SPAN: May/June, 2009 by SPAN magazine

u.s. Charge d'Affaires Adept at

Indian Languages, Cuisine

earning to cook in Bengal and Lucknow, reading newspapers in Hindi, chatting with monks in Sinha la, writing the history of medieval Nepali kings-Peter A. Burleigh, charge d'affaires of the US. Embassy, has immersed himself in South Asian culture since his first experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer and Fulbright scholar convinced him to spend his life as a diplomat. "While I was on the Fulbright in Nepali took the Foreign Service exam and then spent 33 years in the Foreign Service," says Burleigh, during a brief break in the non-stop, seven-daya-week schedule he has been keeping since his April 6 appointment by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He is interim charge until a U.S. ambassador to India can be nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U,S. Senate. "1 am highly positive about the Fulbright program. When I have been serving in various posts, including in Sri Lanka, India and Nepal, I have always been active on Fulbright boards and have encouraged those local academics and graduate students, but also Americans, who participate in the two-way flow of the Fulbright program. It was really a major event in my life," The Fulbright program has expanded exponentially since the 1960s when Burleigh was the only student grantee in Nepal one year, "The fact that the government of India is contributing funds to the program here is a major advance, and both countries value this kind of exchange. ,and better understanding of each other's societies," says Burleigh. "The program here in India now reflects real partnership," . When Burleigh was posted at the U,S Consulate General in Calcutta in 1972-19-75, "those were days when US-India relations were marginal and there was a lot of mutual suspicion between our two governments I am amazed at the transformation from a very minimal and fragile relationship in almost every area

Peter A. Burleigh Charge d'Affaires of the U.S. Embassy

"I am highly positive about the Fulbright program. It was a major event in my life."

For more information: United State~Andia Educational http://www.usief.org.in/ US Embassy, New Delhi http://newdelhi.usembassY.gov/

Foundation

Peter A. Burleigh meets women and children in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, who receive free health care under a USAID program.

to people-to-people relations and governmentto-government relations that have now flowered and bloomed incredibly, broad and deep, and it seems like it's expanding all the time," Since his retirement in 2000, after serving as ambassador to Sri Lanka and in other posts, Burleigh has been to India 15 times, studying history, architecture and cooking In one class in Kolkata in 2006 he was the only man ina group learning Bengali cuisine. "Now in all the big cities there are cooking classes for young women who are about to get married, who are highly educated but who have not learned the traditional housekeeping skills," Burleigh says "So it was a hilarious experience, we had a lot of fun and we learned Bengali cooking, me and about 15 young women," At home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Burleigh cooks every weekend, "1 do Indian food, I cook huge amounts and have friends over and I have leftovers for two or three nights. You know Indian food frequently tastes better the second and third night, when there is more time for the spices to seep into the meat and vegetables," All the ingredients, except for a particular type of leaf needed for Maharashtra and Karnataka cuisine, are available in South Florida, ''In my small city we have three Indian markets all owned and run by Gujarati families, immigrants to the United States," Burleigh speaks several languages of India. There's Nepali, which he picked up as a Peace Corps volunteer and Fulbrighter and later as U,S, deputy chief of mission in Nepal He learned to speak, read and write in Bengali, gave interviews in Sinhala and has "a kind of desi Hindi, in which the words are not grammatically very pure, but I can speak and understand it, I can read the Hindi language newspapers" Burleigh adds a caution, however, to anyone who may meet him during his tenure. "1 am avoiding being tested in anyone of these languages because I find myself rusty in all of them,'" -L.K.L.

May/June 2009 Front cover: Photograph by John FoxxiCreative ÂŠ Getty Images.

SPAN Publisher: Editor in Chief: Editor: Associate Editor: Urdu Editor: Hindi Editor: Copy Editors: Art Director: Deputy Art Directors: Editorial Assistant: ProductioiVCirculation Manager: Printing Assistant: Research Services:

Larry Schwartz Lisa A. Swenarski de Herrera Laurinda Keys Long Deepanjali Kakati Anjum Naim Giriraj Agarwal Richa Varma Shah Md. Tahsin Usmani Hemant Bhatnagar Khurshid Anwar Abbasi Qasim Raza Yugesh Mathur Rakesh Agrawal Alok Kaushik Bureau of International Information Programs, The American Library

* TechnologylTheater:

Wired Connections By Vibhuti Patel

* For Many Americans, Home is a Boat By Steve Fox

* Achievers: Jamie Osborne By Kumud Mohan

Published by IhePublic AffairsSection,AmericanCenter,24 Kasturba

By Erica Lee Nelson

GandhiMarg,NewDelhi 110001 (phone:23472000), on behalfollhe AmericanEmbassy,NewDelhi. Printed at ThomsonPressIndiaLimited, 18/35, Delhi MathuraRoad,Faridabad,Haryana121007. Opinions expressedin this58-pagemagazinedo notnecessarilyreflecttheviewsor policiesot theU.S.Government.

