SPAN: May/June, 2006 by SPAN magazine

ife is often painful for 9-year-old Risha Shukla. But the young resident of Irvine, California, puts aside her own suffering to bring a smile to other kids. Diagnosed six years ago with chronic pancreatitis, a rare disorder in children, Risha started the nonprofit Kids Who Care Foundation in 2004 to cheer up hospitalized children by sending them a "card quilt"-a paper mosaic of cheerful greetings and drawings. She received one from friends during a long hospital stay after surgery in March 2004. "It made me very happy and made my room colorful and cheerful. I wanted to do the same for other kids," says Risha, who attends Brywood Elementary School. Even though she has four other chron-

Above: Risha (left) with sister Rhea. Right: Students of Linda Vista Elementary School, Mission Viejo, California, get together to draw cards.

ic ailments that have no cure and at times spends days doubled up in pain, her mission keeps her going. She organizes cardmaking parties every three months with help from neighbors, her 7-year-old sister Rhea, and parents Chetan, born in Uganda, and Anisha, born in Mumbai. Kids make bright "Get well" wishes with stickers, glitter, drawings and jokes. Risha visits schools in the area to seek help in making cards and talks about her experiences to educate young people about chronic diseases. "Kids making quilt cards learn to be more compassionate to kids with diseases because they see whom they are helping," she says. The foundation has three programs: The Kids Who Care Club, which sends the

cards; My Journal, where parents of children in hospitals can share experiences on-line; and the Pancreatitis Support Group, an on-line forum. The club has sent out more than 3,000 cards that were made into 165 card quilts. Requests are made on its Web site [http://www.kidswhocareclub.orgl] from all over the United States and other countries. Besides other recognition, Risha was chosen as "Hero Kid of the Year" by the Spirit of Giving program of the Mission Hospital in Orange County, California, this February. She also spoke on the benefits of volunteering by children at the National and Global Youth Service Day banquet at the University of California, Irvine, in April. -O.K.

A LETTER FROM

THE

PUBLISHER'

or decades, the United States has been welcoming Indian students, teachers and researchers to enrich, and be enriched by, America's universities and colleges. Many of these exchanges are subsidized by the educational institutions themselves or by U.S. government funding, through fellowships, scholarships and other programs. For the past four years, India has surpassed all other countries in the number of students it sends to the United States; 80,466 enrolled for the 2004-05 academic year. American students are coming to India, too, to learn about the history, culture, economics and political system, as well as to gain from cooperating in top-level science, engineering and agricultural research. More than in the past, these students come speaking Hindi and other Indian languages, or they come to learn them. President George W. Bush has encouraged this, funding an initiative that includes Hindi and Urdu among the strategically important languages for American students to learn as our countries grow closer and young people of both nations grow up to become global citizens. Also, universities are linking up to share professors-in person and virtually-recognize each other's'courses and someday, perhaps, issue joint degrees. The mutual desire of our two peoples for quality education serves as a foundation for more cooperation in other fields. In this special issue we have focused on higher education in response to requests from hundreds of readers. Many of the articles carry Internet links to help you find additional information. This is a new feature aimed at making SPAN more useful to you; and we provide even more links on our Web site, so we hope you will visit us there.

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Front cover: Business school graduates cheer while waving dollar bills and international flags during Harvard University's 2004 commencement ceremonies. (Photograph by Michael Dwyer © AP-WWP) Published by the PublicAffairsSection,AmericanCenter,24 KasturbaGandhiMarg,New Delhi 110001 (phone: 23316841), on behallof the AmericanEmbassy,NewDelhi. Printed at AiantaOllset& PackagingsLid., 95-8 WazirpurIndustrialArea,Delhi 110052. Theopinions expressedinthismagazinedonotnecessarilyreflecttheviewsorpoliciesot

theU.S.Government.Nopartot this magazinernaybereproducedwilhoulpermission. Thismagazinecontains68 pages.

By Deepanjali Kakati

USEFI: An Educational and Cultural Bridge An interviewby LaurindaKeysLong Possible

Sources

of Financial

Aid By Martina Schulze

Private Higher Education Excerptsfrom a speech by HarvardUniversity PresidentLawrenceH. Summers

Costs and Choices in American University Life By Monica Mercer

Strength Out of Diversity

By RichardEkman

Teaching with Tech ByVickyHallett Indian Higher Education

Gets American

Wings By Giriraj Agarwal

Americans Studying in India By A. Venkata Narayanaand Laurinda Keys Long frj

.26 • 27

•

30 34

World Press Freedom By Madhuri Sehgal

Travel: Let a Camera Be Your Eye By lIana Ozernoy

Searching for a Hoopoe

ByThomasL Walley

Audubon: Birdman of America

By Richard Rhodes

A purple sunbird at Roosevelt House, New Delhi.

Sports Publisher:MichaelH.Anderson Editor-in-Chief:CorinaR.Sanders Editor:LaurindaKeysLong AssociateEditor: A.VankataNarayana UrduEditor:AnjumNaim Hindi Editor:GirirajAgarwal CopyEditor:DeepanjaliKakatiArt Director:HemantBhatnagar DeputyArtDirector:KhurshidAnwarAbbasi EditorialAssistant:ShaliniVermaProduction/CirculationManager:RakeshAgrawal PrintingAssistant:AlokKaushik BusinessManager:R.Narayan ResearchServices:AmericanInformationResourceCenter,Bureauof International InformationPrograms.

Getting Into a U,S, Graduate School

44 8 Mrunal Patel(left) and Nisarg Patelof the United States ©

run against Namibia in the Ice Under-l 9 Cricket World Cup

2 44

Images of Fortitude Let's Play Ball! Mind Movies

51 52

By Deepanjali Kakati

ByAdnan A Siddiqi

ByJoshFischman

On the Lighter Side Making Copies

By David Owen

Spotligllt: Vishakha Desai By Ramola Talwar Badam CORRECTION:Photographsfor the article, "Agricultural KnowledgeInitiative" in the March/April 2006 issue of SPANwerelaken by IG Venkatesh.

he United States is a favorite destination for Indians an enormous choice for higher studies. In fact, it would not be planning to pursue higher education abroad. There were an exaggeration to say that there is always one perfect college almost 58,000 Indian graduate students in the United for every individual," says Jamshed A. Siddiqui, deputy director States in the 2004-05 academic year, says the nonprofit of USEFI. Institute of International Education. India overtook Manish Khanna, an engineering student at the Netaji Subhas China in 2001-02 as the primary country of origin for most forInstitute of Technology in New Delhi, says that what led him to eign students in the United States. plan higher studies in the United States is that "the curriculum is For Sadaf Humayun, an engineering graduate from Aligarh more flexible and accommodates the individual student's needs." Muslim University, the United States represents an~opporHe also appreciates the "proper funding for research." tunity to pursue cutting-edge research. "There are limTo draw up a list of institutions that meet your needs its to what we can do in India as far check out their Web sites, write to as research is concerned and the Readers interested in seeing the the professors and admissions education system itself operates personnel for more details, visit within certain constraints. But CD-Rom" USEFI, interact with students universities in the United States who have studied there or attend please send an e-mail to Vijaya Khandavilli at offer excellent research facilities, U.S. University Fairs in India. students have a lot of freedom to . fl. I During the February-March 2006 explore their skills and decide visit to India by Linden what they want to learn," says Educational Services-which Humayun. helps U.S. universities recruit international students-stuA graduate degree program in the United States is what we in dents in Mumbai, Bangalore and New Delhi got to meet admisIndia call postgraduate studies. Degrees awarded by graduate sions officials from more than 24 institutions. If you have schools include master's degrees, doctorates and other postgraduenough money, you can visit the campuses or take a summer ate qualifications. The academic year usually lasts nine months, course. Many schools organize campus tours led by current stufrom August/September to May/June and may be divided into dents. You should narrow down your university choices by two, three or four terms, depending on the institution. If there are August to be ready for the following year's fall term, because two, they are called fall and spring terms. "It is best to join in the there is still more to do: applying, seeking financial aid, arrangfall term as scholarship opportunities are more readily available ing for a visa, transportation and housing. and it is a full-fledged session," says Luna Das, educational advis"Students should look beyond Ivy League colleges because er for North India at the United States Educational Foundation in there might be some lesser known but excellent school that India (USEFI), the only official source designated by the U.S. offers exactly what you are looking for. Do not reject a univergovernment to give up-to-date, impartial and accurate information sity or college just because your family or friends have not heard about higher education opportunities in America. of it before," advises Das. A department's reputation relies heavFor students aiming to join in the fall term in 2001, it is time ily on the quality of its faculty and sometimes it is more importo get moving. "With more than 3,600 accredited institutions tant to study under a particular person than at a university with and tens of thousands of academic programs, Indian students get a prestigious name. One should also check whether a degree from the school you are applying to will be recog~ nized in India. ~ Suchi Sood, a final year student of physiotherapy ~ at Delhi University who will apply for a master's program in the United States, says studying there means "a chance to learn much more because of its greater expertise in this field. Our options are limited here because it is not a well known subject in India," says Sood. All the necessary requirements like the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) or Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) must be taken between May and October 2006 for the fall 2007 term. The TOEFL score is important for applicants from India, as for other international students.

Inside Graduate Admissions,"

Richard Johnson, director, International Relations (Asia), University of San Francisco, talks with students at the Linden U.S. University Fair in New Delhi in February 2005.

Right: Musician Melissa Etheridge talks about her battle with cancer at a Biology of Cancer class at the University of California, Los Angeles. Right, below: Emily Franks, a graduate student at the University of Findlay, draws house plans between classes in the Center for Fine and Performing Arts building on the campus of Owens Community College in Perrysburg, Ohio. She saves monel} by taking basic courses at the two-year school.

l ÂŤ

Admissions committees also assess your proficiency in English is through the GRE verbal score and your written statement of pur- ~ pose. "Our students need to be able to think on their feet and to ~ do that in English, which is the language of instruction," says Stuart J. Sigman, dean of the School of Communication at Emerson College, Massachusetts. If you have a list of schools ready by the time you take these tests you can ask that your scores be sent to them, saving time and money.

After shortlisting the schools it is time to tile your applications between November 2006 and March 2007. Your packet should have the completed application form, academic credentials, test scores, the statement of purpose, letters of recommendation, application fee and, whenever necessary, supplemental materials like a portfolio of creative work or details about work experience. "Indian students must remember that admission to U.S. universities takes place on two levels-eligibility and admissibility. Besides test scores, they also take into account factors like published articles, research projects and the focus of your studies," says Vijaya Khandavilli, the USEFI country coordinator of Educational Advising Services. You can expect to hear from the universities in April, Mayor June 2007. To be eligible to apply for a graduate program in the United States students must complete 16 years of school and college study. As India has three-year degree programs and students end up with 15 years of education, they have a number of options to get that extra year of study. They can do one year of postgraduate study, opt for a correspondence course with an institution like the Indira Gandhi National Open University or complete a one- or two-year postgraduate diploma program recognized by the Government of India. But that extra year needs to be carefully planned. As Evelyn Tate, director of graduate admissions and fmancial aid at the Boston University School of Management, says, "We would look more favorably upon a candidate who would have taken some of the more advanced courses as opposed to having taken more of the introductory level courses and sort of aced his or her way through." Schools also take into account whether the candidate has taken courses relevant to the program applied for. The statement 01 pUrpose that American universities require applicants to write is your opportunity to show how the program you have applied for fits into your long-term goals. Sigman has some advice: "Write it yourself. We can actually tell if other people have written your essay. One of the reasons we can tell is your professional writer does not have the .. .interest in the program." Four questions should be answered in the essay: Why you want to pursue a graduate degree, what your academic or ~esearch interests are, why you have applied to this particular school and what special skills you can bring to the classroom. In other words, there should not be details about where you were , born, what school you went to, what sports you participated in, as

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ these are ignored by the selection committees. Most universities set a length and you should stick to that. When seeking letters of recommendation, it helps to choose people who know you and your skills well. Your recommendation will be much stronger "if you choose the one professor you realIy had contact with and provide him with a reminder of the courses you had together and the special projects you worked on," says Susan Lee Albin, professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Amajor issuelorloreign students islunding. Besides getting together your financial records like bank statements well ahead of time, it also helps if you don't send your application in bits and pieces as this delays the selection process and you run the risk of losing out on funding. "We have to make sure that we are following federal regulations and they require that we demonstrate that students have a full year of funding somewhere, whether it's funding from the school or from some other source," says Chris J. Foley, director of international admissions at Indiana University. Funding at U.S. graduate schools comes in the form of assistantships-research, teaching and administrative. "Students interested in research must select departments and universities that are research intensive and check out the profile of the faculty. For teaching assistantships, the department applied to should have an undergrad section. Otherwise, whom will you teach? As for administrative assistantships, IT and administrative skills are essential," says Khandavilli. . Once you get admission to the program of your choice, you should have your student visa in hand by August 2007. Then it is time to pack your bags and get set for the adventure that awaits in the United States. 0

USEFI An

Education and Cultural Bridge An Interview with JANE E. SCHUKOSKE by LAURINDA KEYS LONG

n attorney, a law professor, an academic, a researcher, a writer, an activist, a senior Fulbright scholar, a lecturer and an administrator. They are all one person: Jane E. Schukoske, who since May 2000 has been executive director of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI). Popularly known as the Fulbright Commission, USEFI was created by a 1950 treaty to promote mutual understanding between Indians and Americans through educational exchanges. Scholars, professional experts, teachers, lecturers and researchers-people like Professor Schukoske-travel between the two countries with guidance, advice, encouragement, information and funding arranged by USEFI. Fellowships are primarily funded by U.S. government agencies as part of the worldwide Fulbright Program, and, to expand their availability, USEFI is always seeking educational institutions, businesses and organizations in India and the United States to help sponsor a visiting lecturer, student, researcher or seminar. USEFI also administers the U.S. State Department-funded Humphrey Fellowships, the Ford Foundation-funded International Fellowships Program and others, arranges conferences and workshops, and sponsors appearances

by Fulbright alumni who return to India to share their experiences and education. Members of the USEFI Board, five Indians and five Americans, volunteer their time to set policies for and advise the Foundation, approve its budget and participate on committees which recommend qualified applicants for fellowships in the United States. From its newly renovated headquarters in New Delhi, and from offices in Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta, USEFI also conducts informational programs throughout India to provide up-to-date, accurate and unbiased guidance for students interested in pursuing higher education at one of the 3,600 accredited colleges and universities in the United States. Professor Schukoske took a leave of absence from her work as an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law in Maryland to become USEFI executive director six years ago. While based in Sri Lanka as a senior Fulbright scholar in 1995-96, she had often been invited to lecture at Indian law schools, where she enjoyed the academic debate and felt the country's "vibrancy and warmth." On a return visit, she heard about the USEFI vacancy. It was initially a two-year assignment, but she has stayed on, challenged and energized by her work, Professor Schukoske told SPAN:

Why is the USEFI program important to the United States? To India? To both countries, USEFI is a valuable educational and cultural bridge. USEFI's mission-Indo-U.S. educational and cultural exchange in the arts, humanities and social sciences-is part of the people-topeople diplomacy valued by the United States to nurture understanding, friendships and professional relationships between Indians and Americans. For India, USEFI's fellowships cultivate appreciation of ancient and contemporary India in the United States and bring American lecturers into Indian classrooms. USEFI's educational advising services provide Indian students access to accurate information about U.S. higher education. USEFI also encourages Amelican students to pursue "Study India" programs. What are the criteria you use for choosing Fulbright fellows? To begin with, we're looking for people who have a clear research proposal that is doable within the time frame allowed. Successful applicants explain why it's important to go to the United States to do the research and how it would be relevant to India. In all our Fulbright scholarships we're looking for people who would be good cultural ambassadors and willing and able to share their Fulbright experience and their learning in

What are the common misconceptions about Fulbright fellowships? The Fulbright selection process is truly a transparent, merit-based process. Sometimes that's hard for people to believe. But our reputation for faimess is well established and I'm very pleased that I've experienced no interference.

What do you like most about your job?

their disciplines when they come back to India.

Is there a certain kind of research project that has a better chance of earning a fellowship? The current focus is on issues of contemporary relevance. That cuts across so many fields. So it's not that there is a magic discipline, but that somebody has a fresh, good idea that is really relevant to both India and the United States.

What kind of personality do the selection committees like to see? Committees look for self-starters who would reach out to the communities in which they're studying or researching in the United States and people who are willing to, upon return to India, reach out beyond their own institutions. We often arrange speaking engagements for them to talk about their work in the United States and some people are invited to help at predeparture orientation programs for the next batch of scholars.

Do they get any pay for this? It's hardly worth mentioning, taxi fare, .basically. Fulbright scholars are proud of their selection and experience, and are eager to give back to the communIty by sharing their learning.

It requires every wit I have! Many aspects of this job energize me: working with highly talented board members, scholars, students and staff; leading a team to creatively design workshops that feature the cross-cultural learning USEFI supports, and encouraging collaborative projects involving our scholars. And, on a day-to-day level, there is satisfaction in being able to place environmental economist Jim Stevens in Mizoram-the first American Fulbrighter there in memory. I enjoy seeing the enthusiasm of our Fulbright students working on issues critically important to India, such as Michelle Rosenthal's research on girls' education in rural Maharashtra and Ravi Satkalrni's research on Indian Americans' role in governance upon return to India.

What has been the most satisfying specific experience? Seeing people collaborate across communities and cultures. Fulbrighters have banded together to do tsunami relief work, to publish journals featuring Indian and American writing, to plan environmental protection strategies and to further Indo-Pak dialogue. A group of Indian and Pakistani secondary school teachers of English have come back from their U.S. study to train the teachers in their school systems. Dance therapist Priti Patel leads troupes of adults and youngsters with special needs.

What is the Indian government connection with USEFI? The Indian government appoints the five Indian Board members, people from academia, business and government. Board appointments are annual, according to our treaty, but often there are reappointments to provide continuity. The Indian govemment provides a refund of sales, excise and customs taxes that USEFI has paid. In addition, private Indian institu-

tions often provide in-kind contributions or cost-share our conferences.

Where does USEFI get funding? Most of our funding is from the U.S. Department of State. We also receive funding from the U.S. Department of Education. We receive a grant from the U.S. International Fellowships Fund in New York funded by the Ford Foundation. We have a contract as the local representative for the East-West Center in Hawaii. Fulbright alumni donate, and students at universities pay for services received from our educational advising offices.

What are the fees for information about higher education in the United States? USEFI's annual student membership cost is Rs. 1,500. There are certain other small fees for USEFI services. This fee level is much less than that charged by private agents to counsel scholars about education abroad. About 80 percent of the people desiring to study abroad go for graduate studies, so they become members when they are at university. We are seeing growing interest in undergraduate education in the United States so some secondary school students and secondary school guidance counselors come to us for advice.

Why is it important for U.S. universities and colleges to have Indian students? Indian students who go to the United States are highly motivated and top performers. In addition to their academic abilities, they are valued in U.S. classrooms for the perspective they add to the class.

What are your aims? As the higher education environment rapidly changes, there is a lot of opportunity for innovating, for seeing new ways to connect people and institutions and there are lots of interesting cross-cultural topics that our scholars are researching. It's great fun facilitating dialogue across cultures. That's what this job is about.

So,you're doing somethingworthwhile? Yes. It's worthwhile in any era but it's particularly crucial in these times when there is so much misunderstanding cross-culturally.

IS CII

What's most challenging? The most challenging aspects of the job are staying up with the constantly evolving higher education environment. That's also extremely satisfying. We see lots of delegations from U.S. universities coming to India; some led by university presidents. They're interested in forging new relationships with Indian institutions. India is examining the issue of how it wants to regulate the entry of foreign edu-

cators. As we try to imagine innovative possibilities we also have to track the regulatory situation. So it's challenging to be creative and realistic at the same time.

Are you talking about joint degrees, on-line degrees, branches of American universities in India? All those things. We have had people come to India who are setting up virtual classrooms between the United States

and India. We know U.S. institutions that would like to have a physical presence in India. We know of a lot of institutions that have twinning programs where Indian students take two years of study here and transfer to the United States for the final two years of study. Some of these arrangements are currently feasible. Others will take more guidance from India as to what it's interested in hosting. D

Possible Sources of Financial Ai ~ :0: Princeton University's Jarrett ~ Walters on graduation day. w N

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~ the sciences than in social sci~ ences and humanities. And there is ~ generally more money for international students applying for academic than for professional programs. Incidentally, chances of receiving financial aid from the host institution increase during the second year of studies.

What kind of financial aid is available from U.S. sources?

