrote Editor John Strohm in the April/May 1973 issue of National Wildlife, "fewer and fewer children will be able to rub shoulders with nature." How could kids "brought up on concrete" grow into adults who would care about wildlife? NWF had a plan: Bring the wildlife to kids. The idea was that backyards-large or small, rural or urbancould, at little cost, be transformed into wildlife habitats, creating a network of mini-refuges for plants and animals displaced by development. That magazine issue's lead article explained the core tenet of the program, unchanged to this day: Wildlife needs four basic elements to survive: food, water, cover and places to raise young. Readers also found out how to get started in their own yards, with a detailed garden plan and lists of native plants. One year later, 249 homeowners had certified their yards. Today, many of these original habitats are maintained by the same homeowners-though the landscape around them has often changed. One of those habitats is the home of Fred and Edith Halbut in Brownsburg, Indiana. When they moved there in 1946, their threeacre lot was "out in the middle of nowhere." Now, says Edith, the birdbaths, butterfly garden and handmade marsh create an oasis in the middle of a sprawling city. As the country grows increasingly more urban, the number of cerLeft: A University of Florida student donates time to develop the habitat in a constructed wetland on campus at UF's Natural Area Teaching Laboratory in Gainesville. Wetland and streamside vegetation serves as a buffer to excess nutrients in water running off the land, and attracts wildlife, like this Mallard Duck (below, left), one of the most abundant wild duck species in the northern hemisphere.
tified backyard habitats has also grown steadily. They range in size from tiny apartment balconies to the sprawling grounds of governors' mansions. And that number may be just the tip ofthe iceberg. "There are many thousands of people who are using the program to create and restore habitat for wildlife who haven't officially certified their habitat with NWF yet," says program manager David Mizejewski. "We have more than 45,000 individual users visiting the Backyard Wildlife Habitat Web site every month, and we distribute habitat information to tens of thousands of people annually." Meanwhile, the increasing mobility of American families means some certification numbers represent more than one habitat. For example, Don Hohimer of Alpine, California (Habitat No. 28685), has moved three times in the last 10 years. With each move, he and his family created a new backyard habitat-and the buyers inherited the old habitat. "Our houses sold quickly because of the gardens," Hohimer says. Some certified "backyards" are actually on the grounds of small businesses, where customers get a free education about the value of gardening for wildlife. At Dover Canyon Winery (Habitat No. 29356), located in Paso Robles on California's central coast near San Luis Obispo, owners Mary Baker and Don Panico and their 10-year-old son, Troy, live in a 1920s farmhouse next to the winery barn. The habitat certification sign is on display in the tasting room. "Our visitors are always interested and ask lots of questions," says Baker. Then there's Niche Gardens (Habitat No. 15467), a plant nursery near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that specializes in native wildflowers. Horticulturist Kim Hawkes saw the need for a specialty nursery after purchasing mail-order wildflowers for her Right: Barn owls (Tyto alba) like this one are frequent cohabitors with humans, nesting in buildings, surrounding trees or crevices, all good vantage points for swooping down on mice, their favorite prey. Barn owls are found throughout the world.
Left: In Arizona, the NWFcertified home of Lu and Rolf Cartharius attracts native species such as mule deer, cougars and hawks.
own yard. "It was obvious most of the plants had been dug from the wild," she says. "That bothered me." So today she offers her customers sustainably cultivated natives. She also teaches them about wildlife gardening on tours of her demonstration gardens, which include a bog and a "meadow giants" garden vibrant with sunflowers, bee balm and Joe-pye weed. Children from nearby schools visit on class field trips. Other certified backyards are actually public spaces, including parks, government buildings and places of worship. After Dale and Pat Bulla finished certifYing their backyard (Habitat No. 29482) in Austin, Texas, they enrolled in the Habitat Stewards training program, which involves three days of training on topics such as creating a butterfly habitat and building a backyard pond. The Bullas went on to help create habitats at a neighborhood school and at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin. Says Dale, "We've had several 'walkabouts' after services, where we explain why the plants are here and what they do." The program's original mission-to get entire families closer to nature-is still NWF's main focus. In Cohassett, Massachusetts, Barbara Canney is giving a tour of her wooded yard (Habitat No. 25511), when Garrett, age 10, comes running up. "Mom, there's a slug! Come see it!" he exclaims. "My parents taught me to appreciate nature," Canney says. "I want to pass that along to my son." When she and her family moved into their English cottagestyle home nine years ago, the two-acre lot was already shaded by mature oaks, maples and white pines and surrounded by viburnum, holly and mountain laurel. "Making habitat for wildlife here was mostly just Jetting things be," Canney says.
Left: Students at an elementary school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, learn about nature S diversity by studying pond life. NWFs Schoolyard Habitat program helps schools design real-life laboratories. These habitats attract native species such as humming birds and butterflies. Below: A backyard wildlife habitat at the home of Barbara Kennett in South Padre Island, Texas. Her 15 X 30 square-meter lot features ponds and native flora, an oasis for traveling birds. Right: This Altamira Oriole (Icterus gularis) was photographed in Texas, but the colorful species enlivens treetops worldwide.
Still, several family projects enhance the habitat: Garrett and his father recently installed a small pond; there's also a brush pile, a bat house and a songbird nesting box. Even Stoney, the family golden retriever, pitches in to help wildlife. The fur he sheds goes in a mesh bag to provide nesting material for birds. Jim and Judy Lambert (Habitat No. 3247) in Selma, Indiana, wouldn't have known about the backyard habitat program if it hadn't been for their kids-they read about the program in their son's Ranger Rick magazine. The Lamberts' 100-year-old farmhouse sits on six acres in the middle of corn and soybean fields. A portion of the land has been returned to tall grass prairie, with big and little bluestem grass, Indian grass, gamma grass and compass plants. Close to the house are evergreens that provide shelter for rabbits and songbirds and "food trees" that provide fruit for songbirds and small mammals. A patch of plowed-under wetland has been restored, and Jim designed a large pond that attracts sora rails, doublecrested cormorants, wading birds and nesting Canada geese. Although the Lamberts' three children are grown now, "They're still gardeners and environmentalists," Judy says. "Our son in particular is an avid birder and butterflywatcher." And Jim and Judy continue to educate young people about wildlife. Scout groups and school groups come regularly to tour their prairie oasis. But having wildlife-friendly habitat is not all about owning a home surrounded by a big yard. Even renters can help attract native species. Take NWF's Mizejewski. When he joined the NWF staff three years ago, he was eager to practice what he was about to preach. But his home (Habitat No. 32156) in an urban part of Arlington, Virginia, is a rental house with a postage-stamp yard. "I don't own the property, so I don't want
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to spend a lot on plants," he says. "I also have to pay the water bill, so I don't want plants that need a lot of it." To create a habitat on a budget, Mizejewski gets extra plants from his friends' gardens or picks up specimens at "plant rescues," places such as construction sites where native plants will be uprooted. He has planted more than 20 native species, including columbine, white wood aster, bleeding heart and wild geranium. "In last summer's drought, my natives did better than my neighbors' ornamentals," he says. An old silver maple-a haven for nesting squirrels and birdsshades the yard. So far, Mizejewski has convinced his landlords to keep it. In fact, he says, most landlords are pleased to have a tenant take an interest in the yard. "My landlords have seen what I've done," he says. "They think it's great." Recognizing the importance of educating people about wildlife-friendly habitat at an early age, NWF started its Schoolyard Habitats program, which, most notably, encourages schools to transform their surround1ngs into living laboratories.
For example, thanks to a renovation in 2000, Tuckahoe Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, is now surrounded by micro-habitats, including a pond with a resident red-eared slider named Tess and a bird-viewing habitat outside the art room, says Beth Reese, the school district's outdoor learning coordinator. With nature just outside the door, students at Tuckahoe have a real-life lab within reach. Last spring, when Tess emerged from hibernation, second graders deduced independently that water temperature, not air temperature, had stimulated the turtle to emerge-thanks to the data they had been diligently logging three times a week. Students also seem proud to leave something permanent behind them. "Every weekend I see families coming to check on the garden," Reese says. "And I hear, 'Look there's the tree I planted,' or 'Hey, that's my brick! ", The movement to create habitat around schools extends to the halls of academe. At Indiana University in Bloomington, the grounds around Jordan Hall now reflect the subject studied inside-biology. That's thanks to Jennifer Hannink, who recently graduated with a master's degree in environmental policy and natural resources management. She had enrolled in an NWF-sponsored Habitat Stewards class to complement her course work. Then she looked around campus for a place to translate concepts into ac- . tion. "It seemed appropriate that the biology department should have some areas planted with native species," Hannink says. With funding from a Campus Ecology fellowship, Hannink has transformed the massive planters fronting the building from an untended jumble of gravel and invasive species to a gemlike sample of prairie habitat. She grew prairie plants from seed-including purple coneflower, butterflyweed, cardinal flower, columbine and mountain mint-in a campus greenhouse, then moved them to the planters along with dogwood and redbud trees and nest boxes for birds. "There's all sorts of insect activity around the planters now," she says, "with ladybugs, wasps, bumblebees and butterflies flittering about." Certainly, gardening for wildlife can transform people's surroundings, but it can also transform their lives. In San Diego, Jenny Parker is an anesthesiologist at a local hospital. Lately, neighbors have been admiring her yard and asking for help with their own. Now she's started a small landscaping business with a budding clientele, and eventually she hopes to retire from medicine and do landscaping for wildlife full time. "It's funny," Parker notes. "When I first talk to people, they don't want animals in their yard-because birds make a mess and so on. So I go a little slow. I say, 'See that phoebe over there swooping down? It's eating the bugs that are causing problems for your plants. Wouldn't it be nice if you could keep him around?' "Then I recommend some plants that work really well to attract hummingbirds. And well, once they start seeing hummingbirds up close, they get hooked! Wouldn't you?" D About the Author: Cynthia Berger is a science writer based in Pennsylvania and has a certificate from National Wildlife Federation for her wildlife-friendly backyard.
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is late summer in Vermont, and the landscape is lush with greenery. Trees are in full leaf, but a few stray leaves are turn'] ing yellow and red, a reminder of the fleeting warm weather in this nOltheastern state. In a taxi headed for the Bread Loaf Campus of Middlebury College, a friendly group of strangers are getting acquainted. All are writers, on their way to attend 10 days of intensive workshops, lectures and discussions about their craft, to hear distinguished writers read, to meet agents and editors. After a scenic two-hour drive they pull up at an old inn along a country road. The travelers alight into a setting sure to elevate any writer's mood. The Bread Loaf Inn and companion cot-
1. The inviting veranda at the old Bread Loaf Inn. 2. Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Director Michael Collier (right) gives feedback to Greg Mikkelson in a poehy workshop. 3_Author Sarah Stone (left) in conference with participant Caroline Peabody. 4. Merrill Feitell (left) and Norton editor Carol Houck Smith converse between events.
tages, painted a comfortable shade of yellow, cozy in the benevolent aura of Bread Loaf Mountain and the surrounding Green Mountains, had doors flung open to welcome about 200 participants for a prestigious alUlUalevent that is all about writing. The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is among the most venerable institutions in the American literary world. Dating back to 1926, some of the greatest American poets, fiction and nonfiction writers have graced its halls and partied in its spacious barn. It was a brainchild of poet Robert Frost, whose presence was so indelible that he is called "the godfather of Bread Loaf." He attended its inaugural session in 1926 and most conferences until his death in 1963. His nearby cabin is owned and
maintained by Middlebury College as a National Historic Site. Despite occasional rivalries between writers and peccadilloes between poets-Frost was jealous and sometimes behaved badly to younger poets making their mark-the emphasis of Bread Loaf was and still is an invigorating dose of hard work. A typical day statts eat-ly. The breakfast bell rings at 7:30 a.m., and participants are expected to be snappy about it. Waiters are scholat路s who have been awarded full tuition in exchange for their services at three hectic meals a day. They must serve and clean up before racing to the next event. From the daily 9:00 a.m. lecture, often until late at night, there is one serious, writerly activity after another. Fiction, nonfiction and poetry
The 1940 Bread Loaffellows posing with director Theodore Morrison and faculty member Louis Untermeyer. (Standing, from left) Eudora Welty, John Ciardi, Brainard Cheney, Edna Frederickson, Untermeyer; (seated, from left) Marian Sims, Morrison, Carson McCullers. Welty and McCullers achieved fame in due time, and Ciardi later became conference director. Opposite page: 1. Robert Frost at Bread Loafin the 1920s. 2. Early participant Willa Cather, also in the 1920s. 3. Sinclair Lewis, 1930s. 4. Poet Galway Kinnell gives a reading in the Little Theater, 1970. 5. Achmed Abdullah, 1927.
