SPAN: July/August 2006 by SPAN magazine

U.S. After-School Programs Keep Kids Out of Trouble ByRakeebHossain HaviKoro: Celebrating the U.S.-India Connection

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Inspiration of that Soulful Sound Cross-Cultural Connection My

Experiments

Americans

ByDeepanjaliKakali

By Christopher Holland

By LaurindaKeysLong

with Hindi By KarenKeshap

Come to Learn Indian Languages

U.S.-India Trade There Must Be Progress and Results

By RameshJain

By LaurindaKeysLong

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36 40 44 46 48 51 57

Lessonson Lifeand Lossfrom the Nicobarese By NeeleshMisra Health The Battle to Stop Bird Flu By Thomas Goetz

Women's Rights? "I Cannot But Laugh" Travel Maine: Nature Beckons

By Joannie Fischer

ByJulianEBarnes

Education The Washington Monthly College Guide On the Lighter Side

58 60 Publisher: Michael H. Anderson Editor-in-Chief: Corina R. Sanders Editor: Laurinda Keys Long Associate Editor: A. Venkata Narayana Urdu Editor: Anjum Naim Hindi Editor Girirai Agarwal Copy Editor Deepanjali Kakati Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar Dply Art Directors Khurshid Anwar Abbasi, Qasim Raza Editoriai Assistant Shalini Verma Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawai Printing Assistant Alok Kaushik Business Manager R. Narayan ResearchServices American Information ResourceCenfer, Bureauof Intemafional fnformation Programs

Front cover: A member of the American dance crew HaviKoro performs at the Centrestage Mall in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Photograph by Hemant Bhatnagar Published by the PublicAffairsSection.AmericanCenler,24 KasturbaGandhiMarg, New Delhi 110001(phone:23316841),onbehallof theAmericanEmbassy,NewDelhi.Printed atAiantaDllset & Packagingsltd., 95-B WazirpurIndustrialArea,Delhi 110052. The opinions expressedin Ihis magazinedo not necessarilyreflecttheviewsor policies of the U.S.GovernmentNo part 01 this

magazinemaybereproducedwithoutpermission.Thismagazinecontains68 pages. Visit SPAN on the Web at

http://usembassy.state.gov/posts/in

editorspan@state,gov

1/wwwhspan.html

A Farewell From The Publisher Michael H. Anderson

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IndIans andiAmericansoonnectthrough learning about each other's music, 'languages, history; cultural practices, society and' ,buying each other's products, attending each other's universities, teaching, visiting each other, helping in t1me of need, and working together to prevent the spread of disease and disaster~'9PAN oelebrates these connections in this issue, beginning with a fareweUinterview from 'PubJisher who has worked to foster mutual understan as Embassy Minister Counselor for Public Affairs. Anderson, a former journalist and leacher, ,and a 25year veteran of the Foreign Service, is transferring to the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. ~fWli1fpu•• 'Y¢~~

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ElIlbasSY'saJl~ln(Ual»r~$$,(tuJ.tur0IDId educathUlalcIDt~its,Wllat's YOllrw]{e oIlU.$.-'India relatioIlS? Like many American diplomats in India, .I've had the 'privilege of two, separate ];!ostingSinthis remarkable conntry. From 1987,-90,): was tbe Embassy's spokesmanJinfofmation off1,cer.trhen l came back in 2002 to Serve in theposf' liberalized, "new" India. Relations between om:two countries are tbepest they baveever been. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice putlitlnicely when she said: "India is an increasingly important partner for tbeUnited States,aiand we welcomeits emergence as a global power in the 21st century." Our two governments, a]jldani~ncreasingly wider range of 60th ofiour,peqples, realize thattbe development ofia strategic partnershipisa "win-win" for bothcountries. That's why President George W. Bush made his histotic fuIndia in March and why there's been ,such,acceleration in our. cooperation. "Indians and Americans areinteractiog as never before and acroSS a wide spectrum of acti¥ities-not just civil nuclear iSSueSbut also on trade, defense, tQurism,.health and education. As two great multicultural democracies, we realize as before that it is in our mutual interest to work closer together On the great challenges of these times-anJi-ter,rori$m, regional security,trade and investment, energy, the environment,HIVI AIDS,humantrafficking, UN refortll and other concerns. Have yon.had any disawildments in India? ... R

Michael Anderson interacts with rescued street children atJanaseva Sisu Bhavan in Aluval.Keral~inMarch 2005. Not personally, but professionally as a diplomat and as someone who believes greater intemationalpeople-to-people contact For example,!' d like to see much ,moreintemational educational cooperati9n to help both countries adapt to a changing world. There are dozens of top-notch, accredited American universities which are eager to work with India, but the 0ppOl;tmlltiesjust aren't there yet and welcoming policies aren't in place. J would hope that sooner rather than later the Indian govemment would come out with clear policies that would foster more educational exchange,jointresearch and other kinds ..of"lndo-US. academic cooperation. We all know that India .has more students in the United States--80,466 last year-

than any other conntry:We reaIIy need to work on gettiog more American scholars to experience and leam from India so there's not such an imbalancein the flow of studentsbetWeen our two countries. Wtmtspecifically Jnight India do. to attract more AmericauSttholars? The research clearance and visa issuanceprocesse$ cowd be greatly speeded up. Indian universities and bodies .like theUniver.sity Grants Commission. the All India Conncil for TecbnicalEducation andtbe.Association oflndian Universities could more activelY.market and promote Indian higper education opportunities to, and in,.AmericaFacilities-from dotmitories and canteens tQ,publications and ". Web sites to libraries and.labs-could be greatly improved to draw more foreigners to India. American students would certainlypay to have the chance to studyin India, N

but they won't come in any significant numbers until infrastructure improves and policies are much clearer and more welcoming. While many countries are moving rapidly to reform higher education and make it world-class, India seems to be hesitating and sending out mixed signals.

With Indian university seats in such short supply, why should India bother with trying to recruit foreigners? To be more globally competitive, India needs to attract the world's "best and brightest" and exchange ideas and research with leading educational institutions from around the world. India can no longer afford to be cut off from the benefits of international education, which promotes not only mutual understanding and new knowledge, but also practical science and technology, business, agricultural, social science and other "spin-offs" that can help improve people's lives and promote a knowledge-based, more modem economy. Many good things are going on between our universities, including the new Agricultural Knowledge Initiative launched by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. But much, much more can, and should, be done. Our bilateral educational cooperation is just starting, and I think the time is right to dramatically expand all kinds of partnerships between Indian and American universities, both public and private. There's no reason why India shouldn't be both importing and exporting teaching, training and research services. The needs are clearly there and growing, and the mobility of scholars and everyone else is on the rise.

Much of your work has involved dealing with the Indian media. How do you assess their performance? Like the American press, of course, the Indian press is feisty and free, and I've not always agreed with their coverage, but I respect their independence and have observed a rise in professionalism. Especially in terms of production qualities, the Indian media have come very far in just the past few years. Unlike the American media, India's lucky to be very much in a media growth mode-with new TV channels, PM stations, various publications in different languages and f6rmars and online services popping up all over. In

the United States, journalists are very worried that the daily newspaper and even our four major broadcast networks may eventually become inelevant as cable TV and Intemet become ever more dominant as news and entertainment providers. I do worry that part of the Indian press has become highly sensationalized and overly "page three" oriented. These same trends are seen in the United States. As responsible citizens, I think we all need to make sure our young people acquire the reading habit and keep up on cunent affairs at home and abroad. As the world shrinks, that's more important than ever because what happens in the United States affects India and what happens in India affects the United States. Whether it's Wall Street or Dalal Street, Hollywood or Bollywood, oil prices or wheat prices, the world is increasingly interdependent, and we simply must stay well informed if we are to maintain our

Michael Anderson congratulates Saatvik Agarwal, a student from AmihJ International School, Saket, New Delhi, who was chosen in November 2003 to participate in a NASA Mars exploration project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Stanford University recently awarded Agar-tUala scholarship to study there. respective democracies and promote peace and security. One encouraging recent development that has impressed me in India is the passage of the important Right to Information Act. This farreaching legislation is along the lines of

America's Freedom of Information Act, and I think its speedy implementation will greatly empower the average Indian citizen and contribute to a more transparent, responsive government.

What'S happening att}le American Centers in India? " The American Centers in New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai are actively engaged in what we call "public diplomacy" activities, striving to explain American policies and values and society in all their diversity and to engage with a wide range of Indians. We do that in a variety of ways, including cultural programs, speakers, films, workshops and seminars, often in partnership with Indian organizations. We try to foster an exchange of ideas on timely issues as diverse as HIV/AIDS, environeconomic reform, mental protection, nuclear proliferation and biotechnology. Since more than half of the Indian people

are under 25, we want to reach out to young people. Through our Hindi and Urdu editions of SPAN we are trying to do a better job commnnicating with non-English speaking audiences. In addition to our excellent public access libraries, which we now call American InfOlmation Resource Centers. we recently established an English language teaching program, and we work closely with the U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) to promote Fulbright and other exchange programs and to provide advising services to help students pursue higher education .in the United States. []

, U,S. After-School Programs I

ey, how are you doing?" was the question, from out of a crowd, in a strange land. I had just reached Washington, D.C., and was emerging from Immigration, looking for my luggage. This was my first visit to the United States and there was little chance that someone could know me here. Surprised, I turned toward the voice. A middle-aged man, with a smile on his face, was standing in front of me. I was at my wits' end to figure how this man could know me. He turned out to be a member of the airport staff and helped me find the baggage section. Little did I realize then that this was just a way of life in America, an example of how ordinary people try to solve their own little problems, collectively, with smiles on their faces. This is the most important thing I learned during my onemonth visit to the United States as part of the State Department's Youth Leadership Program. I came to realize that America as we know it from glossy magazines, television channels and HoIlywood movies doesn't really exist. America has its own share of little problems. They range from school dropouts to underdeveloped neighborhoods, from drug addiction to religious differences, from lack of involvement by youths in political happenings in the country to students having nothing to do after they come home from school and often choosing the wrong

way of life. But amid all these problems, the zeal to go on and strive for a better tomorrow comes out vehemently through some exemplary work of certain individuals and groups-what I call the American way of life-showing care and concern for every individual. A visit to Harlem and the Bronx, among the poorest sections of New York City, takes you to an altogether different worldso close to the world's financial capital, yet so far from the fruits of Wall Street. In the Bronx, I came to know how even a small group of people can make a big difference to the place where they live. And I met a group of joyful youths who are changing the Bronx River from a dirty and shallow canal to a healthy part of the neighborhood. They showed us how a change in the local environment can actuaIly lift the spirit of the entire neighborhood, so much so that a patch of bad road could be repaired by the residents themselves with their hard-earned money. It was not a very big job, nor would it have made too much of a difference for the local administration in terms of revenue expenditure. But it would certainly make a difference in the lives of those handfuls of people who live there. I also saw the work being carried out by the Police Athletic League, the largest nonprofit independent youth organization in ew York, changing the lives of70,000 boys and girls in the city

Students at Pacific High School in Pacific, Missouri, near St. Louis, sing for their international visitors. Arts programs give students alternatives for their time outside of the classroom. every year through 20 full-time youth centers with free recreational, educational, cultural and social programs. The whole idea behind the setting up of the organization 90 years ago was to keep the kids out of trouble on the streets by channeling their energies into recreational and athletic programs, explained Bobby Dunn, associate executive director of the Police Athletic League's Harlem Center. Such organizations not only offer empowerment to the kids, but are solving a burning problem of America. For, unlike India and other developing countries, American school students have little to do once school hours are over. In many American families, both father and mother work. In others, there may be only one parent in the picture, who must work two jobs to make ends meet. In other cases, the parents may be on drugs, ill or otherwise incapable of providing care and monitoring for their children.

These institutions give students a place to go after school, rather than to an empty or dangerous home, where they can engage in constructive activities such as studies, games, painting or music. And I believe, with rapid urbanization, nuclear families and working parents, it's time Indian teenagers get this kind of afterschool care, sooner rather than later. A little compassion, a little personalized effort, not waiting for the help to come fro(Tlsomewhere else but coming forward with it-that's what is making things work in U.S. society. And some simple words, as simple as, "How are you doing?" from a common man to a stranger, speaks for the society itself-a society that truly cares, even for strangers. D Rakeeb Hossain in Calcutta.

is principal correspondent of the Hindustan Times .

One taste of a particular South Asian strain of Sufi music led Fulbright scholar Christopher Holland halfway across the world, searching for more. His journey ended in a New Delhi alley on a sweltering night, when he heard the qawwals singing.

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remember many years :~o my friends telling me about a phenomenal Sufi v singer from Pakistan who, so they said, would knock me off my feet. They knew that I was deeply involved in music and was always looking for something new to broaden my horizons. So I took their advice, wrote his name down (because I had difficulty pronouncing the long name) and purchased my first Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

album. Listening, I became enthralled, feeling suspended in reality like a child is with a new toy, and played the e~tire album many times. The words I did not understand and the musical style was completely different than what I was accustomed to hearing, but the soul of the singing was deep and resonated in me. Being a native of Georgia, in the southern United States, I could not help being reminded of the soulful Gospel music I was used to hearing in churches. The Nusrat album opened a vibrant new world of Sufi-inspired music to me, and although many years have passed, I look back on this moment and it always brings a smile to my face. I learned that Nusrat's sound was based on a Sufi style of singing that is found only in South Asia, called qawwali. Inspired, I tried to find more soulful music like Nusrat's in These qawwals traveled to Fatehpur Sikri in Uttar Pradesh to take part in a mehfil-esarna' (gathering), as the sun began to spread its rays in the sky.

the States. This search was long, difficult and fruitless. I knew that a trip to South Asia was imminent. I arrived in New Delhi one year ago. Quickly, I found that Sufi is the new catch phrase for all forms of art, including music. Every time I looked in the newspaper a new album was being released that claimed to be Sufi, or a new show of Sufi dance and music was being produced. All of these interested me because I wanted to take in as much of the Sufi art. as possible while in India on my search for the inspiration behind Nusrat's soulful sound. I listened to the new Sufi albums coming from people like Zila Khan, Abida Parveen, Strings and Pankaj Awasthi. And I attended many Sufi performances, by Madan Gopal, the Wadali Brothers, Humasar Hayat, and the annual festival, Jahan-e-Khusrau. Each of these albums and performances possessed its own Sufi-inspired flair and was enjoyable, but did not seem to fully quench my thirst for the inspiration behind the Nusrat style. Finally, on one

sweltering Thursday night, I ventured through the winding alleys to the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya. And I heard the qawwals singing. Immediately, I forgot about the uncomfortable heat and felt relaxed as though I were sitting in my home back in the States, remembering that fIrst time I heard Nusrat. They played and sang for what seemed like hours, stopping only for namaz (prayer). With the energy and vibrant life in which the qawwals sang in praise of God, I was again reminded of that soulful joy of Southern Gospel that I was used to. Having a working knowledge of Urdu, I quickly became friends with many of the qawwals, talking with them whenever I went to the dargah. We would discuss all things qawwali and I began to learn about this musical tradition that has managed to survive for more than 700 years, through many periods of political threat and social change. Qawwali began when the founder of the Chishti order of Sufism, Muin'l1ddin Chishti, came from Baghdad to Ajmer,

Above: A muezzin sings a devotional remembrance at the dargah of Sheikh Nasiruddin in Chiragh village, New Delhi. Right: Christopher Holland exhibited his photographs at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi in February.