On the Lighter Side

* Articles with a star may be reprinted with permission.

Can't Stop the Beat: Bhangra on U.S. College Campuses

Art Exchanges: Junctures and Constellations

Those without a star are copyrighted and may not be reprinted Contact SPAN at 011-23472135 or editorspan@state.gov

By Kathryn Myers

* Heritage on Wheels By Ranjita Biswas

* Holidays: A Grand Old Flag

hllp://span.state.gOv

By Laurinda Keys Long

* Literature/Film:

Finding Herself in History

* Music: Rhythm, Rhyme and Rebellion By Rachel B. Crawford

Biodiversity: What's in a Wetland?

By Deepanjali Kakati

Media: Inbox Journalism By Kim Hart

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A LETTER FROM

THE

EDITORS ood, fun and music. These are among the treats of summertime, which we're offering in this issue of SPAN. It starts with a delicious cover photo of strawberries, a fruit that is plentiful in the summertime in the United States as well as in India. This hints at the goodies inside, a whole section of recipes for summertime food and sharing of memories from Americans about what their families do in the warm, relaxing months of the year. Try the strawberry shortcake, an American traditional dish. It's also interesting to read about how many American children become fruit and vegetable harvesters in the summertime, and fondly remember the experience! We hope you'll write to SPAN and share your summer memories, too. Music is an essential part of summer for Americans, conveying a change in workaday routine, relaxation, joy, romance and fun, as Laurinda Keys Long relates in "Summertime, and the Livin' is Easy." That's a line from one of America's most famous summertime songs, from 1934, and the theme is still a popular one for songwriters, right up to the rap generation. We invite you to log on to SPAN's Web site, http://span.state.gov and click the links to listen to a host of American summertime songs and videos. Let us know which ones you like best, and why. One favorite summer song from the 1960s is If You're Going to San Francisco. In case you are going to San Francisco this summer, we've included "A Cable Car Ride Off the Tourist Trail" by Kim Clark. If you are headed to the East Coast, don't miss the Franklin Institute. It's showcasing a unique astronomy exhibit this summer, and specializes in hands-on science exhibits, as Vibhuti Patel explains in "Practical Science." Summertime in the. United States is also a time for patriotic holidays, starting with Memorial Day in late May, Flag Day in June and Independence Day on the 4th of July. The still mysterious history of how the U.S. flag came to be is highlighted in "A Grand Old Flag." The story of how The Star-Spangled Banner, the U.S. National Anthem, was written and the meaning behind its words are illuminated by Edwards Park in "Our Flag Was Still There." We also hope you'll interact with us about our other articles. What do you think of "For Many Americans, Home is a Boat" by Steve Fox? It seems like a relaxed Illestyle, yet the boaters tell us it's also a lot of hard work, just like maintaining any home. We've also started a dialogue with several Indian journalists on the subject of "Inbox Journalism." Their opinions are in our pages, with more comments on our Web site about the news meQia'suse of the nevt tectmologiese-mail, instant-messaging, SMS, even Twitter. What is your opinion? For those interested in becoming a Fulbright scholar, researcher or professor and participating in one of the oldest and most successful U.S.-India exchanges, now is the time to contact the U.S.-India Educational Foundation at http://www.usief.org.in/ and apply. To give you a taste of what the Fulbright world is like, start with Charge d'Affaires Peter A. Burleigh's profile, on the inside front cover. Artist Kathryn Myers, scientist Beth Middleton and writer-director Sadia Shepard-Fulbrighters all-share their experiences in our pages. Enjoy your summer holidays and please take a moment to write to

us.

ay the word "summertime" and many Ameridiiis will break into song. ...,.