77 YEARS OF BREAD {'local worthy, Joseph Battell, died in 1915, willing the Bread LoafInn, outbuildings and 12,000 hectares of forested land to Middlebury College. In 1920 the college established the Bread Loaf School of English there. Poet Robert Frost joined the faculty in 1921, and soon proposed that an annual conference for writers be held on the inspiring Vermont campus. In 1926 a young editor, John Farrar, organized the first conference program. According to the initial announcement, it would consist of "background lectures on the writing of short stories, novels, articles and poems, with practical suggestions on developing a prose style and the preparation and placement of manuscripts," as well as informal discussions on artistic and practical problems of creative writing. It combined the aesthetic and professional with the practical, a formula that has worked well for 77 years, spats between the artists and the more commercially-minded elements notwithstanding. Writers who were Bread Loaf faculty, fellows, scholars and participants include Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Ann Sexton, Archibald MacLeish, Ralph Ellison, May Sarton, Galway Kinell, Wallace Stegner, William Meredith, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Tess Gallegher and Charles Simic. An early Asian participant, in 1927, was Eton educated, AfghanWhite Russian writer and adventurer Achmed Abdullah who entertained conferees with tales of his service in British India. He later went to Hollywood to write screenplays for films
LOAF such as The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and The Thief of Baghdad. In the past decade more South Asians have participated in the conference, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee and Vikram Chandra among them. Some Bread Loafers return repeatedly, perhaps feeling as Wallace Stegner did, that "Bread Loaf was, in a curious way, my Paris and my Rome," where he met with admired writers, camaraderie and much encouragement. After editor John Farrar and academic John Gay, Bread Loaf directors have been poets. Theodore Morrison's 23-year tenure was followed by the 16-year term of John Ciardi. Poet Robert Pack succeeded Ciardi, logging more than two decades as conference director. Michael Collier, a noted poet who is currently the co-director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland, became director in 1994. The. annual event relies on temporary staff while in session, but is orchestrated each year by Collier, associate director Devon Jersild and administrative manager Noreen Cargill, supported by an admissions board. The serene Bread Loaf Campus remains the home of the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer graduate school. Each year courses are offered in literature, creative writing, the teaching of writing, and theater. In recent years the Bread Loaf School of English has expanded to include programs in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Juneau, Alaska in the U.S., Oxford in the U.K. and Guadalajara, Mexico. -L.T. For more information, see www.middlebury.edulblwc/
workshops with distinguished faculty follow morning lectures. On alternate days are talks with editors and publishers. Afternoon craft classes are folloyved by readings. After that are more discussions with editors and agents, one-to-one appointments with faculty, film screenings and sometimes a social event. An evening reading by faculty or a guest, precedes a film, a dance or special concert. There are open mike readings where participants may strut their stuff in the afternoons in the inn's Blue Parlor and at more creative venues in the late evenings. Resources for writers abound. Representatives from universities may offer information on their institution's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program. Earning an MFA is a common choice for new writers who want to develop the discipline necessary to write poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction. Experts offer tips about publishing. Everywhere you go there are discussions
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about various genres, passionate arguments about form, not to mention literary gossip. Creative writing is an act done best in isolation. A writers' conference such as Bread Loaf allows valuable exchanges among a crowd who at home may be solitary islands of literary fervor in Montana, Mississippi or Maine. onfiction writer and
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Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali meets with a workshop participant, /998
historian David Haward Bain, who first at ease with himself, and was instantly came to Bread Loafas a fellow in 1980, was loved." Ali returned as a fellow in 1987, so taken by it that he settled there, joining then as faculty in 1997 and 1998. At the the Middlebury College English faculty. 2003 Bread Loaf Conference, poet Linda Bain probably has the most extensive insti- Gregerson devoted much of her lecture "Off tutional memory of anyone, having written the Page: The Lyric of Cultural Embeddeda histOly of the conference f]-om 1926-1992, ness," to examining imagety in Agha Whose Woods These Are, with his late wife Shahid Ali's "From Amherst to Kaslunir" Mary Smyth DuffY. Sitting one afternoon cycle of poems. on the inn's pleasant veranda, Bain Michael Collier, an active, afshared his thoughts about the confable presence at conference ference. "Meeting like-minded events, recalls that when he was people releases excitement and inappointed conference director in spirational momentum. You real1994, "It was rare for there ize, 'There are other people like to be more than a handful of ethme,''' he says. During the years of nic or writers of color among his association with Bread Loaf, he conference participants and fachas seen it evolve. "There is more ulty, and yet the contemporary diversity. It has blossomed in ways American literary landscape people didn't imagine 24 years Michael Collier was being enriched, increasago." He gives much credit to Bread Loaf ingly, by an incredibly diverse range of Writers' Conference director and poet writers." Incorporating this diversity into Michael Collier for encouraging cultural di- the conference became a goal. "My hope versity. "It has always been an international was to make Bread Loaf look more like the conference, but it had a national flavor from reality that American writers lived and the I920s." The 1950s and '60s saw more worked in." The presence of such writers as African American writers, but not many. Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati "There were blacks and women, but not Muketjee, Agha Shahid Ali, Vikram enough," Bain says. A new, more internaChandra and other ethnic writers has made tional influx began in the 1980s and '90s, as a difference, he says. "Including such disminorities began to find a more commandtinguished writers in the conference has ing voice in American writing. South increased the diversity of the applicant pool Asians were not the least among the ethnic and as a result the conference does reflect groups represented. Bain recalled the late more closely, though not perfectly, the poet Agha Shahid Ali, who first attended dynamic atmosphere of contemporary Bread Loaf in 1983 as a waiter/scholar. "At American writing." Looking ahead, Collier a waiter's reading, Shahid got all dressed says, "My hope for the future ofthe conferup. He looked marvelous, with graceful ence is that it continues to become more gestures, a beautiful speaking vojce. He was open and inclusive," adding, "My staff and
keep examining the premises on which the conference is established so that we can be responsive to changes the passage of time demands." Evidence that diversity has become an integral part of Bread Loaf was a well-attended and lively multicultural discussion group that met in the Barn midweek. People with Haitian, Hispanic, Chinese, Sri Lankan, Indian, Afi'ican and European ethnic roots mulled over the role of ethnic writers and cultures that have had their literary traditions transfen'ed into English writing. Mar'keting of "ethnic" literature was questioned: why do publishers invariably expect books to be about the ghetto, China, or India rather than mainstream America? "If you are privileged to have a voice, you should write about the issues," chimed in one woman. "Pearl S. Buck can be as good an Asian writer as an Asian," offered a Chinese American writer. Roompa Bhattacharya, a Detroit-based writer and editor whose family hails from Calcutta, countered, "It is different being white in an Asian country than Asian in a white countty." And so it went. The allotted hour-and-a-halfwasn't nearly enough. "This is my vacation!" Roompa told me afterwards. She is working on fiction writing while maintaining a busy career in advertising copy writing. Another participant was Sheila Nayar, whose father is Indian. She teaches at Greensboro College in North Carolina. Also a screenwriter with an MFA from Columbia University--one of her films was selected for screening at the Sundance Festival in 1996--film remains her first love. She said she was excited about her CUlTent research, on how a non-literate audience shapes Bollywood films. The ten days of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference pass with whjrlwind intensity, a world where an obscure literary allusion is immediately understood by everyone at the lunch table, and terza rima may be mentioned quite naturally and without apology. On the last morning a cold nip in the air defines the moment of parting fi'ol11fi-iends and the magic writers' circle. A great thing about Bread Loaf, says David Bain, is the mutual understanding it fosters, across cultures and gender, "It's the richness of human experience in the mis. Everybody is heard." D
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"A Habit of Vanishing" Valerie, Edinburgh, 1990s
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he more 1 meditate on these lives, the more I stare into the gaps between details. Curiosity is a progressive affliction, and lately I've been wondering about my grandmother's family. I find them in book nine of the 1881 census. Grandmother is one year old, living with her parents, Archibald and Christina, and her three siblings. Their neighbors are a clerk, a housekeeper, a van lad, and a dairyman. I want to know more, but she has disappeared by the 1891 census. I can't locate anyone except her father, Archibald, and he is on a merchant ship. (Odd how my mother and her grandmother both married merchant sailors. Mary is the patron saint of seamen.) I spend all day searching. Finally, late in the afternoon, I see a listing for Mary Jane Gill, aged eleven, living without her family. The only other detail is an address near Coburg Lane, where she was born. Racing to find the census microfiche before the library closes, I do locate her. "Mary Jane Gill, age 11, Servant." She is living in a one-room tenement with her employers, George Dallas, a fotiy-five-yearold dockworker, and his wife, Mattha, aged thirty-five. An eleven-year-old servant. It fills me with amazement, then sadness. I knew she must have had a hard life, but it never occurred to me that it had been this tough for so long. When did she stmt the job-at age nine or ten? No wonder Mother felt such equanimity about her own life. After all, she didn't have to go out to work until she was fOUlteen. 1 walk through Leith, trying to identifY the tenements where my grandmother was born, where she worked for the Dallas family. Coburg Lane is torn down, taken over by several shipping businesses and a big office firm called Coda Technologies. Some coda. This section of North Leith is perhaps the poorest of the
The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir, by Valerie Miner, is a cross-genre novel, meaning that it moves from fiction to nonfiction and back again. In this way the author weaves the story of several generations of a struggling family. One member eventually emigrates from Scotland to the United States to become the author's mother. The non-fiction aspect is Miner's search for her roots: her attempts to question her mother, her trips to Edinburgh, Scotland, to do research and meet other relatives. The fiction comes when the author inhabits the characters of her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather, giving them voice as they cope with life's difficult choices. The first excerpt from the book, Chapter 24, "A Habit of Vanishing," is a non-fiction chapter. It is followed by the first part of Chapter 28, "The Light Should Last Forever," in which the author fictionalizes a conversation with her mother, as seen from her mother's perspective. The novel's title refers to a traditional Scottish ballad interpreted, Miner notes, "in accordance with the old belief that when Celts meet death in a foreign land, their spirits return to their birthplace by an underground, fairy way, on the Low Road."