Rajasthan, in the 13th century. Following Sufism's inclusive tradition of religious non-discrimination, he synthesized the Hindu style of kirtan with Arabic and Persian poetry to sing about the unity of God for sama' (listening). A century later, the artistic genius Amir Khusrau, who is also popularly recognized as the creator of the tabla and the sitar, organized what Muinuddin began, and qawwali was born. One of the most popular stories the

qawwals like to tell is of the Qawwal Bachche. Meraj Ahmed Nizami, the elder qawwal of Nizamuddin's dargah relates: "Hazrat Amir Khusrau wanted to do something special for his sheikh, Nizamuddin, who was especially fond of sama'. So he found 12 especially talented young boys and trained them to perform the ragas he composed. The sheikh was very pleased with their performance and these 12 boys became known as the

The head priest at Nizamuddin Auliya's dargah in New Delhi accepts a donation during a qawwali gathering. Qawwal Bachche." The qawwals in Nizamuddin's dargah refer to themselves as Qawwal Bachche because they trace their lineage back to one of those 12 children. Qawwali has been passed from father to son through the generations, with an emphasis on the children remembering the poetry and correct pronunciation of the words because many of the ganas (songs) are in Persian. The style has been allowed to adapt to the changing times in order to make the music appealing to each new generation. Changes include incorporating new rhythms and instruments, such as the harmonium, introduced in the early 19th century and now synonymous with the qawwali sound.

From the 12th to 18th centuries in the Delhi region, depending on each new ruler's religious policy, sarna' and qawwali were either discouraged or patronized. The Chishti Sufis, in their defense, have always referred to the 14thcentury revered saint Nizamuddin, who successfully defended sarna' throughout his life. A popular couplet the sheikh recited is: "Sarna' is forbidden in my opinion," you say. Fine then, to you forbidden, let it stay.

Although Sufi-inspired music and the qawwali style are increasingly popular, many people are unaware of the influence qawwali has had on culture in India. Since the inception of Bollywood, the movie industry has drawn heavily upon it. Qawwals were hired from Pakistan to train Bolly-

wood mUSiCIans. These mUSICIans have adopted many of the melodies, though the words were changed. The Sufi poetry sung by the qawwals, with its beautiful imagery of love, also made its way into movie songs. After learning this, I started to pay more attention to Bollywood songs and found that I did hear such Sufi references as ishq (romance), mehboob (beloved), as well as some of the same melodies. During my time spent with the qawwals, I was not only able to learn about the soulful tradition behind the Nusrat album that first inspired me, but I also learned some of the ragas and ganas. 0 Christopher Holland, from Athens, Georgia, has been in India on a Fulbright scholarship since August 2005.

Cross-Cultural Connection An Indian American diplomat aims to advance the President's vision of U.S.-India relations.

tul Keshap, the U.S. Embassy's deputy political counselor, believes India is going to be America's "most important bilateral relationship over the next century." And he envisions a scenario of millions of Indians and Americans traveling each year between both countries, not just visiting their families, selling, buying, studying and sight-seeing but also healing, discovering, inventing, investing, inspiring and joining in a partnership of shared democratic values to make the world safer, freer and more prosperous. "My life, education, career, ancestry and origins make me believe that I should give all that I can to move that vision forward," says Keshap. "It's a happy accident of my career that 1'm in India at a crucial moment in U.S.-India relations." When he became a diplomat in 1994, one could say Keshap was joining the family business. His mother, Zoe Calvert, had worked for U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker from 1956 to 1961, in an office about 30 meters from where Keshap works now, during her first Foreign Service assignment. Her next posting was at the U.S. Embassy in London, where she met Keshap's father, Dr. Keshap Chander Sen, who later embarked on a U.N. career in Africa, Central and Southeast Asia and Europe. Atul Keshap's wife, Karen, is also a diplomat, an assistant information officer for the U.S. Embassy. Their three children live with them. Keshap's job as a political officer is to increase understanding between India and the United States and to help the two governments work cooperatively together. "I

Atul Keshap enjoys a shikara ride on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. get excited by the notion that we are finally building the kind of relationship with India that I, as an Indian American, would have liked to have seen occur 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago," says Keshap, 35. "For many years we were indifferent, if not antagonistic, toward each other. And lately, with a significant number of Indian Americans living in the United States, significant investment in India by American companies, enhanced educational links, enhanced travel links, you can see that our two countries are realizing that they share a common language, a

common heritage, a common set of values, a common outlook on the world and should have been natural partners from the get-go." If the United States and India embrace the vision articulated by President George W. Bush during his March visit, "they will transform the world for the better, and will spread democracy and stability and free market prosperity," says Keshap. "Other countries working to achieve what India has achieved-a democratic, multiethnic, tolerant, pluralistic, liberal, freemarket, stable country-can look to India and say, 'Wow, this is the way to do it.' " Keshap encounters some people who may not share these views, but says,

"That's why I'm here, so I can go out and engage with people and have a respectful and open dialogue about differences of opinion and perception. America, to a lot of folks, may just mean what they watch

fargarh, in undivided Punjab. He had just finished college in Lahore when Partition came. Warned to flee, the family arrived by train in New Delhi in October 1947, eventually settling in Panipat, Haryana.

on TV," he argues. "But it's still recognized as a land of opportunity and people want to replicate that sense of liberty and opportunity around the world. And you see that every day with Indian IT entrepreneurs and others who are taking control of their own destiny and not waiting for other institutions to catch up, but seeing that they have :m opportunity to try to make their lives better and to contribute in their own way. And many take that inspiration directly from the ideals of our Founding Fathers." Keshap was born in Nigeria as an American citizen during one of his father's assignments. He spent his first 12 years living in Nigeria, Lesotho, Zambia, Afghanistan and Austria; then the next 12 years in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he completed his studies at the University of Virginia. "I wanted a sense of belonging to one place, and that's what those 12 years gave me," he says. His mother and brothers still live there. Keshap's father, now a U.S. citizen, lives in Mysore, where, coincidentally, Keshap's maternal great-grandfather helped supervise construction of the Sivasamudram hydroelectric project for General Electric over 100' years ago. Keshap's father was born in Muzaf-

After finishing university in New Delhi, Keshap's father worked eight years for the Punjab government in Shimla, earned his doctorate at the London School of Economics, met and married Keshap's mother, who is from North Carolina. They spent 30 years traveling in U.N. service. Every summer, the family vacationed a few weeks each in the United States, Europe and India. "So I very much grew up with an understanding of both sides of my heritage," Keshap says. With his American accent and no prior knowledge of Hindi, he sometimes "felt like a stranger in a strange land" when trying clumsily to play cricket with cousins in Panipat or when touring India as a child. "But I received nine months of Hindi language training before I came out to India for this assignment. And it has unlocked a sense of comfort that I never had," he says. "If you speak English, you can speak to 300 million people in this country, but if you speak a little bit of Hindi, you can probably speak to an additional 300-, 400-, 500 million or more. So, I'm delighted with this rudimentary Hindi that I have and I use it as much as I can, even though it greatly pains most people to hear it." 0

he shopkeeper in Rajasthan thought it was charming that I used my Hindi to negotiate a better price on my block print tablecloth. The ability to listen to Hindi conversations around me has proven hilarious and invaluable; hilarious when I anSwer a Question that was asked about me but not to me and invaluable when it comes to directing the local taxi wallahs. But in the beginning Hindi was a daunting prospect. Prior to my diplomatic assignment to India as the U.S. Embassy's assistant information officer for electronic media, I reported to the State Department's Foreign Service Institute for six months of Hindi language training. Hindi can be an intimidating language with its different script and sounds. The Hrstday: we" spent four hours memorizing the Hindi script and alphabet. It was discouraging to realize at the end of that day that.! had only learned the

first four letters. We would not ~earn any vowels for a week! By the end of three weeks, we knew the entire alphabet. Our instructors, NRls from Lucknow, New Delhi, Gujarat and Punjab, had the class read through Hindi newspapers, finding simple words that we recognized. I staggered out of class with a pounding headache in those first weeks as my brain took a crash course in Devanagari. As our proficiency grew, we discussed topics including the Ramayana, agriculture, gender issues, culture, weather, crime, politics, HIV/AIDS, shopping, terrorism, transportation and even cooking My classmates were in the military and we studied vocabulary like: tactical, navy, general, aircraft and joint exercises. I also studied the names for family members-uncle, aunt, father's older brother's son-finally resorting to a family tree to track all the different titles Indians use to address their relatives, including masijees, sa/ijees and dadijees. One of the most helpful exercises was learning to give directions in Hindi to get from India Gate to Chandni Chowk and Old Delhi, including when to turn left, right, or cross a bridge. Our instructor moved a plastic orange horse all over a map of New Delhi, as we stopped to visit the railway station, took a swim in the river when we forgot the word for bridge, and finally ended up at the Jama Masjid. Practical applications such as this have proven very useful here in India, and my taxi Hindi has often come in handy Field trips were always a highlight: We interviewed Hindi speakers about their lives in the United States and in India. Our instructors took us to temples, mosques, grocery stores and restaurants, even the most current Bollywood films at a local cinema. Studying Hindi was my job for six months, making it easier to focus on the language and absorb aspects of Indian culture. President George W. Bush's National Security Language Initiative will turn out many more folks like me-ordinary Americans who know, speak and understand Hindi. Many other American diplomats have taken the time to get to know Indian languages and culture through the opportunity afforded to us by the Department of State. Such knowledge has made me a more effective diplomat and opened a doorway for me to explore a vast, ancient and complex culture. The long-term implications of studying Hindi will make me and others like me more empathetic, and build bridges of 0 trust and understanding.

Americans Come to

Learn Indian Lan ua es By RAMESH JAIN

earninga language-somebody else's language-is a kind gesture. It's a gesture of interest," President George W. Bush said as he launched the National Security Language Initiative in January. "It really is a fundamental way to reach out to somebody and say, 'I care about you. I want you to know that I'm interested in not only how you talk but how you live.''' Among the people that the U.S. government wants American citizens to care and know about are Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu speakers in India. And 39 Americans have taken advantage of Critical Language Scholarships funded by a State Department pilot program to spend 10 weeks this summer among vernacular language

me to a place that will make my Hindi better. I am doing a PhD in ethnographic work. Being able to read primary documents in Hindi and having on-the-ground discussions, interviews with local people, will help me learn about different cultures, too." This is echoed by Colleen E. Kelly, a South Asian studies graduate from Cornell University. "My research is within the Urdu community around Lucknow, so by reading Urdu I will be able to complete my research in history," she said. "This scholarship will pay for my language study, allowing me to attend these classes without paying for anything, and it includes my living, board and travel expenses."

communities, learning to speak, read, write and understand. They have been joined by another 51 young Americans-visiting India through other language learning programs-to be taught by the American Institute of Indian Studies, based in Gurgaon, Haryana. It is supported by a consortium of more than 50 American universities that teach Indian studies. The 90 American students are expecting to apply their language skills in their careers and vocations. Cole H. Taylor,an anthropology undergraduate from Smith College, Massachusetts, is learning Hindi and hoping to use it in the field of human rights. "Certainly in the rural parts of India people don't speak English," she says. "So if I want to interact with various people, Hindi is going to be great. You're less likely to resolve conflicts if you don't understand the cultural, societal and historical background of the people you are engaging with." Kerry C. San Chirico, a religious studies graduate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, says, "The scholarship is going to take

Marianne Craven of the State Department awards language scholarships in New Delhi.

The language program "strives for a collaborative environment in which learners take charge of their own learning by keeping track of their language development and language learning needs," says Purnima Mehta, director general of the American Institute of Indian Studies. "Students are expected to reach out for their instructors' help and to respectfully engage with the local host community for understanding the subtleties of cultural and linguistic variation." The institute has arranged for the participants to live with communities that speak the languages they are learning. So the students of Bengali will be based in Calcutta, those learning Hindi will stay in Jaipur, the Urdu students will be in Lucknow and the Punjabi students in Patiala. The institute also encourages them to stay with host families. Besides classroom instruction and individual tutorials, film screenings and plays have been planned. 0

Bikram yoga has taken the United States by storm. Here's why America's hottest fitness trend is just that.

've been to a lot of yoga classes in my life, but none of them prepared me for Bikram yoga, often called "hot yoga." Why, I wondered, was I warned not to eat for several hours beforehand? Why was everyone lining up to buy jumbo-sized jugs of vitamin-infused water at $2 a pop and carrying a stack of towels with them into the studio? Why were they so intense and quiet? I soon found out the hard way. Bikram method yoga takes place in a room heated to over 40 degrees Celsius. That is seriously steamy, a temperature more suited to desert dwellers than gym rats. During the 90minute class, I perspired and fumbled my way through a tortuous series of 26 standing and seated postures, called asanas, that somehow managed to engage every cell in my entire body. Sweat poured off me, forming embarrassing little puddles on the floor, and I thought I might be sick in front of my equally sweaty neighbors. Yet we weren't allowed to leave the room, even if we felt nauseous. "Just sit down on your mat," chirped

Above: Bikram Choudhury (front) leads what was billed as the world's largest yoga class at the Los Angeles Convention Center in 2003. Left: Dr. Scott Gerson practices classic yoga in his. office in New York. He feels newer yoga styles are corrupting the discipline as it gains popularity. An estimated 18 million Americans do yoga exercises regularly.

Paula, our instructor, in a tone meant to be encouraging. I took her advice quite a few times and prayed for the suffering to be over. Finally, finally, the class ended. Yet as soon as I managed to catch my breath, something strange happened: I felt great. After first gaining popularity in America during the hippie-era 1960s, yoga has become one of the fastest-growing forms of exercise in the United States, with an estimated 18 million Americans regularly practicing. Most forms of yoga are as old as the hills, ancient forms of stretching and bending that have been part of Indian culture for as long as 5,000 years. But Bikram yoga is a relatively new variation, founded in the 1960s by Bikram Choudhury, a Calcutta-born yoga and bodybuilding champion who crushed a knee in an accident and was told he'd never walk again. Yoga helped him prove the doctors wrong, and he devoted his life to the exercise. Choudhury moved to the Los Angeles area in the 1970s and over time developed his perspiration-fueled

series of poses, held for exactly the same length of time and done in the same order in every single class. The heat, he claims, increases flexibility, helps heal injuries and flushes toxins out of the body. Bikram yoga is said to have mental benefits as well, exercising what Choudhury calls the five elements of the mind: faith, self control, concentration, determination and patience. Jennifer Lobo, co-owner of seven Bikram yoga studios on the East Coast, says the class is basic enough for anyone to try, but demanding enough to challenge experts. "This is a full body workout," she says, noting that she easily finished a marathon last year after doing only yoga as training. "You never perfect it. There's always something more you could be doing." Choudhury got his start in the United States when actress Shirley MacLaine encouraged him to open a studio in Los Angeles called Bikram's Yoga College of India. Hollywood fell in love with the concept, and Choudhury soon became the "guru to the stars," with celebrity devo-

tees including basketball player Kareem .Abdul-Jabbar and pop singers Michael Jackson and Madonna. Today, Bikram is one of the fastest-growing styles of yoga, with 715 studios in the United States and around the world. "It's really detoxifying," says Laurie Malen, a personal trainer who's tried Bikram. "I felt like I just cleansed my system." Although most gurus shun the moneymaking aspects of their trade, preferring to focus on the spiritual, Choudhury has parlayed his yogi status into a classic success story. In early 2003, Choudhury went so far as to put a copyright on his own method. Since only Bikram-trained teachers are allowed to teach the Bikram method, and he charges $5,000 for a nineweek training course, this self-made immigrant has made himself quite wealthy: Living proof of inventor Thomas Edison's famous maxim, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." D Jennifer Reingold is a senior writer with Fast Company magazine.

