SPAN: March/April 2005

iramdasu Venkata Rama Rao, an Indian American painter from Palos Hills, near Chicago, was struck by the abstract expressionist movement while learning printmaking in London in 1962. The small-town art student from Gudivada in Andhra Pradesh realized his dream to study American abstract art forms, thanks to a fellowship from Tufts University in Boston in 1969.

"I did not want to miss the great cultural flowering of the time in painting happening in America," says 69-year-old Rao. He was influenced by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg (American), Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro (Spanish), and Georges Braque (French), who swept the art world with their new experiments in pop, cubist and abstract art. "I wanted to become not only a witness to but also a partic~ ipant in the American art," reminisces Rao. He said he moved toward abstract art z~ because it provides an opportunity to express, rather than illustrate, a feeling. ~ Cll The American art scene at the time was churning with change and Rao was well~ placed to develop his own style. He combines what he calls "Indian lyricism" and ~ sense of color with western forms. Most of his work has an Indian derivation-depicting the hills, the rivers running between them and the roads in the valleys.

Rao's work has received acclaim because of his ability to bring into it an oriental touch of poetical expression, a conjunction of color and preferences that are typically wash system of China, the Indian. His blending of three oriental traditions-the Japanese obsession with line and the Indian style of decoration-helped develop his distinct style. Rao's plan to combine the delicate colors of the East with the shapes and forms of the West enabled him to obtain a color mixture that is clear in its intensity. "I knew that if I make the people believe that I paint in oil, but it is really watercolor, then it is magic," says Rao. After leaving Tufts, he was offered a teaching job at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio in 1970, and after a year he became art professor at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

Rao's works have been exhibited at more than 60 galleries in India and abroad, including the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Second Bienalle de Paris International Art Exhibition in Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

His paintings are also displayed in the Fogg Art Museum in Boston and the Asia House Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Awards and recognition for his work have been extensive, but Rao was happy receiving the Padma Shri from President K.R. Narayanan in 2001. After retirement, this full-time, self-employed artist is experimenting with blending his style with realism and abstract expressionism.

-A.V.N.

S

F

SPAN VOLUME

XLVI

The Mailing of America

NUMBER 2

By A shish Kumar Sen

Publisher Michael H. Anderson

The Mall Mania

Editor-in-Chief Robert B. Richards

By Sudipt Arora

Editor Laurinda KeysLong

Remote Access

Associate Editor A. VenkataNarayana

By Alex Kingsbury

Higher Education Online

Hindi Editor Govind Singh

By Govind Singh

Urdu Editor AnjumNaim Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

Empowering Women through Education

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

By A. Venkata Narayana

Art Director Hemallt Bhatnagar

Strategic Partners in Defense

Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi

By Rahul Bedi

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

Walden's Ripple Effect

Printing Assistant Alok Kaushik

By Robert D. Richardson

Business Manager R. Narayan

Saving the Raja's Horse

Front cover: A portrait of Hunsraj, a Marwari horse from Rajasthan. Photograph by Dale Durfee, www.daledurfee.com.

See article on page 28.

By Jason Overdorf

Editor's note: In the article titled "Printmaking: Multiple Encounters" in the January/February 2005 issue, we inadvertently omitted reference to its American connection.

The exhibit was cosponsored by the Manhattan Graphics Center in New York.

American Involvement in Cripps Mission

By Dinyar Patel

The Sound War

STATEMENT FORM IV The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars aboul SPAN magazine as required under Section J 9D(b) of the Press & Registration of Books Act, 1867, and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, 1956.

2. Periodicity of Publication: 3. Printer's ame: Nationality Address

4. Publisher's

5. Editor's

Name: Nationality Address

Name: Nationality Address

6. Name and address of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one percent of the total capital:

Public Affairs Section American Embassy American Center 24, KaslUrba Gandhi Marg ew Delhi 110001 Bi-monthly GP. Todi Indian Ajanta Offset & Packaging Ltd. 95-B, Wazirpur Industrial Area Delhi 110052 Michael H. Anderson American 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001 Laurinda Keys Long American 24, KaslUrba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 11000 I The Govemment of the United States of America

By Evan T.Schwartz

Big-Picture Biotech

By Jon Cohen

On the Lighter Side Ritu Primlani

Environmentalism Made Feasible

By Dipesh Satapathy

Castinga Wide Net

By Joannie Fischer

Fighting TB Together

By Dinesh C. Sharma

I, Michael H. Anderson, hereby declare that the particulars above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

(Signed) Michael H. Anderson Signature of Publisher

given

Indian Ragas-American Jazz Ravi Shankar Meets Ravi Coltrane

By Laurinda Keys Long

A LETTER

FROM

'"""J"11e future of India's noble Marwari .1horse-with its hot temper, curly ears and legendary courage-is threatened by crossbreeding and misuse. After eight centuries in the subcontinent, the bloodlines of the warrior horses of Rajasthan have been diluted.

For our cover story, "Saving the Raja's Horse," Jason Overdorf relates the struggle of a U.S.based horse lover and her Indian friends to gain recognition for the breed's special qualities and export some of the horses to a protected environment in the United States. Photographs by Dale Durfee and Bob Langrish show why the Marwari is worth the effort.

"The Mailing of America," by Ashish Kumar Sen, describes the development of the shopping mall phenomenon that began in the 1930s and spread across the United States and around the world. Sudipt Arora explains how "The Mall Mania" exploded in India in just six years, adapting to the desires and pod<.:etbooks of the growing urban middle class.

Someday, customers strolling through a mall may find announcements and advertisements are being beamed to each of them individually. That's the dream of two inventors, using different approaches toward the same goal-changing the way we send and receive audio, writes Evan 1. Schwarz in "The Sound War." Anyone can Jom the war against tuberculosis.

A shoeLaurinda Keys Long maker or a teacher can be a volEditor unteer, monitoring a su ff ering neighbor to ensure that the full dosage of medicine is taken and the patient is cured.

The "directly observed therapy, short course" or DOTS system is winning battles against the disease, Dinesh C. Sharma explains in "Fighting TB Together."

Innovations in teaching are highlighted in a package of articles: Alex Kingsbury's "Remote Access" describes American teachers using computers to reach students in rural areas; in "Empowering Women through Education," A.Venkata Narayana focuses on a new experiment in rural India, while Govind Singh writes about the popularity of "Higher Education Online."

THE

PUBLISHER

Recent developments in U.S.-India cooperation are outlined

by Rahul Bedi in "Strategic Partners in Defense." U.S. interest in India's security and independence first emerged during World War II, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration worked with Indian freedom movement leaders and the British government. Dinyar Patel tells the story in "American Involvement in Cripps Mission."

It was 150 years ago that Henry David Thoreau retreated to a cabin at Walden Pond in Massachusetts to write his seminal treatise on individualism and the meaningful life. In "Walden's Ripple Effect," Robert D. Richardson says Thoreau's VValden is the ultimate self-help book on finding one's own convictions and living them out.

Another expression of individuality and freedom is jazz, an Anlerican-born musical form that grew from ragtime and blues in the middle of the last century. In the early 1960s, a personal connection with sitar master Ravi Shankar led one of America's jazz greats, John Coltrane, to draw Indian musical themes and structures into his work and to name one of his sons Ravi. A recent emotional reunion and spontaneous jam session in New Delhi between Shankar and jazz musician Ravi Coltrane is described in "Indian Ragas-Anlerican Jazz."

It is written by Laurinda Keys Long, the new editor of SPAN, who joins us after a 32-year journalism career with The Associated Press news agency and several American newspapers. Born into a musical family in Hollywood, Keys Long earned her journalism degree from the University of Southern California. She has worked in more than 30 countries and lived since 1999 in India, where she met her husband, Allahabad native Peter Vijay Long, an electrical contractor and consultant.

Keys Long succeeds Lea Terhune, who has returned to California after serving seven years as SPAN editor.

We are grateful to Terhune for her excellent work with SPAN and hope that she will continue to write and provide photographs for the magazine.

We hope you enjoy all of the articles we've chosen for this issue.

The --

erlca T

he opening of the Southdale Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Minnesota, in October 1956 heralded what author William S. Kowinski later described as the "malling of America."

It was certainly not the first shopping center in the United States, but this one was different. Southdale, the brainchild of Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen, was the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping center with a two-level design.

It had central air conditioning and heating, a garden courtyard, which was, at the time, one of the largest indoor public spaces in America, a theater, orchestra, goldfish pond, aviary, hanging plants and artificial trees. "Gruen wanted to recreate the Viennese Plaza in Edina," says James J. Farrell, the author of One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping.

A refugee who had fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1938, Gruen was regarded as a pioneer in modern store design. His plan for Southdale, which would serve as a blueprint for future malls

.~ E ~ ~ ~ ~

across the United States, encouraged shoppers to spend more time at the center.

"More people-for more hours-means cash registers ringing more often and for longer periods," he wrote in 1973.

Most industry professionals consider Southdale Center the first modern regional mall. In a 1956 interview, Herman Guttman, the original project manager of the Southdale Center, noted that there were "some people who at the time were quoted as saying Southdale would never be repeated, but they turned out to be dead wrong."

Kowinski, who spent two years traveling across the United States studying the phenomenon of the shopping mall, notes in his book, The Mailing of America, that shopping malls have become a way of life. "There are more shopping centers in the United States than movie theaters [and most movie theaters are now in shopping centers]. There are more shopping centers The West Market inside Mall of America in BLoomington, Minnesota, America Largest retaiL and entertainment compLex.

s

Shopping malls have become a way of life in America.

There are more shopping centers than movie theaters, school districts, hotels or hospitals.

There are more malls than cities, colleges or television stations.

The shopping center space has increased by a factor of 12 in the last 40 years.

than school districts, hotels or hospitals.

There are more malls than cities, fouryear colleges or television stations," he says. Farrell, who teaches history and is director of American studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, says shopping center space has increased by a factor of 12 in the last 40 years. By 2000, there were more than 45,000 shopping

malls in the United States, with 5.47 billion square feet of gross leaseable space.

Nancy E. Cohen, author of America's Marketplace: The History of Shopping Centers, writes that between 1860 and 1910, "such merchants as John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, R.H. Macy in New York and Marshall Field in Chicago built multi-story retail palaces, where attentive

sales clerks fit calfskin gloves, cut yards of lace and fetched an array of merchandise for the carriage trade." But the modern shopping center had its genesis in the 1920s, according to the New York Citybased International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSe).

The concept of developing a shopping district away from a downtown is general-

ly attributed to J.e. Nichols of Kansas City, Presidents and countless foreign dignitaries.

The 1980s was a period of unparalleled Missouri. His Country Club Plaza, which opened in 1922, was constructed as the growth in the shopping center industry, business district for a large-scale residenwith more than 16,000 centers built tial development. It featured unified archibetween 1980 and 1990, according to the tecture, paved and lighted parking lots, and ICSe. By the 1990s, factory outlet cenwas managed and operated as a single unit. ters-like Potomac Mills on the outskirts Cohen writes: "The supermarkets that of Washington, D.C., and a major tourist attraction in Virginia-were among the were replacing the corner grocer typically fastest growing segments of the industry. led the way into the suburbs. The proliferation of the refrigerator-a fixture in 91 perAs the 1990s drew to a close, Internet retailing was heralded as the wave of the cent of homes by 1954-had freed shoppers from a once-daily chore; they could future. In July 1998, Time magazine prenow load up their cars and fridges with a dicted the demise of the shopping mall. week's worth of groceries. But that required The magazine's cover advised its readers: parking. Supermarket chains had begun "Kiss Your Mall Good-Bye: Online expanding into the suburbs by building Shopping Is Cheaper, Quicker and Better." their own stores along the roadways; later, While the cover was purely sensational, the tone was clear, the ICSC notes in A they built a complementary strip of stores."

In the 1930s and '40s, Sears, Roebuck Brief History of Shopping Centers. The and Co. and Montgomery Ward set up shopping center industry was under large freestanding stores with on-site attack, yet again, from an alternative parking away from the big cities. In 1976, the country's first urban vertical mall, Water Tower Place, opened in Chicago on Michigan Avenue. To many industry experts, this mall with its stores, hotel, offices, condominiums and parking garage, remains the preeminent mixeduse project in the United States.

According to the ICSC, nighttime shopping was inaugurated at Town & Country Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, when developer Don Casto hired Grandma Carver (a woman who dived from a 90-foot perch into a 4-foot pool of flaming water) to perform her act in the lighted parking lot, bringing shopping center promotion to a new level.

During the 1970s, a number of new formats and shopping center types evolved. In 1976, the Columbia, South Carolina-based Rouse Co. developed Faneuil Hall ~ Marketplace in Boston, which "vas the first 8 of the festival marketplaces-a mall created in a historic location. Four years later, shopping format. Several years earlier, buoyed by its success in Boston, the Rouse similar claims were made about the Co. opened Harbor Place in downtown impact home television shopping would Baltimore, Maryland, with new buildings have on the industry. Unlike home televiconstmcted along a historic waterfront. In sion shopping, Internet retailing quickly Washington, D.e., Union Station is an captured the attention of the public, the example of a festival marketplace. The media and Wall Street as companies bustling station, situated a few blocks from rushed to develop Web sites that would the Capitol, has played host to 17 U.S. sell directly to consumers.

"Fearing the cannibalization of store sales, brick-and-mortar retailers at first were hesitant to sell directly to the public via the Internet," the ICSC publication says. "However, when it became apparent that they had some clear advantages over pure Internet retailers (brand name recognition, distribution facilities, supplier relationships, ability to accept returns at stores, etc.) brick-and-mortar retailers launched their own Web sites. These advantages quickly paid off ...." In 1998, conventional retailers' Web sites captured 60 percent of online sales.

The idea of entertainment has changed over the years. In Las Vegas, Grand Canal Shops at the Venetian, in the heart of the Nevada desert, features a gondola on a canal in the 500,000-square-foot shopping center. "As you shop, you can enjoy imitations of what they call Venetian 'streetmosphere,' including the Grand Canal,

The KiTe EaTing Tree inside Camp Snoopy in Mall of America.

Named after newspaper comic sTrip charaCTer Charlie Brown's kiTes, which keep landing in a "kiTe eating tree," this joy ride swings people around its trunk and over eighT meters above The ground.

Saint Mark's Square, and a wide range of strolling musicians and magicians.

Overhead, an electronic sky changes throughout the day," says Farrell.

The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, boasts the nation's largest indoor family theme park (Camp Snoopy), a 4.5-million-liter walk-through aquarium, a 14-screen movie theater, eight nightclubs, restaurants, more than 520 shops and other attractions. Opened in August 1992, the 4.2-million-square-foot complex, which cost $650 million to build, is the largest retail and entertainment complex in the United States. Minnesota's professional baseball and football teams, the Twins and the Vikings, moved from Met Stadium in Bloomington to the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis in 1982. The loss hit Bloomington hard but also gave the city 32 hectares of prime real estate. Four years later, the Ghelmezian brothers, who had just built the world's largest retail and entertainment center- West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada-signed a deal with the Bloomington Port Authority and teamed up with Melvin Simon and Associates to make Mall of America a reality.

Mall of America generates more than $1.7 billion each year and has put Minnesota on the map as a tourist destination. In fact, the Mall management says, tourism accounts for four out of every lO visits to the mall, the first in the industry to mix retail and entertainment. Dubbed the "Hollywood of the Midwest," Mall of America has been a site for movies Jingle All the Way and Mighty Ducks and the world premiere of lee Age. Most malls in the United States were built in the 1970s and '80s along traditional lines, but many new malls are turning to the Main Street concept that replicates the old-time downtowns for which shoppers are nostalgic. Patrice Duker, ICSC's manager of media relations, says malls today "are trying to be something for everyone." Many have included enter-

tainment opportullitles - movie multiplexes, themed restaurants, carousels and skating rinks.

According to the ICSC, there are more than 100 such lifestyle centers across the United States.

The impetus for these projects comes from a slowdown in the construction of new regional malls and the need of national specialty chains to find a new platform to support store growth. Also important is the desire of many consumers to combine the convenience of a strip shopping center with the panache of upscale retailers.

Lifestyle centers are most often located near affluent residential neighborhoods.

They typically range from 150,000 to 500,000 square feet of leasable retail area.

Defining features of these centers are open-air configuration, high-end national chain specialty stores, one or more sitdown restaurants and often a movie multiplex. The retail layouts and street patterns often reflect a Main Street type ambience.

But some malls are moving away from that theme. "People are very comfortable with the typical mall-a large, enclosed space with department stores and anchors," says Duker. "There are malls that have renovated and expanded to include different concepts of downtown feeling to them. In some cases the redesign is part of an effort to make an area unique on a competitive front. People are spending a lot of time in malls and developers are looking to make attractive properties."

Between 2002 and 2003, 36 malls reinvented themselves because the original concepts didn't meet what the consumers wanted. Last September, the Mills Corporation announced plans to renovate Potomac Mills, the second largest enclosed shopping center in Virginia.

The renovation efforts will focus on redesigning the nine shopping neighborhoods into five geographically distinct areas: mountain, valley, hill, plain, and coast. Within each of the five areas, the floor

and ceiling treatments will change patterns and colors, creating a more customer-friendly navigation system as customers' transition from one shopping area to the next.

In Ohio, the corporation revamped its Cincinnati Mills to include two educational and interactive play areas for children.

Developed in partnership with a Public Broadcasting Service television series, PBS Kids BackyardSM is a free place for families to play, learn and explore together. The mall always will be a social experience, says Duker.

So are shopping centers a good, or a bad thing? "The answer, of course, is 'Yes, they are!'" says Farrell. Malls are an American cultural phenomenon. Farrell says they "tell us a lot about America, revealing cultural patterns that we usually don't see.

They are places where we act out our values." Despite the challenge of e-commerce, he says, people like the pleasures of meeting and being seen with other people.

He is confident that malls "will be O.K." Many academics are disdainful of shopping centers, but Farrell says he finds much to appreciate. "Malls are a place for American conversations," he says. The retailers tell stories about "the good life," and about America.

The lingerie and women's clothing store Victoria's Secret, Farrell explains, is a romance novel; about bodies and beauty, about femininity and masculinity.

Sportsmart and Foot Locker are the sports page of the mall, telling stories about the games we play, about striving and success, and about embodiment in American culture. Toy stores and GapKids tell stories about what it means to be a child, and what it means to grow up. Abercrombie & Fitch combines adventure stories with coming-of-age stories. The Gap started by telling stories about the generation gap, but now their stories are about "cool" characters and their "casual" lives. The stories of progress at Radio Shack are often futuristic fantasies, while Hot Topic

Most malls in America were built in the 1970s and '80s along traditional lines.

But the new malls are turning to the Main Street concept, offering something for everyoneentertainment places, themed restaurants, carousels and skating rinks.

Far Left: The Grand CanaL Shops at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas features rides in an authentic ItaLian gondoLa, providing shoppers a taste of Venice in the heart of the Nevada desert.

Left: In the 1980s, BaLtimore's Inner Harbor was transformed from a dereLict waterfront to afestivaL marketpLace. HarborpLace offers a mix of shopping center and attractive public space.

tells stories about individualism and conformity, dissent and deviance.

The Rainforest Cafe tells adventure and nature stories. The department stores tell stories about abundance and choice.

Malls have contributed to suburban sprawl, but Farrell says opinions on this are a lot like the chicken-and-egg argument. "Malls go to the suburbs because people are moving there, but people do move to the suburbs because of the malls."

The biggest problem malls pose, he says, "is that they are the tip of the iceberg of an environmental disaster. We just use so much stuff without thinking about it."

In Sausal ito, California, a picturesque tourist destination across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, residents have long opposed the construction of a sprawling shopping complex in their midst.

George Stratigos, former vice mayor of Sausalito, says successful businesses have always led to an increase in traffic, and that's the last thing this idyllic city's residents want. But, he says, the community is not opposed to shops that are "exciting and useful to tourists and residents." The Village Fair-a group of stores once locat-

ed in downtown Sausalito, put the fonner fishing village on the tourist map with its unique offerings.

"Malls cost a fortune and you need credit tenants," says Farrell. "The most important [credit tenant] is GAP. Once it commits to go to a mall you know you're going to have good traffic there. So you get a mix of similar stores at malls across the country."

It's precisely this homogeneity that Stratigos finds boring. "American malls lack uniqueness. All they're about is retail and a little side entertainment," he says. He suggests public libraries should be at the centers of malls. "Shopping malls allow themselves to become closer to the community if they focus on more than just retai I." Duker says there is a growing trend toward adding "non-traditional anchors like post offices and libraries" at malls.