response to the "s" word is ajazz lullaby from a 1934

American opera by a Jewish composer from New York and set in an impoverished African American fishing village called Catfish Row, somewhere in the Sometimes it's a snippet of an old rQck 'n' roll tqne South. aboyt going to the beach, riding in an 'open-topped ~ar The name of the song is Summertime. The writer: or surfing, or it's a ballad from longer ago about fish- George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother, Ira, and ing or dancing under the moonlight. DuBose Heyward. The opera: "Porgy and Bess." As in Thoughts of warm days, relaxation and fun, often of most operas, there is a love triangle, intrigue, temptaromance, definitely trigger a musical synapse in the tion, betrayal, a knife fight, bad weather, multiple American brain. The late 20th century phenomenon of deaths-and gorgeous music. The lullaby, Summersummer rock concerts-starting with the 1967 Monterey time, is first trilled by a mother to her baby while the pop festival in the so-called "Summer of Love" and the neighbors gamble with dice in the background. It's so 1969 Woodstock rock'festival in rural New York-has pretty that Gershwin placed the song three times in the reinforced the cOnflection. opera, the last time to soothe the fretting child after One of the most common songs an American may both parents have apparently died. start humming, singing or whistling in a Pavlovian So what has all that got to do with Those Lazy,

Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer that N at King g about in 1963, all about pretzels, bikinis, soda. !J:lot dogs and beer? Why has this lullaby from such a sad story been a staple for American singers from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald through Janis Joplin to Fantasia Barrino, whose version put her over the top to win the American Idol television contest in 2004? It's all in the words and the music. Summertime is a blues lullaby. And contrary to its name, much of blues music is not blue, or sad; instead the singer sings to cheer up herself and her listeners. The melody of Summertime evokes a lazy, relaxed feeling, as if it's a hot afternoon. The lyric, whether true or not, portrays an idyll: easy living, abundant crops, fish jumping right into the boat. Pa's rich; Ma is good looking ...So hush little baby, don't you cry. There's a contrast in much American popular music between the hard, workaday world and the promise of SUllllJlerrespite, of slower moments when nothing is required because it's just too hot to move or when nothing can be expected until the cool of the evening. Otis Redding said it for everyone in The Dock of the Bay: Sittin'in the morning sun. I'll be sittin' when the evenin' comes. Watchin' the ships roll in and I watch 'em roll away again ... Sittin' on the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away. Just sitting on the dock of the bay, wastin' time. It's definitely a blues song. He's out of work, far from home, and the blues change-up moment has him calling out in anguish that he's got nothing to live for. But the

y favorite moment of summer was clambering with my sisters into the back .of my Uncle Charles' truck and heading from Los Angeles up to the central California town of Bakersfield, where he and my Aunt Mozelle lived in a mobile home. It was tiny and cramped, but they lived on the outskirts of town where I could ride my aunt's bike along the dirt rows between orchard trees and crops in the morning, listening to birds and planning my future. On the ride back, I stopped at the local library to check out books to read during the warm afternoons. In the evening my uncle would cook hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, corn on the cob and potatoes on the charcoal grill outside. We would watch the stars while laughing and listening to stories and jokes. The mobile home had a small kitchen, so my aunt improvised meals that could be made on the stovetop or in her electric broiler. Here is Aunt Mozelle's recipe for pizza on toast: ·1 slice of bread ·1 ounce of cheese: Mozzarella, Muenster or Swiss ·Garlic powder' • A pinch of oregano ·2 teaspoons tomato juice or tomato sauce Broil one side of bread and turn over. Place cheese on unbroiled side and top with seasonings. Pour tomato juice or sauce over all and place under the broiler until the cheese is melted.

-Laurinda Keys Long, Editor, SPAN

song ends with the singer clinging on, resolving to remain the same. A marked contrast is The Lovin' Spoonful's 1966 hit, Summer in the City, rated by most list-makers as the greatest summer song. "Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck gettin' dirty and gritty," growled the lead singer, John Sebastian. His staccato keyboard punching throughout the song is anything but relaxing. It makes the hearer want to tap his feet despite the sweltering heat and conveys the restlessness before the respite of nighttime. Then a change-up to a more languorous mood with the words, "But at night it's a different world." That dissatisfaction turned to happiness is rock 'n' roll with an echo .of the blues. The quintessential summertimt<,band, of course, was The Beach Boys, a West

