SPAN: May/June 2005

More Choices路

SPAN

u.s. Student Visa Procedures

By William M. Bartlett

The Dynamic U.S.-India Relationship

Publisher Michael H. Anderson

An Interview with Ambassador David C. Mulford

By Laurinda Keys Lang

Editor-in-Chief Robert B. Richards

Editor

Synergy in Agricultural Trade

Laurinda Keys Long

By A. Venkata Narayana

Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana

Hindi Editor Govind Singh

Urdu Editor AnjlUTINairn

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

Editorial Assistant K. Muthul..'umar

Art Director Hemant Bharnagar

Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi

Production/Circulation Manager

Super Organics

By Richard Manning

Sikhs Rule in California's Central Valley

By Lea Terhune

Zero Tillage in Indo-Gangetic Plains

By Ritu Upadhyay and Dipesh Satapathy

Kenyon's Ageless Quest

By Stephen S. Hall

Rakesh Agrawal

Reefs in a Prairie Sea

Printing Assistant A10k Kaushik

By John L. Eliot

Business Manager

India on Wall Street

R. Narayan

By Rajesh Mahapatra

Elesearch Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center Bureau of International Information Programs of the State Department

Front cover: Washington State apples imported to India. Photograph courtesy the Washington Apple Commission. See article on page 6.

The Great Paving

By Justin Fox

Indian Highways: Planning for Prosperity

By Sudipt Arora

On the Lighter Side Sufism in America

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

By Anjurn Nairn

Persian Poet Rumi Conquers

America

By Steve Holgate Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 23316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delbi. Printed at Ajanta Offset & Packagings Ltd., 95-B Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi 110052. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

American Corners: Reaching Out

By Dipesh Satapathy

Sustainable Development in Uttaranchal

By Govind Singh

A LETTER

J

FROM

ust over a year since Ambassador David C. Mulford's arrival in New Delhi, he took time to share with SPAN his excitement about the dramatic progress that has taken place in the relationship between the United States and India. He mentions the successful visit of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the new Open Skies agreement, and openings for cooperation in nuclear power and military procurement in an article, "The Dynamic U.S.India Relationship," by Laurinda Keys Long.

"The Great Paving," by Justin Fox, illustrates how construction of the Interstate Highway System made America more mobile and prosperous:and changed the culture in some ways. Sudipt Arora looks at a similar ambitious project in "Indian Highways: Planning for Prosperity."

Rajesh Mahapatra polnts out advantages of open trade and investment systems. in "India on Wall Street," explaining how American investors, Indian companies, their employees and shareholders all benefit when Indian companies list on the U.S. stock exchanges.

The potential for more American fruits and vegetables being made available to Indian consumers through elimination of remaining market inhibiting restrictions is explored by A. Venkata Narayana, in "Synergy in Agricultural Trade." The article is part of our cover package of stories on more choices in food and food路 production.

Richard Manning continues this exploration" of choices in "Super Organics." Scientists can produce abundant, delicious, and nutritious agricultural products that are safe to eat and better for the earth. The key is smart breeding, based on what farmers have been doing instinctively for hundreds of years. Also innovative is an economical and environment-friendly farming method outlined in the article, "Zero Tillage in IndoGangetic Plains." Lea Terhune relates how Indians have been contributing to American agriculture and society for more than 100 years in "Sikhs Rule in California's Central Valley."

Another contribution to the United States'

THE

PUBLISHER

"melting pot" of cultures is the Sufi tradition of Islam, popularized by American writer Coleman Barks' translation of the works of Persian poet Jelaluddin Rumi and spread by immigrants who have taught American devotees the meaning of Sufi prayers and the techniques of the whirling ritual. The story is brought to us in Anjum Naim's "Sufism in America," with vibrant photographs by Lee Guthrie.

An equal feast for the eyes is the photography of Annie Griffiths Belt, illustrating "Reefs in a Prairie Sea," in which John L. Eliot describes the strange beauty and changing geology of South Dakota's Badlands National Park, along with efforts to preserve its history and ecology. Govind Singh takes a look at the tension between preservation and inevitable change in one of India's beauty spots in "Sustainable Development in Uttaranchal. " One apparently inevitable change for humans is the process of aging, although individuals have been searching for an antidote since the dawn of history. The search continues, now in laboratories around the world, and one San Francisco scientist's genetic research on microscopic worms renews the ancient hope, says Stephen S. Hall in "Kenyon's Ageless Quest."

SPAN welcomes a new writer in this issue, distinguished theater journalist and drama critic Romesh Chander, who investigates, in "Arthur Miller in Indian Theater," the link between Indian audiences and the characters created by one of America's greatest playwrights.

We've also included some informative articles from Dipesh Satapathy on the American Corners, which are providing research facilities and opportunities for discussions and exhibitions in four regions of India; and from Minister Counselor for Consular Mfairs William M. Bartlett on the procedures for obtaining student visas.

Take your choice and enjoy!

c)~ lJJJJHJJJ ~JiJJJ *Procedures

By WILLIAM M. BARTLETT Minister Counselor for ConslIlar Affairs

S

pringtime signals the season to start planning travel for fall studies. For the third year in a row, students oflndian origin represent the largest full-time foreign student population in the United States. In the 2003-04 academic year, 79,736 students from India were studying as undergraduates and graduates in American universities and colleges. There are more than 3,600 accredited colleges and universities in the United States, some of them among the oldest and most prestigious in the world. In the United States, Indian students can find a flexible, diverse and high quality education that is student friendly and offers the chance for hands-on training. American universities welcome the difference in perspectives,

culture and opinions that international students bring to campus.

In the past, there have been certain rnisperceptions ~ about student visas-that~" there was a quota on student~ \ visas or that, post 9/11, it was 5 more difficult to get a student visa to the United States. These are simply not true.

Anyone who is qualified for a student visa will receive a visa and the basic criteria for who is eligible have not changed.

The U.S. visa policy is based on the principle of "Secure borders, Open doors." And although the events of 9/11 have required us to take additional precautions to protect American citizens and foreigners working and studying in the United States, we are

working hard to ensure that all qualified students gain access to an American education in a timely manner.

To enhance security, some additional steps have been added to the visa process, including the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), personal interviews and fingerprinting.

These changes have now been seamlessly integrated into the visa application process and help ensure the quick processing of bona fide students.

The American Embassy in New Delhi and the Consulates in Chennai, Mumbai and Calcutta are working hard to see that students gain their visa interviews in time for the fall semester.

D

When making an Appointment for a student visa:

Visa Applicants should:

• First-time students should schedule their visa interviews as early as possible, but ideally not more than 90 days before the school's start date.

• First-time students cannot enter the United States more than 30 days before their start date. Continuing students with a valid visa can return at any time.

• Students can request an emergency appointment if they are unable to schedule an interview in time to attend school.

• Students with more than two U.s. visa refusals within the past six months cannot apply for an emergency appointment, but may schedule a regular appointment online when one is available.

• Students studying in high-tech or sensitive fields should apply early, as some applications may require an additional three to four weeks of processing.

• Make an appointment in the appropriate consular district. Applicants in the New Delhi, Chennai and Calcutta districts should apply online at www.TISVisas.com. Applicants in the Mumbai district should apply online at www.visa-services.com.

• Complete application forms DS-156 and DS-158 (and DS-157 if required).

• Have a visa photo taken and obtain a demand draft for the application fee in the amount of Rs. 4,400. No issuance fees are required for student visas.

• Pay the $100 SEVIS fee by credit card or draft according to instructions at www.fmjfee.com.

(SEVIS is a one-time fee, as long as the student is continually in status while in the United States.)

• Appear for the interview at the appointed date and time and be sure to bring student's passport, SEVIS-generated I-20 form, evidence of ability to pay for the education, and any relevant academic information.

• Be ready, during the interview, to convince the consular officer that the applicant is a credible student, able to pay for the planned course of study and has a credible plan to return to India.

Student

For further information on student visas or other consular issues, refer to the u.s. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs Web site at travel.state.gov/visa_services.html.

For information on educational opportunities in the United States, refer to the U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) Web site at www.fulbright-india.org.

The Dvnamic

U.S.-INDIA -onshl-p

Relall

An Interview

with

fl •• ~

mbassador David C. Mulford came to India 15 months ago excited about the opportunity to be "engaged at the cutting edge of history," looking forward to working with people in the Indian government and private sector to transform I relationships between the two countries.

Now, he says, "The transformation is taking place so quickly that it's a little bit hard for people to keep up."

Driving that change has been President George W. Bush's clear declaration that the U.S.-India relationship is of key strategic llpportance for the United States and that he wants that relationship to grow and develop into a truly comprehensive one, says Ambassador Mulford.

"A wide variety of positive things have happened that have strengthened and diversified and extended the relationship," the ambassador says. Among them is the NSSP, Next Steps in Strategic Partnership, launched in January 2004, with the Phase I agreement concluding after nine months, despite the change in the Indian government. "Both the BJP-Ied government and the Congress-led government have, while in power, indicated that they want a strong strategic relationship with the United States.

So that represents a very broad political consensus in India, which has been a very positive and exciting proposition," he says.

Other developments are signing of the Open Skies agreement in April and "a highly positive visit" in March from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which "moved the U.S.-India relationship into a whole new level."

Responding to views of some analysts that India does not need

* * * * *

Ambassador DAVID C. MULFORD

By LAURINDA KEYS LONG

We have now indicated, as a matter of policy, that the United States wishes to help India achieve its vision of being a world power in the 21st century.

We are establishing a special energy dialogue where we will look into the key energy issues that challenge India, including civil nuclear, clean energy and nuclear safety issues.

We have extended and broadened our military relationships.

We have authorized u.s. companies to participate in the tender for 126 multi-role fighter aircraft.

We have agreed to establish a new space initiative.

We have indicated that we wish to conduct with India a strategic dialogue on global as well as regional political issues.

or want American help to become a major world power, Ambassador Mulford says, "There is a lot of 'old think' around in ... circles in India, just as there is some 'old think' around in the United States ....But these are people who, in part at least, are living in the past."

Ambassador Mulford himself was surprised "that the views on Pakistan among Indians generally were much more constructive and much less sensitive than I had been led to believe by my briefing in Washington before coming out. .. .1 found the general public wanting to see the two countries get together and cooperate economically and restore their relationship and move forward."

This atmosphere has enabled him "to take a much more confident position with regard to establishing the proposition that the United States has a freestanding bilateral relationship with India, which has its own vision of the future as a regional and

world power, with whom we have very special interests."

Pakistan also has a freestanding bilateral relationship, with a different vision for the future, he notes.

"We are no longer in the mode where every single action is viewed through the prism of the other country's relationship.

That has to be constructive and, in my view, marks real progress during the course of the last year," the ambassador says.

He and his wife, Jeannie, have visited most of the major regions of the country, finding that "India is a truly diverse democracy, which practices tolerance and is an enormously active and vibrant society, filled with movement and color, culture, all kinds of interesting things." It's been an important part of his job to understand this, Ambassador Mulford says, "but it's also been deeply pleasurable, lots of fun."

His disappointments are focused in the area of economic reform in India, which "wants to integrate itself, to some extent, with the world economy," but is cautious about ensuring that the benefits of that process are spread through Indian society. "I quite understand that," he says. "On the other hand, ... there are some areas where it seems to me that it's absolutely essential that they adopt a more aggressive stance. One of those is infrastructure.

If they don't create a world-class infrastructure relati vel y quickly, in my view, it is going to be a major constraint on growth.

"Secondly, I think they need to face the reality that their financial system needs very significant further liberalization to open up the banking sector so that it becomes more efficient, more competitive and serves the needs of the economy more effectively, and also that they encourage in a more forceful manner the creation of a long-term capital market," he says.

Although the United States and India still have serious work to do in moving their relationship forward, he says one impediment has been removed, namely in the defense field.

"We are now authorized to compete for major military platforms here and we have said, very significantly, that we are prepared to look into co-production, technology transfer, ... which should be of very great interest to India because India is looking to expand those segments of its economy."

Among the challenges, he lists

"It's been deeply pleasurable, lots of fun."

Left: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Roosevelt House in New Delhi with Ambassador and Mrs. Mulford.

Above right: Ambassador Mulford during a Delhi Little League baseball game at the Embassy's Leo Flanagan Field in New Delhi.

Right: Ambassador Mulford cuddles a baby during a visit to a New Delhi polio clinic.

"One of the most enduring relationships. "

improvement of the foreign direct investment climate in India, and coping with restrictions in U.S. law on technology transfer and high tech exports because of the nuclear non-proliferation commitments of the United States.

And what does the United States need to work on?

"We need to figure out a way to deal more efficiently with this huge visa demand, and in particular to be more sensitive to the needs of Indian companies that need faster and more efficient visa service in order to move their employees to the United States for training and business operations, quite apart from the general visa demand," Ambassador Mulford says. "Waiting periods for an appointment are too long, despite a major investment by the United States in terms of people and visa windows and equipment."

He emphasized that the Embassy and the consulates in Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta are constantly reviewing the visa waiting times, have added to the resources dedicated to streamlining the process and are engaged in creative think- ~ ing to resolve the difficulties. ~ He explains that the aim is to improve the security of the United States without closing the country off to foreign visitors. "We don't want students, for example, to get frustrated and decide to go to other countries for their education because they think it's too difficult to get a visa," he says.

Ambassador Mulford is convinced that "the U.S.-India relationship 20 years from now will be one of the most important and enduring relationships in the world because of the way the two countries are, in a sense, comfort~ able in themselves, with each other's CI: ~ basic values, society, form of govern~ ment and general approach to things."

The large Indian population in the United States is well educated, articulate, successful, friendly, contributive, he says. "They don't live off the system and they stay in close touch with their past and their families," he says.

They are becoming increasingly politically active in the United States, he notes, "which means there's going to be a very significant definition of U.S.-India relations and what our interests are in India by people who are 'of the place.' This is a unique feature of the relationship at this point and will have an impact as we look into the future."

0

i

(/)

Left: The Washington Apple Commission promotes the export of apples to some 50 countries, including IndiJl since 2001.

Right: A hostess marketing America's popular Hershey's Syrup at the Aahar 2005 exhibition in New Delhi in March.

Representatives of the American food industry, such as the California Pistachio Commission, the Washington Apple Commission, the Pear Bureau Northwest, the California Table Grape Commission and the Pennsylvania Depattment of Agriculture showcased their products.

Besides promoting the Indian food industry, the exhibition provided a platform for international companies seeking mat路kets for produce, dairy and horticultural products, processed food, packaging and refrigeration in India or to launch business ventures.

India removed quantitative trade restrictions in 2000, allowing importation of a wider variety of foods, but tariffs remain high, at 30 to 60 percent on most food items. As a result, the pace of American agricultural exports to India has remained slow, reaching a mere $260 million in 2004, most of it in high-value consumer products, such as processed and packaged foods.

India's agricultural exports to the United States touched $1.3 billion last year, registering a steady growth of 11 percent during the past five years.'The Indian

exports include shrimp, tree nuts, vegetable oil and spices. While the United States imported tree nuts from India, it also exported the same item to India, besides cotton, soybean oil and fresh fruit to a total value of $260 million last year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. That leaves the balance of

"Due to some of the world's highest import duties and other barriers to agricultural imports,

Indian consumers are denied access to the many high quality and nutritious food, beverage and agricultural products from the United States."

-

KEITH Sm.;})ERLAL,

Representative of tile Washington Apple Commission agricultural fra~ favor of India by more than $1 billion for t~ calendar year 2004.

From the U.S. peisp~ctive, India is a potential major market fOr~food exports and joint ventures but needs address issues such as high tariffs, higher ~nsaction costs, trade facilitation, the remaming long list of blocked imports, remnants of the licensing system and protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). "India's onerous food laws, increasing use of SPS [sanitary and phytosanitary] measures, its fragmented market chain, lack of a cold chain [to keep food refrigerated] and a complex tax structure work as disincentives to the exporters," says Chad R.

Ambassador David C. Mulford tasting freshfruit imported from the United States at the Aahar 2004 exhibition in New Delhi.

Opposite page: Mansi Ahuja (right), corporate affairs manager of the Washington Apple Commission, chats about California pistachios with hostess Parminder Kaur at Aahar 2005.

Russell, agricultural counselor at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. "To put this in a micro-economic context, a consumer product valued at $1 in New York will cost at least $3.50 at retail in New Delhi."

Keith Sunderlal, an Indian representative of several American agriculture expOlt corporations including the Washington Apple Commission, agrees. "Due to some of the world's highest import duties and other barriers to agricultural imports, Indian consumers are denied access to the many high quality and nutritious food, beverage and agricultural products from the United States," he says.

American food exporters are aiming at India's large and growing middle class, numbering 50-200 million. With increasing urbanization and exposure to western culture, there is a segment of 10-50 million consumers, largely concentrated in the major metros, who are the target customers because their consumption behaviors are comparable to westerners.

Growing health consciousness among the middle class has further spurred specialty food imports, while the growth of fast food and western style restaurants and the vibrant domestic food processing industry has created substantial markets for an increasingly broad range of food items.

Transition from subsistence existence to "middle class" further creates demand for quantity, quality and diversity of food.

Rising income leads to more protein consumption in the form of poultry, eggs, milk and vegetable oils.

Responding to the changing food preferences of millions of Indians, the government is aiming to bring reforms to the age-old food safety laws. It is a welcome sign to those who want to sell their products in India and desire a "level playing

~ §" ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ § 8

field" with Indian food exporters. "We would like to see that the new law is transparent, based on science, not trade restrictive," says Michael Riedel, agricultural attache at the American Embassy.

Riedel feels that the United States and India should work on areas of biotechnology, research and investment. "India has to establish a regulatory framework for biotechnology that is timely and transparent, and carry out collaborative research to spur development of new bioengineered products. To attract investments needed to stimulate growth of the biotechnology sector, proper IPR protections must be adopted and enforced," he says.

Level playing field "India should remove non-science based SPS measures that are negatively affecting U.S. agricultural exports. India should notify new measures to the World Trade Organization prior to their implementation and establish a regular dialogue between technical experts from India and the United States to systematically address SPS issues with a view to increase bilateral agricultural trade," adds Riedel.

The Confederation of Indian Industry (Crr) views the Indian food processing industry as a sunrise sector because of its strong product base and great export potential. According to crr estimates, India produces 41 percent of the world's mangoes, 30 percent of cauliflowers, 28 percent of tea, 23 percent of bananas, 24 percent of cashews and 36 percent of green peas.

"These advantages, if leveraged optimally, can translate into India becoming a leading food supplier to the world," says Monojit

There are huge opportunities for large investments in food and food processing technologies, skills and equipment, especially in canning, dairy products, specialty processing, packaging, frozen foods, refrigeration and thermo processing.