An expert outlines where international students, particularly graduate students, can look for financial aid, and how to make a successful application. ore than 500,000 international students successfully apply for admission to U.S. colleges and universities every year. According to the Institute of International Education, some 67 percent of them rely on family funds to pay for their studies in America. But for many, applying for adequate financial support is a crucial part of their application. On average, international students will have to pay between $16,000 and $46,500 for tuition and living expenses for an academic year in the United States.

Where do international students receive financial support? The main sources for financial aid outside of personal funds are the host U.S. college or university, with 23 percent offering aid, followed by the home government or university with 2.4 percent The overall picture changes, though, when one compares the percentages for undergraduate and graduate students: While only about 10 percent of all international undergraduates receive financial support from their host institution, 41 percent of all graduate students are supported by their host university Many of them work as research and teaching assistants at doctoral and research institutions. Moreover, there are more funds available for PhD programs than for master's programs, as well as more funds in

International undergraduate students can apply for partial scholarships, primarily from private colleges and universities; they also are eligible for athletic scholarships and can apply for student loans. Graduate students can apply for teaching, research and administrative assistantships, as well as for fellowships and scholarships from private and public universities. Applying for a student loan is also an option

How do you successfully apply for financial aid? Start early with your preparations and research, preferably 15 to 18 months before your studies will begin. Learn about scholarships offered by your home government and university, and apply early. Do your research: Visit an EducationUSA-supported advising center, and study the special ized reference works on U.S, colleges

and universities and prospective departments, which offer information on how much financial aid is available. Also, use the Internet to learn as much as possible about the four to six institutions that you are applying to. If you are a graduate student, run a Web search and get to know your professors before you apply. They are the people who will decide which new graduate assistants are accepted, and they should have heard from you before they review your application package. Don't be shy about asking for financial aid. Send a second letter if your first application for financial aid has been denied, and address it to a specific person in the academic department or admissions office. If you don't succeed the first time, call to learn why your application was not successful and apply again with a stronger application the next year. Financial aid for international students is limited and the competition is keen. To increaseyour chances of success, you should demonstrate that your academic qualifications are first-rate; study hard to get excellent TOEFL, SAT, GMAT or GRE scores; show that you have some private funds, or show your financial need; and send in a neat, complete and well-researched application. D About the Author: Martina Schulze is an educational adviser at the American Center in Hamburg, Germany

Private Higher Education

Opportunities and Challenges Excerpts from remarks by Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers at the Higher Education Summit of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, New Delhi, March 23, 2006: .. .I was impressed by some figures that I was given suggesting that the U.S. and India have in common that about 70 percent of all education is publicly fmanced and 30 percent privately financed. But a sharp distinction between the U.S. and India occurs at the higher education levels-only 20 percent of Indian education is fmanced privately whereas more like 50 percent of American education is financed privately .... Why [is] this so important? ... Wisdom: Education is in many ways the foundation for civil society and the basis for democracy. Prosperity: There can be no question that, increasingly, higher education is central to prosperity and creating the kind of leaders of institutions that can drive an economy forward .... Opportunity: ... Without providing a strong basis for individuals born in any circumstances to move to higher education there is not the possibility of creating the kind of equality of opportunity based on merit and excellence on which the legitimacy of our society depends .... Five lessons from the American experience for you to consider in strengthening your higher education system: • The most important guarantor of both quality and adequate investments in American higher education is competition .... [For example our] History Department is constantly engaged in thinking about which outstanding historians from other universities we could-with appropriate tactics, appropriate salaries, with an appropriate offer-bid away from another institution .... If there is a single reason why American education has excelled, it is the brutal competition for students, for faculty, for grant funds .... At the federal level in the U.S. we rely primarily on direct federal support for students, who can then take that support to the institutions they choose, who then compete to attract the best students .... • American higher education depends on flexibility and the D.- capacity to respond. ~ Unlike what takes place ~ in the primary and sec~ ondary level, there is in ~ the U.S. no standard for 'l what constitutes a necStudents take their meals at the Memorial Hall on the Harvard campus.

(From left) Lawrence H. Summers, FICer President Saroj Kumar Poddar and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia at the education summit. essary curriculum. No mandate as to how the academic calendar is to be organized. No set of requirements for what a university must provide .... The culture of American private institutions, in which leaders are selected, not by members of the faculty or student body or staff, but by independent trustees, is a powerful spur to quality .... Success depends on flexibility. That means, for example, that at Harvard and other great universities there are no fixed salary scales. When an extraordinary professor gets an extraordinary opportunity, we are in a position to change her salary. People of different ages or in different fields, because of conditions in the marketplace, have salaries that can differ by a factor of two or three. Students who want to change their curriculum or forge a major that cuts across two different fields are permitted to do so .... • Universities must be places based on the authority of ideas, rather than the idea of authority .... There is no question that should be impossible to ask, no subject that should be beyond the scope of inquiry, no issue that should be regarded as finally settled, and no one who should be above or beyond debate .... • There must be generous philanthropy. Our ability to maintain an institution like Harvard, the United States' ability to maintain a system of private higher education, depends on ...wealthy individuals who recognize their obligation to an institution that gave them their start, or to giving something back to society, or to promoting a cause that they believe in. It depends on a government's set of policies, ranging from tax deductions to an attitude taken by public officials that celebrates and welcomes, and is unthreatened by, individual generosity .... • Successful universities focus on research and on professional education as well as on undergraduate study .... Universities have as their objective not just training students, but providing new knowledge. 0

hen I walked onto the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai for the first time this past January, I was impressed. It seemed cleaner and greener than other Indian universities, and there was a palpable intelligence in the air. But was I imagining it because of the hype? My lIT alumni friends had always half-jokingly (but I'm sure were deadly serious) dropped hints that the school only takes the best of the best. My rudimentary assessment was that it's basically the Indian counterpart of America's Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, another world-class university with mythical status and the ability to invoke both awe and envy with a single breath. A few weeks later I was visiting 19year-old mechanical engineering student Rohan Paranjpey in his hostel room at lIT, walls scribbled with drawings from the student before him, cupboards sparsely lined with toiletries, Tracy Chapman singing through the iPod sound system. The room with its cement floor was rough around the edges, but could have been a dorm room on any allAmerican university campus. Smart and handsome with a dream of

designing cars, Mumbai native Paranjpey played down his entrance to lIT, chalking it up mostly to luck. He invited me to leave my own legacy on the wall-the cement was crumbling and scheduled to be repainted. Paranjpey received a call from his friend Neetha Nair, a 21-yearold who had just received her first rejection from one of several MBA programs she had applied for in the United States. She had called for consolation, and I thought to myself that at least one thing is a sure bet around the world: Playing the higher education game-whether it's an Indian student trying to get into an lIT, an

Indian student trying to make it to America, or an American just trying to make it to his or her local junior collegewill always invite varying degrees of surprise, disappointment and rejection. Yet the American higher education experience is unique and difficult to neatly characterize, which brings me back to that crumbling, scribbled wall as I remember my own ride through the system. The ride at times seemed planned, but was more often improvised,

because there are as many ways to get your education in America as there are typical American 18-year-olds every year who sweat over whether they will be admitted to their top school choices, what to study and how to pay for it. Starting with the "how" of paying for college, it's nothing short of stressful and usually requires creative thinking unless, as the saying goes, you've been born with a silver spoon in your mouth. If I had scribbled on my newly-remodeled dorm

http://www.state.gov/r/summiV58708.htm

US University Presidents' Comments on Education

Far left: James Marshall walks down the steps of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Center: Students at the Carl Icahn laboratory at Princeton University. Above: Cornell University graduate student Taran Sirvent works at the laboratory.

room wall at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, I probably would have been slapped with a $500 repainting fee, or it would have been taken out of my hefty deposit. It's just a small entry in a long list of financial concerns that will often trump all others for the average American student, including which college to go to. My tuition to the traditional SMU

hovered around $18,000 a year in 1997, but now costs $23,846 for the 2005-06 academic year. The school estimates that with additional fees, a place to live on campus and cafeteria food three times a day (called room and board), you could very well end up spending at least $36,000 a year for a typical four-year bachelor's degree at SMD. And SMU claims that's a bargain. Duke University, another private institution, charges $32,600 for tuition alone, not including room and board. Despite the intimidating price tags from where I stood as a high school graduate in 1995, my money situation

y short-term advice is: learn basic cooking. Also, develop people skills. "Indians tend to be intellectually,great but are relatively Gutoff from the 째rest,of us': "is the general complaint from other students. For the long term, figure{)ut what you want to see yourself doing five years later. We have heard repeatedly from visitingo CEOs, "You will all make it big, so go after what you like." Use theJwo years explori(:lgyour personality. Don't erid up with the job you ditln't care about but your neighbor always wanted. was the catalyst for taking a detour from the conventional four-year commitment to one university or college. The numbers I had to work with weren't exactly high. I'm from the state of Nebraska where my father still operates a large farm that produces industrial corn and soybeans. Every summer we would sell sweet corn, but even after years of running the seasonal business and my father putting the money into college accounts for all five children, there still wasn't enough to pay for four years at a place like SMU. It was clear I would need' to do some juggling. I decided instead to go to a

small two-year school called Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri, which was less expensive, but also a women's school with a good academic reputation. My parents could pay for those first two years, and then I transferred my credits for the classes I had taken to SMU, which has a half-tuition "transfer student scholarship" for those who come in with at least a 3.5 grade point average out of a possible 4.0, which means perfect grades in all classes. I borrowed the rest of the money from the government at a low interest rate and graduated in 1999 with just over $10,000 in student debt-well below the national average of postgraduate debt. My personal experience speaks volumes on the flexibility of education in America where many students go to junior colleges first and then transfer, or choose less expensive state universities. It's a viable option that can save thousands of dollars for foreign students as well since non-citizens are ineligible for low-interest government loans. Colleges and universities require students to take a certain number and type of classes to earn a degree, so taking basic courses at a less expensive junior college can save money. Credit for those classes goes with you if you transfer to another college or university and counts toward your degree requirement at the new, often more prestigious school. The tuition of places like Harvard, Princeton or Yale is similar to Duke, and it's a good reason these schools are not the destinations of most high school graduates. Yet, after money, there is also the issue of choosing the right school and taking care not to fall into the trap of thinking the top-ranked schools are always better just because it is hard to gain admittance. Prestige does not figure so prominently on the American educational landscape as it once did. Although Matt Daniels, 27, an American who now lives and works in Mumbai, applied to five top schools-Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia and the University of Michigan-and got into all of them, he graduated from Harvard with a mixed bag. "Harvard has a wealth of longstanding institutions, many of which, like the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and Let's Go

Publications, you won't find at any old college, even at an Ivy. They enriched my four years considerably," Daniels said. "Most of all, spending all that time amid the (usually) bright, versatile, manic, ambitious student body is its own education." What's in a name, then, when we're talking about an American education, even if it's Harvard? When asked if he had always planned on going there, Daniels said, "No, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. I thought maybe I'd go into robotics or something. Had I known then what I know now about the school (Daniels said he found Harvard a forbidding place that sometimes stifles innovation and has professors who are stingy with teaching and advising), I'd probably have chosen differently, though knowing what I know now about myself, I'd make the same choice again. Make sense? Another way to put that: Harvard was instrumental in my personal development, though it was frequently negligent with regard to my intellectual development. " The lesson is that American high school graduates who have literally thousands of college options do not live in a pressurecooker environment of constant competition or expectations that they will attend high-ranking universities. They don't have to, because many lesser-known institutions offer equally high-quality educations. In fact, once the money issues are taken care of, there is almost a luxurious freedom on the American education front not replicated anywhere else in the world. All places of higher learning in America have their good and bad points and, as Daniels suggests, it is often incumbent upon the student to make' the experience a positive one. Navin Jayasekar, 29, of Atlanta, Georgia, who came to America when he was 17, said, "I was taken aback by the culture, independence and freedom." He remembered his time at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, as eye opening to the advantages and disadvantages of choosing a small regional school. Shorter was private, with a homogeneous student body, but offered personal attention from professors. It also had a reputation for "southern hospitality" that Jayasekar said had infiltrated his parents' consciousness

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B'oston Experi en ce

joined Boston University in the fall of 2001 as a graduate student in the College of Engineering. Boston has long been recognized as the academic capital of America and more than 250,000 students go there annually to study at the approximately 50 colleges and universities in the area. I chose BU not just for its location but also because I got a full tuition waiver and a teaching/research assistantship

that would cover my living expenses. Higher education is expensive in the United States and it's often difficult for students from India to study if they don't have some form of financial assistance or loans. The first thing that struck me was the resources that are made available to students. I was really amazed by the great research opportunities and very good library services. The faculty has a great deal

study. Hence, time management is an integral requirement in a graduate student's life. Course work is, of course, given due importance, but the lifeblood of the American universities is the involvement in research and thus advancement of scientific knowledge. This is a major difference that I observed between the universities in the United States and those in India, with a few exceptions. Another difference that I found

leam it the hard way. But we were fortunate to have friends who helped and encouraged us. The campus had a multicultural and multinational student population. Studying in a country with such an international heritage opens up your mind about human diversity. American citizens are proud of their country and culture, yet are open minded enough to allow foreigners to come to their land to study and work.

From left: Simly Vas on graduation day at Boston University; Boston University School of Management students; Boston University's Corinne Jean (left) loses the ball as Boston College's Aja Parham looks on, during a basketball game; guitarist James Valentine of the Maroon 5 band performs at the Agganis Arena at Boston University.

of influence in all academic areas. You have the opportunity to study with highly accomplished professors who bring their scholarly and professional pursuits into the classroom as original teaching material. They encourage you to take personal initiative in research work rather than dictate what to do. Graduate study in the United States is very demanding for certain disciplines and of a relatively short time frame compared to undergraduate

was that the Indian education system gives more importance to theoretical knowledge and numerical problem-solving skills while the American system is geared more toward practical exposure and handson skills. The difference was more obvious as I had a friend who got his undergraduate de~ee from one of India's best technical institutes, was an expert at problem solving but found himself at a loss when it came to lab skills. So we had to

As advice to other prospective foreign students I would say: involve yourselves in college activities besides studies, do not interact with just students of your community, but reach out to students of different countries and you will learn a lot more than you can possibly imagine. D About the Author: Simly Vas worked with Johnson & Johnson in Boston. before returning to India in 2004. She lives in Bangalore.

Jill

he biggest challenge I faced as a graduate student was to cope with the uncertainty about completion. The question is not when one will finish one's graduate studies, rather whether one would be able to do so. The research component is substantial. It is expected that, as a graduate student, one should be able to conduct research and publish scholarly articles independently with minimal

supervision. The path of original research is bound to be ridden with frustration from time to time. But that is how, ultimately, research maturity is inculcated by the system. Students (and parents) should avoid being paranoid about finding information about everything, starting from housing to the details of the academic system. Most things are best, and only, learned upon arrival. Nearly all universities have

societies formed by students from almost every country represented on campus, and they assist new arrivals in every possible way. If you have been admitted to a university in the degree and area of your choice, it is likely that you would be away from your family for a long time. Therefore, spend your time making the best of memories rather than going overboard on planning and logistics.

in India while they were also hearing "horror stories" of the things students experience at big-city universities. So Jayasekar spent four years at Shorter, at one point having a baseball player for a roommate who always invited the other all-American baseball team members to their dorm room. "I was on the tennis team and always had my teammates from other countries over as well. It was like a United Colors of Benetton commercial in our room all the time," he said, laughing. But beyond the tennis team, Jayasekar said he learned that Rome was more culturally isolated than he and his parents had bargained for and it took him a while to adjust to smalltown living in America's conservative

evita R. Saraf wasn't clueless when she started college at a popular American university. She had done her homework, which included attending a summer course at the University of California, Berkeley, to get a taste of California life.

The most common grading scale in the United States is the A - F or 0 - 4 scale:

A=4 B=3 C=2 D=1 F = 0 (failure) [sometimes called E]

Other common grades: I = incomplete W = withdrawal WU = unofficial withdrawal Audit = take course for no credit, no grade, attend and complete assignments Pass/Fail = take course for either Pass or Fail, no specific passing grade PassINo Credit = take course for either Pass or No Credit, no negative points.

"During my two months at Berkeley, I saw what an American education could offer me and the global perspective a world-class university can bring to a student," she says. But even after a fair amount of exposure to American culture, Saraf discovered one thing that threw her for a loop in the classrooms of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where she finally began pursuing her bachelor's degree. It was how differently the typical American student treats a grade. The lesson came in her first class at USC, a basic writing class that Saraf took with Mumbai native Nimita C. Shroff as part of their course requirement at USC's Marshall School of Business. "It was in that class that we got our grades for the very first time and realized the difference in the education systems of the two countries," Saraf says. "Instantaneously Nimita and I looked at each other, discussed our grades and showed each other our papers to see where

Each professor establishes the criteria that he or she will use to evaluate work and assign a final grade for the course. Professors generally inform students of the grading criteria on the first day of class by including it on the course syllabus. Often professors will explain how they grade tests and how they grade research papers. Very rarely will one's final grade depend on just one paper or test. Usually there is a range of items that will be evaluated. Some combination of the following criteria might be used: • • • • •

% % % % %

class participation quizzes or interim tests midterm exam final exam final research paper

the other had gone wrong and grade a student received. The how we could improve and practice is in stark contrast to the help each other. Our class- Indian system where often the mates thought we were weird, percentage a student scores on and when we asked someone one exam is the sole determielse about their grade, we just nant of a student's performance. Saraf gives that as the reagot a blank look." It's true American students son for Indian students being are much more private about so open with their grades. their grades, something Saraf "It's considered a positive calls one of the biggest culture practice where one can get shocks she had to overcome. more competitive and know During my own literature and who their competition is, writing classes at SMU, the because the ideology is to scenario was always the same: reward the top rankers." Good grades are rewarded virtually no sharing of grades or discussion of assignments, but in the American higher educaprivate reflection at our own tion system, often determining desks when the professors eligibility for merit scholarships or the caliber of graduate prowould hand back our papers. There may be multiple rea- grams that will accept you. But sons for such treatment of the fundamental difference is grades that are more or less that American students do not hardwired into the American compete with each other, which psyche. One practical explana- makes the concept of grades a tion might lie in the way college much more personal phenomeclasses are taught. Over the non. Calling grades in America course of her studies at USC, perhaps the most "confidenSaraf says she got used to col- tial secrets" that students lege courses being divided into keep, Saraf says, "In America, several assignments and activi- the education system teaches ties, including tests and exams, . you to compete with only one -M.M. that all contributed to the overall person-yourself."

Deep South. "I would tell anyone coming here to find an organization or join a group, but it's harder to do that in a small place. Rome had only four Indian families living there at the time. You just have to come in with an open mind and leave all your normal ways of thinking aside wherever you choose to go." Devita R. Saraf and Nimita C. Shroff said it's definitely important to get involved and that once a student belongs to something cohesive on campus, everything else tends to fall in place. At Cottey College I sang in an a cappella choir for two years and then in a choir at SMU when I transferred, even though my English and Russian

majors had nothing to do with music. Saraf, 24, and Shroff, 23, who both now live and work in Mumbai, received bachelor's degrees from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and dabbled considerably in extracurriculars. Unlike Shorter, both said USC was brimming with organizations and opportunities to connect with students outside the classroom. "One should take advantage of all the student group choices on campus and get involved with them in order to have an allrounding education," Shroff said. She joined the Association of Integrated Marketing, taking a leadership role that involved creating a new logo for the group

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t is a good idea to try and get profiles of your professors (if available) from prospective universities; this would help you prepare better. One important source of networking is through your professors. Understanding them beforehand can help you not only to make better choices about your university, but also after joining a university to approach them and seek their guidance. One particu~ar aspect of studying in America is that the textbooks and reference materials are Quite expensive. A good place to buy books is through Amazon.com. Pulling up notices on university message boards can be a good way to buy used books. These notice-boards are also a good way of purchasing used items such as cooking utensils or electronic appliances from previous students at cheaper rates than what you would pay at a store.

and installing its Web site. Saraf started a student organization called Globus that now leads self-funded learning trips around the world. Ultimately, an education in America is about choices. Saraf said she had so many choices, like the typical American freshman, that it really stressed her out, namely East Coast vs. West Coast, small town vs. big city, prestige vs. practicality, partial scholarships to schools focused on business vs. full-tuition scholarships to schools that were stronger in other areas of study. "My best advice would be to keep your eyes and ears open to what's going on, ask your peers, but ultimately make your own decisions. You will always look back at college life with a smile if you were your own self." 0 About the Author: Monica Mercer, formerly a reporter for The Indian Express in Mumbai, has recently returned to the United States to continue her work in journalism.