Independence

Whv Americans and Indians Celebrate Dinerentlv ummer is settling in. It is school vacation, long, heat-filled days and relaxed starlit nights. It's I~ 1 mangoes and monsoons in India; ~ it's baseball and the beach in the United States. And, before you know it, in both places, it's Independence Day. In America, that means the Fourth of July, or "corn dogs," "white pants," "friends," "picnics," "fireworks," "parties" and "catching fireflies in a jar." People become positively giddy over it: "It's all about stuffing your face with BBQ (barbecue) and picnic food. But it is also all about fireworks and patriotic songs!" Sophia Park gushes. Park, 28, is a law student who works in New York City, but plans to head to the beaches of Nantucket Island for the Fourth. In India, it means August 15, or "official speeches," "the prime minister at the Red Fort," "problems in Kashmir," "flying kites all day," and "flags hung everywhere." "Most people just sleep in late,"

Samrat Choudhury, a 30-year-old journalist from Shillong, muses cynically over a cup of chai in New Delhi. Both days represent monumental occasions of freedom from British rule. Both symbolize vanquishing a colonial government. Both signify the beginning of independence. So why, then, are the celebrations so decidedly different? The answer begins with a bit of history. In India, at the stroke of midnight, on August 15, 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru welcomed the formation of the new country and the end of British rule. But it also marked the beginning of Partition, the forced migration of millions of friends and neighbors and the difficult transition to rule by the people's representatives over a large country still not wholly comfortable with unification. At home in Mumbai, on vacation from her studies in the United States, Nayantara Kilachand, 25, says that the joy of independence is mixed with a

deep-rooted sorrow. "Millions died. Hindus and Muslims were pitted against each other. And the British managed to take off with billions of dollars." In the United States, on the other hand-though independence was earned through a bloody war-the day does not signify the end of that battle. Rather, it celebrates the day, July 4, 1776, that the 13 American colonies reached a unified decision that the war already being waged was for independence-not simply for improved treatment from the British king and Parliament. The day also celebrates the Declaration of Independence, a stirringly written, history changing document that has inspired freedom seekers in countries across the globe for 230 years. From the start, men like John Adams (who became the second President of the United States) saw the day as a joyous celebration: the birthday of a nation in the minds of its citizens. George Washington, the general who

became the new nation's first President, celebrated by passing out more rum rations to his troops. The city of Philadelphia, the first national capital, set up huge bonfires in honor of the day. The Indian government chose a more formal approach. In the shadow of the Red Fort, the prime minister hails the nation and there are flag-hoisting ceremonies in all states. There are no raucous celebrations, because, to many, it is a day to ponder what has been lost. Nayanima Basu, 27, a reporter, says, "We got back a divided country, we lost a very rich culture and a major part of history was taken away from us." She has firsthand experience with the two celebrations because she spent one Fourth of July in Virginia while training with 'GE International. The first 70 years of American celebrations had a somber edge to them as well. From left: Joey McGlamory and his wife, Karen, from Atlanta, Georgia, celebrate the Independence Day holiday on the beach at St. George Island, Florida. Fireworks explode near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York on July 4,2005. The colors of the Indian flag were on display at the National Kite Flying Festival in Bangalore in 2005. Spectators watch fireworks above India Gate in New Delhi on August 15, 1997, the 50th anniversary of India's independence.

Though Independence Days were greeted with fireworks and bells ringing, people would gather to hear speeches about the fallen war heroes and sad songs were sung in honor of the fight for freedom. But by the 1850s, Marian 1. Doyle, a American Homes writer for Early Magazine, says the festivals had become less about remembering the fallen and the hard-won battle and more "a sideshow of peddlers, circus acts and crackling disruptions." It is not surprising then that 230 years after Independence, many Americans view the day as nothing more than a good chance to celebrate summer and friendship. "It's basically just an excuse to have a big party," Katy Stafford laughs. Stafford, 28, attends Northwestern University in Illinois, but will spend the Fourth with a friend in Virginia. "We love a good theme party and this is just that: the red, white and blue outfits, the fireworks, someplace warm and all your friends." Though Independence Day is also a national holiday in India, most people spend it in a laid-back manner. Choudhury grew up in the Northeast and says that people often stayed inside for safety. "Militants usually want to strike on days that are important to the country and Independence Day is the biggest day for them of all." He says that the holiday will close down whole cities. Once, in Shillong, he walked

through the middle of the market at 11 a.m. and didn't see another soul for four kilometers. "This is incredible in a country where you can't walk into a market without literally bumping into people." Shawn Tao lives in Bristol, Rhode Island. The town council there says they have been hosting the oldest Fourth of July party, since 1788. Tao says the town decks itself in red, white and blue and prepares for days for the parades and fireworks. "People literally go nuts," says Tao. India is yet to "go nuts" over its Independence Day. For some, that's as it should be, since the reminder of sacrifices made by past generations should linger over the celebrations. Basu, though only 27, gets angry at the "Bunty and Bubbly" attitude of the younger generation that takes its liberty for granted. Others, though, like Ashwini Sharma, a 25-year-old filmmaker from Calcutta, says the sacrifices haven't been forgotten, but the joy has been. "I wish Indians would take part in an all-day dance marathon on Independence Day. Or do anything that expresses the joy that shook us as a nation 59 years ago. The feel, the trip of fighting for independence is all gone. There are many ways to find this." 0 Melissa Bell recently completed a two-month .internship with the Sunday Hindustan Times in New Delhi and now works as afreelancer from San Diego, California.

The Beginning of It All ~ I

By DEEPANJALI KAKATI

econd looks often lead to fresh interpretations. More so when it is art depicting a cosmopolitan landscape. Sundeep Bali, who spent six months in the United States on a Fulbright fellowship from July to December 2005, found himself reading new meaning in the random shots he brought back to India. As an artist creating with photography and video, what actually took Bali to the United States was his curatorial expertise and work with museums and exhibitions. He researched communication and interpretation methods and resources used for fine arts and culture at the National Gallery of Art and the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C. His trip to the United States also gave him a chance to play itinerant documenter of unusual moments within regular scenes. Bali shot nearly 400 photographs and six hours of video footage. From these he exhibited 19 photos and two video installations in his exhibition "Made in USA: An American Experience" at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, in May. "I was just documenting things that were shocking me, amazing me, to show back home. But when I came back I started looking at these things in a different light. I thought they have a particular viewpoint: that of a person who goes to the United States with a lot of stereotypes. Most of these were broken in my initial days in the country," he says. A change probably aided by the fact that Bali's landlady, Martha Smith, who works with the Freer and Sackler Galleries, ended up allowing him to stay at her house for free on condition that he use his Fulbright stipend to travel around the country. July 4, America's Independence Day, was Bali's first day in the United States and quite aptly the opening photograph of his exhibition is called "The Beginning of it All ... July 4." The image of an old couple at the Fourth of July parade in The Palisades, a neighborhood in Washington, D.C., holds a lot of meaning for him. "A lot of people say it's an old couple and you have called it 'beginning of it all.' But this was one of the first photographs I shot in the United States. It was the beginning of my American experience. Fourth of July also marks the beginning of the United States," says Bali. The variety of cultures on display and the families lining up to watch it reminded Bali of the Republic Day parade in India and is the subject of a number of his photographs. While Bali did all the "touristy" stuff like traveling to Niagara Falls, what really made an impression on him was the energy of New York. The city's landmark Empire State Building was a major point of interest for Bali, who says it is ironic how it has once again become the tallest building in New York after 9/11. "It was an icon before the World Trade Center came up and now

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~ Hooray, July 4 it has again become an icon," he says. Bali's images are also an attempt to capture the cosmopolitan nature of America, which is the inspiration for the exhibition's title. "A lot of the things available in the United States are actually made elsewhere," he says. This idea of different parts of the world converging in America appealed to Bali, who feels he has gained a whole new perspective after his U.S. trip: "We should travel with an open mind. People everywhere are the same." 0

StandingTall at Throughout the world, this iconic skyscraper symbolizes New York.

or more than a century, steel-framed towers piercing ever higher into the sky have captured the modern imagination. "One of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent opportunities ... ever offered to the spirit of man," wrote architect and "father of the skyscraper" Louis Sullivan of the lofty structures. "The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it." Possibly no skyscraper better represents that spirit than the Empire State Building in New York City, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in May. Although it no longer is the world's-or even the United States' -tallest, the Empire State Building remains iconic. An outstanding example of art deco design, the site of magical cinematic moments and the dominant point of the midtown Manhattan skyline, the Empire State Building remains a treasured landmark, identified by the American Society of Civil Engineers as "one of the seven greatest engineering achievements of American history" and "one of the top engineering monuments of the millennium." A number of technological advances combined to make possible the modern skyscraper.

The colors chosen for the Empire State Building's nighttime illumination are symbolic. This red, white and blue on August 31, 1990, was a tributc; to U.S. military troops.

Sarah Hedden, 22, and Chris Lasher, 24, of North Tonawanda, New York, hug on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day in 2004 after being married on the 80th floor. Many couples get married here on Valentine's Day in mass ceremonies. Building materials like steel, glass and reinforced concrete were essential. So was the water pump, which enabled the transport of water to high altitudes. The safety elevator, invented in 1853 by an American, Elisha Otis, and the electric elevator, invented in 1880 by Werner von Siemens of Germany, made it practical for people to live and work in high-rise buildings. The Empire State Building was constructed at a time when American architecture was influenced by the art deco movement, an artistic style that spanned structural design and the decorative arts. It emphasized clean lines and a streamlined symmetry characteristic of modern mass production. One of the'best-known examples of the style is the 282-meter tall

Chrysler Building, completed in 1930. At that time it was the world's tallest, but only 60 centimeters added in a lastminute adjustment allowed it to surpass the 40 Wall Street tower in lower Manhattan, the island on which most of New York City's skyscrapers stand. The Empire State's builder, John 1. Raskob, a former General Motors Corporation executive, was determined to break the Chrysler record. He hired architects Richmond H. Shreve and William F. Lamb to design a building reaching more than 300 meters. To make it even more difficult to surpass their engineering feat, the draftsmen added a 60-meter mast, supposedly intended as a mooring post for zeppelins and other dirigibles. It was, The Wall Street Journal later concluded, "the looniest scheme since the Tower of Babel, but it added one of the most dramatic crowns that ever a building wore." Excavation of the site at 350 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 35th streets (the former home of the original Waldorf Hotel), began in January 1930, with construction commencing in March. The

building was completed in just 410 days. The construction employed about 3,400 workers, many of them immigrants or members of the Mohawk nation of American Indians. When President Herbert Hoover switched on the building's lights, the Empire State Building stood 102 stories (and 381 meters) tall-a television transmitter added in 1952 would expand its height to 448 meters. It weighed an estimated 330,000 tons and offered more than 185,700 square meters of floor space. The Empire State's characteristic shape inspired several other buildings, like the Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (also designed by Shreve and Lamb), and the Torre Latinoamericana in Mexico City. Because of its great height and beauty, millions saw the Empire State Building as a symbol of New York City, the nation's greatest metropolis. Hollywood filmmakers utilized this symbolism in a number of feature films. Most famous was King Kong (originally released in 1933, and remade in 1976 and 2005), in which the

Above: A steel worker rests on a girder on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building during construction in 1930. Left: A view of the building after the steel work was completed. great ape climbs to the building's apex with a woman in his hand as he battles squadrons of fighter planes. Both in real life and in movies, like An Affair to Remember (1957) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993), the Empire State Building is considered a place for romance. Its 86th floor open-air viewing area offers an unparalleled panoramic view of the city for the brides and grooms who marry there on Valentine's Day in mass ceremonies, or for the 3.8 million visitors who in 2005 enjoyed what a character in An Affair to Remember called "the closest thing to heaven in New York." The Empire State Building is home to many other attractions and events. Each year, a group of determined and fit men and women race up its 86 flights of stairs. The National Cartoon Museum, which will house some 200,000 cartoons from

more than 50 countries, is to open there in the fall of 2006. . The Empire State's nighttime illumination has its own symbolism. On some evenings, the chosen colors represent one or another of New York's professional sports teams. At other times, the building is lit in blue and white for the United Nations, in green for Saint Patrick's Day, or in seasonal colors for other holidays. One night in late 2004, the building remained dark for 15 minutes in tribute to the recently deceased Fay Wray, the star of the original King Kong. Remembered forever as the woman held atop the Empire State by a giant ape, Wray enjoyed the association with the famous building and often extolled its splendor. "Each time I arrive in New York and see the skyline and the exquisite beauty of the Empire State Building," she wrote in her autobiography, "my heart beats a little faster." D Michael Jay Friedman writes for Washington File, a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State (http://usinfo.state.gov).