The ICSC reported that in 2000, America's shopping centers served 196 million customers a month.

They employed more than 10.6 million workers, which is about eight percent of the non-farm workforce in the country. Malls

also generate $46.6 billion in sales taxes, accounting for almost half of all state tax revenue. In a 2003 survey, ICSC found that on average, shoppers make 9.5 visits during any three-month period, or 38 trips to malls annually. Malls have made a difference, says Duker. "Besides being large generators of sales tax that goes to build local services and help communities, malls have become a gathering place.

They serve as an old town square."

After 9/l1, residents in Everett in Washington state, gathered at the Everett Mall, where an open space was converted into a memorial to those who died in the attacks. Some malls have places where children can display art, while others have spaces for seniors to exercise indoors.

"We have learned that not one approach works; there can't be a cookie-cutter approach," Duker says, adding, "We've had growing pains, but overall, the industry is strong and will continue to evolve and renovate itself."

D About the Author: Ashish Kumar Sen is a Washington-based journaList working with the Washington Times. He aLso contributes to the Tribune.

n much of the world, the local marketplace has evolved over centuries from open-air stalls in the town square, to stand-alone shops, organized high streets, and then the huge shopping centers and malls that erupted across the American landscape in the 1950s and spread to Europe, East Asia and Latin America.

In India, however, the development of shopping malls has literally been a revolution. The opening of the Indian economy in the early 1990s brought a wide range of new household appliances, stylish apparel, and other consumer goodies, along with plenty of media exposure. But what the Indian consumer still lacked was a world-class shopping experience: a pleasant, open, relaxing, air-conditioned place to compare prices, quality and styles without other customers trying to squeeze

through the shop doorway or shout over one's head to the proprietor.

"A good ambience is important to inspire a desire for shopping," says Sunil Chander, vice president for marketing operations at Crossroads, India's first operational mall that opened in Mumbai in 1999. The same year Ansal Plaza was started in New Delhi. Crossroads, built by the Piramal Group, set the pattern with a stunning 150,000 square feet of retail shops, displaying branded gadgets, clothes, home furnisrungs and luxuries behind huge glass walls, as if the visitor had just walked into a television advertisement.

Over the past six years, those first malls have grown into six million square feet of operational shopping mall space in Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Construction is proceeding so rapidly that the New York City-based

International Council of Shopping Centers predicts India will have 26.2 million square feet of malls by the end of the year, with 40 percent of it in the "national capital region" of New Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida.

"Nothing seems to symbolize India's transformation from a stagnant Th iI'd World country into an emerging economic superpower as much as its sparkling new malls," says Nidhi Benipuri, who works for American Express' business process outsourcing center in Gurgaon.

Benipuri and her husband are typical of India's growing population of workaholic city-dwellers who only find time to relax and have fun when they go shopping at the local mall on their day off.

"Malls are fast identifying customer needs to serve them better," and changing Indians' buying behavior. "I don't mind

Youngsters sociali::.e at McDonaLd's in the Metropolitan MaLL ill Gurgaoll.

Text by SUDIPT ARORA Pholographs by HEMANT

spending money on branded, good quality stuff," says Benipuri. "Malls provide a composite shopping experience and save a lot of time as we get almost everything under one roof."

With their roomy, stylish and glittering interiors, a wide range of stores in one place and handy fast-food outlets, malls are becoming the ideal place to hang out, in the view of millions of urban Indians, particularly the young.

The problem for retailers and mall operators is that those crowds of youngsters and family groups strolling along and gazing at all the pretty things are often not buying. India's malls generally are not yet making a profit.

Developers, retailers and brand franchisees are betting that will change. There are about 250 modern shopping centers, including malls, under construction now

BHATNAGAR

and another 250 being planned, says Amitabh Taneja, the Indian director for the International Council of Shopping Centers. "As India rushes into middle class consumerism, shopping centers have grown at an exponential pace, a pace unmatched anywhere at anytime in history," says Taneja.

The overall size of India's retail market is estimated at Rs. 5.88 trillion, according to Mahendra K. Sanghi, president of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM). But almost all of that is unorganized, he says, noting that the organized market's share is just Rs. 50 billion, including the Rs. 6 billion in the food and grocery trade.

But by 2008, say ASSOCHAM and other experts, organized retailing is expected to reach Rs. 1.6 trillion, and malls will have a big share.

"Initiatives of the central and state governments in the form of land allocation at concessional rates, grants of loans at liberalized interest rates to promoters of shopping malls, and rational ization of state levies are prime factors that will aggressively inspire organized retailing," says Sanghi.

Real estate developers and corporations are building, or developing plans for construction of malls in large and midsized cities across the country, even where malls already exist. Mumbai has 10 malls, plus two dozen shopping centers and department stores. Yet another 25 malls, measuring 90,000 to 600,000 square feet, are under construction as old, defunct textile factories in the suburbs are being converted. Space constraints and the high cost of real estate are inhibiting factors, however. A hefty Rs. 4 billion is being pumped into these projects by 20 investors, according to Images-KSA Tecknopak, a think tank on the retail industry.

While southern metros such as Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore have always had big shopping complexes (Spencer Plaza in Chennai, for instance), new ones are coming up.

The trend is spreading to smaller cities such as Jaipur, Ludhiana, Pune and Indore.

The half dozen malls in Ahmedabad attracted huge crowds during the last Diwali season, with lots of freebies, discounts and lucky draws.

The economic changes initiated by the government in the 1990s provided opportunities to millions of job seekers, expanding the country's middle class and its disposable income. With this added wealth, Indians now travel more and see how shopping patterns differ elsewhere in the world. In the past, lack of money, opportunity and choice-along with traditions of asceticism and simplicity-checked the spread of the modern Western "buying is fun" culture. Television, travel, the twinkling neon lights and soaring steel facades of the Indian malls have convinced many urban Indians that it's O.K. now to go out for a weekend splurge.

The change is obvious on the once dull, dusty New Delhi-Gurgaon border. As a

half-dozen sparkling shopping centers sprout along Gurgaon's so-called Mall Mile, multi-laned highways cany streams of customers from India's capital and surrounding areas. They are dumped into a chaos of honking, swerving cars and monster-sized advertising banners.

One major difference between Indian malls and those in the United States is the allocation of parking space. Malls in America were planned on the outskirts of the cities, just as those in India, but the designs in the United States include vast

end of 2007, says Ajay Khanna, chief executive officer of DLF Retail, which runs the city's biggest mall, DLF City Centre.

A large, young working population; nuclear families in urban areas; growing numbers of working women and opportunities in the services sector are the key growth drivers of the organized retail sector. The number of Indians below the age of 34-the malls' chief hope for the future-is 728 million, almost 70 percent of the population, according to the Indian government. These youngsters meet up

The Gold Souk in Gurgaon, promoted by tile Aerel/s Group, is a one-stop shopping arcade for jewelry, gems and luxury watch mallufacturers.

More sucll souks are planlledfor Pune, Koclli and Nashik.

Seen here are women coming out of the souk.

areas for parking, in underground basements, multi-storied garages or on huge concrete fields. Indian mall developers have not had to meet the same standards as their American counterparts, who are required by government agencies to provide a set number of parking spaces for the expected number of customers.

Because Indian maIls are so new, developers may not have been able to estimate their popularity, but fighting to find parking space sours that pleasant shopping experience the malls are meant to offer.

Indian malls are also generally more crowded inside, with less space left unused to allow the customer a sense of openness, although many of the riewest centers have play areas for children as part of the "family outing" appeal.

It's going to get more crowded, too.

Gurgaon alone will have 15 malls by the

with friends at casual restaurants in the malls such as Cafe Coffee Days and Barista, each vying to be the Starbucks of India. More young people also view shopping-or "window-shopping" without buying-as an enjoyable pastime.

The malls feature American and European chains such as McDonald's, Lacoste, Pizza Hut, Benetton, Subway, Marks and Spencer. The success of the international branded retailers spurred Indian chains such as Pantaloon, Globus, Shoppers Stop, Giant, Lifestyle and Big Bazaar to lease space in maIls. American malls, and those in East Asian hubs such as Singapore, provide food courts as a major draw, where customers have a wide choice of different eating styles. The current Indian malls have only a few restaurants.

In malls overseas, major brands such as

Torruny Hilfiger, Swatch, Arrow, Louis Vuitton and Nike are signed up for space first to provide an "anchor" and attract other retailers. However, since India does not yet allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in the retail sector, foreign companies such as Nike, McDonald's and Reebok sell at mall outlets through their Indian subsidiaries or franchisees.

Malls are also raising the profiles and property values of residential localities near them, just as proximity to a convenient mall adds to the price of a private home in the United States, as long as the house is not too close to the traffic. Some Indian urbanites also now base their flatbuying decisions on the presence of a mall in the vicinity.

Because most Indian mall visitors are not yet mall shoppers-but come to enjoy the cool air and interesting sights-many outlets, including restaurants at malls in Gurgaon and New Delhi, have closed down. Many retailers who bought space at Fifth Avenue, one of Bangalore's earliest malls, have folded. "There will be finetuning and some of the not-so-good ones may not survive," says Khanna of DLF Retail. "But those who develop mall management into a fine science will be ultimate gainers."

The mall mania is based on an assumption that people will desert neighborhood retail stores and buy into the promise of a better shopping experience. But this is yet to happen. Neighborhood stores remain in place. Grocery sales are still dominated by kirana, or small family-owned stores, that offer credit to customers who often make daily visits.

Indian malls have not yet given space to the large grocery stores that are in most American malls, making it easier for customers to do all their shopping in one place. Some U.S. malls even have adjoining car repair garages, so the tires can be realigned and the oil changed while the family buys food, clothes, toys and gifts, then takes in a quick dinner and a movie.

"Not all centers are created equal, and there is a high probability that many of India's new centers may not survive," says Taneja of the shopping center council. "The long-term viability of any retail

development requires a design plan that can stand the test of time, particularly the inevitable onslaught of new competition.

With a well conceived, thought-out and executed design plan, survivability and profitability are much more likely."

As many malls have nothing to differentiate them from one another-just the general mix of clothing, consumer appliances and lifestyle products-for specific purchases, shoppers still must visit specialized markets. Upcoming specialty malls seem to be an answer. "When we did a study, we realized a general mall wouldn't work," says Rohtas Goel, chairman and managing director of Omaxe group.

"Customers have specific needs." Omaxe is building a wedding mall in Gurgaon, which will house everything from trousseau to event managers and jewelry.

The nearby Gold Souk, promoted by the New Delhi-based real estate developer Aerens Group. is a one-stop shopping arcade for jewelry, gems and luxury watch manufacturers. "In India, jewelry buying is a special occasion," says G.S. Pillai of Gold Souk. "So we felt a secure environment where all jewelry brands are under one roof, with childcare and food facilities thrown in, would work."

AMERICAN MALLS • • • • • • •

Started 1930s Laws stipulate parking versus retail floor space ratio Subtle, softer music More open, unused space Similar mix of store types Most contain grocers Variety of dining choices, seen as money-earners

All of Gold Souk's shops are not yet open, however, and recently a group of a half-dozen ladies were seen leaving the mall, having looked but not purchased.

Nevertheless, Pillai believes customers will eventually prefer the malls to the traditional gold markets. Now, even the shops in "Delhi's sprawling retail marker. .. are taking up space in gold souks," he says. More gold souks are being planned in other metros, as well as in cities with high gold sales such as Pune, Kochi and Nashik.

Within the next year or two, Calcutta will see a furnishings mall on Elgin Road, says the local developer, much like Arcus Plaza in Gurgaon and the upcoming Urban Spaces in Pune.

Senior Developers Ltd. talks of building

INDIAN MALLS • Started 1999 • Inadequate parking detracts from shopping experience • Louder music in shops and public areas • More space allocated to stores • Innovation: themed malls • No grocers • Just a few fast-food purveyors, viewed as rest stops a 10-story auto mall in Gurgaon, with a rooftop testing track, but that is years away.

Retail is India's largest industry, accounting for more than 10 percent of the country's GDP and around 8 percent of the employment, according to figures of the ational Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER). It is one of the fastest growing sectors, but because of the high initial investments required, breaking even is difficult.

India is now examining a proposal to allow FDI into the retail sector. Big-time retailers want it, but a large section of small and middle rung sellers are opposed, saying foreign competition will be detrimental to local needs. Minister for Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath said early this year he is consulting Indian industry and preparing a policy. Only two percent of India's retail trade is in the organized sector and half of the remainder is run by subsistence, family-run small businesses. he said.

Also, foreign mall operators cannot bring their expertise and ideas into India because FDI in real estate is now restricted to construction and development of integrated townships with a minimum area of 40 hectares.

Meanwhile, India's middle class is exploding in size. NCAER statistics say the number of middle class workers is 300 million, each earning Rs. 100.000 to 300.000 a year, and is predicted to rise to 445 million in the next couple of years.

The future of malls seems promising.

0

About the Author: Sudipr Arora is a NeH' Delhi-based senior correspondent \\'irh rhe Unired News of India. Lalll'inda Keys Long conrribured to rhis arric!e.

Rural schools around the United States are expanding students' options with e-classes arly one recent Thursday mOI11ing, three bleary-eyed teenagers at the Emery School in a remote ~ corner of southeastern South Dakota are struggling to concentrate on their Advanced Placement calculus course.

Sensing that she's losing her audience, veteran teacher Mary Cundy calls on Andrew Pluth, an 18-year-old senior, to show the class his solution to a particularly tricky problem. He walks to the front of the room and sets his calculator under a video camera, which broadcasts his equations (and his bright red T-shirt with "Your Mom's Got It Going On" written across the chest) to Cundy - who is more than 400 kilometers away - and to his 20 distance-learning classmates at five locations around the state. Being on television every morning can be a drag. Fluth says, but the altemative would be not taking calculus at all.

The talJest building in Emery, population 439, is the four-story grain silo on the main street (it's called a prairie skyscraper). The nearest city, Sioux Falls, is more than an hour's drive across 105 kilometers of open farmland.

Rural schools like Emery, which houses 200 students from kindergarten to 12th grade, often have difficulty attracting and retaining teachers and frequently lack the resources to offer advanced courses in math or anything else. Yet for all its remoteness, Emery has state-of-the-art technology that allows students to stay competiti ve with their big-school counterparts: wireless Internet connectivity, laptops provided by

the school for all seniors,

and access to a

wide variety of online classes through the statewide Digital Dakota Network.

"It broadens their horizons," says Jean Clarke. a family and consumer-science teacher who was the first at Emery to teach on the network five years ago. She has seen teens make friends-some have even snagged (arranged) prom dateswhile taking long-distance classes.

Across the United States, e-leaming has changed from a technological curiosity to an integral part of rural public school education, offering more class options to students and even educating teachers.

Forty-three percent of America's public schools-and nearly one-third of the country's 48 million public school studentsare in rural communities.

Now, with the spread of advanced technology that aims to close the "digital divide" and make public education more equitable, groups of isolated schools in more than a dozen statesincluding Minnesota, North Carolina, and Oklahoma-can share qualified teachers in subjects like physics, advanced math, and foreign languages.

High-speed data networks cany math classes to American Indian reservations in Montana, bring arts and health courses to the hills of West Virginia, and provide an outlet for psychologists and other school staff in Nebraska to discuss student disability diagnoses.

Hybrids. Traditional

e-learning can be a lonely proposition-a digital version of old-fashioned correspondence courses.

Students study solo at their computers, reading texts, writing essays, and talking through e-mail to their instructors and classmates. True, these classes live up to the promise of "any class. anytime, and anywhere."

But the newest generation of e-classes goes further by merging videoconferencing with computer coursework.

These hybrid e-courses take the best of each system and attempt to simulate the traditional classroom ex perience - al beit with a few digital props.

At Emery, students watch their teacher on a projection television screen at the front of the classroom while sound-sensitive video cameras can move from teacher to student when somebody asks a question. Laptop computers at each site coordinate video feeds, and an on-site staff monitor ensures that everything runs smoothly.

Students seem unfazed by this unconventional setting. "At first, I was nervous about taking a language class because there was no teacher in the room, but after a while you don't even notice the difference," says Virginia Langle. a junior at Emery who took Spanish I in 2003 and began Spanish II last fall (the school's only language instructor teaches German).

Despite the physical distance from their teachers, students can receive personal attention when they need it: Instructors offer small early-morning study groups through the videoconferencing system and contact students on the phone or via e-mail if they seek individual help.

Teachers even write college recommenda-

tions for teens they may never have met in the flesh. Forgoing an in-house instructor, students and teachers agree, is a small price to pay for access to courses (such as two years of a foreign language) that are required to receive a South Dakota Regents scholarship or that keep them engaged. Fluth, who wants to pursue a career in Web site design, says he was bored with lower-level math classes until he had a chance to take Advanced Placement calculus last year. ''I'm taking the class for the challenge," he says.

Schools are also deploying their tech infrastructure to instruct teachers. The No Child Left Behind Act (signed by President Bush on January 8, 2002, it aims at reforming schools, empowering parents and improving education for all children) established new certification standards for teachers and classroom aides by requiring them to be "highly qualified" in the subjects they teach. This has especially burdened rural schools,

where instructors often teach several subjects and have limited access to continuing education. Now several states, including Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa, offer teachers and other staff classes toward advanced degrees or professional certification through distance learning.

Cann.cted. These courses have been a boon for educators like Marilyn Vercimak, assistant superintendent and clllTiculum director at Wyoming's 1,700student Carbon County school district. The nearest college is a five-hour drive, so she took classes for her masters and PhD in education through statewide networks that connect every school district with two-way audio and video systems. As it was, she still had to drive 122 kilometers to the nearest school with an e-class facility offering certain courses she needed. "Where I am is so rural that you have to drive a long distance just to access distance learning."

No matter how isolated their locations,

Gayla Marrens reaches Spanishjrom Aberdeen, South Dakora, ro studenrs 275 kilomerers alVay in Salem, Massachusetls.

rural students have access to a surprising range of virtual experiences. Last spring, Amy Garrett, a U.S. park ranger at the Homestead ational Monument of America in southeast Nebraska, used a mobile e-learning cart with a computer and video cameras to broadcast a controlled l2-hectare prairie fire live to a consortium of public schools around the state. Garrett, who teaches weekly classes on the park's exhibits to public schoolers around the state, says it was like an interactive video field trip. "The kids were so close, they said the only thing missing was the smell of the smoke," she says-but no permission slips were required.

D About the Author: Alex Kingsbury is a reporter Il'irh U.S. News & World Report.

Q Earn your degree when and where you want. Advance your career with an online degree.

notes containing animation and graphic pictures. So the lessons cease to be dull and monotonous. In a way, it is more effective than conventional education.

Online education Q Earn your bachelor's, master's, This holds true because in a class of 40gradually penetrates or doctorate degree online. Choose SO students, the teacher may err, but in a multimedia program, the teacher is from over 600 courses in 40 areas India as students and answerable to thousands of students." of specialization. institutes learn more Unlike traditional students-who usuabout its benefits Q If you're serious about your future, alJy attend university in their twenties before entering a profession-the online get serious about the online school student community is diverse in you choose. lifestyle, background, age and needs. any universities and colleges in the United States and Online learning at times provides the only educational opportunielsewhere have been luring students with such adverty for people preoccupied with work, family or other obligations. tisements offering coveted degrees as new technology Working professionals, the physically challenged, educators or has brought long-distance education online. With a computer military personnel who cannot manage time to attend an on-camand Internet access, students can pursue an academic course, pus course benefit from online classes. without being present in classroom.

Online students save time, travel and lodging expenses, As a consequence, many students and professionals with var- although the fee for an online credit hour is the same as for a credied profiles who want to further their careers are opting for it hour on campus. Most online colleges and universities use proctors at centers within the country and abroad to monitor exams. online degrees. It's now possible to earn a degree from a university abroad while remaining at home.

Through the Internet, text material can be sent anytime, anyThe trend to acquire online degrees and diplomas began in the where according to convenjence. The transfer of text and graphUnited States in the 1990s and European countries followed suit. ics is faster and more reliable than through the mail, making students part of a global communjty. As in a classroom, students in The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in New Delhi started admitting students for online courses five years online courses are formed into groups where they can discuss the subject and share notes. Students also chat with teachers. ago, aiming to democratize higher studies and provide affordable Anup Chawla, an associate professor with the Indian Institute quality education to students even in remote areas.