neighborhoods I've seen in Edinburgh. I walk down dead-end streets and into vacant buildings, stupidly feeling immune to harm in this, my family estate. Of course, Mother was happy in her seventies living in a studio apartment across from the cafe where she worked because San Francisco's Tenderloin, for all its problems, is much more comfortable than Leith. From the 1890s map of this neighborhood that I dig out of the National Map Library, I know that Coburg Lane ended near the Water of Leith, Edinburgh's River. These days, there is a concrete public footpath and benches. What was my grandmother's experience with the river? I wander around a graveyard, searching for McKenzie and Gill stones, until I realize that people this poor can't afford headstones. I search through the car parks and vacant lanes and find one boarded-up building that dates back to the 1870s. Its location could be the corner of Quayside and Coburg Lane. I take some photos of the desperate old thing. Then r wander up to Manderston Street, where Grandmother lived before she married Mr. McKenzie. Most of Manderston Street seems to have been blasted for modern council housing, replacing one disaster with another. But I do take photos of the Victorian buildings there as well. Manderston isjust a few blocks away from Springfield, where the McKenzies lived when Mom was born. I already know that most of Springfield Street has also been torn down. The McKenzie-Campbells had a habit of vanishing. Not quite without a trace. When I first found Springfield Street two summers ago, I was so distressed that Mom's building had been destroyed. I was also a little shy. Today, r have come prepared to look closer. (I have been to libraries and map rooms. I know that Springfield Street is one of the oldest roads off Leith
Walk, and in thel780s Mr. McCulloch of Ardwell, Customs Commissioner, entertained the writer Samuel Foote here. Leaping ahead a century, I have scoured the Post Office Directories for the years Mom lived there. Although the McKenzies couldn't afford a listing, I do learn that when Mom was born, the neighbors included Jane Dobie, James Robb, and John Dickinson. And the establishment of Stenhouse, Williams and Sons.) Today I do find one building that dates back until at least 1910. Sturdy, grey, cold, low-storeyed, it has thick recesses for windows. I take more useless photos. Then I venture into the Volunteer Arms to see if I can find out if the pub was here in Mom's day. There's a public house on the corner in maps dating back to the mid-1800s, but was it this public house where Mr. McKenzie drank his pints? Inside, the place smells as if it hasn't been cleaned in ninety years. Three rooms are packed with grey people who are smoking and drinking and some of whom are watching a match on the telly. Shyly, I approach the bar, but the publican ignores me. I walk further down and catch the eye of a second bartender. "Can you tell me when this pub was built?" I can hear my foolish American accent and my trivial question drowning out all the conversations and music and TV buzz. I know everyone in the pub is staring at me, this busybody with academic questions. I want to tell him I'm not a stranger. I'm not here for history, but for family flesh and bones. It takes him years to answer. "No," he says finally, barely containing his smile. "No, dear, I haven't a clue." OK, I have some sense of place. I have visited the streets where my mother and her parents and their parents lived. I have
birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates. From the census I know that no one in my family was "Deaf, Dumb, Blind, Lunatic, Imbecile or Idiot." I know they did not speak Gaelic. But what have I really learned? Saddened, horrified, I am also simply astonished by this unScottish opera. Poverty, child servitude, proliferating babies, desertion, early death, diasporic expatriation. As I face my grandparents' daily difficulties, I understand the impossibility of the choices for which I'm holding them culpable. Still, I can't comprehend how they could have allowed all this pain. Why did they have so many children? I don't feel them to be particularly religious. They weren't stupid. What contraception was available then? Was it too expensive? Were they too bloodyminded to use it? How much of the problem stemmed from simple, complicated lust? I don't seem to feel very much about my grandmother. Maybe because it's easier to be mad at my grandfather. Since I can be angry with him, I sense a connection. For her, I have mainly sorrow, incomprehension. Then my friend Susie, a Scottish historian, lends me a book on Marie Stopes, who struggled with family planning for years and finally managed to set up the first birth control clinic in Britainsix years after my grandmother's last child. Marie knew, " ... there is nothing that helps so much with the economic emancipation of a woman as the knowledge of how to control her maternity." Yet it's really T.C. Smout in A Century of the Scottish People, 1850-1950, who clarifies the most for me: "Artificial contraception could have made some contribution (to the decline in the birth rate): from the 1880s the use of rubber sheath in particular
enjoy revision. I hate revision. More important, I believe in rewriting my fiction as a mode of discovery and clarification." So novelist Valerie Miner began her discussion of the art of revision with a group of receptive writers, artists and performers at Sanskriti Kendra near New Delhi recently. Most artists struggle with revision. Resistance to doing it is the norm, so the noises of commiseration during the lecture were no surprise. "Revision," Miner asserted, "is distinct from the kind of historical revisionism which subverts memory to ideology and is a form of lying. Rather, I'm interested in our ability to re-envision, which can lead to deeper truth, through re-imagining our stories under different stars." She recalled how often she procrastinated, yet how
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Valerie Miner on the
Art of Reri!iioD
much she has learned from revising her own work, and what a satisfying experience it can be, a "deliberate pleasure in a zip-zip world." Modern life militates against thoughtful consideration and reconsideration, which is a slow and even sensual process. "Literature does not happen in a rush. We might be more willing to delete the brilliant phrase-or save it for another occasion-if' we privately allowed ourselves the pleasures of phrase-making and word pruning." Editors and agents may give conflicting advice, as do select readers. But after all the comments are gleaned, creating a work and revision of that creation is a wholly personal discipline that demands honest inner confrontation. It is a path of evolution for the artist. There was a lively exchange of
became better known, as a consequence of the much publ icized trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for distributing 'new-Malthusian' propaganda. Contraception was evidently first practiced by the middle classes, among whom the birth rate fell first and fastest. Already by 1911, there was a well-marked class difference in family size. Artificial contraception was sternly denounced by all the churches, not least by Presbyterians, who spoke of 'the withering blight cast over humanity' by its practice and demanded that the manufacture and sale of anti-conception materials should be 'rigorously repressed.'" As the Reverend Norman Maclean declared, "If the British race refuse to multiply and develop the resources of its vast empire, other races, not yet weary of life will inevitably displace it. If Australia and New Zealand are not occupied by the British, the yellow man cannot be shut out." In fact, Grandfather and Grandmother did produce many pinkfaced people who did go to Australia and New Zealand and India (as well as to Canada and the United States). Reverend Maclean would have approved of their pro Iiferation if not of their morality. And I, who have no qualms about their morality, now acknowledge that my grandmother was more powerless than naive. Any judgment I make has more to do with my privilege than her innocence. Because my moment has followed hers, I have had a chance to pursue my loves and lusts and passions with relative impunity. Childbirth, backstreet abortion, syphilis, AIDS-I sneaked through the window at a small, safe time. My grandmother was also a woman of her time and class. We all live (and die) in history. 0
views after the talk, over lunch, and later in the afternoon, after Miner read from her most recent novel The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir. Bringing together artists from different disciplines to explore the common creative ground and passion that motivates art is impOtiant. "Too often we view writing as a solitary pursuit, unaware of our company, fellow sufferers, muses and comrades in other venues of cultural work," Miner said, citing dance and theater as useful examples of revision in rehearsal and audition. Valerie Miner likes India, and she keeps coming back. She first visited in the 1980s, and later as a senior Fulbright fellow in 1999-2000. Profes-
sor of English at the University of Minnesota, her impressive list of published work includes seven novels and several collections of stories and essays. Range of Light and Winter S Edge are her two previous novels. Her themes are reflective, and frequently track how women, young and old, live and grow in the world. The Low Road is a subtly moving example of Miner's gift of conveying complex emotions and relationships. The event, intended as a chance for artists to productively connect with each other for a few hours, was sponsored by SPAN Magazine. It is the first in an ongoing series of events about culture and ideas.
"The Light Should Last Forever" Mary, California/Edinburgh,
I
1968
had been waiting for this. I didn't know how or when, but I knew she would leave one day. I was suspicious when she called from Berkeley to say, let's have dinner Thursday. A weeknight away from the library? This meant something. Like all of us, my girl worked too hard. It was a lovely French restaurant near Lake Merritt, a little pricey and a little saucy, but the nice waiter gave us a private table by the wall. She stalled nervously until salad was served. "I've applied to a summer program at the University of Edinburgh." Not-May I go? Will you let me leave the country? Not, I'm going back to your home, is that OK? I ate a roll to absorb this news. Well, she never asked permission these days: I hadn't been able to tell her a damn thing since she was eighteen. What had I done wrong? Was college responsible? Her generation? She never seemed to ask anything, except those infernal, nosey questions. "Isn't that expensive?" I finally responded. No, she explained, besides, she had money in her savings account from all those jobs. She could get a student charter flight. Being my daughter, she had the economics sorted out. "And I kind of hoped you'd come over." She was finishing her second roll. "Maybe before classes start, you know, to show me Edinburgh and to visit Uncle Johnny." Said with the evenness of, "How about a trip to Ghirardelli Square this weekend? She did not, of course, know what she was asking. This dream: t6 bring back my daughter. This nightmare: to return to all that fearful sadness. What would I recognize? Would the place be thick with ghosts who could trap me there? "Too expensive." I shook my head and picked at the salad. "It's the wrong time. Someday. But not just now." "You get a two-week vacation," she said, "and charter flights are cheap. Britain is cheap, especially with the exchange rate." "No, I don't think so." "I'll help you. I've saved a lot of money." "Oh, don't be silly. I have some money saved too, I. .. " "Then it's settled. June in Edinburgh. Think about the light, it should last forever that far north." She sometimes forgot, I sometimes forgot, who was the mother here. By the time our fish was served, she had added London and Paris to the itinerary. I told myself it would be good for her to get away from her pleasant, but unimaginative, boyfi"iend for the summer. I may have failed as a wife, but I had raised three lovely children-bless their hearts-and my Berkeley-educated, Frenchspeaking daughter was about to take me to the Eiff'el Tower, Royal Albert Hall, and back home to Union Place. Well, she was twenty. The age I was when I left Scotland. And if she had to cross the ocean in the contrary direction, this was probably the right time. 0
e will have to hurry," Vimla Sahu of the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation (JBF) said as I came out of Jodhpur airport. "We try not to keep the villagers waiting, and then we have to be back at the palace on time to meet His Highness." Under the leadership of Maharaja Gaj Singh, JBF is trying to replicate in the seven districts of the Marwar region in western Rajasthan the water harvesting movement started by Rajendra Singh of Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) in the eastern part of the state. Rajendra Singh is the vice chairman and JBF seeks to marry the mass mobilization skills ofTBS with the credibility of a former ruler and the professionalism of a well-managed NGO. We picked up Shubhang Pandya, the project director, from JBF's office in a wing of Umaid Bhawan palace. As we sped toward the Great Thar Desert through an increasingly empty acacia-strewn landscape, Pandya explained the severity of the environmental stress and drinking water problem that Rajasthan had just been subjected to by three years of drought. "The government is boring deeper and deeper with each advance in technology, but the groundwater keeps receding. Deep tubewells are responding to a long-term problem with a short-term solution, which in drought years leaves the villagers in the lurch. The villagers have become so dependent on the government for everything that they have forgotten how to help themselves. We are trying to help them find solutions, their own solutions." We turned onto a gravel road and at the end of it reached Bhakri, a poor village of about 90 households. A crowd ran forward to greet us from the school veranda, where a bhoomi pooja had just been performed for a
piece of land marked out by chalk lines. A tanki, or small tank, would be built here to receive rain water from the schoolhouse roof, which was made of long slabs of red sandstone. A local schoolmaster was also the secretary of the five-member Jal Samiti that would execute the project. He explained that the boys and girls under his lone charge, these days, could neither quench their thirst nor use a toilet. "How can I stop them when they keep running home-and don't come back?" he added ruefully. Not that the situation in their homes is much better. There are no dug wells in the village because it lies in a saline belt.
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tank for just a few days at a time, and the water is still slightly saline. "We use it for bathing and for the animals when we have it, but for the rest we have to cart water from a tank 15 kilometers away by truck or by camel cart," Prithvi Singh said. It costs the villagers Rs. 350 a tanker which lasts for 15-20 days. The poorer households share the cost of a tanker. The water is stored in little underground tanks next to each house. There are a few houses in Bhakri with flat stone roofs suitable for capturing rain water, and a few of them do, but most of the poorer houses in this village have thatch roofs. And yet Rajasthan at one time was re-
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Successfully making the most of resources, sustainably "Even the animals will not drink the water here," said Jal Samiti chairman Prithvi Singh. "They say our ancestors used to mix dahi [curd] with the water to make it potable for the animals." This may be true. Cattle are still the main form of wealth in the area and milk is abundant in good years. According to Dying Wisdom, a magnificent book documenting traditional water harvesting methods all over the country by the late Anil Agarwal and his team at the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), when children spilt a tumbler of water they were scolded more than if they spilt milk or ghee. The public supply in this village consists of a large barrel-shaped cement tank standing at ground level, with taps and a trough for animals, but water pressure in the long pipeline that feeds it from a distant source is usually enough to fill the
plete with traditional water harvesting structures. Villages located too far away from tanks or large ponds and without open wells, even those receiving 100 millimeters of annual rainfall like this one, would have a number of kunds. Kunds are pits made out of stone plastered with lime built in the middle of a gently inwardsloping circular area to capture rainfall. A cover keeps dust and litter out. Villagers would carefully clear the catchment areas of larger community kunds of shrubs, grass and cow dung before each monsoon. The aprons of smaller household kunds would be compacted and plastered with pond silt and charcoal ash to make them more impermeable. The government did, in fact, promote kunds at one time and even offered a subsidy on them. However, as piped water systems and supplies from the Rajasthan Canal grew, kunds fell into