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u.s.-India Trade

There Must Be Progress and Results he United States and India could"absolutely"-someday negotiate a free trade agreement, says America's No.2 trade official, Karan Bhatia. But significant challenges will take years to resolve and steady progress toward a more open and balanced commercial relationship is essential. ''I'm optimistic," Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Bhatia told SPAN in June during a visit to shepherd the "nascent, developing trade dialogue" between the United States and India. Other high-level U.S. trade dialogues, chaired at the ministerial level, exist only with China and the European Union. India's inclusion in this category with the formation of the Trade Policy Forum last November is a significant development, says Bhatia. "But if it's going to mean something, it's got to continue to produce results, which means really removing barriers to trade and investment." President George W. Bush and Prime

Minister Manmohan Singh have committed to the goal of doubling U.S.-India trade within three years. There is a relatively low starting base of about $30 billion in annual goods and services trade, compared to annual U.S. trade with China, at around $285 billion. Thus, doubling trade between the United States and India means adding just another $30 billion, so it's a realistic goal, Bhatia says. That doesn't mean it will be obstaclefree. "We're going to have to see steady progress if that goal's going to be achieved," he says. "I'd like to see restrictions lifted, impediments to trade both ways being addressed so that our businesses have an easier time investing in India and Indian businesses have an easier time investing in the United States." So is a free trade agreement (FTA) a conceivable vision someday? "There are a lot of issues that we would have to work out," Bhatia answers. "India continues.to have a very highly protective agricultural sector, for instance, and the hallmark of our FTAs is that they basically take tariffs down to zero. So that would be a significant issue. Intellectual property rights protection is another area that India would need to move substantially on. So there are some things that probably are challenges that are going to have to be addressed over the course of years, not months. But, could I foresee a day when the U.S. and India might enter FTA negotiations? Absolutely." One reason for Bhatia's optimism is his role-when he was Assistant Secretary for Aviation and International Affairs at the Department of Transportation-in bringing about the "open skies" agreement that India and the United States signed last year. "Sometimes things happen very quickly when you have the right people pushing it and I think that was the secret of open skies," says Bhatia. "It's important to look for places where the United States and

India have cornmon interests. And open skies is something that we had invested deeply in as a concept. It worked very nicely with the Indians' need to reform the sector and to liberalize and introduce greater competition. So those are principles that I think we're trying to apply in other areas, especially as we move forward with this nascent trade policy forum." For example, he says, the United States and India have a common interest in developing biotechnology. Also, they recognize the need for greater liberalization of policies that limit investment in infrastructure or agribusiness, where development is to the advantage of both. For the trade relationship to grow, it's important that U.S. firms continue to see India as an attractive place to do business. "I think the jury is still out on this," says Bhatia. "There was a lot of excitement, stimulated in part by the President's visit here, and that does give the relationship momentum. But if American companies run into problems such as tariffs or nontariff barriers, regulations that make doing business difficult over here, they're going to look very quickly at opportunities in other parts of the world where they don't face such barriers. And India is not that far from economies like those of Southeast Asia where you have also pretty aggressive, fast growing economies and rapid liberalization." American businesses are excited about the dialogue, happy to see the U.S. and Indian governments engaged on a senior level, pleased that their problems are getting attention, says Bhatia. "But they also expect to see results, which means, for instance, that the restrictions on foreign direct investment are removed, or barriers that discourage them from trading or investing here, such as regulatory barriers." As an example, Bhatia mentioned Harley-Davidson, the American manufacturer of large motorcycles, a niche

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exporter whose products find customers around the world. "Indian tariffs on large motorcycles are on the order of 100 percent. And not only that, but they have regulatory barriers, emission standards, that effectively only allow you to import much, much smaller motorcycles," says Bhatia. "It's not as if the Indians are doing this to protect their homegrown industry. They don't make motorcycles the size of Harley. But trying to get the bureaucracy to move on this, to move on the issue of both the tariff and the non-tariff barrier has been a tough chore." This is the kind of thing that the Americans are going to keep pushing in the developing trade dialogue "because American businesses like Harley should have access to the Indian market and Indian consumers should have access to American products," says Bhatia. "Our market is very, very open to Indian products. In fact, we give them preferential access through our GSP (generalized system of preferences) program. But we need to see that reciprocal access is being offered by the Indians."

Bhatia sees an important change compared to 20 years ago in that "the Indian government is trying to work to eliminate these obstacles. There are always challenges that governments face in bringing together their agencies, which sometimes have less forward leaning propensities," he comments. On the other hand, the issue of Indian professionals being able to travel easily to the United States is a significant issue, and there are U.S. banking, agriculture and industrial product regulations that the Indian government has raised concerns about. "We've been trying to be responsive to their issues as well," says Bhatia. One result is that a 17-year debate was ended and Indian mangoes will be ready to import to the United States next year. "The reality is that global trade should benefit both sides," says Bhatia. India has a distinct advantage over the United States in terms of trade right now. We run a deficit of billions of dollars in two-way trade with India. Is that a problem? I don't think so. I would like to see U.S. compa-

American businesses expect India to remove import barriers against products such as Harley-Davidson motorcycles, says Karan Bhatia. nies have a level playing field here and more market access to be able to compete vigorously. But at the end of the day, what I want to see is a growing, thriving bilateral relationship." Bhatia's father, from Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, emigrated to the United States in the 1960s. Bhatia says he is part of the growing Indian American community in the United States that has been responsible for focusing people in the U.S. government and industry on the economic possibilities that lie within India. "It's not so much that you do anything differently being Indian American, but you do pay attention to the opportunities here perhaps a little more," Bhatia says. "So when choosing which countries to focus one's limited negotiating time with, perhaps India gets a little bit more of an opportunity. But again, that only lasts for as long as you actually can progress." 0

Cars that run on vegetable oil? Do-it-yourselfers and entrepreneurs alike fill 'er up with America's fastestgrowing alternative propellant. very few weeks, Etta Kantor goes to a Chinese restaurant and fills a couple of 19-1iterpails with used cooking oil. Back in her garage, the 59-yearold philanthropist and grandmother strains it through a cloth filter and then pours it into a custom-made second fuel tank in her 2003 Volkswagen Jetta diesel station wagon. Once the car is warmed up, she flips a fuel toggle on the dashboard to switch to the vegetable oil. Wherever she drives, she's trailed by the appetizing odor of egg rolls. Sean Parks of Davis, California, collects his cooking oil from a fish-and-chips restaurant and a corn-dog shop. He purifies it chemically in a 150-liter reactor that he built himself for about $200. The processed oil can be used even when his car's engine is cold, at a cost of about 20 cents a liter. Parks, 31, a geographer for the U.S. Forest Service, makes enough processed oil to fuel his family's two cars. Kantor and Parks are willing to go the extra mile to reduce their dependence on petroleum and cut down on pollution. But these days environmentalists are not the only ones banking on biodiesel, as dieselengine fuel made from vegetable oil is known. Entrepreneurs and soybean farmers are creating a new biodiesel industry, with some 300 retail biodiesel pumps throughout the United States so far. Commercial production of biodiesel grew 25 percent in 2004, making it the fastest-growing alternative fuel in the United States [And nearly 285 million liters were produced in 2005, three times that of t004.] Even singer Willie Nelson started a company last

year to market the fuel at truck stops. The greening of the diesel engine is a return to its roots. Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who in 1892 invented the engine that bears his name, boasted that it ran on peanut and castor oil. "Motive power can be produced by the agricultural transformation of the heat of the sun," he said. The inventor foresaw a future of virtually unlimited renewable energy from plants, but the idea slipped into obscurity because petroleum was so much cheaper than vegetable oil. A century later, customers for commercial biodiesel include the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Army, the Forest Service, the city of Denver and numerous private truck fleets. Almost all use blends of 2 to 20 percent biodiesel mixed with standard petroleum diesel. The mixture helps federal and state agencies comply with a 2000 executive order by President Bill Clinton mandating less petroleum consumption. In March 2002 Minnesota

became the first state requiring that all diesel fuel sold there be 2 percent biodiesel by 2005. DaimlerChrysler's 2005 diesel Jeep Liberty comes off the production line with its tank filled with a 5 percent biodiesel mixture. The major obstacle to wider use is price. Pure biodiesel sells for 65 to 80 cents a liter, about 15 to 30 cents more than petrodiesel. To spur biodiesel's use, some European nations levy no taxes on it, and in October 2004, President George W. Bush signed into law a 15-30 cent credit to fuel manufacturers for every liter of biodiesel blended into petrodiesel. Diesel engines differ from gasoline engines in their use of high pressure rather than a spark plug to ignite the fuel and drive the pistons. Diesel engines can run on fuel that is heavier than gasoline, making it possible to substitute filtered waste grease for petrodiesel. Both used and virgin vegetable oil contain glycerin-a syrupy liquid used in hand lotions. It burns well in a hot engine, as in Kantor's retrofitted diesel, but clogs a cold one. Etta Kantor fills her diesel car spare tank with recycled vegetable oil at her horne in Weston, Connecticut.

Willie Nelson fills his bus with Bio Willie Diesel Fuel in San Diego, California.

Removing the glycerin yields biodiesel, which is suitable for even a cold engine. Skeptics have questioned whether it takes more fossil fuel to produce biodiesel-to fertilize crops, transport them and press them for their oil-than the resulting biodiesel replaces. But Jim Duffield, an agricultural economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says the "few lone voices" who still make that point have not kept up with improvements in agriculture and biodiesel technology. Indeed, a study by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy in 1998 and another in 2002 for the French government show that soybeans and canola oil yield three to four times more energy than is needed to make the fuel. (Similar skepticism has also dogged ethanol, a corn-based fuel mixed with gasoline to create gasohol. But the U.S. government's and other studies show that today's ethanol provides up to 30 percent more energy than it takes to make it.) Another benefit of burning biodiesel is cleaner air. Compared with fossil fuels, it emits less carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, as well as sulfur compounds related to acid rain. Pure biodiesel also substantially reduces overall emission of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to climate change, because the plants from which the oil was extracted absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide while they were growing. A bus running on pure biodiesel would emit 32 percent less particulate matter, which has been implicated in the dramatic increase in asthma cases in cities. The only air pollution downside

of pure biodiesel, according to the 1998 U.S. study, is a slight increase of smoginducing nitrogen oxides. The inspiration for the do-it-yourself biodiesel movement came from Joshua Tickell, 30, of Baton Rouge. While studying in Germany in 1996, he was astonished to see a farmer using canola oil to run his tractor. Back in the States, Tickell used his last student loan check to help buy a 1986 diesel Winnebago. He painted sunflowers on his "Veggie Van" and, for two years beginning in 1997, toured the country, towing a simple reactor that turned restaurant oil into biodiesel. In 2000, he co-authored what would become the biodiesel bible, From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank. "My goal is very simply to make the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries obsolete," he says. Vegetable power also appeals to 50year-old Marty Borruso, a chemist and partner in Environmental Alternatives in New York City, who insists he's no "environmental crazy." He produces biodiesel for a generator that makes electricity and hot water for an 87-family apartment house. He also sells the fuel to a tow truck fleet and anyone who comes to a pump he operates next to his production facility in Staten Island. In a 26,600-liter reactor, Borruso processes out-of-date virgin vegetable oils, which he buys at a steep discount, and free grease from a fried chicken emporium. But he spurns grease from a seafood restaurant. "It smells like calamari," he says. "I love calamari, but I don't know if I want to drive it." On average, fast-food restaurants in

any major U.S. city generate about 10 kilograms of waste grease each year per city resident, according to a 1998 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The National Biodiesel Board, a trade group in Jefferson City, Missouri, estimates that more than 11 billion kilograms of waste cooking grease are available annually-enough to make 380 million liters of biodiesel. Of course, America's appetite for petroleum is huge: 2004 consumption was nearly 1,200 billion liters, including 530 billion in gasoline and 155 billion diesel. Robert McCormick, a fuels engineer at the laboratory, says that biodiesel could displace 5 percent of the petrodiesel used in the United States within 10 years. To replace more will require growing vegetable crops specifically for fuel-and America's soybean farmers are standing by. Some proponents envision growing aquatic algae-richer in oil than any other plant-in pools next to electric David Modersbach pumps vegetable oil into a friend's tar in Berkeley, California. Modersbach went on a fivemonth road trip in a station wagon that ran on spent vegetable oil from restaurants. power stations. In an ecological two-for-one, the smokestack carbon dioxide would feed the algae, which would chum out biodiesel. Grassroots fans aren't waiting. Kantor, who paid $1,400 to outfit her VW diesel with a second fuel tank, says she gets nearly 85 kilometers per petrodiesel liter. "This is not about money," says Kantor, who speaks at schools about protecting the environment. "I'm doing this to set an example." 0 Frances Cerra Whittelsey is a freelance writer in Huntington, New York.

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Architect Santiago Calatrava created an urban landmark in the guise of an addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Left: On the shore of Lake Michigan, the soaring addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum suggests a gull in flight, says its architect, Santiago Calatrava. Above and right: Windover Hall in the museum.

1994, n Zurich-based architect Santiago Calatrava got a call inviting him to submit a design for a proposed addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum. He promptly went to a map. "I knew it was in the Midwest, having been to Chicago," Calatrava says. But over the next seven years, the architect, 54, would become . intimately acquainted with the city on the shores of Lake Michigan. Calatrava, who

trained as an architect and an engineer, visited Milwaukee some 43 times to oversee the $95 million project, which was completed in October 200l. The result was Calatrava's first structure in the United States, the 13,375-squaremeter Quadracci Pavilion, named for philanthropist Betty Quadracci and her late husband, Harry. "It's an extravaganza," wrote the New Yorker's Paul Goldberger in 2001, "that says something about the exhilaration of well-crafted structures, and about the ennobling potential of public places." Now the architect, who was born in Spain and is best known for his bridges and train stations, is designing the glassed-in transit center for the World Trade Center site. In Milwaukee, the exterior of1:he pavilion is configured as a glass-and-steel cone. The

interior faces the lake, offering unimpeded views of water and sky. "I worked to infuse the building with a sensitivity to the unbounded, wind-swept grandeur of the lake," says the architect. The structure's soaring glass roof, with a 27-meter apex, is fitted with a series of steel louvers that, when closed, function as a sunscreen. The two wings of the hinged roof are opened at 10 a.m. and closed at 5 p.m. most days. When they are open, the wingspan extends more than 60 meters. "You can imagine that roof as just about anything," said a visitor, "a bird, a plane, even a ship." The Calatrava addition has drawn increasing numbers of

visitors-500,000 in 2002, up from 160,000 the year before-to the 117-year-old institution's collections, which include old masters; a large number of works by Georgia o'Keeffe; folk art and Haitian paintings; and 19th- and 20thcentury American and European works. Calatrava calls the city of 596,000 in Wisconsin a "wellkept secret" that earned an indelible place in his heart. He says his experience there, where he made many friends, was rooted in "the warmth of its people." 0 Terah U. Dejong is a writer Rhode based 111 Providence, Island.

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t first glance, the diminutive but sparkling blonde American woman appears to be indistinguishable from other budget travelers as she makes her way through New Delhi's crowded Main Bazar of Paharganj, jostling her way past cows, cycle rickshaws, pavement vendors and fellow travelers draped in shawls. Except, perhaps, that she looks down as she walks-her eyes combing the pavement for bits of discarded papers which she scoops up into her shoulder bag. I first met the Los Angeles-based collage artist Margi Scharff with other foreign friends and fellow travelers in an alfresco restaurant in Dharmsala, Himachal Pradesh. That was the summer of 2002. She was in love with India and had collected numerous "souvenirs" and images during her trip. But a visit to her rented room-cum-art studio revealed the nature of her souvenirs: a strange collection of what to the average Indian appeared to be garbage collected from the roadside. It included

discarded wrappers of cigarettes and beedis, chewing gum, matchboxes, incense boxes, tea-bag tags, bits of newspaper, etc. It was part of her "raw material from the road" which she would reassemble and transform into colorful collages. Scharff was happy to arrange a show of some two dozen collages on the twin beds in her room. A few months later, I saw the. collages hung at a Kathmandu art gallery and watched her on the BBC. Wherever she traveled in Asia, she collected ephemera, made her exquisite collages and made friends. Living on a budget of $10 a day, she sometimes sells or barters her collages, explaining how she got her latest digital camera through a Web site. It all started when she lived as an expatriate artist in Tijuana, Mexico, making assemblages in the mid-1990s. In her artist statement she says, "At first, I collected commonly discarded things like bottle caps, pop tops, nails ...ordinary objects that can be found on the road anywhere in the world. I saw these objects

"Every day I walked the road to harvest materials and every day I made art."

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as reflective of contemporary culture-a time of mass production, disposable things and throwaway packaging, multiples, copies and repetitions-a time of globalization. "Every day I walked the road to harvest materials and every day I made art. One day I began to put on a good pair of boots and began to walk a little farther down the road. By the time I got to Asia I had learned to select materials that were lightweight and would travel well. I picked up paper scraps, cigarette packs, matchboxes, candy wrappers, incense paper, ticket stubs and I began making road collages." Most of the collages are lO-by-lO centimeters and she says, "I deliberately keep them small since I must travel with them."