Mark Rosenberg, executive vice president and provost of of Technology in New Delhi, who has been associated with the Florida International University in Miami, says that it is not just University ofIJIinois' online education center, says, "Every instithe promise of impressive technology that is luring people to electute does not have to be an expert on every subject. With multitronic-learning, but the need to keep abreast of the changes in media and other technological tools, online courses for science business. Companies such as AT&T, Cisco Systems and Lucent and technology can now be made possible."

Marmar Technologies offer their employees online courses at lower costs.

Mukhopadhyay, adviser with ClassteacheLcom and director of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Rosenberg writes in his book, E-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age: "Unlike education Administration in ew Delhi, says, "The monopoly of the classroom as a source of education has been broken. The students through correspondence, the student remains in constant touch with his teacher. He can seek guidance from the teacher. Lessons should have the freedom to choose their medium."

Online education is proving to be a boon for those who had taken which are received through the Internet are not plinted notes but

M

www.onlineuc.net www.aacc.nche.edu www.distance-educator.com www.online.uillinois.edu www.du.edu/uts/training/online/ www.umass.edu/umhome/academics/online. html

up jobs without completing their education. The same holds true for housewives and teachers who want to keep themselves updated.

American universities are the global leaders in online courses.

According to a CNN survey, 90 percent of state-funded institutes and 40 percent of private institutes in the United States are offering higher education online. Under the aegis of the American Association of Community Colleges, more than 550 institutes are offeling online graduate and postgraduate courses. The Online University Consortium is also spearheading medical education in various universities. Greg Eisenbarth, executive director of the consortium, says, "Universities don't want to miss the market opportunity online education presents and adult leamers at company cites increasingly need qualified online degree programs that are delivered by quality universities."

More importantly, the online degrees hold the same value as regular on-campus degrees. Reputed institutions such as the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Denver in Colorado have entered the online degree market.

In India a handful of private institutes and universities have started offering online courses and degrees, plus coaching for medical and engineering examjnations. Some corporate houses are encouraging their staff to take online professional courses. E-gurukool.com, Zeelearn.com, Classteacher.com, NetVarsity.com, Aptech Limited, Brainvisa.com and Evidyarthi.com are some of the institutes in India that offer personalized professional courses to corporate executives.

NetVarsity.com, hosted by NUT Online Learning Ltd., offers 300 onljne courses that encompass the needs of a beginner just starting to use a computer to a programmer to someone preparing for the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer examjnation. Some popular NUT courses online are on public speaking and mabng a dynamic presentation. According to Uday Singh, head of NUT online courses, the university has mostly professional employees enrolling in online courses to enhance their sblls to fit into the global work environment. "We are making our courses more interactive with learners. Our programs such as Online Open Forum and Expert Opiillon recreate the expelience of a classroom. When the broadband Internet connectivity improves within the country, we feel student enrollment will obviously go up in the next four to

~

five years," says Singh. Because of convenience and cost factors, more than 10,000 students from Nepal, Bhutan and Brazil are enrolled with etVarsity. Besides courses on infonnation technology, NetVarsity has an array of online courses on soft skill development and project management.

The Institute of Management Technology in Ghaziabad near New Delhi offers management courses online. It enrolls students in a two-year eMBA and a one-year diploma course. Anupam Kumar Gupta, program officer of the institute's e-Ieall1ing courses, says, "We are running the tlJjrd session now with 700 students and the number is increasing day by day." The institute has WWw.netvarsity.com a three-tier delivery www.imtonline.org system-its main www.ignou.ac.in office, two regional WWw.e-gurukool.com centers and 110 study www.evidyarthLcom centers located across www.zeelearn.com the country. Students www.classteacher.com seek counseling from their nearest center.

Each student gets a login ID and password after adlmssion. The study material is available online, along with CDs and interactive course material. Students can also chat with the faculty. Assignments, case studies and examinations are done online. According to Gupta, the cost of a two-year eMBA course is Rs. 60,000 and a one-year diploma is Rs. 15,000.

Conventional universities in India are yet to take the online path. Says IGNOU Vice Chancellor H.P. Dikshit: "We've explored every technical possibiljty while preparing our selflearning material. The methodology we developed for e-Iearning is being extended to other e-learning courses of the university. In all, we have put on offer six online programs and intend to increase such offerings." Dikshit maintains that such jnitiatives can eradicate problems related to access, equity and quality of education in India and abroad and contribute meaningfully to the goals of national development.

0

"ANMA'C"""

'"" 15

A student of Pard ardadi School in An shahar workin n a home furnishing broid

Empowering Women through Education Text by A. VENKATA Photographs

by HEMANT

NARAYANA BHATNAGAR

e Pardada Pardadi Girls'

t

Vocational School is touching the hearts and lives of thousands of socially backward and economically poor students and their families in Anupshahar.

This unique school, set up in 2000 in Uttar Pradesh, is teaching rural girls skills that are immediately marketable and bring in cash as they study. Its teaching method, focused on valueadded academics and skill-based vocational courses. caught the

imagination of people who perceive it as a means to combat illiteracy, gender discrimination and unemployment in the area.

The school aims to build a society with equal opportunity for women in development and income generation in a family.

"The need of the hour is to provide both academic and vocational education in schools. This will help tackle the decadesold problems daunting the rural society, such as poverty, gender discrimination and illiteracy," says Virender Sam Singh, an Indian American who was bom in the region and now promotes this distinctive expeliment in education. "If you educate girls you are educating the entire family. Girls with education and vocational training become socially independent and financially self-sufficient. We believe that the woman, as the center of the family, plays an important role in any rural amelioration

Clockwise, from right: Studenrs of lhe Pardada Pardadi School in Anupshahar working on a home furnishing; girls working on computers donated by the Program Development Office of the U.S. Embassy; as commuting is an issue in the region, girls who lravellong distances get free bicycles.

Left: School promoler Virender Sam Singh spending time with schoolchildren during lunch hOLlI:

,

,

If you educate girls

you are educating the entire family. Girls with education and vocational training become socially independent and financially

self-sufficient. " program. Without education and gainful employment, women cannot bring stability to the family and help enhance the family's social and economic status," says Singh, who is fondly called "Sam" by his friends and locals. He retired in 2000 after serving 37 years with DuPont Corporation, an American multinational company with utilities, textiles, pharmaceutical and chemical interests. ow he aims to fully devote himself to the school's mission of helping girls become economically and socially enlightened. He returned to Bichola, his native village, to do something for the daughters of landless farmers and agricultural laborers.

Sam Singh believes that if India is to progress, education and empowerment of women must be given high priority. If the quality of life of the rural population improves, the quality of life of everyone in the country obviously will go up, says Sam Singh, who donated Rs. 20 million and 17 hectares of land to set up the schoo!'

Poverty, illiteracy and child maniage force many girls in the area to drop out of school by 12 or 13. Employment avenues after school or college are minima!' Women, in particular, have to cope with gender discrimination at every step. As the area is crime-prone, parents discourage their daughters from attending school, fearing for their safety.

The Pardada Pardadi School worked to overcome these hindrances by offering incentives and outreach programs to earn the goodwill of villagers. The school offers a congenial and friendly atmosphere, and doesn't discriminate on the basis of caste or class. Offers of free education, food, uniforms, books and bicycles for commuting generated a great deal of interest among children. Transportation is a key issue in the area for girls, as some commute 20 kilometers daily. Parents are welcome to openly express their views and discuss their problems with the school

authorities. As a result, the dropout rate, which was 65 percent in 2000, has come down to 9 percent in the current academic year.

Jobs are scarce in the agricultural belt of Anupshahar, one reason why parents are excited about the school's unique employment guarantee plan and an incentive of Rs. 100,000 cash for each girl who completes her education. Girls who complete schooling in academic year 2007 will receive the full cash incentive. Even if the girl leaves school early, she will get the amount that has been deposited in her bank account daily for her vocational work.

Excellence in academics and vocational training are equally important at Pardada Pardadi Schoo!' The first session is devoted to studies, and after lunch the girls are trained in embroidery, sewing, aari, resham, zardozi, applique and block printing. The girls are grouped according to their aptitude, skill and age. After two years of training, seven- to eight-year-old girls become professionally skilled. The sale of products manufactured by junior girls fetches each Rs. 30 per day and senior girls earn Rs. 70 per day. Out of these earnings, Rs. 10 is put in fixed bank deposits in the girls' individual accounts.

According to school principal Shankar Sinha, the school's caveat that the individual fixed deposits are allowed to be withdrawn only after the girl completes schooling is working in favor of preventing child marriage.

Villagers in the region have great hope about the school's initiative. Baran Singh, a retired army soldier of nearby Dugrou village, said he would have to spend Rs. 2,000 on each child for similar education in any private school. His daughter, Alkesh, is in class VII and her niece, Krishna, studies in class IV. But at Pardada Pardadi School, " ... children are given an opportunity to

grow to their fullest potential. Free education, free meals and the cash incentive at the end of the schooling are beyond our expectation," Baran Singh says. "The difference in children from Pat'dada Pat'dadi and other schools in the area is remat'kable. These students gain confidence and the ability to take care of themselves."

Sinha, a workaholic, travels to villages on weekends to interact and get feedback from parents. "Such visits have a beneficial effect because parents freely discuss their problems. Through interaction with villagers we assess the socio-economic background of children the school intends to admit next year," says Sinha. The number of students has increased to 286 this year, covering 80 villages. That is a six-fold increase from 45 in 2000. The school plans to cover all 198 villages in the region by 2007, admitting nearly 1,000 students. Sam Singh hopes that the school will serve as a model for girls' education and village development. The school's long-term plan is to provide academic courses and vocational training for at least one girl from each of the 50,000 poor families in the Anupshahat' region.

Marketing world-class home furnishings such as curtains, cushions, bedspreads and wall hangings, produced by students during their vocational courses, is the key to the success of the school model. The finished products are sold at various outletsPlaza Mall in Gurgaon and the Central Cottage Industries Corporation emporiums in Mumbai and New Delhi. The school also displayed the high-end products at recent national and international exhibitions in New Delhi.

"India has lots of hands with tremendous skills, and why not use them for productive gain," says Renuka, the school's director of development. She says the school expects to attain sustainability within a couple of years. The design of fabrics and

furnishings is handled by Madhu Singh, a ew Delhi-based design consultant who helps market the products.

Several individual donors and charity organizations have been supporting Sam Singh's initiative. In December 2004, the Program Development Office of the U.S. Embassy gave a $43,600 grant to set up a computer lab in the school for providing computer education to 500 girls for two years. It also donated 20 computers and two printers in support of the program. The computer lab is run on diesel because of enatic power supply in the region. Sofia Blake, wife of Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy Robert Blake, and Michael H. Anderson, Country Public Affairs Officer, inaugurated the computer center, named after Helen Keller, an American icon for the physically challenged. "The computers make schoolchildren design-conscious. They give the children a tool to deal with the modern world and the confidence when they go for higher education. In the practical sense they eventually will be able to use computers for design and keeping track of vocational work they are doing," says Bat'bara Hibben, the Embassy grants officer. "This grants program is designed to fit into the mission plan of improving mutual understanding between the two countries and empowerment of women to become economically and socially enlightened in society."

Like Sam Singh, the students want to help their village and community. They talk about coming back to work as teachers or vocational trainees. Sam Singh believes that this will have a multiplier effect and could be a model for rural development. "Too many people are involved in agriculture in India which is not providing gainful employment," he adds, "so we need to impart education in a holistic manner that will address the interrelated issues of poverty, illiteracy and gender discrimination."

0

Strategic Partners inDelense urgeoningU.S.-India defense and strategic relations are poised to increase following the continuing series of joint military exercises, equipment sales, reciprocal visits by senior commanders and doctrinal exchanges.

The latest impetus to strengthening bilateral strategic ties came last September when Washington eased export controls on India's civilian nuclear and space facilities. Since January 2003 ~ the two sides have worked on liberalizing high technology trans- ~ fers to India as a follow-up on the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership ( SSP) initiative.

U.S. restrictions on transfelTing space and "dual use" technologies that came into effect after India's first nuclear test in 1974, and were reaffirmed after the \998 nuclear tests, were initially eased and sanctions were lifted in 200 I. India is signatory to none of the nuclear-restraint regimes such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

"These efforts [on the NSSPj have enabled the U.S. to make modifications to U.S. export licensing policies that will foster cooperation in commercial space programs and permit certain exports to power plants at safeguarded nuclear facilities," the two sides declared in a joint statement in Washington, D.C. ~ "The fIrst phase in the NSSP is more fIxed on the space side," ÂŤ India's Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said after talks with U.S. Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman in Washington, D.C., ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's meeting with President George W. Bush in New York last September. When we get to the second phase, it will be focused perhaps a little more on the nuclear stage, he Above: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld makes a stcllemeJ1l added. ew Delhi, in rerum, has promised to tighten controls on furafter his meeting lI'ith his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukheljee ther exporting this technology gamered from the United States. in Nell' Delhi in Decemba In ovember 2002, India and the United States established the Top, right: Indian and American soldiers board an Indian transport High Technology Cooperation Group (HTCG). the first formal plane in Agra in Mo.\' 2002 as part of a joint military exercise. working group Washington set up with any country to deal seriTop: U.S. and Indian Army paratroopers at the Agra exercise.

B

A strong U.S.-India defense partnership could be a key

ously with this long-standing bottleneck in bilateral relations over high technology transfers. Ever since. progress has been gathering momentum following a series of high-level meetings in the two countries between senior officials.

"Any effort to develop a strong political and economic relationship between India and the United States must address the technology denial issue. No worthwhile strategic relationship can be built between the two countries unless the strategic issues involving India's nuclear and missile programs are resolved in a manner consistent with India's dignity, security and sovereignty," says former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal who negotiated extensively with the United States. Sibal, presently India's envoy in Moscow, warns, that considering the sensitivity of the subject and its linkage to the non-proliferation issue, progress was bound to be slow. But the seriousness with which the exercise is being undertaken was unprecedented, he adds.

The sixth Defense Policy Group (DPG) meeting chaired by India's former Defence Secretary Ajay Prasad and U.S. Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith in ew Delhi last June reaffirmed their commitment to close military and strategic ties

shortly after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assumed office.

The DPG highlighted headway made in the Malabar. COPE India and Cooperative Cope Thunder, Yudh Abhyas, and the Iroquois series of military exercises. There was also greater progress in interaction and interoperability between both militaries through 2004. The United States also issued invitations to fndia for the July 2004 Missile Defense Conference in Berlin and Roving Sands Exercise in 2005, and a series of four missile defense planning events culminating in a Command Post Exercise in 2006.

One area of discussion at the June DPG meeting concerned the Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement (ACSA) that seeks to formalize the logistical relationship between the two militaries.

Both sides discussed the draft ACSA agreement, which is still pending with the Indian government. This agreement is a logistics billing arrangement that could cover issues such as mutual billing for charges on exercises and other services provided.

"Indo-U.S. Military Relationship: Expectations and Perceptions," an analysis prepared by a non-U.S. government organization, fnformation Assurance Technology Analysis Center (IATAC), in

stabilizing factor in the future Asian environment.

Military cooperation has included regular joint exercises and equipment deals. Fighting terrorism is a high priority for both India and the U.S., despite some differences on strategic issues.

October 2002, concluded that Washington's motive in forging closer military ties with ew Delhi was to have a "capable partner" to take on "more responsibility for low-end operations" in Asia.

The IATAC report, produced after interviewing 82 senior American and Indian officials, mostly military personnel linked closely with furthering bilateral security ties, views the strategic relationship with India as a "hedge" against losing significant allies such as Japan and South Korea. American interviewees argued that with India as a strategic partner, the future Asian environment might be less threatening and more easily managed.

Fearing that Asia could become hostile and dangerous to continuing American military presence in the region, the report argued that the United States also considered strategically engaging India as a "future investment." After 9111 Washington has, other than in Afghanistan and to a lesser extent in Pakistan, significantly extended its military presence across Asia through a complex web of alliances backed by economic incentives. This includes defense cooperation agreements with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, a limited degree of influence over turbulent states such as Sri Lanka and Nepal, and a military presence in Southeast and Far East Asia that is presently being reviewed.

India has already allowed the U.S. Army admittance to its Counter Insurgency Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) at Virangte in the northeast, but is still considering opening up the High Altitude Warfare School (HAWS) at Gulmarg in western Kashmir.

But despite this restriction, U.S. and Indian special forces jointly conducted high altitude exercises in Ladakh in September 2003 to augment "inter-operability" between the two armies.

These exercises, conducted after similar maneuvers at Agra a year earlier, were the first time India had permitted foreign troops into the geographically strategic region bordering Pakistan and China for the three-week Balanced lroquoislVajra Prahaar (lightning attack) exercises.

'The exercises-that included rock craft, cliff assault techniques and surveillance-were at heights above 11.500 feet on barren hills and rocky ten'ain not available in the U.S.A," says former Lieutenant General Arvind Sharma, commander of the locally based XIV corps that hosted the maneuvers. The exercises herald a new long-term strategic and military understanding between India and the United States that has emerged after the 9111 terrorist attacks, he added.

India is working to acquire $31 million worth of special forces equipment to enhance its counter-terrorism capabilities and for "equipment commonality" to facilitate future joint operations.

Details of the equipment purchases are still being worked out.

Meanwhile, the Indian Air Force (IAF) sent its Jaguar fighters to participate in Cooperative Cope Thunder 2004 exercises in Alaska in July, five months after carrying out joint aerial maneuvers at Gwalior-the first ever since 1963. The maneuvers in Alaska were the IAF's first refueling mission outside India.

The lO-day Cope India 2004 maneuvers at Gwalior were the IAF's largest and longest air combat exercise with a foreign air force and the visitors conceded they had been "bested" by their hosts in dog-fights and air combat missions. The IAF similarly upstaged the U.S. Air Force at Alaska, much to their hosts' surprise and chagrin.

Underpinning other areas of strategic cooperation are weapons sales to India and a budget hike for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program through which Washington sponsors Indian military personnel for training courses in the United States. In 2004, the IMET budget increased to $1.25 million, up from $1 million a year before, when 43 Indian officers attended military courses in Amelica.

Since sanctions were lifted in 2001, the United States has sold India $200 million wOlth of defense equipment under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreement. To ease weapon transfers, U.S. 2 congressional clearance is now necessary only for military goods ยง wOlth more than $14 million, placing India in the same category as ~ close American allies Japan and South Korea. ~ Deals finalized with the United States include the purchase of u 12 Thales-Raytheon Systems AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder artillery locating radar, 40 General Electric F 404-GE-F2J3 engines for the locally designed Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), deep submersible rescue vessel systems and spares for Sea King helicopters.

Military officials say the first AN/TPQ-37 systems were U.S.-India defense cooperation has reached a l!e\l' high, \I'ith all three mililalJ branches engaging injoil1/ exercises. At the 10-dar Cope India 2004 in G\mIiOl; air force personnel ji'Ol11both sides discuss the finer points of a combat exercise before the operation.

delivered in Chennai in February while the rest would be handed over in batches of two. Two refurbished radars loaned to the Indian Army for familiarization in July 2003 would be returned as the new radar systems arrive. Indian Army personnel have also been training at EI Segundo, California, for more than a year on this radar system that is capable of detecting artillery positions 28 to 32 kilometers away and tactical missiles from a distance of up to 50 kilometers with a lO-meter accuracy.

In addition, the Indian Navy is negotiating with the U.S. government to acquire eight to 12 refurbished P-3C Orion maritime strike/reconnaissance aircraft via U.S. foreign military sales (FMS), the former chief of naval staff, Admiral Madhavendra Singh, acknowledged a few months ago. "The U.S. is one of the few countries with such aircraft on offer for sale," Admiral Singh declared, adding that the navy wanted to extend its "limited" maritime patrol capabilities as part of its overall power projection capabilities. India's military is also interested in the Patriot anti-missile system.

The United States acknowledges the Indian avy as a "stabilizing force" in the Indian Ocean region and wants a closer working relationship with it as it straddles the strongest area of strategic convergence-sea-lane protection. According to senior U.S. officials, naval cooperation is perhaps one of the more promising and nonthreatening areas of service-to-service cooperation for the United States and India.

The two navies have held five rounds of exercises since the late 1990s off India's western coast, while a sixth in the Malabar series is due to take place later in the year.

For its part, the Indian Navy is also rep0l1edly not averse to joining the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and the

American F-15Cfighters (foreground) and Indian Sukhoi-30 fighters fly in close formation during a joint exercise over Cwalior in February 2004.

Regional Mmitime Security Initiative. The PSI is a response to the growing challenge posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), their delivery systems, and related materials worldwide. Under the initiative, II countries have committed themselves to disrupting the illicit trade in WMD by interdicting vessels, aircraft or other modes of transport in their territory or territorial waters that are reasonably suspected of can"ying suspicious cargo. The Indian Navy's joining the initiative would give it teeth and significantly extend its reach.