Health food and supplements are another rapidly rising segment. Chintey feels that family income growth, over time, impels a switch to more consumption of meat and value-added products, which has been the tendency the world over. There will be a sharp increase in livestock production and thus animal feed and cereal production Chintey, executive officer in the ClI's and imports as Indians gain more disposdepartment of food processing. able income, he suggests. Experts estiIndia should diversify into new products mate by 2025 India will need an additionand add to the quality of current exports to al 92 million tons of cereal production to the United States such as shrimp, other meet the demand. marine products, nuts and spices. "To furIndia, the world's third largest producer of agricultural products after the United ther increase exports to the United States, States and China, already grows 150 milIndia should design a strategy with speciflion tons of fruit and vegetables per year ic targets. For example for 2010 the target for merchandise should be pegged at $65 and is the largest producer of eggs at 43 billion, while $40 billion should be the tar- million per year, according to the crr. Yet, get set for services," suggests Chintey. says Chintey, 40 percent of all Indian agricultural produce is wasted before reaching Benefits of consumer the market and could be preserved through new technologies available through partchoice One reason for India's restrictions on nerships and trade with American and other importers. Grading, sorting, packagfood imports has been a demand by Indian ing and refrigeration enhance the shelf life farmers for protection from the competition.

But Sunderlal, the representative of Ameriof food products and will especially benefit India's poultry and fishery can exporters, says consumers will always want choice and sectors. there is room for local and Trade provides consumers imported produce in India. For¡ access to a wider variety of example, he said, until four food products at reasonable years ago, growers in Himaprices. American consumers chal Pradesh were resigned to receive tropical fruits, coffee selling their apples at about Rs. and exotic French cheese.

30 per kilo. When the governImports make fresh fruits and ment lifted quantitative import vegetables, such as asparagus restrictions in 2000, imported and grapes, available at Pear Bureau NorthWest affordable prices during the apples began appearing in the winter. Indian consumers can Indian market and sold at also have these advantages. As about Rs. 100-120 per kilo.

Suddenly, Himachal growers the food industry becomes discovered that their apples globalized, it increasingly would sell at up to Rs. 60. The California Prune Board uses not just trade, but a variimported fruit, instead of ety of innovati ve business harming the local farmers' arrangements to access global markets and provide services interest, boosted the popularity and price of Himachal apples. and products.

0 California Table Grapes Commission

Forget Frankenfruit-the new-and-improved taste of tomorrow is earth-friendly and all-natural.

Welcome to the delicious golden age of gene science. nce upon a technologically optnlliStlC time, the founders of a swaggering biotech startup called Calgene bet the farm on a tomato. It wasn't just any old tomato. It was the Flavr Savr, a genetically engineered fruit designed to solve a problem of modernity.

Back when we all lived in villages, getting fresh, flavorful tomatoes was simple. Local farmers would deliver them, bright red and bursting with flavor, to nearby markets. Then cities and suburbs pushed out the farmers, and we began demanding our favorite produce year-round.

Many of our tomatoes today are grown in another hemisphere, picked green, and only turn red en route to the local Safeway (store). Harvesting tomatoes this way, before they've received their full dose of nutrients from the vine, can make for some pretty bland fare. But how else could they endure the long trip without spoiling?

Flavr Savr was meant to be an alternative, a tomato that would ripen on the vine and remain firm in transit. Calgene scientists inserted into the fruit's genome a gene that retarded the tendency to spoil. The gene-jiggering worked-at least in terms of longer shelf life.

Then came the backlash. Critics of genetically modified food dubbed the Flavr Savr "Frankenfood." Sparked by the Flavr Savr's appearance before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), biotech watchdog Jeremy Rifkin set up the Pure Food Campaign, stalling FDA approval for three years and raising a ruckus that spread to Europe. When the tomato finally emerged, it demonstrated that there was no accounting for taste at Calgene. Flavr Savr wasn't just oddly spelled; it was a misnomer. Even worse, the fruit was a bust in the fields. It was highly susceptible to disease and provided low yields. Calgene spent more than $200 million to make a better tomato, only to find itself awash in red ink. Eventually, it was swallowed by Monsanto.

But the quest for a longer-lasting tomato didn't end there. As the Flavr Savr was stumbling (Monsanto eventually abandoned it), Israeli scientist Nachum Kedar was quietly bringing a natural version to market. By

crossbreeding beefsteak tomatoes, Kedar had alTived at a savory, high-yield fruit that would ripen on the vine and remain firm in transit. He found a marketing partner, which licensed the tomato and flooded the U.S. market without any public relations problems. The vine-ripened hybrid, now grown and sold worldwide under several brand names, owes its existence to Kedar's knowledge of the tomato genome. He didn't use genetic engineering.

His fruit emerged from a process that's both more sophisticated and far less controversial.

Welcome to the world of smmt breeding.

tithe to the life sciences giant.

Which brings us back to smart breeding. Researchers are beginning to understand plants so precisely that they no longer need transgenics to achieve traits like drought resistance, durability, or increased nutritional value. Over the past decade, scientists have discovered that our crops are chock-full of dormant characteristics. Rather than inserting, say, a bacteria gene to ward off pests, it's often possible to simply turn on a plant's innate ability.

The result: Smart breeding holds the promise of remaking agriculture through methods that are largely uncontroversial and unpatentable. Think about the crossbreeding and hybridization Cยง that farmers have been doing for ~ hundreds of years, relying on ~ instinct, trial and error, and luck to ~ bring us things like tangelos, giant j pumpkins, and burpless cucumbers. ~ . ~ Now replace those fuzzy factors wIth ~ precise information about the role ~ each gene plays in a plant's makeup.

he tale of the Flavr Savr is a near-perfect illustration of the plight of genetically modified organ' isms CGMOs). A decade ago, GMOs were hailed as technological miracles that would save farmers money, lower food prices, and reduce the environmental damage unintentionally caused by the Green Revolution-a movement that increased yields but fostered reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and wanton irrigation. Gene jocks said they could give us even greater abundance- and curb environmental damage Smart breeding by inserting a snip or two of DNA from anothholds the promise of er species into the genomes of various crops, remaking agriculture a process known as transgenics.

In some cases, GMOs have fulfilled their through promise. They've allowed American fam1ers to that are largely be more productive without as much topical pesticide and feltilizer. American grocery stores m'e stuffed with cheaply produced food-up to and unpatentable.

70 percent of all packaged goods contain GM ingredients, mainly com and soybean. GM has worked even better with inedible crops. Take cotton. Bugs love it, Today, scientists can tease out desired traits on the fly-somewhich is why Southern folk music is full of tunes about the boll thing that used to take a decade or more to accomplish.

Even better, they can develop plants that were never thought weevil. This means huge doses of pesticides. The world's largest possible without the help of transgenics. Look closely at the edge cotton producer, China, used to track the human body count during of food science and you'll see the beginnings of fruits and vegspraying season. Then in 1996, Monsanto introduced BT cottonetables that are both natural and supernatural. Call them a GMO that employs a gene from the bacterium Bacillus Superorganics-nutritious, delicious, safe, abundant crops that thuringiensis to make a powerful pesticide in the plant. BT cotton require less pesticide, fertilizer, and irrigation-a new generation cuts pesticide spraying in half; the farmers survive.

But while producers have embraced GMOs, consumers have had of food that will please the consumer, the producer, the activist a tougher time understanding the benefits. Environmentalists and and the FDA. Nearly every crop in the world has a corresponding gene bank foodies decry GMOs as unnatural creations bound to destroy traditional plants and haIm our bodies. Europe has all but outlawed trans- consisting of the seeds of thousands of wild and domesticated relatives. Until recently, gene banks were like libraries with milgenic crops, prompting a global trade war that's costing American lions of dusty books but no card catalogs. Advances in genomics faImers billions in lost expOlts. In March 2004, voters in Mendocino and information technology-from processing power to databasCounty, Califomia, banned GMO faIming within county lines. es and storage-have given crop scientists the ability to not only Opponents have found an ally in crop scientists who condemn create card catalogs detailing the myriad traits expressed in indithe conglomerates behind transgenics, especially Monsanto. The company owns scores of patents covering its GM seeds and the vidual varieties, but the techniques to turn them on universally.

One of the smart breeder's most valuable tools is the DNA entire development process that creates them. This gives marker. It's a tag that sticks to a particular region of a chromoMonsanto a virtual monopoly on GM seeds for mainline crops and stifles outside innovation. No one can gene-jockey without a some, allowing researchers to zero-in on the genes responsible

T

methods

uncontroversial

for a given trait-a muted orange hue or the ability to withstand sea spray. With markers, much of the early-stage breeding can be done in a lab, saving the time and money required to grow several generations in a field. Once breeders have marked a trait, they use traditional breeding tactics like tissue culturing-growing a snip of plant in a nutrient-rich medium until it's strong enough to survive on its own. One form of culturing, embryo rescue, allows breeders to cross distant relatives that wouldn't normally produce a viable offspring. This is important because rare, wild varieties often demonstrate highly desirable characteristics.

After fertilization, a breeder extracts the premature embryo and fosters it in the lab. Another technique-anther culture-enables breeders to develop a complete plant from a single male cell.

The science behind some of these techniques makes transgenics look unsophisticated. But the sell is simple: Smart breeding is the best of transgenics crossed with the best of organics. It can feed the world, heal the earth, and put an end to the monopoly of big agriculture companies.

Take it from Robert Goodman, the former head scientist at Calgene who now works with the McKnight Foundation, overseeing a $50 million program that funds genomics research in the developing world. "The public argument about genetically modified organism~, I think, will soon be a thing of the past," he says.

"The science has moved on." n the mid-1980s, a graduate student in plant breeding at Cornell University was handea a task that none of her peers would take. Her name: Susan McCouch. Her loser assignment: Create a map of the 40,000 genes spread across the rice genome. In 1988, the completion of that work would be heralded as a scientific breakthrough. Sixteen years later, it's beginning to shake corporate control of science.

A genome map is a detailed outline of an organism's underlying structure. Until McCouch came along, rice-the most important food for most of the world's poor-was an orphan crop for research. Big agriculture companies were interested only in the Western staples, wheat and com. But good maps enlighten-geologists once looked at maps of South America and Africa and figured out that the edges of the two continents fit together, giving rise to the idea of plate tectonics. McCouch's map was just" as revealing. Researchers compared it to the genomes of wheat and corn and realized that all three crops, along with other cereal grasses-more than two-thirds of humanity's food-have remarkably similar makeups. The volumes of research into corn and wheat could suddenly be used to better understand developing world essentials like rice, teff, millet, and sorghum. If scientists could find a gene in one, they'd be able to locate it in the others.

By extension, characteristics of one crop should be present in related plants. If a certain variety of wheat is naturally adept at defeating a certain pest, then rice should be, too; scientists would just need to switch on that ability. McCouch started her project as a way to unlock the door to the rice library; it turned out she cut a master key.

Still at Cornell, McCouch is now learning how crossbreeding

How Smart Breeding Works The mission: Develop rice that's resistant to bacterial blight and will thrive around the globe.

1. Search: Food scientists scour the rice gene bank, consisting of 84,000 seed types, in search of varieties with blight immunity.

2. Insert marker: Scientists extract DNA from selected varieties and tag the blightimmunity gene-previously identified by researcherswith a chemical dye.

3. Crossbreed: A network of researchers around the world cross disease-resistant varieties with thousands of local versions.

With some plants, this means merely putting two varieties in a room. Self-pollinating rice requires manual pollen insertion.

4. Analyze: The offspring are analyzed to detect the presence of the immunity gene.

Those containing the genes are planted in a field.

5. Test: Mature plants are exposed to bacterial blight to confirm resistance. Those that don't die, and maintain desired traits from local variety, are distributed. Unless ...

6. Repeat: Sometimes, the process reveals several genes responsible for a trait. Three genes confer resistance to different blight strains. In such cases, breeders repeat the crossbreeding until all genes are turned on.

)1\' 7. End result: A rice plant with broad resistance to bacterial blight that will thrive in local conditions.

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domesticated rice with wild ancestors can achieve Superorganicssuper-abilities that neither parent possesses. nutritious, delicious, "We're finding things like genes in low-yielding wild ancestors, which if you move them into cultisafe, abundant crops vated varieties can increase the yields of the best that require less cultivar," McCouch says. "Or genes of tomatoes that come out of a wild background-they make a pesticide, fertilizer, and red fruit redder. We also have ways to make larger irrigation-is seeds, which can yield bigger fruit." Generations of unscientific plant breeding have inadvertently eliminated countless valuable genes and weakened that will please the the natural defenses of our crops. McCouch is recovering the complexity and magic. consumer, the Food scientists around the world are picking up producer and the on her work. In China, researcher Deng Qiyun, inspired by McCouch's papers, used molecular activist. markers while crossbreeding a wild relative of rice with his country's best hybrid to achieve a 30 n't nearly as difficult as getting it to the people. As with the Flavr percent jump in yield-an increase well beyond anything gained during the Green Revolution. Who will feed China? Deng will.

Savr, golden rice drew the ire of the Frankenfood crowd while In some parts of India, where the poor can't afford irrigated land, running afoul of some 70 patents. A natural counterpart wouldn't encounter such problems. Far-fetched? Maybe, considering they grow unproductive varieties of dryland rice. By some estimates, Indian rice production must double by 2025 to meet the that there's no known natural1y occurring rice containing betaneeds of an exploding population. One researcher from the cm路otene. Then again, we never thought carrots had vitamin EUniversity of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore is showing the until Goldman found some.

By scouring the carrot gene bank, Goldman discovered severway. H.E. Shashidhar has cataloged the genes of the dryland varieties and used DNA markers to guide the breeding toward a al exotic varieties of carrots (ranging in color from yellow to orange, red, and purple) that make vitamin E. Capitalizing on high-yield super-lice. In West Africa, smart breeders have creatthat native ability is a matter of tagging the relevant genes and ed Nerica, a bountiful rice that combines the best traits of Asian and African parents. Nerica spreads profusely in early stages to crossbreeding the wild relatives with ordinary, everyday calTots.

Gene bank searches are also revealing a whole host of antioxismother weeds. It's disease-resistant, drought-tolerant, and condants, sulfur compounds, and tannins-chemicals that bring tains up to 31 percent more protein than either parent.

This is not exclusively a matter of crafting new rice varieties in sharp color and strong tastes-that have been stripped out of our crops over the centuries. Many of the developing world. Irwin Goldman, a horticulture professor at lowest-common-denominator the University of Wisconsin-Madison, cites McCouch's work as these qualities not only fight cancer and increase the nutritional value of our vegetables, but also make them taste better while critical to the progress he's made with cmTots, onions, and beets. helping plants fight disease. We now have the ability to bring For example, he has produced a striped beet through some sophisticated genome tweaking-and in the process revealed methods these traits back.

And we can do it quickly. It often takes seed companies sevto improve the appearance and taste of all SOl15of vegetables.

Beet genes make two pigments of a class of chemicals' cal1ed eral years to establish a new variety. To recover their investment, betalain. When both are present, the beet is red. Switch off one they release seeds that don't usually pass on the parents' traits, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year. Smart breeding, by gene, as happens in natural mutations, and the beet is gold. contrast, is faster and cheaper because much of it can be done in Switch it on and off at different stages and the beet becomes the time and expense of growing countless striped. Creating a striped beet is not hugely important by the lab-reducing varieties in the field. Goldman's work is funded by university itself-striped heirloom varieties date back to 19th-century Italy. dollars, which allows him to give away the spoils. He links up What's significant is that Goldman pinpointed the genes responwith local organics growers, farmers' markets, and the expandsible for the trait and figured out how to turn them on.

This type of smart breeding may one day lead to something as ing counter-agribusiness food movement and hands out openpollinated seeds-agriculture's version of open source. useful as a high-yield rice that's natural1y rich in beta-carotene, which our bodies convert to vitamin A. For years, genetic engiichard Jefferson is an iconoclastic American bluegrass neers have been trying to introduce so-called golden rice to Asia, musician living in Australia. He's also a brash biotechwhere vitamin A deficiency causes millions of people to go blind nologist intent on wrestling control of our crops away every year. Creating the genetically modified version wasn't from Big Agriculture. As head of CAMBIA (the Center easy-it required the insertion of two daffodil genes-but it was-

a new generation of food

for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture), a plant science think tank in Canberra, he's sowing the seeds of a revolt, citing as inspiration the open source ethos of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman in computer software sharing. "In the case of almost every single enabling technology, the corporations have acquired it from the public sector," he says.

If McCouch and Goldman are making an end run around GMO by improving on methods that predate genetic engineering, Jefferson is taking a direct approach. All three scientists use an expanded knowledge of plant genomes to create new crop varieties. But where McCouch and Goldman do gene bank searches and study genome maps to figure out which plants to bring together, Jefferson digs into the genome itself and moves things around. He doesn't insert anything-he calls transgenics "hammer and tong science; as dull as dishwater"-but he's not above tinkering. His big idea: manipulate plants to teach ourselves more about them.

Jefferson made a name for himself as a grad student in 1985 when he discovered GUS, a clever little reporter gene that causes a glow when it's linked to any active gene. He distributed GUS to thousands of university and nonprofit labs at no costbut charged large corporations of the world millions. He used the money to estaqlish CAMBIA, which invents technologies to help developing world scientists create food varieties without violating GMO patents.

Transgenic researchers treat the genome like software, as if it contained binary code. If they wmt an organism to express a trait, they insert a gene. But the genome is more complicated than software. While software code has two possible values in each position (l and 0), DNA has four (A, C, T and G). What's more, a genome is constantly interacting with itself in ways that suggest what complexity theorists call emergent behavior. An organism's traits are often less a reaction to one gene and more a result of the relationship between many. This makes the expression of DNA fairly mysterious.

Jefferson is out to master this squishy science with a practice he calls transgenomics. You are different from your siblings because your parents' genes were unzipped during reproduction and the 23 chromosomes on each half rejoined in a unique pattern. The same thing happens in plants. Jefferson has modified native genes to act as universal switches that turn a plant's latent genes on and off.

Simply put, he's rigging the reproductive shuffle.

In a process he calls HARTs-homologous allelic recombination techniques-Jefferson manipulates genomes (no insertions allowed) to force plants to mimic other crops. "We're taking inspiration from one plant and asking another plant to make that change in itself," he says. One example Jefferson likes to talk about is sentinel corn-a plant-sized version of the GUS gene that would turn red when it needs water. It may not sound like much, but by the time a traditional corn plant wilts, it's usually too late. More efficient irrigation would mean the difference between profit and loss-or nourishment and starvation.

Jefferson's greatest hope to challenge Big Agriculture comes in what's known as apomixis-plant cloning. He wants to teach

all sorts of crops to clone themselves the way dandelions and blackberries do naturally. When a plant's seeds produce genetically identical offspring, there's no need to buy hybrid seeds every year. Jefferson and rival scientists claim to have several paths to apomixis-but the race is competitive and no one's offering details. The real problem, says Jefferson, is not developing the methods, but releasing them into a world of patents. "I am not a technological optimist who thinks that if you put a technology out there, everything is going to be fine," he says. "How you put it out there matters as much or more than what it is."