Coast group of five young men who just wanted to sing about cars and girls, and an occasional time-out for surfing. None of that jazz-blues sadness-turning-to-gladness for these guys. It was Fun, Fun, Fun, pure rock 'n' roll with a bouncing beat that made you dance or kept your head bobbing as you listened on the car radio, with the top down, heading to the' beach. Listening to Beach Boys records and videos decades later reveals that they were often singing off-key and were dorky dancers. Yet, even those who were teenagers stuck in summer school or summer jobs remember those as fun days because those words and that music still play in their heads. The same themes and ftln-Iovingjoy comes through 30 years later in Will Smith's Summertime rap video with DJ Jazzy Jeff. "Put your car on cruisin'

like that 'cause it's summertime ... Put the top down so everybody sees you," advises Smith, in a lyric not much different from the Beach Boys'. He raps about barbecues, dancing in the park, playing in the water sprinkler, meeting a summer romance, a break from the norm. Of course, the biggest break from the norm that summer brings is no more school. In America the summer break lasts from the end of May until early to mid-September. It gives three full months for long family vacations, a part-time job to earn some cash, a chance to go to summer school for extra credits to graduate early (It is an option.), with plenty of time to spare for swimming, picnicking, playing, relaxing, hanging out, sleeping late, whatever. It surely is impossible for teachers to control kids on that last day of school, and many of those who have afternoon classes just cancel them and let everyone go early. The joy of that sudden release from the ordinary, the anticipation of all that fun and freedom actually translates into screaming as the hordes rush from the classrooms. Alice Cooper's guitars and voices screamed along with them in the 1972 School's Out. That who-cares summer attitude is in the lyric: "We got no class, and we got no principals, we got no innocence, we can't even think of a word that rhymes." Unfortunately, as The Beach Boys so poignantly pointed out, they can't all be California Girls, so what do those East Coast kids do in the summer, with all that humidity and sidewalks that bum tired feet, as The Drifters lamented in Under the Boardwalk? This song is about the wooden quay that runs above the beach in East Coast cities. Souvenir shops, carousels, sellers of hot dogs and French fries are close enough to hear and smell as the singer sits on the sand under the boardwalk with his "baby." In the midst of the 1960s civil rights movement, as black Americans marched and staged sit-ins, there was also joy

hen I was young, before a sing-songy melody meant an incoming cell phone call, it meant something else: the approach of the ice cream man. A standard in every American town, he sits in a boxy van plastered with pictures of ice cream cones, sundaes and other treats, and cruises through the neighborhood, signaling his presence with a megaphone placed on top of the roof. In India, he might get drowned out. But in the quiet of a leafy, green American suburb such as my home town in New Hampshire, it was often the only sound breaking the silence of a lazy afternoon. I looked for the ice cream man most often at the town pool. My mother would pack my siblings and me off to the pool every sunny day, where we'd launch into a dizzying routine of swimming lessons, playground activity and free swimming, halting only once an hour for the 10minute lifeguard break and ... the ice cream man. When the sound was heard pealing around the bend, all the kids would run out of the pool, dripping, quarter coins in hand, and line up in the parking lot, each of us hoping that the spot we chose would put us first in line when the van pulled up We all had our favorites-the popsicle, the orange slush, the ice cream sandwich.

.Q2

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~":; Mine was the Cornetto, the neatly packaged vanilla ice cream in a sugar cone with a surprise nugget of chocolate hiding at the bottom. If I managed it right, I could eat all the way down to the chocolate before it melted. When the ice

cream man pulled up his window and rolled away, seeking more hungry customers, we dashed right back into the pool. -Anne Lee Seshadri, Director, American Center, New Delhi

raduation Time

raduation day is such a fun and momentous occasion in America that it's now cele5rated, not just in high schools and universities, but in junior and lower schools, in church schools and even nursery schools. It seems that parading across a stage while one's name is announced over a microphone, while friends and family applaud and take photos, receiving a certificate of edutational accomplishment and having a congratulatory party afterward is one of the happiest days many Americans can remember. Education has always been important for Americans, and free public education for all, with many opportunities for , David Bloch (from left),Shonali Bedi, Miguel Soland and Peteras Vaicius at the commencement ceremonies at Stanford University in 2005.