In fact, she keeps them in a small suitcase. Once, in Nepal, thieves stole the suitcase, thinking that it contained something valuable. But when they took it to the forest, Scharff relates, "Imagine their surprise when they found only bags full of old paper and pictures!" A hotel employee discovered the suitcase and had it returned to Scharff intact. Scharff describes her collages, "Raw Material: From the Road in Asia," as a working journey, an artist's pilgrimage. Having returned to the United States in 2003 she was eager to show her work to the Los Angeles art community, which has been supportive. She exhibited her collages in a two-artist show with S.E. Barnet called "Foreign and Familiar" at the Overtones Gallery.

"No road leads the way. The path follows behind. The journey itself is home. "

Another exhibition is set for later in 2006 at Los Angeles' L2kontemporary Gallery. Resuming her road journey work, Scharff again came back to Asia late last year to Vietnam and India. She recently conducted an art workshop at the American Embassy School in New Delhi and in 2003 had been artist-in-residence at New Delhi's Sanskriti Kendra. In March, while in New Delhi, Scharff felt ill and thought she had contracted "Delhi belly," or travelers' diarrhea. But investigation revealed that she had developed something more serious-ovarian cancer-and is now undergoing treatment at the Dharamshila Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in New Delhi. Between chemotherapy treatments, she also finds time to conduct writing workshops for underprivileged children in the Paharganj area where she now resides. Although Scharff still keeps her walking boots ready, she can no longer do any arduous road journeys, but says she remembers the lines of an anonymous poet: "No road leads the way. The

path follows behind. The journey itself is home." Sometimes she is an incense-wrapper rani in a regal sari. Sometimes she is a singing bird from the Bangladeshi two-taka note warbling on a branch. Or the Indian farmer plowing his field on a serpentine journey toward a mythic Taj Mahal illuminated by multiple suns torn from a newspaper weather forecast as in the collage Night Journey. When it became known that she was battling cancer, Philip Reeves, the New Delhi correspondent for Washington-based National Public Radio (NPR), interviewed her in March. "Margi reached out and touched people," Reeves said. The listener response was so overwhelming that "it was the top e-mailed story on the NPR Web site [www.npr.org]." Scharff's story can be heard online. She also has her own blog: www.margischarff.blogspot.com D

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How a tenacious team kept alive a vital New Orleans link to the outside world.

housands of New Orleanians owe the survival of their businesses-and in many cases, owe their lives-to the tenacity of a former Special Forces soldier named Michael Barnett. As Hurricane Katrina toppled cell towers and blacked out police radios [last August], Barnett led an effort to keep alive one of the city's remaining links to the outside world, a data center shared by three tech companies: I-55, Data Protection Services and the Intercosmos Media Group. With the power out and other communications networks down throughout the city, the hub became essential in coordinating rescue efforts. For nearly two weeks after the storm, Barnett and his crew stuck it out on the 10th floor of a downtown high-rise, keeping the servers running on a diesel backup generator and documenting New Orleans' ordeal on a blog called the Interdictor. In addition to hosting more than 780,000 domains, the data hub stores critical backup records for business owners throughout the Gulf of Mexico region. During the crisis, the server farm also became the primary data conduit for the National Guard. When the city government lost its own Net connection after routers were flooded, Barnett and I-55's chief technician, Brian Acosta, brought the T-llines back up, enabling officials to coordinate emergency teams using BlackBerries, e-mail, instant messaging and VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol]. Soon after, Barnett's group got a message that two nurses and a patient were trapped by rising floodwaters in a garage at the Tulane Medical Center. They notified officials, who dispatched a rescue helicopter. The steel-hardened facility that housed the data hub was once part of the Enron empire. After the free-spending company went belly-up, it sold its $6 million data

center for $250,000, complete with a backup generator, to Sigmund Solares, Intercosmos' founder. As Katrina roared toward the city, most of the company's 55 employees evacuated with their families. Solares hired Barnett, a friend since childhood, to act as crisis manager and help coordinate the volunteers who rode out the hurricane among the servers. His field experience, including a stint in Desert Storm and another six years in the Special Forces,

But when I was a soldier, I never liked living in the garrison and cutting lawns. In the field, I was in heaven." The first crisis came early. Katrina blew out three of the hub's double-paned windows, prompting the crew to sandbag the servers with hundreds of launch-party T-shirts. While 26,000 people sought refuge in the Superdome a few blocks away, Barnett kept the servers humming with the help of Solares, Acosta,

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~ National Hurricane Center Assistant Director Ed Rappaport (left) and Director Max Mayfield examine an infrared satellite image of Hurricane Katrina in Miami on August 28, 2005, as the tropical cyclone approached the northern Gulf Coast. proved invaluable for those holed up in the otherwise empty 28-story building. "The irony is, I was never an IT guy," Barnett says. "I haven't programmed a computer since the days of Basic and Logo [simple programming languages].

Intercosmos Senior Vice President Donny Simonton and Barnett's fiancee, Crystal Coleman. Turning a security camera out the window, the group tracked Army helicopters trying unsuccessfully to put out fires. Taking brief fact-finding trips outdoors to interview local residents and law enforcement, they transformed Barnett's blog into one of the only sources of unfiltered information from inside the disaster zone. On September 1, while Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was minimiz-

ing rumors about "isolated incidents of criminality" at a press conference, Barnett reported: "The National Guard, FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], the NOPD [New Orleans Police Department] and city authorities do not have the city under control....It's the Wild Kingdom. It's Lord of the Flies." As links to their site proliferated through the blogosphere, the crew fielded thousands of instant messages, text messages and phone calls each day from city officials, clients, frantic relatives and journalists. They got so busy, Coleman recalls, "I had to read Michael's blog to find out what we were doing." In honor of his fiancee, Barnett dubbed the center Outpost Crystal. Solares rigged a makeshift shower by hoisting a water cooler on top of two file cabinets. The team survived for days on canned ravioli, bottled water and cold cuts intended for employee lunches. Keeping the generator fed was more difficult. The group used the online chat system ICQ to ask experts for advice on conserving fuel. Then all but one of the data center's connections to the Internet backbone failed, and the generator down the street that powered the remaining line started running out of diesel, threatening to fmally throw the hub offline. Barnett's team put the word out, and a crew from a local tech company donned military fatigues and drove into the sealed-off city to deliver a tank of fuel. When a National Guard colonel needed a router, Barnett's team gave him one. Later, the Guard returned the favor, furnishing diesel to the hub until grid power came back on September 12. Crews from the companies that shared the data center spent the following days getting hospitals, pharmacies and other essential services back online. As Barnett and his fiancee departed for Florida, Data Protection Services [DPS] sought donations of new laptops so that small-business owners could retrieve the backup data they needed to restart their lives. "Many of our customers lost every- 0.. thing else," says DPS spokesperson! Jamie Foster. "Years will pass before they ~ speak of this in the past tense." 0 § <f) -·--···-·-····----------0

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By MIKE KELLER

--Systems

Afterthe Storm

Two things make communications networks go: electrons and infrastructure. Electrons supply the power, pushing words and data between the sender and the receiver. Infrastructure-wires, towers, antennas, circuits and processors-provide the conduit for that energy to move as data. If either one of those two critical ingredients encounters, say, a massive hurricane along the Gulf of Mexico, then all sorts of critical technology goes kablooey Here's the inside story of how one hurricane wreaked telecommunications havoc.

What Staved Online, What Didn't-and Whv Emergency Services Dispatch In Harrison County, Mississippi, the radio! towers dedicated to first-responder dispatch-police, fire, and so on-were built to handle 5,000 radios in sustained winds of 320 kilometers per hour. (Katrina maxed out at 280 kilometers per hour.) Despite problems in isolated areas, most emergency personnel could talk to their headquarters. Yet agencies across the region had trouble talking to one another. As the storm moved in, veterans like Pat Sullivan, fire chief in Gulfport, Mississippi, were prepared for a total system failure. "You need to be able to go back and do it old-school," he says "We had already decided that we would have runners going from fire station to fire station if the communications system went down."

Cellular Phones Cell phone services suffered the most in the storm. Towers fell, antennas and equipment broke away from their foundations, and generators intended as a fail-safe for the loss of the grid were submerged in the hurricane's record 6- to 12-meter storm surge. (They'd been placed on the ground-or on piers 3 meters high.) Though mobile towers called Cellon Wheels are supposed to keep the network online when the fixed versions go down, they didn't get deployed effectively. However, text messaging worked pretty well. Texts use very little bandwidth, and if they encounter a busy signal they queue up instead of dying off.

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Radio and TV Radio and local TV stations mainly stayed on the air, even though towers toppled along the coast. In Biloxi, Mississippi, only a few kilometers east of Katrina's eye, WLOX-TV lost a low-power antenna and its main building was nearly torn in half. But five days after the storm, the station had missed broadcasting only two hours. And even then, WLOX still wasn't off the air. It put a satellite truck outside the studio and beamed to a friendly station 40 kilometers away for rebroadcast. But who was watching? People with batterypowered TVs and radios. In fact, eight or nine radio stations actually transmitted WLOX's audio feed for a time.

Internet The major Internet hub in New Orleans sustained surprisingly few wounds. But there were serious problems at the edges of the network, where users connect. Head-endsoutdoor cable boxes that route DSL [digital subscriber line] lines to homes or neighborhoods-got submerged. Lines got knocked down. DSL circuitry in some offices got shut off (to avoid shorting out) and may stay that way, because dirty connections can short even when they're dry. And where the power was out, DSL was out of luck. The local phone company hadn't installed battery backups because the systems suck so much 0 p~er. Mike Keller is a writer based in Gulfport, Mississippi.

hand to hail the light. A boy with a trumpet stood at the foot of the invader's statue. He bleated and blahed his way through Miles Davis' "All Blues." I slipped back into the alleyways and zigzagged for another half hour until I found myself standing in front of Preservation Hall. Now, I have never been a fan of traditional jazz. Worse, I had always imagined that the music featured inside Preservation Hall would, like Disneyland Dixieland, be an uninspired impersonation for the tourists. The line in front was very long, but a tenor sax player was wandering the street, playing for free, so I took my place at the end of the line, as much to rest and listen to the sax as to gain entry. When we were finally ushered into Preservation Hall, I saw that a lack of artifice was its greatest asset. The hall looked about twice the size of my hotel room, dimly lit like the gloomy altar of some country church where a few candles sputtered bravely. Six musicians sat on wooden chairs atop a small stage some 46 centimeters off the floor. A halfdozen wooden bench pews filed back from the stage; everybody else-maybe 75 people--erowded together in the darkness, shoulder to shoulder. I didn't recognize the band's rust tune, but when the trumpet player took the lead, he shaved the melody close, King Oliverstyle. After the clarinet solo, he stood up again and sang out to the audience. His woman had left him, giving him the blues: a story that has served America's popular culture for 100 years.

Knowing what it means to miss New Orleans 'd been in a fury about the loss of New Orleans for two weeks, but only after listening to a radio benefit concert at Lincoln Center featuring the Marsalis and Jordan families-and evoking the dynastic quality of musical descent ~ that speaks to the sinking heart of the city's cultural treasure--did I finally experience the sorrow. Standing at my kitchen counter, grinding spices to fry catfish, I thought about a past visit to New Orleans and burst into tears. I had ambled through the Quarter, down Dumaine Street, up Bourbon, along Chartres, heading no place in particular following a day's work in the city. In Jackson Square, I rested on the cement steps to finish a bottle of beer I had carried out of a dark, noisy joint near Patout's. The moon arched above the statue of General Jackson saddled upon his horse, his hat doffed in one

Left: Members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in front of the hall in New Orleans on April 27, 2006. The band marched through the streets of the French Quarter to mark the first concert at the landmark jazz hall since Hurricane Katrina. Right: Chris Black (from left), Thomas Oliverio and Darrin Ingle play music in a devastated New Orleans neighborhood on February 4, 2006. The musicians Ci.~ from Salem, Illinois, were there as part of a "" documentary about the ~ rebuilding after Hurricane (f)I~ Katrina. 0 z

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Traditional jazz has never seemed risky enough to me. But as the band continued to bang out one number after another, the piano, bass, drums, banjo, clarinet and trumpet swelling into a sea of collective fakery with sufficient spirit and peculiarity to challenge conventional harmony, I caught for an inspired instant how daring the music must have felt at its inception. Even now the friction of creation showed sparks, the pain of squeezing something unheard before from a motley collection of instruments only recently transported to these shores. The band rambled on, and I realized this music had always been full of risk, unstable and liable to combust. The bass player seemed determined to prove the point. He launched into a flurry of notes that were both too rapid and dissonant for New Orleans vintage jazz, playing more like Charles Mingus than Pops Foster. He scurried up the instrument's neck from the bridge to the scroll, shattering the tune. The other play-

An innovative public-private partnership has committed to constructing a new National Jazz Center and Park, rebuilding a key part of New Orleans and promoting the city as the birthplace of jazz. The focal point, to be designed by architect Thom Mayne, would house the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, studios, classrooms and a library. It is to be connected to a 6,500-square-meter outdoor amphitheater by a park full of interactive art, gardens and fountains. The project is to be partly funded by the company that owns the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which was damaged in the hurricane and will be renovated within a new shopping center. Hurricane-hit court, municipal and state buildings will be torn down and rebuilt nearby, as well, Louisiana state Governor Kathleen Blanco announced on May 30.

ers grunted encouragement. Together they were demonstrating how music (and culture) argues, blends, dissolves, mutates and then takes the next step. The odd bird who hears something different plucks his strings too quickly or queerly or flat out plunks the wrong note, but he does it over and over until it sounds right and the people around him begin to listen. He finds his own groove and fashions new music from the old. And that's exactly what American music-American culture-has always managed to do. Our nation's truest anthem contains the funeral dirge of the New Orleans street band combined with the whorehouse piano and the last slave's work song and the bickering melodies of 200 disparate points of origin, from Marseilles to Dakar, from Manaus to Guangzhou, now stretched out over the American plains like the hide of some mythical beast. Perhaps this is the irreplaceable loss in New Orleans: the erasure of proximity that allows for the accretion of influence over time. Perhaps this is what many of us hope may somehow rise again: New Orleans as simultaneously past and prologue, the foundation for all things opposed and American. Of course, when the city's great music was just being born, it was then a fashionable complaint to jeer that America had "no culture," a notion that still raises its silly head even among sophisticated people who today may confuse vox populi with a loathsome noise. In truth, we have more culture than one people will ever be able to digest. And that helps explain why the melting pot sometimes bubbles up-and, when we least expect it, explodes. 0 Fred Setterberg has co-written an account of multicultural California, Under the Dragon, with Lonny Shave/son, to be published by Heyday Books this year.

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Top: In Malacca, a coastal village on Car Nicobar Island, everything was destroyed except a statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Above: An elderly couple who lost their home and belongings rests on a cot outside a small hospital-tumed-relief camp in Mus village in the compound of the John Richardson Church on Car Nicobar Island in February 2005.

