SPAN: July/August 2005

I

I .

. I

agreed, in their meetings in Washington, D.C., on a new global partnership between India and the United States that reflects a transformation in the relationship between the two countries not seen since 1947. They agreed on concrete steps to promote democracy, combat terrorism, fight disease, develop energy resources, cooperate on space exploration, agriculture and technology. The United States is now the biggest investor in India and the two governments have agreed to strengthen trade and economic interaction.

Above: President Bush and Prime Mini.Her Manmohan Singh take part in arrival ceremonies with their wives Gursharan Kaur and Laura Bush, on July 18, 2005 at the White House in Washington, D.C. Right.' President Bush welcomes Prime Minister Singh during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House.

SPAN

Fourth of July in the Heartland

By Michael Morain

Publisher Editor-in-Chief

Making The Declaration of Independence

Robert B. Richards

By Pauline Maier

Michael H. Anderson

Editor

A Nation Made of Poetry

Laurinda Keys Long

By Joannie Fischer

Associate Editor A. Venkata

arayana

Open Skies Agreement

Hindi Editor

A New Era in Civil Aviation

Govind Singh

By A. Venkata Narayana

Urdu Editor AnjumNaim

American Winemaker Helps Build Brand India

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

By Lea Terhune

Editorial Assistant K. MmhulGunar

California

Art Director

Avtar S. Sandhu

Hemam Bhamagar

Wine Country

Winning Over India with Wine

Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi

Where the BestIdeas TakeWing

Production/Circulation Manager

By Julie Rawe

Rakesh Agrawal

Printing Assistant

Chakachak

Alok Kaushik

By Laurinda Keys Long

Business Manager R. Narayan

Movies and Modern America

Research Services

By Richard H. Pells

AIRC Documentation Services.

American Information Resource Center Bureau of International Information Programs of the State Department Front

cover:

Romance,

special

effects,

drama

are

wood films. life

of

the

Hemant Hollywood

action,

heroics, some

But the movies common

Bhatnagar films

of Art

the

Director

the essence

in the cover

story on page 26. Photographs

meloHolly-

also reflect

man.

captures

By Michael J. Bandler

flamboyant

emotional

features

A Conversation with Geoffrey Gilmore

collage.

Hollywood's Master of Light Photographs by Joe Toreno

of See

Š AP- WWP.

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

The Secret Society of Old Hollywood The Shadow Internet

By JejfHowe

Bollywood Pirates Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 11000] (phone: 23316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Ajanta Ltd., 95-B Wazirpur Offset & Packagings 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.

By Ramola Talwar Badam

Conquering Our Phobias

By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak

The Indus Entrepreneurs

By Aseem Chhabra

On the Lighter Side Humphreys Promote Leadership

By Dipesh Satapathy

A LETTER

FROM

or a summertime treat, SPAN is offering articles on movies, America's Independence Day and new opportunities in travel and business.

Our cover package celebrates two new India-based films, charts the history of Hollywood and explains how American movies have articulated universal themes while providing entertainment. There are also insights into movie-making techniques and warnings about the danger that intellectual property theft poses to the movie industries of India and the United States. As new audiences have come of age in each generation, gifted, and often eccentric, American producers and directors have made films on the dreams, disappointments and victories of ordinary people. In addition to special effects extravaganzas, character studies and searing dramas have touched viewers everywhere, says Richard H. Pells in our cover story, "Movies and Modern America."

The yearning for independence in creativity and in business decisions is reflected in "The Secret Society of Old Hollywood," which tells how the modern movie business developed from the tussle between the early studios and a group of independent producers, directors and actors. Independent filmmaking continues to develop, says Michael J. Bandler in ''A Conversation with Geoffrey Gilmore," co-director of the Sundance Film Festival. A representative of independent Indian filmmaking, Sai Paranjpye, has practically developed a new film genre with her Chakachak. Laurinda Keys Long describes it as a children's movie, a comedy, an adventure, and a documentary all rolled into one, with a gentle message on how we can clean up the environment by starting in our own homes and neighborhoods. We also take a look at the development of Mira Nair's new film, The Namesake, exploring the ties that bind Indians and Americans.

"Hollywood's Master of Light" details how computer scientist Paul Debevec invented a way to mix real-world light with computer graphics, creating some of the movie industry'S most striking effects. Moviemakers everywhere are threatened by the rampant theft of their creative products through copyright violation, Internet piracy and smuggling. "The Shadow

F

THE

PUBLISHER

Internet" by Jeff Howe shows the up close and personal view of the thieves' international networks, while Ramola Talwar Badam explains in "Bollywood Pirates" how the problem ranges from the streets to executive offices.

Marianne Szegedy-Maszak examines a different sort of problem in "Conquering Our Phobias." She explores the variety and range of paralyzing social fears and ways to overcome them.

As summertime is when Americans and Indians celebrate their independence, we take a peak at "Fourth of July in the Heartland," through the words of Michael Morain and photographs of Mike Jaeger in their Iowa hometown. Pauline Maier takes us back to how it all started in "Making The Declaration of Independence," while Joannie Fischer illustrates in ''A Nation Made of Poetry" how Americans have expanded their views of themselves, their ideals and history through individual writings.

Individual choices and new ideas are the themes of several business-related stories in this issue. The "crossbreeding" between winemakers in California and India are detailed in Lea Terhune's stories, ''American Winemaker Helps Build Brand India" and "Winning Over India with Wine." The celebration of such entrepreneurship and sharing of expertise is the driving force behind "The Indus Entrepreneurs," a group of successful U.S.-based businessmen of South Asian origin who told Aseem Chhabra how they network to help grow new companies. Customers as well as businesspeople will be the big winners as the new "open skies" agreement between the United States and India provides more frequent flights to more destinations, at lower prices and allows more variety in routes and types of service, A. Venkata Narayana explains in ''A New Era in Civil Aviation." Another way for Indians and Americans to develop new ideas together is through exchange programs and fellowships. Dipesh Satapathy tells about one of the most successful of these in "Humphreys Promote Leadership."

So, enjoy your reading, and your summer!

A

s soon as Kathy Templeton wakes up on the Fourth of July, she steps out to the front porch of her tidy yellow farmhouse in southern Iowa and raises the American flag. Few people will drive past on the gravel road and see it, but the ritual is part of her Independence Day routine-a routine she's followed for as many of her 53 years as she can remember.

"I look forward to the whole day," she says. "I put the flag out and try to figure out what red, white and blue to wear."

Once dressed, she packs a bag with a jacket, an umbrella and a tube of sunscreen, and fills a cooler full of watermelon.

"It's all about the watermelon," she says, adding that the first batch of sweet corn is usually ripe by July, too. "They used to say corn was 'knee-high by the Fourth of July,' but now [with improved farming techniques] it's 'as high as an elephant's eye.' "

Brittany Larson rides her red, white and blue bicycle down Main Street on the Fourth oj July, carrying on a traditionjor young girls in her hometown, Lamoni.

With the bag slung over her shoulder and the watermelon packed in ice, Templeton and her family drive a few kilometers to the small town of Lamoni-a two-hour drive north of Kansas City-where she works as a secretary at a private university.

She'll spend the rest of the day watching the parade, chatting with neighbors and, after sunset, enjoying the annual fireworks display. "I look at it as family time," she says.

For many Americans, like Templeton, the Fourth of July is a mix of patriotic spirit and family fun. Although officials plan elaborate events in Washington, D.C., and each of the 50 state capitals, small towns scattered throughout the Midwest celebrate the day with a particular blend of time-honored tradition and creative gusto.

And the 1,200 people of Lamoni, like those in small towns everywhere, boast that their town is the best place to spend the day. "It's just a big celebration. It's a great time," says Ruth Thomas, 59, who manages Grandma's Cafe near the center of town. When Independence Day rolls around, she closes the cafe and gathers with her extended family to watch the parade. Up and down both sides of the 1.3-kilometer route-west from the cattle auction barn on Main Street, then north to the park on Linden-folks unfold aluminum lawn chairs or spread blankets over the sidewalk. Some have established places where they sit every year.

The parade usually starts around noon when a police car clears the way for a few uniformed soldiers carrying an American flag.

When they pass, spectators rise from their seats. Many place their right hands over their hearts.

After a troupe of Boy Scouts marches by, a handful of dignitaries glide along, seated on the backs of convertibles, waving to the crowd and tossing handfuls of candy to kids. These cars are the first of many vehicles that together stretch into a virtual showcase of transportation evolution.

"If it's got wheels, it can be in the parade," Templeton says.

Each year, in fact, the parade features skateboards, scooters, bikes, tricycles, golf carts, antique cars, antique tractors, riding lawnmowers, a limousine or two, semi-trucks and a couple of fire trucks swathed in red, white and blue bunting. There's even a drill team of local moms who push their kids' strollers in elaborate figure-eight formations.

One year, Larry Phillips, 55, a drugstore pharmacist, started what may become a new tradition. "We lined the back of my pickup with a plastic tarpaulin and filled it with water. We had kids swimming around in it. They enjoyed it," he says, grinning ..

Another year, he and his wife, Linda, joined the parade on a twoperson bicycle.

Templeton, too, remembers riding her bike in parades when she was a little girl. "My bike was red, white and blue," she recalls.

"It's all about our colors and our heritage." Another year, she dressed up as a cowgirl, and later, she twirled a baton and marched with the school's band. "We just did parades all over," she says.

Event planners from neighboring towns still schedule parades at different times to allow people to attend as many as possible, although Templeton now spends the whole day in Lamoni. She buys lunch from outdoor stands at North Park, where the parade ends.

"There are lots of food places. You can get hot dogs and hamburgers, and they have lots of apples and oranges and cotton candy," says Earl Black, 12, who marches with the Boy Scouts in the parade. He's a big fan of vanilla and caramel ice cream.

While vendors sell food from temporary stalls, some families prefer to pack their own picnic feasts of fried chicken, bacon-Iettuce-and-tomato (BLT) sandwiches, corn on the cob, potato salad, baked beans, cherries, grapes, and, of course, Templeton's favorite: slabs of slushy red watermelon.

After lunch, "Grandma" Ruth often drives to a nearby town to watch her grandchildren participate in the annual rodeo. They rope cows, ride bulls, wrestle steers and run horses around lines of baITels. Although she enjoys the excitement, she says it can get a little scary. "Sometimes I get a little nervous," she says.

Back in Lamoni, most people end up at the park, where a carnival is in full swing. Giant inflatable obstacle courses dominate the soccer field, and there are enormous foam-rubber bodysuits for friendly "sumo" wrestling matches. The musically gifted-or simply brave-show off their karaoke skills on a temporary stage, and there's a homerun tournament over at the baseball diamond.

"You can pay a buck and try to slug as many balls out of the field as you can. The winners score a little cash at the end of the day," says Brad Carr, 49, director of student activities at the uni-

versity where Templeton works.

As karaoke winds down later in the afternoon, Carr steps up to the microphone to sing with a local rock band. "We're the kings of small-town festivities," he says, smiling. While they perform, a frenzy of kids jump around in front of the stage as their parents ease themselves into lawn chairs, chatting with friends and swatting the first mosquitoes of the evening.

After the sun slips down beyond the fields of soybeans to the west, frreworks start to burst across the sky. The best place to see them is up by the baseball field where they are launched, according to Black, the Boy Scout. "I like the ones that go WOOOOO!" he says.

A team of about 10 volunteer firefighters, in full uniform, is in charge of launching the annual show, paid for by the city. Richard Jackel, 53, has assisted for nearly 20 years. "The year before I joined, one of the fireworks came out of the pipe and turned right and slammed into the back of the [fire department] chief. It burned the coat right off of him," Jackel recalls, who suffered an injury a few years later when some sparks fell into his glove.

Despite the occasional risks-there hasn't been an accident for more than a dozen years-Jackel is proud of the firefighters' role in the celebration. "The Fourth of July reminds us of what we and all the other volunteer services-the police, emergency medical services-are here for in the frrst place, especially since 9/11," he says.

Not everyone, however, thinks the fireworks are such a good idea. Erma Beaty, 91, who volunteers at a second-hand shop, usually watches the show from her porch. 'T d discourage it if I could because of the war," she says. "That boom! Bang! Why spend money on that? Maybe I'm just too conscious of the suffering in the world."

For Beaty, Memorial Day, observed on the last Monday in May, holds much more meaning than the Fourth of July. Every year she goes to the local cemetery, where military veterans present a ceremony to honor soldiers who died during battle. "They do such a beautiful job," Beatty says, describing the service and the American flags that outline the cemetery hillside.

Although she supports many of the activities during Independence Day and acknowledges all the preparation they require, she wonders if some people miss the point. "I don't know if they know what they're really celebrating," she says.

Boy Scout Black, for one, seems to have a pretty good idea. "It's because we became independent from England-and we have a movie called 1776," he said, recalling a film his class watched in school.

His brother, Raymond, 13, has a slightly different reason to celebrate the Fourth. "It shows respect. .. they had all the arguments and stuff about what to write in the Declaration of Independence," Raymond says. "I think it's pretty important."

After the parade in Lamoni, families gather in North Park for picnics and games such as the three-legged sack race.

Others disagree. Josh Johnson, 23, who grew up near Washington, D.C., and studies political science at the local university, doesn't get very excited about the holiday. "I just sort of block that patriotic stuff out. I'm glad we have all the freedoms we have, but I would honestly feel better if we weren't trying to be Britain all over again," he says. "We're trying to force people to believe what we believe. We're trying to impose democracies on other countries."

Wayne Bowers, 57, a retired middle school science teacher, attributes part of that antipathy to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"2001 has put us in a predicament about which civil liberties we sacrifice and which we keep," he says. ''We have a lot of freedomsthat's always been part of my understanding of Independence Day-but I just think about how tenuous that liberty might be."

As for Templeton, who started the day by raising the "Stars and Stripes" up the flagpole, her understanding of Independence Day boils down to two things: her family and the freedoms they enjoy as Americans. Those blessings-and their connection to each other-have come into clearer focus since her son returned in December from military duty in Iraq. "I just hope we instilled all of those values in our kids," she says.

Every year, she recalls a lifetime of Independence Day celebrations with her family. She remembers, for instance, launching bottle rockets from her farm. "Of course, we don't shoot fireworks near the house anymore-we can't run fast enough," she says, chuckling.

Now she is content to simply watch what the firefighters send into the sky above the baseball field. ''I'm the one that's 'oohing' 0 and 'aahing,' " she says.

About the Author: Michael Morain is a reporter with Juice, a weekly newspaper in central Iowa.

9VCaking Tfi~

Vec(aration 1nd9:~!:!E~nce As Americans' political system developed, so did their reverence for the nation's founding document as an eloquent, enduring statement of human rights and the purpose of government.

Conor Park, 8, and his sister, Ripley, 7, in Phoenix, Arizona, view one of the 200 original copies of the Declaration of Independence that were printed on July 4, 1776. Only 25 original copies remain, and this one was bought at auction in 2000 for a reported $8 million by television producer Norman Lear, who sent it on a national tour.

ohn Adams thought Americans would commemorate their Independence Day on the second of July. Future generations, he confidently predicted, would remember July 2, 1776, as "the most memorable Epocha, in the History of erica" and celebrate it as their "Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

His proposal, however odd it seems today, was perfectly reasonable when he made it in a letter to his wife, Abigail. On the previous day, July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress had finally resolved "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." The thought that Americans might instead commemorate July 4, the day Congress adopted a "decla-

ration on Independency" that he had helped prepare, did not apparently occur to Adams in 1776. The Declaration of Independence was one of those congressional statements that he later described as "dress and ornament rather than Body, Soul or Substance," a way of announcing to the world the fact of American independence, which was for Adams the thing worth celebrating.

In fact, holding our great national festival on the Fourth makes no sense at all-unless we are actually celebrating not just independence but the Declaration of Independence. And the declm'ation we celebrate, what Abraham Lincoln called "the charter of our liberties," is a document whose meaning and function today are different from what they were in 1776. In short, during the 19th century the Declaration oflndependence became not just a way of announcing and justifying the end of Britain's power over the Thirteen Colonies and the emergence of the United States as an independent nation but a statement of principles to guide stable, established governments. How did that happen, and why?

According to notes kept by Thomas Jefferson, the Second Continental Congress did not discuss the resolution on independence when it was first proposed by Virginia's Richard Henry Lee, on Friday, June 7, 1776, because it was "obliged to attend at that time to some other business." However, on June 8, Congress resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole and "passed that day & Monday the 10th in debating on the subject."

By then all contenders admitted that it had become impossible for the colonies ever again to be united with Britain. The issue was one of timing.

John and Samuel Adams, along with others ... wanted Congress to declare independence right away and start negotiating foreign alliances and forming a more lasting confederation (which Lee also proposed). Others, including ... Robert R. Livingston of New York, argued for delay. They noted that the delegates of several colonies, including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delawm'e, New Jersey and New York, had not been "impowered" by their home governments to vote for independence. If a vote was taken immediately, those delegates would have to "retire" from Congress, and their states might secede from the union, which would seriously weaken the Americans' chance of realizing their independence. In the past, they said, members of Congress had followed the "wise & proper" policy of putting off major decisions "till the voice of the people drove us into it," since "they were our power, & without them our declarations could not be carried into effect." Moreover, opinion on independence in the critical middle colonies was "fast ripening & in a short time," they predicted, the people there would "join in the general voice of America."

Congress decided to give the laggard colonies time and so delayed its decision for three weeks. But it also appointed a Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence so that such a document could be issued quickly once Lee's motion passed. The committee's members included Jefferson, Livingston, John Adams, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Pennsylvania's Benjamin Franklin. The drafting committee met, decided what the declaration should say and how it would be

organized, then asked Jefferson to prepm'e a draft.

Meanwhile, Adams-who did more to win Congress' consent to independence than any other delegate-worked feverishly to bring popular pressure on the governments of recalcitrant colonies so they would change the instructions issued to their congressional delegates. By June 28, when the Committee of Five submitted to Congress a draft declm'ation, only Maryland and New York had failed to allow their delegates to vote for independence. That night Maryland fell into line.

Even so, when the Committee of the Whole again took up Lee's resolution, on July 1, only nine colonies voted in favor.

South Carolina and Pennsylvania opposed the proposition, Delaware's two delegates split, and New York's abstained because their 12-month-old instructions precluded them from approving anything that impeded reconciliation with the mother country. Edward Rutledge now asked that Congress put off its decision until the next day, since he thought that the South Carolina delegation would then vote in favor "for the sake of unanimity." When Congress took its final tally on July 2, the nine affirmative votes of the day before had grown to 12: Not only South Carolina voted in favor, but so did Pennsylvania and Delaware-the arrival of Caesar Rodney broke the tie in that delegation's vote. Only New York held out. (Later, on July 9 it also allowed its delegates to add their approval to that of delegates from the other 12 colonies, lamenting still the "cruel necessity" that made independence "unavoidable.")