His solution is to create an open source movement for biotechnology. In his vision, charitable foundations, which have paid for most of the world's public-interest crop science, would fund platform technologies and provide free licenses to public and private scientists. Commercial end products would be encouraged, but the basic technology, the operating system, would remain in public hands. To get the whole thing started, Jefferson is offering up CAMBIA's portfolio of patents. griculture is one of the most ill-conceived human endeavors. We plow down stable communities of hundreds of species of plants to get single-row crops. We replace entire ecosystems with pesticides, fertilizers, precious fresh water, and tractor emissions. Then, after every harvest, we start all over again. Organic agriculture breaks this cycle. But it's just a Band-Aid on the wound.

By some estimates,

Indian rice

production must double by 2025 to meet the needs of an exploding population.

Add the knowledge and tools of biotechnology, though, and we are on the verge of something enormous. Plant genomes carry age-old records that reveal the complex manner by which nature manages itself. Researchers around the worldMcCouch, Goldman, and Jefferson are a few examples-are learning to not only read those records but re-create them.

Which is not to say success is automatic. This new era of food won't arrive with a technological big bang. But that's a good thing. Single events are too easy to control and monopolize. A steady trickle of innovation will buy time to get the marketing right. Public perception is as complex as the genome, and just as important to master. The science is taking hold. If the business side can clearly communicate what superorganics are-and what they are not-these new foods will not only change the way we eat, they'll change the way we relate to the planet.

D About the Author: Richard Manning

is a freelance. journalist

and

writer based in Lolo, Montana. He has authored several books including Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization and Food's Frontier.

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In

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Gentral Valley

When the first Sikh immigrants arrived in California's fertile Central Valley more than a century ago, they were reminded of the plains in their homeland, the Punjab. Their farming skills, their willingness to work, and their drive to get ahead ensured their rise in status from humble migrant laborers who picked fruit in the hot sun to significant landowners who today control much of the agriculture in California. But agriculture was just the beginning. Today an estimated 250,000 Sikhs live in California, and they are found in all businesses and professions, making a major contribution to the socioeconomic fabric of the state.

e Yuba-Sutter area is not a hot tourist spot like the wine-producing counties 160 kilometers to the west, but it has some of the best aglicultural land in the United States, placed between the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east and the Coast Range to the west. The weather is fine.

This was one reason Sikh pioneers settled here, the Bains among them. The Bains Ranch office, surrounded by orchards on the outskirts of Yuba City, is wellappointed but unpretentious. Trucks and tractors are parked outside near a large, aluminum-sided barn. It is the business hub of one of the largest farmers in the Central Valley, Didar Singh Bains.

At 66, Bains looks like the patriarch he is with his long, white flowing beard and bright orange turban. His great grandfather migrated first to Canada in 1890, and to California in 1920.

Bains' father arrived from India in 1948 and Bains himself followed in 1958, 18 years old, fresh from Nangal Khurd village in Hosiharpur. Those were long, hard days. "You know, we came here empty-handed, and I worked like a manual laborer," he says. "We worked really hard, borrowed, struggled, took risks our whole life. God is always good to us." He is known as the top peach grower, but also cultivates prunes, walnuts and almonds. "Some crops are pretty good, walnuts, almonds, still get a retum. But peaches, no, because there is too much manual labor and the cost is too high." He supplies peaches to big distributor Del Monte, but has recently dismantled one of his canneries in Yuba City.

A few years ago Bains began selling parcels of land to housing and commercial developers. "When I saw the way that agriculture is going, not too much profit, then I thought I'd start to downsize." He still owns about 6,000 hectares of prime California land in the Sacramento Valley and further south, near Bakersfield, most of it near cities.

He sees development as a good thing, yet he keeps his hand in farming. "I love farming, but I like to see it make some money on the other end."

The Punjabis' hard work and clean living gained their neighbors' respect, but the earliest immigrants still faced social and economic hurdles. The same attitudes that oppressed African Americans in the South were too often applied to the turban-wearing "Hindus" or "East Indians," so called to distinguish them from indigenous American Indians. They couldn't own property and were forced to make benami-like arrangements with trusted associates to buy land. They were barred from marrying local women, except for Mexican women, who were often immigrants themselves.

Legislation eventually

rescinded harsh anti-miscegenation laws and the Alien Land Law. Restrictive immigration quotas for South Asians were relaxed when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Indians could bring their families, and immigration from all over South Asia increased. "In the beginning there was some hate," says Didar Bains, "but you start a dialogue, then people start accepting."

After more than 100 years, he says, "people are very familiar with us now. We are part of the community here. We are part of the economy here in California. We have people all the way to Los Angeles."

Newcomers also do well. Harbhajan Singh Samra, 46, came to dominate okra farming in record time. He arrived in California with an M.A. in economics in 1985. What drew him? "Friends convinced me. I listened to their stories and I thought, let me make my own story." He began supplying produce to Indian restaurants and stores in the days when tinda, methi and moolee were hard to come by. He sold produce out of the back of his pickup truck. Later he opened a stall in the downtown Los Angeles 7th Street produce market. "You have to find your own niche. It's hard in the beginning to start from scratch, but once you create something, you have the confidence," he says.

After 10 years of building his business, the next step was growing his own produce. His first okra crop, planted in 1994, failed. There were serious setbacks. Debts caused him to lose his farm, but he recovered. He bought several hundred acres near Indio in Southern California. Now Samra Produce & Farms, which farms about 120 hectares, has customers for Indian vegetables throughout the United States, Canada and Britain.

According to a 2001 New York Times report, Samra's annual

Pride in being American as well as Sikh, belief in shared values.

Leji: A young girl in her finery at the annual Punjabi American Festival in Yuba City.

Right: A professional dancer from Los Angeles entertains the crowd. Some entertainers are brought from India.

turnover exceeds $10 million, although he declines to be specific. He credits the American system for helping him succeed.

"If you are determined, you can do anything in the world. But in some places in the world it is rough, and in others it is smooth. In America you can do things smoothly," he says. "But you have to work for it."

Dr. Jasbir S. Kang, 42, a physician practicing in Yuba City, comes from a long line of farmers, and while he is proud of his roots, he says, "We're not just a farming community. There are 20-plus physicians in this community. In Yuba City there is not a specialty where there is not a Sikh physician." He enumerates the small businesses, gas stations, mini-markets, restaurants and hotels where Sikhs are prospering. They are in construction, banking, engineering. "You name it, they are doing everything," he says. Dr. Kang himself joined with a number of enterprising physicians to purchase land and build the large medical center where he has his office.

A common feeling among Sikhs who have settled in California is appreciation of America and pride in being American as well as Sikh. One reason for this is a belief in shared values. Didar Bains compares the principles of the Founders, embodied in the U.S. Constitution, to those of Guru Nanak. So does, Dr. Kang, who says, 'The Constitution of the United States expresses the same ideals as Guru Nanak. It reads like the Guru Granth Sahib. Both advocate equality and justice for all." Dr. Kang came to the Central Valley from Chicago in 1991. Hailing from Patiala, he attenaed Patiala Medical College and completed his qualifications at the University of Chicago, where he came face to face with American urban realities during

Prominent American Sikhs, including

several

from California, were invited to the White House on August 14, 2004, to mark the 400th anniversary of the Guru Granth Sahib, celebrated on September 1, 2004. Singh Sahib Darshan Singh, former jathedar (priest) of Akal Takht at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, led prayers in Punjabi. Kirtans followed. Speakers included Tommy G. Thompson, then U.s. Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Uttam Singh Dhillon, Associate U.s. Attorney General, whose ancestors migrated to America a century ago. In July 2004 the Smithsonian Institution opened the Sikh Heritage Gallery, a permanent exhibition in the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibition, entitled "Sikhs: Legacy of the Punjab," features items of Sikh heritage and culture, combined with information on the religion and history of the Sikh people.

D

his residency at Cook County Hospital. He is among the new, progressive generation who believe in raising commlmity awareness about who Sikhs are. "When I came here, as a physician I had the opportunity to interact with all kinds of people," he says. "I realized there was a lot of ignorance. I knew Sikhs were here for a hundred years, but still people knew very little about Sikhs."

Sikhs interacted with their neighbors, but not in ways that conveyed much about their culture and values, "which I think are very much American values," says Dr. Kang. "I felt there was a need for an organization that is dedicated to help our fellow Americans to understand us better." He adds, "I don't want them to see us as Indians, I want them to see us as Americans of a different shade or different flavor or whatever."

To bridge this information gap, Dr. Kang and other like-minded people formed the Punjabi American Heritage Society. In 1993 they organized an event for local teachers at a Yuba City

Eco-friendly and cost-efficient farming takes root

high school. This "Teacher's Appreciation Day," a dinner party that featured a slide show and Punjabi performing artists, was a painless way to better acquaint the general community with Punjabi culture. "It was overwhelmingly successful," he says.

They decided to organize a bigger event, and the Punjabi American Festival was born. The older generation of Sikhs had already instituted the Sikh Parade, a religious festival started in 1979 and held on the first Sunday in November to commemorate Guru Nanak's birthday. Didar Bains, a large donor and one of the founders, says tens of thousands come from all over the country to hear the reading of the Guru Granth Sahib, kirtans and demonstrations of martial arts.

"It's a great event," Dr. Kang agrees, "but sometimes people tend to treat religious events like they are just for Sikhs, although for the Sikh Parade everybody's welcome." The Punjabi American Festival is now an annual spring mela. complete with

ross the vast fields of India's breadbasket, millions of farmers anxiously count the days between heir wheat harvest and rice planting season. Too many lost days could cost a month's earnings. And fam1ers desperate for a fast crop tumaround often end up turning their fields into smoke stacks.

Buming harvest residue is a better option for them than taking time to plow the land.

But that's not the right way. "This is terrible for the environment and the land, but in their minds, it saves them money in the short term," says Raj Gupta, India coordinator for Rice-Wheat Consortium for the Indo-Gangetic Plains (RWC).

Now a major agricultural transformation is sweeping across India's northern rice- and wheat-growing belt and helping farmers save time as well as conserve precious natural resources. The method, called "zero tillage," utilizes a seed drill that can cut through crop residue. The seed is then dropped directly into the soil.

Farmers no longer have to engage in expensive and time-consuming plowing.

Nor do they have to resort to burning off harvest waste to decrease their time until

A

A farmer in Karn.al, Haryana, who has used zero tillage to plant wheat in his field.

bhangra, folk dances, songs and plenty of good food. "It took off so well that right now our event is drawing more people than the capacity of the fairgrounds." Dr. Kang also helped start a local TV program in Punjabi called "Apna Punjab," still running after more than a decade. It provides public service information and a forum to discuss local issues.

Then came September 11, 2001. Of that, Dr. Kang says, "I was very hUlt about what had happened to our country. And then 1 was doubly hurt that we were blamed for something we had nothing to do with. So I felt rather than getting mad at other people, that, as I was an educated person of the community, it's my obligation to help other Americans understand." He, along with other Sikhs, wrote articles, gave speeches and sent e-mails. They raised seed Dr. 1.5. Kang, a founder of the Punjabi American Heritage Society, in his Yuba City clinic. The stained glass panel behind him incorporates a motif taken from the Golden Temple.

the next planting. This practice saves 75 percent or more on tractor fuel, obtains better yields and requires up to 30-50 percent less water.

RWC, formed in 1994, started zero-till farming in Pantnagar in Uttar Pradesh. In the past, the zero-till project in the IndoGangetic Plains of South Asia-cqvering Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladeshhas been funded by the World Bank, British Department of International Development, Directorate-General of Development Cooperation of Netherlands and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

The India office of the U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID) stepped in to fund the Indian component of the project in September 2003 when ADB funding came to an end, Gupta says.

RWC is now one of the programs of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a global alliance that mobilizes science to benefit the poor.

The concept of zero tillage wasdeveloped in the late 1950s by George E. McKibben at the Dixon Springs Agricultural Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the 1970s James Clarke McCutcheon pioneered and popularized its use in Manitoba, Canada.

Change is often viewed skeptically by traditional farming communities.

"Farmers want to see their gains right away," says Gupta. In the case of the zero-till method, farmers couldn't help but respond to the results. Arun Bhaku, a

farmer in Uttaranchal who has been using zero tillage for two years to plant rice and wheat, says, "My total yield every season has increased by at least 20 percent, and it saves me so much money. All my neighboring farmers have also started using it."

"Leaving a protective blanket of leaves, stems and stalks from the previous crop on the surface is actually better for the longterm health of the crops and soil," says Gupta. Residues provide a natural herbicide, retain nutrients in soil and moderate soil temperature. "By burning the residue, fatmers were actually stripping the soil of microbes and moisture that are essential to a crop's long-term health," he adds.

Last year, zero tillage was applied to about one million hectares of farmland representing 10 percent of land farmed for rice and wheat and the livelihoods of 10,000 farmers. in the Indo-Gangetic Plains ofIndia. USAID provided $1.5 million in research and development grants to engage private machine shops in adapting the seeder for different crops. The seeder has already been modified for chickpea, maize and sorghum. The special planters required for zero tillage are now being manufactured by about 100 companies in India. In the winter wheat planting season last year, l.7 million hectares in India were farmed using zero tillage.

According to Gupta, farmers in Haryana and Punjab save Rs. 3,000-3,500 per hectare because of cost reduction in tillage, fuel, labor and water and

enhat1ced wheat productivity of one to two quintals per hectare. For farmers in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, the gains range up to Rs. 6,000 per hectare because of timely planting.

The total gains from this during last winter's wheat season were $140-180 million, according to Gupta.

Latin America-where one crop with high productivity is generally harvested using zero tillage-has the maximum area under the system. In India, however, the technique is used for a double cropping system. The fact that rice is grown in wetlands-the plants are partially submerged in water-whereas wheat needs drylands was a major challenge, Gupta says.

Between June and September last year northwestern India suffered drought while many parts of the east were hit by floods. Gupta says such unpredictable weather is one more reason why resourceconserving technologies are so important in this region. "Crops survived longer on drought-affected fields where zero tillage or minimal tillage was used and crop residue was left on the surface. The residue also acts as good weed control," he adds.

With two-thirds of India's one billion people depending on farming for employment, the benefits of the zero tillage techniques can be widespread.

0 Freelance writer Ritu Upadhyay and Dipesh Satapathy contributed to this article.

Social welfare and education rank high with Sikhs.

Right: Hardeep Kaur Singh, a real estate agent in Oroville, California, likes the life in America but wants her children to learn and preserve their Sikh heritage.

She and her doctor husband are active in local community causes.

Below: Young dancers at the Punjabi American FestivaL.

money for a documentary film, Mistaken Identity: Sikhs in America, that has been screened at film festivals, police departments, schools and colleges. There were no attacks on Sikhs in the Yuba City area, and Kang credits the work of the local Sikh organizations and Yuba City's Appeal-Democrat newspaper, which aided the outreach effOlt by running informative articles.

Social welfare and education rank high with Sikhs, whose philanthropy is not limited to the gurdwara, but extends to causes that help everyone, from aiding rescue missions for the homeless to running marathons that raise funds for the American Cancer Society. Money is sent to India as a matter of course, often to support schools or hospitals. These concerns go hand in hand with political action, second nature to the Punjabis settled in California, who have been political from the earliest days. They have participated in American politics as candidates, as lobbyists and as campaign contributors. Didar Bains is a member of the Republican Presidential Roundtable, an elite group of business leaders who commit to give at least $5,000 annually to the par路ty.

Ironically, Dalip Singh Saund, who became the first' Asian American elected to the U.S. Congress in 1956, couldn't get ajob after taking his mathematics PhD at Berkeley, so he became a farmer. But times have changed, and their strong entrepreneurial ~spirit and savvy spells success ~ for Punjabi Americans. They ~all want to own land and busi~ nesses, and many do. John .~Singh Gill, 42, came with his ~ parents in 1980. He grows ~almonds on a small farm in ~Bakersfield; he runs a trucking ~ company, Gold Line Express, () in Woodland, whose 70 trucks serve Northern California; and

he and his brother buy and sell commercial property to developers up and down the Central Valley. They are doing well and he has no wish to return to India. "I was 17 when I got here and it's like home to us."

Women entrepreneurs abound. Those from big farming families shoulder their share of the work and explore new areas of the business, like Bains' daughter Diljit. She is a real estate developer and is on the city planning commission.

Others pursue careers in law and medicine. Hardeep Kaur Singh is a路 successful real estate agent in nearby Oroville.

At her canyon-view house in between appointments, she explains that she just returned from the school, where her nine-year-old son was showing his hair to classmates. "Ever since GUljes has been in kindergarten we have gone every year and he has shown his hair to the class." With her help he shares why Sikhs keep their hair uncut. "He wants to do it," Singh says. Singh and her doctor husband are active in the Punjabi American Heritage Society and other community organizations, and do their part in outreach. "We want to portray the similarities rather than the differences," she says. She came to America with her parents when she was seven. Her father was born in Dosanj, in Moga, Punjab. She values her Sikh heritage and she wants her three children to master Punjabi. "You can speak or talk, but if you can't read, how are you going to read gurbani?" Mothers have been tutoring the kids, and a new gurdwara preschool will help answer this need.

Harj Mahil's boutique, Indian Fusion, fronts the revitalized main street of Yuba City's old downtown. Festooned with saris and lehengas from floor to ceiling, it offers a bright splash of color to passersby. Mahil says, "I opened this shop because I wanted to create a fusion of design that could be appreciated by people of Indian and non-Indian heritage alike." Her nonIndian friend Lynn chimes in, fingering an embroidered silk dupatta, "I just love it. The work is so beautiful!" She wants to visit India.

Fusion may well be the byword for the active, communityminded Sikhs of the Central Valley. And while many families weathered hard times, their good humored resiliency and balanced view of the world have gained them not only acceptance but extraordinary success. The "okra king" Harbhajan Samra puts it simply: "If you don't have guts you don't get anything done. If you have guts, you can get it done." Undeniably, this Punjabi masala brings a welcome piquancy to the American melting pot.

0 About the Author: Lea Terhune is a freelance California, and a former editor of SPAN.

writer based in

T

he poster taped to the door of Cynthia Kenyon's office at the University of California, San Francisco seems so ordinary that you would hardly suspect it advertises a revolution in hU,man affairs. It announces a talk she was about to give on genes that influence the life span of a type of nematode, a tiny worm that lives in soil. The poster shows a cartoon ish illustration of a wizened little worm hobbling along with the help of a cane, while half a dozen human infants, in diapers, splash in the spray of a fountain. Despite the whimsical drawing and the mischievous title of Kenyon's lecture, "Genes from the Fountain of Youth," she's not kidding.

Since the early 1990s, Kenyon, a molecular biologist, has produced a body of research about this simple organism that has broad implications. She and her collaborators have doubled, quadrupled, and in some instances sextupled the worm's life span by manipulating several of its genes. And others have found that the same metabolic pathway, controlled by genes, appears to function in other organisms, including yeast, fruit flies and mice.

The question is whether it also functions in people-and might be manipulated to extend human life.