I came back wiser, a bit calmer, temporarily not worrying about my next raise or my next book, until chaotic New Delhi engulfed me again in its sharp-edged

ways-and then I waited for another opportunity to go back to the Andamans to steal another small chunk of peace of mind. Peace of mind. On that day in 2005, I thought that this rare commodity was all that the Nicobarese had, and used, to face the life-changing disaster that nature had brought to them. Thousands had died across the net-. work of 572 islands scattered across 8,290 square kilometers, otherwise lined with stunning beaches, clear blue waters and thick forests. Vast stretches of coral

reefs and trees had been wiped out, more than 157,000 cattle and 38,400 pigs-the centerpiece of Nicobarese culture and economy-were killed. About 11,000 hectares of rice fields and coconut plantations-one-fifth of the total plantation area-were destroyed. About 10,000 houses, 85 schools, 34 medical centers, 20 power houses and 24 jetties were smashed. Islands were split and tilted. There were other losses, though, that had a much more far-reaching impact. The 40,000 Nicobarese-former animists who have mostly converted to Christianitystill revere nature, winds, the sea and pass their customs down generations through riddles, fables and folklore. Each Nicobari who died in the tsunami was, anthropologist S. Bari told me, "a walking book that was no more." Most importantly, the Nicobarese, who have for centuries lived along the coast, had to give up living by their beloved sea, and build new villages inland. And yet, as they have done for centuries, the Nicobarese prepared a stoic response to nature's fury. I spent months in the Andamans, going for several weeks to cover the immediate aftermath of the tragedy and then returning several times to document the rehabilitation. In the rest of India and other Asian countries, the tsunami had been a devastating tragedy, a tale of death and destruction and despair. But among the Nicobarese people, it was a saga of courage and hope, of community bonding, common efforts to deal with insurmountable calamities, and using traditional wisdom and skills to make their homes and villages better prepared for the future. It was a lesson the simple Nicobarese were holding out to a world increasingly imperiled by natural disasters. The difference was stark in the relief camps in Port Blair, the archipelago's capital. There was despair and gloom in the mainlanders' camps, a wave of panic and desperation to flee the islands. But the Nicobarese camps seemed festive: they held prayer meetings in the evenings and sang hymns; they talked to each other to give strength, and their elders conceived designs for new homes that could withstand another onslaught from the waves. When an aid group on Car Nicobar Island approached the Nicobarese elders to offer funds for an orphanage, a surprise was

UPDATE

artners in Aid

artnerships have been established The $13.68 million in USAID grants between Indian towns struck by the includes: tsunami and American cities that have • $673,375 to CAREto build water and sanitation projects, including community toilets. recently recovered from natural disasters. The International City/County Managers Asso- • $200,000 for the U.N. Development Program for psychosocial counseling. ciation is implementing a $1.98 million agreement to strengthen governance in Cuddalore • $5 million for the U.N. Development Program to make disaster risk management and Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu by establishmethods part of normal civic life and governing city-to-city partnerships with Palm Bay and ment practice in 20 districts of Tamil Nadu. Port Orange in Florida, which have recently recovered from hurricanes. In addition, the US Agency for International A tailoring center for women run by the Development has been helping people affected Pondicherry Multipurpose Social Service by the tsunami in coastal areas of South India Society's livelihood program with support since December 2004, giving $4.28 million in from USAID and CRS at Devanampattinam in the Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu. immediate relief and another $13.68 million to fund on-the-ground groups that have bui it waste management, sanitation and safe drinking water systems, erected temporary shelters and day care centers and provided counseling, job training and entrepreneurial advice. Also, cash-for-work programs have provided desperately needed income to thousands of families so that they can meet their daily needs and begin transitioning back to a normal life. In the 18 months since the tsunami, USAID and its partners have helped provide temporary shelters for 4,294 families; safe drinking water and sanitation services for 115,600 families; trained 150 self-help groups in business management skills and formed 12,249 disaster management committees.

in store. There are no words for "orphans" or "widows" in the Nicobarese language; the relief workers were told that the community would take care of everyone. In the autumn of 2005, Vivek Porwal, an engineer-turned bureaucrat who volunteered to serve in the Nicobar Islands after the tsunami, conducted a survey of 26,000 Nicobarese and non-tribals, the largest study to observe post-traumatic stress disorder in the tsunami-hit zone. Porwal found more proof of what I had seen in the camps: the Nicobarese had sprung back swiftly from the disaster. There were, unlike among the mainlanders, no signs of acute psychological distress. Porwal told me at the time: "The non-tribals have shown signs of more stress, maybe because of their materialistic attitude or lack of the very strong social SUppOlt that the tribals have, and their religious beliefs."

Oftentimes in the clutter of New Delhi's traffic, at noisy dinners, or in moments of brain-deadness when small problems seem insurmountable, my mind wanders to some of the faces I brought back with me from the Andamans: Tsunami Roy, the baby born in the forest hours after the tsunami who doctors said was certain to die with his mother due to birth complications; Michael Mangal, the man who was left alone for 25 days on his island where everyone died and he had to survive on rainwater and coconuts; Koshi Mackenroe John, the teenage boy who tried to save his submerged island of death by writing passionate letters for help that he wasn't sure would reach anyone; Jeremiah, who scoured the waves for the toe of his drowning eight-month-old son, Michael, and hauled him up to life. The doughty Samir Acharya, a leading

• $511,500 for ACTED, an international organization, to promote self-help groups' livelihood revitalization projects. • $4,878,600 for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to undertake water, sanitation, health, shelter projects; to support women and youth and reduce trafficking. • $2,401,560 for Project Concern International to execute water, sanitation, shelter, child care and education, health, livelihood revitalization and anti-trafficking projects in other tsunami-affected areas. • $707,200 to support Exnora International in implementing a solid waste management and community organizations development project. -A.V.N

activist in the Andamans who taught me a lot about the Nicobarese, told me of some youths from the tribe who had once lived next door to him. One day they had nothing to eat. Instead of despairing, they took their empty canisters of wheat flour, started beating them and made a funny extempore song about hunger. I don't have that Sufi-like spirit, the strength of resolve and the dispassionate calm of a mendicant who wanders the world and yet seeks to own none of it. I don't know how to feel the bliss of being able to abandon all that seems so central to our lives, and the power to unshackle myself from my ball-and-chain of desire and greed. But I am working on it. Perhaps I need to go back to the Andamans. D Neelesh Misra is a journalist, author and songwriter who lives in New Delhi.

epidemic, Germann thought, people might behave like the atoms in his simulations. "Atoms have short-range interactions," Germann explains. "Even though we're doing millions or billions of them, everyone just moves in its local neighborhood. People work in the same way." So, just as a cooling metal slows down atoms, a quarantine slows down people. By bolstering these physics models with experimental data on things like how viruses circulate from children to adults, he could conceivably model the entire U.S. population, or even the entire global population. Germann cranked up the simulation, adjusted the software, and added the parameters Longini had used to model his smallpox outbreak. That marked the birth of what would be called

EpiCast-a combination of epidemic and forecast. "It's basically still the same code," Germann says. "We use it one day for running atoms and the next for people." As it turned out, the model showed that smallpox may not be the cataclysm many imagine. Because of the long lagtime between successive generations of an outbreak (two weeks or more), and the telltale symptoms, smallpox would be quickly identified. That, plus the stockpiling, post-9/11, oflarge quantities of vaccine, means that "it should be possible to contain" an outbreak after the first few waves, Germann says. The flu, by contrast, has a very short generation time (days instead of weeks) and generic symptoms. What's more, it's nearly

By A. VENKATA

Healthy Collaborati on~~-==_ hen Maharashtra was battling bird flu in February,the Health and Human Services office of the U.S Embassy worked closely with Indian health experts to identify the disease so that measures could be takento keep it from spreading Fast action is a principal factor in keeping disease outbreaksfrom tuming into epidemics, and a quick response is the aim of U.S.India cooperation in preventing, controlling and eliminating disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a specialist agency of the Embassy's health office, "supplied the diagnostic reagents to the National Institute of Virology in Pune and the National Institute of Communicable Diseases for identification of the bird flu virus in human samples," says US Embassy Health Attache Altaf A. Lal. "That demonstrates how quickly we were able to move the new technology of reagents into India and how quickly India was able to use that technology" The Centers for Disease Control continues to provide technical support to Indian laboratories and other institutions to help monitor and identify any new cases of avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu. The Embassy's health office will post two public health experts in India to collaborate on research for a vaccine and help control the spread of bird flu. The US health experts are working with the Indian Ministry of Health and

Family Welfare and the Indian Council of Medical Research to enhance India's capacity for disease surveillance and laboratory detection, which are key to preventing and controlling disease outbreaks. For four decades the Embassy's health office has been working with Indian experts on medical research, public health and disease control, prevention and elimination. In addition to the Centers for Disease Control, other agencies of the Health and Human Services office, including the Food and Drug Administration, have broadened the scope of their joint activities with Indian health institutes and organizations. One example of such collaboration is the development of a vaccine against rotavirus, which kills children in India. Another success story is the near eradication of polio in India. The Indian govemment, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund and the Health and Human Services office fought as a team to reduce the number of polio cases from more than 40,000 a decade ago to an estimated 40 now. "Because of the govemment's emphasis on eradicating the disease, we offer advice on the scientific policy and standard guidelines A huge effort is needed to ensure that immunization is administered to eliminate the crippling disease," says Subhash Sulanke, regional adviser for commu-

NARAYANA

-==_ -==_ -====_-====_-====_-====_

nicable disease surveillance and response at the World Health Organization in New Delhi. Four Centers for Disease Control professionals are working full-time in India on polio eradication, and every month another two to three technical consultants come from the agency's Atlanta, Georgia, headquarters "We are within reach of eradicating polio. There were 40-odd cases reported, predominantly in some areas of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar With a proper immunization program and support from the global community, polio can be taken out of the country," says Lal. US and Indian health experts had predicted polio would be eliminated in India by the end of 2004, but the deadline was not met. As long as there are any cases at all, the disease can erupt and spread again, so immunization in every corner of India, and in neighboring countries, is essential.

Examples 01collaboration • The National Institutes of Health is providing funding to more than 125 research projects in India, up from zero in 1990. The projects cover HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, rotavirus and others. Six Health and Human Services consultants have been working in India on HIV/AIDS in the laboratory and on the prevention and treatment side. • The Health and Human Services

office has established seven bilateral programs in India, which provide avenues for expanding collaborations on vaccine development, vision research, disease monitoring' environmental and occupational health, prevention of HIV/AIDS, mother and child health. The Embassy health office also gives support to establish schools of public health in India. In March, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched a foundation for public health to establish schools whose graduates would become the hands and minds of disease control and prevention. • Through workshops on medical science, public health and technology transfer, Indian professionals exchange views and information on the latest techniques of matemal and child health, vaccine development and clinical research, through Health and Human Services funding. The aid includes grants for Indian health investigators to work with American counterparts Nearly 400 American health professionals come to India each year and an equal number of Indian experts go to U.S laboratories, says Lal. "They are the ambassadors of medical research. They investigate diseases together, develop scientific knowledge together, fight, control and prevent disease." 0

I-

Women's RighlS~

----------

"I Cannot But Laugh!

hen John Adams was gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 with other Founding Fathers, decrying England's tyranny and envisioning a government that would promote equality and freedom, his wife, Abigail, wrote to him, "Remember the ladies .... Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands." But he dismissed his wife's concerns. "I cannot but laugh!" wrote Adams. "We know better than to repeal our masculine systerns ... which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat." More than 100 years later, when a proposal for a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote reached the U.S. Senate, the response was much the same. Even after activists had worked for decades, senators refused to take the issue seriously, laughing so much that one journalist noted they looked like a convention of comedians. It would take the nation's leaders 144 years to agree that a woman's voice should matter not just at home but also at the voting booth. In fact, throughout much of the country's early history, women hardly had a voice, even at home. As had the British, the American colonists considered women to be little more than property of their husbands, with virtually no rights of any kind. And the Puritan [religious] ethic gave strict admonitions that women submit to men in all matters. The idea of a woman's casting a ballot when the man of the house had already spoken seemed redundant. But many women began to see themselves in a new light as the movement to end slavery grew. Listening to speakers

exposing the hypocrisy of a democracy in which blacks had no rights, many women began to see the injustices in their own lack of power. They began speaking of rights due slaves and women. And when two of these women met at an antislavery convention in London in 1840, a fast friendship was born. Out of it grew the official U.S. women's rights movement. A young activist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was honeymooning at the convention with her abolitionist husband when a disagreement broke out about whether female abolitionists should be allowed to take part in the discussions. After the "nays" won, Stanton and a fellow-sidelined wife, Quaker activist Lucretia Mott, vowed that they would host the fust convention devoted solely to women's rights. It took eight years to make good on that promise. In July of 1848, Stanton, Matt and three friends put together a convention in Stanton's hometown of Seneca Falls, New York. More than 100 women and men attended. Stanton had taken it upon herself to draft a "Declaration of Sentiments" asserting that "all men and women are created equal" and listing 12 resolutions toward equal rights. By far the most controversial was the declaration that women should be allowed to vote.

During World War I, women demonstrated at the White House, demanding President Woodrow Wilson support their right to vote.

So entrenched was the idea that women and men had vastly different duties that many women activists-who argued for such things as laws to better protect wives from abusive husbands-were aghast at the notion of a woman's muddying herself in politics. Even Mott worried that seeking suffrage was going too far. Finally, famous antislavery leader Frederick Douglass convinced the crowd that, like the slave, the woman would never be truly free until she could choose her leaders. The Seneca Falls Declaration was reprinted in papers throughout the country, often accompanied by ridiculing editorials. It attracted the attention of Susan B. Anthony, who soon formed a formidable duo with Stanton. Though Stanton had a gift for philosophy and writing, she was busy raising seven children. So while she was the driving mind behind the early suffrage movement, Anthony was the foot soldier. Stanton would write speeches, and Anthony would deliver them. Most women working for suffrage assumed that it would come when the slaves were freed. To their shock, when

that time came, men left women out of the picture. After Stanton herself organized a petition drive to pass the 13th Amendment, which freed all slaves, she was shocked to read drafts of a proposed 14th Amendment granting all males citizenship and enraged by a 15th granting black males the right to vote. When women appealed to the men of the abolitionist movement, even their longtime ally Douglass demurred, arguing that black men had a more urgent need for the vote to protect themselves. "The government of this country loves women," he said, "but the Negro is loathed." Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party told women it was "the Negro's hour" and promised that if they would wait their turn, the party would help them later. Women activists themselves were split over whether to support the amendments boosting black men or to demand that women be included immediately. The movement foundered until a new generation took the reins in the late 1800s. Younger activists such as Carrie Chapman Catt headed west on campaigns to revitalize interest in the more egalitarian states of the West. In 1869, the women in the frontier Territory of Wyomjng became the only females in the world legally entitled to vote, thanks largely to a single woman, Esther Morris. Morris had convinced the new governor that women would help establish

The U.S. Constitution, adopted by a convention of states in 1787 and ratified in 1788, provided a procedure for adding amendments, and there are 27 of them. The 19th Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, granted American women the right to vote. Amendments can be proposed in two ways. Two-thirds of the members of both houses of Congress-the Senate and the House of Representatives-may propose an amendment. Or, a convention can be called to amend the Constitution if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states agree. Once an amendment has been lawfully proposed it can be ratified-made part of the Constitution-in either of two ways, with the method to be chosen by Congress. The legislatures of three-fourths of the states must ratify it. Or, ratification conventions may be held in three-fourths of the states.

strong moral laws in a state oven'un with "transients." In 1890, when Wyoming applied for statehood, members of U.S. Congress expressed their displeasure with the territory's law. But Wyoming stood firm. ''We may stay out of the Umon for 100 years," legislators wrote to Congress, "but we will come in with our women." It wasn't until after the turn of the century, though, and the Progressive Movement, that the women's vote campaign gained the momentum it would need. Willie many mainstream women declared they weren't interested in voting, they had been getting involved in "women's clubs," which took on charitable causes from easing poverty to eradicating liquor. Many of these women began to see that voting would help them advance their causes. Susan B. Anthony, one of the leaders of the women's suffrage movement.