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disuse, even as supplementary hoards or insurance in bad years. Indeed it turned out that quite a large government-built kund with an elevated reinforced concrete cement roof and sand traps at the inlet points was sitting right next to us in the school compound. It should have been full at this time of the year, only four months after the end of last year's bountiful monsoon that ended the drought. However, large cracks were visible in the base as we peered down into the darkness. "Would it not be cheaper to repair it?" I asked. There were the usual smirks all round as it was explained to me that the panchayat would rather repair the kund itself with fresh government funds, if such funds were fOlthcoming, than open itself to the transparent accounting JBL would require. Apparently "public participation" was the last thing it wanted. "So why would it be different this time?" I asked. There were howls of protest as we settled back on the veranda. "For one thing," explained Prithvi Singh, "we are putting about Rs. 15,000 of our
hard-earned money into the tanki," or onefourth of its cost, as lal Bhagirathi Foundation requires. Babu Singh, the treasurer, pulled out the minutes book and registers of the Jal Samiti and showed me the break-up. "Our contribution will pay for the stone chips which will come by truck from 30 kilometers away. Then there will be bajri, or sand, that will have to come from a nearby canal bed. Our women folk say they will help dig it up and clean it with a sieve, and they will also help the masons. Our contribution will also include the cash, about Rs. 3,000, required to pay the camel Calts to carry water here for the masonry," said Babu Singh. For the people of this village, this was a lot of money. They had lost many of their animals, mostly cattle, in the three-year drought. The sheep and goats manage to migrate to the neighboring states. "Nowadays the severity of a drought is measured more in terms of cattle deaths than human deprivation," Pandya explained. "The government is getting better
at ensuring that supplies of grain get through to the villagers. But fodder in adequate quantities is more difficult to bring in over long distances, and the interaction of hunger and disease brought on by weakness is disastrous." So the villagers were now largely dependent on making and selling charcoal from the surrounding acacia or babool trees until their cattle stocks recover. As for land, they had lost most of it in the flash floods of 1979 when the Luni River dumped sand on their fields and rendered them unfit for cultivation. It was hard to believe, but Bhakri was actually cut off for several days by the flooded canals on all sides. Much ofthe water had come down the Luni River from the Aravali hills further east. The land is too flat by the time the water reaches this area to provide suitable sites for check dams or bandhis. Check dams, made largely of stones and rubble with a cemented spillway to protect the structure, impound the water for long enough after the monsoons to let it percolate into the ground to recharge wells in the vicinity. Some of the water also oozes into shallow wells or kuis dug right next to the pond to provide clean drinking water. Cattle drink directly out of the pond as long as the water lasts. But direct irrigation out of the pond is not allowed by the villagers. Even indirect irrigation out of recharged wells is rarely an option this far west. As Pandya explained, "Our first priority is drinking water for humans. Next comes water for the animals. Then comes water to grow fodder with. And only if any is left, which is sometimes the case with larger structures, do we encourage irrigation." Prithvi Singh got back to explaining why it would be different this time. He said with pride, "We have designed the structure ourselves." Pandya said this was true. "When we got here we suggested the usual cylindrical tank because it is the cheapest. But the villagers said they did not want a tall structure next to the veranda because it would obstruct the view. If we wanted a 30,000-liter tank, enough to see the school through to the next monsoon no higher than ground level, it would have meant going quite deep, and the rock
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here is so hard it is almost impossible to dig beyond one meter. The panchayat kund had to use dynamite. So the next alternative considered was a shallower, oblong-shaped tank, but then the cost would have gone up on the steel girders for the cover. At this point the villagers suggested we build a long shallow rectangular tank, no wider than the 3-meter patiyas, or slabs, of stone readily and cheaply available to cover it with. It was their idea and we readily agreed." "Ultimately these are their structures. They are responsible for planning, design, procurement of materials, storage during construction, maintenance, everything. We only act as catalysts and try to modulate the social dynamics. We try to suggest that all the major social groups in the village be represented on the Jal Samiti including a women's representative, through the natural leaders. Then there are people with nuisance value who have to be neutralized. Sometimes it is better to include them than exclude them. The attention we pay to these matters is what distinguishes us from government programs," said Pandya. JBF has a team in each block headed by a resource manager. Under him are an assistant and field organizers. None of them are engineers, but people with skills in social mobilization. There is only one engineer in the Jodhpur office, who advises on technical aspects. "This is because the process is more important than the structure. It is an interactive process through which we try to embolden the community to come up with
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its own solutions even if they sometimes make mistakes. We don't believe in fault finding," said resource manager Kuldeep Singh. He said things often came to an impasse in this village during protracted discussions over several meeting of the Jal Sabha, or the assembly of all the villagers that is initially set up and which chooses the Jal Samiti. "Then there were disagreements over the costing. They got irritated with us and we got irritated with them. But we camped here for three days until we came to an agreement." The United States-Asia Environmental Partnership (US-AEP) was one ofthe earpest of JBF's donors to recognize the importance of social mobilization, the "soft part" as Pandya put it, without which the hardware which donors prefer to support "will not follow." Largely with this support several chetna yatras, or awareness walks, through the villages led by Gaj Singh accompanied often by Maharani Hemlata Rajye, were organized. Well-known figures from various religions were invited to a conference as part of a multi-faith initiative. Support groups have been set up in Mumbai and as far away as Singapore. JBF is now set to expand with support from several donors. The tank in Bhakri is part of a pilot project funded by UNICEF in 11 villages. UNDP has just entered into a partnership with JBF to construct 500 structures over the next three years. Back at the palace Gaj Singh talked about the "affinity, the real feeling," the people of Mar war have for water, and how JBF plans to build on their traditional
knowledge. "If Marwar were to remain one of the most densely settled deserts in the world, we needed to augment its water resources rather than just mine them," he said. It struck me that many of the sources of water JBF is now rehabilitating were developed by his ancestors, often as drought relief work. The next morning we visited one of these, at Rewara-Jaitmal, where JBF catalyzed the villagers to deepen a tank that serves 12 villages. Sixty people assisted by 10 tractors worked for a whole month to deepen the tank to 30 meters at its deepest. Chain Singh, the chairman of the Jal Samiti, said households had contributed between Rs. 100 and Rs. 1,000 each depending on their income level. Some of the poorer households contributed labor. As we looked down from the embankment onto an expanse of blue water, tanker trucks and camel carts were taking turns to fill up. I asked Sawai Singh, the vice chairman, whether they were worried the tank would run dry. "No way," he said, "even if the rains fail next year there will be plenty of water left." Cattle were sauntering down to water's edge and some donkeys were chilling out standing in the water. Sawai Singh rattled off with pride the names of a string of villages whose cattle come here to drink. The village had raised a further embankment entirely on its own, to prevent sullage from the village from flowing in during the monsoons. Bathing is prohibited in the tank. The project also keeps alive a tradition in which everyone, including the women, come out to dig up 20 to 50 tagadis (the metal bowl used to carry earth) once a fortnight on full moon and no moon days. On the far side a flock of Demoiselle Cranes basked in the late winter sun. A few women in their bright red Rajasthani skirts and headdresses were scattering grain for the birds, while others cleaned up their droppings from near the water's edge. Many more ofthe birds had flown in from Saudi Arabia, the villagers said. It was a sight to behold. 0 About the Author: Prabhu Ghate is a development researcher, consultant and freelance journalist based in New Delhi.
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ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
路fter the observations ofthe ancients and the meticulous mathematical charting of Johannes Kepler, after Giotlo's comet fresco and the telescopic discoveries of Galileo Galilei, after Sputnik, Ranger and all the far-flung probes of more than four decades of spaceflight-we have the stark, spectacular beauty of the spheres themselves. They're suspended in space like weightless jewels. Of the planets, most have moons. Of the moons, some are bigger than planets. Both moons and planets can have tenuous atmospheres, or incredibly thick ones, or none at all. Much of the solar system's awesome scenery has been photographed, scanned and parsed for more than 46 years by over 100 robotic explorers from the United States, the former USSR and 16 other nations. The information we've acquired in the brief years of direct space exploration so far outstrips all previous human knowledge of the solar system as to make the comparison almost ridiculous-a library of encyclopedias next to a dime-thin pamphlet. I've been monitoring the activity of solar system probes for much of the past decade, looking for deep-space photographs that inspire awe. I found myself going through many thousands of raw, unprocessed photographs from NASA's robotic explorations, fascinated to stumble on previously unnoticed views of alien topographies. Many of the pictures can be found on-line, on Web sites such as NASA's Planetary Photojournal (photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov) and Views of the Solar System (www.solarviews.com). The most ravishing extraterrestrial landscapes I could find, including those on these pages, appear in my new book, Beyond: Visions of the Intelplanetary Probes (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.). Most of the images required digital enhancement. Some had never been rendered into color before. Others are composites. All are wondrous, at least to me. Near the outer reaches of the solar system, the second largest planet hovers like a hallucination. The shimmering ring system of Saturn is 402,250 kilometers wide and formed of minute to boulder-size particles-ice, dust and rockheld in the gravitational grip of a rapidly spinning central sphere. Saturn looks almost designed-an object as perfect as mathematics. Jupiter, the largest orb by far, has flickering polar auroras, high-speed scudding clouds and mas-
sive whirling-dervish storm systems that define the gaseous planet's face. Jupiter's powerful gravity means that its innermost large moon, To, is unstoppably volcanic and eerily lurid in its surface coloration. By contrast, a second Jovian moon, Europa, is cool and off-white, a frozen, giant cue ball. A third satellite, Callisto, has been so ravaged by eons of meteor impacts that it looks nothing like the other two Jovian moons. Their proximity to one another only accentuates the disparity. NASA's Galileo probe-which ended its 14-year mission by diving into Jupiter this past September-found the first moon of an asteroid and helped planetary geologists deduce that the spidery network of cracks on Europa almost celiainly betrays the presence of a liquidwater ocean beneath the icy smface. This tantalizing prospect has renewed speculation that the Jovian moon may SUppOltlife. Closer to the familiar bl ue glow of our home world, cloud-shrouded Venus is a solid "terrestrial" planet, like Earth, Mercury, Mars and Pluto, whereas the others-Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune-are gaseous. The baking surface of Venus ripples and heaves with strange, protuberant forms first discerned in the early 1990s by Magellan's unwavering radar eye. The phenomena were quickly dubbed "ticks" and "arachnids" by planetary scientists and are almost certainly the result of subsurface volcanic activity. Our other next-door neighbor, Mars, sports seasonal dust devils that trace spidery calligraphic streaks across Valles Marineris, the grandest canyon in the entire solar system and as wide as the continental United States. This complex of vast and serrated desert walls was named after its discoverer, NASA's Mariner 9 probe, launched in 1971 and the first to orbit the planet. Two recent orbiting probesthe Mars Global Surveyor and the Mars Odyssey-revealed that the Red Planet's distinctive gullies, among other featmes, suggest the presence of water below the smface. Mars, too, the speculation goes, may have once hosted extraterrestrial life-and may still. Despite NASA budget cuts and a crisis in the agency following the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, the flood of celestial revelations isn't about to stop anytime soon. Tn January 2004, three new probes-two rovers
from NASA, and one orbiter from the European Space Agency, which released a lander-circled Mars or sent instruments to the Martian surface. Those craft join the probes that are currently orbiting the planet, for an unprecedented six spacecraft snooping on Earth's closest planetary neighbor simultaneously. Also in 2004, one of the largest and most complex interplanetary spacecraft ever conceived, NASA's Cassini, will arrive at Saturn after a sevenyear flight. The school-bus-size robot will study the planet's rings and deploy a European-built probe called Huygens, which will penetrate the clouds covering Saturn's mysterious moon Titan. That opaque brown sphere appears to be rich in some of the organic chemicals that presaged life on Earth; it may contain lakes, or even oceans, of liquid ethane or methane. A small squadron of other space probes are in development, including NASA's Messenger, which will settle into orbit around Mercury in spring 2009, and its New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt probe, scheduled for a 2006 launch to the solar system's remotest, smallest planet. After a reconnaissance of Pluto and its moon, Charon, it will venture on to the intriguing array of cometary snowballs at the dim edge of the solar system, the Kuiper Belt. When all those robots get where they're going, they will, like the explorer probes before them, help place us in space and time, change our sense of our position and our possibilities, and reveal glinting and unexpected new vistas under the dazzling sun. D About the Author: Michael Benson is afreelance writer and filmmaker whose 1995 Predictions of Fire won an award for best documentary at the Vancouver, Canada, and St. Petersburg, Russia, film festivals.
ON
FOCUS
THE
BLUES Text by DAVID FRIEND Photographs by DICK WATERMAN
RICHARD
WATERMAN'S
PHOTOGRAPHS AT THEIR
CAUGHT
DOWN-HOME
ick Watelman's front porch resembles many in timeless Mississippi: wicker-back rockers, a bucktoothed rake, withered hanging plants. But step through the front door and you're in the proud, disheveled I960s. The living-room walls are adomed with posters for long-ago concerts. Shelves swell with LPs. On tabletops and couches are stacks and stacks of vintage photographs. B.B. King and Janis Joplin, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Waterman's pictures of old bluesmen (and women), taken over four decades, include priceless artifacts of the music's glory days, and until now they've been all but hidden. Perhaps no one alive has known more blues masters more intimately than Richard A. Waterman, 68, a retired music promoter and artists' manager who lives in Oxford, Mississippi. He broke into the business in 1964, when he and two friends "rediscovered" Son House (guitar mentor of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters). Waterman went on to manage a cadre of blues icons (Mississippi Fred McDowell, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt, among them), promoted the careers of their electrified musical progeny (Luther Allison, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells), and took under his wing a 19-year-old Radcliffe freshman named Bonnie Raitt and managed her career for about 18 years, helping her become one of her era's reigning blues guitarists and singers.