Strength Out of Diversity

The Independent Sector he most remarkable feature of u.s. higher education is its diversity. The national government does not control the curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities or the methods of teaching, and state governments also exercise a fairly light touch. But it is in the "independent" or "private" sector of higher education where diversity of educational philosophies, programs and traditions is greatest. Some 600 smaller colleges and universities make up this sector and include many of the United States' most venerable institutions. Consider these diverse features: Ursinus College in Pennsylvania offers an interdisciplinary freshman-year program that exposes students to a wide variety of texts in the humanities and social sciences; Warren Wilson College in North Carolina requires all students to share in the manual labor of running the institution and treats this as an important part of the college's educational philosophy; Northland College in Wisconsin goes to extreme lengths to operate in ways that are sensitive to the environment; AldersonBroaddus College in West Virginia draws most of its students from small towns in the West Virginia hills and leads many of them to careers in science and medicine; Earlham College, which was founded by Quakers, is located in Indiana and contin-

Private, four-year colleges provide diverse educational experiences, primarily to undergraduate students. A look at what makes private, or independent, colleges different from their counterparts in the public sector. ues to use consensus among all members of the campus community as its main form of decision-making; Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania, a college for women, counters the stereotype that women do not excel at science by producing large numbers of science graduates. These 600 or so independent colleges' and universities have, despite their differences, a number of characteristics in common: • They are fairly small, with enrollments rarely exceeding 3,000 students. • They are mainly or entirely undergraduate-oriented, with very few graduate programs. • All faculty members are committed to teaching. Although most also conduct research, they view it as secondary to their teaching duties, and they spend long hours with students in and out of the classroom.

Berklee College of Music graduates watch their senior video during commencement in Boston. • The methods of teaching are highly interactive and engaged. • Because these institutions understand that much of the educational process takes place outside the classroom, opportunities for interaction among students and between students and faculty abound, and these are understood to be important parts of the cocurricular dimension of education. • These institutions are explicit about their underlying values. Sometimes these are the values of the religious denomination that founded the college (or some echo of those values if that denomination now is less deeply involved). Sometimes these values reflect a distinctive educational philosophy, such as the "great books" colleges-of which St. John's College, with campuses in Maryland and New Mexico, is the best known-or the "work colleges" such as Warren Wilson College or Berea College in Kentucky, where, in addition to their studies, stu.dents have assigned duties that help support the school. • These institutions view study of the hb-

eral arts as essential for responsible citizenship after graduation, no matter what professional training is also acquired. The format of higher education represented by these schools works exceptionally well. Statistics on degree-completion, for example, show that small, private colleges have higher degreecompletion rates than bigger state-run universities. Moreover, this difference holds true not only among the most talented students, but also among those that enter with poorer secondary school grades or SAT [http://www.collegeboard. com] scores. Higher degree-completion rates also apply to socioeconomic groups that are sometimes associated with low college participation rates, such as students who are the first generation in their family to go to college, students who must work full-time in addition to attending class, or students from minority groups. The explanation for the comparative effectiveness of the smaller private institutions can be found in the "engaged learning" that takes place at these institutions. George Kuh, the founder of the National Survey of Student Engagement (in which hundreds of colleges and universities par-

ticipate), notes that success in college is closely correlated with getting to know a professor; getting involved in an extracurricular activity; working at a community-based internship; and being enrolled in classes in which active pedagogies dominate, such as classes that require oral reports and frequent written papers. These characteristics are more likely to be found at smaller institutions than at large ones. Smaller, independent institutions can be found throughout the United States, in major cities, smaller towns and cities, and rural areas. These colleges welcome students from many different backgrounds and those who bring different talents and perspectives to campus discussions. Students who have grown up in other countries are highly valued (although instruction is almost always in English). Additional information about any of these institutions is readily available on their Web sites. The Council of Independent Colleges has, from its Web site [http://www.cic.org/], links to most of these institutions. 0 About the Author: Richard Ekman is president of the Council of Independent Colleges.

Podcasls, back channels and bookless libraries otebooks open and water bottles at their sides, the students in general biology at Johns Hopkins University wait for Professor Richard Shingles to kick off his 11 a.m. lecture. "Please join the class with your CPS units," he announces, and suddenly there's a rumble of backpacks as more than 200 undergrads pull out thin blue devices that look like TV remote controls. The students punch in the course code on these gadgets and then place them on their desks. Meanwhile, Shingles grabs his tablet PC and begins to talk about ecological succession. â&#x20AC;˘ About 15 minutes into the lecture, he

writes a question on the PC so that it is projected on the screen behind him. "How do you reduce the size of populations of undesirable species?" There are three answers: A) shootJkill them, B) restrict resources available, C) do nothing as populations oscillate. "I bet a lot of people pick A to be funny," sophomore Sage Farrar tells Kristin Capone. Both of the students pick up their CPS brand of remotes and point them at the front of the class, where a grid of white boxes with numbers for each student appears on the screen. As the students vote, the boxes turn blue, and a few seconds later the results pop up. Answer A received 26

votes, B got 167 and Chad 29. Shingles explains why B is correct and carries on; pausing the class two more times during the lecture for similar impromptu quizzes. "It's kind of cool," says Farrar, fiddling with her long brown hair. "It's like 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.' " Actually, it might be the future of higher education. Colleges and universities around the United States are scrambling to keep pace with innovations in technology, both to flaunt their abilities as cutting-edge research institutions and to engage a generation of students armed with camera phones, Wi-Fi laptops and Google. Some classroom technologies, like course Web

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come to campus. sites, are already widespread while others-such as podcast lectures-are still experimental. But each new technique aims to revolutionize the learning process. Many faculty and students worry, though, that these advances are just distractions from the material and from time-tested methods of teaching. No one yet knows how effective these new teaching tools are. For now, students and instructors are engaged in what amounts to a national beta test to determine which of these technologies will go to the head of the class. In theory, each new tool brought into a classroom offers new opportunities to improve a certain part of the education

process. For example, consider those mammoth lectures for introductory courses. In the traditional style, professors often have no idea how well the class is grasping the material. As long as heads keep nodding and no one raises a hand, it's easy enough for the speaker to think that everyone is following along. Those blue remotes at Hopkins (and similar systems at schools such as New York University) help the professor determine if he should spend more time on a certain subject. They also keep students engaged. ("They're not just sitting down and going to sleep," Shingles says). And slackers be warned: They keep attendance, too-although some students sneak in absent friends'remotes. Catering too much to students' short attention spans bothers Professor Maurice Bessman, also at Hopkins, who has been teaching for 47 years and insists on sticking with just chalk. "It's much easier to use visual aids, but it's counterproductive when teaching because the students look at the pictures instead of listening," he says. "It becomes a production instead of a lecture." Dartmouth junior Mark Henle agrees about the use of tech during lectures. "It interferes," he says. "I like my classes taught with a professor in front of a blackboard." There is some evidence that suggests he could be right. In 2001 and 2002, the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory at Cornell University gave students in a communications class laptops and encouraged them to supplement the lecture by finding material relevant to the course online. Even though participants knew their behavior was being monitored, most still e-mailed friends and browsed the Web for other pursuits, too. "Definitely, boundaries have to be set," says study coauthor Helene Hembrooke. Colleges continue to experiment, nevertheless, because when technology is well harnessed to serve the goals of traditional academics, the mixture can be compelling. University of Southern California interactive media grad student Justin Hall noticed his fellow students

were text chatting or e-mailing in class, exactly the sort of distractions the Cornell study found. He suggested that instead they chat with one another in a "back channel," in essence passing virtual notes on questions about the seminar, like book titles and Web addresses. The back-channel system was a hit and was added to the department's weekly speaker series. During each lecture there are 14 screens projected for the audience to view. The speaker fills some screens with information from the lecture, the attendees fill more screens with chats about the lecture, and another persondubbed the "Google jockey"-fills the rest with Web sites in response to the speaker and the chat. "It becomes a

Graduate Student, Computer Systems Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston

hen leaving for the United States always keep handy the contact information of the university's International Student Office (the office that issued 'your 1-20). In case of any immigration problems they are the ones who should be contacted pronto. In fact, your university's International Student Office is the office that helps you with all the initial paper work, settling down, campus information and, very importantly, the acculturation process. The best way to find out about any university is to interact with students enrolled there. Every decent-sized university has an Indian student organization. Just try to find it using the university Web site and search engines like Google (http :/fwww.google. co mlo pt i on sl universities.html). Try and contact the board members of the organization using the e-mail IDs listed there. Also do not bring any electronic items from India as those in the United States work on a totally different voltage (110V). Whatever food items you bring along, make sure the ingredients are clearly marked or Customs officers will not allow them.

Indian Higher Education Gets

American Wing By GIRIRAJ AGARWAL

or the thousands of Indian students who are unable to pursue studies in the United States, there is now another way to have access to American professors while studying at Indian colleges. The elearning project under the aegis of the Indo-U.S. Universities Network launched by President A.PJ. Abdul Kalam in December 2005 has initiated a partnership under which U.S. professors visit India for speciallectures. The aim of the project is to improve science and engineering education at Indian universities and boost the supply of worldclass engineers for corporate and academic research in both countries. A memorandum of understanding to allow all this was signed in July 2005 during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to the United States. There are 21 U.S. universities and 37 Indian institutions involved in the network. Indian participants range from big names such as the IITsat Kanpur,Mumbai and Chennai to those like Nirma University at Ahmedabad and the Government Engineering College at Thrissur. On the American side participants include Ivy League universities Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and Yale as well as the universities of Washington, Texas and Michigan. Three U.S. companies-Microsoft

Corporation, Qualcomm Inc. and Cadence Design Systems, Inc.are also part of the initiative. About a dozen American professors have already come to deliver lectures at Amrita University in Coimbatore, the founding Indian university in the network and the one responsible for coordination. "These lectures are telecast to thousands of students at other universities through the ISRO's (Indian Space Research Organisation) satellite Edusat," says Amrita's vice chancellor, P Venkat Rangan. The university expects the ISRO to extend this facility to 50 more universities. Rangan, a former professor at the University of California, San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering, adds, "The IT wave has created a shortage of good teachers in India's institutions of higher learning. This initiative will provide students at second-rung technical institutes the best professors in the world. It will give a new direction to e-Iearning in India." The initiative is supported by the ISRO, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum. Executive director of the forum Arbind Mitra adds, "DST's Technology Information, Forecast and Assessment Council is helping

create the core course material. Expenses are being borne by the three American companies, Amrita University and the Technology Forum." Many U.S. universities feel that helping improve technical education in India could lead to more Indian students going to the United States for further research. Professor Bruce Wojak of Illinois University adds, "It will allow American teachers to find opportunities for research partnerships." Rajesh Gupta, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, visited India at the launch of the network, and says, "We are at a juncture where engineering as a discipline is being redefined. At San Diego we have established multiple interdisciplinary centers. In the process we realized there is great scope for participation from Indian research and exchange of ideas in areas like automotive, information technology and biomedical. This engagement is a beginning of such an effort." Better engineering education at second- and third-tier Indian universities would create a more techsavvy workforce for research and

development operations in both countries. Hence the presence of the American corporate world in this educational project. Microsoft is helping Amrita University establish an international e-Iearning center. The company has endowed Rs. 5 million to establish the Microsoft Chair for three years. Microsoft Corporate Vice President S. Somasegar says, "We have a longterm vision and we are committed to empower students, teachers and lifelong learners." Qualcomm will take care of the needs of the University of California, San Diego, and California Institute of Technology professors visiting India. "Through our partnerships we are working to bridge the industry-academia divide. We realize the importance of grooming the next generation of technology leaders," says Qualcomm India President KanwaIinder Singh. "In the future, universities will not be limited to the physical campus. Whatever part of the world they are in, students would prefer to listen to top-grade professors' digital lectures rather than third-rate teachers. The Indo-U.S. university network is just the right 0 beginning," says Mitra. c

~Above: Amrita ~ University in ICoimbatore. ~Left: Delegates from .ยงIndian and American universities with President A.PJ. Abdul Kalam at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi.

collaborative presentation," Hall says. Technology is also being deployed to improve study habits. Already the gadget of choice for subway rides and gym workouts, iPods also are infiltrating college quads. "Podcasting," essentially an upgrade of the old practice of recording class lectures for future study, is catching on. The improvement over tape-recording is that podcasts can be distributed quickly and easily via course Web sites. Eddy Leal, a junior at Duke University, has been recording lectures on his iPod for two years, so he can focus during class and then write out notes later. "I couldn't survive without it," he says. Indeed, Duke dove headfirst into podcasting in 2004, giving every inco~ng freshman an iPod for educational purposes. But according to student surveys, they used the devices more for listening to audiobooks and their favorite hit songs. Lynne O'Brien of Duke's Center for Instrumental Technology insists the test was a success. But last year, the give-away was confined to students enrolled in courses using the hip product-like Sally Schauman's environment and community class, which uses the iPods to record field notes. Meanwhile, the university is sampling other technologies, including digital video and GPS. It's in courses like Schauman's that hand-held technologies might do the most to enhance the learning experience outside the classroom. Eric Klopfer, who directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's teacher education program, is testing a gaming concept called "Environmental Detectives," in which students receive PDAs with global positioning system capabilities and use the devices to go around campus collecting data and conducting interviews to solve a mystery, such as the source of unusual health problems. The next version in development now gives each student a specific role-a doctor, an environmental scientist, etc.-and based on who they are, they can get only certain information with their PDAs. As a result, classmates will have to learn to work together to figure out the answer. "They need to be able . to problem-solve and think creatively as active learners," says Kurt Squire, a University of Wisconsin assistant professor who worked on the MIT project. It's a

ducation for Every Child W

e have pledged to hold ourselves accountable to educate every single child in reading and math by the year 2014," said Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, explaining America's "No Child Left Behind" law during her visit to India in April. The United States and India share a belief in the power of education as fundamental to democracy, economic and civic development, Secretary Spellings said in an April 13 speech to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the American Chamber of Commerce. "We face the shared belief, and the shared challenge, Senator Michael B. Enzi and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings visit the American Embassy School's computer learning program for slum children in New Delhi on April 13.

that ensuring every single child a quality education is critical to our future." Accompanying a congressional delegation headed by Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, Secretary Spellings visited a computer kiosk project that allows street children and working children in six slum clusters in New Delhi to learn how to use Windows programs, load and save files, run educational software, browse the Internet, and use e-mail in an informal learning atmosphere with minimum adult supervision. The project, called Hole in the Wall, is sponsored by the American Embassy School, the American Women's Association, the National Institute of Information Technology and the voluntary development group Disha. "In my country we face what we call an 'achievement gap' between those who have

access to a high quality education and those who don't," Secretary Spellings said. Under the "No Child Left Behind" law, which she helped draft as an assistant to President George W. Bush, the Secretary said, "We are going to ... measure every single student every year in reading and math, and to look carefully at that data, to hold ourselves accountable for the performance of every single child and every single group of students." For too long, she said, "we denied the underachievement of our neediest students by averaging scores for all students together. Now we are holding ourselves accountable for the achievement of everyone. When schools fall short of these standards, we give parents options to transfer to better schools, or to get extra help for their students through tutoring or afterschool prograrns." -L.K.L.

Undergraduate Life Unplugge eems there's a small problem at Utah State University. Students keep bumping into one another. Literally. The undergrads are so busy fiddling with their cellphones, iPods and other gadgets that they're not watching their steps "These devices have created an alternate universe where students aren't paying attention to what's going on around them," says Brooke Nelson, a senior and the editorin-chief of the Utah Statesman, which this fall published an editorial titled "Hey Aggies, watch where you're going." Indeed, when it comes to technology, college students are in another world. From cellphones with built-in cameras to

Facebook.com, which students use to create social networks on and off campuses, undergraduates are ravenous for new ways to connect. And universities have the resources to serve up tech in ways that the outside world can't. Want your laptop to know which classroom you're entering and automatically download the right study materials? The Wi-Fi network at Dartmouth College, one of Intel's "most unwired campuses," is making that possible. Ralph Bond, Intel's consumer education manager and a former professor at Saddleback Community College in California, predicts that colleges will con-

teaching model that can be applied to many subjects, he adds. Even the most venerable symbol of higher education-the campus libraryis not safe from this extreme technological makeover. The University of Texas-Austin, for instance, took a radical step by removing all 90,000 books from the undergraduate library to open more room for a Wi-Fi powered learning

THE MOST UNWIRED CAMPUSES Intel studied colleges and universities nationwide to find which campuses had the best wireless Internet access coverage. 1. Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. 2. Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. 3. University of Akron, Ohio. 4. Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. 5. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 6. Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. 7. St. John's University, New York. 8. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. 9. Bryant University, Smithfield, Rhode Island. 10. Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. tinue to expand their digital content offerings, from podcasting lectures to Web casting sports events so both alumni and students can tune in. So what's the one tech purchase no undergrad

space. The building, open 24 hours and packed with computers, has retained five digital librarians, who help students navigate the vast world of electronic media. The library Web site has a virtual reference desk with a chat function, and librarians are augmenting course Web pages with recommended e-books, journals and databases. The book is not dead, says Fred Heath,

should go without, according to Bond? A surge protector. 0 About the Author: Alex Kingsbury is an education writer for u.s. News & World Report.

vice provost and director of the University of Texas libraries. In fact, those 90,000 volumes were reshelved in the campus's other libraries. "A book that's been on a shelf for 500 years, you can open it and read it. I can't say the same thing about electronic media." Many of the documents of the 21st century will be electronic, however, and libraries need to prepare, he says. And many are-Emory

Far left: University of Southern California students Morris Mult (left) and Linda Alpert study at a Starbucks coffee shop in Los Angeles. Left: Christina Rainie works on her laptop in her dormitory room at the University of Georgia. Below: Physics professor Bill Reay uses a graph to display his students' responses to a multiple choice question, using infrared wireless remotes linked to a computer at Ohio State University in Columbus.

and the University of Michigan are among the schools with similar digital libraries. Colleges are also improving their information networks to give students access to these digital resources outside of libraries. This fall, Dartmouth's computer network gained TV service with some video-on-demand capabilities, so lectures and other educational materials can be available to students anywhere and at any time. English Professor Tom Luxon says this will make it possible for his students to see a film for his Shakespeare class without having to crowd into a lecture hall. As these applications become more common, he hopes students use multimedia to present arguments in unconventional ways. "You could have block quotes of video and audio-although that means you certainly can't have a printout," he muses. In the evolving world of high-tech campuses, "maybe we won't call them papers anymore." D . About the Author: Vicky Hallett is an associate editor with U.S. News & World Report. '

Good Teachers Are Good Learners

ByA.VENKATANARAYANA

onvinced that learning English is a basic need for students in the modern world, and eager to learn more effective ways of imparting language skills, some 100 Indian and Pakistani teachers have shared strategies, insights and ideas in workshops held in Washington, D.C., New Delhi and Lahore. "The workshops' debate on basic issues of development, implementation and research was aimed at introducing new approaches to education reform," says Sarita Tiwari, an English teacher from the Government Model Senior Secondary School in Chandigarh who participated in all three workshops. What impressed Tiwari most was the interactive approach, as teachers shared suggestions and how different techniques would specifically help students in India and Pakistan. The first six-week workshop-with 13 Indian and 10 Pakistani English teachersbegan in June 2005 at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "We want to ensure the effectiveness of teachers by strengthening the schools as an institution and prepare diverse populations for the future," said Judith M. Findlay, a faculty member of the graduate school and coordinator of the workshops.

Above: Judith M. Findlay; participants of the South Asian Teacher Training Project workshop. Below: Sarita Tiwari.