On May 6, 1912, women took to the streets in New York City, demanding the right to vote.

By the time Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912, women had grown more daring and impatient. An especially bold activist, Alice Paul, upstaged Wilson by leading 5,000 suffragist women through Washington, D.C., during his inauguration. Paul and her followers continued to lambaste Wilson for fighting for democracy abroad [during World War I] while denying it to half the population at home. While angry suffragists were shouting outside the White House, mainstream activists like Chapman Catt were dining inside, wooing Wilson with the prospect of scores of women suppOlting his war in gratitude for the right to vote. In 1918, Wilson spoke to Congress in favor of the suffrage amendment. On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified by a single, tiebreaking vote. It was cast by a 24-year-old Tennessee legislator who was expected to vote against ratification but who received a telegram from hjs mother telling him to be a "good boy" and support the women's cause. Some activists considered the battle won, while others, like Paul, immediately went to work for an Equal Rights Amendment to prevent future erosion of their hard-won gains. First presented in 1923, and passed by Congress in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified by enough states to be added to the U.S. Constitution. D Joannie Fischer is a contributing editor with

U.S. News and World Report.

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jagged rock and green spruce trees, I was overcome with the feeling that I had found the most beautiful place on Earth. On this return visit, I wondered if I would feel the same magic, Isle au Haut is one of the most remote outposts of Acadia National Park, About 25 square kilometers in size, it lies at the end of an archipelago of islands in Maine's Penobscot Bay. French explorer Samuel Champlain named it High Island in 1604, for its peak overlooking the bay Mainers mangled the French, so today's pronunciation is eye-Ia-ho, Roughly half the island is incorporated into Acadia; it is also home to a few hundred summer people and about 45 yearrounders, including a dozen or so lobster fishermen, Even at summer's height, the island is free of the crowds that jam the heart of Acadia on Mount Desert Island, Unless you have your own kayak or boat, the only way there is a 45-minutemail boat ride from Stonington.

Wild over ewe The $32 round trip through the islands between Stonington and Isle au Haut is a fantastic cruise, As the mail boat pulls away from the dock, Russ Island is in view~now

spruce covered but once the scene of open meadows where farmers raised sheep Russ is sheep less these days, but wild rams and ewes can still be spotted on York Island, off Isle au Haut's eastern shore. As the mail boat turns into Deer Isle Thoroughfare, passengers get a close look at the granite quarry on Crotch Island, named for the fiordlike inlet that splits the island in two. Though large-scale granite mining ended in the 1960s, the lust for granite countertops has revived old quarries. Lobster is the lifeblood of the area. The ocean is thick with colored buoys, and in summer, the morning mail boat passes dozens of lobster fishermen pulling traps from the ocean floor. On the day I visit, a steady drizzle falls from the sky. It is often rainy in May on Penobscot Bay, but from July to September, clouds yield to sun. The ranger station is a short walk from the town landing, and I hurry over. Wayne Barter, the senior ranger on the island, has a white mustache and Below: A moss-covered trail in the woods. Bottom: The Inn at Isle au Haut.

a soft coastal Maine accent (r's disappear from the end of words, then reappear where they don't belong) Barter has a taste for dramatic understatement. I ask if his family has been on Isle au Haut a long time, "Oh, a couple generations," he says. "They came in 1792" Maine humorists call that a poke line. You aren't supposed to laugh but can't resist a smile,

Duckvview Barter suggests walking down the Duck Harbor Trail, which begins behind the ranger station, then exploring coastal trails at the island's southern end. Western Head and Cliff trails are two of his favorites, "It's a toss-up between those trai Is and [hiking up] Duck Harbor Mountain," he says "It's only 90 meters high, but you get a great view." The 6.1-ki lometer Duck Harbor Trail is the best way to get from the town landing to the coastal trails. In the summer, one of the morning mail boats goes directly to Duck Harbor, But you'd miss the wild blueberries on the trail's edge, along with a great example of a Maine fog forest. Because of the moisture in Isle au Haut's air, moss spreads like kudzu vines and lichens crawl up the spruce trees. Where winds push over a shallowrooted spruce, its lichen-covered spine looks like a whale skeleton. On summer mornings when a fog still hangs in the air, the forest seems wrapped in a ghostly aura, Eben's Head Trail, which starts near the end of Duck Harbor Trail, takes you through coves and rocky beaches, Dozens of them ring the island, and each is subtly different. On some beaches, small rocks crunch under each step; on others you pick your way along jagged cliffs. Some coves are sheltered and quiet. Others present fierce cliffs and battering spray There's one quintessential Maine scene after another, As I walked the trail, I got the same feeling as five years before~ as if I were the first to have disturbed the stones on these sublime shores. An illusion, I believe, that many visitors savor.

A day tripper could spend the rest of the afternoon climbing Duck Harbor Mountain and walking Cliff Trail, then catch the 545 p,m. boat back, Because I have the luxury of staying overnight, I get a ride with Barter to the Inn at Isle au Haut. (Forced to choose between a $25for-three-nights campsite and a $300-a-night lodge serving three elegant meals, I opted for the latter.) The next morning, Greenlaw picks me up at the inn and takes me around the island in her old Range Rover. Before she returned to Isle au Haut to lobster, Greenlaw was a swordfishing captain who commanded the sister boat to the Andrea Gail, which went down in the Perfect Storm. These days she does more writing than lobstering~her latest work is Recipes From a Very Small Island, an Isle au Haut cookbook, And like a good fisherman, she loves telling stories, As we tour, she points out a mastless sailboat where her handyman raised four of his five chi Idren, and a house with a boulder sticking up through its kitchen floor~the rock was too big to move and the builder wanted the house in a very particular spot. We then enter the park, and I walk with Greenlaw past Deep Cove, where harlequin ducks squeak in the backwash of waves, to Cliff Trail, where the surf is breaking in spectacular patterns, I ask her what drew her back. "There are places I get a real sense of the past," she says "1 can imagine [American] Indians exploring this place, living here," I nod, Maine has many picturesque coastal villages. Yet that beauty has led to inevitable changes. Fishing becomes secondary to tourism; canneries yield to boutiques. Not on Isle au Haut. Much of the island is still wild, seemingly untouched by modernity. There are those who love the big sky of the American West, but to me it is this place~with its perfect littl e rocky beaches that you can take in at one glance~that is the most beautiful place on Earth. D Julian E. Barnes is a senior editor with US News & World Report.

n late summer, u.s. News & World Report releases its annual rankings of colleges. First published in 1983, the guide has become its own mini-event: College presidents, education reporters, alumni, parents and high school juniors alike all scramble to get their hands on the rankings. Its release is followed by weeks of gloating from the top-ranked schools and grumbling from those schools that dropped from the previous year. Inspired by the popularity, other guidesfrom Princeton Review to Peterson's to Kaplan-have rushed to compete. College rankings are now so influential that universities and higher education journals hold regular chin-stroking sessions about whether the numbers game has too much influence over the way schools behave. New York University's Vice President John Beckman sniffed to the Harvard Crimson last spring that the rankings "are a device to sell magazines that feed on an

Eastern Washington University students lobby lawmakers outside the Capitol campus in Olympia, Washington, on February 15, 2005, for Higher Education Day.

American fixation with lists," which is precisely what institutions say when they're trying to duck accountability. There's a good reason for the American fixation with rankings: If done correctly, they can help tell us what's working and what's not. Of course universities ought to be judged. The key is judging the right things. All of the existing college rankings have the same aim-

to help overwhelmed parents and students sift through the thousands of colleges and universities in the United States by giving them some yardstick for judging the "best" schools. Whether the guides actually do measure academic excellence-as opposed to, say, academic reputation (not always the same thing)-is debatable at best. The publishers of these guides argue that they are providing a valuable

consumer service. Parents who will shell out tens of thousands of dollars to put their teenagers through college need to know they are spending their money wisely. How much more important, then, is it for taxpayers to know that their money-in the form of billions of dollars of research grants and student aid-i~ being put to good use? These are institutions, after all, that produce most of the United States' cutting-edge scientific research and are therefore indirectly responsible for much of the national wealth and prosperity. They are the path to the American dream, the surest route for hard-working poor kids to achieve a better life in a changing economy. And they shape, in profound and subtle ways, students' ideas about American society and their place in it. It seemed obvious to us that these heavily subsidized institutions ought to be graded on how well they perform in these roles, so the editors at Washington Monthly set

University of California, Los Angeles*

47/87

788 (2)

133

University of California, Berkeley*

53/85

475(11)

122

Cornell University, New York

68/92

496 (9)

336 (14)

Stanford University, California

73/94

21 (16)

538 (7)

462 (2)

157

Pennsylvania State University*

60/82

22 (14)

443 (14)

377 (9)

Texas A&M University*

69/75

6 (78)

437 (16)

361 (10)

154

University of California, San Diego*

55/83

28 (5)

585 (6)

219 (30)

157

University of Pennsylvania

75/92

17 (32)

522 (8)

217 (31)

72/85

13 (46)

674 (3)

426 (5)

116

10. University of Michigan* 'Public universities

SPAN JULY/AUGUST 2006

Reprinted with permission

from The Washington Monthly. CopyrightÂŠ

by Washington

Monthly Publishing, LLC. www.washingtonmonthly.com

out to create the first annual Washington Monthly College Rankings.

Iowa State Beats Princeton The first question we asked was, what does America need from its universities? From this starting point, we came up with three central criteria: Universities should be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth, and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service. We designed our evaluation system accordingly. Given our very different way of measuring success, we suspected that the marquee schools routinely found at the top of US. News' list might not finish at the very top of ours-but even we were surprised by what the data revealed. Only three schools in the 2006 US. News top 10 are among our highest-ranked: Massachusetts Institute of

17% (85)

18% (83)

17% (97)

20% (65)

28% (37)

31% (23)

34% (14)

18% (80)

11% (168)

Technology, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, while the private colleges of the Ivy League dominate most rankings of the nation's best colleges, they didn't dominate ours-only Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania made our top 10, and Princeton (tied with Harvard for the top slot on US. News' list in 2004) was all the way down at #44, a few slots behind South Carolina State University. Our list was also more heavily populated with firstrate state schools (the University of California system scored particularly well) than that of US. News, which has no public universities within its top 10. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) finished second in our overall ranking, University of California, Berkeley third, Pennsylvania State University sixth, Texas A&M seventh, University of California, San Diego eighth and the University of Michigan 10th. Each of our highest-rated schools

are, by any reasonable national measure, academically serious schools. But they are not the super-elite-the Harvards and Yales-that normally dominate lists of the nation's "best" universities. The schools that topped our list didn't necessarily do so for the reasons you might expect. MIT earned its No. 1 ranking not because of its groundbreaking research (although that didn't hurt), but on the basis of its commitment to national service-the school ranked #7 in that category, far better than most of its elite peers. Similarly, UCLA, which finished second on our overall list, excelled in research and came in first in our social mobility rating because of its astoundingly high graduation rate given its large number of lower-income students. (Schools in the University of California's system were consistently high performers in this area: UCLA

took top honors, with UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and UC Riverside not far behind.) At the same time, Princeton finished behind schools such as the University of Arizona and Iowa Stateschools with which it probably does not often consider itself to be in competition-not just because of its comparatively low research numbers, which are perhaps to be expected given that the university doesn't have a medical school and considers its mission to be teaching, not research. What really did in Princeton were mediocre scores on national service and social mobility, categories in which it should have excelled.

Other Priorities Princeton's comparatively low ranking is evidence of something else indicated by our numbers. Schools that are similar in size, prestige and endowment end up in very

Students gather around Ludwig's Fountain on Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley.

different places on The Washington Monthly College Rankings, largely because of decisions they have made about how to prioritize their

results are interesting. The big state schools finished somewhat higher than we had expected, and the super-elite schools (the Cal Techs and

Wellesley College, Massachusetts

Wesleyan University, Connecticut

Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania

Harvey Mudd College, California

Fisk University, Tennessee

resources or focus their energies. When it comes to social mobility, for instance, Harvard has the lowest percentage of Pell Grant recipients [a form of federal aid that does not have to be repaid] in its student body of any school in the country. By comparison, Columbia, whose institutional ambitions and prestige are similar to Harvard's, has twice as many lower-income students as its counterpart on the Charles River; Cornell has nearly three times the number. Public universities provide some equally interesting data: Both Indiana University and the University of Virginia are the most elite public institutions in states with populations of roughly similar wealth, yet the percentage of Indiana University students who are Pell Grant recipients is nearly twice that for the University of Virginia. On research, as well, the

none Harvards) fell somewhat lower. Even so, we were caught offguard by some of the top finishers, including University of California's San Diego campus. UCSD is not normally considered among the elite UC campuses-UCLA and UC Berkeley have that distinctionmuch less top-tier national schools. But it has quietly rounded up a formidable team of scholars. Nine Nobelists are on faculty at UCSD (Dartmouth, by comparison, has none), and the National Research Council recently ranked its Oceanography, Neurosciences, Physiology and Bioengineering departments either first or second in the country. This concentration of talent translates into direct benefits for the surrounding community: 40 percent of the companies in San Diego's biotech corridor are spin-offs of research based at UCSD. These accomplishments landed UCSD

in the sixth slot for research grants, and eighth on the overall rankings. Perhaps the most striking data, however, is found in national service. Our measures here were simple: whether a school devotes a significant part of its federal work study funding to placing students in community service jobs (as the original work study law intended); the percentage of students enrolled in ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps]; and the percentage of graduates currently enrolled in the Peace Corps. All schools, large and small, are capable of excelling in these areas. In fact, we found that while some very small and nationally unknown schools have made an aggressive commitment to national service, most of the highest ranking U.S. News schools have not. The University of Portland, for example, finishes first in national service while Harvard lingers down at #75. Harvard obviously has far more resources than the University of Portland, and there's no question that it could match

Portland's remarkable performance on service if it chose to make a similar commitment to emphasizing those values among its students. But, at least by the criteria we set, it has not. These service results haven't changed much since the first time we rated colleges on their commitment to national service. But there's one nice surprise: MIT leaped from near the bottom of the pack three years ago to near the top today. We created a separate ranking for the nation's liberal arts colleges, and our results there confirmed these general trends. Some of the schools at the top of our list-including Wellesley and Bryn Mawr-are considered among the nation's most elite liberal arts colleges. But some schools we didn't expect-Wofford College, #8or had simply never heard of Presbyterian College, # 13crept into top slots. Though research rankings for both Presbyterian and Wofford were comparatively low, both schools produced extremely strong numbers for service, and per-

University of California, Los Angeles *

Polytechnic University, New York

University of California, Berkeley*

South Carolina State University*

University of California, San Diego*

University of Portland, Oregon*

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

College of William and Mary, Virginia*

George Washington University, District of Columbia

Case Western Reserve University, Ohio

'Public universities

formed well in the social mobility standings. And the traditional prestige schools didn't all benefit from the Washington Monthly ranking system. Williams, which U.S. News ranks as the top liberal arts school in the country, wound up at #14 on our list, one slot below Presbyterian, largely because of its weak service numbers.