D
NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED THE BEST
ROOTS
MUSIC
LEGENDS
Through it all, Waterman carried a Leica or Nikon camera and committed thousands of musicians to film, catching the magical and the mundane. Usually he just stashed the photographs in a drawer or closet. Though a relentless advocate of other artists, he never got around to publishing his own work, perhaps out of some bonebred aversion to seeing things through. "I've been trying to get him off his youknow-what to get these photographs out to the world," says Raitt. They are finally surfacing, thanks to a chance encounter in 1999. Chris Murray, director of the Govinda Gallery in Washington, D.C., was strolling down an Oxford street when he spotted a number of Waterman's shots in a framing shop. Within hours, he and Waterman were talking about doing a book. Their project, Between Midnight and Day, was recently published by Thunder's Mouth Press. Now those images, like the blues veterans they depict, are resonant again after decades in the dark. "This was no more than a hobby," Waterman says of his photography. Despite many years in the South, Waterman's highpitched voice is still shaded with notes of his Boston boyhood. "I never considered myself a chronicler of my times." "That's like Faulkner saying that he was a farmer, not a Writer," says William FelTis, a folklorist and a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. "There's no question [Waterman] knew what he was doing and he did it systematically, like any good folklorist or documentary photographer. He is a national treasure." Howard Stovall, a former executive director of the Memphis-based Blues Foundation, says Waterman "had amassed an incredible body of work before it even occurred to him that there was a 'body of work.' " He adds, "There's probably no one in America who was that close to that many blues artists-with a camera in his hand." Waterman's camera work is only now coming to light, but his efforts on behalf of musicians have long been recognized. "Dick helped shepherd the blues to a place in the culture that truly befits its worth," says Raitt. He has had David-and-Goliath triumphs over record companies, extracting copyrights and royalties for blues musi-
cians and their heirs. "In those days," says room-puddles of unopened mail and uncashed checks and a Christmas ornament James Cotton, the Mississippi-born harresting on a breakfront testify that Watermonica master and band leader (whom Waterman did not represent), Waterman man, a bachelor, still spends a lot of time on "was the tops because he treated his artists the road-he pulls out a favorite print of Son House, father of the blues guitar, and right and he made them money." Peter Guralnick, author of biographies of Robert takes a deep breath, as if inflating his lungs Johnson and Elvis Presley, sees a connecwith memory: "To see Son House perform. And to see him go to a place within himself tion between Waterman's management style and his photography: "Dick's [career] that was velY dark and secretive and omihas always been about treating people fair- nous and bring forth that level of artisny. it ly. I think the photographs are about trying was as ifhe went to 1928 or 1936 ....Hejust to reflect people honestly." left the building. The greatness of Son Since 1986, Waterman has made his House was to look at Muddy Waters or home in the Delta, that fertile comer of Howlin' Wolf or Jimmy Reed when they northwest Mississippi known for growing watched Son House and to read Son House cotton and bluesmen. He describes himself in their faces. They would shake their as one of Oxford's token Northerners. heads. Buddy Guy would say, 'That old "Every Southern town has to have a crackman's doin' another kind of music. We pot eccentric Yankee," he says. As it hapcan't even go to that place.' If the blues pens, he lives a short drive from Clarksdale, . were an ocean distilled ...into a pond ...and, site of the mythical "Crossroads," popularultimately, into a drop ...this drop on the end ized by Eric Clapton and Cream, where of your finger is Son House. It's the blues legend Robert Johnson supposedly essence, the concentrated elixir." traded his soul to the Devil in exchange for He opens a drawer, and a gust of regret a wizard's way with a guitar. seems to blow into the living room. "I Lately, Waterman, who retired in the don't show this to many people," he says. early 1990s from managing musicians, has He holds up a tray from a photo darkroom. had little time for relaxing on his porch. He "It's velY depressing." In his hand are 150 photographs performers at blues festivals, rolls offilm all stuck together, representing exhibits his pictures hither and yon, and is some 5,000 pictures from the 1960s. "1 put forever offering insights to willing listeners. them in a closet, and there was some SOliof On a steamy July day in his living leak from the attic. It filled with water, and the emulsion adhered to the inner sleeves. "When 1hear the blues, " says Waterman Many, many, many rolls, gone forever." (at home in Oxford), "1remember being Those corroded strips of negatives are with my friends. " like forgotten songs, the ones that somehow never found their way onto a round, hard surface. Hold a sliver of film toward the light and one can discern faint streaks: tiny figures playing guitar. They are irretrievable now. But the blues is about loss, and Waterman has known his share of the blues, including a stutter (which he has overcome), past cocaine use, whirlwind relationships (he and Raitt were an item for a time) and once-simmering feuds with rival managers. He has lost legions of friends to illness and hard living. But if his life has been about anything, it has been about redressing loss and regret through the balm of rediscovery. Late in the day, Waterman takes a drive to visit the grave of his friend Mississippi
Above: Cambridge, 1967: Today Buddy Guy (b. 1936) runs a Chicago club. Above, left: Newport, 1968: B.B. King (b. 1925) reached a widening audience. Left: Philadelphia, 1970: Mississippi Fred McDowell (1904-1972), Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup (1905-1974) and Williams cavort in Waterman's yard.
1. Newport, 1968: Janis Joplin (1943-1970) gave a fiery performance. 2. Philadelphia, 1964: Son House (1902-1988) "distilled" the blues. 3. Boston, 1974: Singer Sippie Wallace
(1898-1986) recorded in the 1920s and worked with Bonnie Raitt (b. 1949), right, in the 1970s. 4. Newport, 1964: Waterman says he photographed Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966), left, and Skip James (19021969) for posterity.
Newport, 1965: Hammie Nixon (1908-1984), Yank Rachel! (1910-1997) and Sleepy John Estes (1899-1977) got their start in the 1920s.
Fred McDowell. The photographer steers his old Mercedes out of Oxford, past signs for Goolsby's World of Hair and Abner's Famous Chicken Tenders, past the novelist John Grisham's massive house set amid the horse pastures. The floor of the passenger's seat is awash injunk mail and contact sheets. Within an hour, Waterman is standing in a hillside cemetery in Como, Mississippi, population 1,308. The headstone reads: "Mississippi ,Fred"
McDowell, Jan. 12, 1904-July 3, 1972. Plastic flowers sprout at the marker's base, where recent visitors have left a silver guitar slide and $1.2] in change. The ash-gray slab, paid for by Waterman, Bonnie Raitt and Chris Strachwitz (the founder of Arhoolie Records), bears lyrics of McDowell's blues classic "You Got To Move": "You may be high, / You may be low, / You may be rich, child / You may be poor / But when the Lord / Gets ready / You got to move." "You talked to him about funny, stupid, absurd things that just made you pee laughing," Waterman recalls. "Some of
the most enjoyable experiences [I've had] were with Fred." Later, as he heads back to Oxford, a hazy sunset turns the air to taffY. Watetman pops in a cassette, and across the dash comes the thrilling tang of McDowell's slide guitar. Waterman passes families on porches, a tractor in a willow's shadows, children playing dodgeball in the dust. "We're listening to Fred in Fred's country," he says. A tear appears in the corner of his eye. And on he drives. 0 About the Author: David Friend, a former director of photography for Life magazine, is editor of creative development at Vanity Fair.
Lok Sangeel An Interview with
STEVE YOUNG
Steve Young performing with Rajasthani folk musicians at the Jaipur International fleritage Festival in January.
For guitarist, songwriter and singer Steve Young, it's a life devoted to country music. His music comes from the roots of the Americana-folk, blues, gospel and country, with a bit of Mexican influence. His unpretentious way of delivering songs has won him fans worldwide. Various music stars, incll!ding Dolly Parton, Rita Coolidge, Joan Baez, Hank Williams, Jr., WeylonJennings and Tom Russell, have recorded songs written by Young. Born in Georgia, Young survived and emerged from a spell of drug addiction and alcoholism to perform across continents. The 61-year-old musician was in India in January on a program supported by the Public Affairs office of the American Embassy. He performed with folk musicians at theJaipur Heritage International Festival and various venues in Delhi. He participated in several events and workshops, some exclusively with Indian musicians. This was his second trip to India, the first being personal travel in 1985. He respects India's spiritual past and music, which, according to him, "is one of the most advanced forms in the world." Buddhism attracts him. He is open to experimenting with fusion of Indian music and his form. "It's about the lasting power of music and the courage of the human spirit," he says. Young spoke to SPAN while he was here:
SPAN: Hovv was your experience while peljbrming with Indian folk artists in laipur:) STEVE YOUNG: It was a wonderful opportunity for me. I loved the colors, the rhythms, the talents. To me their music was truly of the earth and they were very open, spiritual, earthy people. I was walked into their midst in front of people one day and was expected to kind of jam a little bit. I was really terrified because I did not know what would happen and how we would play anything together. But we did marvelously well. They were really good; and were very gracious to me. What difference do youjlnd in Rajasthanifblk and American folk music? It [Rajasthani folk] isjust a whole different approach, in some ways, to music. It is a different rhythm, different structure altogether, that T would love to know more about. It seems to me like one of the forms called Flemenco-it starts and plays, rises, sometimes speeds up, creates more excitement as it goes. T think that's great. Does.filsion dilute the original flavor styles? Yes, fusion does dilute. But that's not to say that all fusion music is bad, sometimes it is good. It gets a little pretentious because
oung is dedicated to the fight against alcohol and drug abuse and he shared his experiences with students at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University in Delhi. He toJd them how difficult his life had become from drug abuse. "There was a Jot of suffering. There was no fun anymore. Besides that I was going to die from drinking and drugs .. .J bad a son and I did not want to leave him that way." This motivated him to stop,"although he didn't believe he could at first. "Most addicts do not believe," he said. "It is such a part of their life. And then I thought it could be done. So life got better." Not wanting to preach, he said, "Youth must find their own way. They won't take my word for it. Just like me-l did not take anybody's word for it either. I just learned from experience. Nobody ends up happy taking too many drugsthey either die or live in misery. If you love life, you are creative and you want to lead a life of joy then you have to find a way to do it without addictions." 0
it just seeks to combine everything and do everything. You need to go back to the real roots of something. So fusion could be good-it depends. What has been the irifluence of Buddhist teachings on your life and music? I love Buddhism. T love the philosophy and even the religious aspects of Buddhism-the rituals, the meditation. It is not easy but T think it will be very good for me when I will do it. I like the idea of achieving peace from within instead of without. T think this is the truth, and the dharma. T was quite young and no one around me would have liked Buddhism as T worked in the deep South. People would have said, "Qh, that is a bad thing, you do not have to do that." I do not know why I was interested in Buddhism but T was. When I was a teenager I was attracted to eastern philosophies. How popular is country music in America compared to other modernfbrms ofmusic? Country music has become watered down. What they call country music is fusion in a bad way because it incorporates lounge music or pop music. Country music used to be more earthy; it was about the people of the earth, more like the people in Jaipur. What kind of influence do Scottish, Irish and other forms of music have on American countly music? T think there is great deal of influence because a lot of these folk songs came from the British Isles countries. For instance, the American folk song "Streets of Laredo" talks about a cowboy dying in Laredo, Texas, but originally it was an Irish folk song in which a sailor dies of venereal disease. So that's the way folk music works. These have a tremendous impact on American music. It has also influenced Rock 'n' Roll. Certainly the blues are the "biggest part of Rock 'n' Roll but it has a Celtic influence as well. What draws American musicians to alcohol and drug abuse? Do alcohol or drugs improve performance? I think insecurity-being young and confused-and the fact that other kids do it helps draw them to alcohol and drugs. When people are young, everybody says this is the coolest thing to do. It makes you feel like you can mix with girls, makes you feel like a big man or whatever. It is natural if you have fear you would want to cover it any way you could. For musicians there is a myth that they [drugs and alcohol] can help you create. I think this is not true. It may help you at first but then it prevents you from creating. I know this from experience. Also there is an element of travel and performing-you are supposed to be good, have energy and feel great, so take some drugs. Want to sleep at night, take some more drugs. It is a vicious cycle. What difference do youfind between American and Indian response to your music? Some people in the Indian audience, especially the ones who really are into this kind of music, have a deeper response. Because students are young, they may want more Rock 'n' Roll. But the mature Indian audience has a deeper sense ofthe spiritual and deep qualities of music than most Americans do. 0
An Interview with EDY KAUFMAN
rofessor Edy Kaufman is an internationally acclaimed conflict resolution practitioner and theorist. Considered the guru of track two, or citizens' diplomacy, by the U.S. academic community, this peace educator has led several conflict resolution workshops around the world and taught at numerous universities. Track two diplomacy is used as a tool for redressing conflicts, including the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian discord. Kaufman is executive director and senior research associate at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and senior researcher at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, College Park. In addition he is the founder of B'tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that monitors the occupied territories. He recently visited India for an international conference on conflict resolution at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science at PHani,Rajasthan, and a lecture organized by Women in Security Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP) and United States Educational Foundation in India. In an interview with SPANhe shared his thoughts: CA
SPAN: How did the concept of track two diplomacy emerge? How useful is this method in finding viable solutions to global conflicts? EDY KAUFMAN: Track two diplomacy has its roots in the United States during the Cold War era of the 1970s. Diplomats as well as civil society activists around the world were deeply concerned about the crazy arms race carried out by both the superpowers. Alarmed with the dangers posed by the arms proliferation, a small group of intellectuals informally gathered to discuss the issue. They were not representing anybody but themselves. Complementing the efforts of traditional diplomacy, track two, or citizens' diplomacy, is seen as an effective means to deal with protracted conflicts-prolonged identity-driven disputes accompanied by high levels of violence. Since track two diplomacy offers unconventional methods for working with unofficial citizen representatives, it is designed to facilitate resolutions of a conflict based on transformation of the parties' perceptions and attitudes. Track two diplomacy paved the way, for example, to a great extent in resolving the conflict between Great Britain and Argentina during the Falklands War in 1982. The ethnic peace process in Sri Lanka was a success largely because of the track two diplomatic initiatives. The Oslo accord between the Israelis and Palestinians also demonstrates the efficacy of track two diplomatic commu-,
nication for the stalemated official discussions. Sometimes track two diplomatic moves are a success, but very often its initiatives generate just a lot of goodwill. Nevertheless, for the past 10 years, we have been trying to perfect the tools of track two diplomacy.
How are the people for track two diplomacy chosen? How do track two diplomats break the ice? People from influential formal or informal policy bodies, professional groups such as educators, journalists, former diplomats, women activists, human rights representatives, leaders of chambers of commerce and trade, sports personalities are ideal to participate in track two diplomacy. If they are close enough
people must enjoy the enormous credibility of their countrymen. Once chosen, these citizen diplomats must be trained in using track two diplomacy tools.