The South Asian Teacher Training Project, aimed at improving the teaching of English, was sponsored by the U.S. State Department. It led to two more two-day workshops in January 2006 in New Delhi and Lahore conducted by the U,S. Educational Foundations in each country. In New Delhi, the Indian and Pakistani teachers who attended the Washington workshop shared their experiences with 50 other teachers who came from various parts of North India. The main focus of the New Delhi workshop was on how to integrate new teaching methods such as critical thinking, cooperative learning and independent writing. There were discussions on how to identify different students' learning styles and create an ideal learning community. Many participants felt that using English as a medium of instruction would aid in cross-border understanding. "The education system in both India and Pakistan has to be more practical than theoretical so that we understand each other's complexities better. To overcome this problem, the English language plays a vital role," said Azir-urRahman Dahlot, a teacher at Government High School in Hyderabad, Pakistan, The more interaction, the better, he said, "The participants were engaging in 'classroom diplomacy' in a manner just as effective as the ongoing India-Pakistan 'cricket diplomacy,''' observed Adnan Siddiqi, chairman of the board of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India. D

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The Study in India programs' customized courses on culture, religion, sociology and sciences draw students from the United States and other countries. or the past 10 years there has been growth in the number of American and other western students coming to India, mostly for summer courses, or full semesters that give them credit at their home universities. An estimated 3,500 foreign students came to India this past academic year. One was Lindsey Grossman, 21, who has just completed a fivemonth term at the University of Hyderabad, taking courses in Hindi, religion, politics and women's movements, earning academic credits toward her political science degree at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, one of the top 10 U.S. universities. ''I'm also a photography student, so I've been working on an independent documentary, recording the lives of women, comparing roles of urban women and women in villages," says Grossman, who hopes to become a U.S. diplomat. "I've been traveling on weekends doing fieldwork, meeting with women, talking to farmers," says Grossman. She spoke to SPAN by cell phone while traveling with fellow students to pick mangoes at a farm owned by her "Indian uncle," a friend of one of her American professors who helped connect her with volunteer groups for her documentary. "I've met with Indian policewomen, service people, women in the city in competitive jobs. It's been interesting to see the spectrum of women in India," says Grossman, who had studied Hindi at Washington University and during a 2004 summer study course in Rajasthan. She intends to keep studying Hindi in the United States this summer. Her choice of courses and the flexibility that allows her to travel, meet Indian people and observe different lifestyles is no accident. 'The unique selling point of our program is the custom-made courses we offer to students on India's heritage and tradition," says Probal Dasgupta, director of the University of Hyderabad's Study India Program and head of the department of linguistics. The Study India Program faculty do not expect the foreign students-IS of them at Hyderabad this past semester-to spend their entire time in the classroom or at the on-campus guesthouse

By A. VENKATA NARAYANA and LAURINDA KEYS LONG

they share, but encourage them to go out and learn first-hand. The program specializes in arts and humanities courses such as dance, musical instruments, grassroots democracy, gender studies, women's empowerment, the role of religion and caste in society and rural education. "The objective of this course is to provide some basic ethnographic skills to students and give them an opportunity to apply those skills to study different aspects of Indian society. The course helps students observe and understand the new cultural milieu," says Aparna Rayaprol, a reader in the department of sociology who coordinates the university's Study India Program. "We are not taking any help from the govemment in inviting students from abroad. We have been administering the program after reaching an agreement with individual universities or institutions and signing memorandums of understanding with them," says Prakash Sarangi, a political science professor who is joint director of the program. He says the program began in 1998 with nine students from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and 200 American students have participated since then. The University of Hyderabad was one of six universities that established Study in India programs when the University Grants Commission, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, began encouraging them in the late 1990s to try to attract students from western countries. There are 65 Indian universities that now have such programs listed on the Web site (www.ugc.ac.in/studyindia). American students find out about the programs in different Right: Lindsey Grossman of Washington University completed afive-month term at Hyderabad in May. Far right: Jeremy Jones (left) of Southern Connecticut University in New Haven, a Hindi student rehearses music

with Rajan Dharni, from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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ways. Grossman wanted to return to India to study, but needed a reliable program that would allow her to eam course credit at her home university. "In many study programs in South Asia, students live in households and shift all over the place. However, I wanted a real university setting this time," said Grossman, who had studied history during the summer of 2004 in a village outside Chittorgarh in R<tiasthan. She knew about the Council on International Educational Exchange, which since 1947 has been facilitating international study programs for students, teachers and college administrators. "They have programs allover the world and they have a link-up with the University of Hyderabad," says Grossman. In fact, anyone

Julia Heiter (left) from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Amy Motichek from Loyola University in New Orleans learned kathak in the University of Hyderabad's Study India Program. who goes to the Web site (www.ciee.org) and types in "study" and "India" will get only one option: the University of Hyderabad. One alumni of the Hyderabad program, Rajan Dharni, a political science student from the University of California, Los Angeles, had a vague idea about India, which he had heard from his parents. "Although I studied much about India prior to my trip, this whole experience has turned out to be different from what I expected," said Dharni, who was born in the United States to first generation Indian American medical doctors. During his term at Hyderabad last fall, he focused on the role of India in world affairs, and hopes for a career in an international organization or a corporation. He also resumed his study of the tabla, which he had wanted to learn since childhood. Amy Motichek of Loyola University in New Orleans studied kathak under the guidance of Anuradha Jonnalagadda, dean of Hyderabad University's Sarojini Naidu School of Performing Arts, Fine Arts and Communications. Motichek was able to perform at solo concerts on campus last September. "Indian classical dance has helped me in a million different ways because it is not just about body movement but about a combination of song, music, eye, feet and hand coordination that play an important role," she says. Grossman most enjoyed two courses taught by the same professor, Manjari Katju, describing her as "a strong feminist, a very secular, accepting person, very well spoken." One course was Women's Movements in Modem India and

Post-Colonial India. ''I'm writing my senior thesis on political rights of women, so that class helps me, and the class on religion and politics was really good," says Grossman. She made friends with Indian students as well as her fellow foreigners. "Our work level wasn't so intense so we went out a whole lot in Hyderabad, made a lot of friends, went to pubs, restaurants, cafes, movies. We were very social, and we traveled a lot as well in South India," she says. "A lot of people make fun of me if they hear me speaking Hindi. They are surprised it comes out of a six-foot tall blonde." At home, she says, more of her weekends were spent writing papers and doing other homework. "The competitive nature at Hyderabad is less in my opinion, than at Washington University. Overall, I found that the grading was a lot easier. But the sciences at the university are really strong. I have a friend who took a computer science class and it was really difficult. But that reflects India; the sciences are more stressed, the humanities are seen as not valuable." Jeremy Jones, a biology and global studies major at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, studied sitar and Hindi at the University of Hyderabad last year. "We don't have Asian or Indian studies at our university, so I took this summer program," he says. "As I want to work abroad, having experience and knowledge of another country and its culture will help my career." "Initially, it was hard to make him understand Hindi, but within three months he has begun speaking and writing a few sentences," said Mamta Saini, his teacher. Jones stayed on for a second semester. After turning in her course papers, 10 pages for her religion in politics class and four pages in Hindi, Grossman traveled to Rajasthan and did more research in New Delhi before heading home. "My experience was very well rounded and complete," she says. "I worked with an NGO, spent weekends in villages, also spent time with the upper class in restaurants and million-dollar mansions. I really got a feeling for India's full economic range and I think it reflects a lot about India right now. That's what I wanted, to gain a better understanding of India as a country, and I 0 did that."

World Press Freedom Remembering the Costs

Indian filmmaker Ramesh Sharma's documentary on the life and death of Mumbai路based reporter

Daniel Pearl

reminds viewers why journalists 00 in harm's way-to find and tell the truth.

nfortunately, it's no longer an unusual image: a photograph or video showing a journalist with a gun to his or her head, the gunman unseen or masked. The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide, reports that 13 journalists-including Prahlad Goala of the Asomiya Khabar in Assam-had been killed in 2006 as of May 3, World Press Freedom Day. They either died in the line of duty or were deliberately targeted for assassination because of their reporting or their affiliation with a news organization. Among their number in 2002 was Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. While searching for the truth about connections and monetary support between the 9/11 hijackers; Richard Reid, who tried to set off a shoe-bomb on a Paris-Miami flight; and South Asian terrorists, Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, murdered and beheaded. Omar Sheikh, a British citizen, was among several men arrested, tried and sentenced for the crimes.

The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl, Ramesh Sharma's 90minute documentary that tracks the parallel lives of Pearl and Sheikh, premiered at a special screening during New York's Tribeca Film Festival that ended May 7 and was also scheduled for viewing at the Cannes Film Festival this May. India's Moving Picture Company, promoted by Sharma, teamed up with U.S.-based HBO Documentary Films, London-based Ahmed Jamal's First Take and Anant Singh's company, Distant Horizon, to make the documentary, narrated by CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, a board member of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. HBO will air the documentary in the United States near October 10, Pearl's birth anniversary, but there are no firm plans for an Indian showing. "The film is not a piece of cinema. Rather it is a story of a great journalist of our times that needed to be told," says Sharma, who co-directed with Jamal. "Two years back, while researching on another film, I came across the fascinating story of Pearl

and Sheikh. Meanwhile, in London, I met Ahmed Jamal, who wanted to make a film on Sheikh. So we decided to put these stories together. "Pearl's and Sheikh's lives were very similar in many ways," he says. "They were highly educated individuals from privileged backgrounds. The two men saw the world differently, but with similar passion and commitment. Pearl was a humanist, who spent most of his career reporting from Islamic countries to promote cross-cultural understanding. Sheikh ... was a militant who ultimately chose a deeply violent path to express his views. After 9/11, their paths crossed in Pakistan, with tragic consequences," Sharma explains. Mourning Pearl's death in 2002, the Committee to Protect Journalists said: "He believed firmly in the truth, and he died searching D for it."

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Camera Be Your Eye o look through the lens of a Yosemite." Back then, he was just camera is to make the rest of another tourist carrying his the world disappear. Cars, father's Kodak Box Brownie NO.4 backpackers, crowds of agitated .camera (yesteryear's point-andtourists all melt away as a single shoot). Today, the Ansel Adams image comes into focus: a granite Gallery, tucked away in Yosemite cliff reflected in the Merced River; Village, offers free guided walks white waves of snowmelt cascad- (reserve in advance!) that retrace ing down Yosemite Falls; the way his steps and teach tricks to batthe sun wraps around the EI tle harsh afternoon light and Capitan monolith like a wedding compose interesting pictures. band. This is what Ansel Adams, "When you arrive in Yosemite, the photographer whose name you're hit with all of these big has become synonymous with things," says Sara Bateman, a Yosemite National Park,discovered staff photographer at the gallery. "A camera shuts you out from the when he first came here in 1916. Adams later wrote: "I knew my world, Everything quiets down, destiny when I first experienced It's a more personal experience."

At 9 a,m" a dozen or so tourists gather at the gallerysome with professional-grade cameras, others carrying tiny digital cameras. All hope to capture even a fraction of what Adams saw. "When I have special feelings about a place, photography makes it that much better," says Terry Casteel, an Oregon winemaker. "A camera becomes another eye in understanding a place." The group sets off for Cooks Meadow, which is in the heart of Yosemite Valley but away from the crowds already gathered at the base of Yosemite Falls to see the snowmelt. The valley, as it is called here, is surrounded by a granite precipice that seems to stretch into the sky without end. ~ The valley floor is only 11 kilometers long and 1.6 kilometers wide but sees almost 95 percent of the park's 3.5 million yearly visitors, who flock to glance at the vistas of Half Dome and Yosemite Fallsan average visit tops off at four hours. Locals joke that all you need to do to avoid the crowds is go on a slightly elevated or unpaved trail. To see why, start walking up the Falls Trail, surrounded by girls teetering on high heels and dads with toddlers in tow. To battle valley overpopulation, the National ParkService has hired 18 hybrid buses, which take tourists from trail to trail. Some people prefer to drive their own cars, but rangers say the environ-

mentally friendly buses have cut noise pollution and traffic jams. From Cooks Meadow, as from the lesser-known Valley Floor Trail, you can see the towering cliffs made legendary by Adams: Sentinel Rock, North Dome, Cathedral Rocks. The photo walk is both a history lesson and a workshop. Bateman advises on technical matters-which filters are best for what kind of light, how to adjust shutter speed and aperture. And she passes on familiar but often overlooked tips: the "magic" hours are right before and after sunrise; a polarized filter will cut glare; shoot in shade when the light is harsh. "Don't become reliant on your zoom lensl If you can walk up to it, walk up to it!" she calls out to students. After the walk, Bateman invites her students back to the gallery and hands out a park map highlighting places where Adams shot his most memorable images. "You're standing in the place where he was standing and looking through the lens like he did, and it's just this rush of emotion," she gushes, "It's so amazing!" Her students, some of whom are pulling out wallets to buy photo books and photo equipment, enthusiastically agree 0 ---------Aboutthe Author: Ilana Ozernoy is an associate editor with U.S News &

World Report

Enduring Friendship Fo

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Jolm Kenneth Galbraith ohn Kenneth Galbraith, t~e public intellectual whose career transcended his formal training as an economist to encompass the worlds of politics, diplomacy and social analysis, died April 29 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 97. From April 1961 to July 1963 Galbraith served as President John F. Kennedy's ambassador to India, a post he had desired since advising India's Planning Commission in 1956. As ambassador, Galbraith established a strong personal relationship with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, offered economic advice and argued for increased U.S. aid. He also shaped Washington's pro-India tilt during the 1962 border conflict with China. Galbraith was an avid collector of Indian art and in 1968 co-authored with Mohinder Singh Randhawa Indian Painting: The Scenes,

Themes and Legends. In 1991, India honored Galbraith with its second-highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, for his contributions to strengthening ties between India and United States. In accepting the award, Galbraith said, "Nothing gives me greater pride than looking back on my two excursions to what we shall one day call not only the world's largest democracy, but also the world's most successful democracy, both politically and economically." Drawing on insights of the British economist John Maynard Keynes and the American sociologist Thorstein Veblin, Galbraith enunciated a broad vision of the relationships between government, labor and business in the modern economy. His challenge to the assumed link between increasing material production and social health anticipated the work of the Nobel

laureate Amartya Sen and the "postmaterialist" school of economic thought. Galbraith was born October 15, 1908, in Ontario, Canada. After earning a doctorate in agricultural economics from the University of California at Berkeley, Galbraith in 1934 joined the economics department at Harvard University, an affiliation he would maintain for much of his professional life. He became a U.S. citizen in 1937. He accepted an editor's position at Fortune magazine in 1943, writing articles that explained what came to be known as Keynesian economics. Keynes had argued that high unemployment reflected insufficient "demand," defined by Keynes as the sum of consumer expenditures, private investment and government spending. During hard times, when consumers and businesses could not

spend or invest sufficiently, Keynes argued that increased government spending was necessary to increase demand and reduce unemployment. At Fortune, Galbraith honed an ability to explain these concepts to a general readership, a talent that would anchor much of his subsequent career. In 1952, Galbraith published American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power. He argued that even though large American corporations held unprecedented market power they also drove the technological progress necessary for future prosperity. Even so, checks on their influence-"countervailing power" Galbraith called it-were needed. Government regulation and labor unions were two such forces. The book sold 400,000 copies, and established Galbraith as a public intellectual of the fust rank. In 1958, Galbraith produced possibly his most influential work. The Affluent Society argued that the United States essentially had solved the problem of economic insecurity. With basic needs satisfied, Americans increasingly amassed private wealth in the form of heavily advertised but ultimately unnecessary consumer goods. Meanwhile, the nation remained poor in such "public goods" as health services, housing and transportation. Galbraith called on a "New Class" of educated, intellectual elites-much like Galbraith himself, critics suggested-to work toward redressing. the balance between private wealth and "public squalor." Even as The Affluent Society became a Top: Ambassador Galbraith was a frequent visitor to Prime Minister Nehru's home, Teen Murti Bhavan in New Delhi. From far left: Galbraith and his wife, Catherine, danced with construction workers at a party to celebrate the completion of the new Ambassador's residence, Roosevelt House, in October 1962; the Ambassador served lunch to children at Madras School in New Delhi. As an agricultural economist, Galbraith enjoyed trips to the 路countryside. He visited a rice transplantation field in Orissa and a coconut farm in Kerala.

" He laid the foundation of an enduring friendship between our two countries on which we are now attempting to build a new edifice defined by trust and mutual benefit. Generations of Indians have admired his wisdom and humor and thanked him for his friendship. In his passing away India has lost a dear and trusted friend, the discipline of economics has lost a most lucid interpreter, the people of America have lost a great liberal and a voice of reason and his admirers around the world have lost a profound teacher, thinker, philosopher, diplomat and a man of peace." -Prime Minister ManmohanSingh

million-seller, Galbraith's prescriptions of slower economic growth proved controversial. Leon Keyserling, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Harry S Truman, wrote tartly: "It is really hard to imagine where Mr. Galbraith was when he wrote all this. I believe he was in Switzerland. Even today, there are millions of American families who cannot afford a nutritious diet." The dispute presaged subsequent divisions between "lunch-pail" and "lifestyle" American liberals. With the 1960 election of President Kennedy, Galbraith emerged as a presidential confidant. He argued vigorously against U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War. As Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later recalled, "Ken Galbraith was particularly lethal because he presented his views with the wit Kennedy relished."

After his ambassadorship in India, Galbraith returned to Washington as an adviser to Kennedy's successor, but broke with President Lyndon B. Johnson over the Vietnam War. During the remainder of his long academic career, Galbraith produced more than 30 books and numerous articles and continued to advocate progressive economic and social policies. Galbraith's later career saw the bestowal of numerous awards. In 1999, the Modem Library included The Affluent Society among the century's 100 finest English language works of non-fiction. In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Galbraith the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor. 0 About the Author: Michael Jay Friedman is a writer for The Washington File, produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, u.s. Department of State.

've always been something of a naturalist, amateur of course; more into trees and shrubs than birds. But when I heard we were to be assigned to India I became intrigued. I grew up and had always lived in the North Temperate Zone, and the subcontinent was said to be full of exotic flora, not to mention strange birds, bound to be new and exciting. One of the most intriguing to me was the hoopoe, a bird of romance, adventure, and, may I say it, strangeness. The hoopoe (Upupa epops) is as large as, maybe, a small crow, with an attractive brown-black-white color scheme, a long, straight beak for nibbling up grubs from the grass and an erect posture like a roadrun-

nero Plus a crest that opens and closes, opens and closes, kind of like a Japanese folding fan. So I came wanting to find a hoopoe. But where? Well, the first thing to do is to consider habitat. Now, birds do have some requirements. There must be food, of course. Birds eat a stunning variety of things, depending upon the species, though, so that didn't help much. They need water, naturally, some more than others. There's shelter, both for nesting and for protection, so that means plants of some kind, although some birds have a fondness for rocky cliffs and the walls of old forts. And they need other birds of similar persuasion, for mating.

One of the attractions of India is that, even in the biggest cities, a morning walk can bring encounters with exquisite beauty for those who notice the birds around them.

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ce Above: A purple sunbird at Roosevelt House, the residence of Ambassador David C. Mulford in New Delhi. From far left to right: common hoopoe, Lodhi Gardens; brahminy starling and coppersmith barbet at a park in Malcha Marg.