In response to the recent tsunami disaster, for example. the United States and India put years of joint exercises into practice by working closely to bring relief to devastated areas in Sri Lanka and other affected areas in the region. Close and successful cooperation in providing tsunami relief was vivid evidence of how far the U.S.-India defense relationship has progressed and a template for future joint efforts to address common regional security and humanitarian contingencies.

Potential U.S. sale items include transport aircraft to replace the lAP's aging fleet of Soviet-supplied platforms. "We have opened talks with the Indian Navy for the P-3C Orion and with the IAF for around 50 C-13OJ transpOlt through Foreign Military Sales," says Dennys Plessas, vice president for business initiatives at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. The United States has also indicated its willingness to make Perry-class fligates available to India as well as Sea Hawk helicopters to replace its aging fleet. Chemical and biological protection equipment is also on offer.

~ '"

* 9

ijj

:i

,~

~

Top: Ambassador David C. Mulford and wife Jeannie aboard the F-J 5E Strike Eagle aircraft at the Aero India 2005 at Yelahanka Air Station, Bangalore, in February.

Above: An American participant stands on the wing of a Stratotanker KC-/35 as an Indian Sukhoi-30MKI takes of/during Aero India 2005.

Showing its keen interest in increasing its arms sales to India, the United States had it largest ever participation in the Aero India 2005 in Bangalore in February. In addition to five state-of-the-art aircraft brought by the U.S. Department of Defense, 15 American defense and aerospace companies showcased their products and expressed interest to deepen commercial ties with India.

In other areas, Washington and New Delhi are committed to continuing their dialogue on missile defense that began in June 2000.

Indian expeI1s attended a subsequent session on the subject in Colorado in 2002. India also attended the multilateral ballistic missile defense conferences in Kyoto and Berlin in 2003 and observed the U.S. Roving Sands missile maneuvers in Berlin last July.

The United States is also conducting Joint Staff talks with India's Integrated Defence Staff, established three years ago.

Washington hosted delegations to its National Defense University and tri-service institutions that, in India, are still in

their formative stages. Both militaries were also engaged in peacekeeping exercises, drawing upon India's vast experience in this field over the past five decades.

But differences in perception over strategic issues persist. The United States envisions India's role in Asia in a much broader context while New Delhi's concerns are limited to its immediate turbulent neighborhood, where continuing turmoil threatens to spillover its borders.

Washington's priorities in the region center around the war on terrorism, China's burgeoning military and economic power, nuclear developments on the Korean peninsula, the future military role of Japan and good governance in West Asia. India's concerns focus on cross-border terrorism problems with Pakistan, the incessant flow of economic refugees across the eastern frontier with Bangladesh, and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. Sri Lanka's unresolved ethnic conflict and China's growing influence in Myanmar are other areas of immediate anxiety for India.

"India principally wants the U.S. to partner it in shaping the strategic space in the region which could otherwise be usurped by other regional players," says Brigadier Arun Sahgal (Retd.), the first director of net assessment in India's Integrated Defence Staff.

Continuing interaction at the policy and operational levels should, over time, build a strategic concurrence of interests for the sake of stability, he added.

Another area where India hopes to change Washington's policy is the strategic rationale of dealing with New Delhi via the Pacific Command (PACOM), while neighboring Pakistan is handied by the Central Command (CENTCOM).

Indian officials remonstrate that many of their pressing strategic concerns and issues most conducive to closer military cooperation with the United States lie outside PACOM--cross-border ten"orism, Islamic fundamentalism, stability in Central Asia and protecting energy flows from the Persian Gulf region. Consequently they are more inclined to bypass PACOM headquaI1erS in Honolulu, Hawaii, and press their strategic advocacy in Washington where many issues get submerged in bureaucracy.

Senior Indian militaI"yofficers aI'gue that the difference is not so much of procedures as of priorities. PACOM's priorities are centered around China, Japan and the Korean peninsula and suffer from what many term "strategic fatigue" when it comes to dealing with India. Discussions to resolve these differences gained ground when General irmal C. Vij became the first Indian Al1l1YChief to visit eE, TCOM headquaI'ters in Tampa, Florida, in early 2004.

Official sources said both sides agreed to regular interaction between CENTCoM and New Delhi, with the possibility of posting a senior Indian one- or two-staI' liaison officer in Tampa.

"Eventually Indo-U.S. defense relations have to overcome bureaucratic resistance from the State Department and their Indian counterparts," says Brigadier Sahgal. Domestic political constituencies would ultimately facilitate this relationship and make it firm, he adds.

0 About the Author: Rahu/ Bedi is a New Delhi-based correspondent/or Jane's Defence Weekly.

Walifen~2?jppfe IF,ffect

One hundred fifty years after its publication) Henry David Thoreau)s meditation remains the ultimate self-help book

O

n the Fourth of July, 1845, a month-and-a-hal f after British explorer Sir John Franklin set out from London with the ships Erebus and Terror to find the Northwest Passage, Henry David Thoreau set out from the family home in Concord, Massachusetts, to take up residence at nearby Walden Pond to find himself. He was not yet 28. He had a

degree from Harvard College, he had tried teaching and failed, and he possessed some skill in surveying. He had almost no money, but he had friends, by far the most valuable of whom was his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau had built himself a 10by IS-foot cabin with secondhand lumber on shoreline property at Walden, owned

by Emerson.

, 'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberatelyy to front only the essential facts of lifey and see if I could not learn what it had to teachy and noty when I came to diey discover that I had not lived.' , Thoreau lived at the pond for two years, two months and two days. His idea was to conduct an experiment in simple living, to lead a life according to nature and to determine the real necessities of life. "It would be some advantage," he wrote, "to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization."

Walden, published 150 years ago, is Thoreau's report on this modest-almost backyard-experiment in getting back to basics.

The book is conceded to be a masterpiece and figures on every list of essentially American books, but in this day and age, we may legitimately wonder whether Thoreau's experiment in plain living has any meaning at all for a generation weaned on cell phones, the Internet and Nintendo.

I know that when I first tried to read Walden, at age 15, Thoreau did not speak to my condition or to my life goals, which were, at the time, to get a car and meet girls. Nor is he exactly easy to read: his sentences are not always as clear as, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," and he can irritate a reader when he turns on him: "It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live." Finding this on page three of Walden, I put the book down.

I did not wake up to Thoreau until I was 40, though I had by then been teaching him, in an empty, pro forma way, for 15 years. One day, I found myself rereading Thoreau's essay "Walking," in which he tells about going to see two panoramas, one of the Rhine River and its storied castles, the other of the Mississippi. (A panorama is a long roll of painted canvas slowly wound from one roll to another across a stage before an audience, a sort of

precursor of the movies.) Looking at the unadorned Mississippi panorama, he writes, "I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the stream; and I felt that this was the Heroic Age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men."

Though I had read and taught this essay many times, I now saw it, for the first time, not as a text, but as a truth. Just as Thoreau was startled to discover that his era, the 1840s and 1850s, was as heroic as the Middle Ages, so he had startled me into the realization that I walk in the same natural world that Thoreau did. Like that essay, Walden is a self-help book, perhaps the ultimate self-help book, urging us to show up for our own lives, to have the courage to find our own convictions and to try to live them out.

As soon as I understood that Thoreau was talking directly to me, the mythic Thoreau, the hermit of Walden Pond, the echo of Emerson, the isolated and lonely figure from America's rural past vanished from view. In his place stood a writer of immense humanity, vitality and humor.

Thoreau is a man of terrific intensity.

We become aware of this through his passionate insistence on seeing-a "habit of attention" he once said he possessed to such a degree that it fatigued his senses.

We all look at the same things, but some see more than others. "A single gentle rain," Thoreau observes in his chapter on spring, "makes the grass many shades greener."

Allied to his acuity of sight, his granting to every object a "separate intention of the eye," is Thoreau's great learning. Yes,

he required a four-hour walk every day to keep in good spirits. But he also spent four hours or more every day at his desk, reading and writing. He read Virgil, Goethe, Linnaeus, Darwin and Ruskin.

He read travel books, the classics, botany, zoology, philosophy, politics and economics. He was, in critic Edward Davidson's nice phrase, a chain reader. Like Pliny the Elder, who read or had himself read to every leisure hour, even in the bath, Thoreau apparently found no book so bad it couldn't be used in some fashion.

During his first year at Walden Pond, Thoreau cultivated about a hectare of Emerson's land, planting and tending potatoes, corn, peas, turnips and, chiefly, beans. What he didn't eat he sold.

Contrary to popular belief, he went to town frequently, entertained visitors at the cabin and once even hosted a large picnic there for an abolition (anti-slavery) society. But mostly he worked at his desk, where he accomplished a great deal of The first printing of Walden (2,000 copies at $1 each) did not sell quickly.

BOSTON: TiCKNOR

AND

FIELDS.

writing. Drawing on a two-week-Iong trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine and his brief arrest in Concord for failing to pay his poll tax, he wrote essays on "Katahdin" and "Civil Disobedience" (which remains the preeminent American statement of the primacy of individual conscience). He wrote one book (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) and the draft of a second (Walden).

In his writings, and in Walden above all, Thoreau forged a thought-out way of life, a philosophy that insists that the individual turn not to the state, not to the gods, not to society, or even to history for a guide to life, but to nature and the self.

But this turn to nature and the self should not be confused with selfishness. It is not the final destination but only the starting point of the examined life. Thoreau's social side is everywhere in Walden. "I had more visitors while I lived in the woods," he says in the chapter "Visitors," "than at any other period of my life."

Thoreau's second great achievement is one he shares with Emerson and other American Transcendentalists: the articulation of the social imperatives of their movement. If I wish to be free, the Transcendental ists argued, then all must wish to be free, and none may be denied freedom. In the formulation of the African-American writer and leader Frederick Douglass, "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong, for him."

Thoreau's activism led him to make speeches and organize meetings to protest slavery, to work for the Underground Railroad, to defend the abolitionist John Brown and help get one of his men to Canada, and to write "Civil Disobedience." Walden is full of incisive social and economic analysis. "I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing ....The principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched."

Thoreau's third great achievement is that he first articulated America's conservation ethic. When Thoreau said, famously, "in wildness is the preservation of the

world," he means the preservation of civilization, too. "Our village life would stagnate," he wrote in Walden, "if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness."

Walden was published on August 9, 1854, to mostly good reviews, and it developed a small but steady following. It sold roughly 300 copies a year for the next IS years. The naturalist John Muir read it, as did poets William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost. After a brief dip in popularity in the 1870s and early 1880s, the book began the steady climb that carried it through the 20th century and that shows no signs of slowing.

Thoreau's Walden speaks to our modern condition because it is mostly right about the big things. Open the book anywhere: One should beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. A person is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. Morning does bring back the heroic ages. The universe is wider than our views of it.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. The sun is but a morning star.

One hundred fifty years after its publication, Walden also remains a practical, usable manual on how to lead a good, just life. It offers readers an ethical view of life that begins in self-rule and ends in public and social commitment to the next generation. Gandhi picked this idea up from Thoreau, among others, and he put it with admirable pith and sinew. "[Real home rule] is self-rule or self-control....If man will only realize that it is unmanly to obey laws that are unjust, no man's tyranny will enslave him," Gandhi wrote in Indian Home Rule. At its core, Walden is about the project of personal freedom, self-emancipation, which is where all pursuits of freedom must start.

Thoreau left Walden Pond in 1847, saying he had "several more lives to live." He stayed for a while with the Emersons; he traveled to Maine and Cape Cod. He read Darwin's Origin of Species and felt that it squared with his own observations. He spent years gathering material for a neverrealized "Calendar of Concord," an ambitious design to record even the smallest

Inside the Thoreau House replica at Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

natural fact about Concord and thus make of it a microcosm of nature as a whole. One day in 1860 while he was out counting the rings of recently cut trees, he caught a cold, which turned to bronchitis and then aggravated an existing case of tuberculosis.

Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, as the Civil War was raging. He was 44.

Sir John Franklin not only never found the Northwest Passage, he never returned to England. His wife sent out expedition after expedition to find him. "Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him?"

Thoreau asks in the conclusion of Walden.

Then he gives us his final bit of advice.

"Be rather the Mungo Park, the [Meriwether] Lewis and [William] Clark and [Martin] Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans. Explore your own higher latitudes." That task is just as hard now as it was in 1854, and Henry Thoreau is still one of the best guides around.

0 About the Author: Robert D. Richardson is the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: The Mind on Fire.

Saving the

Horsewoman Francesca Kelly brings India's fiery Marwari to the United States, hoping to revive the breed.

hen Francesca Kelly took her first trip to Indiafor a luxury horse safari in 1995-a friend told her, "You'll either love it or you'll hate it." A 49year-old woman with a slightly square jaw that hints at a streak of stubbornness and impatience, Kelly is not the sort you would expect to fall in love with the haphazard life of India. But fall she did, first for an exotic and desperate Indian horse, the Marwari, and then for its sprawling desert home.

"The Marwari had this incredible, otherworldly presence which said, 'Yes, I'm here by God's will. But I don't belong to anybody,' " Kelly told me in ew Delhi. "There are very few horses in the world that have that. It's [their] combination of beauty and wildness of spirit that is very alluring; especially in this present day, when it's such a rare thing."

In 1995, the year Kelly bought her first Marwari with the intention of bringing it to the United States, the horse was on a long list of threatened breeds illegal to export. Three years earlier, India had signed a global biodiversity pact and declared its indigenous livestock part of the country's "national wealth." With Indian scientists then estimating that only 500 or 600 Marwaris remained untainted by crossbreeding, the odds against getting the Indian government to reverse its position looked insurmountable.

Left: Bredfor hal/Ie in the desert, the Marwari horse has a silkY COal 10 keep cool, long eyelashes to block sand, sharply curved ears and a hor temperament. A bay colt is shown with its groom in Rajasthan.

Below: Raghuvendra Singh Dundlod and his son, Raghuvir Singh Dundlod, flank Francesca Kelly, an aide and a Marwari horse in the drawing room of the Dundlod Fort in the Ihunjhunu district of Rajasthan.

Top: The pointed ears of this Marwari horse, decked for a pageant in Gangaur, resemble the upturned mustaches of the Rajput warriors who rode them into battle for centuries.

Above: A Marwari mare displaying the style that enables its breed to travel great distances without firing.

Many people would have given up. Not Kelly. Born in Washington, D.C., she grew up the stepdaughter of Sir Harold Beeley, the United Kingdom's ambassador in Cairo from 1961 to 1964 and again from 1967 to 1969, and spent much of her childhood there, where her fondest memories were of midnight gallops in the sands surrounding the family's desert retreat, a large Bedouin tent filled with colorful hangings and rugs. Nearly three decades later, looking into the eyes of Shanti, her untamed Marwari mare, was like looking into that past. She wasn't about to give that up. But first she would have to go toe-to-toe with

some pretty tough opponents-among them, the Indian government and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Her battle lasted five years. By the end, she'd not only won-bringing six Marwari horses home with her to Massachusetts in 2000-she'd launched a remarkable drive to preserve one of the world's oldest horse breeds.

"The view was that there were too few [Marwaris] to export them," says Raghuvendra Singh Dundlod, better known as Bonnie, a descendant of Indian nobles. It was he who led that first, influential horse safari and is now Kelly's partner in a business based on breeding and exporting the horse. "But instead of instituting some kind of rehabilitation program, basically the government had sought to freeze the situation, because it was the easiest thing to do," he adds.

The danger was that ignorance and indiscriminate breeding would lead to the demise of the Marwari as a distinct breed, an all-too-common trend. Worldwide, livestock breeds- made obsolete by tractors and tanks or replaced by "super breeds" of industrialized agriculture, such as the white turkey mass-produced on factory farms in North America and Europe~are disappearing faster even than wild species. Half the livestock breeds that existed in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century are already extinct, and almost half the remainder are at risk or endangered, according to a 1997 report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. .

Most recognized horse breeds are protected by pedigrees that trace the lineages of the "pure" animals back for generations. Registered Thoroughbreds, for instance, are linked by pedigree to one of three Arabian stallions (the Byerly Turk, the Godolphin Barb and the Darley Arabian) brought to England from the Middle East around the turn of the 18th century. Some registries use breed standards to define animals suited to produce pedigreed offspring. But in the case of the Marwari, there were no records, no studbooks and no codified breed standards. Worse, considerable interbreeding had already taken place. Without a useful, agreed-upon description of the Marwari and the introduction of a registration system, the breed would remain highly vulnerable.

To be sure, the Marwari has a storied past. A hot-blooded desert horse with a thick, arched neck, long-lashed eyes and flaring nostrils, the horse was bred for battle by the Rathores, a clan of fierce warriors belonging to Rajput rulers. The prince who founded the ruling dynasty of Manvar came circa 1212 with an army of only 200 animals. But after II generations and many battles, the clan ruled a kingdom three times as large as Belgium, conquering most of what is now Rajasthan. Proud to a fault and honoring a glorious death above all, these martial Hindus bred into the Marwari its temperament-passionate, showy and quick-tempered, but capable also of terrific bravery. They also bred into the Marwari its most distinctive physical characteristic: ears that curve inward to a sharp point, meeting to form a near perfect arch at the tips. Aficionados compare their shape to the lyre and even to the scorpion's arched stinger. But, twisting to points so sharp they seem an affectation, the Marwari's ears resemble nothing so

FrancescG Kef/I' Gnd Raghuvendra Singh Dundfod. her partner in saving the Manvari breed, ride with three horsemen in Rajasthan.

much as the Rajputs' own trademark handlebar mustaches, turned upright and set on their thick, bushy ends.

The Rajputs resisted Muslim conquerors for hundreds of years before accepting Mughal control in the 16th century. In that era of almost constant war, the Rajputs employed a legion of bards to chronicle their exploits-in songs of great horses as well as great men-tales so bloody they make the Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad look like Quakers (a religious group opposed to all forms of war).

One story glorifies the horse of Amar Singh, a Rajput who was asked by a Mughal minister to pay a penalty for missing a court meeting. "The only wealth I possess is in my scabbard," the Rajput retorted. "Come take your penalty if you willi" When the

minister reprimanded him. Singh cut him off in mid-sentenceat the neck - and attacked the emperor Shah lehan. After soldiers cornered Singh on the 70-foot-high ramparts of the Agra Fort. the Rajput spurred his fearless horse over the wall. The animal died in the fall, but Singh somehow made it to his walled mansion before soldiers caught up with him. Today. a statue of the horse stands beside the fort, a few miles from the Taj. Another legend sings the praises of Chetak, a gray stallion that sacrificed his life for Maharana Pratap-the last Rajput to succumb to the Mughals- in the 1576 battle of Haldighati. By rearing and drumming his hooves on the forehead of the war elephant of the imperial commander, Chetak allowed his master to kill the elephant's driver, blunting the Mughal advance. Only the arrival of reinforcements on the field rallied the Mughal troops. The story goes that even with one of his hind legs hacked off above the hoof, Chetak carried Rana Pratap away to safety. More than

Villagers preparing Rani, a horse of the Man1Jari breed, for a wedding.

400 years later, the stallion's name lives on. not only in countless racers and cal1horses, but in a line of Chetak motor scooters produced by Bajaj Auto Ltd. In modern times, however, the Rajputs' glorification of their mounts nearly proved the Marwari's undoing. Because the rulers had long ago created a parallel caste system for horses and baITed anyone but their noble kinsmen from owning or riding the prized animals, the breed became a hated symbol of feudalism and India's oppressive social divisions.

In 1956, nine years after winning independence from the British, the nation's socialist government abolished feudal tenures and deptived the Rajput noblemen of their estates. Thousands of horses were shot, castrated or turned over to peasants to use as draft animals. And indigenous horse husbandry fell, for the most part, to rural farmers.

The seeds of the Marwari's potential salvation were sown in the 1980s, when India's tourist industry began to take off. Twothirds of Rajasthan is little more than sand dunes, but the colorful costumes and religious festivals of the state's diverse peoples have made it a top destination for visiting foreigners. Chief among the beneficiaries have been the Rajputs. Pioneers in "heritage tourism," former maharajas, thakurs (lords) and jagirdars (vassals) rebounded from their reversal of fortunes by turning ancestral Rajput forts, palaces and walled mansions into museums or hotels. And with their renewed prosperity, some resumed interest in an ancient pastime: the breeding of horses.