-.~ _________

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higher learning, are supported across the nation among all ethnic, religious and economic groups. And, of course, graduation from high school or university is exciting because it is a transition, to summertime fun and relaxation, a job, career, university, married life or travel. Most graduation ceremonies-called commencement because of the connotation of beginning adult life-take place in late May. The planning starts in February For larger universities, such as路 the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles-with 8,000 graduates this year, 40,000 guests and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as the keynote speaker and honorary degree recipient-it's all about organization. Tickets for the Baccalaureate Dinner, which follows an interfaith celebration and benediction for students the day before graduation, went on sale just after classes began for the final semester. Then there are graduation fairs, rehearsals, sendoff parties, placement of orders for the souvenir DVD, renting of the cap and gown (about $40 for a bachelor's regalia, with option to buy at $600), hotel rooms booked for out-of-town family bringing gifts, and practicing of speeches by the valedictorians, the students with the highest grade point averages. Large institutions have a mass ceremony for all degree recipients, at which the guest speaker, university leaders and honorary degree recipients would make appearances; then each school or department holds a separate ceremony on campus for its own graduates, with the students' names called out and individual processions. This is usually followed by a tea or lunch. In the evening, graduates party with their friends. In most cases, the all important degree certificate is not handed to the student at the ceremony, but mailed afterward once the iinal grades are tallied. -L.K.L.

pon hearing the words "New York," most people immediately think of New York City. Yet, when I was a child growing up in a small town in rural, western New York state, New York City seemed like a distant planet With some of the most fertile agricultural land in the United States, New York state .is a leading producer of dairy products, apples, peaches, grapes, vegetables and my personal favorite-strawberries. During the brief strawberry season, which only lasts from mid-May to early June, many of the local farms would offer a "pick your own" option My brother, my two sisters and I would accompany my mother to the strawberry fields and pick berries for several hours. For the next few days, we'd eat strawberries on cereal at breakfast, strawberry pie, strawberries on ice cream, and of course strawberry shortcake. My mother would also prepare several dozen jars of strawberry jam, preserving those early summer flavors to savor again and again in the fall and winter months. We also ate other fruits and vegetables when they were in season-sweet corn in mid-summer, peaches and tomatoes in late summer, apples in autumn-but none could ever comparewith the tangy sweetness of fresh strawberries in May.

Here is a recipe for traditional strawberry shortcake: ·1 Quart strawberries, sliced ·1 cup sugar °One-third cup shortening (fat, to make the dough flaky) ·2 cups of flour • 3 teaspoons baking powder ·1 teaspoon salt • 2 tablespoons sugar 00/4 cup milk ° Margarine or butter, softened • Sweetened whipped cream Mix strawberries with 1 cup sugar; let stand 1 hour. Heat oven to 232 degrees Celsius. Blend shortening into the flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, baking powder and salt until the mixture resembles fine crumbs. Stir in milk. Smooth dough gently into a ball on a lightly floured, cloth-covered board. Kneadthe dough 20 to 25 times. Roll it to V2-inch thickness. Cut it into 3inch diameter circles and place them about an inch apart on an ungreased,flat, cooking sheet Bake until golden brown, 10 to 12 minutes. Cut the cakes crosswise while still hot Spread with margarine Fill and top with strawberries and whipped cream. Makes six servings. -Steven P. Kerchoff, Information Resource Officer, U.S. Embassy

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~ hen I think of summer memories, I think of the smells: fresh cut grass, alfalfa hay and sheep's wool. My family lived in rural southern Oregon, where the summers were hot and dry and the economy was agricultural. My five-member family was part of the 4-H youth organization, which lasted the entire year, but took up most of my time in the summer. Between measuring out food to walking our sheep around the neighborhood as if they were dogs, it was a source of much hard work and pride (and embarrassmentfor a want-to-be-hip 12-year-old), which ultimately resulted in our family's first champion ribbon. I remember the long hours of grooming the sheep, the pain of a 58-kilogram animal stepping on my bare feet, the pride of winning that big purple ribbon, and how grown-up I felt taking my winnings to the bank to open my first bank account. The long days at the fairgrounds invariably involved convincing one of my parents to give me Quarters, which I would save up to spend on snow cones. I had a fascination with these mounds of ice in a paper cone drizzled with brightly colored sugar water of mysterious flavors like blue raspberry. I still have never seen a blue raspberry. Once the cone was in your hand, it was a race to finish it before it melted and started dribbling down your hand and arm. However, it was a fine art to avoid the drips and getting a "brain freeze," that sharp sensation in", your head when you eat or drink ~ something cold very fast. I even- ~ tually mastered this skill after ~ enduring many brain freezes and ~ ;0: a blue-stained tongue and arm. ii: -Diane Brandt, Assistant! Cultural Affairs Officer, U.S. ~ Embassy~ LlJ