Patriotic Competition A word on our criteria. This is the first Washington Monthly College Rankings. In future years, we would prefer to expand our criteria and develop an even more comprehensive measure of the qualities by which colleges and universities enrich our country. There's only one problem: Many of these data aren't available. We would love, for example, to add a category measuring academic excellence. It's nearly impos-

sible, however, to directly gauge the quality of education a student receives at a given school. Most ranking systems rely on measures of inputssuch as the average SAT [Scholastic Aptitude Test] scores of the incoming class or the size of faculty salaries. But as Amy Graham and Nicholas Thompson noted in these pages four years ago, "[t]hat's like measuring the quality of a restaurant by calculating how much it paid for silverware and food: not completely useless, but pretty far from ideal." There is one existing set of data that would do a great deal to answer that question: the National Survey of Student Engagement. It compiles such information as the average number of hours students at a particular school spend doing homework or meeting with professors outside of class-measures which, studies show, are

higWy correlated with academic achievement. Unfortunately, the vast majority of colleges and universities refuse to grant the survey permission to release their schools' scores to the public, and legislation to force them to do so, sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, has been stifled in the U.S. Congress. Rather than use data that we believe doesn't accurately measure the quality of an undergraduate education, we chose not to include that category in this year's ranking. We hope to be able to add those measures in the future. And while we're putting together our wish list, we have a few additional requests. We would prefer that the federal government require every school to report the percentage of Pell Grant recipients who actually graduate, but it doesn't. We would love it if schools kept a systematic count of which professions their graduates entered-such as teaching-but they don't. And we would be thrilled if the federal government tabulated how many of its employ-

ees came from which schools. Still, we have tried to abide by the best principles of social science and used the best data available to generate the closest possible measures of the qualities we value. It pleased us to use metrics for success that were almost all within the means of even the most modest of our nation's universities. For that is more or less the point of this exercise. Succeeding on the Washington Monthly ranking (and succeeding at serving the country) is within the reach of most schools. Granted, most colleges are unlikely to catch up to Johns Hopkins on research overnight. But when it comes to service, Portland finishes first because it has made an institutional commitment to value that work. And in terms of social mobility, schools such as Alabama A&M and South Carolina State-hardly considered academic powerhousesscore very high because their graduation rates are well above what their Pell Grant numbers would have predicted. The U.S. News rankings, and others like them, have had

University of Wisconsin, Madison*

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor*

University of California, Los Angeles*

Stanford University, California

University of Washington, Seattle*

0:.

During their May 2006 commencement, graduates of the University of Missouri listen as a posthumous honorary doctor of law degree is bestowed on Lloyd Gaines, who mysteriously disappeared 67 years ago while trying to end racial discrimination at the school.

an impact. A growing body of reporting and scholarship shows that the criteria these guides use have sent administrators scurrying to increase the

rawing from a variety of available data resources, the America's Most Literate Cities study ranks the 69 largest cities (population 250,000 and above) in the United States. The study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing

~ :" ~ ~ w ~ it

amount of money given by their alumni or the SAT scores of their incoming freshmen in order to improve their score. Such measures have arguably

resources, educational attainment and use of online media. Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, is the author of this study in collaboration with the university's Center for Public Policy and Social Research. From this 2005 data one can perceive the extent and quality of the long-term literacy essential to

very little impact on how well a school serves its student body, but as schools compete for students, every little thingincluding rising or dropping

individual economic success, civic participation, and the quality of life in a community and a nation. Because of the number and compleXity of the variables, the variety of ways in which the resource data are gathered and presented, and the variability in the timeliness of the data, the ranking is an interpretation.

two spots on a list--counts. Imagine, then, what would happen if thousands of schools were suddenly motivated to try to boost their scores on the Washington Monthly College Rankings. They'd start enrolling greater numbers of low-income students and putting great effort into ensuring that these students graduate. They'd encourage more of their students to join the Peace Corps or the military. They'd intensify their focus on producing more PhD graduates in science and engineering. And as a result, we all would benefit from a wealthier, freer, more vibrant and democratic country. D Research assistance provided by Paige Austin, Elizabeth Green, Avi Zenilman and Brian Beutler, interns with The Washington

Monthly.

Seattle, Washington Minneapolis, Minnesota Washington, D.C. Atlanta, Georgia San Francisco, California Denver, Colorado Boston, Massachusetts Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Cincinnati, Ohio St. Paul, Minnesota

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.5 9.5

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"George won't go to a movie or rent a video-he prefers waiting till they're released on radio." Copyright

"It's time to call in other people who don't know more but are just different. " Copyright

Bruce Eric Kaplan from cartoonbank.com.

2005

SALLY IRONFIELD, the non-immigrant visa chief at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, discussed procedures for applying for student visas in a Web chat on June 13, assuring Indian students that it's not too late to apply if they want to study at American universities this fall. Students may apply for a visa 120 days before the start of their studies. Because less time than that remains, lronfield said her office was accommodating all requests for student visa interviews, usually within three weeks. Most applications from India are approved. SALLY IRONFIELD: Let me start out by saying that we're very happy to see that there's been an increase in student visa applications this year, and we hope to surpass last year's total of 18,000 student visa applicants processed.

How does India rank in terms of numbers of student visas issued annually? India sends the largest number of students to study in the United States worldwide. There are currently 80,000 Indian students studying in the United States. There are a lot of master's and doctoral candidates applying for visas, and this year we have a sharp increase in applicants wishing to pursue undergraduate studies.

How much money can I carry in the United States? Will I get a part-time job? If I have specialized in a particular field and want to earn some money, can I do so? What types of questions are asked at

the time of the visa approval? Students generally are not eligible for employment the first year they are studying in the United States. However, there are opportunities to pursue on-campus employment and other types of employment upon approval of the school's administration. All applicants for a nonimmigrant visa must establish that they have strong ties outside the United States that the interviewing officer believes would lead the applicant to depart the United States. During an interview, the officer considers the general overall status of an applicant, and does not make a decision based on anyone factor. They consider and will ask questions about family, employment, longevity of work history, income, travel history and purpose of traveling to the United States.

I am an MBBS graduate and I want to know about further study options there. You

should

contact

the

U.S.

Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) for more information at http://fulbrightindia.org/

Is there any possibility of the number of student visas for India being raised? There is no congressionally mandated limit for issuance of student visas. Possibilities are limitless. Sponsoring schools register with the Department of State and are then authorized to issue 1-20 forms for international students. We are committed to giving every student an opportunity to apply in time to report to their selected school.

What is the ideal time to apply for a visa? What are the documents one should be prepared with? The good time to apply for a student visa is as early as possible, usually once you've received your 1-20. You can arrange an interview up to 120 days before the start date on your 1-20, and you can enter the United States 30 days prior

Key Steps .., Pay application (currently Rs. 4,600) and VFS (Visa Facilitation Service) appointment and courier delivery system fees (currently Rs. 276) at a designated HDFC Bank. .., Schedule an appointment and complete application forms at http://www.vfs-usa.co.in/ You will need the HDFC Bank receipt in order to schedule the appointment. .., You must have rewived from the school a document called an 1-20.

to the commencement

of classes.

What is the approximate time we are allowed to stay in the United States after getting our visa? You normally are pennitted to stay until 30 days after the completion of your studies, provided you remain a full-time student.

What is the normal duration of a visa interview? Each visa interview lasts only a few minutes, because what you write on your application, combined with the 1-20, provides most of the information needed for an officer to make a decision.

May I know how much money will be required for being eligible for a visa? The 1-20 indicates how much money is needed and who the school believes is financing the education, whether it is personal, family or school funds. The applicant needs to demonstrate that there are sufficient funds available for the first year of study, and that he or she has resources that can cover the remaining years of study.

What if the 1-20itself states that the student is getting full financial aid? In that case, are we supposed to show our personal funds? No. But as part of the applicant's qualifications, he needs to demonstrate that he has strong ties outside the United States, and the financial status of the applicant and/or their family may factor into the interview.

What are the documents required for the visa interview? Besides the documents already mentioned, the application and the 1-20, the consular officer may ask you for your

This document also requires a payment for the SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) registration system The school may have made this payment for you, and will send you confirmation information, which will be necessary to present at the interview . .., Questions on SEVIS payments should be directed back to the school or answers may be found at http://www.fmjfee.com/

mark sheets, degree, GRE, SAT and TOEFL scores. Depending upon who's paying, they could also ask for the financial status of the individual financing your studies. For more information, I suggest you visit the visas section of our Web site: http://newdelhi. usembassy.gov /

What are the probable reasons for rejection of a student visa? On occasion, a student may not receive a visa because the student is unable to convince the officer that he or she is a credible student, or he/she is unable to finance the studies, or does not have a credible plan to return to India. Bringing documentation is helpful, but cannot take the place of an interview with the officer. The applicant needs to be able to discuss his or her eligibilities clearly during the interview.

What are the convincing indicators that the student will come back after studies and maybe a short work experience? The best way is to have a credible plan for return that the applicant can explain to the interviewing officer in just a few sentences. Prior to the boom in the technology industry here, many Indian graduates remained in the United States after their studies, adjusting their visa status to H-IB. Now we have seen an increasing number of students returning to India to join high-tech firms or establish their own companies. We are confident that the India of today will continue to attract the return of its graduates. Working in the United States on an H-IB visa further enhances their marketability in India.

By putting so much emphasis on the financial strength of a candidate, can

you do justice to deserving students from India's educated but not so rich families? If a deserving student can demonstrate that there are sufficient funds-be they family funds, scholarships, bank loans, etc.-to pay for their studies, there is no bar to eligibility due to the student's financial situation.

So what if I had a student visa and then I graduate? I want to get a job in the United States. Do I have to change visas? Do I have to come back to India to get a new visa? Probably yes, but I suggest you visit the Department of Homeland Security's Web site for more information about adjusting status while in the United States: http://uscis.gov/ D

_.~;

-~,..

~~.

~--

~TES. The State Department's Education USA: http://www.educationusa.state.gov/usvisa.htm US Educational Foundation in India: http://fu Ibright -india. org/ US Embassy http://newdelhi.usembassygov Bureau of Consular Affairs: http://trave I.state.gov/ Visa Facilitation Service: http://www.vfs-usa.co. in/ Department of Homeland Security/Immigration and Customs Enforcement http://www. ice.goy/graph ics/sevis SEVIS http://www.fmjfee.com/ For questions about a specific visa case,e-mail nivnd@stategov

Dr. Mohinder P. Sambhi

Musical Taj Mahal in Memory of

Doctor's Wife f music be the food of love, Dr. Mohinder P. Sambhi still plays on. That explains why the department of ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is now recruiting a full-time permanent professor to fill the Mohindar (Minno) Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music, supported by a $1 million endowment. Last October, the Ludhianaborn doctor, a hypertension specialist who spent his career teaching at Indian and American universities, made the endowment in the memory of his wife of 51 years, known as Minno, to celebrate her love of music and his love for her. The gift is like a musical Taj Mahal, designed to give inspiration and enjoyment for years to come. UCLA, where Sambhi was a professor from 1971 to 1994, received half of the endowment-$500,000-in June. The rest would be paid by his estate. Meanwhile, he is to provide $25,000 per year in operating expenses with the interest from the remaining half million, and the university hopes to fi II the position by early next year.

The Sambhi Chair is meant to support the teaching and research activities of a distinguished faculty member by underwriting graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. "It is gratifying that I can honor my wife with a gift that will ensure that the study of Indian musical culture will continue to be supported at UCLA," says Sambhi. "Minno was an ardent music lover and a child psychiatrist who believed in the healing powers of music, especially while treating children." For Sambhi, love may have bloomed on Indian soil but it really matured into marital bliss in the United States. While teaching at Lady Hardinge Medical College in New Delhi in 1951, he met his student-turned-soul mate, Minno. They married in 1953, much against his parents' wishes, and sailed off to America, announcing the wedding from New York. "I accepted a position as an intern in Cleveland, Ohio. The money was not enough for the two of us to live on," Sambhi remembers. However, he was sure he wanted an academic career in medicine, despite the lower pay, "For the next four

years, I worked as a postgraduate research fellow. I selected hypertension as my specialty. My wife trained as a child psychiatrist and always made more money in training than I did and she supported my research career," he says. In 1958, after finishing his residency training, Sambhi says he was offered $100,000 a year to go into private practice with his mentor. But Minno told him, "I know you. You may never make full professor, but you will never be happy unless you have tried. I would rather have a contented husband than a rich one," Sambhi did achieve a full professorship, and the couple also did alright financially, astutely investing in real estate and seIling the succession of homes they lived in to amass the funds the doctor is now giving away. He first joined the University of Southern California Medical School faculty where he worked from 1961 to 1971, then moved across town to rival UCLA, where eventually, he headed his own department of hypertension and became an emeritus professor. "We never made a lot of

money from our salaries," he says, "only enough to live on quite well, including hobbies such as travel and wine. My students would look forward to their teaching rotation with me in the hope that they would be treated to some great wines, and they were," states Sambhi. "I auctioned off most of my cellar after Minno was gone." Though Minno died in 2004, the bond they shared endures through several philanthropic missions undertaken by Sambhi. For example, in January, he pledged $135,000 to set up the Minno Sambhi free blood transfusion program in Chandigarh for children suffering from thalassemia. His estate will pay the money to the PGI Blood Bank to fund the program in perpetuity. "My greatest regret," Sambhi says, "is not to have asked Minno earlier if anything was lacking in her life. I did ask her and she said it would have been nice to have a couple of kids. When we discussed it, it was already too late." 0 Vevandh is a freelance writer based in New Delhi

onny Jain, an eighthgrader from Moline, Illinois, won the National Geographic Bee in May, collecting $25,000 and a lifetime National Geographic Society membership. Bonny moved from Kota, Rajasthan, to the United States in 1997, at the age of 3, with parents Beena and Rohit, a software engineer, and sister Riya. Mary Lee Elden, founder and head of the National Geographic Bee and the World Championship, plans to speak at the November 5-8, 2006, GeoFest in Lucknow. Also, India is holding an annual geography competition to form a team for the World Championship in August 2007 at SeaWorld San Diego, California.

ulbright scholar Dr. Nina S. Roberts, an assistant professor at San Francisco State University, in California, who is affiliated with the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests, evaluated the National Green Corps Eco-clubs across India. She also shared her knowledge of environmental education and youth programs with students in the Sirmour district of Himachal Pradesh, as part of World Environment Day activities in June.

Pokane, Washington-based theater director Brian Russo coaches an aspiring actor during auditions for a July 28-29 production of American playwright Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, sponsored by the State Department's Culture Connect program and SPANDAN, a Calcutta arts and cultural organization