But when Kelly and her husband, James, came to India for the first time for their horse safari, in 1995, the effort to conserve-as opposed to just breeding-the Marwari horse had yet to start. The breeders of indigenous horses-a fractious lot, like many horse breeders everywhere-had no collective strategy for preserving the breed. Meanwhile, the only step the Indian government had taken to conserve the Marwari was banning their exportation.

The ban drew on sound logic. With the Marwari gene pool already depleted, sending stock overseas seemed foolish, even potentially disastrous. Despite a few exceptions, such as the Akhal Teke horses of Russia and the Caspian horses of Iran, most rare breeds have failed to prosper outside their original homes. Moreover, according to veterinarian Donald E. Bixby of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, transplanting breeds adapted to one climate and environment to a new habitat can itself alter their genetic makeup. "I've seen these plans come along fairly frequently," says Bixby, "and I've seen them

fail fairly frequently."

When Kelly found out that her mare and two other Marwaris she had purchased wouldn't be corning home with her. she was devastated. But after a day or so, she set her jaw and decided that she wanted to be involved with these horses, even if that involvement might be confined to India. "The fact that the breed wasn't really being taken care of, either ttu'ough ignorance or lack of money or appropriate breeding practices, pushed me into finding out as much about them as possible," she says.

Knowledge led to resolve. "I saw these horses, all pegged out like slaves, tied at the head and at the back, nose in the manger, no room to breathe," she recalls. "Nobody was going to ride them. They were the saddest specimens of crossbreeds that you will ever see." She and her partner, Dundlod, pledged to do something about it. "The future of this horse is outside as well as inside India," she decided.

To blunt the objection that shipping Kelly's handful of Marwaris to the United States would deplete the gene pool, Kelly and Dundlod started breeding top-quality horses in Rajasthan. In 1999, they joined others in founding the Indigenous Horse Society of India, the only national body of its kind, to work with the government on conservation-related programs, raise awareness about the Marwari and encourage breeders to adopt more modern methods. By 2000, the pair had won the lOO-kilometer endurance race at the national equestrian games, convinced the Equestrian Federation of India to sanction the first national show for indigenous horses and produced a coffee-table book-Marwari: Legend of the indian Horse-that remains the most complete study of the breed in English. Along the way, Kelly traveled to so many auctions and horse festivals in remote towns across the Punjab and Rajasthan that the Mirasi caste of horse traders began calling

her ghorawalli: the horsewoman.

By interesting India's equestrian community in the horse through shows, competitions and exhibitions, Kelly and Dundlod influenced the market and breeding practices. But even more significant was their effort to conjure up a studbook.

Without bothering to trace the breed's foundation sire, which, if possible at all, would have involved years of poring over documents and interviewing horse traders, they began registering those prime Marwari specimens whose immediate sires and dams could be identified. When, in 1997, they finally convinced the government to lift the ban on exports, prices began to jump.

By early 2002, when I first met Kelly and Dundlod, India seemed to have almost as many Marwari breeder associations as it did Marwari horses. Already, several of the associations claimed to have plans to develop breed standards and introduce studbooks of their own. But the conservationists were trying to save an animal that they had yet to identify. Which of the existing animals represented the purest specimens? For Kelly, who hoped to interest a major U.S. breeder in promoting the Marwari in the United States, it was vital that everybody work from the same manual and, one day, set stock in the same pedigree. But the other Marwari breeders were reluctant to cede control over the registration and valuation of their own horses-especially to a group led by a foreign woman and a lesser noble who wasn't even from Marwar. One association, the Marwar Horse Society, had begun organizing the first national breed standards conference in the city of Jodhpur to make the next step in forming a coalition - and to stake its own claim to lead it. Kelly and Dundlod therefore set out for Jodhpur in October 2002.

The capital of Marwar since 1459 and the city from which the riding pants (and short boots) adopted by the British in the 19th century take their name, Jodhpur seemed the natural center for the movement to save the Marwari horse. But shortly after the breed standards conference began, with a Hindu blessing and a series of redundant speeches by politicians, it began to unravel.

One speaker after another made rambling set-piece presentations on topics of questionable relevance, whether the army's mule breeding program or shoeing practices.

Kelly, who'd turned up in trim jodhpur pants and tall riding boots, her hair wound and secured in a knot behind her head, was slowly losing her cool. Poised stiffly in her seat, she looked like a spring slowly being twisted tighter and tighter until the metal is about to snap. Every so often, she exhaled sharply and whispered a cutting aside. But, she told me, she'd resolved not to explode.

"We are getting nowhere!" Dundlod finally stood to interrupt, during the 10th description of the Marwari's ears. "Every breeder has his ideas about the breed characteristics, but without discussing them, we'll never come to a consensus."

The third day of the conference started on a sour note, as the breeders took up a proposed draft of the new breed standards.

The first sentence read: "It is difficult to exactly trace the origin of the true Marwari horse with precision, but undoubtedly it has connections with the Arab and may have mixed with the Turkmenian breed and the horses of invading armies."

The first casualty was "undoubtedly." Then the link to the Arabian and Turkmenian horses came under attack. The argument developed with nationalist fervor, with Hindi-speaking breeders shouting that the Marwari could not be a Muslim horse.

Eventually, after much haggling, the group settled on a statement that was by then indisputable: "It is difficult to trace the origin of the true Marwari horse."

The animal proved equally difficult to describe. An attempt that began, "The head is refined [and] relatively long. with a medium muzzle and shallow, firm mouth," was boi led down after a heated argument to, "The head is long." "But you have to say more than that," objected M.P. Yadav, director of the Indian Veterinary Research Institute in [zatnagar, Uttar Pradesh, "or it doesn't mean anything!" Each adjective, whether "refined," "long," "straight," "broad." "large," "well-developed" or "wellset," and whether applied to the head, face, ears, chest, hindquarters or tail, brought the group no closer to any consensus on an ideal, theoretical horse. By the time the three-day meeting ended, it had generated a useless description that, but for something about curved ears, might have suited any horse.

Later, Kelly said grimly, "We're going to continue with creating our own breed standard." Over the next several months, she and Dundlod and experts from the Indigenous Horse Society defined their own breed standards and subsequently translated them into Hindi. Registration with the society is now compulsory for anyone who wants to export horses or compete in the national indigenous horse show, and the National Research Centre on Equines in Hisar, Haryana, and most other veterinary departments have accepted and agreed to disseminate Kelly and Dundlod's breed standards.

By 2002. India seemed to have almost as many Marwari breeder associations as it did Marwari horses. Several associations claimed to have plans to develop breed standards and introduce studbooks of their own.

A month after the Jodhpur conference, I met Dundlod again at the annual horse and camel fair held in Pushkar, Rajasthan, one of the most important pilgrimage sites. Each year for Kartik Poornima, a festival marking the full moon of the month of Kartik, more than LOO,OOO pilgrims come to the holy lake in the center of Pushkar to wash away their sins and make offerings at one of the 400 temples surrounding it. The same week, thousands of farmers and herdsmen, some of whom traveled on foot from up to 160 kilometers away, set up camp outside town, forming a huge outdoor livestock bazaar and the country's largest

gathering of horse breeders. These men had been excluded from the decision-making process at the conference. But because they bred the largest number of Marwari horses-earning their livings by providing prize horses for Hindu marriage ceremonies-no group was more important to the preservation effort.

Hundreds of white tents were spread out over the plain below.

Camels drew carts at an easy lope over the dunes, and everywhere I counted the bright turbans of the villagers who had brought animals to sell. The camps with the best horses were at the top of the hill near a Ferris wheel. At the bottom of the slope, the ranks of the camels began. Farther from town, and more rustic still. were the cattle and buffalo and the villagers who'd driven them here from countless miles away. Many of the horses and cattle were gaunt, their skeletons clearly visible beneath the skin. This was the third year in a row that the rains had not come to Rajasthan. Only the camels were thriving.

"There are no good horses this year," Dundlod

said when I

found his camp opposite the Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation's tent village. "They're asking me to take [secondrate animals I as safari horses can't afford to keep them."

for whatever

price. because

they

For the next three days, a diverse assemblage of breeders drifted into the Dundlod camp offering horses. They did seem eager to sell, but it was also clear they were savvy salesmen, for which Kelly and Dundlod were surely at least partly responsible.

"I used to pick up horses for my rides say for about 20,000, 30.000 rupees." Dundlod said. "There was no emphasis on the breeding really .... Everything has changed. Seven years back, if I had to go and buy a horse and somebody said. 'You pay a lakh of rupees: I'd have said, 'Oh my God, you're crazy" But today T"m paying a lakh and a half, two lakhs.路路

Francesca Kelly has worked aggressively to promote the Marwari in the United States. advertising in breeder directories. producing studbooks. competing at horse fairs and exhibitions.

Those higher prices, in large part, reflect Kelly's decision four years ago to ask $50,000 for Dilraj, her stallion in the United States- a fraction of the $150,000 routinely asked for top competition horses from establ ished bloodlines, but a stupendous sum to Ind ia' s rustic breeders. News of the price. first published on her Marwari Bloodlines Web site (www.horsemarwari.com). spread rapidly. Since Kelly and Dundlod exported their first horses in 2000. the price of top Marwaris within India has jumped from around $500-$600 to $3,000-$4,000.

Dunlod and Kelly argue that the higher prices, combined with the government's decision to lift

the export ban, have given domestic breeders a strong incentive not only to take better care of their horses but also to document and preserve bloodlines to further increase the breed's value.

Others remain unconvinced.

According to Bixby, of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, the export market "seldom, maybe never" encourages local breeders. For Kelly to succeed, he says, she would need a few dozen animals with several stall ions. a supportive breeder network and regular exchange with the larger population to prevent her animals from becoming genetically isolated from the original breed. "I can't imagine an active interchange of genetics between the United States and India," says Bixby, concluding, "I don't think it's a very strong project from a conservation standpoint."

Another skeptic is Satyendra Singh Chawra, a Rajput breeder sympathetic to Dundlod and Kelly's general aims but convinced the time is not yet ripe for exports. "We are pathetically low on quality stock," he says. "In fact, you can count on your fingers the really good specimens of this breed." He continues: "One of the strongest arguments in favor of exports is that they have revived a lot of our dying handicrafts. but there's a big difference between handicrafts and horses. There may be a demand [overseas]. But we at the moment do not have adequate stocks to meet that demand."

I got a firsthand look at just how difficult the international trade in exotic horses can be when I visited Kelly's stable on the island of Chappaquiddick, off the coast of Massachusetts and not far from the East Beach bridge made infamous

by Teddy Kennedy in 1969. She and her husband, James, a multinational business consultant born in Montclair, New Jersey, visited the island many times since their marriage 14 years ago. but didn't move there from London until 2000, when James decided to cut back on his work to focus on writing a book about how men with Type A personalities make the transition into retirement.

"The big reason that we're on the island is these horses,"' Kelly told me on my first visit in December 2002. "Because they couldn't go to England, we started building a horse farm here and it all sort of fell into place." A biting wind blew out of the northeast, and from the Kellys' barn overlooking Cape Pogue, the pewter waters of the bay looked distinctly uninviting. I had no trouble imagining the shock that Kelly's first six Marwari horses must have experienced during their first winter here in 2000. far from the Rajasthani desert.

During another visit two years later, Kelly's second shipment of horses was slated to arrive, but she was still juggling flight schedules with the availability of slots at U.S. quarantine centers.

(Her horses were to fly Korean Air the long way around the world, because the European Union barred planes carrying Indian horses from even touching down to refuel due to fears about the spread of contagious animal diseases.)

Kelly was showing me her prize stallion Dilraj when her stable manager, Jennifer Blais. rushed out to us with a cordless phone. "Joe Santorelli!" she said. "He has space in Los Angeles." Kelly took the receiver and. after hearing when the California quarantine center would be available, asked the importer to hold a place there until she could again talk with Korean Air. When she hung

When Kelly's.first six Manmri horses arrived Oil Chappaquiddick island ill 2000, they were spooked by the sight of the ocean. Now they love to S\l路il71.She is stilll1avigating Ihe Iricky logistics necessary to imporl a second shipmem.

in which a troupe of classically trained dancers shares the ring with one of Kelly's half-wild Marwari mares. Basing her estimate on information she's gathered from breeders of Spanish Andalusians-another rare breed that has become increasingly popular in AmericaKelly says spreading the word about the Marwari in America will take at least another five years.

"My goal now is to find someone who is already set up as a major breeder. who up, she said, "Apparently a lot of Americans like to import horses to give away as Christmas presents."

Logistics for her first shipment of Marwari horses, in 2000, had been even more complicated.

From door to door, including veterinary fees, transport charges and quarantine space, the shipment had cost her more than $10,000 a horse, even with shipping the six animals in sets of three, the capacity of the airline's shipping pallet. Although all of her horses had been certified as healthy before leaving India, when they reached America one mare tested positive for piroplasmosis, a tick-borne infection that damages red blood cells. The mare was not allowed past customs. Once the U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarian rejected Kelly's horse, no other country would accept it, either.

For 10 weeks, Kelly had fought to keep the veterinarian from euthanizing the mare, buying time by raising the specter of an international incident.

Eventually, the vet steered her to Dr. Ralph Knowles, an expert on piro, who arranged for treatment in Venezuela, a reprieve that cost Marwari Bloodlines another $15,000. Today, Shyamla is doing beautifully in Chappaquiddick, pregnant with her second foal.

"If you go to India, you're going to buy your horses for three or four thousand dollars if you buy a good one," says Kelly. "And then, try to get it out. The Indigenous Horse Society [will help], but you can go around and see a hundred horses and maybe one of them will be clear of piro. That's the rub. Then you've got to ship it, and [even] if you only want to ship one horse to the United States, you'll still have to spend thirty thousand dollars."

Kelly has worked aggressively to promote the Marwari in the United States, taking out advertisements in breeder directories, cooperating with Bob Langrish, a top equine photographer, to shoot the horses for use in advertisements and breed encyclopedias, and drawing crowds at national horse fairs with exhibitions of tent pegging, a Rajera skill in which galloping riders attempt to spear a four-inch wooden block. She's even tried her hand at equine performance art in a slick theatrical production called Ride,

has the passion and the funds to really put the Marwari on the map in America," she told me in Chappaquiddick.

"I've had multiple offers for individual

horses, but I've resisted because that wouldn't serve the breed" As of spring 2004, her second shipment of horses was still waiting in India, after a strike by workers at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York delayed her import plans until it was too late for one pregnant mare to travel. Setting up a viable gene pool in the United States to avoid inbreeding will require a major investment by a major breeder. Until that happens, Kelly has vowed not to scatter her horses or sell them to owners who aren't interested in breeding them. Her biggest fear about offering her stallion Dilraj for sale is that someone interested in the horse's "novelty value" might get fed up with the Marwari's spirited temper and geld him. (So far, no suitable buyer has met her price.)

Kelly goes to India about three times a year now, and in early 2004, at the National Indigenous Horse Show in Jaipur, she saw an encouraging sight: middle-class breeders, as well as royals and tribal horse traders. coming from all over Rajasthan to participate. She plans to sell her property in Chappaquiddick, mostly because it's too isolated to be a useful headquarters.

She's looking for a place in California.

The obstacles she faces in establishing the Marwari in the United States are daunting.

Previous examples of successful transplantation of new breeds such as the Andalusian. were well established long before they were introduced to America.

"I don't really have a master plan," Kelly told me. "If you feel strongly about something, if you have these dreams, you've just got to work toward manifesting them. And 1 know it will happen, because I always hold out for things that I want, and, eventually, it falls into place."

D About the Author: Jason Overdolf is a New Delhi-based freelance wriler. He has conrribuled 10 The Atlantic Monthly, The Asian Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.

Invo(vement in

n

CrippS Mission nearยง' 1942) tIie 6om6s 6eganfaffill9 on tfie eastern coast of India. With Japanese forces massill9 on tIie Burmese 60nfer after roCfill9tlir0U9fi Soutlieast Asia) tIie su6continent swned to 6e on tIie eve of a massive invasion. Despite this threat) India stood wotjUffy unprepared for war.

"What of America, that great land of democracy, to which imperialist England looks for support and sustenance during this war? Does Britain think that the people of the United States will pour their gold and commodities to make the world safe for British impe rial ism? .. The aims and objectives of this terrible war are clear at last. "

From the Himalayas to Cape Comorin there were virtually no anti-aircraft guns, air-raid floodlights, or radar sets. For Calcutta. in grave danger of attack by waves of Japanese bombers, the only defenses that the Royal Air Force could muster were two barely workable fighter planes. Damaging the already fragile Indian morale, British authorities in New Delhi hastily devised a scorched earth policy to at least slow down a Japanese advance.

Surplus rice and grain was moved out of the northeast. and plans were drawn up to destroy Assam's Digboi oilfields and Calcutta's port. British authorities appeared resigned to defeat, yet made no attempts to engage the Indian independence movement. so to at least buoy Indian spirit. Lord Linlithgow, the dour Scot who ruled from the Viceroy's House. vowed he would never "gratuitously hurry

the handing over of controls to Indian hands;' even as British possessions in East Asia were falling into Japanese hands.

India's situation seemed hopeless.

Yet it was in this same dark hour, as gloom and defeatism threatened to descend over the subcontinent, that India and America forged their first meaningful relations. The two countries recognized their shared values, principles and idealism. India sincerely hoped these commonalties would help it win independence, and America believed that they would help the Allies win the war. Looking at America, Jawaharlal Nehru and other Indian leaders saw a vibrant democracy that was firmly opposed to empire. Looking at India, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and members of his administration were reminded of their own nation's struggle

against colonialism and for representative government.

The realities of war forced America and India to act on these observations and build an alliance rooted in both practicality and principle. As today's diplomats are busy shuffling between New Delhi and Washington, proclaiming a new relationship between India and the United States, it is important to reflect on the first instance when the two nations recognized themsel ves as "natural allies'" The year 1942 began badly for the Allies. Great Britain had survived the traumas of the Blitz but now heavily relied on American aid in order to stay alive. Following the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941, Britain's Asian holdings began to crumble one by one: first Malaya, then Singapore, and finally Burma. To many policymakers.

Japan and Germany seemed engaged in a "giant pincer movement" designed to unite their two empires. At the center of this movement was India.

If Germany was to continue advancing through the Soviet Union and Japan was to capture India. American journalist Kate Mitchell warned. the Axis

lia. Such a symbolic move, he believed, would rally Indian morale by providing visible proof of autonomy.

The genius of Sapru's telegram lay in its timing.

His telegram was addressed to Washington, not London, for on January 2. Churchill was in America discussing war plans with Roosevelt. Within a short while, Roosevelt learned of the cable and began pressing Churchill on the issue of Indian independence.

By February it wasn't just Roosevelt who was getting concerned about the situation in India. On the 25th of that month, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long reported "a serious undercurrent of anti-British feeling" at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting. Long went on to summarize the proceedings: Jawaharlal Nehru with Sir Stafford Cripps at Sirla House, New Delhi, March 1942. powers would "have control of a wide belt stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, so rich in basic raw materials. food. labor power, and strategic military and naval bases that [the Allied position] would be highly critical, to say the least."

Thus, American attention focused on India. Instead of finding a country ready to defend its borders, officials in Washington were shocked to discover abysmally low morale.

What incenti ve did Indians have to fight off the Japanese empire when the British Empire refused to retreat? For Viceroy Linlithgow, wartime hostilities had provided ew Delhi a convenient excuse for stymieing the Indian independence movement.

He had shocked the Indian National Congress in 1939 by declaring, without con-

suiting anyone of the country's 300 million inhabitants, India at war with Germany.

Now Winston Churchill, famous for declaring that he would "rather go out in the wilderness and fight" than lose India. was Prime Minister.

For many Indians, World War II seemed to be a conflict between their present occupier and a potential new invader.

In early 1942, President Roosevelt received an urgent telegram from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of Nationalist China. Chiang and his wife had just returned from a goodwill visit to India. "I am personally shocked," the Chinese leader began, "by the Indian military and political situation. In a word. the danger is extreme. If the British government does not fundamentally change their policy toward India, it would be like presenting India to the enemy and inviting them to quickly occupy India." The telegram confirmed Roosevelt's fear that British

colonial mismanagement posed a threat to the Allied war effort.

Indian leaders had long been aware of Roosevelt's concem and knew they could use it to their advantage. On January 2, 1942, the moderate Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru sent a message to Winston Churchill, asking in telegraphese for a "bold stroke far-sighted statesmanship ... without delay."