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"Last one in is a rotten egg!!! Yaaaaaayyyy!!" nd with a mad dash we ran off the end of the small pier and plunged into the freezing waters of a northern Minnesota lake. June. School was out and the family was on its annual holiday to a fishing resort near the Canadian border, a 960kilometer drive in the family car from our home in southern Minnesota. After a brisk swim it was time to load the fishing gear into the boat and head out across the lake to the waterlily patch where we would catch a mess of perch for the evening's allcamp fish fry. Perch-the little green and golden fish that inhabit the shallows. A fillet is just a couple of bites. But mmmmmm tasty. We would catch a netful in an afternoon and bring them back as our contribution to the weekly outdoor grill and buffet for all the residents of the resort. Skinned and de-boned, the tender white morsels were spread on the charcoal grill and just roasted to perfection. Maybe a little salt and pepper, but the natural fresh taste enhanced by the billowing smoke was all it took to make a platter fit for a king. And kings we felt like as we dug in and feasted to our heart's content.

-Richard Boyum, English language Officer, U.S. Embassy

and hope, as evinced by Dancing in the Street, the summer of 1964 hit by Martha and the Vandellas, one of the many talented African American singing groups emerging from Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan. The music says, never mind the temperature or the sweat, just go

front porch, knowing one could stay up late, in the coolness of the evening, because it's summer, and we can sleep in tomorrow. Summer s here and the time is right for dancin'in the street ... All we need is music, sweet music.

out~id, and dancu in a giant blocK party. Thm~'ll b~ music ~Vgry~hgm. Each neighborhood could turn on the radio and have its own Woodstock, play songs everyone remembers, invent new dance steps, make new friends, party out on the

There'll be swing in', swayin' and records playin' and dancin' in the street. It doesn't matter what you wear just as long as you are there... ~

y sisters and I spent every summer on our grandparents' farm in.5tinking Creek, Kentucky, where we swam in the muddy creek, hunted crawdads and salamanders, aggravated snapping turtles, chased fireflies. We toted laundry baskets out to the clothes line and picke~ blackberries in the humid heat. We peeled app1es,hoed the garden.,slopped the hogs, plucked feathers off chickens for dinner. We shucked corn, boiled corn, popped corn, canned corn. In the evenings, as the sun set behind the highest ridges and mist rose from the creek, we sat on the cement porch steps and picked blood-swollen ticks off the hounds and squashed the ticks with our bare feet. We listened to our grandfather's ghost stories

mountain people. At night our grandmother came upstairs to tuck us into clean sheets that smelled of the summer sun and pulled quilts up to our chins, quilts that she'd pieced together herself with . swollen, arthritic fingers. She stroked our foreheads as she listened to our bedtime prayers. "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to'take." My family has recipes for fried squirrel, boiled racoon, turtle soup, as well as chicken and dumplings or fried apples, but I'll tell you what I remember best: picking tomatoes direct from the garden, when they were hot from the sun, sprinkling them with a

<l.

and the adults' memories of the past. absorbina oiJr identity from

little sugar, and eatino them riohtthere, so fresh and Juicy that the :

tho~e ~torie~. We Wflffi a family of coal min@rsand fium@rs, mid

s@@dsran down our arms and f@11back into the black, loamy ~

wives and moonshiners, school teachers and Pentecostalsnake- earth. It was the taste of summer and youth and happiness. handlers. Outsiders called us hillbillies. We called ourselves -Melody Carnes, writer, California