O

nce independence had been adopted, Congress ... spent the better part of two days editing the draft declaration submitted by its Committee of Five, rewriting or chopping off large sections of text. Finally, on July 4, Congress approved the revised Declaration and ordered it to be plinted and sent to the several states and to the commanding officers of the Continental Army. By formally announcing and justifying the end of British rule, that document, as letters from Congress' president, John Hancock, explained, laid "the Ground & Foundation" of American self-government. As a result, it had to be proclaimed not only before Americm1 troops in the hope that it would inspire them to fight more m'dently for what was now the cause of both liberty and national independence but throughout the country, and "in such a Manner, that the People may be universally informed of it."

As copies of the Declaration spread through the states and were publicly read at town meetings, religious services, court days, or wherever else people assembled, Americans marked the occasion with appropriate rituals. They lit great bonfires, "illuminated" their windows with candles, fired guns, rang bells, tore down and destroyed the symbols of monarchy on public buildings, churches or tavern signs, and "fixed up" on the walls of their homes broadside or newspaper copies of the Declaration of Independence.

But what exactly were they celebrating? The news, not the vehicle that brought it; independence and the assumption of selfgovernment, not the document that announced Congress' decision to break with Britain. Considering how revered a position the Declaration of Independence later won in the minds and

This painting by John Trumbull was part of a series commissioned by the U.S. Congress in 1817for display in the Rotunda of the U.s.

Capitol building. It shows the drafters of the Declaration of Independence-John Adams, Roger Sherman, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Philip Livingston-presenting the document to John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, which approved it on July 4,1776, in what is now Independence Hall, in Philadelphia. Trumbull had sketched the scene from life. His 12-by-18-foot [3.66-by-5.49-meterl painting, includes portraits of 42 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration and five other patriots.

hearts of the people, Americans' disregard for it in the first years of the new nation verges on the unbelievable. One colonial newspaper dismissed the Declaration's extensive charges against the king as just another "recapitulation of injuries."

Citations of the Declaration were usually drawn from its final paragraph, which said that the united colonies "are and of Right ought to be Free and Independent states" and were "Absolved of all Allegiance to the British Crown"-words from the Lee resolution that Congress had inserted into the committee draft.

Independence was new; the rest of the Declaration seemed all too familiar to Americans.

The adoption of independence was, however, from the beginning confused with its declaration. Differences in the meaning of the word declare contributed to the confusion. Before the Declaration of Independence was issued-while, in fact, Congress was still editing Jefferson's draft-Pennsylvania newspapers announced that on July 2 the Continental Congress had "declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States," by which it meant simply that it had officially accepted that status. Newspapers in other colonies repeated the story. In later years the "Anniversary of the United States of America" came to be celebrated on the date Congress had approved the Declaration of Independence. That began, it seems, by accident.

In 1777 no member of Congress thought of marking the anniversary of independence at all until July 3, when it was too late to honor July 2. As a result, the celebration took place on the Fourth. In the late 1770s and 1780s, the Fourth of July was not regularly celebrated; indeed, the holiday seems to have declined in popularity once the Revolutionary War ended. When it was remembered, however, festivities seldom, if ever-to judge by newspaper accounts-involved a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. It was as if that document had done its work in carrying news of independence to

the people, and it neither needed nor deserved further commemoration. No mention was made of Thomas Jefferson's role in composing the document, since that was not yet public knowledge, and no suggestion appeared that the Declaration itself was, as posterity would have it, unusually eloquent or powerful.

All that began to change in the 1790s, when, in the midst of bitter partisan conflict, the modern understanding and reputation of the Declaration of Independence first emerged. Until that time celebrations of the Fourth were controlled by nationalists who found a home in the Federalist party, and their earlier inattention to the Declaration hardened into a rigid hostility after 1790. The document's anti-British character was an embarrassment to Federalists who sought economic and diplomatic rapprochement with Britain. The language of equality and rights in the Declaration was different from that of the Declaration of the Rights of Man issued by the French National Assembly in 1789, but it still seemed too "French" for the comfort of Federalists, who, after the execution of Louis XVI and the onset of the Terror, lost whatever sympathy for the French Revolution they had once felt. Moreover, they understandably found it best to say as little as possible about a fundamental American text that had been drafted by a leader of the opposing Republican party.

It was, then, the Republicans who began to celebrate the Declaration of Independence as a "deathless instrument" written by "the immortal Jefferson." The Republicans saw themselves as the defenders of the American Republic of 1776 against subversion by pro-British "monarchists," and they hoped that by recalling the causes of independence, they would make their countrymen wary of further dealings with Great Britain. They were also delighted to identify the founding principles of the American Revolution with those of America's sister republic in France. At their Fourth of July celebrations, Republicans read the Declaration of Independence, and their newspapers reprinted it.

Moreover, in their hands the attention that had at first focused on the last part of the Declaration shifted toward its opening paragraphs and the "self-evident truths" they stated. The Declaration, as a Republican newspaper said on July 7, 1792, was not to be celebrated merely "as affecting the separation of one country from the jurisdiction of another"; it had an enduring significance for established governments because it provided a "definition of the rights of man, and the end (or purpose) of civil government."

The Federalists responded that Jefferson had not written the Declaration alone. The drafting committee-including John Adams, a Federalist-had also contributed to its creation.

Federalists rediscovered similarities between the Declaration and John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. .. and used them to argue that even the "small part of that memorable instrument" that could be attributed to Jefferson "he stole from Locke's Essays." But after the War of 1812, the Federalist party slipped from sight, and with it, efforts to disparage the Declaration of Independence.

When a new party system formed in the late 1820s and 1830s, both Whigs and Jacksonians claimed descent from Jefferson and his party and so accepted the old Republican position on the Declaration and Jefferson's glorious role in its creation. By then, too, a new generation of Americans had come of age and made preservation of the nation's revolutionary history its particular mission. Its efforts, and its reverential attitude toward the revolutionaries and their works, also helped establish the Declaration of Independence as an important icon of American identity.

The change came suddenly. As late as January 1817 John Adams said that his country had no interest in its past. "I see no disposition to celebrate or remember, or even Curiosity to enquire into the Characters, Actions, or Events of the Revolution," he wrote the artist John Trumbull. But a little more than a month later Congress commissioned Trumbull to produce four large paintings commemorating the Revolution, which were to hang in the rotunda of the new American Capitol. For Trumbull, the most important of the series, and the one to which he first turned, was the Declaration of Independence. He based that work on a smaller painting he had done between 1786 and 1793 that showed the drafting committee presenting its work to Congress. When the new 3.66-by-5.49-meter canvas was completed in 1818, Trumbull exhibited it to large crowds in Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore before delivering it to Washington; indeed, The Declaration of Independence was the most popular of all the paintings Trumbull did for the Capitol.

Soon copies of the document were being published and sold briskly, which perhaps was what inspired Secretary of State John Quincy Adams to have an exact facsimile of the Declaration, the only one ever produced, made in 1823. Congress had it distributed throughout the country.

In the early 1820s, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were still alive, and as the only surviving members of the committee that had drafted the Declaration of Independence, they attracted an extraordinary outpouring of attention. Pilgrims, invited and uninvited, flocked particularly to Jefferson's home, hoping to

I

ndependence Day is regarded as the birthday of the United States as a free and independent nation.

Most Americans simply call it the "Fourth of July," recalling the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. At that time, the people of the 13 British colonies located along the eastern coast of North America were involved in an armed revolt over what they considered unjust treatment by the king and Parliament in England. Many colonists still considered themselves British citizens and subjects of the king. Their elected repre-

The committee chosen to draft a declaration of independence for the 13 American colonies is shown at work in this 19thcentury engraving.

sentatives-delegates from each colony, or state-met in September, 1774 at the First Continental Congress to draw up a list of grievances such as: lack of representation in Parliament, unfair taxation, confiscation of the colonists' resources and mistreatment by the king's soldiers. The grievances were ignored. In 1775, George Washington took command of the Continental Army and began fighting the British in Massachusetts, the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Gradually, and painfully, the colonists realized that they were fighting not just for better treatment, but freedom from rule by England and its king.

On July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Second Continental Congress presented and debated a second draft of the Iist of grievances, called the Declaration of Independence. During the next month, the document was read publicly and people celebrated whenever they heard it. On the first anniversary, in Philadelphia bells rang and ships fired guns, candles and firecrackers were lighted. But the war dragged on until 1783, the year Independence Day was made an official holiday In 1941 the U.S. Congress declared it a national holiday.

-LKL

catch a glimpse of the author of the Declaration and making nuisances of themselves. One woman, it is said, even smashed a window to get a better view of the old man. As a eulogist noted after the deaths of both Adams and Jefferson on, miraculously, July 4, 1826, the world had not waited for death to "sanctify" their names. Even while they remained alive, their homes became "shrines" to which lovers of liberty and admirers of genius flocked "from every land."

D About the Author: Pauline Maier is the William Rand Kenan, ir.

Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article is adapted from her book American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, published by Knopf

ANation Madeat

Many men and women steered the course of America's progress with their letters, poems or songs.

They inspired future generations by explaining what it really means to be an American. he official documents on display in Washington, D.C., offer one version of America's story. It's an authorized biography of sorts, screened and sanctioned. But the beauty of words in a democracy is that anyone can offer them up, and they live or die not by a ruler's dictate, but by their ability to permeate hearts and minds, to ignite passions, and to provoke action.

T

Throughout our history, we have learned that words with enough resonancewhether from a slave, a student, or a songwriter-can change history as dramatically as any decree.

In fact, for every official document marking America's progress, there are countless others that have steered events, whether by inciting, critiquing, warning, encouraging, cajoling, enraging, or inspiring. Sometimes the words in these unofficial manifestos are so powerful that they echo through time, blending with other potent phrases to form a grand montage of ideas and urgings, odes and rants, tall tales and truthful testimonies. This "unauthorized" biography of the nation is scrawled in letters and diaries, in pamphlets and propaganda, in poems and rock concerts, in novels and essays. From the whole, vast array, we each pick and choose those lines that move us most, and piece together our own story of what it

really means to be an American.

To be sure, without some of these scripts, key moments in U.S. history might never even have taken place. Without Thomas Paine's elegant and angry prose, for example, we might not even exist as an independent country. In 1775, Colonial leaders were torn by warring views about how to deal with England. Then, in January 1776, Paine's pamphlet Common Sense was published, opening with the legendary phrase, "These are the times that try men's souls." The pamphlet argued forcefully for revolution and sold 150,000 copies overnight. It's widely credited with overcoming dissenters' qualms and unifying opinion enough to make the Declaration of Independence possible. "Without the pen of Paine," said John Adams, "the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain."

So, too, was the Civil War sparked not by the flare of a cannon but by a flair for

language. Although slavery had been controversial for 100 years, and tensions between the North and South ran strong and deep, it took novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to convey in intimate detail the horrors of slavery and galvanize the abolitionist movement. In 1851 and 1852, roughly 10 years before the siege of Fort Sumter, some 300,000 people had devoured the tome, published in weekly installments in a magazine and ending with this exhortation: "On the shores of our free states are emerging the poor, shattered, broken remnants of families .... They come to seek a refuge among you."

Stowe so famously fueled fevers that Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting her in 1862, is said to have declared, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

And, ironically, if not for a letter signed by the great pacifist Albert Einstein, the

United States might never have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plunging the world into the nuclear age. In 1939, when physicists found a way to split atoms and release immense amounts of energy, experts said that such energy would never be harnessed into a bomb-a claim that the U.S. government bought into. But Einstein became convinced by colleagues not only that a bomb was scientifically feasible but that if the United States didn't build one first, the Nazis would, thereby gaining an unbeatable advantage over the rest of the world.

On August 2, 1939, he signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt advising him the atomic bomb was not only possible but imminent. The letter also warned that Germany had commandeered Czechoslovak uranium mines and halted further sales of the ore. To ward off disaster, he urged the President to sponsor a U.S. atomic project. Einstein's letter launched

the Manhattan Project and the nuclear arms race, which led six years later to the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Toward the end of his life, Einstein said that sending the letter was "the greatest mistake" he ever made.

At times in our history, laws on the books had declared an issue resolved, a case closed, but informal voices sprang up and forced Americans as a people to reconsider. In 1963, for example, decades after a constitutional amendment gave women the vote and supposed equality, Betty Friedan wrote in her book The Feminine Mystique about "the problem that has no name." As she described it, "Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover materiaL .. chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question, 'Is this all?'" With these words, Friedan awakened women of the "silent generation" and spawned a movement for women's rights that continues today.

And in the same year, a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and years after the official end of racial segregation, Martin Luther King Jr. reminded the country: "We must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free." His words were epic: "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note," King said. "It is obvious today that America has defaulted ... insofar as her citizens of color are concerned." The force and eloquence of his words emboldened crusaders for racial equality, and within two years both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were enacted.

Acting as mentors, our official scribes have fostered traits such as our famous individualism. Ralph Waldo Emerson did this when he wrote in Self-Reliance: "Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist." And Henry David Thoreau echoed that sentiment in a personal diary that's been as influential in American culture as many archived documents: "I went to the woods because I wished to live

deliberately ... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." These philosophers and essayists have held up models for us to emulate, with stories of strong heroes like Paul Bunyan and courageous pioneers like Davy Crockett. And they have encouraged our world-renowned work ethic, as in Walt Whitman's celebration of carpenters and mechanics and shoemakers in 1 Hear America Singing, or more recently Woody Guthrie's and Bob Dylan's and Bruce Springsteen's paeans to American fo\k.life and the nobility of labor.

Yet we often stumble into virtually irreconcilable

tensions in trying to derive solidarity and community from millions of ambitious individualists. Indeed our wordsmiths have often warned us when we have tipped too far off balance. Robert Frost was cautioning the nation when he wrote, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall. ... Before I built a wall 1'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out." (Yet so wed are we to the values of freedom and solitude that we tend to skip over Frost's intended irony and quote his final phrase as words to live by: "Good fences make good neighbors.")

It took an outsider, the French social critic Alexis de Tocqueville, to alert early Americans to the "restlessness in the midst of their prosperity." He chastised

Americans for their "taste for physical gratifications," for "brooding over advantages they do not possess," and for the "vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path" to success. Writing in 1835, he concluded: "It is impossible to spend more effort in the pursuit of happiness."

In the almost two centuries since his Democracy in America appeared, countless homegrown sages have tried to warn us of the deceptive lure of the pot at the end of the rainbow. There was the folktale of ~ John Henry, who ~ out of pride worked ~ himself to death in ~ order to beat a o ~ steam engine blastQ ing holes through a ::;mountain.

There was F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragic Gatsby, doomed by his materialistic appetites, and at the opposite pole John SteinÂŤ beck's hardworking but lost @ families in The Grapes of Wrath, cast into wretchedness by forces beyond their control. The folk duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang cautionary rhymes about a fraudulent "big, bright, green pleasure machine" and about the superficially successful Richard Cory-first the subject of an 1897 Edwin Arlington Robinson poem-who despite all his worldly riches and power was so miserable as to put a bullet through his own head.

Some influential writers have gone so far as to reject our capitalist ways altogether. In his 1906 polemic The Jungle, socialist Upton Sinclair argued: "There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside." Half a century after Sinclair was writing, a new generation of young socialists would spark the wave of 1960s protests. "The

American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak," declared the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society. "In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests."

One 1960s peace activist motto-"make love, not war"-still reverberates today, and more recent counterparts of the antiwar activists have added "no blood for oil" to the unofficial national lexicon.

To its credit, America has always shown a great measure of tolerance for such self-criticism. Indeed, even when we have disagreed most vehemently, Americans have tended to agree on basic principles like the right to disagree. Again, Emerson's words have guided us: "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Others have created icons of integrity, such as Harper Lee's character Atticus Finch, a southern lawyer who in To Kill a Mockingbird defends a black man whom everyone else would scapegoat. Such high principle may be best portrayed by the ultimate American hero, the scrappy Huckleberry Finn, who after much soul-searching decides that the right course of action is to defy all authority and help the nmaway slave, Jim, to escape to freedom.

Freedom: the term Americans say best defines our nation. It's the juncture at which all of our most defining documents-both official and unofficialalways intersect. Our government proclaims freedom as a God-given right, and our songs chime, "Let freedom ring." Our activists protest freedoms still denied, and our sages remind us time and again that freedom is only truly worthwhile when we use it to "do the right thing." Perhaps that is why indelibly engraved into our collective American conscience are not only the words "land of the free" but also "home of the brave."

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

Open Skies Agreement

ANEWERA

CIVil AVIATION The long-awaited pact will stimulate new passenger and cargo services for both countries' economies and people.

fter years of talks and negotiation, exchange programs. the open skies Air Transport "It is in the national interest since it Agreement between the United gives greater connectivity, helps tourism, States and India was signed on improves cargo service and generates April 14, opening a new era in more jobs," says Onkar Kanwar, president civil aviation partnership. of the Federation of Indian Chambers of The new accord replaces a 1956 agreeCommerce and Industry. "The agreement that had restricted airlines' choices ment. .. opens new vistas for a spurt in travon the number of flights, the cities that el, trade and commerce. It will represent an could be served, and the prices charged. important development in the broader Now airlines of both countries can utilize U.S.-India economic partnership as well." an additional half a million seats every In many ways, the agreement was long year. To cope with the increased traffic, overdue, considering the economic, politmore direct flights and improved frequenical and societal relationships between the cies at competitive fares are being offered.

United States and India. Karan Bhatia, All government interventions and regulaU.S. assistant secretary of aviation and tions of business decisions have been removed except for normal safety and traffic management needs. The pact offers opportunities for cooperative marketing AIR-INDIA arrangements, including code sharing Current: New York, Newark, Chicago, between Indian and American private carLos Angeles riers, and allows all-cargo carriers to operPlanned: Washington, DC, Houston, ate in either country without directly conSan Francisco necting to their homeland. It also allows JET AIRWAYS international carriers to pick up passenPlanned: Mumbai to Newark gers and cargo in one partner country's AIR SAHARA territory en route to other destinations.

Planned: New Delhi to New York, New Delhi Transportation Secretary Norman Y. to Chicago Mineta, who signed the treaty with Civil INDIAN AIRLINES Aviation Minister Praful Patel, observed Planned: New Delhi to New York, New Delhi that the new pact would tremendously to Seattle, Mumbai to Chicago boost business in both countries. "We CONTINENTAL AIRLINES have signed a landmark agreement that Planned: New York to New Delhi, * opens the skies between India and the Newark to New Delhi United States. America is committed to help India become a major power in the DELTA AIR LINES 21st century. Civil aviation is a core comCurrent: New York to Mumbai ponent of that goal," Mineta said.