Many scientists say no, but Kenyon is betting on yes. Four years ago, she co-founded a biotechnology company, Elixir Pharmaceuticals, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop drugs and other products to treat age-related diseases and slow down the process of aging. Another ~ company co-founder, Leonard Guarente, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of ~ Technology (MIT) and an old friend of ยง Kenyon's, has suggested that the company might, within a decade, develop a pill that could add 10 to 30 years to a person's life.

"We may not have a perfect drug in 10 years, but we'll have something to build on," says Kenyon, 50. "Potentially, we could have it sooner."

Elixir is one of about a dozen small

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Juan Ponce de Leon failed to find the "Fountain of Youth," but did discover Florida.

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Right: In her San Francisco lab, Cynthia Kenyon searches for longevity genes.

Left: Engraving of Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, who was searching for the legendary "Fountain of Youth " when he discovered Florida in the 16th centUiY.

biotechnology companies jumping into the fountain-of-youth business. Only a decade or so ago, the pool was pretty empty, unless you counted the pseudoscientists and snake-oil salesmen who have historically hawked anti-aging nostrums.

But genuine advances in genetics and the study of stem cells, unspecialized cells that can be coaxed to develop particular functions and thus might replace damaged tissues, have engendered new ways of thinking.

"The thing about aging," Kenyon says, "was that everybody thought, 'Well, you know, the animal just breaks down, and what's to study, really?

It's not going to be very interesting.' But when I looked at it, I could see that different animals have different life spans."

Consider a mouse, a canary and a bat.

"The mouse lives two years and the bat can live 50 years and the canary lives about 15 or so years. They're all small animals. l;:hey're warmblooded.

And they're not that different, really, in such a fundamental way from each other." A fairly small number of genes, she argues, may control the creatures' differing 'life spans.

To a lot of biologists, aging research has

"The process of aging influences our poetry, our art, our lifestyle and our happiness, yet we know surprisingly little

about it." not always been a respectable calling.

When Kenyon's lab first began to work in the field, she insisted that her co-workers avoid even using the "a-word" in research reports and grant applications. "It was embarrassing to say we were working on aging," she says. "The field had a reputation for going nowhere." To be sure, life extension is still subject to wild exaggeration and implausible predictions, but the field has progressed tremendously, and Kenyon's research has had a lot to do with that. "The field needed an injection of fantastic talent, people like Kenyon and Guarente," says Gordon Lithgow, a molecular biologist at the Buck Institute for age research in Novato, California. "They're great communicators, but they're also just the tip of the iceberg. There's some great

The Search fora

•

" .. Dr. Roy L. Walford, professor emeritus at the University of california, Los Angeles.

For his concept that diet is inherently linked to longevity. Reducing caloric intake, even in old age, may be effective in improving health and increasing life span . • ¡m;,[,la,IA Several books on aging, including Beyond the 120- Year Diet (2000), The Anti-Aging Plan (1994),.

Maximun Life Span (1983), The Immunologic Theory of Aging (1969).

M:1.I;,9 June 29, 1924, in San Diego, california.

M.@R April 27, 2004, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive, fatal neurological disease belonging to a class of disorders known as motor neuron diseases.

science coming out of this area."

The marriage of molecular genetics, our most precise and vaunted life science, with perhaps the oldest and most alluring human fantasy-eternal youth-is one of the most intriguing aspects of recent gerontological research. Given the moral embedded in the misfortune of Tithonusthe sad sack of Greek mythology whose wife mistakenly asked the gods for eternal life for him instead of eternal youth, causing him to wind up in an endless purgatory of decrepitude-the myth of a fountain of youth has been part of the record of human longing for more than two millennia.

If Tithonus gave that longing a cautionary quality, ancient cultures, notably the Egyptians and Chinese, gave it an aura of quackery, at least to modern eyes. More than 2,000 years ago, Chinese alchemists known as "thaumaturgists" devoted considerable energy to creating "drinkable gold" as a means of prolonging life. "The king of the state of Chu was presented with an 'elixir of deathlessness' by thaumaturgical technicians," notes a Chinese text of around 400 B.C. (which did not, however, reveal whether the potion worked). Gerald J. Gruman, a historian who has surveyed life extension, writes, "Interest in the fountain of youth had reached an apex in the 14th and 15th centuries, and the discovery of America gave a new impetus to the tradition in the early years of the 16th century."

It was Juan Ponce de Leon, of course, who put a more modern face on the myth and gave it an enduring ethos of futility.

Legend has it that, around 1509, while serving as governor of what is now Puerto Rico, he first heard tales about a fountain or spring on Bimini, an island to the northwest, that rejuvenated anyone who drank from it. Intrigued perhaps more by reports of gold than rejuvenating waters, Ponce de Leon mounted an expedition in March 1513. He failed to find either Bimini or the "Fountain of Youth," but within a month or so did discover Florida.

The search for youthful immortality took a notably pseudoscientific turn in 1889, when the respected French scientist Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard claimed

he could rejuvenate old men with an injection containing crushed dog testicles.

Though the claim was mistaken, it incited scientific races in the early 20th century to isolate the male hormone testosterone and the female hormone estrogen, which have long been promoted by physicians and charlatans alike as anti-aging tonics.

On Kenyon's office bookshelf, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination sit alongside James D. Watson's The Molecular Biology of the Gene, a combination that hints not only at the breadth of Kenyon's interests but the way they straddle popular culture and hard-core science. Even her scientific papers are accessible. "The process of aging infl uences our poetry, our art, our lifestyle and our happiness, yet we know surprisingly little about it," she writes in

her PhD. She then spent five years at Cambridge University in England, where she was tutored in the ways of one of the lowliest and yet most astonishingly instructive creatures to crawl out of the ground: the nematode.

At Cambridge, she trained as a developmental biologist under Sydney Brenner, who received a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work showing how genes dictate the development of organs and tell some cells when to die, as though they'd been preprogrammed to self-destruct at a particular time.

Brenner had long championed the virtues of experiments with the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The translucent smooth worms, barely the size of the comma at the end of this phrase, are in constant motion; viewed under a microscope, they carve sinuous arabesques Left: Cynthia Kenyon, with postdoctoral students at the University of California, San Francisco, generates interest in developing an anti-aging pill by showing venture capitalists movies of worms.

Below: A micrograph of a nematode, a translucent worm the size of this comma, whose life span Kenyon has managed to increase sixfold.

the data-thick, jargon-strewn journal Cell.

Born in Chicago and raised in Georgia, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, Kenyon attended the University of Georgia, where her father was a member of the geography faculty and her mother worked as an administrator in the physics department. Cynthia Kenyon traces her passion for genetics to the day her mother brought home Watson's The Molecular Biology of the Gene, which taught her, she recalls, "about switching on and off genes in bacteria. Ijust thought it was fabulous."

After graduating as class valedictorian in 1976 with a degree in biochemistry, Kenyon moved on to MIT, where she got

Kenyon theorized that aging in nematodes and people might also be controlled by

comparable genes.

across the gel on which they're grown in the lab. To scientists, the worm provides a remarkably revealing model of genetics in action. C. elegans has a three-day cycle from birth to laying eggs and lives a little more than two weeks. It possesses a relatively modest 19,000 genes, and has the added benefit that its body's 959 cells are virtually transparent when viewed through a microscope-enabling scientists to literally peer into the worm's parts as it develops, whether naturally or in response to an experiment. Soon Kenyon became part of an army of researchers who, through sophisticated experiments, could show genes being activated in distinct patterns.

Those tests yielded important clues about which genes controlled specific steps in the worm's growth, development and aging.

She learned not only the exquisitely sensitive genetic choreography of developing organisms, but also that when it comes to genes, evolution keeps going back to the same well: the genes that control the development of nematodes and frogs and mice also tend to control human development (albeit in slightly more complicated ways). Similarly, Kenyon theorized that aging in nematodes and people might also be controlled by comparable genes. Moving to the University of California, San Francisco in 1986, and aware of the work of Tom Johnson, a University of Colorado biologist who had studied a nematode that lived longer than usual, Kenyon and her co-workers looked

for genes that, when altered in particular worms, made those worms live longer than others. She found that changing one specific gene, called daf-2, doubled the animal's life span and also prolonged its youthful activity. Another scientist, Gary Ruvkun of Harvard Medical School,

discovered that the genes in question regulated a hormone-signaling system in the worm that is surprisingly similar to the way the human body signals the need for both the hormone insulin, which spurs the breakdown of sugar, and an insulin-like growth factor (IGF-l), which affects physical growth. Flouting the scientific tradition of understating one's findings, Kenyon began to talk about the "fountain of youth gene," an idea, as she recalls it, that people thought was "kind of cute."

Every month, however, it seems a new research report adds credence to the notion that the

fundamental ravages of aging might at least be blunted by exploiting the bio-

chemical pathways discovered by Kenyon and Guarente.

As Kenyon and co-workers delved into the problem, they learned more about the insulin-signaling pathway, showing that when certain worm hormones were suppressed, it activated a host of other genes that appeared to playa role in extending the animal's life. So the question became: Did evolution favor this mechanism and pass it along to other organisms? "Is it in humans?" Kenyon asks. "We don't know." Still, she and other scientists have what they believe are promising leadsthus the work at Elixir and other biotech firms to identify human versions of the same life-extending genes found in simpler creatures.

One of Kenyon's buddies from her Cambridge, Massachusetts, days was Guarente, a meticulous and somewhat reticent molecular biologist. He has studied important but esoteric aspects of gene regulation for 20 years. In the mid-1990s, his research group discovered a family of specialized genes that influence the life span of yeast cells. Called silencing genes, their job is to make proteins that smother, or

silence, other genes, usually in response to changing environmental conditions. When the MIT biologists genetically engineered yeast to have an extra copy of one such gene, called sir-2, the yeast cells lived longer. The function of the sir-2 gene is to direct the making of an enzyme. Equally important is that the gene is activated when food intake and metabolism are reduced. In short, the silencing gene linked the hightech molecular manipulations of life extension in yeast to a low-tech life-extension strategy that had been known for decades in rats: a starvation diet.

In a classic set of experiments in the 1930s by Clive McCay at Cornell University, rats fed just enough food to fulfill the animals' nutritional needs but not enough to maintain their usual weight lived about 20 to 40 percent longer than rats raised on a normal amount of food; some lived twice as long. More than half a century later, caloric restriction remains the only proven strategy oflife extension other than gene engineering. It has been demonstrated to work not only in rodents but also in yeast, fruit flies, spiders and fish, and, in continuing studies sponsored by the U.S. National Institute on Aging, it appears to have a similar effect in monkeys.

The link between diet and longevity has intrigued fanatics as well as researchers. A professor emeritus of pathology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and

a member of the 1991-93 Biosphere 2 experiment, Roy Walford undertook a much-publicized experiment on himselffor years he ate a nutrient-rich diet of just 1,600 calories a day in the hopes of extending his life. (His research was complicated by his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, which led to his death in 2004.) Yet, according to The Wall Street Journal, hundreds of Walford disciples are restricting themselves to as few as 1,500 calories a day in hopes of living longer.

Guarente, following up on his group's discovery of a life-extending sir-2 gene in yeast, a single-celled organism, has more recently shown that the more complex nematodes possess an analogous gene that can also prolong life. In fact, the researchers showed that endowing nematodes with an extra copy of that gene prompted the worms to live nearly 50 percent longer than usual. In any event, human beings possess versions of both the dal2 and sir-2 genes, which is what tantalizes researchers, biotech investors and consumers.

Around 1996, Kenyon began showing, to venture capitalists, a five-minute film dramatizing the difference between geezer and genetically rejuvenated nematodes. "I show them the movie, of worms that are normal that are about to die after two weeks, and the altered worms that are still moving," Kenyon said. "They see it

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In the Mahabharata, King Yayati, cursed with premature old age, borrowed years of youthfulness from his youngest son. Aswatthama, Samitinjaya,

Vibhishana, Hanuman, sage Kripa and sage Vyasa are said to have eternal life.

In Greek myth, Tithonus got eternal life, but not eternal youth. ttIII):!'" Chinese text says King Chu received anti-death potion.

110.1fCD alA Juan Ponce de Leon searches for "Fountain of Youth."

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as anti-aging tonics.

Kenyon and co-workers in San Francisco make nematodes live longer

by altering their genes.

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Leonard Guarente's research group makes yeast cells live longer, reduced food intake is key.

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British scientist Sydney Brenner shares Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing how genes dictate the development of organs and tell some cells when to die.

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University School of Medicine group finds centenarians ly to have a gene related to fat processing.

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predicts a pill to add 10-30 years to human life.

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"There are no death or aging genes, " says ~ biodel1tographer S. Jay Olshansky. He ~ and Bruce Carnes (left) mocked the anti~ aging industry with awards lnodeled on U old-fashioned patent Inedicine bottles. z

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with their eyes, you know? ..And that's really all you have to do. It speaks for itself." In December 2000, Kenyon and Guarente started Elixir with the ultimate hope of selling a product-ideally, a small molecule that could be packaged as a pill-that would extend life span and prolong youthfulness by affecting the sir-2 gene, among other parts of the insulin-signaling system. In 2003, Elixir merged with Centagenetix, another Cambridgebased biotech firm, which has been scouring the chromosomes of centenarians and other very old people for genes that may have contributed to their long lives.

Even before the yeast and nematode research, scientists suspected that genes play a role in determining life span. More than 50 gene mutations affecting it have been identified in various animals. A group headed by Thomas Perls, of the Boston University School of Medicine and one of the cofounders of Centagenetix, has investigated many centenarians in New England and beyond, and in November 2003 he reported that a gene on chromosome 4 appears related to life span. (People who lived to 100 were more likely to have a particular version of the gene that produces a protein that plays a role in processing fat.)

Such findings dovetail with Kenyon and Guarente's approach. "When single genes are changed, animals that should be old stay young," they wrote recently. "In humans, these mutants would be analo-

gous to a 90-year-old who looks and feels 45. On this basis we begin to think of aging as a disease that can be cured, or at least postponed."

But skeptics say that extending life span through genetic manipulation is not inevitable. The distinguished gerontologist Leonard Hayflick, a pioneer in the study of aging cells, says he doubts that lives can be significantly prolonged by genetic tinkering and has famously stated that eradicating cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other principal causes of death would add, at most, about 15 years to average life expectancy. S. Jay Olshansky, a biodemographer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, applauds the work on nematode aging but questions its relevance to people.

Human life span, he suggests, is not a simple matter of genetics: "There are no death or aging genes-':"'period." He bases his assertion on evolutionary reasoning, arguing that natural selection operates primarily on traits that affect an organism's ability to reproduce; accordingly, one would not expect evolution to favor genes that extend an organism's life much beyond its reproducti ve years. In fact, Olshansky has warned that trying to extend human life by manipulating genes could have "unintended and unwanted consequences," such as an extremely old person who is physically fit but cognitively impaired.

Every month, however, it seems a new research report adds credence to the

notion that the fundamental ravages of aging might at least be blunted by exploiting the biochemical pathways discovered

by Kenyon and Guarente. In August 2003, Harvard Medical School researcher David Sinclair and colleagues reported that several common organic molecules-including resveratrol, an ingredient in red wine-activate sir-like proteins in human cells and extend the life span of laboratory yeast. Those findings have bolstered the observation that people who drink moderate amounts of alcohol, including wine, appear to live longer than those who abstain. Sinclair, a former postdoctoral fellow in Guarente's MIT lab, has said he plans to set up his own company to develop a drug that acts like resveratrol. Says Kenyon: "It's kind of romantic that red wine contains something that could extend your longevity, don't you think?"

Given the mere hint of such possibilities, she is struggling to balance the unforgiving demands of science against the expectations of a public understandably eager to live longer. Some scientists have gone so far as to talk of "practical immortality," the idea that human life span can be extended perhaps hundreds of years.

Kenyon recoils from the notion, but does not entirely retreat from its contemplation. "These worms aren't immortal. They live twice as long. Or they live four times as long. In fact, we can now get 'em to live six times as long." She pauses, then allows that it's not theoretically impossible to make nematodes practically immortal, though, she says, "We haven't."

And therein may lie the difference between molecular biologists and philosophers: the latter often inflect their pronouncements with a palpable, if unspoken, "but." The unspoken phrase for biologists is always, "Not yet."

D Adapledjrolll published

Merchants

of Immortality

by StetJhell S. Hall;

by HoughlOn MiJj7ill. Š 2003 by Stephen S. Hall.

About the Author: Stephen S. Hall is a Brooklyn-based science writer.

Text by JOHN L. EUOT Photographs by ANNIE GRIFFlTHS BELT

The area is so desolate that the U.S. Air Force and later the National Guard used it for bombing and artillery practice from 1942 until 1970. "We lived next to the range," Marvin says. "Planes dropped targets with parachutes, and we'd watch where they came down. Then we'd go get the parachutes and make silk curtains and tablecloths out of 'em."

T

he great -grandfathers of the Oglala Sioux called the land north of Cuny Table mako sica, "land bad."

They had good reason. Eons of water and wind have carved the region into a wild maze of cliffs, canyons, spires, pinnacles, castles, balancing rocks, tables, gullies.

Almost nothing lives in the hot, naked buttes except turkey vultures that soar and scan for a jackrabbit's carcass.

French-Canadian fur trappers reviled the landscape as les mauvaises terres a traverser, the bad lands to cross.

Yet there is a richness to this desolation. These same haunting buttes draw 900,000 people a year to Badlands National Park, the heart of the landscape. Most come to drive along the Wall, a long, narrow rampart of colorfully banded cliffs and buttes that stretches some 96 kilometers from west to east. Surrounding the Wall and associated battlements, and woven through gaps among them, spreads 243,000 hectares of prairie-most of it tended by the U.S. Forest Service as Buffalo Gap National Grassland. Together the two areas create a vast ecosystem of nearly 344,000 hectares, a land of silence where thunderheads roam far horizons.

A middle ground between the sheer buttes and the flat grassland is a treasure in itself. A few miles west of the Wall,

the buttes give way to low emerald hills threaded by cedars and cottonwoods-the park's Badlands Wilderness Area.

Here Sage Creek and its branches wind for miles through an old floodplain. It's irresistible to a hiker seeking solitude: The only trails are maintained by some 800 buffalo, reintroduced beginning in 1963. In the ecosystem's grasslands, endangered back-footed ferrets also have been reintroduced, as have a few bighorn sheep, which are rarely seen.

I pick a buffalo trail and follow it south. Small groups of bison graze on tiny meadows below the hills. A coyote, pale as a ghost, lopes down a slope. The breeze carries the songs of western meadowlarks, rock wrens, and western kingbirds.

Three old bulls, grazing near a primitive camp-ground, have lost half their winter coats. Their front ends flap in the breeze like moth-eaten blankets; their fully molted rear ends stand naked as gray rhino hide.

PRAIRIE PARTNERS Above, right: Nearly extinct a century ago, bison have been steadily reintroduced and now number about 2,500 in South Dakota's national and state parks.

Below, left: Prairie dogs are protected in the Badlands National Park, but neighboring ranchers kill the rodents for digging up pastures.

Below: Pronghorn, like bison, forage on tree seedlings, a service that keeps forests from overtaking grasslands.