~ ~

The all of the Camping with kids takes extra effor

summer tradition for many Americans is the family camping trip. Thousands of public campgrounds have been set up in national and state parks. They are equipped with barbecue pits, showers, toilets, even electrical and waste disposal hookups. Rangers keep the peace, provide safety tips and organize nature appreciation hikes and evening campfire talks on the flora, fauna and geology of the area. All this makes it easy for Americans to get away from the city and explore their forests, deserts and seashores. Many travel in large mobile homes or smaller "campers" fixed on truckbeds. Others travel by car, or hike, and pitch a tent, cooking outdoors and sleeping under the stars like the pioneers and explorers of old. Waking up to the sound of a rushing river, the chirping of birds and squirrels in the trees overhead, and the smell of fresh fish and eggs being cooked over an outdoors charcoal fire are memories carried for a lifetime and passed down through generations. Learning to ford a river boulder by boulder; to catch a fish after an hour of patient waiting; to follow a forest path and recognize the names of trees are experiences that stimulate the imagination, help children learn self-reliance and an appreciation of nature. Floating on an inflated raft in a pool formed by a waterfall, swinging over the water from a tire rigged up to a tree branch, the awesome wonder of the starry night sky with no earthly lights to dim its brightness, cuddling up in a sleeping bag in a tent among one's brothers and sisters, shivering to the slightly scary hoot of an owl or yip-yip of a coyote as giggles and kicks lead to sound sleep. These are the memories of summer.

iving most of my life in the Midwest we would quite often spend a summer vacation camping somewhere on a lake in Wisconsin. It was always a wonderful experience: Setting up the tent, hiking the trails, swimming and fishing in the lake with waters so clean you could sometimes see the fish as they approached your bait. The greatest memory of it all though was the breakfasts in the morning There is nothing like the smell of bacon, eggs and a pot of coffee mixed with the fresh morning air and it always tasted so much better than at home around the kitchen table. Then there were camp beans that we would slow-cook all day for the evening meal: â&#x20AC;˘ Start with a large cast-iron Dutch oven filled with beans that have been soaked in water overnight. â&#x20AC;˘ Add lots of onion, bacon cut into .bite-size pieces, barbecue sauce, brown sugar and a bit of mustard. It's very important that the lid to the oven is a tight fit. To be safe, wrap aluminum foil around the outside to ensure a good seal. Then, next to the previous night's campfire, dig a hole large enough to accommodate the oven with room for the leftover hot coals from the fire. Line the bottom of the hole with the hot coals. Put the oven on top and then surround the pot with more hot coals. Lastly, cover the rest of. the pot and coals with a layer of dirt from the hole. After five or six hours of enjoying the day's activities you will return to c~mp with a voracious appetite and an awesome pot of hot baked beans. To make this a vegetariaR meal, just omit the bacon. -Larry Daykins, computer services entrepreneur, California

...

-but it's worth it. By FLORENCE WILLIAMS

et me sing the praises of the big tent. Nobody else does. The talk is all about ultralight bare-bones-rnicro-nanopeanut-schmeanut. Nonsense. Our tent is so big, oU"rkids have used it as a playhouse, guesthouse and train depot. And one recent summer, my husband, Jamie, and I, along with our two kids, actually used it as a tent. After five years of day trips carting bags of diapers, we were pining for some bigger expeditions. The wilderness had been a big part of our lives, pre-parenthood. So with a sense of thrill, we dusted off our gear, upgraded our mattress pads to the deluxe models, purchased a couple of wee sleeping bags, and headed out with another couple to Colorado and Utah for a month and a half of adventure. Our kids became budding birders. "Look, Dad, there's the grateful heron!" said 5-year-old Ben on the San Juan River. Two-year-old Annabel learned to spot the nests of cliff swallows, and together we watched peregrine falcons soar past sandstone walls. Ben worked on his spin-casting, while Annabel developed a flair for hopping across boulders and peeing in the river. Yet achieving moments like these is a little like engineering Caesar's conquest of Gaul. There's a tremendous amount of advance work, ~rom finding routes to planning snacks to packing emergency ~oredom-busters. There's the mountain of gear and supplies; then there are the logistics of moving the mountain. So why do it? Besides the cliched but true reasons-Family togetherness! Memories for a lifetime! Instilling a love of nature!-there's the future to think about. Starting little ones out early will help them (and us) be more comfortable and competent on bigger and better trips down the line. We do it for them and we do it for us. We found that !!Ie logistics became less daunting with every new adventure. We now keep a checklist of essentials: first-aid kit, sunscreen, bug spray, munchies, stuffed bunny. My, our lives have changed. Before we left for Colorado, I had thumbed-through a copy of Scott Graham's excellent book Extreme Kids (Wilderness 2006). His advice is sage. "Slow down," he writes. "Leave the howmany-miles-did-you-run/hike/bike/paddle m~ntality at home." Right-o. But how to while away the slower times? "Pails and shovels, of course!" Why didn't I think of that? And so the kids spent hours making "peppermint" mud cakes and throwing rocks in the river. They got muddy, sandy, and as happy as I've ever seen them. I actually sat in a camp chair with a margarita and read a'book one afternoon. Other moments were considerably less relaxing. One evening