Planned: New York to Chennai U.S.-India cooperation in transportation NORTHWEST will not be limited to civil aviation. The Planned: Minneapolis to Mumbai, United States is committed to helping India Minneapolis to Bangalore improve its entire transportation infrastrucUNITED AIRLINES ture. "Becoming a world-class economic Planned: Washington, DC, to New Delhi, powerhouse requires a world-class transSeattle to Mumbai portation infrastructure," Mineta said. (*Non-stop service. Rest are single-stop services.)

This is India's first open skies treaty with any country, while for the United States, this is the 67th such treaty since it opened its skies to the rest of the world. "We are on the verge of an aviation revolution," Patel said. The treaty will help support India's ~ ci vii aviation sector through technical 4' assistance, job training and personnel ~

A

DESTINATIONS

~ a: o

:;;

z

14

SPAN JULY/AUGUST2005

~ t;;

international affairs, pointed out that there is no non-stop service between India and the United States, despite the fact that two million passengers travel every year between the two countries and bilateral trade, which amounted to $18 billion in 2003, is constantly growing. The existing one-stop U.S.-India services are also relativelyexpensive.

As soon as the agreement was signed, eager airline companies began announcing new service schedules. U.S. airline Continental has announced the launch of the first non-stop service between India and the United States: a New York-New Delhi route; and also a one-stop service between Newark and New Delhi this winter. Delta plans daily service between New York and Chennai, while Northwest Airlines wants to offer new flights between Minneapolis and Bangalore.

Private Indian carriers Jet Airways and Air Sahara announced schedules to fly to several American destinations starting this winter. However, Jet's entry into the U.S. market was delayed by legal problems with a similarly named company in America, which has asked the U.S. Department of Transportation not to grant a license to the largest Indian private carrier. Air Sahara is enthusiastic about touching American shores, but must overcome a pilot and aircraft shortage. Indian Airlines, predominantly a domestic carrier but with limited services to neighboring countries, is firming up schedules for flights to the United States.

According to trade experts, the open skies agreement will help Indian carriers more than American ones in the short run because the U.S. counterparts, facing financial crunches after 9/11, can't expand as quickly to meet the demands of international travelers.

The advantages for tourists, students, technology professionals and multinational executives, who form the bulk of air traffic, are discounts, easy connectivA new American Airlines jet is towed across an access bridge at the Boeing company's plant in Everett, Washington State in 2001. American Airlines, the world's largest carrier; is working out schedules for the open skies era in India.

ity and convenient flight times. Until now, U.S. and Indian carriers traveling between the two countries have been booked up to 8S percent of their capacity year round and passengers must wait weeks for confirmations or choose a third country airline. The pact will help resolve this problem since more flights will be available.

The pact will provide substantial economic spin-offs for India. According to industry estimates, one extra daily international flight to India has the potential to generate Rs. 2.8 million worth of foreign exchange. It allows airlines to make commercial decisions with very little government intervention and decide for themselves on where and how often they will fly, how many people they will carry, and what they will charge. "Passenger traffic between the two countries is estimated to rise by 30 percent this year with ample scope for expansion in the future," says Pushpinder S. Dhillon, economic officer at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. For starters Air-India plans to fly to San Francisco, Houston and Washington, D.C., besides its present destinations, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Newark.

The open skies accord allows airlines to serve customers efficiently and face competition in rapidly changing market conditions. They can also enter into joint ventures with other airlines to expand their services, reduce costs and make the most efficient use of their resources.

Open skies agreements worldwide have helped boost trade and commerce and created new markets for cargo and other businesses. Tourism has become one of the world's largest industries, providing more opportunities to low-cost airlines and choices to customers. Productivity has increased and businesses have become efficient. Since the introduction of no-frill budget flights for the common man, tourism has increased within developing countries, adding to economic growth.

The new agreement will generate more employment opportunities in aviation, trade and tourism. Delta, for example, will have an all-Indian crew on its Indian routes. Last

Public-Private Partnership in Aviation Sector he open skies agreement signing on April 14 gave an opportunity to Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta to unveil the U.S.-India Aviation Cooperation Program in New Delhi. This public-private partnership program will forge cooperation between both countries in areas such as air traffic safety and efficiency, airport security, airport infrastructure development, flight standards, regulation and certification, job training and personnel exchange, The U,S. Trade Development Authority has offered $500,000, which will be spent on providing technical assistance services to the Indian aviation industry.

"This partnership is designed to bring the U.S. government and the private sector together to support India in its aggressive program to strengthen its civil aviation system. It'll show how much our two great nations and our two great economies can do when we work together," says Mineta.

Six American corporations-Boeing, Bell Helicopter, Pratt and Whitney, General Electric, Honeywell and Raytheon-will be partners in the initiative, which will provide a boost to Indian civil aviation.

The New Delhi-based American Chamber of Commerce in India will implement the pmgffim.

0

Shilpa Garg of New Delhi enjoys her vacation at Niagara Falls. The tourism industry will get a big boost from the open skies treaty, as it makes possible lower fares, more convenient and frequent flights. year it trained more than 80 crew members for the Chennai-Paris-New York route.

The open skies agreement will also help the outsourcing industry. Currently, traveling to Hyderabad from San Francisco often requires passengers to stop over in Singapore, costing business people a lost day because of the lack of direct flights to India's high-tech centers, says R. Ramamurthy, Wipro Technologies' general

manager for enterprise application services. "We are losing on productivity, manhours and top management time. Travel is very important to our business, both from a business development perspective and from an execution standpoint," he says.

Experience shows that the United States and its other open skies partners have enjoyed enhanced economic growth.

This may hold true for India as well.

D

American Winemaker

* ~ E ~ ~ ~ ยง 8

D

utcher Crossing Winery overlooks the verdant panorama of Dry Creek Valley, a subdistrict of California's famed Sonoma Valley. An azure sky over green and yellow vineyards and a fragrant, cooling breeze promise a perfect day. Seated on the shaded wooden picnic bench outside the wine

tasting room, Kerry Damsky talks about his grand passion. Damsky, 51, is a master winemaker. He has received gold medals for his expertise in growing, harvesting and fermenting grapes and blending fine wines. His passion for this complex art has made an impact in India, where Damsky helps guide the development of Sula Vineyards in Nasik,

Maharashtra. Sula is owned and operated

by Rajeev Samant, who holds degrees in economics and industrial engineering from Stanford University and worked at software giant Oracle before his interest in wine culture led him back to India and into the wine business.

Damsky, from the San Francisco Bay area, was about to study anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, when his father brought home a technical book on wine making. There Damsky found his calling. He moved to Sonoma, where he took the requisite science courses, later finishing his studies in viticulture and enology, i.e., grape cultivation and wine making, at the University of California at Davis.

"It was an exciting time," he recalls.

The California wine industry was just starting to hit its stride. In 1973 Stag's Leap wine cellars won a blind tasting in France. A California Cabernet beat top flight first growth Cabernets. "It was like, sacre bleu!" He earned his stripes by running "a million gallon winery" near Lodi in the Central Valley. Then, at the age of 24, he became winemaker at a 25,000case winery, San Pasqual, near San Diego, where he could indulge in innovation. He married Daisy, gained recognition and eventually moved back to Sonoma where he continued to build his wine making reputation. He formed a consulting firm, Terroirs. Ten路oir is a French term for the sum of factors that affect growth in a vineyard: soil, elevation, climate, geographical features, orientation to the sun and so forth. The name conveys Damsky's dedication to

"the entire ecology of fine wines" in his custom growing, wine making and executive consulting services. Winery startups and vineyard development are his specialty. He now consults for 13 wineries and is a partner in Dutcher Crossing and in his own label, Palmieri, besides being consulting partner in Sula.

India first entered Damsky's portfolio in 1995, when Mumbai businessman Sunil Patel and Nasik-based Hambir Phatadri asked him to come to India. By that time, Damsky says he had become "a corporate guy" involved in the business side of wines. "I was bored with my job. I wasn't making wine anymore, and I thought, 'I want to go to India!'" He visited some vineyards in Nasik, known for its grapes, but saw only table grapes.

In a nursery set up by the French, he found some Sauvignon blanc, Chardonnay and Pinot noir grapes with fruit still on the vine. "The Pinot and Chardonnay were horrible," he says, "but the Sauvignon blanc looked really good. So that gave me an idea." It was clear to Damsky that "the goal here was to figure out two things: what grapes would grow well in India and what wines would be appropriate for Indians." After considering several ways to start the winery, he sent a partner, a viticulturalist, to assess the terroir. They agreed that "if Sauvignon blanc would work, then Chen in blanc would work." He thought, "These are new customers, new clients, new consumers of wine, so we need to make it pretty easy."

California, along with Australia and South Africa, ushered in what is called

New World wine making. This borrows some things, including grapes, from Old World winemakers, chiefly France, Italy and Germany, but uses technology to make bold new statements. It is the New World style that Damsky exemplifies.

He explains, "We were looking at the American model. If that was a model that made sense then we should do friendly wines to start off with. We imported Muscat canelli, Symphonywhich is a University of California, Davis, hybrid that is half Muscat and is Riesling-like, that grows well in warm climates-and Chenin blanc." Both Patel and Phatadri had lived in the United States and grasped the potential of the wine business in India. Phatadri planted a vineyard, but circumstances curtailed their original winery plans.

When, two years later, Damsky was introduced to Rajeev Samant by a mutual friend over lunch at Glen Ellen, Sonoma, it was a match made in heaven. Samant was looking for a winemaker to develop vineyards and make wine on his land in Nasik, and Damsky, by this time, knew the Nasik terroir well. Samant wanted to

plant Zinfandel, a variety abundant in California. He took the cuttings back to India in a suitcase. Phatadri's vineyard provided the Chenin blanc. Damsky started going to India regularly to nurture the new enterprise. "We did Chenin blanc for the domestic market. We wanted to get to the next level, so we started to do Syrah-or Shiraz as it's called in Australia-Cabernet, Zinfandel and Sauvignon blanc," Damsky says. He sent a California winemaker, Tyler Peterson, to work Sula's first vintage from start to finish in 1998. It was chaotic, Damsky says, but "they did a great job. We bottled our first Sauvignon blanc and Chenin blanc and the wines were amazingly good. They were sound. And they were clean wines, they had lots of acidity, they were bright. We sort of astounded the market." Another California winemaker, Scott Sizemore, was sent to oversee Sula's second vintage. In 2000 Sula hired Ajoy Shaw, who is now the lead winemaker. Shaw did a training stint working a harvest in Sonoma.

done at the end of the monsoon and the remaining buds produce the fruit 150 days later. "The combination of growing grapes in the Indian latitude plus the 500to 600-meter elevation allows you to grow premium grapes," he says.

Intense sun is a factor to consider in both Indian and Californian viticulture.

"You have to be very careful in India because of the sun, while here in California 80 percent of the time you don't have burning heat. If you have searing heat, it just bakes the fruit. So in California we are going back to more canopy shading. In India, you don't want huge canopies so that it's fully shaded, but you want filtered sunlight."

Besides steering the wine making for Sula in India, Damsky also teaches at the Grape Processing & Research Institute in Pal us, near Sangli, Maharashtra, which is jointly sponsored by Pune's Bharati Vidyapeeth and the government. He is helping them design a curriculum that will train farmers to grow wine grapes and make wine, and convert at least some table grape growers to wine grape growers. There is some resistance, but Damsky has answers: "People say, 'How am I going to make any money at three to four tons per acre when I am used to getting 12 tons per acre?' Your inputs are going to be less, you're not going to be spraying all the time. We don't want disease, but we -KERRY DAMSKY aren't concerned cosmetically. We want smaller berries. You don't have to water as Left: Rajeev Samant, founder and often. If the quality is high, you are going owner of Sula Vineyards. Sula offers to be getting more money for the fruit. a range of varietal wines made from Therein lies the difference. You are going Indian-grown grapes. to be paid a much higher rate."

Below: The proof of a good wine is in Such education is the key to success, he the "nose," the complexity of taste and says. "Is it possible for India to make the colOl: Kerry Damsky assesses a world-class wine? My answer is yes. It Dutcher Crossing Sauvignon blanc. takes time. And what do we need so we ~ can do that? The answer is trained techniI ~ cians. You can't be sending consultants all ~ the time, you need training." A positive upshot of Sula's success is more work and better income for local farmers who supply wine grapes. Sula has also entered into an agreement with Nasik's ND Wines.

Sula now operates the winery and produces the ND brand from a portion of the

After Sula wines hit the market, the challenge became keeping up with the demand. "The biggest problem we had at Sula was growth for the first years," says Damsky. "We sold out of everything. We could sell three times what we made."

Samant suggested they import some wine to meet the demand while the Nasik vines matured. That is how Sula's Satori brand was created. "We don't have any Medot planted, and this was when Medot from Chile was cheap. And it was a vehicle for many years," says Damsky. Sula also imported a Coastal Chardonnay from California. Meanwhile, "they were planting as fast as they could."

Damsky explains that because of the Indian climate, special techniques for growing grapes in tropical latitudes are employed. "The vines never go dormant, so you have to prune twice. You have to do this in any tropical latitude. Brazil does the same." Harvest time is late January for early white varieties and Illid-March for red. A heavy pruning is done to force the grapes into dormancy. A second pruning is

"Is it possible for India to make world-class wine? My answer is yes."

there f is a place where business converges seamlessly with pleasure, the California wine country is that place. Many other businesses happily .exist in the or.bit of the vineyards. It is hard to fmd a more amiable, easygoing crowd than the vineyard owners and business people of the counties north of San Francisco. Gentle hills planted with picturesque vineyards, pine and redwood forests near the Pacific Coast and pleasant weather help.

Sleepy rural towns settled in the mid-19th-century preserve the look and feel of Old California. Large old homes have been conserved and turned into charming lodgings. Geyserville, in Sonoma's Alexander Valley, is where Cosette Scheiber and her husband, Ron, run a bed-andbreakfast in two stately Victorian mansions called the Hope Merrill and Hope Bosworth Houses. Scheiber says, ':Just being in the wine country is fabulous, but living and working here, you find everybody is extremely supportive." While the vineyards, lodgings, restaurants and shops are hospitality businesses, she says, "We are hospitable to each other.

Although there is competition, we don't feel like competitors." And tourists are warmly received guests. Each year the Schiebers welcome three small groups of aspiring amateur winemakers for a unique, on site program they call "Winemaking 101." During several days at harvest time in the autumn, participants pick their own grapes at Hope-Merrill and nearby vineyards. They are then guided through the "crush" by wine expert Graham Parnell at a small winery in the back garden. They return six months later, when fermentation is complete, to blend and bottle their wine, each person taking a case of their vintage back home.

Wine grapes are cultivated in several states, including Washington, Oregon and New York, but California has the best overall conditions in the United States for producing top wines. It all began when the 17th-century Spanish missionaries planted vineyards for sacramental wine next to their Missions up and down the state. But the fine European varietals were not planted in earnest until the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, as immigrant families from Italy, France and Germany planted vineyards.

Today California wines rival the best European wines, and have the verve of New World style. The Napa Valley is perhaps the best known and most visited. Beringer, Franciscan, Robert Mondavi, Mumm and Sutter Home are a few of the better-known names among the many wineries in Napa.

To the west is the Sonoma Valley, home to such wineries as Clos Du Bois, Gallo, Kendall-Jackson, Korbel and Sebastiani. Further up the coast, Mendocino and Lake counties are as famous for scenery as for wine. Fetzer and Parducci are among the wineries located there.

Other wine regions of renown include the Livermore Valley south of San Francisco, Lodi and Woodbridge in the Central Valley, the Sierra Foothills and the Central Coast, which includes Santa Clara Valley, Santa Cruz, Carmel Valley, Monterey, Salinas, Hollister down to Paso Robles and Santa Barbara. The Central Coast was the setting of the 2005 Oscarnominated film Sideways, which may not have conveyed much real information about wine but certainly promoted the wine industry. The film also gave Pinot noir a boost and Merlot an unwarranted black eye, something that had a marked effect on wine sales.

Once-bountiful agricultural land south of Santa Barbara has been

I

largely covered by commercial and residential development, although there are still a few wineries in the back country east of San Diego. California wine regions such as Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino or the Central Coast are loosely equivalent to what the French call appellations, which identify the geographical origins of any given wine, but in California they are not as strictly defined or legislated.

In recent years the California wine industry has changed. It is no longer necessary to build a winery or have a vineyard to make wine. Grapes may be purchased from growers and production facilities rented, thereby keeping down overhead. Winemaker Kerry Damsky explains, "You can make wine just as well at a place where you rent a facil- ffi ity or you work with a wine mak- ~ ing team." Most of the wineries ~ in California are small concerns, ยง some producing only 2,000 to ~ 5,000 cases of hand-crafted ~ o wines annually. Yet if they can do c;, it, winemakers like the whole deal. "Here at Dutcher Crossing U we built our own facility because part of our model is that we really wanted to create a site and a tasting room to draw people, where we could sell 95 percent of our wines at full retail," says Damsky.

Another change is that the traditional family winery is giving way to big business as more wineries are acquired by huge beverage conglomerates. Constellation Brands, which owns dozens of wineries worldwide, bought out market leader Robert Mondavi in December 2004 for $1.3 billion. Allied Domecq, which may soon be acquired by Pernod-Ricard, owns some prime wineries, as does Foster's Group. The big companies distribute their own wines, making it hard for small, independent wineries. Unlike in India where there is little competition, California is the land of a thousand wineries, and competition is fierce. That's why a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to allow wineries to ship directly to the consumer in several states has small vintners raising a glass to toast future sales, made easier today by the Internet.

j

Avtar S. Sandhu

of the Gallo vineyards, and he admittedly njoys the view.

"Every evening I watch the sun set over that hill from my deck. It's great." Delhi-bred Sandhu, 67, first \. came to California in 1962 as a student in structural engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

After completing his master's degree, he embarked upon a successful engineering career, working for Stone Webster and Bechtel in India and America, where he ultimately ::0 settled and became a citizen. ~ Enchanted by the wine country, ()j in the 1970s he bought 23 hectares UJ :z in Geyserville, and planted 12 ~ hectares of vineyards. His first vin~ tage was produced in 1985 with the ~ help of winemaker Kerry Damsky. ~0 His label, Mushal, was named after _ 13

t:

grapes while gaining a 30 to 40 percent access to all the ND grapes, which include Sauvignon blanc, Cabernet and Syrah.

Sula, in six years, has become a sizable winery, producing 100,000 cases a year.

And they are selling everything. Damsky: "You've got Rajeev and I putting together a winning style that works, in terms of New World styles-really handcrafted wines based on technology-and each year the wines get better and better." He adds, laughing, "But there's no competition. There will be competition. Everyone knows that." He says that Seagrams, now a subsidiary of Pernod Ricard, is building a winery. In recent years these companies have bought out some important Napa and Sonoma wineries and know their wine business. "Five years from now there will be five Sulas, maybe 10 Sulas. So now is the time for growth," Damsky says. And

the Indian consumer has woken up to wine. Even if only the affluent one percent of the Indian population buys wine, that is still 10 million people. Also, Sula wines are affordable. The bottom of the line red and white wine brand, Madera, sells for less than Rs. 300.