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Rising like artfiti hors d'oeuvres, purple coneflowers are tempting for grazers. South Dakota's prairie has thinned in the past 30 years-about 400,000 hectares of grassland have been lost to agriculture. But 800,000 hectares lie preserved in areas such as Buffalo Gap National Grassland.

Each summer as many as 10,000 visitors to Badlands National Park discover the real reason the park was created. Off the park's paved Loop Road, under a large shelter, they can watch researchers tease 33-milion-year-old bones from the ground.

These are White River fossils, fossils from the same forrnationsfound throughout the park-that since 1846 have yielded thousands of specimens to famous bone hunters like Joseph Leidy, Othniel Marsh and Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden. Museums worldwide-including Yale's Peabody Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian-display White River fossils as classic examples of mammalian evolution.

After II seasons this site, called the Big Pig Dig, has given up more than 8,000 bones from the Oligocene, the golden age of mammals, 34 to 25 million years ago. (The site takes its name from the first fossil found here-originally thought to be from a fearsome piglike animal.) The Badlands hold no bones of dinosaurs, since the area was a vast inland sea during their reign. By the Oligocene, the dinosaurs were long gone, the inland sea had drained, and early mammals were colonizing the flourishing forests and savannas. The Big Pig Dig, a water hole that trapped animals in mud as it dried out, reveals a valuable cross section of evolution, mostly experiments that didn't make it: hQrnless rhinoceroses, tiny deer, horse prototypes, leopard-size cats.

The two visitors who reported the first Big Pig Dig bones, in 1993, left them undisturbed-a happy but atypical experience to the park staff. In fact, the White'River Badlands were proclaimed a national monument in 1939 and elevated to a national park in 1978, mainly to protect the fossil beds from nonscientific collectors. Researchers with permits may collect here, but no one else.

About 35 times a year park rangers issue a warning or a small fine to visitors who pick up a tooth and don't know better. But one case involving fossil theft and attempted sale drew a $2,500 penalty; the law provides for a maximum of 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. "Our big concern is the professional fossil hunter," says Scott Lopez, the park's chief ranger and law enforcement officer. "Right out of the ground, a fossil might sell for $300. But after it's prepared and polished, it might bring $3,000."

A few years ago a young ranger came across a partially buried fossil skeleton. It was a titanothere, a mammal the size of a' small elephant, with hornlike projections on its snout. Illegal hunters already had removed some bones; the rest have now been preserved on site. The first fossil ever discovered in these Badlands was a titanothere jaw fragment reported in 1846.

But the recent titanothere has become a bone of contention. It was found near Stronghold Table, in the park's South Unit, 53,800 hectares of tribal land owned by the Oglala Sioux as part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Managed in trust by the Department of the Interior, the South Unit is part of the national park. Though the Sioux do not live there, Stronghold Table is sacred ground to the Sioux, site of one of their last Ghost Dances, in 1890. Later that year a band of Sioux, despite having surrendered, was massacred by U.S. troops 48 kilometers south along a creek with an infamous name: Wounded Knee. The

Light and shadow play over Sage Creek Basin. Nature's architecture impressed one of its best studenrs, Frank Lloyd Wright. He traveled the region in 1935 and rhapsodized over "delicate parallels of rose and cream."

Sioux still hold religious ceremonies on Stronghold Table, and they have strong opinions about what they will and will not permit on their land.

In 2002, invoking cultural preservation, Sioux protesters halted the Park Service's efforts to excavate the rest of the bone bed.

"It's a stalemate," Lopez says. "We may have to bring in an outside mediator." hen the bones of the Badlands turn up in wrong hands, ".Rachel Benton is the first person we call," says Lopez. "She has to tell us what we're looking at." Benton, the park paleontologist, is a busy person. "Besides outright theft, now we have to worry about geo-caching," says Lopez. In this latest twist to a treasure hunt, people hide a container and perhaps a trinket, take the Global Positioning System CGPS) coordinates, and put the coordinates on the Internet. Other people go to the location and try to find the cache.

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Although a treasure hunt may seem a nuisance at worst, and can have the positive effect of getting people (jut in nature, Lopez warns of an escalation: Some geo-cachers are finding f6ssils in park rocks and putting those coordinates on the Web. Anyone can then come to look-or to take.

"To us, a shovel is a shovel," says Benton. "Digging up anything here is illega1." Her mental radar always on, Benton notices every vehicle parked on the roadside and scans for people carrying trowels and large packs.

While something can be done about fossil theft, little can be done about the other, natural, processes that damage fossilswind and water erosion. Pointing to the Wall near Cedar Pass, Benton explains: The Badlands formation consists mostly of claystone, hundreds of feet thick, that washed down from the Black Hills to the west between 37 and 25 million years ago. Yet the sculpting of the Badlands began a mere 500,000 years ago, an eyeblink of geologic time.

"That's when the Cheyenne, the White, and the Bad River systems began to flow over all that clay sediment and carve the Wall," Benton says. "And at the present rate of erosion, this will all be gone in another half-million years." Long before that, of course, countless fossils will be washed away. Water and wind continue to carve the Badlands, claiming up to an inch or more in some places each year.

"Probably an oreodont," Benton says as we walk along a butte and she spots a fist-size skull protruding from the bank.

"We find them throughout the park. Sheep like mammals that lived in herds about 30 million years ago." The fossil lies intact in the soil, but Benton knows other eyes are searching for such a find. Back in the car, we round a bend.

"Stop," she says. "I want to check out that van."

0 About the Author: John L. Eliot is a senior writer with National Geographic.

Since then, eight more Indian companies have successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange ( YSE) and two others have listed their shares on technology stock-heavy Nasdaq. Some of these companies have been among the best performing stocks on the NYSE and 6 Nasdaq. Their success has .~encouraged others, and !nearly half a dozen Indian finns are preparing forays .~ into the U.S. stock market to &- gain global recognition and ,~ find new capital and acquisitions. Their ambitions are g further supported by the ~ political and economic ties ~ between India and the $. United States, which have ยงnever been so good. ~ In the past 15 years-as hndia switched from a ~ socialist-style development ~ strategy to market opening, export-led growth polio- cies-Indian companies have radically transformed their businesses, making them productive and competitive on scales comparable to international standards.

Once they thrived under tax breaks from the government and a protected market at home, but today they want to compete in the global marketplace. So they seek greater visibility, more funds and better corporate governance. All that is well served by their shares being listed in the U.S. stock market, especially on the New York Stock Exchange-the world's largest with $13 trillion in market capital.

Though most companies have opted

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arch 11, 1999, was a special day in India's business history. The leading software firm, Infosys Technologies Ltd., listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, becoming the first Indian company to offer its shares on any American bourse.

for the NYSE, the first Indian listing was on the Nasdaq, because the lead was taken by Bangalore-based Infosys. "We listed on the Nasdaq in order to build our brand, create high-value dollar stocks for our local employees and generate cash to fund our acquisition plans," says Infosys Chief Financial Officer T.v. Mohandas Pai. In India, Infosys pioneered the concept of stock options for employees and many today are millionaires. That has helped the company retain its best talent.

In fact, raising funds for acquisition was a marginal factor in Infosys' decision to list on the Nasdaq, Pai says .

Global visibility Global'visibility is the main factor driving most Indian companies that have listed or plan to list on the U.S. stock exchanges. Some companies that had listed on the London or the Luxembourg exchanges have suspended u'ading there and moved to the NYSE. Tata Motors, the latest Indian stock on the NYSE, convelted its global depositary receipts into American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) last September. The decision was guided by a desire to access the world's largest capital market, said Praveen Kadle, the company's executive director in charge of finance. Kadle said that the listing has given his company, India's largest automobile manufacturer, a global stature and enhanced the Tata brand, besides expanding its investor base and reinforcing its leadership status among Indian auto stocks.

Above, Left: The tricoLor at Nasdaq's market site in Times Square, New York, marking India's Republic Day in 2005.

Below: Deputy Managing Director and cofounder S. GopaLakrishnan and other Infosys officiaLs open the Nasdaq market on March 11, 2004, the fifth anniversary of the company's Listing.

"An NYSE listing brings in tremendous visibility and liquidity," said Dhiraj Shah, an analyst at Mumbai-based brokerage ASK-Raymond James Securities India Ltd. "It's also a seal of approval that you have finally made it to the top league."

The ringing of the opening or closing bell at the NYSE on Wall Street is often a top news event. Companies turn their listing events and anniversaries into wellorchestrated opportunities to entertain, inform and draw new customers. So when India's richest man, Azim H. Premji, rang the opening bell and listed his company, Wipro Technologies, in March 2000, he had Jack Welch, then chairman of the board of General Electric, to cheer him on.

GE is a key client of Wipro, India's third largest information technology company.

For smaller, less cash-rich Indian firms, generating acquisition funds was a key objective behind listing their shares on the U.S. exchanges. Internet service provider Sat yam Infoway, which followed Infosys on the Nasdaq, used most of its ADR proceeds for a $115 million acquisition of an Internet portal-one of India's biggest corporate buyouts at that time. Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, a leading pharmaceutical company, got on the big board of the NYSE in 2001, to raise funds for its expansion in the United States.

For many Indian companies that pursue global ambitions, growth through acquisition has been a preferred business model.

For instance, Narendra Patni, the chief executive of Mumbai-based Patni Computer Systems Ltd., wants to triple his company's revenues to $1 billion, but doesn't want to wait too long. So his company bought out California-based Cymbal Corporation last year, accessing new businesses and winning new customers such as SBC Communications, the company that is taking over telecommunications giant AT&T. Now Patni Computers-India's sixth-largest software services exporter, whose clientele includes Coca-Cola, ABN Amro and Gillette-is eyeing more acquisitions and has planned at least a $100 million ADR issue for this purpose.

Anlerican investors Indian company listings also benefit the U.S. stock exchanges, as their portfolios expand and they are able to offer American

investors greater liquidity and more opportunities to participate in eco- Company nomic growth outside the United States. More than NASDAQ 460 companies from 52 Infosys Technologies countries are listed on the Satyam Infoway NYSE. Some Indian Rediff.com NYSE stocks have yielded among the best returns ICICI Bank for retail investors. The Wi pro Technologies VSNL Infosys share on the Dr. Reddy's Lab Satyam Computers Nasdaq has appreciated more than eight times the HDFC Bank MTNL price at which it was list- Tata Motors ed six years ago. On the NYSE, ICICI Bank's share price has nearly doubled in the past five years, while that of Dr. Reddy's Laboratories has increased about 70 percent since listing.

What is noteworthy is that the listings have also helped build familiarity among American investors about Indian companies, making it easier to attract more retail investors. When Sat yam Infoway offered its shares on the Nasdaq in October 1999, only 25 percent were subscribed by retail investors. Months later, a third of ICICI Bank's offering on the NYSE went to retail buyers and a year later about 42 percent of Dr. Reddy's shares were subscribed by retail investors.

The appetite for emerging market stocks is growing. But retail investors in the United States can hardly access Indian stocks unless they are listed there.

Stringent norms Listing on the NYSE is not easy, however. Indian companies follow accounting practices that ale significantly different from American standards. In order to list, a company must make its books compatible with the U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

It can take months, sometimes years, to fulfill this requirement.

"From the shareholders' point of view, this is good. It improves corporate discipline as the listing requires adhering to one of the most stringent accounting norms in the world," says Shah, the analyst at ASK-Raymond James.

For some of India's large industrial groups, however, the stringent accounting norms have hampered their plans to offer

Month/Year of listing

Symbol

%age of equity held as ADS *

Closing Price on April 14 ($)

Mar Oct Jun

1999 1999 2000

INFY SIFY REDF

8.0 6.8 NA

61.55 4.05 6.70

Mar Oct

2000 2000 2000 2001 2001 2001 2001 2004

IBN WIT VSL RDY HDB MTE

27.3 1.45 12.9 16.0 10.65 19.5 11.0

19.06 18.90 8.55 17.05 21.85 43.13 6.29

TIM

6.4

9.7

Aug Apr May Jul

Nov Sep

SAY

their stocks in the U.S. market. Three years ago, Reliance Industries, India's largest private company, asked its shareholders to surrender their shares under an ADR conversion plan, but it fell through.

Analysts said that accounting and other required procedural norms were a main factor. The company only said its American listing was delayed.

Companies planning fresh ADRs are learning from the experience of the dozen Indian finns that are already listed in the United States. Also, top officials from the NYSE and the Nasdaq have visited India to enlist more companies from here and help Indian firms learn more about the procedures and norms of the U.S. stock market. During a 2002 visit, Georges Ugeux, group executive vice president of the NYSE, offered to help create a global equity market in India.

Still, only one Indian company- Tata Motors-has listed on the NYSE since 2002 and none on the Nasdaq after the dot.com bubble burst. This year, though, several companies are planning a Nasdaq or NYSE listing. These include India's second largest mobile phone service provider, Bhatti Televentures Ltd., Allahabad Bank, software services firm Aftek Infosys Ltd. and storage media firm Moser Baer. Bharti Televentures aims to raise up to $200 million from a U.S. listing, says Sonal Kapasi, head of investor relations. "Our plans to list are part of our vision to have a global presence," she says, "and we think this is a good time."

0 About the Author: Rajesh Mahapatra writes on business and finance from New Delhi.

hen histories of the Interstate Highway System are written, they usually begin with the Fufurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City.

The exhibit, sponsored by General Motors and given dazzling miniaturized form by set designer Norman Bel Geddes, provided a nation emerging from its darkest decade since the Civil War a mesmerizing glimpse of the future-a future that involved lots and lots of roads. Big roads.

Fourteen-lane superhighways on which cars would travel at 160 kilometers per hour. Roads on which, a recorded narrator promised, Americans would eventually be able to cross the nation in a day.

As they left, Futurama visitors were handed buttons reading "I Have Seen the Future." They'd definitely seen part of it: America does now boast 14-lane superhighways. I drove on one of them, the New Jersey Turnpike, the Sunday after Christmas. But I cer-

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tainly wasn't doing 160; in spots, the top speed attainable was about eight kilometers per hour. With a lunch break and trafficjam-avoiding detours onto two-lane state roads in New Jersey and Delaware, the 400-kilometer trip down Interstate 95 from New York to suburban Washington, D.C., took more than eight hours.

So Bel Geddes (yes, that was his daughter Barbara who played Miss Ellie on Dallas) got a few things wrong. But he wasn't alone. For two decades, countless smart, influential, and resourceful Americans dreamed of a nation liberated and enriched by superhighways. On June 29, 1956, their dreaming and scheming finally bore fruit: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, lying in a hospital bed recovering from surgery, signed the bill for a $25 billion National Above: The Interstate System of Interstate and Defense Highway System Highways. pLays a vital roLe in It was heralded as the greatest public America's progress.

works project ever. That it was. And it did, as promised, lead to an America that is more mobile, Jess plagued by regional differences, and vastly wealthier than before.

But in the process of laying 68,868 kilometers of limitedaccess pavement, the Interstate builders changed America in ways few could have imagined in 1939 or even 1956. The Interstate system was sold as a savior for both rural America and declining urban cores; instead it speeded the trend toward suburbanization at the expense of both city and country. It was heralded as an antidote to traffic jams; instead it brought ever more congestion. It was seen as a shining example of progress and good government; by the I 970s it had helped sour Americans on the very idea of progress and good government. And who would have thought that better highways would help make us all so fat?

For American businesses, the Interstates literally and figuratively transformed the landscape in which they operated. Some of

the changes were foreseeable: No one should have been surprised that construction-equipment maker Caterpillar did spectacularly well during the big years of building in the 1960s, or that railroads struggled. And in the 1950s America was already becoming a nation of chain restaurants, chain hotels, chain stores, chain everything-although the Interstates certainly accelerated that transformation.

But other changes in which the Interstates played a role came out of the blue. The FORTUNE 500 has become the standard measure of corporate power. In 1955, when FORTUNE first published the list, it included only industrial companies and was dominated by a few massive ones, with General Motors far and away the biggest and most profitable. The size and seemingly Traffic is allowed to pass through the jireblackened Angeles National Forest on the r"vin lanes of Interstate 5, north of Castaic, California, on August 28, 1996, after periodic closures.

Traffic backs up on northbound Interstate 5, going through Seattle, Wednesday, October 2, 2002.

insurmountable market positions of GM and its co-behem6thsrounding out the top five were Standard Oil of New Jersey, U.S. Steel, General Electric, and Swift-led some observers to suggest that we'd progressed from a capitalist system to a sort of corporate socialism. Or as GM chairman Charlie Wilson put it during his 1953 confirmation hearing to become Eisenhower's Defense Secretary, "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big."

The Interstate Highway System-together with another 1956

~ innovation, the shipping container-helped change ;;,that. Thanks to the new road network and contain~ ers that could easily be moved from ship to train to ~ truck, overseas manufacturers and domestic ~ upstarts were able to get their products to market in ~ the United States more quickly than ever before. a: New distribution networks arose that were vastly more efficient and flexible than the old. They made it possible for Toyota to order parts for its plants in Kentucky, Indiana, and California just as they are needed, for Dell to build personal computers to order, and for Wal-Mart to replace products on its shelves as quickly as shoppers take them off.

That was good for America. It wasn't always good for General Motors, which went from undisputed industrial colossus of the planet to just another big but embattled manufacturer. GM is still around, of course, and still near the top of the 500 (No.3 on last year's list). It's stiJJ sponsoring swell exhibits too. But the company is now an also-ran as far as profits go (No. 46 last year) and even lower in market capitalization (No. 85). And the GM-sponsored "America on the Move" exhibit that opened at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History in November 2003 is far from the unambiguous celebration of automotive progress that Futurama was.

Alongside a display about a Queens, New York, couple who traveled to 49 states in their 1967 Pontiac Grand Prix are accounts of anti-Interstate protests and endless traffic jams. The exhibit's mascot is Bud, the bull terrier, who rode along on the first transcontinental automobile journey in 1903, but its show-stoppers are immaculately restored locomotives and streetcars of the pre-Interstate era.

That anybody would ever romanticize the days when America moved on rails would have stunned the highway boosters of the first half of the 20th century. In those days, highways meant progress, pure and simple. Railroads and streetcars did not. Both had been built with private capital, and the railroads in particular embodied capitalism at its most rapacious. To the Progressives who came to political power at the turn of the century, highways were the Main Street alternative to Wall Street-dominated rail. And for people who lived in rural areas, paved roads weren't just an alternative; they were an escape from mud-imposed isolation during the rainy months.

Federal funding of roads began in 1916, but the clamor for a national network of bigger, better, faster roads-limited-access highways free of stoplights and crossings-dates from the mid1930s. Adolf Hitler's autobahn was an inspiration, as were the

Congressional backers of the Interstate Highway System finally persuaded the roads crowd that if they wanted an Interstate system, they'd have to pay for it-with higher fuel taxes.

It was heralded as the greatest public works project ever. That it was.

And it did, as promised, lead to an America that is more mobile, less plagued by regional differences, and vastly wealthier than before. parkways Robert Moses was building on Long Island. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who saw highway-building as the kind of job-creating public works project that could lift the nation from its Depression doldrums, was an important backer.