Does track two diplomacy address only bilateral or multilateral conflicts between two or more countries or does it help in resolving internal disputes within a country as well? Track two diplomatic methods are equally useful in resolving the protracted domestic issues. For example, we have been able to resolve the language issue of the Kazakhs and Russians in the mid-1980s by convening both the proponents and opponents. There are many problems that can be resolved without the intervention of the government. If you take an issue to a politician or
There are many problems that can be resolved without the intervention of the government. Politicians or government may complicate the problem. The tools we provide to the civil society organizations help and sort problems by themselves before the government intervenes. to the centers of power or have a sort of influence over the decision makers and could mold public opinion they certainly would break the ice. One important criterion is that these track two diplomacy
the government the problem may get complicated. So we provide tools to the civil society organizations to try and sort problems by themselves before the government intervenes. Basically we bring to-
gether the conflicting groups and tell them that they have more ideas in common and only a small percentage of disagreement on certain issues. Once the conflicting groups sit around a negotiating table, the differences would sink and a solution is found in the very first meeting. Track two diplomacy tools also help in resolving conflicts relating to common-pool resources such as river water and ecological disputes among two or more regions within the country. The scope, extent and the utility of track two diplomacy are enormous in any context.
What are the various approaches of track two diplomacy? First, we need to build confidence and trust between the conflicting parties. We have to discover similarities among the delegates and set a participatory tone for a constructive dialogue. We have to go beyond the stated positions of the parties and understand what others' lines of thinking means to our own interests. It is important to underline that we do not want to change the ideologies, identities or the basic values of the parties. We have to avoid common stereotypes and prejudices when we try to appreciate others' point of view. We need to educate ourselves and aim for an improvement in the channels of communication. We don't want just to deal with the system, but we want to diagnose the real conflict.
How important are communication skills in resolving
tensions and flOW do you train track two diplomats? The first effort is to generate a very informal atmosphere. We ask negotiators to write the best way to address the problem. This may sound a little childish but if you give them exercises that will make them comfortable with each other, this wi II be a real icebreaker and make them more communicative. It reduces the level of tension and stereotypes so people will open up and discuss. Another approach is building group skills. There are many subjective ways of seeing the reality, which has different layers. The more we encourage the subjective view the closer, perhaps, we are to finding solutions. This will provide an opportunity to the other side to listen about what you have to say. We keep trying to get the other side to talk. We face problems of communication because of different languages, cultures, status and generations. To remove these barriers we work first on prejudice reduction in particular. In many conflicts the image of the other side has been exaggerated a lot. If you ask a Palestinian to draw a picture of an Israeli, he would draw the picture of an Israeli soldier rather than the picture of a common Israeli. Good communication skills create a positive foundation from which both the parties can work toward a desired future. If there are difference of perceptions how does one find a common ground? Mediation between hostile parties is many centuries old.
We ask them, "Tell us what you would have done differently." We are not trying to score points but find solutions by consensus where decisionmaking is not by majority but on ensuring that everyone's concerns are dealt with before the decisions are made. This means that all participants' opinions are given equal weight and consideration, and we accept them as friends. Shouldn't the government be informed of the track two diplomatic moves and initiatives? The government should certainly have knowledge about the initiatives being taken by the representatives of track two. We need the consensus of the government in principle but not its control of the process. Once the consensus-building process is completed, you should then approach the government and express your views and ideas and advise it to think about them whether it may like it or not. Neither the government nor the citizen diplomats try to push their agenda upon the other. Both parties must honor the principle of give and take and at the same time respect each other's perspective. How relevant is track two diplomacy in a unipolar world? Track two diplomacy is relevant in almost all situations. To my understanding, before the war on Iraq, it was very difficult to offer track two between r raq and the United States because Saddam Hussein would not permit any tri\ck two diplomats into Iraq.
There was hardly any window of oppOltunity for any type of diplomacy to playa role to avoid the conflict. In such situations I agree that track two has its own limitations. In the context of IndiaPakistan relations several confidence-building measures have been initiated recently by both sides. Do you think these moves are adequate to bring permanent peace to the subcontinent?
ties closer? Such visits are one more step forward in confidencebuilding measures. The parliamentarian would get a briefing before the visit as they are, in general, part of track one diplomacy. So what one sees on TV or in the newspapers is just a road show. No substantive issues are discussed in such tours of parliamentary delegations. However, a lot of ground work and behind-the-scenes negotiations initiated by track two
We have to avoid common stereotypes and prejudices when we try to appreciate others' point of view. The initiatives of both India and Pakistan are certainly welcome for the peace process and they have been widely appreciated by the internatiohal community. Bilateral visits of the student and academic community, and the revival of cricket tour are people-to-people activity, which have a limited role to play but definitely help in creating a very conducive atmosphere for a dialogue. These contacts, even though important, serve a limited role in realpolitik of the nations' interests. However, trained track two diplomats, comprising former diplomats and defense officers, can play a useful role in de-escalating tensions between both the countries. Do you think the visits of parliamentary delegations would bring both the par-
diplomacy complements efforts of track one.
the
Does track two provide a true interface between civil society and the government? In citizens' diplomacy we are trying to solve problems by ourselves. We don't have to go to a court of justice because it costs a lot of money and time and even after the court settlement people continue to quarrel because the losing side is not happy. Therefore citizens' diplomacy is the right method since it provides a win-win chance for the confl icting parties. Moreover, 50 percent peace treaties signed by the government are not kept. We need people to support the resolutions and citizens' diplomacy, which comes from the bottom, and which they have a chance to sustain. 0
HE
R HAVE BEGUN
Copyright Š 2003 Conde Nast Publications. All rights reserved. Originally published in Wired Reprinted by permission.
Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel. Next up: the computing industrv. ron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond up to the stainless steel jeweler's loupe he holds against his eye. We are in Antwerp, Belgium, in Weingarten's marbled and gilded living room on the edge of the city's gem district, the center of the diamond universe. Nearly 80 percent of the world's rough and polished diamonds move through the hands of Belgian gem traders like Weingarten, a dealer who wears the thick beard and black suit of the Hasidim. "This is very rare stone," he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented English. "Yellow diamonds of this color are very hard to find. It is probably worth 10, maybe 15 thousand dollars." "I have two more exactly like it in my pocket," I tell him. He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for
the first time. I place the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and size. To find three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 times and never seeing tails. "These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much hope. "No, they're real," I tell him. "But they were made by a machine in Florida for less than a hundred dollars." Weingarten shifts uncomf0l1ably in his chair and stares at the glittering gems on his dining room table. "Unless they can be detected," he says, "these stones will bankrupt the industry." Put pure carDon under enough heat and pressure-say, 1,200 degrees Celsius and 50,000 atmospheres-and it will crystallize into the hardest material known. Those were the conditions that first forged diamonds deep in
EaIth's mantle 3.3 billion years ago. Replicating that enviromnent in a lab isn't easy, but that hasn't kept dreamers from hying. Since the mid-19th century, dozens of these modern alchemists have been injured in accidents and explosions while attempting to manufacture diamonds. Recent decades have seen some modest successes. Starting in the 1950s, engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial purposes-to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels. But last summer, the first wave of gem-quality manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They are grown in a warehouse in Florida by a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A second company, in Boston, has perfected a completely different process for making near-flawless diamonds and plans to
Programme-a none too subtle campaign to warn jewelers and the public about the arrival of manufactured diamonds. At no charge, the company is supplying gem labs with sophisticated machines designed to help distinguish man-made from mined stones. In its long history, De Beers has survived African insurrection, shrugged off American antitrust litigation, sidestepped criticism that it exploits Third World workers, and contended with Australian, Siberian, and Canadian diamond discoveries. The firm has a huge adveltising budget and a stranglehold on diamond distribution channels. But there's one thing De Beers doesn't have: retired brigadier general Calter Clarke. Carter Clarke, 75, has been retired from the Army for nearly 30 years, but he never lost the air of command. When he walks into Gemesis-the company he founded
A Pentium chip made 01 diamond could run at speeds that would liquelv silicon. begin marketing them by year's end. This sudden arrival of mass-produced gems threatens to alter the public's perception of diamonds-and to transform the $7 billion industry. More intriguing, it opens the door to the development of diamond-based semiconductors. Diamond, it turns out, is a geek's best friend. Not only is it the hardest substance known, it also has the highest thelma I conductivity-tremendous heat can pass through it without causing damage. Today's speedy microprocessors run hot-at upwards of 90 degrees Celsius. In fact, they can't go much faster without failing. Diamond microchips, on the other hand, could handle much higher temperatures, allowing them to run at speeds that would liquefy ordinary silicon. But manufacturers have been loath even to consider using the precious material, because it has never been possible to produce large diamond wafers affordably. With the arrival of Gemesis, the Florida-based company, and Apollo Diamond, in Boston, that is changing. Both staItups plan to use the diamond jewellY business to finance their attempt to reshape the semiconducting world. But first things first. Before anyone reinvents the chip industry, they'll have to prove they can produce large volumes of cheap diamonds. Beyond Gemesis and Apollo, one company is convinced there's something real here: De Beers Diamond Trading Company. The Londonbased caltel has monopolized the diamond business for 115 years, forcing out rivals by ruthlessly controlling supply. But the sudden appearance of multicarat, gemquality synthetics has sent De Beers scrambling. Several years ago, it set up what it calls the Gem Defensive
in 1996 to make diamonds-the staff stands at attention to greet him. It just feels like the right thing to do. Palticularly since "the General," as he's known, continually salutes them as ifthey were troops heading into battle. "I was in combat in Korea and 'Nam," he says after greeting me with a salute in the office lobby. "You better believe 1 can handle the diamond business." Clarke slaps me hard on the back, and we set off on a tour of hIS new 2,800-square-meter factOlY, located in an industrial park outside Sarasota, Florida. The building is slated to house diamond-growing machines, which look like metallic medicine balls on life support. Twenty-seven machines are now up and running. Gemesis expects to add eight more every month, eventually installing 250 in this warehouse. In other words, the General is preparing a first strike on the diamond business. "Right now, we only threaten the way De Beers wants the consumer to think of a dia-. mond," he says, noting that his current monthly output doesn't even equal that of a small mine. "But imagine what happens when we fill this warehouse and then the one next door," he says with a grin. "Then I'll have myself a proper diamond mine." Clarke didn't set out to become a gem baron. He stumbled into this during a 1995 trip to Moscow. His company at the time-Security Tag Systems-had pioneered those clunky antitheft devices attached to clothes at retail stores. Following up on a report about a Russian antitheft technology, Clarke came across Yuriy Semenov, who was in charge of the High Tech Bureau, a government initiative to sell Soviet-era military research to Western in-
vestors. Semenov had a better idea for the General: "How would you like to grow diamonds?" A few hours later, Clarke was looking at a blueprint for an 3,630-kilogram machine that used hydraulics and electricity to focus increasing amounts of pressure and heat on the core of a sphere. The device, he was told, re-created the conditions 160 kilometers below Earth's surface, where diamonds form. Put a sliver of a diamond in the core, inject some carbon, and voila, a larger diamond will grow around the sliver. General Electric managed to do this in 1954 by using a 400-ton press to crush the hell out of carbon. GE's machine economically produced diamond dust for industrial uses, and by the early 1970s the company had even managed to manufacture stones as large as two carats. But that effort took so much time and electrical energy, it was more expensive than buying a mined diamond. The Russians claimed their machine was relatively cheap, took no more energy to run than a dozen lightbulbs, and would produce a 3-carat stone in a few days. And the General could have it for just $57,000. Clarke was skeptical. On the long flight back to the States he tried to forget about the offer and sleep, but the light creeping through his window shade kept him awake. If this thing really could make a diamond, he thought, $57,000 isn't that much money. "Hell," he mused, "what could be more fun than trying to make diamonds?" By the time the plane touched down in New York, he'd decided to give it a shot. Three months later, Clarke returned to Moscow. Bodyguards met him at the airport and took him to a warehouse outside the capital. In an unheated room in the middle of winter, he watched Nickolai Polushin-one of the original Siberian scientists-lift the top half of the machine's sphere. Polushin pulled out a small ceramic cube, smashed it with a hammer, and handed Clarke a small diamond. Everybody smiled. The General eventually ordered three machines and told Semenov to ship them to Florida. But there were two immediate problems. First, nobody in the U.S. knew how to run them. Clarke solved that by moving a crew of Russians to Florida. ("1 felt myself all the time in a sauna," remembers ickolay Patrin, who now lives full-time in Sarasota.) The second and more fundamental obstacle was that the Russians themselves had not yet mastered the process. In fact, the machines did not reliably produce diamonds. The General and his newly minted Gemesis needed help. He turned to Iranian crystal expert Reza Abbaschian, head ofthe University of Florida's materials science department in Gainesville. Abbaschian agreed to try turning the Russians' hit-or-miss method into a rigorously controlled and more reliable technological process. With the aid of some graduate students, he ripped out the
analog knobs and dials and installed a computer control system. They upgraded the power supply and methodically tracked the slightest variation in each diamond synthesis attempt. With more than 200 parameters to control, it was painstaking work, and by 1999-three years after Gemesis was founded-the General needed another infusion of cash. Abbaschian's efforts had produced some very highquality stones. So Clarke flew to London to show off a batch to potential investors. Rather than simply present them as a pi Ie of loose diamonds, he went to a jeweler in Hatton Garden, the city's diamond district, and asked if a few of his stones could be set in rings. The jeweler agreed, and Clarke returned to his hotel room at Claridge's. The phone rang. It was De Beers. According to Clarke, a De Beers executive, James Evans Lombe, was tipped off about the synthetic diamonds within two hours of their arrival at the jeweler's. Lombe asked for a meeting with the General. The De Beers executive drove directly to Claridge's, and the two men sat down in the tearoom to the strains of a piano and violin duet. De Beers refuses to comment on the meeting-or about anything for this story-but Clarke says he simply placed his diamonds on the table. "When 1 told him that we planned to set up a factory to mass-produce these, he turned white," the General recalls. "They knew about the technology, but they thought it would stay in Russia and that nobody would get it working right. By the end of the conversation, his hands were shaking." But De Beers wasn't backing down. Throughout 2000, the cartel accelerated its Gem Defensive Programme, sending out its testing machines-dubbed DiamondSure and DiamondView-to the largest international gem labs. Traditionally, these labs analyzed and certified color, clarity, and size. Now they were being asked to distinguish between man-made and mined. The DiamondSure shines light through a stone and analyzes its refractory characteristics. If the gem comes up suspicious, it must be tested with the DiamondView, which uses ultraviolet light to reveal the crystal's internal structure. "Ideally the trade would like to have a simple instrument that could positively identify a diamond as natural or synthetic," De Beers scientists wrote in 1996, when the company unveiled plans to develop authentication devices. "Unfortunately, our re-
search has led us to conclude that it is not feasible at this time to produce such an ideal instrument, inasmuch as synthetic diamonds are still diamonds physically and chemically. " In the summer of 2001, Abbaschian told the General that they were finally ready to mass-produce diamonds. There was one last decision to make. Each machine was capable of generating a 3-carat yellow stone every three days (colorless takes longer). Given their scarcity, the price per carat was much higher for yellow diamonds-so much higher, in fact, that only the very wealthy could afford them. Plus, colored diamonds have gotten hot in recent years. (J. Lo's engagement ring? Pink diamond.) Clarke decided that he'd make the biggest splash by bringing yellows to Middle America. He'd compete on both price-charging 10 to 50 percent less than naturalsand style. And, ifhe succeeded with the yellow stones, he could transition into colorless. The diamond industry fought back. In 2002, De Beers began shipping improved, even more sensitive DiamondSure machines to labs around the world. Meanwhile, industry groups led by the Jewelers Vigilance Committee have pressured the Federal Trade Commission to force Gemesis to label its stones as synthetic. The tussle goes to the heart of the marketing problem for Gemesis or any maker of synthetic gems: How will consumers feel about them? The mystique ofnaturaldiamonds is anything but rational. Part of the all ure is their high cost and supposed rarity. Yet diamonds are plentiful-De Beers maintains vast stockpiles and tightly controls supply.