Growing the business means exploring new technology, such as a French technique called micro-oxygenation to enhance wines fermented in stainless steel tanks, fine-tuning the oak casks used for the reserve wines, or adjusting picking times. "Now we pick ripe, as I pick here, and this year we have very supple tannins, ripe flavors. The wines that we made this year-while they don't exactly taste like they are from Sonoma or Napa-they almost have a Washington State brightness. It's just slightly different, because they are from India."

Sandhu Vineyard in Geyserville.

Most important, they are good enough, Damsky maintains, to be sent to influential wine critic Robert Parker or Wine Spectator for review. Sula wines are served at a growing number of upmarket restaurants in the United States, where sommeliers like the idea of having a reliable Indian wine on their lists.

More recognition will come when Sula achieves ISO certification, the stamp of a world-class operation.

Challenges remain. "Storage is still a problem," Damsky says. "We keep wines cool and refrigerated at the winery, but once it leaves the winery it's out of Sula's control." Improper storage in India's high temperatures will quickly spoil a good wine. Samant agrees.

Besides educating distributors about the importance of proper handling of wines, he says, "we are working with our dis-

his family's ancestral village near Amritsar. Today Sandhu's vineyard has a 10,000-case annual capacity. He is primarily a grower, and sells his Cabernet Sauvignon, Fume blanc, Sauvignon blanc and Chardonnay grapes to nearby Pedroncelli, Acorn and Dry Creek wineries. He does occasional custom crushes under his own label.

Now that he is retired, Sandhu Vineyard is his home, although he frequently returns to India to visit his family and to look after Ark Hospital, a charitable hospital that he funds in New Delhi.

Sandhu is a community activist who served three years on the Geyserville planning committee and also spent five years lobbying for legislation allowing farmers to shoot wild turkeys Why? In the absence of natural predators, the wild turkey population in Sonoma had soared. Mobs of ravenous turkeys freely feasted on Sonoma produce, Sandhu's grapes included. His attempts to scare them off by blasting clay pigeons with a

mate. "Wineries can store wine, but growers can't store grapes, so we have to sell."

Nevertheless, 2004 was a good year for the California wine industry generally. According to the San Francisco-based Wine Institute, U.S. wine exports increased an unprecedented 28 percent over the previous year, bringing a total $794 million in wine revenues, $173 million more than in 2003. California produces 95 percent of U.S. wine exports.

Wine institute International Director Joseph O. Rollo explains, "The weaker dollar has allowed California wineries to better compete at key price points in the world export market." That, coupled with the current Government of India policy that allows dutyfree import of wines by established hotels earning foreign exchange, could spell success for Sandhu and others who want to step up California exports to emerging markets such as India.

shotgun hardly fazed them. But Sandhu's many trips to the state capital, Sacramento, paid off. He was successful in getting permission to curb the turkeys.

Now Sandhu has shifted his activism to promotion of California wine in India. Winning over New Delhi's Hotel Imperial was his first coup. In 2004 he began bottling Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc wines for them under the Imperial's own house label. "The best French wines stay in France, or go to Europe and America. The rest go to South Asia, and that's not very good wine," Sandhu says. That's why he sees a good market in South Asia for California wines.

Anyway, he adds, "We need people buying our wine to sell grapes."

Last year was a difficult year for grape growers in California. "We had to sell our grapes for 50 percent of the average price," Sandhu says. The reasons were overproduction coupled with slow wine turnover in the poor economic cli-

-L.T.

Sula wines are served at U.S. restaurants, where wine lovers look for a reliable Indian product.

Wine stored in barrels at Stuhlmuller Winery in Sonoma. Wine must be kept at low, controlled temperatures both in the winery and at retail outlets to preserve quality and prevent spoilage.

tributors to air-condition a part of their warehouses, as that's really the only way to deal with the heat." He points out that Sula was the first winery in India to refrigerate all storage tanks, crucial for protecting the wine.

Damsky feels that the uneven or inferior quality registered by some Indian wines at tastings may be attributable, in part, to poor storage.

While there is more work to do, India is undeniably on the global wine list, and Damsky is having a good time doing his part to keep it there.

"Wine making comes naturally. It's a passion that works well for me." It seems to work well for Sula, too. D About the Author: Lea Terhune is afreelance writer based in California and aformer editor of SPAN.

WHERE THE

10 Unsung u.s. Agricultural Research Service, one of the most innovative labs in the world, is doing some cool things with feathers s alchemy goes, this isn't the most glamorous of experiments. No one is turning straw into gold here or even water into wine. But David Emery is on a mission to convert the poultry industry's trash-feathers, basically-into heavy-duty cash.

Every so often a few tons of wet, filthy feathers are delivered to the abandoned factory Emery bought in Wheaton, Montana. Emery, an industry veteran who specialized in removing meat from bone, sends the glop through a maze of machinery he cobbled together to clean, dry and position the feathers for slicing. Finally, a giant contraption with three vacuumized tubes separates the quills from tiny bits of now pristine feather fluff. Here's where it gets interesting: this airy fiber, it turns out, is remarkably strong. It's as sturdy as nylon, 60 percent lighter than fiberglass and can be used to make everything from auto parts and medical devices to dollar bills and termite-proof building materials. A few months ago, a leading tiremaker joined a gaggle of FORTUNE 500 companies that have expressed interest in using the material after Emery, 62, scales up production.

Another offbeat entrepreneur trying to create the next big thing? Well, yes. But it just so happens that this project was first hatched by the U.S. government. And the agency that licensed the technology to Emery is one of the most wide-ranging and innovative laboratories anywhere on the planet. Its name: the Agricultural Research Service (ARS). In its 50 years of existence, ARS has provided the genius behind a world of commercially successful products, including permanent-press cotton, Pringles (potato chips), Lactaid (consumed by people who cannot digest milk or milk products) and pretty much the entire frozen-food aisle of the supermarket.

For an old-school laboratory lumped under the sprawling U.S.

Department of Agriculture (USDA), ARS keeps pumping out high-tech solutions to a broad array of problems, ranging from the urgent (how to eradicate plant and animal diseases) to the less pressing (how to duplicate the tangy taste of San Francisco's sourdough bread outside the Bay Area). Along the way, the agency has won numerous patents for breakthrough mechanisms, like the one pending for turning peanut shells into hydrogen fuel and another for harnessing chicken manure to remove metals from polluted water.

When the agency began in 1953, its primary mandate was to seek methods for increasing food production. Since then, ARS scientists have helped find ways to double per-acre wheat production and triple cows' milk output. But now that we produce far more food than our collective maw can swallow-and more than we can export-ARS is setting its cross hairs on new challenges. One-fifth of the agency's $1 billion budget goes to "utilization research" to employ unused agricultural products in places other than landfills. That's where the feathers come in: America's appetite for poultry yields about 2.25 billion kilograms of plucked plumage a year.

For many ARS researchers, the future is all about waste, particularly as an alternative to petroleum. The feather project, for example, can replace some of the fossil fuels used in plastics.

Likewise, a surplus of soybeans inspired researchers to develop SoyScreen as an alternative to petroleum-based sunscreens. At ARS' flagship facility in Beltsville, Maryland, biodiesel, derived from vegetable oil, powers fleets of tractors and lawn mowers for the farms and even heats some of the buildings. Indeed, petroleum is prohibited in the carpeting (which is instead held together by soy-based urethane). The only permissible hand soaps and cleaning products are plant based. And in the parking lot, says Justin Barone, one of two ARS researchers devoted to feather-fiber research, "You'll see a lot more bicycles and Toyota Priuses than SUVs." As ARS pursues a green agenda, workers at the agency's 100 or so labs across the country are demonstrably patriotic in their TOUGH FEATHERS: The fluff from poultry, like these Massachusetts turkey hens, is remarkably strong and can be used to make auto parts or building materials, the U.S. Agricultural Research Service has found.

A HALF- CENTURY OF quest. "We're trying to help American farmers, help our country, make us less dependent on foreign oil," says Greg Glenn, an ARS engineer in Albany, California.

The agency gets little public recognition, and that's just fine. It sticks to the science and leaves product development and marketing-and the glory-to others. Glenn invented some nonfood uses for wheat starch, including a biodegradable version of Styrofoam food containers. His work is being incorporated in various products at EarthShell Corp., a disposable-food-packaging company based in Santa Barbara, California. But when commercial production of the wheat-based plates and bowls begins this year, consumers will see only EarthShell's name on the label.

There will be no reference to ARS. "We don't want the USDA to appear as an endorser," says Ed Knipling, the mild-mannered plant physiologist who runs ARS. "We don't brand our products."

As a result, the agency's 2,500 scientists tend to toil in anonymity, despite their contribution to popular commercial culture. ''I'm constantly amazed how few people know we exist," says Glenn. "When I told someone recently that I work for the USDA, she said, 'Oh, so you're a meat inspector, are you?' " ARS is eager to raise its profile in the business community, however, by passing out information-packed CD-ROMs at trade shows and signing up thousands of executives to receive e-mail updates on new technologies available for licensing. But the driving force isn't cash; ARS collects a mere $2 million a year from royalties. Rather, ARS offers companies exclusive production rights so that the firms themselves will cough up the money to bring the products to market. The payoff for America's farmers: every $1 the government spends on agricultural research translates on average into an extra $1.35 in sales of agricultural products.

For the future, the agency is concentrating in part on products that will contribute to the battle against obesity. In addition to concocting low-calorie fat substitutes, ARS researchers are working to make healthy food more nutritious and more convenient. The trick, of course, is getting us not to eat too much of it.

As for Emery's Featherfiber Corp., which licensed the feather-separating technique from ARS five years ago, it's continuing to tweak the production method at its headquarters in Nixa, Montana, while seeking investment for a full-scale factory.

Emery has already demonstrated several applications for the fiber, and the math should work in his favor: about half a kilogram of raw feathers is worth about two cents, but could fetch roughly $1 as processed fiber. "I strongly believe," Emery says, "that in a very short period of time, processed poultry feathers will be worth more per kilogram than poultry meat."

Then again, the technology is still in its infancy, and feather fiber could wind up as the next frozen-milk concentrate, an earlier ARS innovation that was supposed to put an end to those late-night runs to the store for milk. That's the risk of trying to be ahead of your time.

0 About the Author: Julie Rawe is a reporter with Time. With additional reporting by Leslie Whitaker in Wheaton.

INVENTION

ARS is the brains behind countless innovations in food and other fields

19508 ARS invents DEET bug repellent and instant potato flakes. It also rescues the frozenfood industry by establishing the basic requirements for preseNing taste, color and texture, which are still followed today.

! 19608 I ARS develops

permanent-press cotton, Vi shrink-proof wool and permanent creases in wool trousers. It finds a way to prevent gelling in evaporated milk and uses sterilization to eradicate the screwworm fly in the United States.

19708 SuperSlurper, an ARS cornstarch compound that can absorb up to 2,000 times its weight in water, gets laced into baby powder, wound dressings and fuel filters, It inspires similar materials used in disposable diapers and feminine sanitary napkins.

19808 ARS hits upon the basis for lactose-free dairy products and creates 100 percent soybean ink in four colors, which is now used in USA Today and other papers.

The agency forms a partnership with a private firm to vaccinate unborn chicks through their eggshells.

19908 The agency makes a low-calorie fat substitute out of soluble oat fiber that becomes a hit. ARS invents a large-scale process for peeling orange sections and finds that a lack of vitamin E or selenium can make a benign human virus become virulent.

20008 ARS clones the first transgenic cow with an added gene to protect against mastitis and co-patents a method of preserving the look and taste of fresh apple slices for weeks, the basis of a new side order at McDonald's.

•• .= = c.:a .= III: = .u=

Environmental Awareness Through a Kids' Film

A

garbage dump was the inspiration for Sai Paranjpye's latest movie. Her muse: children as effective agents of change. Her driving force: a belief in film as a potent medium for persuasion.

The result: Chakachak, or Squeaky Clean, a comedy, adventure, children's fable, documentary and family feature film rolled together and topped off with some pretty exciting fight sequences.

Filmed in Pune, but set in Mumbai, the nearly two-and-a-halfhour film tells the story of eight children who find their favorite playground turning into a dump and decide to clean up their whole neighborhood, gradually persuading the apathetic adults to join the campaign.

In real life, the film has had just that effect since it premiered in Pune in November 2004 and was screened in commercial cinemas in Mumbai. Schools and social organizations brought children to see it and Chakachak Toli, or "Clean-up Clubs," have sprung up in Pune.

Children laugh all the way through the movie and " remember what they have learned. Schools now play a role in helping the local government initiatives in energy efficiency, and management of solid waste and water resources.

Paranjpye weaves in a criminal plot, kidnappings, escapes, heroics, the bonds of friendship and the drama of relationships. She uses catchy songs, animation sequences, documentary footage, hilarious portrayals of bad guys, and the fresh, unselfconscious acting of the children.

"I've been trying not to do it for the past 10 years. Then I just thought I've got to do it. Just go out on the road and look around," Paranjpye says. As a creative person she would prefer not to deal with the distribution and promotion but just finish shooting and move to the next film. "But I can't go on to my next film because I've got to nurse this one," she says.

Paranjpye is making no profit on Chakachak. Without even a Web site, her small film company has been handing out posters and information packets, getting exciting response in Mumbai, where two cinema houses took bookings from schools. "It was a shoestring effort and everything went into the film so there is no money for publicity," she said in June, on her way home from meeting with a teachers' group. She is also talking to several distributors to get the film a wider audience in Maharashtra and elsewhere.

"Film is a potent medium, with a boundless power to reach out, ~ impress and win over," says Paranjpye. "Young ~ minds are quick to imbibe. Given proper guidance, ~ they will embrace the principles of model citizenship ~ in no time and learn to care for their surroundings. ~ "Indians are very fastidious about personal hygiene. Their concern does not, alas, stretch beyond their houses at the most," Paranjpye said in the promotional material she prepared to gather Sai Paranjpye in New Delhi seeking distributors for her film, Chakachak, in which children from all walks of life take the lead in cleaning up their environment .

E

~ ~ 'c &.i" 'ro

(/)

~ Q)

'ยง a 0

funding for the film. The money trickled in over two years from about 10 organizations, such as the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, ICICI Bank and the Pune Municipal Corporation. The u.S.Asia Environmental Partnership (USAEP), a project of USAID, assisted Paranjpye in getting a bridge grant for some of the songs and provided technical and other advice. "Chakachak is a mix of entertainment and education with a message that tries to raise awareness about urban squalor and cleanliness in cities," says Kristen Easter, USAEP's country manager in India. The Pune authorities and schools made it easy for Paranjapye to film. "I've never had it so good vis-a-vis access," says Paranjpye, "because everybody is so sick of dirty streets, overflowing garbage dumps and the damage to the environment.

"Children are the best agents of change," she says. "They are pure. If kids start going up and saying, 'Hey Pal, don't spit on our road,' it's awesome."

As a child, Paranjpye says, she read books such as those by Enid Blyton where "kids get together and do things." Her film is reminiscent of the old "Our Gang" movie series in the United States, about young children getting into adventures as they solve their own problems. Paranjpye has never seen an "Our Gang" movie but the motif is clearly universal. "It's very appealing for children to make a group rather than do something in solitude," she says.

The child actors--{)nly one a professional-also learned their environmental lessons. "They said, 'Now you know, Auntie, we can't mess around because people will see what we have said in the film,''' she recalls.

Paranjpye's daughter, Ashwini Abhyankar, also appeared in the film and accompanied her mother to a New Delhi screening, aimed at generating interest for distribution of the film in the capital's schools.

Abhyankar talked about what the film meant in a personal way: "When you are stopped at a red signal and there is a man in a car next to you, you just wait, and you know he will stick his head out and spit." Everyone finds it disgusting, Abhyankar notes, but few speak up. "We are very shy. We feel, 'It doesn't concern me.' Sometimes, every third step there is something under your foot. This is Mother Earth. If young people ask someone, 'Why are you spitting on your mother?' he will look sheepish. If five people ask, maybe he will change."

The children portrayed in the film are from all walks of life, from a ragpicker to a rich kid, a Bengali to a Tarnilian and from different religions. "It had to be that way; it's all of us," says Paranjpye, although she feels, "This is more a city film for this population which is flowing into the cities. I wonder if in the city people lose their individuality to a certain extent and take it out on the city, feeling that, 'It's not really our place.' " There is a "vicious spiral that comes from deprivation, and leads to a generation not able to have a societal feeling," she says. But simply living in a clean environment, with some beauty around can "lead to an overall feeling of betterment and a snowballing effect that translates into a more prosperous, healthy society," she feels.

"I have no illusion that one movie is going to change India overnight," Paranjpye says, "but a drop in the ocean, why not?"D

American films draw audiences because their lives are reflected in Hollywood's dramatic stories of love and loss.

hat is a "typical" American movie? People throughout the world are sure they know.

A characteristic American film, they insist, has flamboyant special effects and a sumptuous decor, each a reflection of America's nearly mythic affluence. Fmthermore, American movies revel in fast-paced action and a celebration of individual ingenuity embodied in the heroics of an impeccably dressed, permanently youthful Hollywood star. And they feature love stories that lead, inevitably if often implausibly, to happy endings.

Yet over the past 15 years, for every high-tech, stunt-filled Mission Impossible, there are serious and even disturbing films such as American Beauty and The Hours. For every conventional Hollywood blockbuster apparently designed to appeal to the predilections of 12-year-old boys, there have been complex and sophisticated movies such as Traffic, Shakespeare in Love,

W

1. The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, was among the 1960s movies that appealed to young adults disillusioned with a more innocent view of life.

2. The Godfather, starring Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, offered a melancholic view of American life in the 1970s. 1t was commercially successful and artistically appealing.

3. Driving Miss Daisy, starring Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy, was a quiet film of the 1980s that savored the triumphs and insights of ordinary people.

4. Frances McDormand in Fargo, an unconventional, character-driven movie of the 1990s.

Magnolia and About Schmidt that are consciously made for grown-ups. What is therefore remarkable about contemporary American movies is their diversity, their effort to explore the social and psychological dimensions of life in modern America, and their ability to combine entertainment with artistry.

Titanic and the Mvths About

American Popular Culture Nevertheless, the stereotypes about Hollywood films are deeply ingrained.

In 1998, while I was a visiting professor in Germany, I often gave lectures at various places in Europe on American movies. The reactions of my audiences were often the same. If, for example, I spoke to secondary school teachers in Brussels, Berlin or Barcelona, I would ask how many had seen Titanic. Half the teachers in the room would raise their hands, reluctantly. They would then look around to see if others were joining them in this confessional. Their embarrassment at having surrendered to yet another Hollywood seduction was palpable.