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New Delhi has actually a plethora of places for birds to hang out. There are quite a few parks, some pretty large. There is the Delhi Ridge, which has been left more or less in its natural state, a scrub jungle, some of it well treed with mature specimens. There is the Yamuna River, which, although badly polluted, does host large numbers of birds along its banks and in its stream, especially in the winter. There's the zoo, which has quite an attractive series of water bodies full of both migratory and resident birds. There are the tombs scattered throughout the city. There are lots of roundabouts, small green islands but with food and shelter for some kind of bird. And finally the backyards of

Seasoned birdwatchers or casual strollers always have a good chance of spotting roseringed parakeets in a tree trunk.

houses with a few shrubs, perhaps a tree, maybe a garden, certainly space for a feeder and a birdbath. So New Delhi actually has lots of opportunities for watching birds. Take a walk and see if you can find a hoopoe. Go to Lodhi Gardens, starting at the Jor Bagh side, reasonably early some morning when the sky is clear and it's not too hot yet. Go through the gate and walk a few yards. Look off to the right. See the tall trees? Those are prime horn bill territory. I once spent a charming lunch at the Garden Restaurant over there looking up at a family of three Indian gray hornbills learning to fly, frolicking about in the upper branches. Now gaze left. There are several thick clumps of bamboo dotted here and there. Look at the ground. Hear that scurrying, chirping sound over there? Jungle babblers, keeping in touch while busily snacking. They never stay quiet, giving them the name of Seven Brothers (Saat Bhai in Hindi), which is pretty apt. Look a little higher now. The middle reaches of the bamboo will very likely have several bulbuls, both red-vented and redwhiskered, flitting from branch to branch and calling to each other. There are probably also house sparrows, the same homely little brown bird we see around Washington, D.C., or London. With any luck, we might see a tree hiding a spotted owlet or three. Walk a little farther now and the area will open up to a lawn, dotted with shrubs. There are mynas, both common and brahminy, hopping around on the ground, strutting as they walk a few paces to search for more food, perhaps some trash. The shrubs are prime spotting areas for tailorbirds, small, green and brown fellows with straight beaks they use for sewing their nests, and white-eyes, another leaf-colored bird with a white circle around its eye, both smaller than house sparrows. You have to look close to see either one of these guys. Look at the tomb there ahead. Chances are pretty good you will see a roseringed parakeet sitting on the wall, or flying hastily here and there with a loud screech. He is green, with a rosecolored ring around his neck and a bright red beak. If you see him silhouetted against a wall, his tail may look a Rose-ringed parakeets, female in the nest, the little blue-that's because it is. You male outside, U.S. will also almost certainly see blue Embassy housing rock pigeons around; you've probably compound, New Delhi. seen some every time you have been out, winter or summer, rain or shine.

t's no secret that India's variety of bird species, estimated at 1,300-including seasonal visitors from Africa, Siberia and Northern Europe-are among the attractions that bring bird lovers from around the world to tour India's national parks and wildlife reserves. What most of those foreign tourists-and perhaps most Indians-don't know, is that Indian cities are uniquely

in the sky. For an American city dweller, spotting one of these stately and fierce-eyed birds calmly lapping up water leaked from a hose in a pocket park next to the honking bustle of an Indian city street is a moment of wonder, never forgotten. But there are plenty of Indians in on the fun, too. Bird watching clubs, whose members stroll out in the early morning with their

shares a huge galleryof bird portraits by local photographers, amateur and professional, and providestips on the best places to spot the 250 bird species that share the city with 12 million people. The Tollygunge Golf Club greensarea prime location,as are ponds at Eden Gardens and Jodhpur Parkand the marshyland at Salt Lake On the India Hotspots site (http!/WVvW.camac-

http://www.kolkatabirds.com blessed with an everyday display, in roadside bushes and trees, of interesting and beautiful birds that may be seen only in zoos in other countries. In the United States, one may grow up never seeing a kite closer than the distance of a soaring speck

eyes in the trees; on-line chat groups that exchange birdsighting reports; and photographers who share their snaps of birds can be found in many of India's large cities. The Birds of KolkataWeb site (http//wwwkolkatabirds.com)

And some doves, either collared or little brown. Watch out for your hat-just about here my wife was dive-bombed by a protective crow when she got too close to the nest. The house crow is large for a crow, aggressive, noisy and very persistent. And practically omnivorous. Look a little higher. You can almost certainly spot a pariah kite sailing in the middle air, his V-shaped tail either held wide or held close, his wings a little splayed at the tips as he controls his glide. Off to the left is an open grove of trees, just right for midheight birds. With any luck, you might see a really spectacular

donald.comlbirdinglasiaindia.html) there are photos, maps, birdsightingreportsand linksto books and government references,plus connections to chat groups such as Bangalore Birds (http!/ groups .yahoo.com/group/bngbirds/)

On the Mumbal Pages Web site (http://theory.tifues. in/bombay/) Sourendu Gupta, a theoretical physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, a prime bird-spotting site, shares this poetic description of sunbirds he has often seen in the midst of India's largest city "These small glittering birds, most commonly a shimmering dark green or blue, are sometimes mistaken for hummingbirds because of the way they hover before flowers." When he is not Investigating quark matter or the temperature of the universe at its birth, Gupta says, "It's relaxing for me to get out sometimes, once a year, to watch birds. I'm no expert I usually go with a group. We are just people from Bombay who like to do this, amateur birdwatchers." -LKL.

sight, a golden-backed woodpecker climbing up a tree trunk, tap-tapping for insects under the bark, then sailing off to start on the next tree. Or maybe a Mahratta woodpecker, smaller, outfitted in black and white feathers except for the brilliant red topknot. Listen as you walk, and you may hear the tonk-tonktonk of the coppersmith barbet as he does his imitation of a tinsmith busily hammering away. I once counted and got 10 tonks in six seconds. Then there is his cousin, the green barbet, who isn't all that green since he has a large brown head with the brown extending about halfway to his tail; he does a loud, persistently repeated two-note call, ku-troo, ku-troo. Did you know that birds don't have to inhale to make a call? They have a kind of continuous flow of air, in and out, or maybe "through" would express it better, since we go in and out. With any luck we could see some painted storks or maybe white pelicans way high, flying to the zoo, which isn't far away. Or maybe some wagtails strutting about along the banks near the water, bobbing their tails up and down. Or if we can find some red salvia flowers, we Far left: A pair of might see a purple sunbird in mating spotted owlets, U.S. plumage, quite a sight, iridescent. But I Embassy compound, haven't yet found a hoopoe. D New Delhi. Left: Oriental magpie robin, park in Malcha Marg, New Delhi.

About the Author and Photographer: Thomas L. Walley and Sean C. Malone1j are Communications Officers at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.

Snowy egret: Audubon wrote that he wanted his drawings to bring birds to life, "to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person. "

A biography of John James Audubon tells how the Caribbean-born frontiersman became one of the 19th century's greatest wildlife artists and a patron saint of the ecology movement.

lfe handsome, excitable 18year-old Frenchman who would become John James J\udubon had already lived his way through two names when he landed in New York from Nantes, France, in J\ugust 1803. His father, Jean, a canny ship's captain with Pennsylvania property, had sent his only son off to J\merica to escape conscription in the Napoleonic wars. Jean J\udubon owned a plantation near Valley Forge called Mill Grove, and the tenant who farmed it had reported a vein oflead ore. John James was supposed to evaluate the tenant's repOlt, learn what he could of plantation management, and eventually-since the French and Haitian revolutions had significantly diminished the J\udubon fortune-make a life for himself. He did that and much, much more. He married an extraordinary woman, opened a string of general stores on the Kentucky frontier and built a great steam mill on the Ohio River. He explored the J\merican wilderness from Galveston Bay [on the Texas coast] to [Canada's] Newfoundland, hunted with Cherokee and Osage [tribes], rafted the Ohio and the Mississippi. Throughout his travels, he identified, studied and drew almost 500 species of f\merican birds. Single-handedly, J\udubon From the book John James Audubon by Richard Rfiodes © 2004 by Richard Rhodes. Published by anangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

raised the equivalent of millions of dollars to publish a great, four-volume work of art and science, The Birds of America. He wrote five volumes of "bird biographies" chock-full of narratives of pioneer life, and won fame enough to dine with Presidents. He became a national icon, "the J\merican Woodsman," a name he gave himself. The record he left of the J\merican wilderness is unsurpassed in its breadth and originality of observation; the J\udubon Society, when it was initially founded in 1886, decades after his death, was right to invoke his authority. He was one of only two f\mericans elected Fellows of the Royal Society of London, the preeminent scientific organization of its day, prior to the J\merican Civil War; the other was Benjanlin Franklin. John James had been born Jean Rabin, his father's bastard child, in 1785 on Jean J\udubon's sugar plantation on Saint Domingue (soon to be renamed Haiti). His mother was a 27-year-old French chambermaid, Jeanne Rabin, who died of an infection within months of his birth. The stirrings of slave rebellion on the island in 1791 prompted Jean J\udubon to sell what he could of his holdings and ship his son home to France, where his wife, J\nne, whom Jean had married long before, welcomed the handsome boy and

raised him as her own. When the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution approached Nantes in 1793, the J\udubons formally adopted Jean Rabin, to protect him, and christened him Jean Jacques or Fougere J\udubon. Fougere-"Fern"-was an offering to placate the revolutionary authorities, who scorned the names of saints. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a revolutionary envoy sent out from Paris to quell the peasant counterrevolution in western France, ordered the slaughter of thousands in Nantes, a principal city in the region. Firing squads bloodied the town square. Other victims were chained to barges and sunk in the Loire; their remains tainted the river for months. Though Jean Audubon was an officer in the Revolutionary French Navy, he and his family were dungeoned. After the terror, he moved his fanlily downriver to a country house in the riverside village of Coueron. Now his only son was escaping again. The young country to which John James J\udubon immigrated in the summer of 1803 was barely settled beyond its eastern shores; Lewis and Clark were just then preparing to depart for the West. France in that era counted a population of more than 27 million, Britain about 15 million, but only 6 million people thinly populated the

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young French neighbor lay ill with a fever in his house and under his talented daughter's care. Lucy was a gifted pianist, an enthusiastic reader and a skillful ridersidesaddle-who kept an elegant house. She and John James, once they married and moved out to Kentucky in 1808, regularly swam across and back the half-mile-wide Olio for morning exercise. Lucy's handsome young Frenchman had learned to be a naturalist from his father and his father's medical friends, exploring the forested marshes along the Loire. Lucy's younger brother Will Bakewell left a memorable catalog of his future brother-in-law's interests and virtues; even as a young man, Audubon was someone men and women alike wanted to be around:

United States, two-thirds of them living withjn 50 miles of Atlantic tidewater. In European eyes America was still an experiment. It would need a second American revolution-the War of 1812to compel England and Europe to honor American sovereignty. But the generation of Americans that the young French emigre was joining was different from its parents'. It was migrating westward and taking great risks in pursuit of new opportunities its elders had not enjoyed. Audubon's was the era, as the historian Joyce Appleby has discerned, when "the autonomous individual emerged as an [American] ideal." Individualism, Appleby writes, was not a natural phenomenon but "[took] shape historically [and] carne to personify the nation." And no life was at once more unusual and yet more representative of that expansive era when a national character emerged than Audubon's. Celebrate him for his wonderful birds, but recognize him as well as a characteristic American of the first generation-a man who literally made a name for himself. Lucy Bakewell, the tall, slim, gray-eyed girl next door whom he married, came from Passenger pigeon: During an 1813 encounter in Kentucky, Audubon gave up trying to count passing multitudes of the grayish blue, pink-breasted birds that numbered in the billions at the ti1J1eof the European discovery of America but now are extinct.

Audubon, who painted this dramatized selfportrait in 1833, spent months at a time in the wilderness collecting, drawing-and eating-his specimens. a distinguished English family. Erasmus Darwin, a respected physician, poet and naturalist and grandfather to Charles, had dandled her on his knee in their native Derbyshire. Her father had moved his family to America when she was 14 to follow Joseph Priestley, the chemist and religious reformer, but opportunity had also drawn the Bakewells. Their Pennsylvania plantation, Fatland Ford, was more ample than the Audubons', and William Bakewell sponsored one of the fIrst experiments in stearn-powered threshing there while his

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"On entering his room, I was astonished and delighted to find that it was turned into a museum. The walls were festooned with all kinds of birds' eggs, carefully blown out and strung on a thread. The chimney-piece was covered with stuffed squirrels, raccoons, and opossums; and the shelves around were likewise crowded with specimens, among which were fishes, frogs, snakes, lizards, and other reptiles. Besides these stuffed varieties, many paintings were arrayed on the walls, chiefly of birds ....He was an admirable marksman, an expert swimmer, a clever rider, possessed of great activity [and] prodigious strength, and was notable for the elegance of his figure and the beauty of his features, and he aided nature by a careful attendance to his dress. Besides other accomplishments he was musical, a good fencer, danced well, and had some acquaintance with legerdemain tricks, worked in hair, and could plait willow baskets."

In 1804, Audubon was curious whether' ~ the eastern phoebes that occupied an ~<l> old nest above a Mill Grove cave were a 8 pair returned from the previous year. <.J "When they were about to leave the nest," Audubon wrote, "I fIxed a light silver thread to the leg of each." His experiment was the first recorded instance in America of bird-banding, a now routine technique for studying bird migration. Two of the phoebes that returned the following spring still carried silver threads. One, a male, remembered Audubon well enough to tolerate his presence near its nest, -e

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though its mate shied away. Audubon had begun teaching himself to draw birds in France. Operating general stores in Louisville and then downriver in frontier Henderson, Kentucky, he was responsible for keeping the cooking pot filled with fish and game and the shelves with supplies while his business partner ran the store and Lucy kept house, worked the garden and bore John James two sons. As he hunted and traveled, he improved his art on American birds and kept careful field notes as well. His narrative of an encounter . with a flood of passenger pigeons in Kentucky in autumn 1813 is legendary. He gave up trying to count the passing multitudes of the grayish blue, pink-

vivacity: of chimney swifts lining a hollow sycamore stump near Louisville like bats in a cave, brown pelicans fishing the shallows of the Ohio, sandhill cranes tearing away ~ waterlily roots in a backwater slough, and § robins down from Labrador occupying § apple trees. He saw bald eagles that nested ~ by the hundreds along the Mississippi ~ swooping like falling stars to strike swans §« to the ground. Crowds of black vultures, ';;:protected by law, patrolled the streets of § Natchez and Charleston to clean up carrion > . g; and roosted at mght on the roofs of houses ~ and barns. Bright scarlet, yellow and emerald green Carolina parakeets, now extinct, completely obscured a shock of grain like "a brilliantly colored carpet" in the center of a field, and a least bittern stood perfectly still for two hours on a table in his studio while he drew it. Not many of the birds Audubon drew stood still for him, nor had cameras or binoculars yet been invented. To study and draw birds it was necessary to shoot them. Audubon's predecessors typically skinned their specimens, preserved the skins with arsenic, stuffed them with frayed rope and set them up on branches to draw them. The resulting drawings looked as stiff and dead as their subjects. Audubon dreamed of revivifying his specimens-even the colors of their feathers changed within 24 hours of death, he said-and at Mill Grove, still a young man, he found a way to mount freshly killed specimens on sharpened wires set into a gridded board that allowed him to position them in lifelike attitudes. He drew them first, then filled in his drawings with watercolor that he burnished with a cork to imitate the metallic cast of feathers. After drawing, he Carolina parakeet: "You are the king of often performed an anatomical dissection. ornithological painters," a French artist exclaimed in 1828 when he saw Audubon's Then, because he usually worked deep in Carolina parakeets, which are now extinct. the wilderness, far from home, he cooked "Who would have expected such things from and ate his specimens. Many of the the woods of America?" descriptions in his Ornithological Biography mention how a species tastestestimony to how quickly the largely selfbreasted birds that numbered in the billions at the time of the European discovery of taught artist drew. "The flesh of this bird is America and now are extinct. "The air was tough and unfit for food," he writes of the literally filled with pigeons," he wrote of raven. The green-winged teal, on the other that encounter; "the light of noon-day was hand, has "delicious" flesh, "probably the obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in best of any of its tribe; and I would readily agree with any epicure in saying, that spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a when it has fed on wild oats at Green Bay, tendency to lull my senses to repose." His or on soaked rice in the fields of Georgia observations match his best drawings in and the Carolinas, for a few weeks after its

arrival in those countries, it is much superior to the Canvass-back in tenderness, juiciness and flavor." Though drawing birds had been something of an obsession, it was only a hobby until Audubon's mill and general stores went under in the Panic of 1819, a failure his critics and many of his biographers have ascribed to a lack of ability or irresponsible distraction by his art. But nearly every business in the transAppalachian West failed that year, because the Western state banks and the businesses they serviced were built on paper. "One thing seems to be universally conceded," an adviser told the governor of Ohio, "that the greater part of our mercantile citizens are in a state of bankruptcy-that those of them who have the largest possessions of real and personal estate ...find it almost impossible to raise sufficient funds to supply themselves with the necessaries of life." The Audubons lost everything except John James' portfolio and his drawing and painting supplies. Before he declared

bankruptcy, Audubon was even briefly thrown in jail for debt. Through these disasters, Lucy never failed him, although they lost an infant daughter to fever the following year. "She felt the pangs of our misfortunes perhaps more heavily than I," Audubon remembered gratefully of his stalwart love, "but never for an hour lost her courage; her brave and cheerful spirit accepted all, and no reproaches from her beloved lips ever wounded my heart. With her was I not always rich?" Audubon took up portrait drawing at $5 a head. His friends helped him find work painting exhibit backgrounds and doing taxidermy for a new museum in Cincinnati modeled on painter Charles Wilson Peale's famous museum in Philadelphia, which Audubon knew from his Mill Grove days. Peale's Philadelphia Museum displayed stuffed and mounted birds as if alive against natural backgrounds, and preparing such displays in Cincinnati probably pointed Audubon to his technical and aesthetic

breakthrough of portraying American birds in realistic, lifelike settings. Members of a government expedition passing through Cincinnati in the spring of 1820, including the young artist Titian Ramsey Peale, son of the Philadelphia museum keeper, alerted Audubon to the possibility of exploring beyond the Mississippi, the limit of frontier settlement at that time. Daniel Drake, the prominent Cincinnati physician who had founded the new museum, praised Audubon's work in a public lecture and encouraged him to think of adding the birds of the Mississippi flyway to his collection, extending the range of American natural history; the few ornithologists who had preceded Audubon had limited their studies to Eastern species. Louisiana heron: Audubon observed and probably painted the Louisiana heron in the Florida Keys. The background, painted by George Lehman, who painted many of Audubon's drawings, depicts a scene from that area.

By spring 1820, Drake's museum owed Audubon $1,200, most of which it never paid. The artist scraped together such funds as he could raise from drawing and teaching art to support Lucy and their two boys, then 11 and 8, who moved in with relatives again while he left to claim his future. He recruited his best student, 18year-old Joseph Mason, to draw backgrounds, bartered his hunting skills for boat passage on a commercial flatboat headed for New Orleans, and in October floated off down the Ohio and the Mississippi. For the next five years Audubon labored to assemble a definitive collection of drawings of American birds while struggling to support himself and his family. He had decided to produce a great work of art and omithology (a decision that Lucy's relatives condemned as derelict): The Birds of America would comprise 400 two- by threefoot engraved, hand-colored plates of American birds "at the size of life" to be sold in sets of five, and collected into four huge, leather-bound volumes of 100 plates each, with five leather-bound accompanying volumes of bird biographies worked up from his field notes. He had found a paradise of birds in the deciduous forests and bluegrass prairies of Kentucky; he found another paradise of birds in the pine forests and cypress swamps of Louisiana around St. Francisville in West Feliciana Parish, north of Baton Rouge, inland from the river port of Bayou Sarah, where prosperous cotton planters hired him to teach their sons to fence and their daughters to draw and to dance the cotillion. Elegant Lucy, when fmally he was able to move her and the boys south to join him there, opened a popular school of piano and deportment on a cotton plantation operated by a hardy Scottish widow. On his first inspection of the St. Francisville environs, Audubon identified no fewer than 65 species of birds. He probably collected there the bird he rendered in what would become his bestknown image, the prized first plate of The Birds of America-a magnificent specimen of wild turkey cock that he had called from a Mississippi canebrake with a caller made from a wing bone. Finally, in May 1826, Audubon was ready to find an engraver for his crowded portfolio of watercolor drawings. He'Would have to travel to Europe; no American

Pileated woodpecker: Audubon painted these bLack-backed and goLden-winged woodpeckers circa 1829 in Mauch Chunk, PennsyLvania. publisher yet commanded the resources to engrave, hand color and print such large plates. Forty-one years old, with the equivalent of about $18,000 in his purse and a collection of letters of introduction from New Orleans merchants and Louisiana and Kentucky politicians, including Senator Henry Clay, he sailed from New Orleans on a merchant ship bound for Liverpool with a

load of cotton. He was trusting to charm, luck and merit; he knew hardly anyone in England. In Liverpool, Lucy's younger sister Ann and her English husband, Alexander Gordon, a cotton factor, took one look at Audubon's rough frontier pantaloons and unfashionable shoulder-length chestnut hair (about which he was comically vain) and asked him not to call again at his place of business. But James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans had been published in London in April and was blooming to a nationwide

fad, and some who met Audubon in Liverpool judged him a real-life Natty Bumppo. The letters he carried introduced him to the first family of Liverpool shipping, the Rathbones, Quaker abolitionists who recognized his originality and sponsored him socially. Within a month, he was a celebrity, his presence sought at every wealthy table; his in-laws soon came round. "The man ...was not a man to be seen and forgotten, or passed on the pavement without glances of surprise and scrutiny," an anonymous contemporary wrote. 'The tall and somewhat stooping form, the clothes not made by a Westend but a Far West tailor, the steady, rapid, springing step, the long hair, the aquiline features, and the glowing angry eyes-the expression of a handsome man conscious of ceasing to be young, and an air and manner which told you that whoever you might be he was John Audubon, will never be forgotten by anyone who knew or saw him." Not only Audubon's novelty won him attention in Liverpool and then in Manchester, Edinburgh and London. Britain was the most technologically advanced nation in the world in 1826, with

gaslights illuminating its cities, steam mills weaving cotton, steamboats plying its ports and railroad lines beginning to replace its mature network of canals, but the only permanent images then available in the world were originally drawn by hand. Traveling from city to city, Audubon would hire a hall and fill it with his lifesize watercolors of birds luminescent against their backgrounds of wilderness, hundreds of images at a time, and charge admission to the visitors who flocked to see them. A French critic who saw the drawings in Edinburgh was entranced: "Imagine a landscape wholly American, trees, flowers, grass, even the tints of the sky and the waters, quickened with a life that is real, peculiar, trans-Atlantic. On twigs, branches, bits of shore, copied by the brush with the strictest fidelity, sport the feathered races of the New World, in the size of life, each in its particular attitude, its individuality and peculiarities. Their plumages sparkle with nature's own tints; you see them in motion or at rest, in their plays and their combats, in their anger fits and their caresses, singing, running, asleep, just awakened, beating the air, skimming the waves, or rending one

Eider duck: Audubon painted these three Eider ducks in Eastport Maine in 1833. The nesting pair is warding off an intruding male. another in their battles. It is a real and palpable vision of the New World, with its atmosphere, its imposing vegetation, and its tribes which know not the yoke of man ....And this realization of an entire hemisphere, this picture of a nature so lusty and strong, is due to the brush of a single man; such an unheard-of triumph of patience and genius!"