To Sapru, a bold stroke meant the creation of a provisional national government that would effectively make India a Commonwealth dominion like Canada or Austra-

"We should demand that India be gi ven a status of autonomy. The only way to get the people of India to fight was to get them to fight for India ... which could only be obtained by accepting the thesis of Gandhi's political objecti ve.'路 Senators had insisted Britain take action on India. The question remained, however. what type of action to take. Roosevelt thought he had an answer. On March 10, the President sent a lengthy telegram to the British Prime Minister, in which he drew from America's first experiences as an independent nation. "Perhaps the analogy of some such method to the travails and problems of the United States from 1783 to 1789," he wrote to Churchill, "might give a new slant in India itself." India, Roosevelt believed, needed the Articles of Confederation-the document that held the United States together before the Constitution

was written. Churchill was less convinced. The Americans, he grumbled, "had strong opinions and little experience."

Churchill knew, however, that he could not ignore those strong opinions. At this crucial hour of the war, the United States was becoming wary of supporting Great Britain since it was unwilling to abandon its imperial outlook.

Moreover, Parliament and the British pubIic in general were pressuring the Prime Minister to make some sort of overture to India.

On March 11, Churchill finally relented. He rose in the House of Commons and announced that Sir Stafford Cripps, a leftleaning member of Parliament who enjoyed huge popularity in both Great Britain and India, would go to New Delhi and pre-

food, unemployment, bad transport-everything tends to a popular upheaval. Martial law would fail because there are not enough troops to enforce it. We shan't be able to hold India."

Viceroy Linlithgow had been of little encouragement to Nehru and other Indian leaders, having declared recently that India and Burma would stay in the Empire "because they are conquered countries."

After meeting with Cripps, several Indian National Congress leaders came to the opinion that the Cripps formula was bad for India.

When a dismayed Mohandas K. Gandhi read the British government's proposals and advised Cripps to take the next plane home, he responded that he "would consider that."

nAPrlf3} 1942} CotOneCLouisA

Johnson. arrived"in New Delhi as PmonaC Representative 'if the Presidfnt 'if the lInited States in India. Roasevcft fuu!sensed the /1ercufean. task Cripps jUced in India,

and was now ~

a pcrsonat:

interest in theMission's success.

sent a formula for Indian independence after the war. Thus, the "Cripps Mission" was born.

Washington's pressure seemed to have paid off.

Cripps' task was not easy.

The formula Churchill had given him was convoluted and controversial, and India was desperate for a clear declaration of independence.

When Cripps stepped off the plane in New Delhi on March 22 he realized just how dire the situation had become.

Nehru greeted him with words of gloom: "Lack of

On April 3, as the Cripps Mission teetered on the brink of failure, there was an unusual twist in the story. Colonel Louis A. Johnson, a middle-aged West Virginian, alTived in New Delhi with a rather weighty title: Personal Representative of the President of the United States in India. Johnson was officially in India to oversee Americanfunded wartime production, but as Cripps knew, "it was clear ... that he had been sent posthaste ... in order to lend a hand in achieving an Indian settle-

ment." Roosevelt had sensed the herculean task Cripps faced in India, and was now taking a personal stake in the Mission's success.

Johnson immediately became involved in the issue causing the greatest deadlock: the appointment of an Indian defense minister. Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad and others firmly believed that the only way to get Indians to fight against the Japanese was to give them an Indian leader coordinating the war effort. Colonial leaders in London and New Delhi balked at the idea.

Johnson injected new energy into the negotiations: in the span of a few days he held 19 talks with Cripps and 16 with Nehru. With careful discussion, Indian leaders and Cripps began reaching a consensus on the defense minister issue. In regular telegrams back to Washington, the colonel informed Roosevelt about the Cripps Mission's growing chances of success. Cripps had been encouraged, too. On April 8 he cabled Churchill: "Largely owing to the very efficient and wholehearted help of Co!. Johnson, President Roosevelt's personal representative, I have hopes [the] scheme may now succeed. I should like you to thank the President for Co!. Johnson's help on behalf of H.M.G. (His Majesty's Government) and also personally on my own behalf. "

But Cripps' improving chances were worrying the Prime Minister and Linlithgow.

Churchill had hoped that the fine print of the Cripps formula would deter Congress' approval, and that the Mission would serve largely as a public

relations stunt to appease American opinion. Now it was dangerousl y close to succeeding. Replying to Cripps' buoyant message, Churchill wrote on April 9, "It is essential to bring the whole matter back to the Cabinet's [original] plan, which you went out to urge." The Prime Minister had effectively revoked Cripps' power to negotiate on the formula for postwar independence; Churchill's message was that Congress could either "take it or leave it." The Cripps Mission was dead.

Johnson was now powerless to influence discussion of an Indian defense minister, since such a position was not in the original formula drafted in London. Rejection of the Cripps proposals atTived swiftly from Congress' Birla House. Churchill followed up with hollow words of encouragement for Cripps, claiming that "the effect [of the Mission] throughout Britain and in the United States has been wholly beneficial." In that latter claim he would prove to be terribly wrong. Roosevelt was shocked to learn of the Mission's failure and urged Churchill to keep Cripps in India. "Every effort must be made to prevent a breakdown," he hastily wrote to London on April 12. "I regret to say that I am unable to agree ... that public opinion in the United States believes that negotiations have broken down on general broad issues .... The feeling is held almost universally that the deadlock has been due to the British government's unwillingness to concede the right of selfgovernment to the Indians."

Despite the President's entreaties, the Prime Minister wrote back that Cripps' plane had already left New Delhi.

The Mission's failure, while recognized on all sides as a

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winstoll Churchill in Casablanca ill January 1943 at one of their wartime meetings. tragedy, actually brought India and the United States closer together. Officials in Washington-from diplomats in the State Department to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter-grew deeply suspicious of Great Britain and its motives in India. When a British government official visited the U.S. capital in Apri I 1942, Roosevelt interrogated him about whether Churchill had cabled new instructions to Cripps just as the Mission was on the verge of succeeding.

In New Delhi, Johnson had become so disillusioned with the British that he urged "a replotting of our policy" in India. "Association with the British here," he warned, "is bound to adversely affect the morale of our own officers."

Now the United States turned toward Indian leaders.

The

cause for Indian independence had left a deep impression on Johnson, who was struck by its commitment to democratic, egalitarian principles.

Even Congress' official rejection of the Cripps formula, according to him, was "a masterpiece and will appeal to free men everywhere."

Johnson had also developed tremendous respect for Nehru. "Nehru has been magnificent," he cabled back to Washington.

"The President would like him and on most things they agree ... he is our hope here." Roosevelt himself was moved by a letter Nehru wrote after Cri pps' departure.

Promising the President that Indians would fight against any Japanese invading force, Nehru stated that Indians would "prefer to perish rather than submit to a new invader."

Support for India was not limited to the uppermost circles of government.

The Indian independence movement was enjoying a surge of popularity and interest among Americans.

The India League of America organized a mass rally in New York, calling on Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek to restart negotiations between Churchill's government and the Congress. Pro-India sentiment only increased after the August 1942 "Quit India" movement landed the Congress leadership in jail. Days after the arrests, a Gallup poll found that 43 percent of Americans supported Indian independence; only 17.2 percent opposed it. The large and influential United Auto Workers, a labor union, passed a resolution supporting swam).

The media also came out against British imperialism. In its August 24 edition, Time put Nehru on its front cover and carried an article on his struggles for Indian self-rule. Two months later, the editors of Life published "An Open Letter" to the British public. Claiming that they spoke for the majority opinion in America, they warned that "if you cling to Empire ... you will lose the war.

Because you will lose us."

Unfortunately, the pressures of war prohibited India and the United States from further deepening their relations.

With its soldiers "island hopping" their way westward, America's attention increasingly shifted to battles in the Pacific Ocean.

Languishing behind bars, Nehru and other Indian leaders were unable to continue their dialogue with Washington.

Ultimately, the Japanese never launched an invasion of India, and thus the subcontinent's strategic importance waned.

But the events of 1942 were to have lasting implications for both countries.

American pressure had contributed to Cripps' visit to New Delhi, and while the Mission had failed, it had opened discussion on a postwar India free from the yoke of imperialism.

Great Britain realized that the emerging American superpower would not tolerate the Empire after the war ended. For the United States, fndia played an equally crucial role by widening American foreign policy horizons.

India, in American minds, had been an exotic, farand away land of maharajas ascetics. Now Americans saw the real India, one that was hoping to become a democratic, modern state in the community of nations. "India, perhaps more than any other factor in recent years:' the journalist Kate Mitchell asserted in May 1942, "has once and for all destroyed whatever isolationist illusions the United States may have harbored."

0 About the Author: Dillyar Palel, a Stanford graduate in international relations, is a research analyst at CENTRA Technology in Washington, D.C.

istory is replete with rival inventors battling one another to bring breakthrough creations to market: Elias Howe and Isaac Merritt Singer over the sewing machine, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray over the telephone, Thomas Alva Edison and Joseph Wilson Swan over the light bulb. In many cases, the winner went on to become a household name and captain of industry, while the loser was essentially forgotten.

H

Now, in that same tradition, two inventors are each staking claim to a new audio technology that corporate customers say will have a huge market within the next five years. Known as directional sound, it uses an ultrasound emitter to shoot a laserlike beam of audible sound so focused that only people inside a narrow path can hear it. "It's phenomenal," says Simon Beesley, an audio marketing manager for Sony's European business division. So far Sony has sold just a handful of directionalsound systems for specialty installations

in stores and other locations, but ultimately, says Beesley, "Without question, this is going to be a billion-dollarplus product."

But who will claim that billion-dollar prize? Elwood "Woody" Norris, of Poway, California-based American Technology Corporation (ATC) , and F. Joseph Pompei, of Watertown, Massachusetts' Holosonic Research Labs, have harnessed the same scientific principle to create competing directionalsound systems, and each insists his version will transform acoustics. Norris

Two very different inventors are locked in a head-to-head battle to tame sound.

At stake are billion-dollar markets and lasting fame as the one who redefined how we all think about audio.

and Pompei both envision a family offour sitting in a car enjoying four different musical selections or radio broadcasts at once-with no headphones. They also see street-level billboards Or displays in retail locations that speak only to one passing consumer at a time, or a crowded trade show in which the cacophony of thousands of product demonstrations is replaced by thousands of focused beams of sound confined to their own exhibits.

Rather than using a megaphone, a police officer could control crowds by directing his or her voice only at a person creating a disturbance. The ultimate goal, say both inventors, is to replace a large number of the milJions of loudspeakers sold each year for home entertainment and personal-computer systems with directionalsound devices.

They may share a vision, but these dueling inventors could hardly be more different. Woody Norris is a 65-year-old West Coast maverick with no college degree who got most of his formal education during a stint as a radar technician in the u.s. Air Force more than 40 years ago. The holder of a once valuable but long-expired patent on diagnostic ultrasound, the self-taught inventor has made a personal fortune that he estimates is in the tens of millions of dollars by inventing audio devices, including a hearing-aidsized FM radio, a line of flash-memory voice recorders and car audio systems, and several models of cell-phone headsets. He has been at work on what he calls "hypersonic sound" for much of the past decade and claims to have invested $40 million in its development. "He has an intuitive understanding of physics and electronics," says Curt Edgar, senior manager for advanced technology at DaimlerChrysler, who has met with Norris for demonstrations. "He's also got incredible persistence."

In sharp contrast, Joe Pompei is a 30year-old East Coast entrepreneur with impressive educational credentials but little track record as an inventor: his Audio Spotlight system is his first major invention. In high school and during breaks from college, while working part time for Bose, the Framingham, Massachusetts, loud-

speaker manufacturer, Pompei took note of the limitations of traditional speakers. But, he says, executives at Bose "were not interested in hearing about the future of sound from a 20-year-old." After receiving his electrical engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he went on to get his master's in psychoacoustics at Northwestern University. He says it was there, in the mid-1990s, that he got the idea for using silent ultrasound as a way of producing audible sound. "1 was considered a mad scientist," Pompei recalls.

He first demonstrated the basic principle at the MIT Media Laboratory. While completing his PhD at MIT in 2002, Pompei launched Holosonic, bootstrapping the company with just a few thousand dollars of his own research stipend money. Pompei's system "really does behave like a spotlight," says David Rabkin, vice president of technology at Boston's Museum of Science, which uses the system in an exhibit. "You point the beam at one person and light them up with sound. But once you step outside the beam, the sound drops off quickly."

The technologies and the visions of the inventors are strikingly similar. So it's likely that the differences in their personalities, backgrounds, and business tactics will be critical factors in deciding who is the first to overcome the roadblocksincluding high costs, lack of massproduction standards, and performance kinks-that stand between them and the lucrative markets they both envision.

Which one of them prevails, if either, will speak volumes about the relative value of education and experience, youth and wisdom-and perhaps luck and timing-in ensuring an inventor's place in history.

One thing Pompei and Norris have in common is this: each quickly learned that in chasing directional sound he was heading down a path others had trod before. Norris says he first got the idea for what has become his Hypersonic Sound system in the late 1970s. He had recently raised money by selling stock in

one of his startups and, flush with cash, was eagerly looking for his next big thing. "1 was ignorant and naive enough to think 1 was the first person to think of this," he says. But as he researched old patents and publications, "names came out of the wall. People have been trying this for 50 years." Pompei's own research revealed that major Japanese corporations had looked into the concept in the early 1980s but abandoned their quest, suspecting that the technique would produce distorted sound or require too much power to be of any use.

Both Norris and Pompei believe they have solved most of the problems that stymied their predecessors.

Each of their systems contains a signal processor, an amplifier, and a platelike device that shoots out beams of ultrasound. At his suburban San Diego laboratory, Norris plugs his Hypersonic Sound emitter into an ordinary portable CD player for a demonstration outside in the parking lot. When he points the device at a visitor standing about 20 meters away, the visitor is able to clearly hear sounds ranging from a waterfall to jazz music. But when Norris points the emitter to the left or right or up to the sky, the visitor hears no sound at all. Inside the lab's conference room, Norris directs the emitter at walls, bouncing the sound beams so that they seem to be coming from spots on the wall, rather than from the device itself.

It's easy to see why directional sound is cool, but understanding how it works is far tougher. Traditional speakers generate audible sound waves that spread out in all directions like ripples from a pebble tossed in a pond. Norris's and Pompei's devices instead generate narrow, laserlike beams of ultrasound waves, which have a frequency above 20,000 hertz, the upper limit of what the human ear can detect.

Both audible sound waves from traditional speakers and ultrasound waves from a directional-sound system distort when they travel through the air; in a traditional sound system, the distortion slightly degrades the sound a listener ultimately hears. But in a directional-sound system, the distortion is actually the mechanism

that generates the audible sound, breakjng the ultrasound waves into lower-frequency, audible sound waves along a straight, narrow path.

The paths of the two inventors, on the other hand, are converging on a marketplace battlefield where corporate customers will be won and lost. The clash is already fierce. Pompei, for instance, says that his is the only directional-sound system that has been built into a vehicle from a major manufacturer.

In fact, three years ago, when the Audio Spotlight was part of a project at the MIT Media Lab, research sponsor DaimlerChrysler did indeed incorporate a prototype into a concept car, with transducers located above each of the four seats in the cabin. "Functionally, it worked," says Daimler's Edgar. But there was one main glitch: the beams would bounce off of the seats and other surfaces, deflecting sound between the zones. Because of that drawback, and the high cost of the system, the automaker didn't pursue it further.

Instead, a year ago, Edgar got in touch with Norris. "ATC has made more strides, in terms of cost and manufacturing and performance," says Edgar. "They are a couple generations beyond where Holosonic was." Still, Norris's system has yet to be built into a vehicle, and there are no immediate plans at Daimler to do so.

Norris admits that he is working on improving the performance of his Hypersonic Sound system. One issue is the technology's current inability to produce low bass tones, a shortcoming that Pompei's system shares. But Norris says that Sony is already rolling out the product in Europe. Sony's Beesley confirms that the company has to date distributed hundreds of Hypersonic Sound systems, which it integrates with its plasma video screens for specialty applications. He says that department stores, banks, and museum exhibitors are using the technology to beam sound at customers and visitors in particular areas. "It has huge potential,"

Beesley says. The main limitation of the system, he adds, is its price. "It's pretty much hand-built right now," he says, at a cost of about $1,000 per unit. "We're looking at various industrial designs to make it cheaper and easier to produce."

The goal is a price point of less than $100 per installation. Daimler's Edgar says a similar price point is essential to making directional-sound technology competitive with traditional car-stereo speakers.

At $ 1,000 to $2,000 per system, Pompei's Audio Spotlight suffers from the same high-cost, low-production-quantity syndrome. Early customers such as Steelcase, vvhich is testing it for office environments, and Cisco, which has installed it in corporate lobbies, have only purchased a few units each.

As ATC and Holosonic race to transform their systems from high-end curiosities to household staples, Norris says he is relying on his patents to protect his intellectual property in the marketplace. On that front, he appears to have the edge on Pompei. Norris has about 20 issued patents covering various aspects of directional-sound technology, and he says that 20 additional ones are pending. Pompei says he has about a dozen patents pending, including two key ones, but only one that has been issued so far.

Given the similarity in the technologies and visions of Pompei and on'is, the shouting match is likely to get louder. The one thing the two inventors can agree on is that directional sound has real long-term opportunities, especially when it comes to displacing the ubiquitous loudspeaker, invented more than 80 years ago. Even the best loudspeakers, they agree, are subject to distortion, and their omnidirectional sound is annoying to people in the vicinity who don't wish to listen. What remains to be seen is which, if either, of these two inventors will become the Alexander Graham BeU of directional sound, and which will become the Elisha Gray.

0

About the Author: Evan J. Schwartz, a former BusinessWeek staff editOl; contributes to Technology Review, Wired and the New York Times.

â&#x20AC;˘ o

o

BIOTECH abol"atol"ies

At Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology, researchers believe that teasing apart complicated biological networks will help unravel some of medicine's greatest mysteries. Why do infectious diseases kill some people and leave others unscathed?

at the Institute for Systems Biology sport magnificent views across the sailboat -cluttered waters of Lake Union, with the hilly downtown of Seattle as a backdrop. On this unusually sunny and warm June day, graced by an endless turquoise sky, the large windows provide an entrancing, even romantic, view. And it well suits the young institute, which has built itself around one of the grandest of biological visions.

Systems biology, one of the hottest fields to spring from the Human Genome Project, defies a simple description. It promises nothing less than to reshape the way that scientists think about how the human body works, providing clues to unraveling the complexities of illness and ultimately leading to new medicines to prevent and treat disease. But even the Institute for Systems

Biology's Web site prominently raises the question 路路What is systems biology?", then offers an answer that fills six full screens of a computer monitor.

As the site struggles to explain, systems biology aspires to connect the dots of all the body's R A, D A, genes, proteins, cells, and tissues, elucidating how they interact with each other to create a breathing, blood-pumping, diseasefighting, food-processing, problem-solving human. "Systems biology is a holistic view of what's going on," says Alan Aderem, cofounder and director of the institute. It looks beyond the individual actors and tries to discover the script they are following, and that marks a radical shift for biology. "The focus for the last century has been on individual molecules," says Marvin Cassman, executive director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, a fledgling systems biology program that joins researchers from the University of

California schools at Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz. "What's been missing is an understanding of the way individual molecules operate together."

Using this new approach, researchers have begun to address some of medicine路s most basic questions: Why do some people become gravely ill from an infectious agent that only causes mild disease in most? Will a clearer picture of how immune-system cells interact with each other guide the development of new vaccines? If scientists identify a defective gene, or an aberrant protein, can they correct it without doing harm somewhere else?

Scientists have dreamed about doing systems biology for decades, but explaining the workings of even a single cell has proved too daunting. Now a confluence of developments has fundamentally altered biology. An explosion of blazingly fast. highly automated machines has enabled the analysis of biological molecules In a fraction of the time it took a mere five

Broad view: Systems biology pioneer Leroy Hood found thm academia did not ofler {he freedom the neH'jield requires.

years ago, Similarly, the torrent of new information from the Human Genome Project and related projects that comprehensively examine entire families of such molecules has presented scientists with dizzying new "parts lists路' for humans.

Add in the ever increasing computational muscle of today's computers. and the systems biology approach that once seemed implausible becomes not only possible but also necessary to make sense of it all.

The formation of the Institute for Systems Biology five years ago fanned the flames, with a dozen universities and biotech firms subsequently announcing new interdisciplinary programs with a systems biology bent. But the Seattle institute remains the highest-profile player, in part because of its founders' combination of scientific expertise and

Perched to take off: Alan Aderelll sees systellls biology's potential to increase hUlllan lile spans.

machine-making prowess. It helps, too. that one of the cofounders, Leroy Hood, has something akin to celebrity status.