The only problem was the price: In 1939 the federal Bureau of Public Roads estimated that it would cost $6 billion ($80 billion in today's dollars) to build a 47,154-kilometer national superhighway network. The great pro-highway coalition of carmakers, truckers, bus operators, oil companies, tiremakers, auto clubs, farmers, and politicians could agree on a lot but not on who would fork over that kind of money. While the U.S. Congress dithered (and focused on more pressing matters, like World War II), wealthier states began building their own long-distance superhighways, starting with the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the first 257-kilometer stretch of which was completed in 1940. The New York State Thr\.1-wayand New Jersey Turnpike followed, and California began building its freeways in the 1940s as well.

The congressional deadlock finally broke in 1956. Eisenhower gets much of the credit, but the massive bond issue he proposed actually didn't fly with fiscal cOriservatives on Capitol Hill.

Congressional backers of the Interstate Highway System, most Below: Central Artery construction laborers work from aerial platforms on the nearlyJinished southbound portion of the Interstate 93 tunnel in November 2003 in Boston.

Below, right: A stretch of construction is seen of a four-lane section of u.s. 65 being built in 1999 in Arkansas.

prominent among them Senator Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee, finally persuaded the roads crowd that if they wanted an Interstate system, they'd have to pay for it-with higher fuel taxes. The legislation Eisenhower signed in 1956 steered those new taxes into a Highway Trust Fund that would pay for 90 percent of Interstate highway construction (with the states covering the rest). The initial estimate was that building the Interstate network would cost the feds $25 billion over 12 years; in fact, it cost $114 billion over 35 years-although the bulk of the work and spending were finished by the mid-1970s.

So was the $114 billion worth it? Probably. John Fernald, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has studied the performance of "vehicle dependent" industries like construction, trade, and services during the Interstate-building boom and found that they made huge productivity gains. "Building an Interstate system that tied the economy together turned out to be extraordinarily productive," he says. "Highways complemented the t1exibility of the internal combustion engine, so that firms found it much easier to do business away from train lines or natural ports."

But as far as Fernald can figure, the productivity boost was a onetime event. Once most of the highway network was complete, more road spending didn't generate similar productivity gains.

Whatever its overall impact on economic growth, the $114 billion clearly steered that growth in new directions. Before the 1956 Interstate Act, states footed most of the bill for highway construction. That meant poor states in the South and Southwest couldn't build superhighways.

The wealthy states of the Northeast and industrial Midwest could, but the spectacular cost

Thanks to the new road network and containers that could easily be moved from ship to train to truck, overseas manufacturers and domestic upstarts were able to get their products to market in the United States more quickly than ever before. of building new limited-access highways through already builtup urban areas meant that they usually went about it cautiously.

The Interstate program changed that equation. For the South, which never had much of a transportation network-one of the reasons it lost the Civil War-that amounted to a huge windfall.

With the building of the Interstates, the region's transportation disadvantage disappeared and it began to attract heavy manufacturers and spawn retailing (Wal-Mart, Home Depot) and shipping (FedEx) giants. In Al Gore Sr.'s home state of Tennessee, per capita income rose from 70 percent of the U.S. average in 1956 to almost 90 percent in 2002.

In and around America's big cities, the legacy of the Interstates is more complicated. When talk of an Interstate system first began in the 1930s, urban areas weren't really part of the equation. The point was to link cities, not repave them. By the 1950s, trough, big-city mayors and merchants were becoming alarmed by the car-enabled outflow of people and commerce to the suburbs. The solution, as they saw it, was to make it easier to get into, out of, and around cities by car. Highway planners listened and redrew their Interstate maps to wrap every big city with superhighways, high cost be damned.

The backlash came remarkably quickly. Through 1956 FORTUNE magazine depicted urban superhighways in a positive light. But in 1957 and 1958, as the bulldozers came out in force, a series of articles on "The Exploding Metropolis" called the automobile's urban role into question, wondering at one point whether the highways needed to get cars downtown might

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"carve so much space out of the city that little worthwhile will remain."

The notion that big highways and big cities don't mix spread. In 1959, San Franciscans staged the "freeway revolt" that halted the building of the Embarcadero Freeway along the city's waterfront. In the I 960s, successful anti-freeway protests followed in Washington, D.C., New Orleans, New York, Boston, and other cities.

In 1973 this resistance led the U.S. Congress to break into the Highway Trust Fund for the first time to aid urban mass transit.

Over the years the share of federal transportation dollars going to mass transit has only grown-a development which, coupled with the anti-tax sentiment of the past two decades, has meant that it's extremely tough to get a new superhighway built anymore. In fact, the biggest Interstate-related building project in years has been Boston's Big Dig, in which downtown-splitting Interstate 93 is being shoved underground.

Still, the protests didn't stop the Interstate system-apart from a few urban stretches-from being built. The first cross-country link, Interstate 80, was completed in 1986, and the system was more or less finished in 1991. The boom cities of the second half of the century-Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, San Jose, Denver, Phoenix, Las Yegas-did their growing along lines determined by Interstate planners. And the new growth that occurred in older metropolitan areas like Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York took place mostly along Interstate highways outside the core cities.

Meanwhile, the mass entrance of married women into the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s meant that more Americans had to get to work than ever before. The jobs to which they commuted were increasingly not in old downtowns but in new office centers built next to Interstate exits . ..; And the houses they went home to at the end of the day . ,If) ! were in increasingly auto-centric developments located . ever farther away from center cities.

Was all that really the doing of the Interstates? Or was it simply a case of Americans freely and consciously choosing a lifestyle oriented toward the car? It was both.

Government policies were skewed against rail transit for much of the century, but they aren't anymore. And the decline in bus ridership over the years would indicate that increasing auto use was more a product of affluence and choice than of government subsidies. But the auto enthusiasts of the first half of the 20th century had promised something that the Interstate Age was unable to deliver: freedom of movement. Sure, you can now drive from Fargo, North Dakota, to Atlanta, Georgia, at the spur of the moment. But you can't get from one northern Atlanta suburb to another quickly at rush hour.

Perhaps the most dramatic change was that by making roads more reliable and by making Americans more reliant on them, they took away most of the adventure and romance associated with driving.

Traffic stands still on January 3, 2005, on Interstate 5, near Castaic, California, due to heavy snow shutting down the major highway north of Los Angeles.

The problem is something called "induced traffic." Build a freeway, or at least a freeway anywhere near a big city, and cars will come. Too many cars. Building more highways or adding lanes only induces more traffic (it is physically possible to build enough highway lanes to outpace the traffic, but not politically possible). Economists love differential pricing--charging people to travel on busy highways at busy times-but that has caught on in only a few cities.

Then there's mass transit. Since the 1970s, new subway and streetcar networks have been built in cities across the country.

But after 50 years of building houses and offices to be convenient for cars, these new systems are of only limited use. Most commutes don't match the suburbs-to-downtown routes followed even by newer mass transit systems like Washington's Metro and Atlanta's MARTA. And most development of the past 50 years isn't dense enough to support mass transit-even when it is, the failure of newer suburbs to build sidewalks has made it unpleasant or impossible for many Americans to walk short distances to schools, stores, bus stops, and train stations. (This, coupled with the rise of fast-food chains, may be where the

Interstate system and the nation's obesity epidemic intersect.)

Some people have been returning to tightly packed older cities that are better set up for mass transit. New York City bucked longstanding demographic trends by adding 685,714 residents in the 1990s; Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco all gained population as well.

But now and for the foreseeable future, most economic activity will happen out along the Interstates. Consider the San Francisco Bay Area during the booming 1990s: Most of the actual "wealth creation" took place south of the city off Interstates 280 and 880 and U.S. 101.

It was the parties to celebrate it that happened in San Francisco.

As you may remember, that wealth creation (and subsequent destruction) had to do with the building of another network of commerce and communication-the information superhighway.

The federal government played a crucial role in the early years of the Internet, but it was private investors who paid to link corporations in the United States and around the world with highspeed data connections. This new network has transformed business and-it appears-put productivity growth on a sharp upward trajectory. It's having a huge impact on the FORTUNE 500 corporations: The list is now liberally sprinkled with technology companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco and has seen the continued rise of highly sophisticated users of technologyWal-Marts, FedExes, and Dells. What's still not in place is a high-speed pipeline into most Americans' homes. In 2003, 22 percent of American households had broadband connections, according to research firm eMarketer. In South Korea, thanks to government subsidies, broadband penetration was 69 percent. Is the United States missing out by failing to subsidize broadband?

Should connecting the "last mile" of fiber-optic cable to American homes be today's Interstate program?

Who knows? The creators of the Interstates certainly didn't know the full consequences of what they were getting into.

Perhaps the most dramatic change was that by making roads more reliable and by making Americans more reliant on them, they took away most of the adventure and romance associated with driving.

So this is the future. We can't drive across the country in a day. But we can drive Japanese and German luxury cars blindingly fast through parts of it. After which we can stop at chain motels with free Wi-Fi access, pull out our made-to-order laptops, and play computer games against South Koreans. The people who trooped through Futurama might just have found that impressive.

0

Indian Highways

PI n in forpros I mall cars, rattling buses and gaily-painted trucks roar along amid clusters of motorcycles and rickshaws, while farm tractors pull trailers with up to 20 travelers apiece. Families swarm both shoulders of the road while kids play on the busy roadway itself.

Welcome to the Indian road network!

But radical changes are underway. Smooth, pristine roads are coming up, connecting major cities, providing traffic flows of more than 90 kilometers per hour and emergency medical teams on standby for accidents. India is witnessing one of the world's largest road building projects, worth more than Rs. 1,720 billion.

At present, India has a 3.3 million-kilometer road network, second largest after the United States.

In 2001, four percent of the national highways in India were four-lane, 80 percent were two-lane and the rest were singlelane. The poor quality of Indian roads is exacerbated by congestion, fatigued bridges and culverts, railway crossings, at times unmanned, low safety and very few bypasses. The central gov-

Views of National Highway 8 at Manesar (above) and Gurgaon (left) in Haryana.

ernment develops, maintains and manages national highways under the National Highways Act, 1956. Recognizing the inadequacy of budgetary outlays to address the rapid growth in traffic, this act was amended in 1995 to allow private participation.

There has been a major shift from railways to road transport in the past decade. About 85 percent of the passengers and 70 percent of the freight traffic use roads, according to the ational Highways Authority of India.

Eager to develop a transportation system worthy of its globalizing and increasingly information-driven economy, India is on a highway-building binge, the largest public works initiative since independence.

President A.PJ. Abdul Kalam said while addressing the Parliament this year that the Indian economy requires at least $150 billion worth of investment in infrastructure over the next decade to catch up with East Asia. Interstate highways are at the core of this. In October 1998 former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee promised world-class roads spanning the country. It is India's version of the U.S. Interstate highway initiative undertaken by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s. India and the United States signed a Memorandum of Cooperation in April, providing for India to utilize American experience in developing highways and expressways of international standards. The current road plan aims to achieve a network connectivity of around 80 kilometers per square kilometer by 20 II. An extra two rupees on every liter of petrol or diesel have been levied to fund the project. It is also backed by the World Bank and other financial institutions.

Most highways do not have adequate bearing capacity for multiaxle and tandem trucks. This has led to rapid deterioration of road surface in many areas. Altogether, India has put in

National

Highwavs

Development Project

PHASE1 Golden Quadrilateral 5,846 km connecting Delhi-Calcutta-Chennai-Mumbai

NH 2: Delhi-Calcutta 1,453 km NH 4, 1& 46: Chennai-Mumbai 1,290 km NH 5, 6 & 60: Calcutta-Chennai 1,684 km NH 8, 16 & 19: Delhi-Mumbai 1,419 km

Indian Road Network Length (in km) Nationalhighways State highways Majordistrict roads Villageand other roads Total

65,569 131,899 467,763 2,650,000 3.315 million

Nationalhighwaysare less than 2 percent of network but carry 40 percent of total traffic.

Source:

NHAI

motion projects for upgrading 20,000 kilometers of roadway.

The government hopes to complete 92 percent of the work on the 5,846-kilometer Golden Quadrilateral linking New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta with an upgraded and wIdened four- and six-lane highway by December, a year behind schedule. As of January 31 this year, about 4,500 kilometers were complete. The target for completing the North-South and EastWest corridors is 2007.

The first phase of the national highway project will focus on the Golden Quadrilateral (see graphic). Its second phase will target the North-South and East-West corridors, about 7,300 kilometers connecting Kashmir to Kanyakumari, and Silchar in Assam to Porbandar in Gujarat. The third phase is a special package for northeastern states under which 6,396 kilometers of national highways and other roads will be developed at a cost of more than Rs. 73.91 billion, according to the Ministry of Shipping, Surface Transport and Highways.

In its latest drive to speed up the third phase of the National

Highways Development Project, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government has allowed the National Highways Authority of India to take investment decisions for individual sub-projects and add more staff. "We'll take the fruits of better connectivity to all parts of the nation and unleash a new wave of development and prosperity, especially in remote and economjcally backward areas," says Transport Minister T.R. Baalu.

About 75 percent of the work is being done by Indian firms, and the rest by companies from China, Russia, Malaysia and South Africa. The Highways Authority attributes the private sector's strong interest in the project to: ensured revenue repayment, fair bidding and speedy execution.

Most of the new four-lane sections avoid the problem of glaring lights from oncoming traffic by raising the road height on one side of the carriageway. A special intelligent traffic management system has been installed on the Delhi-Jaipur Highway (NH-8). It provides information on weather and traffic flow and helps reduce traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and checks for potential accidents. Emergency call boxes at various points help drivers with information about where they can buy fuel, or directions to the nearest hospital.

Rajiv Tewari, a New Delhi lawyer, is astonished by the changes. He was returning home from Jaipur when his bus left without him after a tea break. "I took a taxi and when the driver heard my story, he suggested I use the emergency call box. The m~ssage was conveyed to the bus driver by traffic police. Who could think of anything like that in this country?" he asks. Vikram Grewal, an engineer, is impressed: "It used to take up to seven hours to cover a distance of about 250 kilometers from Jaipur to Delhi. Now, it takes less than five hours even during peak hours."

Better and wider roads have raised expectations among the rural population, too, and among those living close to highways. "As the city progresses, there will be more factories. People will get more facilities, more employment," says Chowdhury Narain Singh, a resident of Rampura village in the Gurgaon district of Haryana.

Widening of National Highway 8 under progress in Haryana (far left); a traveler at an ernergency phone booth on the DelhiJaipur section (left); the highway traffic management system control room in the same section.

Below: The first phase construction of the AhmedabadVadodara expressway in Gujarat.

Courtesy NHAI

Adds Subhash Goyal, president of the Indian Association of Tour Operators: "India gets over three million foreign tOUlists annually and the figure could double if we had better infrastructure.

Good highways .will definitely give a fillip to the tourism industry.

This will have a multiplier effect on the Indian economy."

The highway initiative does not mean that Indians will soon be whizzing around the countryside on limited-access, Californiastyle freeways. In a country of m'ore than one billion people, roughly two-thirds of whom live in rural areas, drivers will share the roads with cows, pedestrians, bicycles and other non-motorized traffic.

The project also faces hurdles relating to land acquisition, poor coordination between the states and the center and the pres-

Motor Vehicles According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers: 75 million vehicles on Indian roads in 2004 58.5 million were registered as of 2002 The breakup: 41.4 million two wheelers 7.5 million cars and taxis 6.6 million buses 3 million goods vehicles 6.1 million other unregistered

vehicles

According to the Indian Foundation of Transport Research and Training: Buses:

750,000 running;

20,000 added in 2003-

04; 30,000 being added in 2004-05 Goods vehicles:

3,2 million running;

250,000

added in 2003-04; 275,000 being added in 2004-05.

ence of thousands of religious sites that must be moved to accommodate the wider roads. One of the worst stretches runs from New Delhi to Calcutta along the path of the Grand Trunk Road. It is a dangerous, traffic-choked mess, nowhere more than in Bihar where the hazards include madly careering trucks and buses, wandering livestock, highway robbers and Maoist guerillas in the forest-covered Kaimur Hills.

At the moment, India's national highways are an antiquated, overcrowded two-lane network with one of the world's highest accident rates and a reputation for lawlessness and corruption.

Nearly 80,000 deaths are reported annually while 400,000 people are injured, according to the Indian Foundation of Transport Research and Training (IFTRC).

Critics say the euphoria over the Golden Quadrilateral project could be short-lived if critical issues of safety, efficiency and cost-savings to users-largely commercial vehicle operatorsare not given attention. Above all, action should be taken to ensure that the carriageway is not damaged by overuse in pursuit of short-term gains. "India can't become an economic power on the strengths of an inefficient support system," says S.P. Singh, senior fellow at the IFTRC. Compared to the United States, the amount of freight traffic carried by highways in India is quite meager. This is partially due to the poor surface quality of the roads. The Indian automobile industry manufactures a large variety of multiaxle vehicles with turbo-charged engines, but most are exported. Indian industry needs these large freighters to transport goods, but inadequate road infrastructure acts as an economic bottleneck, impeding growth for the manufacturers who would build, and the transporters who would use the large trucks.

Though the highways are now being used for a point-to-point drive by cargo vehicles, it will not be long before the much-

India's Original Road Visionarv he Grand TrunkRoad connects Calcutta with Amritsar,cuts into Punjab and the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan and then through to Kabulin Afghanistan.The highwaywas built by 16th-century ruler Sher Shah Suri to promote trade. The G.T.Road stillacts as the backbone of commerce across India.

The Grand Trunk Road was' called the "Road of Hindustan" by RudyardKipling.Muchof his novel Kim is set along this road, which he described as "such a river of life as exists nowhere else in the world."

The road began as a dusty track beaten flat under the hoofs of galloping horses and thumping elephants. Few roads in the world can offer a better livingsnapshot of so many strata of society. G.T. is a bustling diagonal strip stretching 2,575 kilometers. It was known to 17th-century European travelers as the "Long Walk."

With independence and partition, it became a two-way escape route for 15 millionrefugees caught between India and Pakistan.Since partition,Pakistan has controlledits 480-kilometersegment between Peshawarand Lahore,whilethe other 2,000 kilometerslinksix Indian states. It is this road through whichthe subcontinent was invad'edby conquerors. Hinduism,Jainism, Sikhism,and Buddhismflourished in its environs,and Muslimproselytizerstraveled it on their missions. 0

T

debated multimodal carrier system-wherein multiple transportation modes and more than one carrier are used to transport goods-is developed. This would no doubt minimize the wear and tear on the carriageways. However, until such a facility is developed, and if the current axle load stipulations are not strictly enforced, the new highways could soon be potholed.

To protect the Golden Quadrilateral and the North-South Corridor, it is necessary to review the central Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, and reframe rules governing speed and axle load norms for commercial vehicles, says Singh.