So many scenes of birds going about their complicated lives would have flooded viewers' senses as an IMAX Theater presentation floods viewers today, and all the more so because the world these creatures inhabited was America, still largely wilderness and a romantic mystery to Europeans, as Audubon discovered to his surprise. He answered questions about "Red Indians" and rattlesnakes, and imitated war whoops and owl hoots until he could hardly bear to accept another invitation. But accept he did, because once he found an engraver in London worthy of the great project, which he had calculated

would occupy him for 16 years, the prosperous merchants and the country gentry would become his subscribers, paying for the five-plate "Numbers" he issued several times a year and thus sustaining the enterprise. (When the plates accumulated to a volume, the subscribers had a choice of bindings, or they could keep their plates unbound. One titled lady used them for wallpaper in her dining room.) Audubon thus produced The Birds of America pay as you go, and managed to complete the work in only 10 years, even though he had to increase the total number of plates to 435 as he identified new species on collecting expeditions back to the Carolinas and East Florida, the Republic of Texas, northeastern Pennsylvania, Labrador and the Jersey Shore. In the end, he estimated that the four-volume work, issued in fewer than 200 copies, cost him $115,64O-about $2,141,000 today. (One fine copy sold in 2000 for $8,802,500.) Unsupported by gifts, grants or legacies, he raised almost every penny of the immense cost himself from painting, exhibiting and selling subscriptions and skins. He paced the flow of funds to his engraver so that, as he said proudly, "the continuity of its execution" was not "broken for a single day." He paced the flow of drawings as well, and before that the flow of expeditions and collections. He personally solicited most of his subscribers and personally serviced most of his accounts. Lucy supported herself and their children in Louisiana while he was establishing himself; thereafter he supported them all and the work as well. If he made a profit, it was small, but in every other way the project was an unqualified success. After he returned to America, he and his sons produced a less costly octavo edition with reduced images printed by lithography. The octavo edition made him rich. These facts should lay to rest once and 路 d h J h f or ate 11 h en d unng canar t at 0 n James Audubon was "not a good businessman." When he set out to create a monumental work of art with his own heart and mind and hands, he succeeded-a staggering achievement, as if one man had single-handedly financed and built an Egyptian pyramid. He did not leave Lucy languishing in West Feliciana all those years, but before he could return to America for the first time

to collect her, their miscommunications, exacerbated by the uncertainties and delays of mail delivery in an era of sailing ships, nearly wrecked their marriage. Lonely for her, he wanted her to close her school and come to London; she was willing once she had earned enough to keep their sons in school. But a round of letters took six months, and one ship in six (and the letters it carried) never made port. By 1828 Audubon had convinced himself that Lucy expected him to amass a fortune before she would leave Louisiana, while she feared her husband had been dazzled by success in glamorous London and didn't love her anymore. (Audubon hated London, which was fouled with coal smoke.) Finally, she insisted that he come in person to claim her, and after finding a trustworthy friend to handle a year's production of plates for Birds, he did, braving the Atlantic, crossing the mountains to Pittsburgh by mail coach, racing down the Ohio and the Mississippi

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8 A portrait of John James Audubon was painted by his son John, who, with his brother Victor, continued the family's publishing enterprise after their father's death in 1851. But the family was rumed when they lost . .. . most of theIr customers durmg the (IV!l War. ---------------by steamboat to Bayou Sarah, where he disembarked in the middle of the night on November 17, 1829. Lucy had moved her school to William Garrett Johnson's Beech Grove plantation by then, 15 miles inland; that was where Audubon was headed: "It was dark, sultry, and I was quite alone. I was aware yellow fever was still raging at St. Francisville, but walked thither to

procure a horse. Being only a mile distant, I soon reached it, and entered the open door of a house I knew to be an inn; all was dark and silent. I called and knocked in vain, it was the abode of Death alone! The air was putrid; I went to another house, another, and another; everywhere the same state of things existed; doors and windows were all open, but the living had fled. Finally I reached the home of Mr. Niibling, whom I knew. He welcomed me, and lent me his horse, and I went off at a gallop. It was so dark that I soon lost my way, but I cared not, I was about to rejoin my wife, I was in the woods, the woods of Louisiana, my heart was bursting with joy! The first glimpse of dawn set me on my road, at six o'clock I was at Mr. Johnson's house; a servant took the horse, I went at once to my wife's apartment; her door was ajar, already she was dressed and sitting by her piano, on which a young lady was playing. I pronounced her name gently, she saw me, and the next moment I held her in my arms. Her emotion was so great I feared I had acted rashly, but tears relieved our hearts, once more we were together."

And together they remained, for the rest of their lives. If Audubon's life resembles a 19thcentury novel, with its missed connections, Byronic ambitions, dramatic reversals and passionate highs and lows, 19th-century novels were evidently more realistic than modems have understood. Besides his art, which is as electrifying on first turning the pages of The Birds of America today as it was two centuries ago-no one has ever drawn birds better-Audubon left behind a large collection of letters, five written volumes, two complete survtvIng journals, fragments of two more, and a name that has become synonymous with wilderness and wildlife preservation. "All, but the remembrance of his goodness, is gone forever," Lucy wrote sadly of her husband's death, at age 65, from complications of dementia in January 1851. For Lucy all was gone-she lived on until 1874-but for the rest of us, wherever there are birds there is Audubon, a rare bird himself, a bird of America. D About the Author: Richard Rhodes won a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. His The Audubon Reader was released in April 2006.

mages of Fortitude

By DEEPANJALI KAKATI

American photographer Taisie Berkeley captures the daily struggle of Indian women to achieve economic and social equality. he struggle to make a better life is a challenge that women all over the world face every day. American photographer Taisie Berkeley, who was in India from October 2005 to March 2006 working on her project, "Women Helping Women to Economic Justice," captured the daily grind of Indian women. "There is something dramatic and inspiring about India, with its 90 million working women, most of them unorganized, often 0: working for only a few rupees <3 ~I~ a d ay, yet. d·d etermme to ':;: challenge centuries of traz dition," she says. Berkeley was ~ in India on a Fulbright scholar- I ship, an exchange program that are actively involved in the women's rights movefor educators, students, artists and researchers between the ment. At Pune she spent her time with the Lila Poonawalla United States and other countries. Foundation that provides work opportunities and scholarships Some of Berkeley's images to poor women. In New Delhi were displayed at an exhibishe worked through the Slums tion at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, of Delhi Project that promotes New Delhi, in February. The adult and child literacy and health services. In Ahmedaevocative photos of women working in the fields, at bad, her mentor was the construction sites and running SEWA Bank, which is part of a food business from a tiny the Self Employed Women's kitchen in a slum depict their Association. It is wholly "resilience and struggle to owned and operated by poor make things better for women and specializes in subsequent generations of micro-loans. "In India I have women," she says. focused on going through the In India, Berkeley worked NGOs," says Berkeley. Withthrough three organizations out a referral from someone

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trusted by the people she photographed, she felt it would have been very difficult to do the project. Spending time with these women helped Berkeley understand the economics of their situation. Speaking about her photography of construction workers in a village near Ahmedabad, she says, "SEWA has documented that 98 percent of women construction workers are unskilled. And 90 percent of them earn meager daily wages without any other benefits. I can't help but think of the fragility of their financial condition. One accident or illness for many of these women can throw them

and their families into a catastrophic situation." Yet she saw a will to overcome the odds. The theme of her project reflects that after centuries of discrimination, Indian women are today fighting for social and economic equality-and helping one another. Some of the women she met are sole providers for their families and they are doing it with dignity and grace. "The overall impression that I will return with is that the women I have interviewed and spent hours photographing are fighters. They have an amazing determination to keep going despite obstacles," says

Above: Kiranben, 24, runs a food business from a riverbank slum in Ahmedabad and is her family's sole support. Left: Taisie Berkeley at the New Delhi exhibition of her photographs. Right: The gnarled and wrinkled hands of Parvatiben, an agricultural labor in her thirties from a village near Ahmedabad. Berkeley. When she asked the women what motivated them to keep going, the most common answer was: "my children." Berkeley adds that being a single parent of two sons helps her empathize more with women's economic struggles. Based on her work in India, Berkeley has put together a collection of photographs she hopes to exhibit in many countries. It will comprise 50 photos with quotations from . the subjects to explain the context. Berkeley is also exploring the possibility of a book based on her photos and

experiences in India. "I have met with a designer and publisher and am fleshing out ideas for its concept," she says. Berkeley's interest in India began in 2001 when she was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and was urged by her adviser to go to India and develop her theme of "Women Helping Women Shape their Life Choices." She further refined her concept during a trip to India in March 2003 when The Holton-Arms School of Bethesda, Maryland, where she teaches photography, sent her to take photographs for an exhibit at the school and to develop a curriculum for teaching students about India. She says her India project was "an opportunity to continue to grow as an artist and as a person." Her journey of personal growth began in the rnid-1980s when she left her job with the U.S. House of Representatives to pursue a

career in photography. Berkeley's photographic career was launched as a student at Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., when she began a study of a 5-year-old girl who was born blind. The photo essay appeared in Washingtonian magazine in 1986 and 10 years later Berkeley followed it up with a second report. "Knowing her taught me an important lesson early in my career that those we feel sorry for don't necessarily feel sorry for

themselves," she says. Berkeley has a master of fine arts degree in photography from the University of Delaware and a master of arts in writing from Johns Hopkins University. She has done assignments for the Washington Post, the Washingtonian, the New Republic and the National Geographic Society. Berkeley has had solo exhibitions in Maryland and been part of group exhibitions in Washington, D.C., Delaware and Bethesda. 0

was at bright warm day in April. Sandwiched uncomfortably in dusty Section E, I was probably the only American among some 15,000 die-hard Indian cricket fans in New Delhi's Ferozeshah Kotla Stadium. I dined merrily on my bag of peanuts and tried to blend in, even though I hadn't attended a professional cricket match since 1981 and was no longer sure whether "silly mid-on" was a field position or part of a player's undergarments. Better not to ask, I thought to myself. Suddenly, a roar ascended as an early Pakistani wicket fell and then, just as dramatically, chants of "Aa-loo! Aa-loo!" A potato? Who can think of food at a time like this? Oh, I see, it's just the burly Pakistani captain coming to bat. His swagger and grace make me think of the U.S. baseball legend and home run king Babe Ruth. Stop, freeze frame, rewind. My mind races back three decades to 1975, to a loud, cavernous castle much like Kotla, but this time it's New York's famed Yankee Stadium-the "House that Ruth Built"-and the chant rising out of the upper deck is not "Aa-loo!" but "Lou, Lou!" Yep, I would often watch local favorite Lou Piniella come up'to bat at crucial moments for his team. Being a New York Mets fan I never did care much for the

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Namibia's Ewaald Steenkamp runs out Romeno Deane of the United States in a match at the ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup in Sri Lanka in Februa

cross-town New York Yankees. Piniella was especially reviled around the major leagues for his unpredictable temper and proclivity for kicking dirt on an umpire whenever a decision didn't go his way. Nevertheless, Lou was definitely a premier hitter (in more ways than one) and on this occasion he lined a hit to center. The bleacher bums went wild. I stood up and "boo-ed" but my boo sounded like "Lou" and so none of the frenzied Yankee fans around me took any great notice. To be equally enamored with both cricket and baseball is somewhat rare, as the two sports have such different histories, have very different rules, and (at the level of we, the fans) they appeal to very different human senses and sensibilities. Granted the basic goal of the game is the same (to score the most runs) and the tactics are parallel (hit the ball over their heads, through their legs or "wherever they ain't"). And one can certainly see how the rush of adrenaline from a 400- foot home run can

approximate that felt after a towering sixer. But for most inwardlooking Americans, let's face it, cricket is a little, invisible black insect that we hear at night when we barbecue steaks and hamburgers in our backyards. Indians at least know that baseball is a sport and not a creature, but they categorically dismiss it as a primitive version (read perversion) of the original Gentleman's

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spitting out during TV camera close-ups? Is it tobacco, supari or paan, the South Asian wives are always curious to know. The cultural disconnects are endless, but here I am, liking both sports. Call it NRI-induced schizophrenia. Call it a hunger for peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jacks. Call it multiculturalism and a fascination for the other. Or call it just a love for choreography and spectacle, watching swift, elegant athletes dive across freshly cut grass to rob the batter of precious runs. My American friends often make fun of my fascination with cricket. A five-day match? No way! We Americans want instant gratification, three hours or less please, and make sure you give us a result and a winner, because draws are anathema, a colossal waste of time! Break for lunch and then break for tea? In The San Diego Padres' Dave Roberts avoids a run-out by diving back to first base as the ball gets past the San Francisco Giants' Lance Niekro during a September 2005 game in San Francisco.

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auderhill is unique among most runs and took the most wickU.S. cities. Responding to ets during the three-and-a-halfresidents' desires, the city month tournament. The matches authorities used some funds from are free as the city is trying to proa parks bond to build a state-of- mote cricket. During a match at the-art cricket stadium in a new the city sports park, soccer and regional sports park in Broward netball teams are also competing County, in south Florida. Lauder- "Spectators can enjoy all three hill was hoping its stadium, to be sports, listen to music, hear playcompleted by 2007, would be by-play commentaries, all while chosen as a World Cup venue. eating flying fish or jerk chicken," Although that didn't happen, crick- says Tropepe. "There is nothing et madness is growing: there are like it in the United States. free, 20-overs night matches in "South Florida is a melting the local Lauderhill Sports Park; pot," she adds. "When you have the fourth annual Mayor'S a diverse community such as International Cricket Cup has just ours we get to experience all the finished; and teams from the best of what other cultures enjoy, Bahamas and Sri Lanka are in food, music, sports, etc. expected soon. "This year's semi- Cricket has been played here for final game, where India played years on softball fields, soccer Jamaica, was a heart stopper, fields and other patches of open down to the last ball," Leslie space." Tropepe, Lauderhill's public relaNearly a quarter of Laudertions manager, says of the Mayor'S hill's 70,000 residents were born Cup Mandeep Dhillon, one of two ' in the West Indies, according to "India" team captains, made the the 2000 U.S. Census, and some

Aerial view of the cricket stadium in Lauderhill.

40 languages are spoken within its 23 square kilometers. Mayor Richard J. Kaplan, a batsman who has been playing cricket for several years, joined with the city commissioners to establish

the Mayor's Cup. The 10 teams are members of two Florida leagues affiliated with The United States of America Cricket Association. "The players proudly play in the tournament to represent the country of their heritage or birth," says Tropepe. "It's highly competitive." -L.K.L.

Baseball Lives in South Indi t must have been a strange sight for the students and VIPs who had gathered for the first annual YMCA College of Physical Education's baseball tournament in Chennai. The chief guestme-wasn't sitting on stage in the shade, but had suited up as the starting shortstop for the Year II Physical Education Masters team. It certainly left certain protocoland batting order-issues up in the air. Standing there in the infield brought back the same enthusiasm and joy I felt about playing baseball when I was young It's gratifying to know that more and more people in South India are getting the opportunity to share that feeling. Wherever you find baseball in Tamil Nadu, you are sure to find Nazim Fareed. He is an unabashed lover of baseball and tireless secretary of the Chennai District Baseball Association and the Tamil Nadu Baseball Association. He travels around the state organizing baseball tournaments, teaching fundamentals and spreading his infectious love of the game. "I

Right: The Eagle Stars baseball team with Nazim Fareed (second from left)路 Below: The winning team at the YMCA tournament receives the trophy from Christopher Wurst (center).

was a cricket fan growing up, like so many youngsters here," he says, "but I turned to baseball because it's a faster game and in two hours you get the results." Aside from being baseball's ambassador to South India, Fareed manages the Eagle Stars baseball team, a club that participates in tournaments throughout the south. The Eagle Stars, featuring all three of Fareed's sons, recently hosted a team from Karnataka. The Eagle

Stars were also instrumental in reintroducing the sport to the YMCA College of Education in Chennai, the first college for physical education in India, established by Harry Crowe Buck from Liverpool, Pennsylvania, a dedicated baseball lover, in 1920. Fareed and his Eagle Stars devote a lot of time to teaching baseball to students from underprivileged backgrounds, especialIy in madrassas in Chennai. As a

result, baseball has taken off at a number of local schools. At Anjuman-e-Himayath-e-Islam, in Chennai, the Eagle Stars have done such a good job of coaching that they actually have their hands full every time the two teams square off. In fact, several Anjuman players have been selected for the Indian national youth team. What struck me most, standing between second and third basepounding the baseball glove that ~ I've had for more than 20 years, ~ and that has traveled the world ~ with me-was the seemingly effortless transition these young adults had made to this new sport. They were having a great time. When small rules issues arose, both teams helped each other to come to an understanding, And when the final game ended, the attitude among both teams was unanimous: Let's play 0 again!

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About the Author: Christopher Wurst is the vice consul for public affairs at the Chennai Consulate of the U.S Embassy

President George W Bush, once the owner of a baseball team, the Texas Rangers, tries his hand at cricket during his stopover in Pakistan in March. Many of America's Founding Fathers played cricket, and America's first President, George Washington, was among many cricket fans in the fledgling country in the 1700s and 1800s. In fact, the first international cricket match was played in the United States in 1844 at Bloomingdale Park in New York City, against a Canadian team, which won by 23 runs. As baseball gained popularity from the early 1900s, cricket faded, until an immigrant-driven resurgence in the 1970s. Cricket is now played in all 50 states.

baseball, a lO-minute "seventh inning stretch" is quite enough, thank you, just time enough to grab a greasy hot dog or an autograph from the dugout. And what is this business about batting "partnerships" and two innings? We want to cheer our heroes one at a time, and we also want to see them bat four or five times in a game, so that they get more chances at individual glorywe Americans believe in third and fourth chances in life, just as in baseball. The eyes of my Indian friends glaze over when I mention baseball. They are appalled that our players go through more than 300 balls a game as umpires allow fans to keep foul balls as souvenirs, a colossal waste of money! They cringe when they see baseball players rant and rave two inches from an umpire's beak. Gentlemanly cricketers accept decisions with a stiff upper lip and always show respect to the omnipotent man in white; unfair decisions are fatelkarma and will eventually even out over a period of time, so no sense arguing about it, mate. Truth be told, the two sports thrive on a lazy, laid-back pace, followed by unexpected bursts of excitement, sort of like your typical nine-to-five desk job, with the burst of excitement being your daily lunch break or a meeting with the big boss. Who wins and who loses is often determined by "atmospherics"-the decibel level of the crowd, the speed and direction of the wind, the glare of the sun, the moisture level of the grass. Both sports require brain power, strategy, memory. You are not a true fan or a worthy coach until you can follow and anticipate every move by every player on the field. Baseball players (and their coaches, scouts, agents, managers and general managers) love to pore over videos of themselves and the opposition to gain every slight or perceived advantage. Not only will a particular pitcher's pick-off move be analyzed frame by frame to see if he's vulnerable to stolen bases, but true devotees will also study how often he balks, what the pitch count is when he usually throws back to first base, and perhaps even what he eats for breakfast on game days. Cricket captains are just as analytical, driven and superstitious. They are known to arrive at the grounds early in the morning to study hundreds of minute cracks and blades of grass creeping onto a wicket. They and their players are equally infatuated with batting, bowling and fielding statistics, and of course the exalted history of The Game. Both sports do their countries proud, for they are both democratic and pluralist at the level of the common man and woman. Age, gender, skill, income level matter little on public sandlots in the United' States or maidans in India. Shout

"Play Ball" or "Yaar, bowling karo" and people assemble instantly. I snap out of my daydream. "Aaloo" Inzamam hits a four, the crowd in Kotla groans. No point jeering the Pakistani now that he is on a roll. Minutes later, he hits a ball straight at a fielder and makes an ambitious, ill-advised run for it. Crash go the wickets, the instant replay shows that Aaloo is out by a mile (or rather a kilometer) but no signal from the ump, I mean umpire. The Indian team goes on playing, without a word of protest, nay not even an upturned eyebrow or a cynical look to the sky-no, that wouldn't do at all. That wouldn't be cricket if they did. I chuckle to myself, picturing coach Greg Chappell lumbering out to give the white-coat man a verbal dressing-down which everyone knows he deserves, if not the full "dirt bath" that Piniella (now a baseball manager) and others like him habitually bestow on umpires on the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific. It would be just as hilarious of course to see baseball players, managers and coaches getting a multiple-match suspension for using four-letter words or obliged to apologize to the fans and media, an outcome that is a given when the rare cricketer steps out of line. I'm no psychologist, but they say it's good therapy to step out of yourself once in a while. Take a walk on the wild side, do something different. I'd love to see a member of the cricket audience refuse to give back a "sixer" or a "four" that he just caught after sitting in the sun for seven hours. Let him scream, "No, it's mine!" as he is hauled away in handcuffs or carried away (Lagaan-style) on the shoulders of delirious, newly-empowered cricket players, fans and peanut-sellers. D About the Author: Adnan A. Siddiqi is counselor for cultural affairs at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.

aul Thompson has brains. Lots of them. The 34-year-old has degrees in Greek and Latin, mathematics and neuroscience, and a colleague calls him "the smartest person I know." But we're not just talking about smarts. Thompson really does have lots of brains-about 7,000 at last count. To see them, step out of the bright Southern California sunshine and into the dark confines of the Reed neurology building at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Thompson has his office and lab. There, in a room behind a heavy glass panel, is a large, humming black computer, and inside are brain images captured by high-tech medical scanners: young brains, old brains, autistic brains, Alzheimer's brains, schizophrenic brains, drug addicts' brains and a whole bunch of normal ones. "My brain is in there somewhere," Thompson says. Yet individuality is not what Thompson is interested in. He's mapping brain diseases in large groups of people. By constructing incredibly detailed 3-D images of brains with Alzheimer's and then combining them, he has been able to trace the typical path of the disease and show just how it ravages different parts of the brain over time. Now scientists can see which structures get damaged when-and also see which drugs might keep that damage at bay. In schizophrenia, Thompson's maps have pinpointed a brain region involved in understanding sounds as the first part to be hurt; a common symptom of this mental disorder is hearing voices. His maps are part of a current study of how new and older antipsychotic drugs shield this brain region. "We've never before been able to show these links between brain changes and behavior," says Jay Giedd, a psychiatrist at the National

Paul Thompson with researcher Kira Hayashi in their lab at UCLA.