In the mid-1980s, Hood became famous in the biotech community when his lab at Caltech developed the automated DNA sequencer, a machine that made the Human Genome Project possible and helped to reconfigure biology. With support from Microsoft's Bill Gates, Hood in 1992 came to the University of Washington and started an interdisciplinary molecular biotechnology program.

The program planted the seeds of systems biology. but by 1999, Hood had become frustrated with the limitations of academia. and he decided with two other researchers at the school, Aderem and Ruedi Aebersold, to start the Institute for Systems Biology. "In the end, we decided we needed more freedom, and that's why we took this pretty drastic step," says

Hood. Aderem came to systems biology through a less obvious route and with a more pragmatic motivation. A pioneering immunologist, he had earned a sterling scientific reputation for his work on a single family of proteins. Still, he says, "At the end of 10 years, I was tired and realized I wouldn't live long enough to get any real understanding of a system if I was going to do it one by one."

Despite the excitement it inspires. systems biology remains very much in its infancy. The institute has so far churned out papers that begin to establish the virtues of the approach with arcane biological systems like yeast and sea urchins. But at the institute's core are far more ambitious programs in cancer. hean disease. infectious diseases. autoimmunity. and inflammation. And as they make the leap from relatively simple models to critical human problems, Aderem and his colleagues believe that their work will move medicine toward an era in which our life spans increase by 10 to 30 years. That's a terrifically bold claim. But a closer look at

what Aderem and others at the institute have begun to explore shows it may be more than just a daydream inspired by the splendid view.

Testing Ground A native of South Africa who spent five years under house arrest for actively opposing apartheid, Aderem grows animated as he leads a tour of the institute's 6,000-square-meter lab complex. thrilling as much to the scientists themsel ves as to the facility's wealth of new equipment. In his baggy shorts, he looks like a safari guide as he points out a man and woman together at a microscope. "She's a cardiologist working with a physicist.'路 he says.

Aderem's lab also includes a mathematician and an engineer, in addition to the more usual assortment of biology and medical specialists. "My job is to integrate everybody," he says.

This integration of different scientific perspecti ves and different types of data is key to puzzling out the complexity of a network like the immune system. which is

responsible for the body's exquisitely orchestrated response to microbial attack.

And even with a diverse team in place, Aderem is starting with a small part of the puzzle: the various cells that make up the so-called innate immune system, the body's first line of defense. Innate immune cells are somewhat dimwitted; they have no memory and have trouble making fine distinctions between microbes. (Tn contrast, the acquired immune system, which includes antibodies and more troops of cells, remembers how to recognize and destroy every invader it meets.) But the innate system plays an essential role in keeping people healthy by destroying some intruders and by shuttling others to the acquired immune system.

Because it is a relatively simple network, innate immunity makes an excellent testing ground for systems biology. In January 2003, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded a $24 million grant to the Institute for Systems Biology, Rockefeller Uni versity. and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, to create an "encyclopedia" of the innate immune system. Using the tools of systems biology, the researchers have started to catalog precisely how the network reacts to microbial attack. exploring specific biochemical pathways and behaviors of genes and proteins. Compared to acquired immunity, "the players are much more well defined in innate immunity. And it will be possible to ask how important they are in the various pathways," says Richard Ulevitch. chair of immunology at the Scripps Research Institute and head of the encyclopedia project. Aderem, for instance, has long focused on one particular innate immune player, a type of white blood cell called a macrophage. "The macrophage really opens up a whole window" on systems biology, Hood says.

An early test of the macrophage-centric approach came after an unlikely event: death at a Dutch flower show. In February 1999, an annual flower show in the Netherlands attracted 77,061 visitors. Of these, 178 developed Legionnaire's disease, as did 10 exhibitors. Caused by a bac-

terium. Legionnaire's disease leads to severe pneumonia, which in this outbreak killed 21 people. Dutch scientists quickly identified the likely source of the infection: a contaminated whirlpool spa on exhibit.

But the outbreak raised a question that Aderem and his team thought they could help answer: why had these 188 people developed severe cases of Legionnaire's disease. while others who paused at the whirlpool exhibit had not') Aderem was certain it was not simply bad luck.

When a bug like Legionel/a pnelll/1ophila infects a person, the cellular sentinels of the innate immune system sample it and carry off pieces of it to alert the acquired immune system. That sounds simple enough, but it's actually an intricate. tangled drama that cries out for a systems biology approach. It turns out. for instance, that innate immune cells aren't

inflammation, and steer the eventual response by the acquired immune system.

If that seems complex, factor in that researchers have so far found 10 different toll-like receptors, and that the proteins work in concert. For example. three different receptors together recognize the category of bacteria that includes Legionella pneul11ophila.

Aderem's lab at the institute began its study of the Legionnaire's outbreak by hunting through thousands of blood samples to find mutated versions of one of the receptors. The task required sorting through millions of blood cells to pluck out minute variations in the billions of DNA letters that make up each person's genome. To aid in this search, the team turned to a myriad of souped-up lab machines, many modified in-house to more quickly collect the massive amounts

The NanoSystems Biology Alliance hopes to move the nanolab into clinical applications by working with pharmacologist Michael E. Phelps and oncologist Charles Sawyer from UCLA. quite as mindless as was once thought.

Proteins called toll-like receptors. which stud the surfaces of macrophages. allow them to detect, at least on a crude level, differences between microbes. Since the discovery of the first toll-like receptor in 1997, Aderem's group has played a major role in describing how macrophages use the molecules to distinguish a virus from. say, a bacterium. 'There's a bar code on the membranes of microbes that the tolllike receptors can read," says Aderem.

Thanks to these bar codes, different microbes prod different toll-like receptors into action, which in turn triggers different biochemical cascades that can activate or suppress genes, cause or prevent

of data that a systems-level approach requires. Cell-sorting machines. for example. typically deposit cells on plastic plates that have 96 wells each. But the institute's sorter operates so quickly that the researchers devised a new contraption to collect the cells: a long strip of wells that spools continuously off of a reel and through the sorter.

In all, the researchers found four mutations of the targeted receptor. They then studied the DNA of people who had stopped at the contaminated whirlpoolboth those who got sick and those who did not. "This was a blessed study. because we had the controls," says Aderem. Using more high-throughput tools. they hunted

through the DNA samples for the mutations they had earlier identified. By comparing the gene patterns of the people who developed Legionnaire's disease and the healthy controls, they discovered that a mutant version of the receptor tripled a person's risk of getting sick. The speed with which the researchers were able to make the discovery illustrates the power of the Institute for Systems Biology's strategy. "If I had been in a genetics lab where everything was set up, I assume it would have taken many months, if not years," says Aderem. "Here, it took not more than one week." And in uncovering the mutation and linking it to a heightened risk of contracting Legionnaire's disease, they had taken a small but important step toward understanding how individual receptors and other molecules interact within the innate immune system to dramatically affect human health. ~_~_~___ File

Edit

_ Data. Select

.C:tt~s5a.p!f?':.'~{~P __ layout

Visualization

Plugms

~_~_~_.~.

Fillers

interesting study population, he notes, because they often have not seen a particular infectious agent before and have no acquired immunity to confuse analyses of the innate system. For similar reasons, the young have the most to gain from new therapies, and unraveling how harmful microbes interact with the innate immune system could speed the development of new antimicrobial drugs and vaccines.

In many ways, biology is becoming a numbers game. The human genome contains more than three billion DNA letters, representing some 40,000 genes, which actually encode untold billions of proteins, thanks to a complicated system of enzymes that slice, dice, and otherwise modify proteins as they're made. Detailed information on all these players, and on their counterparts in other organisms, is filling gargantuan databases around _ the world. The job of the Institute for Systems Biology is to draw connections between the data its researchers accumulate and all of the information they can scrounge from these databases and the scientific literature. lt is a breathtakingly ambitious mission, marked by huge challenges in the gathering, storing, and crunching of data, so the institute has coupled its state-of-the-art computers via extremely high-bandwidth connections to machines at a supercomputing center in Fairbanks, Alaska, that has the capacity to store more than 300 terabytes of information.

One homemade software program called Cytoscape helps the researchers make sense of the data. Developed collaboratively by the Institute for Systems Biology, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Cytoscape creates visual representations of systems. To the untrained eye, the program's collection of circles connected by lines to other circles looks like some hugely complicated engineering chart that spells out the production process at a manufacturing plant. But Aderem empha-

r~-~~-~-:JtJl0X~ ~;d~i:~';---mIi----

Working with pediatrician David Speert of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, Aderem and his team hope to expand that understanding. Speert is investigating several more "experiments of nature" similar to the Netherlands flower show, with the aim of explaining how innate immunity can determine whether children get sick from infections such as tuberculosis and E. coli.

"With every infectious disease, most people who are exposed do not become sick," says Speert. "We're trying to figure out what's different about the percentage who get sick." Young children provide an

sizes that without Cytoscape, the researchers would be lost. "Humans can extract huge amounts of data, but no human can juggle more than 20 parameters," says Aderem. "By visualization, though, they can do 100,000 parameters or more."

Sitting at his computer, Aderem opens a Cytoscape representation of yeast metabolism. Although yeast metabolism offers an exceedingly simplified model of human metabolism, the same rules that control a single-celled fungus inform how the trillions of cells in a person operate. Each circle in Cytoscape, known as a node, represents a gene or protein. "If you perturb the nodes, that will result in large changes," Aderem notes. For humans, he says, "these are obvious drug targets." The visualization of the system also allows scientists to predict a medicine's side effects: if a drug interferes with a specific protein, Cytoscape shows researchers how that might have a negati ve effect on a connected pathway that controls such critical functions as respiration or metabolism of sugar. "This would take IS years and billions of dollars to see in the terms of standard drug development," says Aderem.

Indeed, researchers typically spend years studying a drug in laboratory and animal experiments before moving it into cumbersome, expensive human trials, which often fail because surprising side effects suddenly surface. Such failures can cost pharmaceutical companies hundreds of millions of dollars and patients their lives. But with a detailed map of the systems that go haywire during bad drug reactions, drug companies might one day be able to substitute a quick computer analysis for many of those costly experiments.

Just as systems biology aggressively strives to piece together biological networks, the Institute for Systems Biology has pieced together networks of leading scientists. And in perhaps the most intriguing joint effort to date, called the NanoSystems Biology Alliance, the institute is collaborating with leading nano-technologists at Caltech and med-

ical researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. The goal is to squeeze many of the highly automated processes used in systems biology onto a one-square-centimeter silicon chip. [f the anoSystems group delivers on its promise, it will create a "nan01ab," a chip that will have the power to outperform entire laboratories. In that systems biology is an approach that prizes technology that is smaller, cheaper, and faster. the nanolab is a dream machine.

"It has the possibility of utterly revolutionizing systems biology," says Hood.

The researchers hope that, gi ven just one drop of blood, the nanolab will separate thousands of cells from each other and, as Aderem says, "interrogate them individually."

The soul of the new machine is an intricate network of microfluidic channels, developed by Caltech physicist Stephen Quake, that range from five to 100 micrometers wide.

After being treated with labels that mark specific cell types, the blood sample enters these nanopipes, which can sort, say. macrophages from other white blood cells. Another series of nanopipes equipped with tiny detectors can then Below: Transmission electron micrograph of Legionella pneumophila.

Opposite page: A screenshot of the main window of Cytoscape 2.0 displaying a network of interactions among 332 yeast genes.

identify and separate into various channels the different proteins secreted by the macrophage.

Caltech chemist James Heath has designed one of these detection systems, an array of nanowires that he coats with molecular "hooks" to fish for proteins.

Each wire, which measures a mere eight nanometers in diameter, can hook a different prey. Heath is designing the system so that only one nanowire is "live" at a time, endowing the nanolab with such exquisite sensi tivity that, currently, a sample need contain only 50 to 500 molecules of a specific protein for the nanowires to detect its presence. [n the future, the hooks will also be able to snare specific sequences of DNA. Meanwhile, Caltech physicist Michael Roukes and his group are making nanocantilevers that can detect proteinprotein interactions, the critical interplays that determine many of the biological events in the body. Roukes attaches protein receptors to the tips of the nanocantilevers. When a specific protein binds to a receptor, it causes a tiny movement, which induces an electrical impulse that indicates both that a protein-protein dalliance has occurred and the strength of the interaction.

The alliance hopes to move the nanolab into clinical applications by working with two researchers at UCLA: Michael E. Phelps, who invented the positron emission tomography scan, and oncologist Charles Sawyer, a leading expert in

Charles Sawyel; prostate cancer expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, is part of the NanoSystems Biology Alliance and lI'orks with the Institute for Systems Biology along with UCLA\- Michael E. Phelps.

prostate cancer. But Aderem stresses that the nanolab project remains in its infancy.

"If we get this functioning in 10 years, I'd be delighted," he says.

It takes a leap of faith to think that a decade from now, a nanolab will be able to decipher from a single drop of blood what Aderem calls "the molecular fingerprint of a cell," and that this information will tie into a systems biology database that will give drugmakers and clinicians a dramatically improved ability to help people live healthier, longer lives.

But great accomplishments begin with great visions, and this one has spectacular technologies behind it, the likes of which biomedicine has never seen.

"When I first got into this, I felt the same way I did when we originally cloned genes," Aderem says. "My God. The power."

D About the Author: Jon Cohen is a Technology Review cOnlrihuting writer and author of Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"What do you mean old age? My olher elbow is the same age and il don 'I hUrl." Copyright © 2004 The Saturday Evening Post Company.

Reprinted with permission.

"Gee, thanks, mister' 1 shall be j(Jrever in your debt.!"

Copyright © 2004 The Saturday Evening Post Company.

Reprinted with permission.

Copyright © Tribune Media Services. Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright © Tribune Media Services. Inc. Al! rights reserved.

SPOIl Ritu Primlani

Environmentalism Made Feasible unning restaurants is an alluring business proposition for many.

But what does that have to do with environmental conservation?

Doing something for the cause of environment that revolves around restaurants is not everybody's cup of tea. Meet Ritu Primlani, Oakland, California-based nonresident Indian and founder of the nonprofit Thimmakka's Resources for

temple, but everyone goes to an ethnic restaurant," Primlani says, and delivering an environmental message at a restaurant has very high impact. According to her,

impose any financial strain on the restaurant owners. Thimmakka has 56 partners, including those from the government, nonprofit and business sectors, the media

restaurants consume more energy per square foot than any other retail space, they are responsible for l6 percent of the

Environmental Education.

Greening South Asian (Ethnic) Restaurants, one of her important projects, uses language, cultural and economically appropriate methods to teach hard-toreach minority businesses about environmental conservation.

They are asked to follow certain standards for which they are certified. About 45 restaurants

Primlani was comfortable working with restaurants owned

by Afghani, Nepali, Sri Lankan, Indian and many other communities, but initially faced difficulty reaching out to restaurants of the Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese communities because of cultural differences. That's when she started taking interns, mostly community leaders, with appropriate language skills who could communicate better with the restaurant owners of various ethnic groups. This is a major advantage, according to Primlani. as local government bodies do not have the resources to conduct outreach in different languages for minority businesses.

She started alone but now has added two more staff members.

Primlani's clients implement environ-

and private foundations.

Some provide heavily subsidized or free equipment and services to the restaurants that adhere to the certification process. Incentives, such as free publicity and promotional performances by local South Asian aI1ists in participating restaurants are also organized by Thimmakka.

Primlani, who is in her early thirties.

R

are part of the program now.

A geography graduate from Kirori Mal College in New Delhi with a masters in geography, urban planning and law from the University of California, Los Angeles, Primlani was inspired by Saalumurada Thimmakka of Hulikal village in Kalllataka, who adopted 284 banyan trees as her children to quiet her neighbors' taunts of infertility. For this unusual effort, she later received an award from the Prime Minister for social forestry.

Primlani started Thimmakka in 1998 and initiated environment outreach efforts for the South Asian community, such as the first South Asian Concert for the Environment in Los Angeles in 2000.

But why target restaurants?

"If you are religious, you may go to a church or a

solid waste going into California landfills, and they pollute the ocean with improperly disposed of grease and oil.

ment-friendly measures such as solid waste minimization and water and energy conservation.

Restaurant owners least aware of regulations due to cultural or language barriers became leaders in their business segment in environment compliance. she says. The entire certification process is voluntary, and Thimmakka's services are free. The aim is not to

earlier worked as a consultant, cartographer and geographic information systems special ist. Her resume boasts half-adozen awards, including the California Governor's Award for Leadership in Economic and Environmental Partnerships and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Leadership Award in 2003. Last year she received the San Francisco Bay Area Hero Award and the Global Ashoka Innovators for Public Social Entrepreneur fellowship.

During her trip to India in January, she set up an office in New Delhi and has met local government officials and a few restaurant owners. She hopes to provide similar services to restaurants in India, although this may require a few modifications in the guidelines to meet local needs. she says.

Thimmakka is contracting with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Risk Management Agency to conduct outreach to Sikh farmers in Yuba and Sutter counties in California.

0

â&#x20AC;˘

Casting

â&#x20AC;˘ a

Wide Net For decades, the idea of welfare was considered

government For the

hile some American ideals are held sacred, such as the right to life and liberty, many others fluctuate with the tides of history. But few ideas in the American mind-set have reversed themselves so completely. and transformed the nation so profoundly. as the notion of whether ought to lend its neediest citizens a helping hand. entire first half of the United States' existence,

Americans ardently rejected the notion of a public safety net for even the most vulnerable citizens. Indeed. the idea of welfare was considered "un-American" - something repugnantly European. Yet over much of the past century, the country has engaged in the rapid-fire construction of a net so extensive and elaborate that about half of all government spending now goes to some kind of assistance. And it's not just for the down and out anymore. Nearly every American citizen receives some form of aid these days, regardless of need.

Early Americans were known for their distinctive antipathy toward government handouts, a distaste historians attribute to both the oppol1unities of their expansive adopted land and the personalities of those who chose to move here. Up to 1870, half the nation's workers were farmers, landowners with extended families that pitched in during tough times. But this all-for-one mentality didn't extend far beyond the family. It was still a nation of immigrants with little in common, says historian LaITy DeWitt. The country lacked any sense of ethnic unity that might have inspired more generosity. What relief did exist for the poor usually came from private or local coffers, but accepting welfare was not a simple choice: Those who took aid often lost the right to vote and sometimes even had to wear a large "P" (for poor) on their clothing.

The industrial revolution radically economy and lifestyle, but it didn't put a mentality. With "more jobs seeking men as one early historian put it, it was hard

transfOimed America's chink into this bootstrap than men seeking jobs," to fathom that any will-

ing worker could not provide for himself or his family. So even as most European nations were creating programs of "social insurance." Herbert Hoover was winning the 1928 presidential election by denouncing the European model as "paternalism."

Hoover's attitude didn't soften when the stock market crashed a year later. plunging a good chunk of the population into unemployment and homelessness.

When 25,000 World War I veterans marched to the White House to request early payment of

A sharecropper's jamily in Arkansas, 1935. Ul1lil President Roosevelt's "Ne\\! Deal," betll'een governmel1l and ci!i~ens, relief was local, private and stigl11ati~ing.

financial bonuses they had been promised, the President's response was to tear-gas them. That was the American safety net in 1932.

But by then the American public was learning some sad lessons. The Great Depression had shown that bootstraps just didn't work for many Americans. Even those most willing to lift a shovel, and even those who had socked away a lifetime of savings, could be made destitute by perverse twists of fortune. Almost overnight, support swelled for the very un-American idea that the government should bear responsibility for helping the unfortunate. Franklin Roosevelt was swept into office to create a" Jew Deal" between government and citizens.

In 100 days. Roosevelt transformed the role of U.S. govemment forever by creating all manner of assistance programs. His largest legacy was the Social Security Act, which led to the vast system of benefits for the retired, disabled, unemployed, and poor. They're all still in place today. The demand was overwhelming: By the time the first checks were drafted, over 35 miJJion people had signed up, and today the program covers 98 percent of workers.

The New Deal marked a turning point "as decisive as 1776 or 1860," argues historian Kenneth Davis. Not only did it transform the U.S. government from "a smallish body that had limited impact on the average American into a huge machinery that left few Americans untouched," but it also resulted in "a previously unthinkable reliance on government to accomplish tasks that individuals and the private economy were unwilling or unable to do."