When I asked them why they saw the movie, they usually said that they wanted to understand better the tastes, however vulgar, of their students or their own children. Or that they were

or 10 days each January, the small winter sports community of Park City, Utah, is transformed into one of the most vital spots on the landscape of American movies. The Sundance Film Festival unfolding there serves as a bellwether of what is transpiring, creatively, in independent filmmaking in the United States-that is, films made by independent producers outside the Hollywood studio system. Since 1990, as co-director and director of film programming, Geoffrey Gilmore has been responsible for film selection and the structure of the annual Sundance event.

From your vantage point, what are the most exciting developments in American movies today?

There is a whole new generation of directors who are doing movies on both sides of the line-independent, low-budget productions and major studio films. The idea that these two sectors would never meet was talked about at the beginning of the 1990s, but you can't say that anymore, not with directors like Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) or Alexander Payne (Sideways) on the scene. Of course, there still are differences, not the least of which is that the average cost of a studio film is approaching $60 million, plus another $30 million for marketing and distribution, while the independent world has considerably lower budgets.

But creatively speaking, you do have a blurring of lines, don't you?

Major studios, by their very nature, are commercially driven. If a procurious to see what all the pandemonium was about, all the marketing and publicity and hype on behalf of a $200 million adolescent fantasy. Not one of the teachers would admit that they went to see Titanic because they had heard it was good, maybe even a work of art.

The teachers did not know it, but they had internalized the criticisms of American mass culture, and especially of American movies, that have persisted for nearly a century. Since the InOs, people both in the United States and abroad have been told that Hollywood's products are "bad" for them. According to the defenders of high culture, American movies are brash, superficial, inane and infantile.

Worst of all, they are commercial. Like everything else in American life, movies are regarded as just another item available for consumption, perpetually for sale, a commodity to be advertised and merchandised, no different from detergents and

ject has a commercial aesthetic to it that also allows for creativity in direction, performance and writing, that's fine. But the studios would rather be on a much more predictable course as to what works and what does not.

You asked about the biggest change recently. There are a whole range of films being distributed theatrically that in the 1980s or even the early 1990s would not have been distributed at all. Some 250 studio films are produced each year, and another 350 or so independenVEuropean art films are distributed. Also, you have more films independently directed by women-like Allison Anders, Nicole Holofcener, Rebecca Miller and Lisa Cholodenko. And there are more works by people of color. There's always been a black-genre cinema that existed under the radar, and it is now completely visible, with people like Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Singleton and the Hudlin brothers. There are Latino writer-directors like Robert Rodriguez and Gregory Nava. Recently, there was a world premiere of Better Luck Tomorrow, a film that came out of Sundance by an Asian-American filmmaker named Justin Lin. This isn't a marginal achievement; it's very significant, and, in some ways, it's only in its initial stages. The independent sector represents less than 10 percent of the total box office. But it has infused Hollywood with remarkable talent.

What is a significant challenge facing young filmmakers and the industry as a whole?

You could say that the good news is the number of films being made,

washing machines.

No wonder, then, that the teachers felt guilty at having gone to see Titanic. No wonder, too, that they acted is if they'd been temporarily slumming. They had not been bewitched by Leonardo DiCaprio, not them. They knew the film was preposterous. The very mention of the movie got a laugh from the audience; it was a guaranteed punch line with audiences everywhere. Indeed, it is this laughter that enables people to enjoy America's movies without suffering any pangs of conscience about wasting their time on such trivia.

American Movies in the 1960s and 1970s

Despite these century-long preconceptions about Hollywood movies, we should recall that-not so long ago-the films people the world over cared and argued about, that seemed to speak directly to their personal or social dilemmas, came

from the United States. From the late 1960s until the end of the 1970s, American filmmaking underwent an extraordinary renaissance. In few other periods were American directors so influential or their movies so central in shaping the experience and values of audiences everywhere.

One reason for this renaissance was that, with the advent of the counterculture, the major Hollywood studios were no longer certain about what sorts of movies would make money or about what the new, young audiences who came of age in the 1960s wanted. So the studios were willing, for a brief time, to let anyone with an idea make a movie. They turned over Hollywood to a group of gifted and often eccentric directors (Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Woody Allen) who wanted to make Europeanstyle movies: films that were mostly character studies, without conventional plots

and the bad news is the number of films being made. Distribution is a bottleneck, and I think it will be even more of an issue as the number of films produced increases and the democratization of film production continues. Today, using a good consumer-level camera and a final-cut pro program on a computer, you can make a movie with the level of production quality of a lot of things that are being bought.

A second major transition has been the "corporatization" of media.

Today, almost all of Hollywood's major studios are part of media multinationals. So you're dealing with companies whose existence doesn't necessarily depend on whether they do well producing films out of Hollywood, but on their other revenue streams, like cable channels or book and music publishing companies.

Do the creative giants of the past still dominate, or has a new generation truly taken hold?

The creative giants, the generation that came along in the 1970s, still have an enormous power-the Coppolas, the Scorseses, the Spielbergs. But their dominance isn't singular. You have a very different economic situation in Hollywood now as far as how films are financed and budgeted. Four directors have come out of Sundance in the last two years who are now stepping up to direct $100 million movies.

Do you see the economic downturn having ominous overtones for independent filmmaking?

The sources of funding that 20 years of stock market increases helped fund-the enormous amount of foreign sales and video-support work-are not going to be there anymore.

Is that going to stop a young adult with a camera and a dream from making movies?

No. It means that instead of an independent film being made for $5 million, it may have to be made for $1 million. And then it's a question of whether or not that kid can get his or her film seen. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ N

Geoffrey Gilmore (right), who runs the annual Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, chats in January with actor Daniel Craig at the premiere of his movie, Layer Cake.

To sum up, then, looking forward?

We've barely begun to see the impact of digital cinematography and digital filmmaking, and we can expect a lot of visual experimentation and stylization. From a broader perspective, though, the world has been introduced to a kind of independent production that cannot be labeled either as "art movie" or "studio film." That opens up a whole range of possibilities for storytelling and writer-driven films that promise a diversity of content.

About the Interviewer: Michael J. Bandler is a writer-cum-editor with the Bureau of International Information Programs of the US. Department of State in Washington, D.C.

or linear narratives, and with lots of sty 1istic experimentation.

Beginning in 1967, with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, the Americans released a flood of improvisational and autobiographical movies, many of them appealing especially to college students and young adults who were disaffected by the war in Vietnam and disillusioned with what had once been called, in a more innocent age, the American Dream. The movies included Mike Nichols' The Graduate; Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch; Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider; Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show; Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces; Coppola's The Godfather (parts I and II), The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now; George Lucas' Tom Cruise (right) chats with anti-war activist Ron Kovic, the disabled Vietnam War veteran the actor portrayed in the 1989 film, Born on the Fourth of July.

American Graffiti and Star Wars; Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Nashville; Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver; Alan Pakula's All the President's Men; Woody Allen's Annie Hall and Manhattan; Bob Fosse's Cabaret and All That JaZ2; and the most wrenching film of the 1970s, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter.

These movies offered a vision of an America drenched in loneliness, conspiracy and corruption, psychic injury and death. Yet despite their melancholy view of American life, the films themselves were made with wit and exceptional exuberance, reinforced by the vitality of a new and distinctly un-Holly wood-like generation of stars-Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway, Jill Clayburgh, Meryl Streep.

Hollvwood and the End of the Cold War During the 1980s, much of this cinematic inventiveness seemed to vanish. Yet even in a decade when people in Washington and on Wall Street allegedly yearned to be masters of the universe, the most memorable films were not the Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger special-effects extravaganzas. They were instead the inexpensive, quieter films like The Verdict and Driving Miss Daisy-movies that savored the unexpected insights and triumphs of otherwise ordinary people, and that offered an antidote to the cliches about America's adoration of wealth and global power.

Despite Vietnam and the generational and cultural upheavals of the 1960s, American life was still shadowed during these years by the grimness of the Cold War. But at least the United States and the Soviet Union understood the rules of the diplomatic and ideological game; neither country was willing to embark on international adventures that might threaten the other's sense of national security. All this changed with the end of the Cold War in 1989. The United States was now the planet's sole superpower. Yet paradoxically, Americans found themselves living in a world of even greater moral uncertainties and political dangers-a world where terrorists respected no national boundaries or ethical restraints.

Contemporary American Movies So having left the familiar parameters of the Cold War behind, Americans after 1989 could be equally moved by films with very different preoccupations. Two trends in American filmmaking were conspicuous, both inspired by the cinematic past. One was a passion (on the part of youthful directors like Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Cameron Crowe) to replicate the unconventional, character1. Steven Spielberg s 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a special effects landmark but also an intense character study and social commentary.

2. The Blues Brothers, starring John Belushi (right) and Dan Akroyd (center) was a quirky, dark comedy that celebrated American music in 1982.

3. Kevin Spacey (seated), shown with Frank Whaley in Swimming with Sharks, is part of a fresh generation of actors who do not conform to the classic notion of a Hollywood stat: 4. John Travolta, Rene Russo and Danny DeVito starred in the 1995 film Get Shorty, a unique blend of dark humor, violence and Hollywood insider jokes.

5. Brooke Shields (left) plays a documentary filmmaker in James Toback's 2000 film Black and White, which deals with issues such as interracial sex, mixing of racial and social classes and bisexuality. Also seen in the photograph are (from right) Method Man, Kim Matulova and Eddie Kaye Thomas.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Kim Basinger gives husband Alec Baldwin an affectionate touch after she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in L.A. Confidential in 1998.

driven, movies of the 1960s and 1970s.

This aspiration was exemplified in such films as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, Fargo, L.A. Confidential, High Fidelity and The Royal Tenenbaums. Thus, in its multiple narratives and sardonic dissection of American show business, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia was reminiscent of Altman's Nashville, while Rob Marshall's Chicago was structured exactly like Bob Fosse's Cabaret, with the events on stage mirroring the events in "real" life. In addition, American directors sought to resurrect the tradition, inherited from the 1960s, of the stylistically impressive, elliptical and nightmarish excursions into the world of tortured soulsan effort reflected in Seven, Fight Club, Mulholland Drive, A Beautiful Mind and Insomnia.

The other trend seemed more atavistic: the longing to return to the epic themes and old-fashioned storytelling of an earlier America, to rekindle the moral certitudes of a Gone

With the Wind or a Casablanca. No two films were more devoted to this project than James Cameron's Titanic and Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan-each brilliantly made, both filled with trust in a better future after all the hard lessons of life were absorbed.

But for all their indebtedness to the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, American movies of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century portrayed a society that the filmmakers and audiences of the counterculture and the antiwar movement would not have recognized. Near the end of Bonnie and Clyde, Bonnie asks Clyde how he would live his life differently.

Clyde responds by saying he'd rob banks in a different state from the one he lives in. The audience shares in, and possibly smiles at, the ironic disjunction between the question and the reply. There is no hope here, only an anticipation of doom.

In contrast, Pulp Fiction and Titanicotherwise antithetical in their subjects and emotions-both strain for faith and reemphasize the typically American notion that individuals can transform their lives.

Films of the past 15 years also introduced to their audiences a fresh generation of actors who were less emblematic of an unorthodox America than were the actors who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s.

Nonetheless, Kevin Spacey, Russell

American movies of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21 st century portrayed a society that the filmmakers and audiences of the counterculture and the antiwar movement would not have recognized.

Crowe, Brad Pitt, John Cusack, Matt Damon, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Gwyneth Paltrow and Julianne Moore-none of whom conforms to the classic notion of a Hollywood starhave given performances as vivid and as idiosyncratic as their illustrious predecessors. Unlike the iconic stars of Hollywood's classic era, who always seemed to be playing themselves-stars like Cary Grant, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Elizabeth Taylor-the current generation of American actors disappear into their roles, playing parts that differ from one movie to the next.

Most of their movies, although financed by Hollywood, are exceedingly offbeat, a testament to the variety of American filmmaking.

One important reason for this eclecticism is the impact of smaller, semi-independent studioslike Sony Pictures Classics and Dream Works-that specialize in producing or distributing avantgarde movies. No studio head has been more influential or more successful in promoting innovative American as well as foreign-language films than Harvey Weinstein of Miramax.

In many ways, Weinstein is the crucial

Above: Dream Works SKG founders (from left) David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg share a laugh during a groundbreaking ceremony at their studio's new site in Los Angeles in 1995.

Above right: Gordon Parks (seated right) produced, wrote and directed The Learning Tree, a 1968 film about a black boy growing up in the 1920s, based on his own novel.

link between the movies of the 1960s and those of the past 15 years. Weinstein grew up in the 1960s, idolizing the films of Franc;ois Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Scorsese, Altman and Coppola. When Weinstein launched Miramax in 1979, he wanted to produce the sort of challenging films he had adored in his youth. Which is precisely what he has done. Miramax has been responsible for bringing to the United States foreign films such as The Crying Game, Cinema Paradiso, Il Postino, Life Is Beautiful and Like Water for Chocolate, all of which made money despite the presumption abroad that Americans will only pay to see blockbuster movies made in Hollywood. But Weinstein has also supplied both the funds and sometimes the inspiration for many of the finest American films of recent years: The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, In the Bedroom, and Scorsese's long-time

project, Gangs of New York.

Still, no matter how important the convictions and contributions of particular producers, directors or actors have been, what contemporary American movies have most in common with the films of the 1960s and 1970s is a seliousness of artistic purpose combined with an urge to enthrall the audience. These twin ambitions are by no means uniquely American. Wherever they have come from, the greatest directors have always recognized the intimate relationship between entertainment and art.

So while American movies are undeniably commercial enterprises, there is no inherent contradiction between the desire to make a profit on a film and the yearning to create a work that is original and provocative. Indeed, it may well be that the market-driven impulse to establish an emotional connection with moviegoers has served as a stimulant for art. Hence, some of the most unforgettable American films of the past 40 years, from The Godfather to The Hours, have been both commercially successful and artistically compelling.

The Universality of American Movies Yet in the end, what makes modern American films most "American" is their refusal to browbeat an audience

with a social message. American movies have customarily focused on human relationships and private feelings, not on the problems of a particular time and place. They tell tales about romance, intrigue, success and failure, moral conflicts and survival. This approach to filmmaking reflects, in part, the traditional American faith in the centrality of the indi vidual.

But American or not, such intensely personal dilemmas are what people everywhere wrestle with. So Europeans, Asians and Latin Americans have flocked to modern American movies not because these films glorify America's political institutions or its economic values, but because audiences-no matter where they live-can see some part of their own lives reflected in Hollywood's dramatic stories of love and loss. As a result, like so many people all over the world in the 20th century, foreign moviegoers might at present disapprove of some of America's policies while embracing its culture as in some sense their own.

0

About the Author: Richard H. Pells is a pro.fessor of history at the University of Texas, Austin.

His books include Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War IT.

Hollvwood's Master 01

sunny beach. A candlelit restaurant.

A creepy dungeon. In the world of moviemaking, directors increasingly use digital tools to add real and virtual characters to different kinds of backgrounds. The key to making it look realistic? Lighting. "How actors are lit is a big deal," says Paul Debevec, a computer scientist who heads the Graphics Laboratory at the

A

University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. By creating more accurate artificial lighting on a computer, he says, his team is "giving filmmakers more flexibility" in their shots and more efficient ways to generate effects. Which means time and money saved on shooting, editing and drawing graphics-not to mention more convincing results. An eventual goal is to create more realistic digital characters and objects that can be used in any scene. But techniques based on Debevec's work have already been used by special-effects companies in numerous feature films, including the Matrix and X-Men series. At his lab in Marina del Rey, California, Debevec showed how to use light from the real world-and algorithms from the digital one-to render an actor's face as it would appear under any conditions, anytime.

Copyright Š 2004 MITTechn%gy Review.

Reprinted with permission. DistribUied by Tribune Media Services.

1. Sunset Sphere Say you want to illuminate an actor in a studio as if he or she were on a rooftop at sunset. The first step is to capture light from the real world. On the rooftop of the lab, Debevec and research programmer Andrew Gardner set up a mirrored sphere on a tripod. Debevec takes photos of the sphere from different vantage points, using a specially calibrated digital camera. Light bounces off the sphere from many directions and into the camera lens, providing a 360-degree representation of the ambient light.

"By using a range of shutter speeds and exposures," says Debevec, "we record the full dynamic range of the light that's out here." So when it comes time to insert the actor digitally into the appropriate background scene, there's enough information captured-direct sunlight, diffuse light from the sky, reflections from the roof-

to illuminate him or her very realistically. The light measurements recorded here are stored and will serve as a reference for artificial lighting conditions to be created on a computer.

2-4. lights, Camera, Action Next up: photographing an actor so he or she can be digitally inserted into a scene, like the rooftop, with the proper illumination. Playing the role of an actor, Gardner sits in a chair next to a contraption called a "Light Stage," a threemeter-tall curved arm containing 30 strobe-light elements (2). Inside each strobe element is a transistor that switches it on and off in a millisecond and a programmable chip that listens for command signals from a nearby computer. A high-speed still camera (foreground) takes snapshots of Gardner's face as the white lights pop off one at a time, synchronized to the camera's exposures (3).

Then, to capture images of his face "lit from every possible direction," says Debevec, the Light Stage rotates smoothly in a circle around him for about 20 seconds (4). During this time, the stationary camera snaps hundreds of still images of Gardner, while the movements of the apparatus are controlled by the computer via an electric motor anchored to the ceiling.

6. Face Value The end product is a photo of Gardner illuminated digitally by the rooftop sunset (right). Compare that to the same face as it would appear in a courtyard in Florence, Italy, on an overcast morning (left). These images can now be placed into background scenes so that they match the lighting in those scenes-without the actor's ever having been there. So a movie director can put more realistic digital faces on extras and stuntmen and "punch in new lighting" if there are editing changes, say, that require a character to be somewhere else at a certain time of day, says Debevec. "We make it look real. Then the director can make it look right," he adds.

So far, these techniques apply to still faces and objects. A next step is to bring the faces alive by blending sequences of different expressions over time-say, moving the lips-which will give filmmakers another tool with which to paint more vivid and realistic motion pictures.

0

5. Digital lineup Now it's up to another research programmer, Tim Hawkins, to make sense of the data and put it all together in the computer.

Hawkins' software sorts through the individual studio shots (six are shown on the screen) and can combine them in different ways to calculate how the face would appear "under any captured lighting," Debevec says. To recreate the sunset lighting, the computer superimposes the face images that correspond to the directions and intensities of the actual light captured on the roof.

About the Photographer: celebrity photographer.

Joe Toreno is a

The forgotten influence of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers.