Paul Thompson's images of Alzheimer's and schizophrenia point to bener treatments. Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. "So these maps are incredibly powerful." But they are also still research tools, Giedd cautions, and not useful for actually diagnosing patients. Still, says Andrew Leuchter, vice chair of psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, "one of the most important things about Paul's work is that everything he does helps to trace the earliest signs of disease, because that's the logical place to begin treatment. So much other imaging work is on advanced stages of illness." The key is to see when things first depart from normal. "The brain is the last giant black box of medicine, locked up inside the skull. Paul shows us what it looks like." Thompson's start in brain science didn't make it seem as if he was going to show anyone anything. "When I first came to UCLA to do my PhD, I had trouble in the labs where they were using test tubes and chemicals. A few things got, well, a bit broken." He laughs. "The man running the lab was really quite sweet, but I think I saw a look of relief on his face when my year with him was up." Things improved when Thompson moved on to neuroimaging. He had always been fascinated by-and good atadvanced mathematics, "and brain imaging is where you can apply math to some tough problems, like understanding what makes people's brains differ from each other. You can collect a lot of brain images, but it's really a mathematical problem to figure out what

Tissue loss, shown in red, is mainly in the parietal lobes of the brain. Such patients usually suffer from hallucinations, hear voices or have bizarre thoughts. The stable regions are in blue. Five years later, tissue loss, shown in pink and red, has engulfed the brain. At this stage, patients could suffer from severe depression, social withdrawal, delusions and an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

the patterns of differences are." Those patterns start out as brain scans taken with a magnetic resonance imaging machine, or MRI. With the MRI, it's as if the brain were an apple sliced into thousands of thin sheets. That's a decent start. But it's hard to get a complete picture of brain anatomy from anyone slice. The hundred billion or so neurons that make up our minds form incredibly complex 3-D structures. These clusters of cells vary in thickness, wind around fluidfilled spaces, and are crossed by thousands of creases, canyons and fissures. A thin cross-section eliminates much of this vital detail and makes it hard to compare whole features in one person's brain with whole features in another. Thompson's solution was, essentially, to map this complex neurological landscape onto a grid. Like a topographical map of real-world canyons, these grids keep accurate information about the size and depth of brain canyons but give them a common scale so they can be compared. Using that scale, infinitesimally small features from one brain can be laid on top of similar features from another brain, and size, shape or thickness can be measured against one another. Do this for a few thousand brains, and you can get an average shape for any brain feature. The next step is to compare this average brain with an unusual brain, one afflicted with a disease such as Alzheimer's. Because the Alzheimer's brain has lost cells, the two brains won't be the same. It takes a certain amount of bending or flexing to make the two shapes conform;

the degree of that bending gives Thompson a measure of the changes wrought by Alzheimer's. He then can blow the brain back up into a lifelike shape, coloring the areas of greatest difference from normal. Thompson has done this for Alzheimer's brains at first diagnosis, then repeated it every few months. The resulting maps reveal that gray matter loss starts in a region called the hippocampus, a memory area, and quickly moves to the limbic system, which is involved in emotions. Within 18 months, it hits areas in the brain's frontal lobes, which are used to control impulses and make decisions. This nicely tracks the sad sequence of behavior changes that psychiatrists-and family members-have long noted. "Basically, we're getting a series of snapshots of the brain that show, in fine detail, which structures are getting hit by the disease and to what degree," says Thompson. "And what I think is exciting about this is that it presents us with targets for drugs. We can try a drug, or a combination of drugs, or even diet, and see if it slows down the rate of cell loss in these areas." Indeed, Thompson is now part of a large trial testing Aricept, a commonly used drug that appears to have moderate effects in the early stages of the disease, in combination with the antioxidant vitamin E. The vitamin has been evaluated already with memory tests, showing little effect, but the combination may be more potent. And if it is, that potency will show up in the brain maps. In schizophrenia, the maps show

changes "exploding like a lava flow over the brain," Thompson says. The disease often strikes teenagers, causing a frightening mix of hallucinations and psychotic behavior, and it comes on very suddenly. Doctors have puzzled for years over the changes in the brain that might trigger this. A few years ago, Thompson showed that abnormalities in schizophrenics first cropped up in a zone called the parietal lobe. This region integrates input from various senses, like hearing, and passes them on to the rest of the brain. "This really was a revolutionary finding," says Leuchter. "Showing that a brain area involved in auditory processing is abnormal is a lot different than simply saying, 'Oh, they hear voices. It's just in their imagination.' Well, it's not just in the imagination. It makes it into a bona fide illness." And an illness that can be treated, perhaps better than it has been in the past. Thompson, with scientists at Columbia U ni versity and elsewhere, has begun to' compare an older drug, haloperidol, with a newer antipsychotic, olanzapine. So far, the newer drug seems to preserve more brain cells. It's also a lot more expensive. But Leuchter and others say that showing it improves brain function helps make the case for using it to pennypinching health insurers. And that makes Thompson's images not only more than pretty pictures, but true maps to better health. 0 About the Author: Josh Fischman is a deputy editor at U.s. News & World Report.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

2005 Jason Patterson from

At first, nobody bought Chester Carlson's strange idea. But trillions of documents later, his invention is the biggest thing in printing since Gutenberg. opying is the engine of civilization: culture is behavior duplicated. The oldest copier invented by people is language, by which an idea of yours becomes an idea of mine. The second great copying machine was writing. When the Sumerians transposed spoken words into stylus marks on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago, they hugely extended the human network that language had created. Writing freed copying from the chain of living contact. It made ideas permanent, portable and endlessly reproducible. Until Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s, producing a book in an edition of more than one generally meant writing it out again. Printing with moveable type was not copying, however. Gutenberg couldn't take a document that already existed, feed it into his printing press and run off facsimiles. The first true mechanical copier was manufactured in 1780, when James Watt, who is better known as the inventor

Adapted from Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg-Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine by David Owen (Simon & Schuster). ÂŠ 2004 David Owen.

of the modern steam engine, created the copying press. Few people today know what a copying press was, but you may have seen one in an antiques store, where it was perhaps called a book press. A user took a document freshly written in special ink, placed a moistened sheet of translucent paper against the inked surface and squeezed the two sheets together in the press, causing some of the ink from the original to penetrate the second sheet, which could then be read by turning it over and looking through its back. Copying presses were standard equipment in offices for nearly a century and a half. (Thomas Jefferson used one, and the last President whose official correspondence was copied on one was Calvin Coolidge.) The machines were displaced, beginning in the late l800s, by a combination of two 19th-century inventions: the typewriter and carbon paper. Among the first modern copying machines, introduced in 1950 by 3M, was the Thermo-Fax, and it made a copy by shining infrared light through an original document and a sheet of paper that had been coated with heat-sensitive chemicals. Competing manufacturers soon introduced other copying technologies and

marketed machines called Dupliton, DialA-Matic Autostat, Verifax, Cop ease and Copymation. These machines and their successors were welcomed by secretaries, who had no other means of reproducing documents in hand, but each had serious drawbacks. All required expensive chemically treated papers. And all made copies that smelled bad, were hard to read, didn't last long and tended to curl up into tubes. None of those machines are still manufactured today. They were all made obsolete by a radically different machine, which had been developed by an obscure photographic-supply company. That company had been founded in 1906 as the Haloid Company and is known today as the Xerox Corporation. In 1959, it introduced an office copier called the Haloid Xerox 914, a machine that, unlike its numerous competitors, made sharp, permanent copies on ordinary paper-a huge breakthrough. The process, which Haloid called xerography (based on Greek words meaning "dry" and "writing"), was so unusual and nonintuitive that physicists who visited the drafty warehouses where the first machines were built sometimes expressed doubt that it was even theoretically feasible.

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Remarkably, xerography was conceived by one person-Chester Carlson, a shy, soft-spoken patent attorney, who grew up in almost unspeakable poverty and worked his way through junior college and the California Institute of Technology. He made his discovery in solitude in 1937 and offered it to more than 20 major corporations, among them IBM, General Electric, Eastman Kodak and RCA. All of them turned him down, expressing what he later called "an enthusiastic lack of interest" and thereby passing up the opportunity to manufacture what Fortune magazine would describe as "the most successful product ever marketed in America." Carlson's invention was indeed a commercial triumph. Essentially overnight, people began making copies at a rate that was orders of magnitude higher than anyone had believed possible. And the rate is still growing. In fact, most documents handled by a typical American office worker today are produced xerographically, either on copiers manufactured by Xerox and its competitors or on laser printers, which employ the same process

trademark is a word, symbol, design or any combination of these used in association with products or services, It distinguishes a specific product from others in the market. Only the owner of a trademark can put it on a product. A trademark can become generic if it becomes so widely known and used with a particular category of goods or services as to designate that particular category, The term escalator was a registered trademark of the Otis Elevator Company until 1950, when the U,S, Patent Office ruled it was in the public domain since escalator had become the generic name for a moving stairway, Here are some brand names that are still protected by trademark: Kleenex: It is a registered trademark of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, which has been in the tissue business since the 1890s and first offered facial tis-

"The letters came out clearly," Carlson recalled of the first xerographic copy, which he made with his assistant, Otto Kornei, in a rented room in New York City on October 22, 1938.

(and were invented, in the 1970s, by a Xerox researcher). Each year, the world produces more than three trillion xerographic copies and laser-printed pagesabout 500 for every human on earth. Xerography eventually made Carlson a very wealthy man. (His royalties amounted to something like a 16th of a cent for every Xerox copy made, worldwide, through 1965.) Nevertheless, he lived simply. He never owned a second home or a second car, and his wife had to urge him not to buy third-class train tickets when he traveled in Europe. People who knew him casually seldom suspected that he was rich or even well-to-do; when

sues in 1924, Dictaphone: The name was trademarked in 1907 by the Columbia Graphophone Manufacturing Company that became a leading maker of these voice-recording devices, Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company, Dictaphone Corporation, in 1923. After changing many owners it was acquired by Nuance Communications in 2006, It is one of the five oldest surviving US brands, Teflon: Commonly known as the coating for non-stick cookware, Teflon is the brand name of the polymer polytetrafluoroethylene discovered by Roy J Plunkett of DuPont in 1938, It was trademarked in 1945 and first used by the military in artillery shell fuses, Vaseline: This brand of petroleum jelly was discovered in 1859 by Robert Augustus Chesebrough In 1874 the original company was incorporated as

Carlson told an acquaintance he worked at Xerox, the man assumed he was a factory worker and asked if he belonged to a union. "His real wealth seemed to be composed of the number of things he could easily do without," his second wife said. He spent the last years of his life quietly giving most of his fortune away. When he died in 1968, among his eulogizers was the secretary-general of the United Nations. Carlson was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1906. His parents-Olof Adolph Carlson and Ellen Josephine Hawkins-had grown up on neighboring farms in Grove City, Minnesota, a tiny

the Chesebrough Manufacturing Company and the brand name was registered as a trademark in 1877. Scotch Tape: The trademarked adhesive tape manufactured by 3M company was developed in the 1930s by Richard Drew, Besides Scotch Transparent Tape, the company has more than 80 variants, such as Scotch Rug and Carpet Tape, Scotch Painters' Masking Tape, Scotch Hair Set Tape, Scotch Freezer Tape Post-it note: This usually yellow stationery with a strip of reusable adhesive on the back is a trademark of 3M, Spence Silver, a researcher at 3M, first developed the technology in 1968 while looking for ways to improve acrylate adhesives, His colleague Art Fry came up with the Post-it note concept when he used the glue to stop bookmarks from falling out of his

church choir hymnal Bubble Wrap: The transparent, plastic cushioning material with air-filled bubbles is a trademark of the Sealed Air Corporation, It was invented in 1960 by Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes and was originally intended to be a type of textured wallpaper. Band-Aid: A registered trademark of Johnson & Johnson, these adhesive bandages were developed in the 1920s by Earle Dickson, who worked as cotton buyer at the company and went on to become a vice president. Dickson made the prototype of BandAid for his wife Josephine, who was prone to cutting herself while cooking, Scrabble: The popular word game invented by Alfred Mosher Butts was trademarked in 1948, In the United States, it is currently owned by Hasbro Inc, -OK

Swedish farming community about 120 kilometers west of Minneapolis. Olof was a barber. He suffered severely from arthritis in his spine, and he developed tuberculosis in his thirties. Seeking relief, he moved his wife and 3-year-old son to a brother's house in California, then to a camp among sand dunes in the Arizona desert, then to an adobe hut on a worthless Mexican farm, then to Los Angeleswhere the family spent more than a year living in a single room in the home of a doctor for whom Ellen, now the family's sole financial support, worked as a housekeeper-then to a dilapidated rented house in San Bernardino, California. In the fall of 1915, when Chester was 9, Olof decided that cold, rather than heat, might improve his health, and he moved' the family again, to a decaying shed in the mountains outside San Bernardino. The snows that winter were three and four feet deep. Each morning, Ellen used a hand mirror to flash a signal to a worried storekeeper in the valley below, to let him know that they had survived another night. Young Chester knew his father only as an invalid and would remember him as "a bent walking skeleton, who had to spend the greater part of his time lying flat on his back." Chester, an only child, also said his mother had always somehow managed to make the family's poverty seem like a game-a challenging puzzle that could be solved with good spirits and ingenuity. Nevertheless, he had a very lonely childhood. During most of the time the family lived in the mountains, he was the only student in the local school. This period, he said, "marked the beginning of a considerable setback in my social development among children of my age." When the school year ended, Olof-who had now abandoned all hope of improving his health-moved the family back into the valley, where, for the next eight years, they lived in a grim succession of rundown houses. By the time Chester entered high school, he was his family's principal provider. Still, he managed to make good grades, especially in science, and began to think seriously about how he might use his talents. He considered gold prospecting, publishing and other occupations be-

fore deciding his best chance would be to invent something valuable. At 15, Chester began jotting down ideas for inventions and making other notes in a pocket diary, a practice he maintained for the rest of his life. He sketched concepts for a rotating billboard, a machine for cleaning shoes and a trick safety pin (which could be made to look as though it had pierced a finger). He was fascinated by printing and the graphic arts. When he was 10, his favorite posses~ ~ 1'l

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The 1949 prototype required four dozen manual operations to make a copy in three

minutes. It almost sank the Haloid Company. sion was a toy typewriter. Later, he worked in a print shop and published a magazine, the Amateur Chemists' Press, for science-minded classmates. "I was impressed with the tremendous amount of labor involved in getting something into print," he recalled in a 1965 interview with Joseph 1. Ermenc, a Dartmouth professor. "That set me to thinking about easier ways to do that, and I got to thinking about duplicating methods." During his junior year in high school, his mother-his one source of happiness, encouragement, stability and love-died of tuberculosis, at 53. Her death devastated him; 25 years later, he was almost physically unable to speak of it. "The worst thing that ever happened to me," he recalled. "I so wanted to be able to give her a few things in life." By the time he

graduated from high school, he and Olof had been reduced to living in a former chicken coop, whose single room had a bare concrete floor. Chester slept outdoors, partly to lessen his own chance of contracting the disease that had killed his mother, on a narrow strip of packed earth between the building and a board fence that ran along the alley, in a sleeping bag that he himself had made. Carlson worked his way through three years at a nearby junior college, then transferred to Cal Tech, where he majored in physics and supported himself and his father by mowing lawns, doing odd jobs and working at a cement mill. (His father, with whom he shared a small apartment in Pasadena, pitched in by doing the cooking.) He graduated in 1930 and was hired by Bell Labs, in New York City, as a research engineer. After a year, he transferred to the company's patent department, believing the skills he would learn there might be useful to him when he became an inventor. In his notebooks during the 1930s, Carlson recorded more than 400 ideas for products, among them a raincoat with gutters to channel water away from trouser legs; a toothbrush with replaceable bristles; a see-through toothpaste tube, made of cellophane; a perforated-plastic filter tip for cigarettes. In 1934, he married Elsa von Mallen, who had given him her telephone number after dancing with him to Duke Ellington records at a party at the YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association). The marriage was troubled almost from the beginning. "I don't know what to do or say-he's so much smarter," she said shortly before they divorced, in 1945. Partly to get out of the house, Carlson enrolled in night classes at New York Law School in 1936. He did most of his studying at the New York Public Library, where he copied by hand long passages from law books that he couldn't afford to buy. His copying gave him writer's cramp and made him think again about the desirability of a device that, unlike carbon paper, could be used to reproduce documents that already existed. "I recognized quite early that if conventional photography would have worked for an office copier it would have been done before by the big companies in

the photographic field who certainly would have explored that possibility pretty thoroughly," he told Ermenc. "So I deliberately turned away from the conventional photographic processes and started searching in the library for information about all the different ways in which light will affect matter. I soon came upon photoelectricity and photoconductivity." Photoelectricity is such a complex phenomenon that it took Albert Einstein to explain it, in 1905; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 for having done so. (Incidentally, Einstein, like Carlson, was a physicist who worked in a patent office.) A photoconductive material is one whose ability to conduct electricity increases

Next, he would project an image of a printed page onto the charged surface, thereby causing the charge to drain away to ground from the illuminated areas (the ones corresponding to the reflective white background of the page) while allowing the charge to persist in areas that remained dark (the ones corresponding to the black ink). Finally, he would dust the entire surface with an oppositely charged powdered toner, which would adhere only to the places where charges remained, thereby forming a visible (and reversed) image of the original page. The powder could then be transferred to a sheet of paper and fused to it: a copy. This idea would become the basis of xerography. Every xerographic office copier

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Haloid's physics team-George Mott, Fred Hudson, Harold Clark and Bob Gundlach, circa 1956-toiled in an old house in Rochester. when light shines on it. Carlson reasoned that he might be able to make a copying machine based on photoconductivity if he could find a material that acted as a conductor when it was illuminated and as an insulator when it was not. His plan was to apply a thin layer of the material to an electrically grounded metal plate. Then, in the dark, he would apply a uniform static electric charge to the entire coated surface.