In a recent presentation to the government, the transport research foundation pointed out that truck and tire manufacturers should adapt modern technology to improve efficiency and earnings. It said truckers should be able to reduce their turnaround time significantly if the present speed limit of 65 kilometers per hour is raised to 100 kilometers per hour without compromising on the maximum axle load capacity stipulation. The average actual speed varies from 30 to 35 kilometers per hour, mainly due to overloading and poor vehicle technology.

The average speed on Indian highways is around 45 kilometers per hour, less than half of that on the U.S. Interstate system.

Coupled with this, there is a problem of low bearing capacities in India. Most road surfaces are flexible pavement bitumen, with bearing capacities one-fourth that of the U.S. Interstate highways. Bitumen pavement was adopted over concrete because high bearing capacity was not needed for passenger movement.

Most military equipment in India is transported on rail, unlike in the United States, where the Interstate roads were constructed to enable movement of heavy tanks and artillery, according to a report on the Indian road sector prepared by the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad in 2001.

More than 90 percent of commercial vehicles use conventional cross-ply tires which-with overloading-affect vehicle efficiency. Radial tires would protect roads from wear and tear. With commercial vehicles, the predominant users of highways, it is imperative that the haulage capacity norms are strictly enforced.

Indian roads are built for a specified axle load of 10.2 tons, which is also the maximum requirement of the rear axle of a truck as per the Motor Vehicles Act. Permitting anything more would damage the roads faster.

On average, traffic flow has been half of projected levels, which is also a problem. For example, on the Delhi-Noida toll bridge the actual traffic flow was a quarter of the expected flow. User resistance to paying tolls has led to a few projects being unviable.

According to the World Bank, less than 20 percent of the highway development projects are being funded through private sector participation, through Build Operate Transfer (BOT) or annuity concessions, or by setting up a joint venture company to execute a project. Some states have been successful in attracting private sector participation. Madhya Pradesh has entered into many "maintain and transfer" concessions. Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu have all signed BOT concessions and many, including Kerala and Karnataka, have set up Road Development Corporations.

Better roads have brought a change in the habits of middle class families. "There's nothing more refreshing than a long drive to a dhaba," remarks Preeti Malhotra, a young fashion designer who makes it a point to visit those on the Kalka-Shimla highway.

The delicacies may extend to Southeast Asian dishes in coming years. To boost trade and tourism, India plans to extend road and rail links to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore.

D About the Author:

Sudipt Arora is a New Delhi-based

spondent with United News of India.

senior corre-

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Immigrant teachers, travel books and translated poetry spread Sufi thought and ritual.

he Sema, symbolizing universal values of love and service, is performed only by the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, one branch of the vast Sufi tradition of Islam. The ritual dance consists of several stages with different meanings • Naat-I-Sherif, a eulogy to the "Messenger of Islam" and all prophets before him.

• A drumbeat symbolizing the divine command "Be" for the creation of the universe.

• A Taksim, an improvisation on the reed flute, expressing the divine breath, which gives life to everything.

• The Sultan Veled procession, accompanied by peshrev music; a circular, anticlockwise procession three times around the turning space.

• During the Sema there are four selams, or musical movements, each with a distinct rhythm. At the beginning, during and close of each selam, the song praises God. • A recitation from the Quran • The salute. The dervish demonstrates the number "1" in his appearance-arms humbly crossed-and by this, the unity of God. • A prayer for the peace of the souls of all the prophets and believers.

he whirl stops and the white skirts of the dervishes, which had flared like parasols, settle in their normal pattern. The mesmerizing dance, driven by boundless spiritual energy, has ended with the fourth salaam, or invocation to peace. The audience heaves a sigh, as the spell is broken for a moment.

Then begins a soulful chant: "Unto God belong the East and West, and whithersoever ye turn, ye are faced with Him. He is All-embracing, All-knowing."

This Sufi ceremony, or encounter with the divine, did not occur in Turkey or Afghanistan, but in Houston, Texas. A friend and I were the only two non-white, non-American folk in the audience.

Together, all of us were on a journey to a special place in the soul.

The dance and the ritual is known as Serna, an old Sufi practice associated with the 13th-century Persian poet Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, who was born in Balkh, Afghanistan. Each detail of dress and every gesture is loaded with significance. The tall cap on the dancer's head symbolizes a tomb under which the ego is buried.

Serna is the pilgrim's progress toward peliection and the realization of the ultimate truth. It is considered an ascent to the c higher self through absolute, unconditional love. Returning from ~ this inward travel, an individual feels he has become the beloved :g of the entire creation, acceptable to and adored by all. The Sufi ~w

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who attains such perfection believes he has risen above denominational squabbles, racial ill will, lust for worldly gain and parochial pettiness.

After the dance ended, I was curious as to how the United States had become the home for such a spiritual quest. I had grown up in India with the image of an America peopled by Christians and Jews only, although people of other faiths, from Native Americans to Chinese workers and other immigrants, had lived there for centuries. The picture started to change further in the early 20th century as more faiths from the East, including Islam, began to influence daily life and attitudes in the United States.

The first Muslim immigrants, from 1878 to 1924, were laborers from Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Those who stayed concenFrom left: Indian sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan started the Sufi Order in the West, now caLLedthe Sufi Order International; Murshid Samuel L. Lewis was aforerunner of unitive mystical experience; Pir Shabda Kahn is the director of the Chishti Sabri School of Music in California.

e is the most popular poet in the United States. Barely known here only a decade ago, classes on his work have sprouted up on university campuses throughout the country. Community lectures and public readings of his poetry are announced in the cultural sections of newspapers in virtually every major American city In perhaps the ultimate measure of his celebrity, a group of movie stars and singers has made a recording of his poems.

Has the United States produced another celebrative poet like Walt Whitman, to sing America's song?

Another Robert Frost, the flinty New Englander, to speak to the half-realized yearnings of our souls?

In fact, this poet is not an American at all. Nor can Americans hope to see him in a local lecture hall or on the television chat circuit; he has been dead for more than 700 years. And, if his name has been familiar in the United States for only a short time', Iranians have held him close to their collective heart for centuries. He is Jelaluddin Rumi of Balkh, better known in the United States simply as Rumi.

Over the last 10 years, say several sources, Rumi has sold more volumes than any other poet in the United States.

An Internet search of his name results in

more than 800,000 citations. Rumi calendars, coffee mugs, even T-shirts have appeared on college campuses and in bookshops around the country.

Yet, despite these hallmarks of typical pop culture celebrity, it would be wrong to trivialize Rumi's success in the United States or to think that his words, though grounded in Islamic tradition, do not address the needs and concerns of many Americans.

Phyllis Tickle, an editor with the Publisher's American periodical Weekly, says that Rumi's popularity in the United States "is a matter of our enormous spiritual hunger." Coleman Barks, the Tennessee-born poet, whose translations of Rumi have been the greatest factor in the poet's popularity in the United States, speaks in a similar vein when he says that the religiously ecstatic nature of Rumi's poetry resonates in Americans seeking this very Quality Rumi's poetic Question, "Where do I come from and what am I supposed to be doing?" speaks to countless Americans who have a strong spiritual sense.

Since the attacks of 9/11, a number of commentators have also made the point that Rumi has served as an important bridge between Americans and Islam.

~ writer, Robert Bly, handed him a volume of Rumi's poetry in 1976, written in a leaden, academic translation-its ~ only English translation at the timei!;' and said to Barks, "These poems need ยง to be released from their cages."

8 Barks, who lives in Athens, Georgia, soon went to work. "I made a free verse version in modern English," he says, believing that this form "is our strongest tradition." Though this method of translation is unorthodox, Barks says that he works hard "to stay true to Rumi's images, and, I hope, his spirit." He adds, "There's a musicality that is so dense-but I cannot do anything to transmit that. I listen for the pulse that comes through (the verses) No one has been more instrumental in Americans' increasing awareness of and try to follow it, to get out of its Rumi than his leading American trans- way" and let it sing.

For seven years Barks worked on lator. James Fadiman, an American scholar, has said, "The secret of his translations, with little thought of Rumi's popularity in the United States publishing Eventually, he sent the is Coleman Barks." The pub Iication of work to the American publisher, HarperCollins, which published an iniBarks' 1995 volume, The Essential Rumi, more than any other event, tial volume of Rumi. The unexpected sparked America's interest in the great success of this volume led to the extraordinarily popular The Essential Persian-language poet.

Rumi and several other more recent In a recent interview, Barks indicated that his mission to translate the titles by Barks. Together, these books have sold more than 500,000 copies, works of Rumi began in an unlikely way "I had never heard of him," he a huge popular success for a poet.

A poet and former literature professays, before the noted American

trated in enclaves in the states of Iowa, North Dakota, Indiana and in the cities of Detroit and Pittsburgh. The Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 halted the immigration of Muslims until the immigration reforms of 1952 and 1965. In the 1960s many Asian immigrants reached the United States in pursuit of the "Great American Dream." There was a spiritual flowering as many gurus, Sufis and missionaries came in.

The new assumptions, attitudes and beliefs they brought generated debate. Sufism began to attract serious attention and found a niche in American society, although it actually had begun to make its presence felt from the early 1900s as an undercurrent in American aesthetics and spiritual life. Bohemians of Los Angeles such as John Cowper Powys had acquired reputations as connoisseurs of Sufism. Also, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and Hazrat Inayat Khan from India presented Sufism in an idiom that modern American society could grasp easily. By the end of the 1960s, San Francisco was home to a large number

of Sufis, representing different spiritual orders.

Idris Shah's stories, reflecting the Sufi way of life, became popular on college campuses. American writers such as J.D. Salinger and Doris Lessing embraced it. Author Frank Herbert turned to Sufi spiritual melodies in his writings and movie star James Coburn, a member of a Sufi order, brought the culture to Hollywood.

The poems of Rumi, who lived from 1207-1273, had been known in academic circles through one English translation. But they became enormously popular after Tennessee-born poet Coleman Barks started translating them into modern English free verse. As Rumi's thought was being disseminated, his circles of devotees and the tradition of "turning" (or whirling dancing) also brought a new cultural perspective to the American "melting pot," although most Sufis in America are from the white majority.

Suleyman Scott Hofmann of Seattle in Washington State is vice president of the Mevlevi Order of America and a semazen

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sor, Barks speaks with enthusiasm and a sense of wonder when discussing the work of the great 13th-century poet. "It is poetry written by another part of the human psyche," he says, "not the personality," but something beyond it, transcendent. "He has a theology of laughter," says Barks, citing Rumi's Sufic tradition, adding that, in Rumi's view, "it may be that God is the impulse to laugh. Just to be in a body and sentient is a great joy," and that "he was talking of the core of the religious impulse, which is to praise-and maybe to laugh" The potential for Rumi's works to bridge the gap between Americans and Muslims is not lost on Barks. "[Americans] are blind to a lot of things in the Islamic world. One of these things is Rumi. We don't fully understand the beauty of Rumi." He hopes, through these translations, to facilitate understanding, to "become an empty doorway" through which Rumi's poetry can enter, "to submit," he says, understanding that this willingness to submit is the very essence of Islam. .

This sense of curiosity and joy, a desire to experience and understand, are characteristic both of Rumi and of Coleman Barks, and are now drawing together two disparate people with common spiritual yearnings 0 About the Author: Steve Holgate is a special correspondent of Washington File.

or turner, who says, "What is attractive to me about Sufism is that at its core is love. It is taught face-to-face, hand to hand, heart to heart. Because of the language ban"ier, the Mev]evi teachings have initially come to America in a very pure form," he says, "expressed by example, gesture .... U]timate]y, it is not an intellectua] exercise, though every persona] resource is used."

In the 1970s, Hofmann first saw "someone stand up in the dervish garb and turn in the center of a circle of people.

Something inside said, 'I don't know what that is, but I recognize it in myse]f.' I just had to know what was behind it." Su]eyman Hayati Dede, leader of the Mevlevi Order in Konka, Turkey, came to Canada in 1976, and sent his son, Je]aluddin Loras on a one-way ticket a couple of years later, to begin teaching the ceremony and the Sufi way. But Hofmann was in a different part of the country trying, with like-minded searchers, to learn to turn by studying pictures of whirling dervishes from a book.

"Of course, we didn't accomplish it," Hofmann says, "but we

were yearning to join in this beautiful ceremony that we were reading about." Eventually he met Loras and learned "there was a method, a step one, and step two and step three."

In America, "there was absolutely nothing that stopped me from searching, discovering anything I could about this," says Hofmann, "except the limitations of not knowing the language, not knowing the customs, not being able to read the literature in its original form, and not having living teachers available to study with. Those are a lot of 'nots.'" But no matter where one is, even in countries where the practice of Sufism is banned or restricted, Hofmann says, "there is no restriction to opening oneself to the essence of this teaching ... because it's an inward journey."

The largest share of credit for popularizing Sufism in the West goes to Hazrat Inayat Khan, who brought musical, universalist Sufism from India to the United States in 1910. A]though he began as a master of the Chishti Order, in America he trained people in the Naqshbandi, Qadiri and Suharwardi orders as we]!.

QADlRI:

founder Abd ai-Qadir al-Jilani, 1077-1166

Founded in Baghdad, reputedly first formally organized Sufi discipline. Ecstatic dance, wonderworking in some branches. Bawa Muhaiyadden best known Qadiri sheikh in North America.

CHISHTI:

founder Muin ad-Din Muhammad Chishli,

1142-1236

Prominent in India, Pakistan, inclusive, universalist. Brought Sufism to Europe, North America.

Hazrat Inayat Khan and son Pir Vilayat Khan bestknown Chisti teachers in the West.

NAQSHBANDI:

founder Muhammad Baha' ad-Din NaQshband, 1317-1389

"Sober" order, strong in Caucasus, Central Asia.

Sheikhs in West include Nazim al Haqqani and Hisham Kabbani.

MEVLEVI: founders Rumi, 1207-1272

followers of Mevlana Jelaluddin

Turkish order, best known as "whirling dervishes," emphasis on "religion of love," Teachers in United States include Kabir Helminski, Jelaluddin Loras,

NIMATUllAHI:

SHADHllI:

RlfA'I:

founder Imam ash-Shadili, 1196-1258

founder

Shah Wali Nimatullah,

1330-1431

Most widespread Shi'ite Sufi order, concentrated in Iran. Leader, Dr Javad Nurbakhsh, lives in London. founder Ahmad 'Ar-Rila'l, 1106-1182

Founded in Egypt by a Tunisian, strong in North Africa. Western adherents emphasize Islamic tradition,

Central Asian influences, tendency to ecstatic dance some wonder-working, other branches sober

SHADHllI-ALAWI:

Merging of Qadiri and Rifa'l, migrated from Baghdad to Istanbul. Sheikh Taner Vargonen leader in United States,

founder Abu-I-Abbas al-'Alawi,

1869-1934

Branch of the Darqawis, founded by an Algerian.

Frithjof Schuon traces his lineage to this order

HELVEn-JERRAHI:

founder Umar al-Khalwati, d, 1397

Turkish branch of Khalwatiyyah, teachings from several major orders. Grand Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak brought the order to New York. Present sheikhs in United States include Nur al-Jerrahi-Lex Hixon, Tosun Bayrak, and Ragip Frager. ~ [3 ~ ~ 8

Turners from the Mevlevi Order of America during the inter-fajth Mystical Chant universal dance of peace in Seattle in 2002.

He told his disciples to follow the order that suited them, because all led to the same truth. After his death in India in ] 927, the movement he led became Sufi Order International, headquartered in New York.

Among Khan's principal disciples was Samuel L. Lewis, who had been born into a Jewish family and became known as Sufi Ahmad Murad Chishti after Khan certified him in ] 926 as a Sufi master, credited with the ability to initiate newcomers into Sufi discipline and train them to perfection. Lewis established a convent in San Francisco, where people from different religious denominations gathered. He died in ]971 at 75.

Another prominent disciple of Inayat Khan's teachings is Shabda Kahn, director of the Chishti Sabri School of Music in

QUIRI-RlfA'l:

UWAYSI:

founder Muhammad Ansarai, circa 1900

launder Uways al-Qarani, 7th century

Devotees follow inner links to Uways al-Qarani, a contemporary of the Prophet Mohammad, rather than a formal discipline. Branch founded by Mir Qutb ai-Din Muhammad Angha in the early 20th century spread to the West.

Based on material in Gnosis magazine,

California, which aims to spread the Sufi message of love through concerts. "Sufism is not about theories or the intellect so much as an experiential, body-based spirituality with many practices, using movement, the voice and music," says Kahn, a frequent traveler to India. In 200 I, Kahn became the leader of Sufi Ruhianat International, which Lewis had started in San Francisco.

Sufism has attracted women in America in substantial numbers. One of the significant characteristics of the Mevlevi Order is its particular emphasis on introducing Sufism to the West with newer dimensions, including allowing women to participate in the mystic assemblies, says Maile Rietow, secretary of the order and wife of Loras, the leader or postneshin. "The Serna that we do in America is exactly the same as it is done in Turkey with the exception that we allow men and women to turn together," Rietow says. "This was also the case historically in Turkey, but not for several hundred years have men and women turned together publicly there. The original permission for women to turn in America was given by Postneshin Jelaluddin's father, Suleyman Hayati Dede."

Speaking from her home on the Hawaiian island of Maui, Rietow says she feels that Sufism "brings the sweet voices of the mysticism of Islam to the Western mind and heart, filling the emptiness there with love and gratitude." She adds, "As with all true paths, it offers a way out of the pain and confusion of separation brought on by materialism."

The dialogue between faiths that Sufism has initiated in multicultural America is the need of the hour, says Jay Kinney, editor of Gnosis, a journal of the Western inner traditions. Says Kinney, "If Sufism embodies the true essence of Islam, as many contend, then grasping what is attractive about Sufism may help us Westerners gain a more complete picture of Islam than the mass media usually provide."

D -Laurinda

Keys Long contributed to this article

Keshav Anand and Shanaz Italia in Ruchika Theatre Group The Crucible, directed by Faisal Alkazi in 1987.

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he works of American playwright Arthur Miller, who died this February at 89, are among the most translated and adapted in India, having been staged in English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and other languages within a few years of their appearance on Broadway or the West End. Miller's flawed, struggling characters-most often placed in desperate domestic, economic or social situations-resonate with the Indian middle class. The characters are very much like people Indian theatergoers recognize within their society or their families.

B.R. Bhargava, visiting professor at the National School of Drama in New Delhi and a freelance theater critic, suggests that the most important factors for the unprecedented success of Miller's plays in India are "the thematic content and its structure, conflict between an individual and his society, shattered dreams and failure of expectations culminating into the tragedy of a man."

For half a century, Miller served as a social and moral conscience of the American people, telling tales of relationships and lives shipwrecked on the rocks of false values. For him the theater was not merely a form of entertainment. It was a serious undertaking, which serves "to make man more human, that is, less alone."

ences are familiar with such situations nearer home.

The play was in the Henrik Ibsen mold in its treatment of the inevitable retribution resulting from the gross violation of basic human values. Ibsen was a 19thcentury Norwegian playwright admired for his technical mastery, symbolism and deep psychological insight. His works, like those of Russia's Anton Chekhov on similar themes, are also popular in India.