T

hey were among the most famous filmmakers of classic Hollywood. Their independent society became one of the preeminent film organizations of its day. Their influence shook Hollywood to its very foundation. Yet today, the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers (SIMPP) has been forgotten.

"It is one of those great Hollywood mysteries finally answered," film historian lA. Aberdeen explains. "This group played an essential part in the transformation of Hollywood. But we have never known what happened to the illustrious society-until now." The author spent years collecting the lost documents of the society for his book Hollywood Renegades: The Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers.

Back in the early 1940s, when the studio system reigned over Hollywood, a small group of film producers joined together to protest the big studio monopolies. Eight independent filmmakersCharlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Samuel

Goldwyn, Alexander Korda, Mary Pickford, David O. Selznick, Walter Wanger and Orson Welles-secretly formed the organization named SIMPP. The studios had already survived government lawsuits, world war and economic depression-always emerging bigger and stronger. But soon the studio system would dwindle as the independent producers changed the way Hollywood made movies.

SIMPP objected to the assembly-line production method of the big film companies. The old studio backlots were run as if they were small cities. Movies were mass-made, and then mass-marketed in theater chains that were also controlled by the major studios.

The independents believed that individual artists, not studio committees, should be in charge. As Charlie Chaplin said: "Masterpieces cannot be mass-produced in the cinema, like tractors in a factory."

To change this, however, the independents would need to break up the studio monopolies that controlled 95 percent of all film production, distribution and exhibition.

"One of the reasons why SIMPP was able to succeed against the studios where

others had failed," Aberdeen explains, "is because these moviemakers were essentially Hollywood insiders. Many of them had worked at the major companies.

SIMPP producers independently made big budget pictures such as Gone With the Wind and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Most of the SIMPP producers were also household names. Their mission was to use their fame and showmanship to attract public attention to the monopoly system.

One example was in 1944 when the society fought against the Fox theater chain that dominated Northern California and Nevada. When Goldwyn refused the paltry price offered by Fox to show a film, SIMPP helped the producer turn a local Nevada ballroom into a temporary movie theater. The premiere of Goldwyn's film Up in Arms became a media event that was broadcast live from Reno. This gave SIMPP producers Pickford, Disney and Welles radio air time to tell the country about their problems with the studio system. Goldwyn could never have hoped to make money from his makeshift theater.

Instead the incident brought the Hollywood monopoly war into the living rooms of America, and helped accelerate government antitrust actions in court.

The independent society also waged an all-out war on the practice known as "block booking" in which the studios sold their films in packages on an all-or-nothing basis, forcing theaters to take the good

Top: Walt Disney, shown in his office in 1965, became more like the studios to achieve complete independence from them.

Center: Producer Samuel Goldwyn (left), Charlie Chaplin (center) and actress Mary Pickford, founding members of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers.

Left: Orson Welles used his fame and showmanship to help independent producers fight studio monopolies.

films with the bad.

According to SIMPP, block booking encouraged cheap filmmaking since the emphasis was on quantity rather than quality. Moreover, many independent producers distributed their films through the major studio exchanges. To the producers' horror, the studios would package independent films along with studio B-pictures, so that each independent film had to carry several studio pictures as box office deadweight.

The studios considered block booking the only logical way to sell films to the national market and felt the studio system could not survive without it. SIMPP held discussions on network radio, mailed letters to politicians and then forwarded copies to the national media. In court, SIMPP helped prove that block booking violated antitrust laws, and the practice was eventually declared illegal.

SIMPP also recruited new members, prominent directors and actors who wanted to defect from the major studios to make films with creative autonomy.

Some famous names who joined SIMPP were John Huston, James Cagney, Constance Bennett, Bing Crosby, Stanley Kramer, Preston Sturgess and Howard Hughes. Generations of filmmakers learned how to set up their own independent production companies from the founders of SIMPP. Aberdeen argues that SIMPP had a significant voice in many of the issues that shaped the industry, such as the Hollywood blacklist and studio censorship. In fact, the rating system as we know it today was originated by Sol Lesser, one of the stalwart members of SIMPP. The Society was also ahead of its time in 1951 when it tried unsuccessfully to get pay television adopted by the U.S. Federal Communications Conunission so that uninterrupted movies could be shown in American households.

SIMPP's defining moment came in 1948 during the Supreme Court Paramount case when studios were found to be violating antitrust laws. The government then ordered the studios to sell their massive theater holdings and to refrain from

anticompetltlve practices.

Aberdeen agrees with many historians that the Paramount case signaled the end of the old studio era.

Without block booking, the studios drastically cut back on film production and concentrated primarily on distribution. As a result the studios depended more on independent films. Within two decades of SIMPP's formation, independent producers were supplying half of all major studio films, up from five percent.

Today more than 80 percent of Hollywood studio releases are independent productions.

But Aberdeen says the independent producers remained united only as long as they had a common enemy. Once the studio system was eliminated, the producers argued about direction and overall mission.

Some of the more powerful producers, such as Disney and Selznick, became more like the studios to become completely independent.

Others, such as Welles, concentrated on more personal films and unconventional subjects.

Without a clear objective, the society degenerated into a group of temperamental, idiosyncratic, self-seeking film producers. "In the end, you could say that their downfall was that they were too independent to form a cohesive unit," Aberdeen concludes.

By the end of the 1950s, many SIMPP members dropped out. In 1963, with little fanfare, Walt Disney Studios took over the remnants of the Society.

"Throughout the history of the cinema, we see this constant trend of independent companies growing up to ultimately become major corporations," Aberdeen observes. "Paramount, Warner Bros. and all the major studios were all once independents who fought the status quo at one time. It seems ironic, but certainly typical as well, that the Walt Disney Company, one of the largest and most diverse media companies in Hollywood today, once began as an independent operation by a producer who opposed movie monopolization."

0

ust over a year ago, a hacker penetrated the corporate servers at Valve, the game company behind the popular ftrst-person shooter Half-Life. He came away with a beta version of Half-Life 2. "We heard about it," says 23-year-old Frank, a well-connected media pirate. "Everyone thought it would get bootlegged in Europe." Instead, the hacker gave the source code to Frankit turned out that he was a friend of a friend-so that Frank could give Half-Life 2 to the world. "I was like, 'Let's do this thing, yo!' " he says. "I put it on Anathema.

After that, it was allover."

Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, higWy secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed

music, movies and video games available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in.

Within minutes of appearing on Anathema, Half-Life 2 spread. One ftle became 30 ftles became 3,000 files became 300,000 files as Valve stood helplessly by watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump of coal. The damage was irreversible-the horse was out of the barn, the county and the state. The original Half-Life has sold more than 10 million games and expansion packs since its late 1998 release.

Half-Life 2's official release ftnally happened last November, after almost a year of reprogramming.

When Frank (who, like all the pirates interviewed for this article, is identified by a pseudonym) posted the Half-Life 2 code to Anathema, he tapped an international network of people dedicated to propagating stolen ftles as widely and quickly as possible.

It's all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about "the scene," fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in

to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies-all the progeny of that original file-spill into the public peer-to-peer (P2P) networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry.

(BitTorrent, a faster and more efficient type of P2P file-sharing, is an exception.

But at present there are far fewer BitTorrent users.)

It's a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It's an appealing, democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music they buy and post them online. But that's not quite how it works.

In reality, the number of files on the Net

ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs and video games is statistically negligible.

People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared-the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" fIle. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a chance to buy it.

The whole shebang-the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P networks girding it all together-is not about trading or sharing at all. It's a broadcast system. It takes a signal, the new U2 single, say, and broadcasts it around the world. The pirate pyramid is a perfect amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at every descending level, until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which time it can be received by anyone capable of typing "U2" into a search engine.

This should be good news for law enforcement. Lop off the head (the topsites), and the body (the worldwide trade in unlicensed media) falls lifeless to the ground.

Sounds easy, but what if you can't find the head? As in any criminal conspiracy, it takes years of undercover work to get inside. An interview subject warned me against even mentioning Anathema in this article: "You do not need some 160-kilo hit man with a Glock at your front door."

The upper reaches of the network are a "darknet," hidden behind layers of security. The sites use a "bounce" to hide their Internet Protocol (IP) address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption.

Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in. Estimates say this media darknet distributes more than half a million movies every day. It's also, by any reading of the law, a vast criminal enterprise engaged in wholesale copyright infringement.

But the Feds are getting smarter. In the spring of 2004, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Department of Justice launched a series of raids code-

named Fastlink. Working with cops in Sweden, the Netherlands, and eight other countries, the operation seized more than 200 computers. One confiscated server alone contained 65,000 pirated titles.

Fastlink rubbed out a few topsites, but new ones filled the void. The flow of illicit games and movies slowed briefly, then resumed. In April 2004, federal agents interrogated Frank and impounded all his computer equipment. So far, no charges have been filed. "But the Feds had no idea about Half-Life," he boasts. "If they found out, I'd be in jail." ruce Forest, a self-described "elder statesman" in the piracy scene, started ripping and trading in the ancient days of the late 1980s. While he no longer actively traffics in bootlegged media, he maintains contacts that give him access to the most exclusive topsites. What the topsites don't know is that three years ago, Forest came in from the cold.

"Basically, I'm a double agent," he concedes, "though I don't fink anyone out; I'm not a cop."

As a consultant for one of the world's largest entertainment companies, Forest notifies his bosses whenever one of their movies appears on a topsite. Thanks to his unpar路alleled access, he enjoys a bird's-eye view of the scene. And because he's ostensibly on the right side of the law, he's uncommonly open with information. This makes him an anomaly within the paranoid byways of the media darknet.

Forest runs his business from the first floor of his rural Connecticut home. He's in his mid-fOlties but moves with jerky, adolescent energy. His brown hair is in perpetual disarray, and he pads around his office with bare feet, dressed in cargo shorts and a faded polo. Gold and platinum albums from his days as a producer at Island Records, MCA and Arista line one wall. A baroque an路ay of computer equipment fills the next, including 13 CPUs and 16 external har路d drives (for a total of three terabytes of storage). His desk runs the

length of the room and supports five fullsize LCD displays. I hear a soft ping.

"That tells me a movie just made its fIrst appearance on a topsite." He points to a window on the monitor. It shows an innocent-looking list of files from an FIP site.

The uppermost file says, "Hell boy.

SCREENER.Proper.READ NFO PRE VCD." Translation: The DVD of one of the year's biggest box office hits has been pirated two months before its intended release date. "The FBI would kill to be sitting here looking at this," he says.

Even fIrst-run movies get ripped.

"Remember what happened to The Hulk?" he asks. On June 6, two weeks before its official release, a near-final version of The Hulk showed up online. To hear studio executives tell it, the bootleg went straight to the P2P networks and spread like a contagion.

Forest denies that. "Trying to distribute The Hulk through the P2Ps would take months, not hours." That's because files on the public file-sharing networks, where no single node is much more powerful than the next, spread at a glacial pace.

Furthermore, when users connect to a P2P network-FastTrack, for example-they connect only to a small proportion of the number of other users connected at the same time. So unless a topsite seeds a file across the P2P network, the odds are slim that someone searching for a copy will actuall y find it.

Forest pushes a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end, and rotates in his Aeron to look me in the eye. "Here's what actually happened: Universal gave the workprint to its Manhattan ad agency.

Then the print got to SMF. And bam!"

SMF, Forest explains, is a piracy group

that specializes in acquirWORKERS at CD or DVD factories, ad ing movies in theatrical agencies, movie theaters and retail stores release. illegally copy or steal films and other products.

Before the folks at SMF could release the movie to a topsite, they had to compress it-from I•••••• ~ ,.,1 roughly nine gigabytes to 700 megabytes, small enough to fit on a single !

CY'~ ~ CD. Now the film drops.

Forest won't say to ~~I~ ~;~;~~d~~~Pr;:~~s i~ which top site SMF first group, which compresses it posted The Hulk, only to fit a single CD, using that "SMF had affiliaskilled technicians, super-fast tions with certain sites, processors and servers. so it must have been one of those."

Within an hour, word had spread that works. Before it reached even a single The Hulk had appeared on the topsites, and shared file folder on Kazaa, Forest estimates there were already several hundred the "races" began-copying and distributing the files to as many other servers as thousand copies in circulation, guaranteepossible, as quickly as possible. "The ing that casual computer users would be able to fInd and download it easily. races are over like that," says Forest, snapping his fingers. "It's amazing."

One of Forest's computers pipes up Soon, The Hulk was working its way again. Another bootleg has just started its race down the pyramid. down the pyramid onto slightly less exclusive sites called dumps. "These sites are a ovie pirates get their booty little slower, and they aren't getting stuff first," explains Forest. "On the other hand, from one of three sources: industry insiders, projectionthey're getting a lot more traffic." With as ists or agents placed inside much as several terabytes of data storage, the dumps are the workhorses of the distridisc-stamping plants and retail outlets. "Half the kids bution process, storing hundreds of thousands of media files filtered down from the in the scene work at Best Buy or Blockbuster to get their hands on stuff they can release," topsites and rolling them to the next layer says Frank. "At the factory, maybe 15 perof the pyramid, the distribution channels.

In 24 hours, SMF's single version of cent of CDs and DVDs are defective," says The Hulk had metastasized into at least Forest, "usually just because the label is off a little bit." They're dumped into a rubbish 50,000 copies. Within 72 hours, the movie was all over the most popular P2P net- bin, ripe for the picking.

Release groups break down broadly by medium-video game, film, music, television-and then often into genre. One release group, for instance, specializes in obscure Japanese anime. Another works exclusively in Xbox games. Every release group has the same ultimate goal: Beat the street date of a big-name album, video game or movie by as much time as possible.

In 2003, Frank and his friends started a release group devoted to first-run movies.

They placed an online ad, and a projectionist in Maryland responded. The projec-

$~'~~ ,',' ~ - '.==

,.~. w~~

Movie pirates get their booty from one of three sources: industry insiders, projectionists or agents in stamping plants and retail outlets.

,i __ ..._-_-

. ..,~.

I~=IJ,

it~ ~.

tionist, who never told Frank his name, proposed to send them the movies shown in his theater in exchange for free downloads from the topsites. Frank's posse wanted to test the guy first-standard procedure for a release group. "We had to know he wasn't a narc [police informant]," says Frank, "and that he could get us quality product on a regular basis."

Frank's projectionist passed this test by providing the group with a high-quality copy of Spy Kids 3D: Game Over. The bootleg was posted the day after it hit theaters. Theaters get movies several days in advance so that exhibitors can check for defects in the reels. "Our dude would just run the film before anyone got to work, and record it from the booth," he says.

Frank and his friends christened their group "MaTinE." Because their supplier-the projectionist-could get them high-quality recordings, MaTinE got noticed. "Eventually, we were putting our movies on one of the best topsites in the world," says Frank. He won't tell me the name of the site, noting it got busted by the FBI. "I can't have them thinking I put the heat on them, know what I mean?"

The quality of bootlegged films varies, depending on the technology used to capture the original reel. The best are produced using expensive TV studio equipment that can convert film to video. The next best are "telesyncs," copies of a movie in which the visuals have been captured by camcorder but the audio comes

directly from a patch into the projector.

"The top telesync groups, like Centropy, Video CD and TCF, are using $10,000 camcorders they get directly from Japan, cams you can't find in the U.S.," says Frank. The least desirable releases are "cams," made by an audience member with a camcorder.

I ask Frank how his group could afford such exotic toys. "People buy them for us," he says, as if this explains everything.

"Usually, these people were in the scene at one time, and now they just want free downloads without having to contribute."

As it turns out, much of the extensive hardware-from superfast processors to servers with terabytes of storage-are donated by these well-heeled patrons.

"Does Bruce Forest do that?" I ask. "I don't know," Frank says, laughing. "What did Bruce tell you?"

In fact, Forest freely admits to being a supplier. "I have bought everything from hard drives to complete computers for various people in the scene. I've probably bought 15 camcorders alone." He says he considers it a business expense, and writes it off on his taxes.

Whatever the original somce-stamping plant, movie theater, or local Blockbuster video store-the film has to be properly prepared for distribution over the networks. Converting analog to digital is a difficult, time-consuming process. And getting it into a form that can be easily compressed into a digital box many times

smaller than its original size is an even bigger undertaking. If it isn't done well, a topsite will reject the file. "Quality control is the number one job of the release groups," says Forest. "Topsites will only take a file that fits a long list of specifications. It basically has to be perfect."

To make sure it is, release groups rely on highly skilled technicians responsible for compressing and packaging the media file. As Forest and I watch the ripped copy of Hellboy, he pauses the movie. "Look at this," he says. A massive fight has just taken place, and Hellboy is perched on a bridge overlooking a devastated cityscape.

It's been raining, and the havoc is reflected in a puddle, into which he stares deeply.

"Look at that reflection. Do you have any idea how hard that is to capture?"

Different scenes require different treatments. "It's almost like using a paintbrush," says Forest. "A good ripper will know exactly how to apply the codec properly." A codec, or compressiondecompression algorithm, is a method of reducing file size to ease its transfer over the Internet. Video is normally compressed using variations of MPEG codecs.

A serious ripper will adjust the bit rate of compression in every scene of a movie to account for changing hue and lighting.

Toby is a master ripper. At 22, he's got a big man's frame but looks malnourished, like he doesn't get enough vegetables. He spends most of his time preparing movies for the Netflix Project. Started by an

anonymous donor-again, an angel investor willing to devote money but not time to media piracy-the Netflix Project aims to archive every film offered by the subscription service. "Netflix offers about 25,000 movies," says Toby. "We've got maybe half of them." Each time Toby finishes condensing and packaging a movie, it gets placed on a central server. The archive is free for members who score a password and can get through the encryption. (Asked for comment, Netflix politely declined.)

I'd been told Toby would be cagey, but I find him funny and sweet. In 2000, he moved to Atlanta to attend college, but after spending a year and a half holed up in his dorm room ripping and burning, he flunked out. "Computer science is impossible," he says. "But I didn't really go to class, so part of it might be my fault, sort of."

Two weeks before the release of A Perfect Circle's new album, Thirteenth Step, Kevin races home after high school

in ally Kevin checks a site telling him that a rip of Thirteenth Step has just been uploaded to a secure FTP site-a week before it hits the stores. He curses under his breath. More than two minutes have elapsed since the file first appeared. The race is on, and Kevin is already at the back of the pack. He opens FlashFXP-a program that allows him to directly transfer fi les-and begins copying the CD to as many sites as he can.

Then he sits back to watch the race.

Everything now depends on the whimsy of Internet traffic and the speed of the server farms whose bandwidth he is pirating.

With his quick, eager intelligence and, more important, a high degree of focus, Kevin spends hours at a stretch performing the minute tasks of copying and transferring files, usually to networks in the middle levels of the pyramid. It's through grunts like him that a song proliferates

Kids in the ripping business do this because it feels mildly rebellious and because it's fun.