tion given to the wildly successful (and more valuable than natural) cultured pearl. In an ambiguous April 2001 ruling, the Federal Trade Commission said that it was "unfair or deceptive" to call a man-made diamond a "diamond," but offered no opinion on the question of calling it a "cultured diamond." So, for now, Clarke is sticking with cultured. But in the end, he insists, it won't really matter. "If you give a woman a choice between a 2-carat stone and a I-carat stone and everything else is the same, including the price, what's she gonna choose?" he demands. "Does she care if it's synthetic or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and ask, 'Is that synthetic?'" Wrong, says JefVan Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week." So goes the De Beers-backed line. And forget the cultured pearl comparison, Van Royen says. Man-made diamonds are more like synthetic emeralds, introduced in large quantities in the mid-1970s. At first, their price was very high, but then the gem labs discovered that the synthetics could be easily distinguished using a standard microscope. The price collapsed and is now less than three percent of naturals. Van Royen is confident the council's lab can pick out synthetic stones. To test him, I ask him to look at a halfcarat light yellow Gemesis diamond. A jovial, bearded
The greatest potential lor the svnthetic diamond lies in computing. II diamond is ever to be a practical material lor semiconducting, it will need to be anordablv grown in large walers. Clever marketing may bring buyers around to manufactured diamonds. After all, there's no chance that they are so-called blood diamonds-stones sold by African rebels to fund wars and revolutions. And they aren't under the thumb of an international cartel accused of buying off foreign governments, despoiling the environment, flouting antimonopoly laws, and exploiting mine workers. In fact, Gemesis is developing a marketing campaign that portrays synthetics as superior to naturals. The General came up with a proposal to brand the company's diamonds "cultlJred"-a deliberate echo of the designa-
man prone to nervous laughter, Van Royen takes the rock and peers at it through a lOX jewelers' loupe. "It is very pretty," he admits, giggling. "But so is cubic zirconium." Although Van Royen's lab is outfitted with DiamondSure and DiamondView machines (the Diamond High Council works closely with the Gem Defensive Programme), he instead puts the gem into a more elaborate piece of equipment-a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer that registers the diffusion of light through crystal. Above the machine hangs a large printout that shows six sets of graphs. Van Royen points to one with a distinctive spike toward the right end of the horizontal axis. "If it is syn-
thetic, it should look like this," he says. Sure enough, the machine displays a graph just like the one Van Royen indicated. But such high-end testing is far from the last word. Only a small percentage of larger diamonds are lab-certified-though the number seems to be growing as the industry becomes more aware of synthetics. Diamonds that are smaller than a fifth of a carat are almost never sent to labs, since the cost would eat up any profit made from them. These modest stones actually represent a significant portion of the market, since jewelry designers regularly use them to create sparkling fields of diamonds on watches, earrings, rings, and pendants. Almost all diamonds of this size are bought, processed, and sold by Indians based in Antwerp and Bombay. One such group-headed by the Choksi familybought a $35,000 batch of preliminary Gemesis research stones in 2002 and is currently selling them in India at a 10 to 20 percent profit. [ met Sabin Choksi, one of the company's principals, at a jewelry convention in Las Vegas. He admitted that his customers don't know the stones are synthetic, but says they don't care one way or the other. In other words, Gemesis may be fully disclosing the nature of its stones, but already one of its wholesalers is not. In Antwerp, Van Royen tells me of another threat. There's a rumor of a new, experimental method for growing gem-quality diamonds. The process-chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-has been used for more than a decade to cover relatively large surfaces with microscopic diamond crystals. The technique transforms carbon into a plasma, which then precipitates onto a substrate as diamond. The problem with the technology has always been that no one could figure out how to grow a single crystal using the method. At least until now, Van Royen says. Apollo Diamond, a shadowy company in Boston, is rumored to be sitting on a single-crystal breakthrough. If true, it represents a new challenge to the industry, since CVD diamonds could conceivably be grown in large bricks that, when cut and polished, would be indistinguishable from natural diamonds. "But nobody has seen them in Antwerp," Van Royen says. "So we don't even know if they are for real." I take a transparent 35-millimeter film canister from my pocket and put it on the table. Two small diamonds are cushioned on cotton balls inside. "Believe me," [ say, "they're for real." Three days before traveling to Belgium, I had flown to Boston to meet Bryant Linares, president of Apollo Diamond. Linares has been secretive about his company
and was suspicious about me. He checked to make sure I was really working for Wired by calling my editor, and he wouldn't say where his company was located other than to tell me to fly to Boston and wait for him at baggage claim. When I arrive, a preppy, square-jawed man approaches me. "I'm Bryant Linares," he says. "Follow me." We get in his blue Saab and begin driving. In a half hour, I realize I'm seeing the same scenery. I ask if we're driving in circles. "We're not taking the most direct route," he allows. For 45 minutes, he questions me about stories I'd written. Finally he seems to decide I'm not a De Beers spy. "You're O.K.," he says. "There's no need for a blindfold." We pull up at a suburban strip mall occupied by a fitness gym and a graphic design company. Linares leads the way into the graphics firm's reception area, which looks normal enough. But when he opens one ofthe interior doors, I catch a glimpse of a man dressed head to foot in Intel-style clean-room scrubs. "Welcome to Apollo Diamond," Linares says, waving me inside and quickly shutting the door. He hands me a bunny suit, including booties, goggles, and a hair cap, and leads me into a third room. Three men dressed in similar contaminant-control outfits stand around a cylindrical contraption that looks like a heavy-duty coffee urn outfitted with a bolt-on porthole. A preternatural purplegreen glow emanates from the window. I peer through the glass. Four diamonds are growing beneath a shimmering green cloud. "It took me a long time to get to this point," says one ofthe men standing beside the machine. This is Robert Linares, Bryant's father. In the 1980s, he was a well-known researcher in advanced semiconductor materials. His company, Spectrum Technology, pioneered the commercialization of gallium arsenide wafers, the microchip substrate that succeeded silicon and allowed cell phones to become smaller and
handle more bandwidth. Linares sold the company to PacifiCorp, a diversified utility, in 1985 and disappeared from the semiconducting world. It turns out he took the money and built a secret diamond research lab. "I knew diamonds were going to be the ultimate semiconductor at some point, but everybody thought it was impossible at the time," Linares says. "1 had the freedom to do what I wanted after I sold my company, so I spent almost 15 years researching on my own." To grow single-crystal diamond using chemical vapor deposition, you must first divine the exact combination of temperature, gas composition, and pressure-a "sweet spot" that results in the formation of a single crystal. Otherwise, innumerable small diamond crystals will rain down. Hitting on the single-crystal sweet spot is like locating a single grain of sand on the beach. There's only one combination among millions. In 1996, Linares found it. This June, he finally received a U.S. patent for the process, which already is producing flawless stones. This year, Apollo plans to start selling them on the jewelry market. But that's just the first step. Robert and Bryant Linares expect to use revenue from the gem trade to fund their company's semiconductor ambitions. Not surprisingly, the diamond industry is hostile to the idea, as the younger Linares discovered four years ago when he attended an industry conference in Prague. He was hoping to find out whether any other researchers-possibly De Beers scientists themselves-had discovered the sweet spot. During a break in the conference, a man approached Linares and told him to be careful. "He said that my father's research was a good way to get a bullet in the head," Linares recalls. The diamonc,j industry is in fact even more concerned
about gems made using chemical vapor deposition than it is about Gemesis stones, though Gemesis poses a more immediate threat. The promise ofCVD is that it produces extremely pure crystal. Gemesis diamonds grow in a metal solvent, and tiny particles of those metals get caught in the diamond lattice as it grows. CVD diamond precipitates as nearly 100 percent pure diamond and therefore may not be discernible from naturals, no matter how advanced the detection equipment. But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 30 centimeters in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, wafer-like fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape, with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years-since Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot-Apollo has been growing increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is producing 1O-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach 2.5 centimeters square by year's end and 10 centimeters in five years. The price per carat: about $5. Back at the Diamond High Council, I open the film canister and shake the Apollo stones onto the table. Van Royen tentatively picks one up with a pair of elongated tweezers and takes it to a microscope. "Unbelievable," he says slowly as he peers through the lens. "May 1 study it?" I agr"ee to let him keep the gems overnight. When we meet the next morning in the lobby of the High Council, Van Royen looks tired. He admits to staying up almost all night scrutinizing the stones. "1 think 1 can identify it," he says hopefully. "It's too perfect to be natural. Things in nature, they have flaws. The growth structure ofthis diamond is flawless." Van Royen reluctantly hands the diamonds back. "You have something that nobody else in Antwerp has," he says. "You should be careful-somebody might jump out of the shadows with a mask on." He leans in conspiratori -' ally: "If you want to know how important these diamonds are, talk to Jim Butler with your Navy. He is the man." Jim Butler is the head of a project known as Code 6174-the Navy's diamond research arm, which is housed in a guarded facility outside Washington, D.C. A civilian scientist, Butler has been researching CVD diamond and semiconducting for the military for 16 years, long enough to see plenty of failure in the field. But today, he's more optimistic than ever. There have been three long-standing roadblocks to diamond semiconducting-and each of them appears to be on the verge of falling. First, diamond is viewed as wildly expensive, due
to the atiificial scarcity that De Beers maintains with its lock on the market. Synthesized diamonds created outside of the cartel will greatly reduce that problem. Second, there has never been a steady and dependable supply of large, pure diamonds. You can't depend on mined diamonds, as there is no way to ensure that each stone will have the same electrical properties as the next. Apollo's CVD diamonds solve that. The third big challenge has been the most daunting for materials scientists: To form microchip circuits, positive and negative conductors are needed. Diamond is an inherent insulator-it doesn't conduct electricity. But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. "There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron's natural conductivity to fonn a borondoped n-type diamond. "We now have a p-n junction,"
professor of materials science. "If Moore's law is going to be maintained, processors are going to get hotter and hotter," he tells me. "Eventually, silicon isjust going to turn into a puddle. Diamond is the solution to that problem." The JCK Show is one of the biggest events in the jewelry business. It draws every major diamond dealer in the U.S., most of whom buy their goods from De Beers. This year, for the first time, the General tried to get a booth. He was told that he'd applied too late. He suspected that the industry simply didn't want him there, but he took it gracefully and announced that Gemesis would unveil its stones at a smaller satellite convention down the street. I head to Las Vegas to check it out. The Gem and Lapidary Dealers Association Show is held in a large room at the back of the Mirage. Here-amid purveyors of quartz-encrusted, electric-powered water fountains ("Be amazed by their magic!"), Lithuanian amber salesmen, Nigerian tanzanite dealers, and Vegas-style cowboys in ostrich skin boots-is the Gemesis booth, which displays more
How will consumers leel about them;Âť The mvstique 01 natural diamonds is anvthing but rational. Butler says. "Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon." Still, Butler is frustrated with what he thinks of as myopia in the U.S. computer business. "Europe and Japan have been investing in diamond semiconductor resemch," he says, citing the Japanese government's announcement in December 2002 that it would begin allocating $6 million a year to build a first-generation diamond chip. "Bob Linares has given the U.S. the advantage, but nobody's paying any attention," he says. "If we're not careful, the Japanese or the Europeans are going to claim the diamond niche." Indeed, Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnammihy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that." But someday, that's exactly what chipmakers will be forced to do. Just ask Bernhardt Wuensch, an MJT
than 1,000 carats of yellow diamonds. The show ends tonight, and JCK starts tomorrow morning, so the last few hours see a whirlwind of recently arrived JCK-bound buyers. Efraim Katz, a yarmulkeclad, heavily bearded gem wholesaler from Miami, literally jogs through the room but pauses in front of Gemesis. "Diamonds mined in Florida?" he asks a Gemesis rep. "I can't believe it. Give me your number-I will be calling." Kevin Castro, ajeweler in Cedar City, Utah, comes to a surprised halt. "These are awfully pretty," he says. I tell him that they are man-made and ask if that bothers him. "If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it's not grown in some steamy hot jungle in Central America," he says. "It's grown in a hothouse somewhere in California. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a beautiful orchid." "Do you care that it's not from De Beers?" I ask. "De Beers?" he says. ''Nobody cares if it's from De Beers. My clients just want a nice diamond." D About the Author: Joshua Davis is a contributing with Wired magazine.