Death of a Salesman, directed by Elia Kazan, with Paul Muni in the leading role, was presented in London in July 1949. It deals with the desperate struggle for survival of an itinerant salesman in a highly competitive world. The playwright's subtle directions suggest a premonition of disaster, the snuffing out of salesman Willy Loman's dream of owning a house, the cruel absurdity of his suicide, even as the last installment on the family home has been paid. Miller's mastery of characterization, dramatic form, and sense of human suffering is revealed quietly, but with a shattering emotional intensity.

In the 1950s, The Crucible, set during the 17th-century Salem witch trials mania, was Miller's allegorical indictment of the communist-hunting excesses of the McCarthy era, which had brutalized decent citizens into betraying their closest friends and professional associates. Miller himself was scrutinized by the House Un-American Activities Committee and cited ~ for contempt of the U.S. Congress for refusing to S identify writers he had met at a communist meeting many years before. In Salem, Massachusetts, from ; June through September 1692, 19 men and women ~ were hanged and a man over 80 was pressed to death a: ;;; under heavy stones on allegations of witchcraft made ยง 8 by their neighbors.

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Indian adapters retained spirit of the teArt

Miller's first play to be presented on the professional stage after World War II was All My Sons, which appeared on Broadway in January 1947. It dealt with the destruction of a middle class family through the revelation that the father, a war profiteer, had sold defective machinery to the U.S. Air Force, an act that brings nemeses upon his own progeny. Indian audi-

Miller's structure and his treatment of the theme have played a big role in acceptability of his plays on the Indian stage and much credit goes to the writers who translated or adapted Miller to Indian languages.

Their careful work by and large retained the structure and the spirit of the text, widening Miller's reach here.

"There was something premonitory about it, when Ashim Chakraborty chose to adapt and play Miller's Death of a Salesman as Janiaker Mritzu in Bengali in 1966," says Samjk Bandyopadhyay, a scholar and critic of the arts in Calcutta. Two years after Jawaharlal Nehru's death, he says, "the generation ofliberals that preceded the 'Midnight's Children' had just started coming out. .. of their complacent trust in the success of the Nehruvian agenda, and becoming aware of the

sneaking entry of yet another agenda of success."

"Post-independence Bengali theater has been too often deprecated for its readiness to grab and adapt plays from other languages at the cost of developing and nurturing indigenous playwriting," says Bandyopadhyay. "But maybe it's a greater commit-

sively the business community," he says. "The play, in spite of its fine productional values, had to be taken off the stage after three shows."

Of Miller's 24 plays, just half a dozen have been staged in Indian languages. These are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible '" (1953), A View from the Bridge (1955), Incident at o)ji Vichy (1964) and The Price (1968). ~ Director Faisal Alkazi says Miller's early plays find ~ an instant echo in India because they deal with the teno sion between family and society as in All My Sons, which was beautifully and rather typically translated into Hindi as Sara Sansaar, Apna Parivar.

Easy transition to Indian setting

A scene from Act One's Hai Wahi Baat Yun Bhi Aur Yun Bhi, based on Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy.

ment to an i'Cleology of response to the times over a concern for the future of theater that lies at the core of this tendency. It was this tendency that drew Bengali theater to Salesman in 1966, and brought it back to the same play in 1993, with the Nandikar Group's revival as Feriwallah-r Mrityu, directed by Rudraprasad Sengupta, in a social scenario overcharged with buying and selling-and aggressive salesmanship!"

Bandyopadhyay says, "The family, which has been Miller's site for his preoccupation with the decay of a sharing collectivity, has also been the favorite site of conventional Bengali playwriting, and quite naturally Miller's works have been taken up in The Price as Neelam Neelam (1987) by Ashit Mukherjee for the Gandhar drama group, and A View from the Bridge as Gotraheen (1996) by Sengupta for Nandikar."

"Measuring by popular response," Banyopadhyay says, "the 1966 Salesman and the 1987 The Price were runaway successes, running for more than two years at a stretch (performing two to three times a month), more maybe for their obvious performance and acting values than their politics, which also contributed to the reception."

Toward the end of the 1960s, he notes, Calcutta's leading Hindi theater group, Anamika, staged a version of All My Sons translated as Mere Bachhey. "One wonders who chose this text that centers on industry's anti-humanity for an audience that was almost exclu-

In A View from the Bridge, the immigrant experiences of Sicilians in America could easily be the Punjabi immigrant staying in England, with the clash between values of the mother country and the adopted country, notes Alkazi. And that's how Ruchika Theatre Group adapted it in 1982, setting it in London's Southall district. A few tweaks of phrase, Indian names for the characters and a couple of Punjabi idioms and endearments, and the play fit perfectly, appearing simultaneously as tragic immigrant tale and a universal contemporary myth of the rootless self.

But of course it is Death of a Salesman that is the most universal of Miller's plays. The human tale of the traveling salesman has been played in Bengali by Rudraprasad Sengupta; in Hindi by Satish Kaushik in the Feroz Khan-directed Salesman Ramlal, the most popular Indian adaptation to date; and in English by Alyque Padamsee. Bhanu Bharati directed a memorable production of it many years ago as Ek Salesman ki Maut in J.N. Kaushal's excellent adaptation of the play to a setting in New Delhi's Karol Bagh area, as did Ebrahim Alkazi in his production of the same adaptation in the late 1990s with his group, Living Theatre.

Miller captured the dilemma of the middle class male of today-holding onto patriarchal values of another earlier age in a world that has changed forever-leading lives marooned and isolated, fragile, tragic. And the fact that all his heroes are middleaged gives tremendous scope to actors at the prime of their careers to essay the moody, fractured, contemporary man.

0 About the Author: Romesh Chander is a senior theater writer and drama critic with The Hindu.

ust left of the entrance to the tranquil second floor of the T.S. Central State Library in Chandigarh, people of varied ages are busy browsing among racks of books and magazines on the United States. On March 28, this space, called the American Corner, attracted literary enthusiasts for a lecture by African American poet Al Young, and in February a two-day workshop on media ethics was organized here. Far to the southeast, in Bhubaneswar, the Knowledge Centre, a private library run by a retired doctor, is home to another American Corner. In the west, Ahmedabad's American Comer is tucked into a management school, the Ahmedabad Management Association; and South India's Comer is in Bangalore, on the premises of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, a prominent cultural and educational organization.

For more than half a century, the primary sources of information about the United States for Indians were the American Center libraries, now called the American Information Resource Centers (AIRCs), in the four metros-New Delhi, ~ Chennai, Calcutta and Mumbai. Now, in a modg est outreach effort to extend these facilities and ~ customer services to other important parts of ~ India, the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. ;;;!j! Embassy has opened American Comers in four Student Sahil Khanna at the Chandigarh Comer (above); Consul General in Mumbai Angus T. Simmons inaugurating the American Comer at Ahmedabad last September 8 (right); Dipti Panda at the Bhubaneswar Comer (middle); and a view of the Bangalore Corner (far right).

hope is that the Comers will serve as venues for special events and mutually beneficial interaction through speakers, Ahmedabad Management Association, ATIRA Campus, Dr. Vikram Sarabhai Marg, discussions and exhibits. Bharatiya Vidya Ahmedabad 380 015 Bhavan's Amelican Corner in Bangalore Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Race Course Road, opened last September 30 with an exhibiBangalore 560 001 tion of photographs by Amelican architecKnowledge Centre, 33, Satya Nagar, ture historian John Margolies and a lively Bhubaneswar 751007 book discussion on educational reform.

IS. Central State Library, 2nd Floor, Sector 17, The Chandigarh Corner's launch included Chandigarh 160017 a performance by two American musicians.

"The American Corner program, in regions of the country. The Comers contain ways both great and small, will build books, periodicals, magazines, CDs, DVDs bonds of friendship and mutual underand videos, plus Internet access. standing between our two democracies," Each Corner is hosted by an Indian part- Robert Blake, Deputy Chief of Mission at ner institution. Each is distinct in character the U.S. Embassy, said when inaugurating and operates a bit differently. But they all the Chandigarh Corner on December 14. provide space and welcome members of the "We hope it will help foster closer peoplepublic. Knowledge Centre, the private to-people ties between our two countries." library run by Dr. Ajay Kumar Mahapatra, It is too early to say how successful the had a stall at the Bhubaneswar Book Fair in Corners will become, but the initial March to make visitors aware of the new response shows they meet a need and American Corn~r in the city. A book display should grow more popular as people come of American Comer titles was also set up at to know about them. Nidhi Bisht, a political science postgraduate student from the English depmiment of Utkal University, which hosted a panel discussion on Chandigarh University, uses the American "Women's Studies in Multicultural AmeComer often and finds good books on polrica" organized by the Cultural Affairs itics but wants more titles to guide students Section of the U.S. Consulate in Calcutta. in pursuing higher studies in the United States. Kenyan academic Justus Mugwe That was a way of establishing contacts with academics teaching American litera- Njuguna, who resides in Chandigarh, had ture in colleges in Orissa. Rita Ray, a soci- to travel to the New Delhi American ology professor at Utkal University, feels Center earlier to do research, but now finds the Corner needs even more publicity. "It's the local Corner a boon.

"It was required for a very long time," well kept and I find it very useful," she says.

The goal of the American Corners is to says M.S. Walia, a Corner patron from Chandigarh. "It should have been here bring accurate, reliable information about earlier. Facilities offered are very good." the United States to Indians and build bridges of understanding. The Comers cater And Muia Singh, professor of English litto those who have limited or no exposure to erature at Punjab University, agrees, "People have been benefiting from American culture or ideals or are simply interested in knowing more about America.

American studies and cultural exchange."

The resources help individuals expand their "All four American Corners in India skills and understand American values. have good relations with the American In addition to providing information, the Information Resource Centers and, as time i)j goes on and the partners get to know one ~ another better, cooperation will become ~ stronger," adds Wendy Zanlan, InforS mation Resources Officer of the Public Affairs Section at the U.S. Embassy. She says that the idea of the American Corners is catching on around the world. She says about 225 Corners are operating in different countries to provide a "window to American life" and useful, user-friendly information to people who want access to U.S. resources.

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Sample of resources in American Corners Books include: Books on American English usage Encyclopedia Americana A to Z of American Women Leaders and Activists African-American Art American Art Since 1945 The American Heritage Encyclopedia of American History The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-1998 The Best American Poetry 2003 National Geographic Guide to the National Parks of the United States

Periodicals such as: American Quarterly Art in America Good Housekeeping Foreign Affairs Smithsonian

Examples of CDs: American Heritage Talking Dictionary World Book Encyclopedia Exploring America's National Parks History of Country Music American Vista Atlas Great Depression Industrial Revolution in America Investigating American Literature

Some of the Videos and DVDs: Echoes from the White House and Understanding the Government American Photography A Century of Images American Roots Music Benjamin Franklin Chicago: City of the Century An Evening with Mark Twain The Famous American Author Series Fun Facts of American History The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century Great Projects The Building of America Liberty! The American Revolution

Dudhatoli Vikas Samiti has constructed these small ponds as part of rainwater harvesting initiatives in the hills of Pauri Garhwal.

Text by GOVIND SINGH Photographs DAN JANTZEN

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conomic development without giving due care to the needs of local residents and future generations can lead to disastrous results. This is why the World Commission on Environment and Development, in its 1987 report, called for "economic and social development that meets the needs of the current generation without undermining the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

The Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 outlined a distinct roadmap to sustainable development, firmly entrenched in the idea of people's participation in the development process. It strove for a balance between development and local necessities; development without degradation of natural resources.

In the context of Uttaranchal, the five-year-old hill state, the issue of sustainable development assumes even greater importance because of its location in the ecologically sensitive zone of the Himalayas. It comprises fragile hills, snow-capped mountains, glaciers, thick green forests and teeming wildlife. Since the Himalayas are susceptible to seismic forces, and Uttaranchal is in the heart of a high-threat seismic zone, the problem is more acute and ultifaceted. The glaciers are melting, green cover is shrinking while jungles of concrete are emerging, wildlife is in danger, and several animals and birds are on the verge of extinction. Yet the projects to protect

these animals are causing problems to the local people and thus creating unrest. People complain that they are not consulted when development plans are drawn up.

The new state is witnessing a development boom. At the same time its population has always shown a positive approach toward enviroument protection as seen during the famous Chipko (tree-hugging) movement in the 1970s or more recent agitations against the Tehri Dam and Nanda Devi Biosphere reserve. So Uttaranchal, as it stands at the crossroads, is an interesting study. Pahar, a Nainital-based NGO, has organized four trekking expeditions since 1974 to enable writers, journalists and teachers to investigate the region's socioeconomic development. Last year the team included Dan Jantzen from Denver, Colorado, associated with Future Generations, an American NGO. It leads a worldwide research effort on how to improve people's lives and protect the enviroument. It coordinated community-based expansion across the Himalayan states of Uttaranchal and Arunachal Pradesh, promoting social development and a network of nature preserves. Jantzen was so impressed with the activities in Uttaranchal that he returned this February to participate in a workshop on sustainable development conducted by Future Generations in Dehra Dun and also to help Pahar prepare geographical information system (GIS) and global positioning system (GPS) maps of the state.

As a former teacher at the Woodstock School in

Mussoorie, Jantzen was familiar with the hills of Uttaranchal, but wanted to study the changes wrought by rapid development since the state was carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000. From Askote, near the border with Tibet, to the town of Arakot in the western part of the state, the journey was an eye-opener.

The emotional highpoint was a meeting in Samdhar, a village in Chamoli district. "More than 100 people crowded into the classroom in which our group of 10 was going to sleep," he says. Villagers reported on the problems they encounter in everyday life: • The locally-built bridge collapsed when a wedding party was returning to the village, drowning three people in the river; • The difficulty in getting children educated after class V because of the distance of secondary schools; • The efforts of a retired army man, now a schoolteacher, to prepare the students for a world in which they stmt with few resources and even fewer advantages; • The problems that lack of education brought to a woman sarpanch from Jantzen's expedition team, who tearfully encouraged the village kids to stay in school.

"Perhaps the most disturbing trend, evident from the expedition and our interaction with villagers, was the tendency to look for the government to solve problems," says Jantzen. "The self-reliance of the mountain villager I knew as a child now seems to have evaporated. N<,?wadays, people do not even think of what they might be able to do for themselves to solve a problem, but rather immediately assume it is the government's job. Then they blame the government for not doing enough." He says the root of the problem is the tendency of politicians seeking votes to promise they will see that the government does all that is needed.

Over-exploitation of forest resources leads to lack of fodder for cattle. That means less manure for the fields and reduced productivity. So' the hill agricultural economy is in a downward spiral, with each generation having a weaker base to work from. Part of the problem is that people have not adapted to modern agricultural practices. Basic subsistence comes to families in what is aptly called the "money-order economy," where relatives back home depend on remittances from the earning members working in the Indian plains or abroad. The long absence of menfolk creates social problems and deprives the communities of leaders. The longer-term solution must involve some combination of finding ways to earn a respectable income in the hills either from horticulture, tourism, small industry or information technology.

To understand the basic problems and share the success stories, Future GeneraVillagers in tions conducts workshops for Purola, UttarNGO activists working at the kashi district, grassroots. The two Amerihave learned to cans who led the Future market agriculGenerations training have an tw'al produce Uttaranchal connection. Carl with assistance Taylor, 88, was born in fromNGOs.

Anlel'ican NGO Future Genel'ations is involved in the hi 11sta te Landour, Mussoorie, and spent his boyhood in the Dehra Dun area. His son, Daniel, is president of Future Generations and educated in MUssoolie. They trained 50 activists from across the country to use the seed-scale methodology to stimulate and direct community change. About 20 workers were from Uttaranchal, representing NGOs such as the Sri Bhuvaneshwari Mahila Ashram, Chirag, and Mahila Samakhya.

Seed-scale methodology forms partnerships of the communities, the government and outside change agents such as NGOs, universities, villagers who return home. But the real zeal for change should come from the community, responding to its own needs and making decisions according to its requirements.

Shri Bhuvaneshwari Mahila Ashram has adopted a successful approach. Two to three activists visit a panchayat and meet the leaders, requesting them to collect data on education, health, agriculture, economics, forest and environment in their village. This data is analyzed at village meetings.

According to Jantzen, "Typically, the findings are that the villagers can address many problems themselves. For example, the issue of child education, the dropout rate from schools, the need to have schools nearby, and the vaccination of children for debilitating diseases. The government health worker can be called to vaccinate the children, ways can be found to encourage children to go to school. The entire community is encouraged to develop an annual work plan stating the problems, who will do what and when.

"Other problems require intervention of the government, like opening of a school or a hospital or constructing a blidge. If you have enough relevant information, you can approach the government in a better way," adds Jantzen.

Future Generations proposes that the process become an annual event. As some success is achieved, more people are attracted and participation improves. Future Generations cites the success story of Dehra Dun-based Himalayan Action Research Centre, which is helping farmers in the Purola Valley to produce tomatoes, beans and capsicum for the markets in the plains. They have had great success in organizing farming communities, introducing new crops, linking producers with markets, and organizing farmers into an effective group. Another example is Dudhatoli Vikas Samiti, which is engaged in construction of ponds to harvest rainwater in the Pauri Garhwal Hills, where deforestation has caused water scarcity.

Sunil Kainthola, of the Nanda Devi Campaign for Cultural Survival and Sustainable Livelihoods in the High Himalayas, says, ?J "We are witnessing the rise of economic prosf. perity. But what is being lost in all this is our tradition of collective labor. Earlier people would work together to achieve the most difficult tasks, but now they need outside help for everything. Every issue demands setting up of a project. It seems to me that sometinles people have no faith in their own abilities."

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ince 1970, when grassroots groups in the United States organized themselves to demand clean air and water in their communities, the annual Earth Day, April 22, has evolved into a . commitment by governments, organizations and individual citizens to protect the global environment. This year, the U.S. Embassy in India screened films on the history of the environmental movement and on water cleanup programs to business people, students and journalists. Posters were distributed to focus on wetlandsmarshes, swamps, bogs, vernal pools, floodplains, and other wet habitats.

Interior wetlands are located where surface water collects or where underground water rises to the surface.

Coastal wetlands are created by tides.

A spectacular diversity of bird and mammal species rely on wetlands for food, water and shelter, especially during migration and breeding. Wetlands are essential to human eJdstence as well, providing: • Flood control: Holding heavy rainfall to prevent possible flooding downstream; • Clean water: Filtering excess nutrients and pollutants before runoff reaches open water; • Groundwater replenishment: Recharging underground aquifers that billions of people depend on for drinking water; • Shoreline stabilization: Protecting against erosion as wetland plants hold soil in place and absorb the energy of waves; • Climate change mitigation: Storing significant amounts of carbon that, if released by the destruction of wetto global lands, could contribute warming; • Economic benefits: Providing natural products such as fish and shellfish, timber, edible plants, and medicines derived from soils and plants. 0 Produced by the Olliee of Internationaltnforrnalion Prograrns, U,S Departrnent of State, llIustratlon by JOHN BURGOYNE: , lANE K. WOOLVERTON,

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