and laser printer contains a photoconductive surface, which is known as the photoreceptor. (In a laser printer, the light that shines on the photoreceptor is a digitally controlled laser beam.) Carlson applied for his first patent on October 18, 1937, and began conducting crude experiments. He had learned from his reading that sulfur had the photoconductive properties he was looking for, so he bought some at a chemical supply store and attempted to liquefy it by heating it over a burner on the stove in the kitchen of his apartment, in Queens, New York City. In nearly a year

of experimentation, he accomplished little beyond setting his sulfur on fire, filling his apartment building with the smell of rotten eggs and angering his wife. In 1938, he rented a laboratory in the New York City borough of Astoria and hired an assistant, an unemployed physicist named Otto Kornei, who had recently emigrated from Austria. Carlson's laboratory was really just the back room of a beauty parlor-it had previously served as a janitor's closet-but it had running water and a gas connection, and Kornei soon succeeded in applying a thin film of liquefied sulfur to zinc plates the size of business cards. Working with Carlson one day soon afterward, he wrote the date and place-10.22.-38 ASTORIA-on a glass microscope slide, turned out the lights and rubbed a sulfur-coated plate with his handkerchief to give it a static electric charge. As Carlson watched, Kornei placed the slide facedown against the plate and turned on a bright flood lamp for several seconds. He turned off the lamp, removed the slide and dusted the plate with powder. "The letters came out clearly," Carlson wrote later. Carlson pressed a piece of wax paper against the image so that most of the powder stuck to it. He was now holding the world's first xerographic copy. (That historic copy is in the Smithsonian Institution's collection.) He gazed at the paper for a long time and held it up to the window. Then he took his assistant to lunch. Kornei, unlike his boss, was unimpressed, and soon took a job at an electronics company in Cleveland. Carlson continued alone and spent six years unsuccessfully trying to interest companies in developing and manufacturing the machine he had envisioned. In 1944, a路 chance conversation led him to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private, nonprofit research-and-development organization in Columbus, Ohio. He performed his standard demonstration for a half-dozen of Battelle's scientists and engineers, then braced himself for the throat-clearing and paper-rearranging that was the usual response to his presentations. But a Battelle engineer named Russell Dayton held up the scrap of wax paper and said to his colleagues, "However crude this may seem, this is the first time any of you have seen a repro-

he global document management firm entered India in partnership with the Modi Group of companies in 1983. The joint venture, which lasted until 1995, made deep inroads into the Indian market. "We now take full control of our destiny," says Andrew Horne, an American who has been managing director of India operations since 2004. Xerox offers more than 35 products, including monoprinters, color printers and multifunction devices. Its network extends to 14 regional offices and some 140 partners who sell only Xerox products. The company has an effective service infrastructure across the country and expects sales to accelerate substantially over the next few years, especially in the small and medium sector where it plans to promote itself as a brand that sells more than just copiers, says Natesh Mani, executive director of the company's New Office Group division. Xerox Corporation has also earned

goodwi II through its corporate social responsibility initiatives. Be it the 2004 tsunami, earthquakes in South Asia or hurricanes in the United States, the company made cash and in-kind contributions to the humanitarian efforts. After the 2005 earthquake in northern India and Pakistan, Xerox representatives joined a team of American corporate houses sent by President George W. Bush to assess the scale of suffering and provide immediate relief to victims. In India, Xerox has spent more than Rs. 1.4 million on hygiene, literacy, environment, medical and family welfare and infrastructure improvement projects such as roads and schools in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, where it has a factory, and in adjacent villages. To encourage bright village kids to attend school, the company began providing -AVN. scholarships in 1995. Andrew Horne, managing director of Xerox India.

duction made without any chemical reaction and [with] a dry process." Battelle agreed to invest. This was significant progress, although it was not the vindication that Carlson had dreamed of. Battelle allocated just $3,000 for xerographic research in 1944, and more than a few of its scientists remained doubtful for years to come. "Of those who knew about it," Dayton said later, "at least 50 percent thought it was a stupid idea and that Battelle should never have gotten into it. It just goes to prove that if you've got something unique, you don't take a poll." Also in 1944, a New York City patent agent and freelance writer named Nicholas Langer came across a copy of one of Carlson's first patents and wrote a laudatory article about it for Radio News. A condensed version of the article appeared the next year in a technical bulletin published by Eastman Kodak and caught the attention of Joseph C. Wilson, president of the Haloid Company, which, like Kodak, was situated in Rochester, New York. For some time, Wilson had wanted to establish Haloid in a business that, unlike photographic supplies, wasn't already dominated by its powerful crosstown rival. Following a lengthy ne-

gotiation, in 1947 Haloid agreed to pay Battelle $10,000 for a one-year license to help the company build office copiers based on Carlson's idea, with options to renew. A quarter of the fee, or $2,500, went to Carlson-the first money he earned from his idea, which was now a decade old. Success was not immediate. Haloid, with considerable help from Battelle, introduced its first xerographic copier, which it called the Model A, in 1949, but the machine was almost comically difficult to operate, and all the early testers returned it. "Awkward in its lack of coordinated design, it required more than a dozen manual operations before it would produce a copy," Haloid's research chief wrote in 1971. That was an understatement; four dozen manual operations was more like it. With practice, Haloid promised, a skilled operator could hope to

make a copy every three minutes or so. The Model A Copier was so hard to use that it might have sunk xerography, and possibly Haloid itself, if it hadn't turned out to be good at something else: creating inexpensive paper masters for offset lithographic duplicators, a type of printing press. Developing a truly useful office copier took another 10 years and many millions of dollars. Carlson became a Haloid consultant in 1948. Later, he was given a laboratory and an assistant, and he made a number of discoveries, for which he received three dozen patents. Still, Carlson's most important contribution to the project during the 1950s was probably helping to maintain the company's enthusiasm for his idea despite repeated setbacks. A Battelle engineer said later, "There always had to be something extralogical about continuing."

As a boy in the 1920s, Chester filled his diary with ideas for inventions, such as a rotating billboard, a machine for cleaning shoes and a trick safety pin.

Haloid's final push to build an automated xerographic copier-the model 9l4-began in the early 1950s. The main theoretical work was done by a group of young physicists, who worked not in a gleaming laboratory but in an old house in a seedy part of town. Robert Gundlach, who went to work at Haloid in 1952 and eventually earned 155 xerography-related patents, told me not long ago, "You had to park about a block away and walk. They put Ernie Lehmann and me up in the attic, in a room that had a ceiling that sloped so that you couldn't stand up except in the middle of the room. There was a group working on powder-cloud development, which involved making a fog of submicron carbon particles. Every once in a while we would have to vent the developing device, because it would become clogged with carbon dust, and we had to learn not to do that on Tuesdays, because that was when the lady next door hung out her white linens."

That Haloid thought of using fur may have had more to do with chance than with science: some of the company's researchers and engineers in those days worked in a bleak, tenement-like brick building on Lake Avenue whose groundfloor storefront was occupied by the Crosby Frisian Fur Co. The engineers tried and rejected beaver and raccoon, then detennined that the back fur of New Zealand rabbits worked just about right. The brushes were handsewn by the father of the fur shop's owner. The engineers trimmed them to size on a homemade machine that looked a little like a reel lawn mower. In the winter of 1959, the company rented a grim warehouse on Lyell Avenue and built a few final 914 prototypes there. The building's owner, to save money, turned the furnace down at five o'clock, so the engineers erected a canvas enclosure around each machine to contain the heat given off by the machine itself and worked inside, often around the clock. They and other Haloid employees were

Carlson came to terms with his wealth by divesting himself of most of it. His philanthropy during the final decade of his life was prodigious. The company's engineers scrounged bolts, springs, aluminum tubing and other items from ajunkyard. An early prototype was eventually able to make copiesthough only in the dark, since it had no exterior cabinet to prevent the room's lights from discharging the photoreceptor and spoiling the images-but it looked more like a science fair project than an office machine. A photoreceptor has to be cleaned between exposures. In the Model A-in which the photoreceptor was a flat plate coated with selenium, a far more sensitive photoconductor than sulfur-the cleaning was done manually, by rocking the plate in a tray filled with what was essentially cat litter. (Coffee grounds, soybean meal, flax seed and corn meal were also tried and rejected-they attracted vennin.) In a 914, the photoreceptor was a cylinder and the cleaning was done by a rotating fur brush.

trying to identify and eliminate the 914's remaining defects, of which there were depressingly many. One of the biggest challenges had to do with the toner-the powdered resin that's used to develop xerographic images. A toner has to have many seemingly mutually exclusive characteristics. It has to melt quickly and completely, but can't be so soft that it smears on the photoreceptor or so hard that it damages the surface; it has to be brittle enough to be capable of being ground to a fine powder to yield sharp, high-resolution images, but not so fine that it fouls the machine. And so on. "The problems are self-exacerbating once they begin," Gundlach told me. An ideal toner, the scientists realized, would have some of the same properties as ice, whose viscosity, as you warm it, doesn't change until the moment it turns into a liquid. Most thermoplastic resins, in contrast,

pass through a gradient of states between solid and liquid, as chocolate does. No one knew whether a suitable resin existed. A satisfactory toner was developed virtually at the last minute, primarily through the efforts of a Haloid chemist named Michael Insalaco, and the first production 914 shipped in March 1960. The customer was Standard Press Steel, a manufacturer of metal fasteners in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. The machine weighed nearly 295 kilograms and had to be delivered on a tilting dolly so that it could be angled through doors. In the mid-1950s, Carlson had worried that few businesses might ever need to make as many as 100 copies a day-the threshold, he felt, at which xerographic office copying would be economical. During the 914's development, Haloid's engineering department had speculated that very heavy users, at peak periods, might make five times that many copies in a day, or 10,000 a month. From the day the first 914 arrived in Jenkintown, though, Standard Press employees used it to make copies at several times the predicted maximum rate. Using a 914 was seductively easy, since there were no special papers or chemical developers, and all you had to do was push a button-and the copy itself provided positive reinforcement, because it didn't smell bad, curl up or turn brown. The numbers seemed inconceivable at first, but the first companies to receive 914s were turning out 2,000 to 3,000 copies a day. Truly epochal technology shifts are sometimes incomprehensible until after they've occurred. When the first videocassette recorders were introduced, in the 1970s, the Motion Picture Association of America spent millions complaining to the U.S. Congress that Hollywood was about to be annihilated. Instead, the VCR revived Hollywood by generating billions in rental fees and transforming the way movies were financed. Xerox machines had a similarly sweeping impact. Office workers didn't realize how much they needed copies until, in 1960, they were suddenly able to make them easily. The technology itself created the demand that ultimately sustained it. Invention was the mother of necessity. Carlson began earning royalties from xerography in 1947. The payments were small at first. In 1953, he traded his old

Studebaker car for a new one. The next year, he and his second wife, Dorris, whom he had married in 1946, built an unpretentious three-bedroom house just outside Rochester, New York. Carlson eventually earned something like $200 million from his invention, but he lived in that house for the rest of his life. He sometimes told Dorris that he could be just as happy, or perhaps happier, living in a trailer in the yard. "I think he felt guilty about having a nice, comfortable house," she said later, "and when people would come in and say, 'Oh, this is lovely,' he would say, 'Dorris planned it all.' " She was never certain how truly serious he was about his trailer, but he mentioned it frequently, and she would tease him when he did: "And will you take your 13 steel filing cabinets with you?" Carlson came to terms with his wealth by divesting himself of most of it. His philanthropy during the final decade of his life was prodigious. It was also entirely anonymous. When he gave the money to build a building, he did not permit his name to be revealed publicly, never mind be engraved in stone above the door. In the mid-1960s, for example, he gave money to Cal Tech for a center for the study of chemical physics, his field of concentration, but stipulated that the building be named for Arthur Amos Noyes, the professor whose teaching had influenced him the most. Carlson made large contributions to organizations that promoted world peace. He supported civil rights organizations. He bought apartment buildings in Washington, D.C. and New York City and arranged for the buildings to be racially integrated. He gave millions to the United Negro College Fund and made contributions to individual black colleges. He (and his will) provided most of the funding during the 1960s and 1970s for Robert Maynard Hutchins' Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. He supported the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other pacifist organizations. He gave money to schools, libraries and international relief agencies. The list of his beneficiaries was long, and he himself weighed every request. (His philanthropy continues today, through the Chester and Dorris Carlson Charitable Trust.) Carlson died, of a heart attack, on September 19, 1968. He was 62. U Thant,

Introducing the Xerox 9400. "WillmiraCles never cease~ When people saw all the incredible things our Xerox 9200could do, they called it a miracle. But, at Xerox, we never fCSt on our miracles. Introducing the Xerox 9400 Duplicator. It does everything the 9200 does and more. With its automatic documenr handler you C20 feed and CY~ to 200originals 2t 3. time. (Even d~~d:r~den':e ~~~~ you can make copies lighter or without having to inte~ rupl the job. You can even correct most probkms yourself with thr help of our new self-diagnostic system which CQnstantly moniton the machine. And if all this wasn't enough, the Xerox 9400 C2Jl automatically coPy on both sides of a sheet of paper at the ~ mcredibk speed of rwa pages a second. You see, we believe mat onc good miracle deserves anomer.

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From 1959 to 1966, Haloid would grow into Xerox, America's 15th-largest publicly traded company. A circa 1977 ad is shown. the secretary-general of the United Nations, who had been a friend of Carlson's, wrote at the time, "To know Chester Carlson was to like him, to love him and to respect him. He was generally known as the inventor of xerography, and although it was an extraordinary achievement in the technological and scientific field, I respected him more as a man of exceptional moral stature and as a humanist. His concern for the future of the human situation was genuine, and his dedication to the principles of the United Nations was profound. He belonged to that rare breed of leaders who generate in our hearts faith in man and hope for the future." In the nearly seven decades since Carlson thought of xerography, no one has come up with a better way of making copies on plain paper. That is an almost inconceivable achievement, given the usual pace of high-technology innovation, evolution and extinction. The number of copies made all over the world on xerographic machines has increased every year since Carlson and Komei peeled away that first scrap of wax paper in Astoria back in 1938. In 1955, four years before the introduction of the 914, the world made about 20 million copies, almost all of them by non-xerographic means; in 1964, five years after the introduction of the 914, it

made nine and a half billion, almost all xerographically. Five hundred and fifty billion in 1984. Seven hundred billion in 1985. This year, trillions. And Carlson's invention is still evolving. One of the most advanced machines today is the Xerox DocuColor iGen3, introduced in 2001. It is a digital printing system rather than a copier but operates xerographically. It produces 6,000 fullcolor, 8-112- by ll-inch offset-quality impressions per hour, and those impressions can be customized on the fly. Its four "imaging stations" lay down cyan, magenta, yellow and black toners on an electrostatically charged photoconductive belt, from which the powders are transferred, all at once, onto paper. The underlying imaging technology, by which a monochromatic process makes full-color prints, is hard to explain, but essentially it involves separating a polychromatic image into the three complementary colors (plus black) in order to "enable one color to be recorded, and then developing with colored powder to produce a copy of that color, then repeating for each other color and superimposing the dust images on the same copy sheet." That, at any rate, is how Chester Carlson described it in his second xerography patent, which he filed on April 4, 1939. D About the Author: David Owen, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is the author of a dozen books.

1!isliaklia mesai

Asia Society:

Forging

Stronger Ties hree Cs define the work of the Asian American who heads a 50-year-old American nonprofit organization seeking to promote cultural understanding between the people of these two continents. For Vishakha Desai, president of the Asia Society, the critical Cs are: culture, creativity and current affairs. Desai is the first woman and the first Asian American to head the institution founded by millionaire philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III. She succeeded Nicholas Platt, a former U.S. ambassador, who retired in 2004. Not too fond of tags, she is happier to recall that she was chosen from 200 candidates, irrespective of her race and gender. While making the point that she wasn't selected "because I was a woman or I was an Asian American," she acknowledges an additional duty. "The responsibility has to do with the fact that lots of people look to you as a role model. It's not that I have become a role model, but people look to you for that." After joining the Asia Society as director of its museum and cultural programs in 1990, she worked as vice president and then senior vice president. Earlier she was curator of Indian, Southeast Asian and Islamic art at the

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston University and Columbia University. Always interested in international relations, she says she fell into the museum career by accident. Museums are "the site of where culture was and is in the United States," said Desai, during a visit to Mumbai in March for the Asia Society's 16th Asian Corporate Conference, which focused on global business, India's new priorities and Asia's new realities. "Ultimately I was always interested in the potential role art can play in cultural understanding rather than simply art as an aesthetic object." Ahmedabad-born Desai first went to the United States as a 17year-old high school student, staying for a year. She returned to complete her graduation in political science at the University of Bombay, and then left India again at 20 to study for a masters and PhD at the University of Michigan. Desai believes her current position draws on her main interests in political science, arts and culture: She enjoys the challenge of heading an organization that holds international business conferences, lectures, art exhibits, cultural performances and pro-

grams on education about Asia. "It's like anybody who becomes the president of a university, you know, they are scholars and then they realize they have another kind of ambition in life....lt's not just the acquisition of new skill sets, but it's really the ability to grow and become a fuller person and fulfill your own potential that you didn't even know you had." Having a former Asia Society president at home is a plus-her husband, Robert Oxnam, headed the organization from 1981 to 1992. She jokes that between them the couple are Indo-China experts-Oxnam is a China scholar. "So we basically cover Asia, you know!" she laughs. Desai says even she is surprised at the rapid pace of growth. "It's explosive. If you had told me two years ago India would be the flavor of the month the way it is today I could not have imagined it would be this fast." While the Chinese economy expanded by 9.9 percent last year, India is the world's second fastest expanding economy with growth close to 8 percent. Aiming to tap this growth, the Asia Society launched its first center in India in March, an office of three at Nariman Point in Mumbai. The center's next big

event will be a contemporary Indian art exhibition, "The Edge of Desire," in New Delhi at the end of November, says Executive Director Bunty Chand. Headquartered in New York City, the society has regional centers in Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Manila and Shanghai. Desai hopes to develop the India office into a South Asia hub with the priority being to create a platform for India-South AsiaU.S. dialogue. "It can't be just business or just social issues or arts and culture. Ultimately it's about relationships and relationships are about people. That's why art and culture become very important, because they often transcend differences." Creating partnerships is vital and her origin does play an important part. "The fact that I am of Asian origin really makes a difference as to how the institution is perceived," she says. "Therefore,it matches our current aspiration of seeing the institution as truly trans-national, not simply an American institution. And I think with my presence it makes it more credible." D About the Author: Ramola Talwar Badam is a writer based in Mumbai.

ater this year, US Navy Commander Sunita Williams, 40, is to become the second American astronaut of Indian heritage to fly into space, when she soars in a space shuttle toward the International Space Station to serve as its flight engineer for several months as part of a three-person team, NASA announced on May 2. Named a U.S. astronaut in 1998, Williams is an expert helicopter pilot, has a master's degree in engineering management, and trained in Moscow on manipulation of the robotic arm that Space Station teams use to carry out work. She is married to Michael J Williams and her hometown is Needham, Massachusetts, not far from the home of her parents, Gujarat-born neuroscientist Dr. Deepak Pandya, and his wife, Bonnie. America's first astronaut of Indian heritage was Kalpana Chawla, who died February 1, 2003, aboard the space shuttle Columbia.

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he non-profit organization Family Health International, in collaboration with the U.S. Agency for International Development, distributed child-friendly materials on HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness in New Delhi on March 30. They worked with the Young Women's Christian Association, the Salaam Baalak Trust and the Sharan group to develop materials that meet the needs of slum and street children. USAID Mission Director George Deikun (left) and FHI International CEO Albert Siemens (seated in center) interacted with children at the YWCA Family Service Centre in Najafgarh, New Delhi.

9th-10th century stone idol, stolen from a temple in Mandsour, Madhya Pradesh, six years ago, was recovered from a New York art gallery in December 2005 and returned to Indian custody by U.S law enforcement agents Martin D. Ficke, special agent in charge for US. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, presented the 133-kilogram idol, depicting the Varaha incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, to Neelam Deo, India's consul-general in New York on April 17.

amya Ramesh (from left), an MBA student and sports parachutist, Shyamala Jayashankar, an adventure trainer, and her husband Wing Commander Jayashankar read SPAN at the Barista coffee shop in Khan Market, New Delhi. From AprilJune, multiple copies of SPAN have been placed at 10 Barista coffee shops throughout New Delhi, and collections of SPAN issues have been sent to call centers for employees to enjoy during their breaks. Also, as part of the project aimed at interacting with new readers on topics in the magazine, SPAN is sponsoring appearances by experts, who will have informal chats with interested clients at Barista outlets. One such event was a May 19 presentation by a representative of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India at the Barista coffee shop in the Safdarjang Development Area, across the street from liT Delhi.

Blowin'

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Wind oze of kites soared through the skie,on March 25, engaging in aerial c0tnbat above the National Mall, an open area national park in Washington,: D.C. that showcases the Washington Monument obelisk as well as other memorials and the Smithsonian museums. The Smithsonian Kite Festival, started by aviation pioneer Paul E. Garber 40 years ago, has become a traditional part of the festivities marking the arrival of spring when Washington's cherry trees blossom. Enthusiasts tested their kitemaking skills, engaged in traditional rokkaku battles in which people try to cut or ground the other kites, and showed off kite-flying tricks. Awards were given in more than 30 categories, kite organizations set up stunning displays and kiteflying masters wowed the crowds.

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