While President Roosevelt's expansion of the govemment was astonishing and unprecedented, it was just the beginning of official compassion in the United States. After World War II, the or Bill (GI means a U.S. Army soldier) helped put a safety net under some 15 million retuming veterans, with cash, vocational training. scholarships, and housing assistance.

This idea - that welfare might come in the form of services, not just cash-came to fruition in the 1960s and was advanced most vigorously by President Lyndon Johnson. The bedrock idea of the Great Society was entitlement: Americans by birthright were guaranteed not only freedom but also a certain level of comfort.

New government programs like Head Start and the Job Corps made that point, but President Johnson's most stunning social innovation was the creation of Medicaid and Medicare. Those two programs declared for the first time that no American-poor, elderly, disabled-should go without decent health care.

Since these innovations, America has struggled to maintain its ethos of self-reliance and hard work. The Reagan administration cut back on spending for public housing and job training, and the Clinton administration demanded more personal responsibility in redefining "welfare as we know it." Even so, taxpayer support of assistance programs has doubled since the 1960s, to roughly 50 percent of the federal budget.

What's more, this is no longer a partisan issue. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle elbow one another out of the way to claim credit for expanding the safety net. Both houses of Congress have recently grappled with adding prescription drug benefits for Medicare and Medicaid recipients trying to cope with recordhigh pharmacy bills.

The revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine argued that the "government is best which governs least." That sentiment inspired Thomas Jefferson and other architects of a small federal government. But as the nation has struggled with economic downturns, the laissez-faire philosophy has lost some of its appeal, and modern citizens have come to expect a government that softens the landing when they fall.

0 About the Author: Joannie Fischer is a contributing editor with U.S. News & World Report.

" I was feeling weak with cough and fever, unable to eat properly and had giddiness and nausea. No other family member has had TB, just me. I think I got it from one of my friends while playing ... .! have not been able to go to school because of TB. I have suffered stigma-both at school, and in the village.

"When my parents were informed about my TB they were shocked. Initially, I was very upset and very scared. Now I know more about TB. When I leave the hospital, I wiLLexplain to everybody, especiaLLy at the school, about TB and stigma .... My chances of marriage have been hurt by this disease.

I willjight this and ifnobody wants to marry me then I will turn to social work to help fight TB. I must complete my treatment and get cured. JJ

T

his may read like a story from a remote Indian village or a leaf from 19th-century public health history. Not so. This is the story of Manju, a l4-year-old girl living in an urban village in ew Delhi. She had been coughing for weeks, and landed up in a chest clinic run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) at Patparganj. Her story depicts the pain and stigma associated with tuberculosis. It illustrates how easily an infected person can spread the disease, explaining the resurgence of this ailment of the last century. At the same time, it

has strands of hope woven into it. The girl talks about her treatment and a cure.

Manju is among the thousands of tuberculosis cases detected every day across India and in many parts of the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates about 1.7 million new TB cases occur every year in India and every month about 100,000 new cases are detected and put on treatment therapy. Globally, TB is posing a major public health problem. Every year nine million people are infected with TB and two million of them die400,000 in India alone. Tuberculosis is 11 times more common than malaria in India, and is the leading cause of death in the ISto 4S-year age group. The increasing prevalence of HIV infection that makes people more susceptible to TB, and the rise of drug resistant TB strains mean the disease will be a serious public health problem with a high economic burden for years to come.

As the disease affects people in their producti ve age-l S to S4 years-it creates a huge social and economic burden. An infected adult loses three to four months of work time and 20 to 30 percent of annual household income. Based on this reality, the Indian government's TB control authorities have estimated direct and indirect costs of tuberculosis to be $3 billion annually. The social costs are also tremendous. Every year 100,000 women suffering from TB are rejected by their families because of the social stigma attached to the disease. Thousands of children become orphans when parents die of tuberculosis. and nearly 300,000 have to leave school annually because their parents get infected with TB.

Since India accounts for about one-third of the global TB burden, control measures in India have a global impact. TB control in the country has come a long way from the days when there were no anti-TB drugs available and a sanatorium was the only option. Once the drugs became available, a national program was launched, but for decades, it had poor results. Treatment of TB requires patients to follow a full drug regimen, but this was not happening. Many patients dropped out of the program and did not comply with the medication requirements. As a result, fewer people were cured and the incidence of drug resistance increased. To ensure compliance with the treatment therapy and to reduce dropouts, it was suggested that drugs should be admjnistered in the presence of a health-care provider. This gave birth to the "directly observed therapy, short course" or DOTS, in which patients swallow anti-TB drugs in the presence of a health worker or a trained person instead of taking the drugs home and consuming them alone. This approach formed the basis of the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP) a decade ago.

The DOTS strategy was internationally recommended by WHO for all its member states with high incidence ofTB. Today it is the main weapon in the global fight against tuberculosis. The World Health Assembly in May 2000 set the target of detecting 70 percent of all people with infectious TB and successfully treating 85 percent of them by December 2005.

India has made rapid progress in implementing DOTS since the program started on a pilot basis in 1993. The DOTS cover-

age was extended to 545 districts with a population of 942 million by December 2004. The entire Indian population is to have access to DOTS services this year, according to the timetable.

Preparatory work is in full swing in areas not yet covered-pans of Jammu and Kashmir and pockets in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

The case detection rate has crossed 75 percent and 86 percent of all cases detected are being cured, according to Control Programme officials. India has already met the WHO targets.

The DOTS program in India is being run with financial help from a number of donors led by the World Bank. The Bank provided $142.4 million to expand DOTS coverage and help strengthen its institutional and managerial infrastructure.

Funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria supports the program in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal. and is expanding DOTS coverage in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. USAID is supporting implementation of the program in Haryana and Tamil Nadu and a few projects in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. USAID. workjng with WHO's India office, will spend $4.7 million for TB control in India this year, says Chris Barrett, infectious diseases and HIV/AIDS fellow at USAID in New Delhi. Haryana achieved treatment success and case detection rates of 83 percent and 64 percent respectively in 2002 and full coverage of its 22 million population in 2003-04.

Worldwide WHO is directing its TB control effort in high burden countries through its Stop TB Partnership, supported by US AID and other donors. The partnership is specifically designed to help 22 countlies with a high TB burden. India,

China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, igeria, Pakistan and South Africa are among the countries that contribute 80 percent of the global burden of the disease.

The DOTS program not only cures individual patients, but works in the community to interrupt the transmission of the disease. Transmission can be interrupted in a reasonable timeframe if the program covers more than 70 percent of the population with cure rates of more than 8S percent. Activities that need to be carried out to achieve these targets include: screening patients with chronic cough; sputum and, if necessary, X-ray examination; initiation of appropriate, standardized treatment; ensuring regular treatment; and documentation of drug intake and cure.

The World Bank funding will end this year and the Indian government is negotiating a second five-year project. "Even if external funding does not come, the government is committed to run the program as long as tuberculosis remains a public health problem," says Dr. L.S. Chauhan, head of the TB control program. After withdrawal of external assistance, the program will be continued as a centrally-sponsored project.

"There are many lessons to be learned from the experience so far, not only for India but for the entire world," says Dr. S.P. Agarwal, Director General of Health Services. 'The most important lesson is that a successful DOTS program can be implemented even with an often inadequate public health infrastructure, if it is appropriately designed and effectively managed," he says. The program has been cost-effective, too, at Rs. 2 per capita per year.

Some innovative measures have taken DOTS to people beyond the reach of the official health machinery by collaborating with the health facilities of other government agencies such as the railways and the Ministry of Labor, private practitioners

Above: At the chest clinic in lhandewalan, New Delhi, a health worker supervises a patient taking her medication.

Above, right: A doctor examines a young boy whom he suspects of having TB at the chest clinic run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi in Patparganj.

and voluntary bodies. Medical colleges and corporate sector hospitals have also been brought into the drive. All this has helped to improve case detection. Nearly 10 percent of the cases are detected by private practitioners, while 18 percent are detected by the 190 medical colleges enrolled in the effort. The challenge is to ensure that all these newly detected cases are brought within the DOTS program.

Nearly 4,000 private doctors are participating in public-private health partnership programs to extend DOTS. This has helped to reach out to patients in difficult areas such as urban slums, where private doctors are often the first point of contact for a large percentage of patients. Some patients, particularly women, don't want to visit a distant government dispensary to take their medication when a private practitioner is available nearby. Several motivated individuals have also become DOTS providers. Bansi Lal, a shoemaker in Karnal, Haryana, is one such volunteer. He became interested when one of his relatives was cured through DOTS. However, gaps and challenges exist in maintaining quality in monitoring, testing and external evaluation. The emergence of drug resistant cases is a major challenge. Right now, Indian government programs don't cover these patients, although multi-drug resistant TB accounts for nearly three percent of previously untreated patients. This resistant strain of tuberculosis has emerged in many countries, mainly due to inconsistent supplies and inadequate quality of first-line anti-TB drugs.

TB patients in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are 10 times more likely to have drug-resistant tuberculosis than in the rest of the world, according to WHO. WHO's Stop TB Partnership estimates that an additional $1 billion will be required over the next five years just to treat such cases,

World Bank funding for the 18 control program in India ends this year and the Indian government is negotiating a second five-year project.

assuming that they will account for nearly 40 percent (about 500,000) of all new cases.

India has started addressing the problem of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Checks have been carried out in six districts in different parts of the country to gauge the extent of the problem.

Similar studies will be carried out in Maharashtra and Gujarat soon. Since drug resistant TB can't be diagnosed easily in a clinical setting, laboratory diagnosis is necessary. So, the government proposes to set up a string of accredited laboratories-one in each state-to conduct drug culture and sensitivity tests. The Revised National TB Control Programme has established an expert panel to adopt international guidelines on drug-resistant tuberculosis to suit the Indian situation. A pilot project has been proposed for DOTS Plus-covering this type of tuberculosisat the L.R.S. Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases in New Delhi. Patient compliance will be a major task because drug-resistant tuberculosis may require patients to take drugs for three years, while regular cases require only about nine months of treatment. These second-line drugs are expensive, too.

Another factor fueling the TB epidemic and posing a serious threat is HIY. TB is the most common opportunistic infection in those infected with HIY. TB accelerates the progression of HIV to AIDS and shortens the life span of infected individuals. India already has an estimated 5.1 million people infected with HIV and nearly half are expected to develop TB. However, DOTS can cure TB even among HIV-positive individuals. So, the effort now is to link TB and AIDS control programs at various levels.

A system of cross referrals has been developed between the voluntary counseling and testing centers of the AIDS control program and the sputum microscopy centers of the Revised National TB Control Programme. This system will now be extended to link up DOTS centers with centers providing antiretroviral therapy to AIDS patients.

Gains made in TB control may be neutralized by rising HIV cases, unless the two epidemics are addressed in a coordinated manner. "We have to see that proper mechanisms are evolved at all levels for coordination between the two programs," notes Dr. Prahl ad Kumar, director of the National Tuberculosis Institute in Bangalore.

While drugs being administered cun'ently through DOTS and the second-line drugs to be given under the DOTS Plus strategy are proving effective, WHO has acknowledged that the disease is growing faster than control measures in many parts of the world. There is an urgent need for more reliable diagnostic tests and easierto-use TB drugs and vaccines-all at affordable prices.

Despite growing attention to the disease, no new diagnostic tools have become available. Microscopic examination of sputum-introduced more than a century ago-still remains the predominant method of diagnosing TB in developing countries. The method does not always yield accurate results and needs well-equipped labs. Delays in diagnosing drug-resistant tuberculosis means more deaths and new cases.

'J.I Ii'

~ 8 A street play to raise mmreness

of TB by a thealer group, Koothu-p-patlarai, at Ihe Anjaneyar Nagar slum in Chennai lasl yeO/: II was organi~ed by Ihe Resource Group for Education and Advocacyfor Communi!)' Health (REACH), with assislance from Ihe Global Fund 10 Fighl AIDS, TB and Malaria.

Similarly, if the treatment period can be reduced to two months or less from the present six to nine months, it would radically alter the fight against TB. A shorter regime would mean fewer side effects, more patient compliance and higher cure rates, besides reducing the treatment cost.

Stop TB Partnership's working group on drug development has reported that two new compounds for TB treatment are undergoing pre-clinical tests and one of them is likely to enter clinical studies this year. But getting new drugs to the market may be a difficult task, considering the lukewarm response of drug companies. Although the market for anti-TB drugs is projected at $700 million by 20 I0, the concentration of TB in poor countries has deterred companies from working on new drugs. So, existing antibiotics are being tested for effectiveness against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Researchers are also seeking to develop an improved Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine.

The CUITent BCG vaccine protects against severe childhood forms of TB but has failed to provide reliable protection against adult pulmonary tuberculosis in endemic countries. In addition, entirely new vaccines are also being developed. Phase I clinical trials of a new vaccine have started and two more vaccine candidates are ready for clinical evaluation soon. But it may be another IO years before a new vaccine hits the market.

As the Stop TB Partnership is busy developing the Second Global Plan to Stop TB (2006-2015), drug resistance, new strains and disease patterns, partnerships between nations and research efforts will decide whether TB ceases to be a global public health problem after 2050.

D About the Author: Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based science and technology journalist who wriles for Cnet News.com (USA) and The Lancet (U.K.).

ometimes you can do things that are spontaneous when you aren't physically trying to compose, said American jazz saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, chatting with students at the Ravi Shankar Institute of Music and Performing Arts in New Delhi, recently.

Moments later, Coltrane was in a jam session, or jugalbandi, cross-legged on the floor, trading musical rifts on his clarinet with shenai playing brothers Sanjeev and Ashwini Shankar. Their teacher, India's musical maestro Ravi Shankar, clapped his hands, patted his thigh to the beat, and sang out snatches of tunes.

The Indian sitar master and the 40year-old American musician who was named after him were fortunate to have music to express their feelings, because several times during the afternoon each was struck speechless with emotion over their first meeting in India.

Shankar had met Coltrane's father, John, one of America's jazz giants, in ew York in the 1960s. The elder Coltrane "was so interested in our expressing through our music a peaceful state of mind and the spontaneous improvisation and all the system of ragas and how we do it," Shankar told his master class.

Shankar said he spent several days with John Coltrane, sharing as much information as he could. They had planned to meet again, but John Coltrane died suddenly in 1967.

"Anyway the love and the friendship that we had made him choose my name and ... call him Ravi, and that has made me so happy," Shankar said, placing his hand over his heart as he looked up into the face of John Coltrane's son, now an

acclaimed jazz musician and composer in his own right.

"Today, we welcome you, Ravi," said Shankar. "I am also very curious to hear and learn more about jazz." He reached out with an American handshake for his visitor, who offered an Indian namaste.

The two Ravis had met before, and also shared a ew York City stage in 1998, when the younger Coltrane pelfolllled with his mother, Alice Coltrane, a rare female jazz musician who plays the organ, piano and harp. She now arranges and records music for Hindu meditation groups.

But this was Ravi Coltrane's first visit to India and the meeting with Shankar was, "of course, the highlight."

"My whole life I've had this name, known this name, known and heard his music," said Coltrane. "My father had such great admiration for. .. his music and love for him, so great that he would name his second child after him.

"I have one child, William. I know the agony a parent can go through choosing a child's name," Coltrane said. "I can relate to and connect with what my father must have been expressing ... by naming me Ravi, so I have to thank you for that."

Coltrane said he was not always grateful to be called Ravi. Born in New York in 1965, he grew up in California, where, "it was unusual having a non-Western name.

I was a very shy person. No one could pronounce my name correctly. I wanted to be like everyone else. I was thinking of changing my name to Robert."

At 10 or 11, Coltrane said, he was "not aware that the world is very big, and having somethjng different and unique is a positive thing." When he was a little older, a girl commented, "It's such a beautiful name."

After that, it was fine to be named Ravi!

Coltrane was just two when his father died, and therefore, has only theolies-not unique insight-about what his father was thinking when he fused Indian and African musical expressions into American jazz.

-'

"Around 1957 is when he had this peliod of awakening as he called it, spiritual awakening, where he was trying to improve his life, add things to his life and himself to make himself a broader person, maybe a more universal person," said Coltrane.

Many jazz musicians at the time were trying to find new influences and inspiration. "It's easy to see differences in John Coltrane's music from 1957 to '60. not just developing as a stronger saxophonist, but the music overall was changing and it changed drastically over a period of time," said Ravi Coltrane.

In his autobiography Ragamala, Shankar recalls that a mutual fJiend had been telling him about John Coltrane for several years, "how he was fascinated by India, had become a fan of mine, and had all my records .... When Coltrane came to me he looked different from his contemporaJies: so clean, well mannered and humble."

John Coltrane recorded "My Favorite Things" in the fall of 1960, probably the first example of his "doing something with a primary rhythmic structure," said his son. At 13 minutes, it may be the longest piece the senior Coltrane had recorded at that time. "I think it was definitely done to sort of emulate the Indian music and African music that he was hearing," Ravi Coltrane said. In the piece, the bass does not move, harmonically

Ravi Shankar weCcomes Ravi Co(trane speaking. The younger Coltrane feels it emulates the sound of the Indian stringed instrument. the tamboura or drone, behind and underneath the jazz improvisations.

Shankar agreed that John Coltrane was very interested in the tamboura, which underlies much Indian music, acting "like a tonic." said the maestro.

John Coltrane "could see that in the world there was music that could relate to higher ideas, besides just sounding good and you enjoying it:' his son said. "He was specifically trying to do that in 1964, trying to imply symbolic meaning to his music.

I'm sure this is something he could see and hear in Indian music, and in music from other cultures as well. The bottom line is he was trying to find something universal." ''I'm a little nervous, with the master here," Coltrane said, glancing toward Shankar as he picked up his clarinet, an instrument he stwted playing at the age of 12. Four yew's later, when his older brother was killed in a car accident, Coltrane stopped playing, and didn't stwt again until he was 21.

In his youth, Coltrane said, he was interested in American pop and thought his father's jazz "was cool music, but it wasn't anything that really had gotten inside me." As he worked through his grief, he kept being asked about his father's music and investigated it on a technical level, as a student. "I started finally hearing the music in a different way. When I went to the music for one reason. I got this other thing from it," Coltrane said. "I thought about it years later and realized it wasn't accidental that I finally made this connection with this music at that time in my life."

Wrapped up in jazz, Coltrane says, is the

idea of freedom, "having the ability to asselt your own sense of self, your own ideas. your own style. That's what makes Indian music exciting, forms of American music exciting, the individual expression, something that can be created in real time."

Jazz is regarded as an indigenous American music form, but Coltrane notes that some of the conditions that produced it are not "part of the American ideal."

"A lot of the creators of the music were black American men who didn't have the easiest lives:' he said. "They were treated like second-class citizens and the music came out despite that type of treatment.

Oppression like that happens in every pan of the world, not just in those days but even today, and people find ways to rise above it in art and music. I'm very proud of the fact that the music did come from the United States and was created by a handful of very talented people. But it's no longer a specific thing that comes from a specific place." 0

Ravi Shankar listens as Ravi Coltrane plays clarinet at the Ravi Shankar 1llStitllte of Music and Pelforlning Arts in Nell' Delhi.

avi Coltrane's visit was part of the 2005 India Jazz and Heritage Tour with other American jazz legends, vocalist Al Jarreau, guitarist Earl Klugh and bass player George Duke. The tour aimed to emphasize hared U.S.-India concerns about the spread of HlY/AIDS and other social issues and was sponsored by the U.S. State Department, Black Entertainment Television, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and MTY-India.

"Until eight weeks ago. I was unaware of the extent of the AIDS epidemic in India. I didn't think it was as pervasive here," said Duke, who provided backup for Jarreau as he performed for child rag pickers and street dwellers in Mumbai, The children at a shelter run by the Committed Community Development Trust laughed with delight as Jarreau sang "Ba, Ba, Bye," making the word move like a wave with crests and troughs. On the birthday of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.. the jazzmen were serenaded with the American civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome," sung by children supported by a nongovernmental organization called Stop Trafficking and Oppression of Women and Children, The children also perfonned an excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore's dance drama, Challdalilw. depicting the trauma of a low-caste girl facing discrimination.

"Jazz was born from the American people's struggle to conquer prejudice and stigma in our society:' then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said as he inaugurated the jazz tour that began in December 2004. ''The struggle continues to this 0 day .... No one should be stigmatized or looked down upon."

Above: AI Jarreau and GeOl:f?eDuke get into the mood at the shelter /'Unby Committed Community Development Trust in Mumbai.

Far left: India Jaz~ and Heritage Tour 2005 concert at the Gateway of India in Mumbai.

Leji: Earl Klugh