"It's about being the fastest." each day, goes down to his basement, and checks various release sites to see if someone has posted it. Kevin resides a few levels down the pyramid from the topsite operators; he's a courier for a couple of release groups dealing in rips of emotional punk and hard-core music albums, and A Perfect Circle is the file dujour.

Usually such a sought-after property first appears on sites far more exclusive and glamorous than the ones Kevin has access to, but he's hopeful a copy will show up soon. Couriers like Kevin are the grunts of the system, but without the "curries" transferring and duplicating files, the massive distribution network would break down.

from 10,000 copies to a million. The night A Perfect Circle's CD was posted, Kevin stayed up late spreading the file around the Net. The curries competing against him must have gotten stuck behind some double-wide trailer of a packet, because Kevin's credits poured in.

Credits are how the curries-and most everyone else-get paid. Back in the early days of the scene, when there were maybe 100 dedicated geeks trading copies of The Last Ninja over their Commodore 64s, the rule was established that site members had to upload one unit (kilobytes at first, now megs or even gigs) for every three they download. The rule creates an incentive to obtain and release, and it's this odd form

of greed that drives the scene. It's true, as Forest likes to point out, that no one gets paid (unless they strike up relations with for-profit Chinese bootleggers, which is considered bad form). But they do get a lot of free stuff-movies, music, games and software-without having to deal with the spyware, phony files and traffic jams that plague the public P2P networks.

In fact, pretty much everyone joins the races from time to time. It's how the pirates while away their idle hours-the release group operator waiting for a new movie to be delivered, the ripper biding time while his gigabyte-sized files compress.

Yet the best racers aren't even downloading all the pirate media they have access to. They have credits to burn, but that's not all that drives them. "It's about being the fastest," Frank says.

The kids in the scene aren't trying to bomb the system. They don't care a whit whether major labels suffer more from file-sharing than independent labels, or if a ban on prerelease DVDs affects Miramax's chances at the Academy Awards. They do this because it feels mildly rebellious, like smoking a doobie behind the local Kroger or setting off the school fire alarm-and because it's fun.

Like ants, curries are monomaniacal about tiny tasks-they copy and move files from place to place-but together they form a force so powerful that it threatens to displace the traditional forms of media distribution.

In fact, Forest believes the scene will eventually go legit, and he's even started a company, called lun Group, that uses the topsites to promote movies, musicians and TV shows. "The topsites don't care where their files come from, as long as no one else has them," he says. Last summer lun Group dropped a collection of live videos and MP3s from Steve Winwood on the topsites. "We got 2.9 million downloads," says Forest, "and album sales took off."

D About the Author: Jeff Howe is a contributing editor with Wired.

Not that her reaction came as a complete surprise. Indeed, it was unhappily familiar. Cox is, by her own description, "fearless" in all other parts of her life. A beloved reading and math teacher in a suburban Atlanta elementary school, she projects the calm competence of the woman you would immediately turn to in a crisis. So her fear of heights seems incongruous. But for most of her 51 years, especially after she had children, acrophobia (as it's technically known) has been the uninvited guest at too many events in her life. On a family vacation at Pikes Peak, Colorado, four years ago, her husband and two teenage daughters stood outside, exhilarated by the panoramic view, while Cox huddled in the back seat of their rental car, hyperventilating, crying and trembling.

Cox is one of approximately 14.8 million American adults who suffer from irrational fears of a particular situation, object or experience. Today, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States, afflicting 13.3 percent of adults. And the nature of these disorders seems to reflect the landscape of worry and stress of 21st-century life: Overdue bills and Code Orange terrorism alerts merely top the list of worries stressing people out.

But for some people, they trigger or fuel a

host of anxiety disorders. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, in which men and women become enslaved to elaborate and sometimes painful rituals: Hands are washed until they are raw and bleeding; pockets are jammed with tiny talismans that seem to be essential for life itself; food cannot be eaten unless a specific place setting is arranged in a precise way. After 9/11, post-traumatic stress disorder seemed to become as common as the cold in day care, with flashbacks, bad dreams and sleepless nights afflicting thousands of people. Then there are phobias, like social phobia, where a conversation with a neighbor can cause a paralyzing sense of dread, or specific phobias like Beth Cox's acrophobia. Agoraphobia translates literally as fear of the marketplace (which today might be called fear of the mall). Some who suffer from agoraphobia panic when they're in public places; others simply become paralyzed, unable to leave their homes.

Like many psychiatric disorders, anxiety disorders in general, and phobias in particular, vary wildly in degree. Some phobias are so mild they could hardly be considered real psychiatric disorders. As Emory University psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff puts it, "Very few people actually seek treatment for them. It's not as if people who are terrified of snakes come

into my office because it is the only thing standing in the way of a career as a herpetologist." Other phobias, however, can dominate people's lives. One woman, who suffered from agoraphobia, refused to leave her house for 18 years. A New York man who suffered from panic disorder ran off the Staten Island Ferry moments before it left the dock, never to get back on it again. A teenager in New Jersey with social phobia missed months of school because of wild fears that she might vomit or blush uncontrollably.

Everyone who suffers from a phobia has a slightly different story, but Cox shares many experiences and traits with other phobic adults. The similarities include a long history of suffering-often extending back to adolescence-from fear, panic and avoidance. And, sometimes, even genes: Cox's father acknowledges that he "never liked heights much either."

Unlike Cox, who has a specific phobia, those who are afflicted with panic disorder cannot predict when it will strike, so its unpredictability adds to the fear. Even so, new understanding of the biology of fear has led to new treatments and new strategies for unlearning and managing fear that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

Where fear lives. The new treatments are important because the cost of fear to society, in terms of medical costs and lost productivity, is staggering.

A 1999 study documented that the annual cost of anxiety disorders in the United States (in 1990, the most recent numbers available) was about $42.3 billion, or $1,542 per American. An estimated $22.8 billion of that went for non psychiatric medical treatment.

Because anxiety disorders so frequently involve physical symptoms, victims often believe that this time they really are having a heart attack, a brain tumor or a stroke. "People with panic disorder come in and say, 'Doc, I feel this or that,' " says psychiatrist Barbara Milrod of Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York State. So the doctor gives them a complete physical and perhaps even says that anxiety is the cause. But they don't believe it, Milrod explains, "so they decide

they need an MRI just to make sure they don't have a brain tumor. People go through this over and over again." And the health care costs keep rising. People with an anxiety disorder are three to five times as likely to go to the doctor and six times as likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric disorders as those who don't have them.

As agonizing as irrational fear can be for the afflicted, it has been a gold mine for researchers. Most diseases, from cancer to depression, involve a complex interaction of genes and physiology, but doctors typically know something about their physical location in the patient's body. Not so for illnesses of the mind like depression or bipolar disorder. But fear is different. Nobel Prize winner and Columbia University professor Eric Kandel describes it as "the one, the only area in psychiatry in which we have an anatomical substrate." We know, in other words, where fear lives.

And we know this largely because of the lowly rat. For years, researchers have explored the brains of rats, and they finally identified the place where fear lodges in the neurons. According to New York University psychologist Joseph LeDoux, "The hub in the wheel of fear" is the small, almond-shaped brain structure called the amygdala. While it is extremely important in terms of regulating all sorts of emotions, the amygdala has long been recognized as being the air traffic controller of the fear response in mammals.

Chicken liDle.

Animals can be conditioned to be fearful. In simple experiments that couple a tone with a mild shock, the amygdala is activated by the tone, sending alert signals to all parts of the body. This conditioned response tells the heart to beat faster, blood pressure to elevate, sweat glands to start sweating, and, often, the stomach to start churning.

Even without the actual shock, the body acts as if it has been shocked because the amygdala sends out the alert signals at the sound of the tone. The amygdala, it seems, can play two very different roles: one as the responsible adult organizing the body to respond well to a disaster, the other as Chicken Little, as in the chjldren's story

about a chicken who overreacted with fear, thinking the sky was falling after a leaf fell on his head.

While the amygdala organizes the fear response, its neighboring brain structure, the sea-horse-shaped hippocampus, plays its part in storing memories of the shock and reminding the rat that it was shocked when a particular tone was played. A feedback loop is created so that even the memory of the shock will stress the rat and activate the amygdala. Stress, says LeDoux, can spark all kinds of fears and phobias.

These are the primitive, unconscious fear responses deeply wired into our brains, and only after they occur does the cortex get involved-the conscious part of our brains that can rationalize, explain and inform. The prefrontal cortex could have told Cox that the likelihood of driving off the Hernando de Soto Bridge was slim, but

it was too late. By the time the cortex comprehended what was happeillng, the hippocampus and the amygdala had taken charge, illustrating that gut-level fear is far more potent than our intellectual analysis.

A rose is a rose. Why do our amygdalas react to one stimulus and not another? Why is the fear of heights or snakes or spiders so common while the fear of, say, rain isn't? Some clue can be found in evolution. In one experiment, laboratory baby monkeys were shown a tape of adult female monkeys acting fearfully with a snake. When snakes were brought into the lab, even plastic ones, the monkeys panicked. Then the same baby monkeys were shown doctored tapes, in which roses were spliced in where the snakes used to be, and the mother monkeys looked as if they were acting fearful-

AN INDIAN VICTIM OF PHOBIA

S

ushmita is 35. an architect with a flourishing practice. She has a bad left knee due to a childhood injury. It makes it difficult for her to use the stairs. but because of her phobia of closed spaces she could not use an elevator either Unable to supervise the job on high-rise buildings. she was forced to curb her movements. She was fast turning into an introvert and finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the situation. until her sister noticed the change in her and fixed an appointment with a psychiatrist.

The doctor prescribed Sushmita anxiety-relieving medicines. At the same time. he took her up for relaxation therapy. Once she felt belter, he began the systematic desensitization treatment. To blunt the fear. he first took Sushmita up to the doors of an open elevator. Over the next few sessions. this exercise was repeated several times. When Sushmita became comfortable with that. he invited her to step into the open elevator with him and they both stayed in the elevator for a few moments with its doors open. After a few more such sessions.

Sushmita could travel with him to the next floor.

The exercise continued. Gradually, she overcame her fear of traveling in the elevator altogether. and this has brought a sea change in her life. She feels energetic and her practice has grown manifold.

Therapists have also found other behavioral techniques useful in the treatment of phobias.

Thus, in the flooding technique. the therapist encourages the person to actually face up to the feared situation. Gradually, they reach the point when they no longer dread the object or event. The implosion technique, similarly. tries to demolish the fear by training the individual to confront the feared object or situation in their imagination.

Visual imagery. deep breathing and other relaxation techniques are also useful in overcoming social phobia.

-Extract reprinted with permission from The World Within: Symptoms & Remedies of the Mind, Rajkamal Books, 2004, by Dr. Yatish AgarwaL

ly with a rose. When presented with roses, however, the babies could not have cared less. Findings like this lead many researchers to conclude that "one reason there is a limited number of phobias is because we have preserved a genetically hard-wired disposition to be frightened of certain things and not the others," says Ned Kalin, chair of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

In a small white house on Seaview Avenue on Staten Island in New York last November, five men and five women sat in an office describing their own experiences with fears and phobias. Ranging in age from 16 to over 60, they explained in painful detail how fear, panic and anxiety

had governed their lives. A white-haired basketball coach named Matt (all asked that their last names not be used) recalled his 24th birthday, on September 10, 1959.

He got on the ferry from Brooklyn to Staten Island, as he had done countless times before. But this time, he was overwhelmed by panic that would be part of the rest of his life. He raced off the ferry and did not get back on for 32 years. Over the years the panic descended without warning: He couldn't travel for some games with his team; he suffered on the subway, fearful that he would get stuck. He sought treatment time and again, including 11 shock-therapy sessions, but the disorder was so poorly understood, until recently,

that he was unable to get relief.

Helen is a psychiatric nurse, and she, too, remembers the exact moment that fear took control of her life. She was 16 years old, riding on a local bus-one she had ridden many times before-when suddenly she was overwhelmed by "an out-ofthe-blue panic attack." That was enough for her to start walking wherever she went.

She became a nurse but eventually was unable to even cross the street from the parking lot to the hospital alone, waiting in her car until she saw someone with whom she could walk. In the hospital, Helen clung to the walls, brushing against them because she was so fearful of the open spaces of the hall. Finally, she had to live on disability payments for two years.

Tony, who paints beautiful watercolors of Staten Island scenes, remembers always being fearful and shy. Despite that, he remembers his childhood as happy. But when he was 12, in 1952, his family went on vacation to Florida, and while on a beach in St. Petersburg, he was overwhelmed by "this weird feeling, spacey, frightened." He ran into the shade and tried to get control of himself, but somehow the switch had been flipped; for the rest of his life he was plagued by fear. He couldn't go to school without his mother.

In high school his mother would sit in the attendance coordinator's office while he went to class. "I was fearful of everything," he says. Today, while he has managed to conquer much of his fear, he still cannot go to New York City alone.

Mary Guardino founded Freedom From Fear, the treatment center where the group meeting was held, in 1984. "It was really based on my own intense suffering from panic and anxiety disorders and depression since I was a little kid," she says. As committed as an evangelical in her mission to change fearful lives, Guardino once had a

vanity license plate that said PHOBIC. After founding Freedom From Fear, Guardino forged partnerships with Columbia University, where researchers in anxiety disorders work with her clients. A combination of therapy, support groups and medicine has permitted Matt, Helen and Tony, among countless others, to get on with their lives. Drugs-whether antianxiety pills or antidepressants-are never the only answer, says Guardino. In fact, she says, they are often "the biggest barrier to treatment." People are afraid the medicine will change their personalities, or even that the pills will get stuck in their throat. For people with anxiety disorders, medicine sometimes turns into another source of anxiety. That is where therapy comes in, exposing yourself to the fear, feeling the wave of panic and learning how to handle it, gradually changing the amygdala and the hippocampus through the heroic efforts of the prefrontal cortex.

Unlearning.

Exposure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy have been used successfully in reducing and even eliminating fears and phobias. Since the dread of feeling fear reinforces the phobia-if the bridge or the tunnel or the snake is avoided, so are the feelings of panic-the challenge of therapy is to make that feeling less frightening. Over and over again, patients are put in situations that catalyze the pounding heart and dripping sweat, and they are taught that those feelings need not exert such a powerful influence in their lives. They are learning new ways of coping. But what if there were a way to learn more quickly?

During his work with rats, Michael Davis at Emory University found that some proteins in the amygdala called NMDA receptors may actually speed up the process of unlearning fear and offer an entirely new option for treatment. "Many years ago, we discovered that the NMDA receptor protein in the amygdala was not only necessary to learn to be afraid," Davis says. "It was also necessary to learn not to be afraid." If those proteins were blocked in rats, then the extinction process was far more difficult. If these proteins were bolstered somehow-and

they could be with a drug called DCycloserine (DCS) that had been used for treating tuberculosis but now had a new application-then they facilitated the extinction of fear.

When Beth Cox returned to Atlanta from Oklahoma, using a different bridge in Memphis to avoid the scene of her most frightening panic episode, she realized it was time to finally try to tackle her fears.

Back home, she saw an advertisement asking for volunteers who were afraid of heights to be a part of a treatment study.

Cox called and soon found herself in Decatur, Georgia, in a warren of offices called Virtually Better. A virtual-reality laboratory and a treatment center, it allows clients to fly in an airplane, talk to an audience, stand on a wooden bridge hundreds of feet above a ravine-and never leave the office. A helmet with a screen inches away from the eye presents clients with a range of computer-generated experiences.

No longer does a therapist need to take a client over a bridge or on an elevator. By confronting their fears and phobias this way, many Virtually Better clients, like Cox, can overcome them.

While virtual-reality therapy is becoming mainstream for the treatment of specific phobias, the study that Cox participated in involved the use of DCS. She was one of 27 people with acrophobia who were given two sessions of virtual-reality treatment for height phobia. Afterward, the group was divided into three subgroups: One received a sugar pill, one received a low dose of DCS, and the third received a higher dose of DCS. Fear was measured both through the descriptions of those who participated and through objective measures of the skin to register how agitated the person was. Cox received the higher dose of DCS. The results of the treatment were published in November 2004 in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Those who received any dose of DCS managed to conquer their fears more effectively than those who got the placebo, and the effects lasted. Three months later, the DCS recipients still felt better. Not only did the drug have no side effects, but it was used only during the learning process. "We have not found that it facilitates fear con-

l ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ "-

ditioning itself," Davis says. "For whatever reason, it is just unique to extinction."

Beautiful.

For Beth Cox, life has been transformed. A few months after her therapy, she went with her family to a wedding in Miami. They were treated to the best room in the hotel, a corner room on the 26th floor with floor-to-ceiling glass windows and a panoramic view. "Before, I never understood why they built hotels like this," she says. "But now I do, because it's beautiful. It's not like I spend my Saturdays looking for something high. But now when I am there, I know that I can handle it."

The knowledge that fear can be handled contains all the elements for conquering it.

Even with all the new understanding of the biology of fear and of new treatments, Columbia's Kandel points out that there is still much to learn: "The human mind is the most complex problem in all of science," he says. "These are complex emotional problems that have intrigued philosophers from time immemorial. Plato and Aristotle struggled with these issues. It's not surprising that they haven't been solved." Clearly, they haven't. But for those who suffer from fear and phobias, the lack of a neat solution no longer means a lack of hope.

0 About the Author: Marianne Szegedy-Maszak is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report.

e n us Opportunity for successful entrepreneurs: Help others set up businesses.

Cost to you? Only $1,500. t's not an offer that is likely to appeal to business people who have built careers by staying ahead of rivals and checking the cost-versusbenefit ratio. Yet, since 1992, successful U.S.-based entrepreneurs of South Asian origin have been accepting just such an invitation, to become charter members of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) for no other reason than to help others like them succeed. The not-forprofit networking and mentoring group now has 42 chapters in the United States and eight other countries and says it is reaching out to promote entrepreneurs from all national backgrounds.

Any entrepreneur can join, paying a $100 fee, and is eligible to receive mentoring from the charter members, contacts and tips, entry to TiE Inc. events and programs.

"Entrepreneurship is very important to me. It is a way to make a difference," says Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande, 55, who joined the Forbes magazine list of the world's richest billionaires in 1997. Three years before that, he launched the Boston Chapter of TiE, the first outreach from the group that had started with a casual conversation among businessmen at a restaurant in Santa Clara, California.

"Entrepreneurship is the ability to say you will make a difference and go make it happen, as opposed to sitting around and complaining about things and being a

Monday morning quarterback," says Deshpande, in a phone interview from his home in Andover, Massachusetts. "To me it is a powerful concept and if you can promote it, it is a worthwhile cause."