editor
WHOWAS DEEP THROAT? fter 36 years as a .full-time reporter at the Chicago Tribune, I retired in 1999 to teach journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During that first semester, as the students searched for an investigative project to tackle, I showed them All the President's Men. This 1976 movie is based on the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Post in 1973 for their stories about the political scandal known as Watergate. The film, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, accurately portrays how investigative reporters comport themselves, ask questions, conduct interviews, even the unobtrusive way they hold a notebook. What most intrigued the students, however, were the secret meetings between the Woodward character and a high-level government official, played by Hal Holbrook, that the book referred to only as Deep Throat. The name echoes a 1972 pornographic movie and plays offthe term "deep background," or information provided to a reporter on the condition that the source be neither identified nor quoted directly. Deep Throat met with Woodward seven times between September 1972 and May 1973 to help the two reporters break several stories about the involvement of Nixon administration officials in the June 17, 1972, burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office-apartment-,hotel com-
plex in Northwest Washington. (The burglars, who were seeking information that could be used against Democrats in the upcoming elections, were indicted later for conspiracy, burglary, wiretapping and planting secret listening devices.) The Post's stories, along with those of other newspapers and several rulings by Judge John Sirica, the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the Watergate trials, led to televised hearings in the U.S. Senate about the break-in. From these, a riveted nation learned about an administration coverup of the break-in and a covert White House operation that engaged in
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in their Washington Post office at the height of the Watergate scandal which their investigative journalism exposed in the early 1970s.
burglary and political spying. The hearings were followed by impeachment proceedings by the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. But before the full House could vote on whether the President should be impeached, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, and Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as President. At least 19 high-level officials and other conspirators would plead guilty to or be convicted of various crimes re-
An investigative reporter enlists his journalism students to help him solve Watergate's most intriguing puzzle lated to Watergate. Besides adding the suffix "-gate" to our lexicon as an indicator of scandal, and evoking campaign finance reform bills, Watergate resulted in a lasting public distrust of government. It also left one of the century's most intriguing political mysteries unsolved. For the past 30 years, guessing the identity of Deep Throat has become something of a parlor game among journalists, pundits and conspiracy theorists. At least three books and scores of articles have delved into the identity of Deep Throat. The list of likely suspects has included former White House aide and current network anchor Diane Sawyer; Nixon's chief of staff, Alexander Haig; acting FBI director Patrick Gray; and John Sears, one of Nixon's deputy counsels. At the same time, some have argued that Deep Throat wasn't one person but a composite of several sources, while others have posited that he was merely a literary invention. Woodward and Bernstein have both said they will not reveal their secret source's name until the individual dies, although Woodward did disclose that Deep Throat was a living male. Likewise, Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate era, has said he knows Deep Throat's identity but won't divulge it. About 75 archival boxes, containing more than 250 notebooks, assorted files, galleys
for the book All the President's Men, and photographs, which the University of Texas bought for $5 million last April, will be available to the public in the fall of 2004. But documents referring to Deep Throat and other confidential sources will be kept sealed in an undisclosed location until the sources' deaths. Why, my students asked, was Deep Throat's identity still not known after so many years? It was not an easy question to answer. Walt Harrington, a fellow journalism professor at the University ofIllinois, once told me he had heard Bradlee say that anyone wanting to learn Deep Throat's identity should search a computer database for Watergate figures who were actually in Washington at the time of those meetings. To my knowledge, no one had ever done so. Though few organizations would have the resources or motivation to unmask Deep Throat, it seemed a challenging pursuit for my students. The students read autobiographies of potential suspects and filled a computer spreadsheet with dates, meetings, events and other information. During eight semesters, about 60 undergraduate and graduate students pored over more than 16,000 pages of FBI reports on microfilm in our university library, as well as all the newspaper stories Woodward and Bernstein had written in the first two years ofthe scandal. From those documents, they concluded
that only a member of the FBI or the White House would have had access to the information Deep Throat evidently leaked to Woodward. Later, we concluded that Deep Throat could not be in the FBI after we found a quote in a 1973 Woodward and Bernstein Post story attributed to a "White House" source that was similar in wording to one attributed to Deep Throat in All the President's Men. In an unpublished early draft ofthat book, we also read that neither reporter had FBI sources. The admission was later excised, in our view, to protect Deep Throat's identity. We obtained the 1972 and '73 White House staff directories, which listed 72 people in high-level jobs; of those, 39 were living males. The students then ruled out anyone not working at the White House between September 1972 and May 1973, the period when Deep Throat met with Woodward. Newspaper reports showed that some promising Deep Throat candidates, including Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, were out of the country during the time of those meetings. Because the repOliers had written that Deep Throat drank Scotch whisky and smoked, the students also eliminated confirmed teetotalers and nonsmokers. That left just seven candidates: Patrick Buchanan, speechwriter and special assistant to Nixon and later a newspaper columnist and presidential candidate; Stephen Bull, a personal aide to Nixon; David Gergen and Raymond Price, both speechwriters; Jonathan Rose, attorney for regulatory affairs; Gerald Warren, deputy press secretary; and Fred Fielding, an attorney and assistant to White House chieflegal counsel John Dean. In June 2002, "Dateline NBC" interviewed the students about our project. The students said the leading candidate was Buchanan. But a month later, one of them, Jessica Heckinger, got a note from him: "Please thank the class for me-for the unanimous vote. It is one of the few primaries I have won, outside of the Reform
The Watergate complex in Washington, D.C Photo taken in 1973.
Party where I won them all. However, you made some mistakes. Buchanan gave up smoking on the China trip (February '72) and Buchanan has no motive." It was not a flat-out denial, but most of the students and I found Buchanan's remarks persuasive. We struck him from the list. A few weeks later, we got a break. We were trying to determine who on our shortlist would have had knowledge of the secret slush fund controlled by members of Nixon's reelection campaign committee. This money bankrolled the Watergate burglars. Judith Hoback, a bookkeeper for Nixon's reelection campaign committee, was the general accountant for the fund. In All the President's Men, Hoback says that soon after the break-in, she deduced that the money she was disbursing might have something to do with the burglary, so she approached the FBI. She told them that. cash disbursements of more than $50,000 apiece were given to committee officials Herbert Porter and Jeb Magruder. In their book, Woodward and Bernstein recalled that Hoback had revealed her suspicions about a slush fund to Woodward in an interview. Before the pair published a story about the secret fund in the Post, they confirmed the information, including the amounts, with Deep Throat. The breadth of Deep Throat's information surprised my students. How could he have knowledge of the reelection committee's secret finances? The students learned that the FBI had shared some of its findings with the White House counsel, John Dean. We did not consider Dean himself to be,a candidate
because he had left the White House in April 1973. This led us to Dean's assistant, Fred Fielding, who was already on our shortlist. In the fall of 2002, student Thomas Rybarczyk dug up a June 1973 letter from Fielding that noted that Dean had given him a summary of a July 1972 FBI report detailing Hoback's acount of the cash transactions. However, Hoback's recollections of the disbursements were mistaken; she had initially provided the FBI as well as Woodward and Bernstein with incorrect figures. In fact, Magruder had received $20,000, not the $50,000 she remembered. Curiously, though, Deep Throat had confirmed the incorrect figures, which suggests that he gleaned the information from the FBI report given to Dean. Other clues started pointing us toward Fielding. For instance, Woodward and Bernstein omitted Fielding's name from stories about the White House counsel's office. Leaving a key source's name out of a story is a journalistic commonplace; it not only protects sources but prevents rival reporters from learning the identity of a valuable informant. As far as we could determine, Fielding shared Deep Throat's taste for cigarettes and whisky. He had access to information that Deep Throat corroborated for Woodward and Bernstein. And as student Robert Breslin found in 2002, Fielding even fit a characterization of the mysterious source that Woodward and Bernstein deleted from that early, unpublished draft of their book. The reporters wrote that Deep Throat was "perhaps the only person
in government in a position to possibly understand the whole scheme and not be a potential conspirator himself." Fielding, who helped Dean run the White House's law office during the growing Watergate crisis, left the White House before Nixon resigned and returned to private law practice. In 1981, he became chief counsel to President Reagan and served in the White House for another five years before again returning to private practice. Fielding became a member of the Bush-Cheney transition team in 2000. In 2002, he became a member ofthe National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Today, at age 64, he is a senior partner in the law firm Wiley Rein & Fielding LLP in Washington, D.C. In 1978, Bob Haldeman, Nixon's first chief of staff, wrote in his book The Ends of Power about his belief that Fielding was Deep Throat and that "only Dean, or his associate, had access from the White House to the CRP [Committee to Re-elect the President], the FBI and the Justice Department during Watergate." Fielding denied the charge at the time. But Woodward has said, as recently as October 2003 at a lecture, that "Deep Throat is a source who lied to his family, to his friends and colleagues denying that he had helped us." (Fielding did not respond to a request for comment.) When my students contacted Woodward during the first semester of the investigation and asked him if he would talk to us about our investigations of Deep Throat, he declined. When we approached Carl Bernstein to ask him about our final seven suspects, he denounced our project, saying it undermined journalistic principles to reveal the iden~ tity of a confidential source. On April 22, 2003, at a press conference in the Watergate Hotel, I announced that my students and I had deduced that Fred Fielding was indeed Deep Throat. The next day, I got an e-mail from John Dean: "I'll bet you a hundred dollars that you're wrong about Fielding." I took the bet. 0 About the Author: William Gaines earned a Pulitzer Prize reporting for the Chicago
Tribune.
Jack Kerouac
gave the Beat Generation its
name, coining it during a conversation with friend and fellow writer John Clellon Holmes. Kerouac certainly was its liveliest chronicler. In his novels, the now classic On the Road and later episodic rambles such as The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums, he told the story of the post-World War II counterculture. He was at the center of the Beats for many years, accompanied by poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and novelist William Burroughs, among others. On the Road is perhaps his best known and most read work, the perennial story of a young man's search for new experiences. It records Kerouac's hitchhiking trip across America, from New York to California. Now the original manuscript of On the Road has itself gone on the road. Purchased in 2001 for $2.43 million by Jim Irsay, owner of American football team the Indianapolis Colts, it has just begun a four-year nationwide tour. The original, first draft is legendary because Kerouac wrote it single-spaced, on a roll of teletype paper, nearly nonstop, in 21 days. The scroll will be displayed at 13 museums and libraries across the United States.
Ironically, when Kerouac died in 1969 at the age of 47, he was living on the edge of poverty. The scroll manuscript was passed from hand to hand until it wound up in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. It was auctioned in 2001. Irsay, whose social conscience led him to support the fight of a young HIV-positive boy to attend school in the 1980s, says having the manuscript is not about money: "Possessions I hold very lightly in the sense that they're kind of like very temporary borrowings," he told the Associated Press. "This will be someone else's and someone else's." Buddhism-influenced Kerouac would no doubt have approved. -L. T.
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