Deshpande was the founder chairman of Cascade Communications, a two-person start-up in Westford, Massachusetts, that in a few years had grown to a company with $500 million in revenue and nearly 900 employees by developing a framerelay switch to move congested streams of data flowing across telephone lines. In June 1997, Deshpande sold Cascade for $3.7 billion to Ascend Communications of Alameda, California, and he was set to launch his new company, Sycamore Networks, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, which develops and markets optical networking products for telecommunications service providers.

Despite his success in the technology industry, Deshpande had another, nobler goal. He wanted to be a mentor to those who aspired to become entrepreneurs.

"The concept of having charter members who have to pay to help others is very unusual," Deshpande says. "At the beginning we all used to struggle with the question, 'What do people get for $1,5007' And we could never come up with a list that actually justified it. So truly, $1,500 gets you an opportunity to help other people."

The worldwide chapters are governed

by TiE Inc., based in the Silicon Valley area of California with 15 paid staff.

For the first time, a non-U.S.-based entrepreneur is leading TiE and the group says its initials now stand for Talent, Ideas, Enterprise. The cunent chairman is London-based Apurv Bagri, managing director of Metdist Group of companies, involved in metal trading, manufacturing and technology sector investment.

One of the founding members, Kailash Joshi, recalls the fIrst meeting, held to honor an Indian government official who did not arrive on time because of a delayed flight.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 8 "We decided to talk among ourselves and it turned out that some of these people had not met each other before," says Joshi, 63, a former IBM executive. "One guest suggested that this group should meet more often. That was the genesis of TiE. And then four or five of us started the group where we would meet once a month and people would share their success stories."

Among the group that day were Kanwal Rekhi, founder of Excelan, a computer networking company, who later became the first chairman of TiE Inc., and Suhas Pati!, founder and chairman emeritus of Cirrus Logic, a leading

semiconductor company.

"It was an informal network of successful entrepreneurs and executives who would get together for dinner and one person would talk about his life experiences and that went on for about 18 months," Joshi says, chatting by phone from Arizona. Later someone suggested that the group should start to mentor younger South Asians who were looking for guidance.

"And then we said we have the makings of an organization and we called it TiE, to encourage entrepreneurship among people from across the sub-

continent," Joshi says. "Somebody coined the name. Somebody came up with the logo. Some people started writing checks.

And in 1994 TiE really became an official organization. " The first TiE conference was held that same year in Silicon Valley to discuss issues that were of concern to South Asian entrepreneurs: how to find funding, write a business plan or market a company. "We thought we would get a couple of hundred people and that would be great, but we got 500 people and we were sold out," Joshi says.

The Boston Chapter was the first step TiE took to grow the organization outside of the Silicon Valley. The chapter now has more than 100 charter members, invited by other charter members, and runs a TiE institute where one-on-one mentoring and networking is provided to young, aspiring entrepreneurs.

The chapter's annual convention-TiE Con East-held in Wakefield, Massachusetts, in April, brought in some 1,000 people.

Charter members are generally very senior people, says Parag Saxena, chief executive officer of Invesco Private Capital, and head of the TiE Tri-State chapter that supports members in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. "The rule of thumb is that these are the people in the mentoring stage of their lives, the giving stage of their lives rather than in the needing stage of their lives," Saxena explains.

Rekhi, the first chairman of TiE Inc., took some major steps in globalizing the group, including launching chapters in India (there are 13 now) and in Pakistan.

Due to personal business commitments Rekhi did not finish his two-year term, and Deshpande took over from him.

Deshpande carried on Rekhi's vision to define what TiE meant to people outside the United States, especially in South Asia, the Indus region.

Last fall two-dozen Boston area venture capitalists, not all with ties to South Asia, paid $3,500 each for a weeklong trip to New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. It was part of TiE Inc.'s global efforts, Deshpande says, adding, "India is very hot right now. Everyone wants to know what India is about, but a lot of

also includes expanding Stanl c outside the field of hann ~ technology, the focus of I GrOin .;;'tel h S'l'Icon VII a ey ~ founders. ~ "As TiE's aspirations :;; ~ grew we realized that ~ without abandoning our ~ tech roots we needed to ~ embrace entrepreneurship Left: Kailash Joshi, founding member of TiE. Right: Charles in its widest possible Prince, CEO of Citigroup, at a TiE Tri-State convention. capacity," says Bagri, 45, who launched the British chapter in 2000. them haven't been there."

In addition to promoting TiE further in Such trips do not instantaneously generate investments in India. "But you the Indus region (the organization still couldn't have better publicity for India, does not have chapters in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka), he feels there is a need for a because when they come back that's what they will talk about for the next two stronger institutional structure. months to all their buddies," he says.

"Remember, it is a volunteer orga"There are two values we can bring to nization. All of us give our time, our India," Deshpande says, "to promote entrethoughts and money," he says. "The aim preneurship in a massive way, not just in is not to undermine that but to underpin hardware and software, but in all aspects; it with a professional organization and global connectivity. It looks like any which allows us to grow and to create opportunities in ways to maximize the part of the economy in India that is globally connected is doing extremely well. volunteer time that we put in. One of the "We don't want to become an industry issues of TiE was that we created all the specific organization, rather we want to chapters and the chapter network grew encourage entrepreneurship," he adds. before the central organization was ever "We want to make everybody aware that in place," he adds. "We are talking they have good entrepreneurship right about an organization of entrepreneurs around them. If we can showcase a and free spirits." TiE Inc. has not added any chapters in the past couple of years specific case, we can say that this person was able to achieve all of this despite the roadblocks.

And then we have the chapters in India to provide assistance."

In India, TiE's advisory board includes • Create an open, inclusive, and Infosys Chairman Narayan Murthy, Kiran transparent organization Mazumdar-Shaw, chairwoman of Biocon • Provide positive leadership role models India Limited, and K.V Kamath, CEO and • Emphasize value-creation through managing director of ICICI Bank Limited. informed entrepreneurship "They are into nation building," says • Maintain high ethical standards Deshpande, who is Murthy's brother-in• Display rigorous, intellectually honest law. "They have done their companies, behavior their industries and they are very • Pursue a modern, scientific and motivated to do something a little bigger.

The idea is not to showcase their stories, forward looking approach but to really use them as people who • Remain socially responsible actually promote the notion of • Do not tolerate pettiness, divisiveness entrepreneurship." and corruption The appointment of London-based • Strive to remain an idea- and valueBagri as the TiE Inc. chairman represents driven organization the maturation of the organization, which

TiE PhilosophV

as it consolidates the existing network.

It is the quality of leadership in each chapter that determines its success. The Silicon Valley chapter hosts four or more events each month, Joshi says. Recent events included a conversation with film producer Subhash Ghai, and a forum for Indian and American pharmaceutical companies.

Under Saxena's leadership, South Asians from the financial, management consulting, pharmaceutical, hospitality, real estate, handicrafts and jewelry industries have joined TiE Tri-State, with different sets of needs than the initial members in Silicon Valley.

"Unlike the Silicon Valley chapter, when I took over the presidency of TiE Tri-State, it was after the Internet bubble had burst," says Saxena, 50. "So that desire to quit your job, become an entrepreneur and raise venture capital had somewhat waned. Instead I found that people were looking for advice on how to get ahead in their jobs."

Initially the Tri-State chapter had only five charter members. Realizing that charter members are the life blood of TiE, Saxena approached Indian-Americans who were division presidents or above in substantial firms.

"I said we have to get these people and keep very high standards," Saxena says.

"Now we have more than 50 charter members and it is an extremely impressive list," which includes Victor Menezes, senior vice chairman of Citigroup; Rajat Gupta, senior partner worldwide of McKinsey & Co.; Ajit Jain, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Co.; and Ashwini Gupta, chairman of the board of American Express Centurion Bank.

TiE Tri-State often co-sponsors events with local Indian Institute of Technology alumni groups, especially in mentoring and networking programs. "These have been a huge success, they are always sold out," Saxena says. "We have one senior person and five or six people sit together for a dinner and they really get a chance to chat with everyone at the table."

D About the Author: Aseem Chhabra is a New York-based freelance writer and board member of the South Asian Journalists Association.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"Let's get down to businessWhere shall we go for lunch?"

Copyright © Tribune Media Services, All rights reserved.

[nc.

Copyright © The ew Yorker Collection 2004 Roz Chast from Canoonbank.com.

All rights reserved.

"You look exhausted.

Why don't you close your eyes and try to get some sleep during the management meeting?"

Copyright

© Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2004 The Saturday Evening Post Company.

Reprinted with permission.

I

Promote

_

ea ers I A fellowship in honor of former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey trains potential leaders.

he career of Subodh K. Gupta, an engineer working with rural development NGO Pradaan in Jharkhand, took an upward turn after he was granted a Humphrey Fellowship in 1999-2000. It allowed him to pursue a lO-month course at Cornell University in finance, banking and economic development. After his return, he moved to Hyderabad where he used his new knowledge as a consultant and later to set up his own company, Safal Solutions (P) Ltd., which develops software applications for providing services in rural areas. "The fellowship broadened my views on how things happen," says Gupta.

The Humphrey Fellowships Program was started in 1978 to encourage leadership in fields critical to the engagement of the United States with developing countries. In India, the program is administered by the U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI). It aims to initiate ties between Americans and their professional counterparts in other countries. Primarily funded by the U.S. Department of State, its mandate under the Fulbright Program is "to help educate a core group

T

" If you are a Humphrey,

of a new generation of world leaders." The International Education (lIE) in New York, program's name honors the public service a private nonprofit educational exchange career of Hubert H. Humphrey, the former agency, and other organizations. The felU.S. Vice President and Senator. According lows interact with American grass-roots to Adnan A. Siddiqi, counselor for cultural activists, private sector and NGO leaders, affairs at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, journalists and opinion makers.

"Humphrey was chosen because his was an The Humphrey fellows design their own -AMIT CHAKRABARTY, acquired, methodical and unassuming kind of individual programs, do extensive networkProfessor of Pharmacology leadership." ing and information gathering and ultimateand Epidemiology Humphrey was a Democrat from Minnely secure for themselves a six-week work sota who had been a teacher, radio commenexperience, called a professional affiliation, tator and mayor of Minneapolis before being elected to the Senate with a U.S.-based organization. They volunteer for community in 1948. He was Vice President under President Lyndon B. activities such as fairs, festivals, cultural performances and Johnson from 1964 to 1968. After losing the 1968 presidential teaching assignments and learn how to lead. They exchange election to Richard Nixon, Humphrey returned to Minnesota as a impressions on their strengths, weaknesses, cultures and potenuniversity teacher. He returned to the Senate in 1971, remaining tial and get first-hand experience of the American business, until his death in 1978. political and social systems.

The Humphrey Program focuses on mid-career professionals, "I have become more confident and have learnt the value aged 35 to 40, offering non-degree programs at U.S. universities of friendship and networking," says Rupsikha Borah, chief in public administration, finance and banking, economic develmanager, finance and accounts, at Oil India Limited and a opment, public health, journalism, education planning, natural fellow at Boston University in 2003-04. Broadening of vision, resources and environment, law and human rights and technoloexposure to new technology, networking with U.S. professiongy policy. The fellows work in groups to develop leadership and als and work experience with the U.S. Environmental other skills to "bring about change and make a difference," says Protection Agency in 199 I-92 helped Anand Chiplunkar, Michelle Johnson, senior program officer at the State Departfounder chairman of AIHF and senior vice president of IL&FS ment's Office of Global Education Programs in Washington, Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited in New D.C. In the past 26 years, 105 Indians have received Humphrey Delhi. "It gave me a better and closer understanding of the fellowships, the highest for any country. Worldwide, the program problems and priorities of different countries," he says. "The has benefited more than 3,000 professionals from 140 countries. multi-cultural exposure within the Humphrey Fellows and in "If you are a Humphrey [fellow], it matters little to the common the U.S. was certainly enriching. It made me more sensitive to man. But you feel different," says Amit Chakrabarty, additional behaviorial and social issues." professor of pharmacology and epidemiology at Sikkim Manipal The program does not have any country or regional quotas.

Institute of Medical Sciences in Gangtok. He was a fellow at Johns The number of participants changes every year depending on Hopkins University in Baltimore in 2002-03. the budget allocated by the U.S. Congress. The amount was The opportunity for professional growth is what interested Vini Mahajan, director in the Prime Minister's Office. She was Opposite page, top: Participants at the Third South Asia Regional a fellow in 2000-01 at the American University in Washington, Conference of Humphrey Fellows held at Agra in April.

D.C., where she studied economics and public finance. "I spent Below: Indian Humphrey fellows, (from left) Dr. Amit Chakrabarty, six months at the World Bank on infrastructure issues and professor at Sikkim Manipallnstitute of Medical Sciences; could understand a little the functioning of the U.S. governDoordarshan Program Director Usha Bhasin; retired IAS officer Babu ment," she says.

Jacob; Subodh K. Gupta, who set up Safal Solutions in Hyderabad; The fellows study leadership theory in a weekly seminar on Rupsikha Borah, chief manager, finance and accounts, ai/India campus and in special sessions organized by the Institute of Limited; and Vini Mahajan, director in the Prime Minister's Office.

it matters little to the common man. But you feel different."

From left: Association of Indian Humphrey Fellows (AIHF) Treasurer Gopi Nath Ghosh; Judith Babbits, assistant director of Humphrey Fellowship Division at the Institute of International Education in Washington, D.C.; Michelle Johnson, senior program officer at the Office of Global Education Programs in Washington, D.C.; and AIHF Secretary Dr. Nimish G. Desai at the Agra Fort.

$9 million for the 2004-05 academic year. The multistage selection process is quite complicated, explains Johnson. In each participating country, the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy, or the Fulbright Commission accepts applications in various fields that best fit the local context. After interviews, selected applications are sent to Washington, D.C., where review panels compare them on a regional basis. After an additional round of scrutiny, about two-thirds are considered for final selection. "We do not decide on numbers per country; we look at the strongest applications. The decisions are made on the strength of the candidate," Johnson says.

Fellows are professionals in their chosen fields, not academics, like most Fulbrighters. "The other unique thing about this program is that we do not have any expectations. We do not say you have to write a report," says Judith Babbits, assistant director of the Humphrey Fellowship Division at lIE. The universities compete to get fellows and every five years they re-compete. About $60,000 is spent on a fellow, including maintenance, air fare, monthly allowance and expenses for professional development, such as a conference trip, and the six-week practical experience.

Johnson, Babbits, Siddiqi and Gupta were among 50 participants at the Third South Asia Regional Conference of Humphrey Fellows at Agra in April. The conference on "Leadership for Public Service" was attended by fellows from 10 countries and organized by the Association of Indian Humphrey Fellows (AIHF), which formally registered last year. The first such conference was organized at Seoul in 200 I and the second at Kathmandu in 2002. Some of the Indian members sit on selection panels and mentor prospective fellows. Babbits Right: AIHF Founder Chairman Anand Chiplunkar.

Far right: Cultural Affairs Counselor Adnan A. Siddiqi.

says the Fellowship Program wants to support any kind of alumni association that fellows organize locally.

According to Johnson, the program instills a sense of greater confidence, helps the fellows present themselves better and suggests different methods of persuasion, problem solving and thinking.

The first two fellows from India were Indian Administrative Service officers, Ravi Mohan Sethi and Sitaraman Gurumurthi, in ]979-80. Sethi went to Boston University and Gurumurthi to Pennsylvania State University. Both studied public administration.

Babu Jacob, who retired as chief secretary to the Government of Kerala and is now adviser to the state government on urban renewal projects, went to Colorado State University as a fellow in 198081 to study economic development. "The program allowed a considerable amount of flexibility. One could better appreciate the economic linkages with different sectors," he says.

Doordarshan's Program Director Usha Bhasin was a fellow at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1996-97. "It has been so wonderfully designed that it helps you to do what you want to do. At the same time it opens new windows to many areas about which you haven't thought," she says. After the fellowship, she started working on media research and got a shortterm consultancy at the World Bank.

Gopi Nath Ghosh, assistant representative of the Food and Agricultural Organization in New Delhi, credits his ]986-87 fellowship with his advancement from a district manager at the National Dairy Development Board. "The most interesting component was the professional visits to various agriculture and agribusiness entities and the internship with the National Coop Business Association that allowed me to interact with many stalwarts in the field across the United States," he says.

According to USEFI's deputy director, Jamshed A. Siddiqui, the number of fellows has been increasing since 200] -02, when six Indians were selected. Eight were selected for 2004-05 and nine for 2005-06. About a quarter of all Indian Humphrey fellows have been women. In the past, mostly Indian civil servants were nominated, but since the late 1980s, there have been more professionals from the public, private and NGO sectors. "We would like to get people who are from outside the major cities, from rural areas," Babbits says.

With joint funding from lIE and the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Alumni Impact Awards were started in 200 I to further expand opportunities for Humphrey alumni. Four to five such awards are given every year. In 2003, the Program adopted online learning.

"Next year we have been asked to submit more names. Even a tiny country like Bhutan is being offered three fellowships this year, which is a great development. We are hoping that the U.S. government will put more money into the Humphrey fellowship," says Adnan Siddiqi.

0

"Poetry is serious business"

A.

frican American poet, novelist and teacher AI Young traveled across India in March and April for a series of poetry readings and lectures on art and spirituality in African American culture, charming his audiences with metaphors and imagery. The focus of his literary work is the multicultural and multilingual American society; and he said he felt a strong kinship with India since it, too, is a culturally diverse society.

Young, 66, mixes his verse with music, a legacy of his father, a jazz musician. In fact, he began his own career as a musician and often appears with musicians as he reads his poems.

"If you have the element of music within you, whatever skills you have, this love of yours will play an instrumental role in sharpening your creativities and making them more profound and effective," he told SPAN. He feels poetry is not merely about "express-

ing a rosy side of life; rather it is a genuine reflection of a culture. It's serious business." His recent work, Straight No Chaser, has political overtones, and Young acknowledges his recent poems have a more overt social and political agenda than earlier ones. "It should not raise eyebrows," he says. "In fact, if the subject of your poetry is a human being or the modern world, then you certainly cannot keep yourself aloof from political references."

In India, Young interacted with literary figures, faculty members and college students during programs organized by the Cultural Affairs Office of the U.S. Embassy at Chennai. He traveled to Kochi, Kottayam, Thiruvananthapuram, Chandigarh, New Delhi, Calcutta, Bhubaneshwar, Behrampur and Cuttack. He spoke often about building a society with love and harmony.

Young said he had collected Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat and Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali before his first tour of India, in 1991. He said they have influenced him deeply.

Young's poems and other works have been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Italian. Chinese, Russian and German. Some of his well-known writings are Mingus-Mingus, a memoir, Drowning in the Sea of Love, a musical memoir, and the anthologies Heaven, Conjugal Visits and The Sound of Dreams Remembered. He has also written criticism, essays, screenplays and novels.