in the desert, our toddler suffered heat exhaustion. I hadn't realized she wasn't swimming or drinking as much as the rest of us. I plied her with water all night and kept her in the shade as much as I could the next day. Fortunately, she bounced right back to her boulder-hopping ways in no time. Flexibility, we found, is the key to surviving a trip like this with a smile. The weather doesn't always cooperate, and neither do road and trail conditions, children's moods and GI [gastrointestinal] tracts. One weekend, we were forced to improvise when a campground we'd aimed for lay beyond a closed road. It was late, we were hungry, and thunderclouds were gathering. Still, we decided to ditch the cars. We popped open a bag of cheese puffs, loaded the kids and gear into bike buggies. and pedaled into camp ahead of the storm. The kids thought it was a grand adventure, and we grownups were giddy with our instant sense of remoteness. We ended up in suddeu" backcQuntry, with an entire campground and its trails to ourselves. That weekend, the rain fell and fell. But the best thing about a big tent is that it holds everything you need for such a time: the shockingly unprogressive Sleeping Beauty storybook, the duffel bags full of pull-up diapers, socks, stuffed animals and washable markers. One afternoon, after a drizzly short hike, the moms took the older kids into town for ice cream. and shopping. It wasn't a strict wilderness trip, but everyone was happy. And Crested Butte [in Colorado] has great ice cream. One week my father, now in fus late 60s, joined us for a paddling and camping trip down Ruby and Horsethief Canyons of the Colorado River. I had canoed a nearby section of this river with him when I was 14. With my kids and my dad aboard, our raft felt whole. "What's your favorite river, Dad?" I asked as we drifted by smooth sandstone walls. We had just finished our 15th application of sunscreen of the day. "River trips are great not because of the river, but because of what happens on them," he said. I thought my kids might douse him with their Stream Machine Hydrobolic Water Launchers. But they just seemed to consider him for a moment. Then Annabel asked for another lollipop, and Ben went back to fly-casting his yellow plastic fish into the _C_o_lo_r_ad_o_.

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Florence Williams is a contributing editor at Outside magazine and a freelance writer for numerous publications.

UCkit in. Cable car coming on the left side!" Dangling by an arm, I was gulping cool salty air, and looiqng down the dizzying California Street hill to the bay. I quickly pulled myself in and hugged the wooden strut on the o,utside of my descending cable car. The uphill car rattled by so close I could have bumped shoes with the other open-air riders.

14 SPAN MAY/JUNE2009

Gripman Walter Scott III muscled the chest-high metal trigger that works the front brakes on the [lOO-year-old] car. He carefully creaked our nine-ton load down the hill. Luckily, on this descent, the brakes held, and none of the passengers got sideswiped off into traffic. Such accidents are rare, but that little whiff of danger is another reason that riding a cable car is so much fun.

Cop)ri~ht

2005lJ.S.

News & World Report.

L.P. Reprinted

with permission.

Riding [America's] only moving monument is, of course, a quintessential San Francisco experience. The vast majority of tourists, however, settle for the least authentic and least interesting version. They typically wait in two-hour queues to ride the Powell Street lines that take them to touristy Fisherman's Wharf. That's too bad. For the same price-$3 one way! or, better yet, $9 for an all-day pass-tourists can join the locals who jump right on the city's oldest cars (there's usually no line) and take an open-air tour of San Francisco history. Noting that his car rumbles through Chinatown and up Nob Hill, gripman Scott declares: "Every trip is an adventure." The adventure begins just two blocks up from the bay, where the California line starts off for the skyscrapers of the financial district. It clangs slowly up to Grant Street, the gateway to Chinatown. A cable car coming uphill from Chinatown in San Francisco, California.

Stepping off here at first seemed a little disappointing, since souvenir joints are increasingly pushing out butcher shops with live chickens and basement vegetable emporiums cluttered with crates of mysterious dark roots. (Many locals have shifted their shopping one block west on Stockton Street.) But there are still plenty of authentic bits of history from the 19th century, when Chinese immigrants sought their fortune at what they called "Golden Mountain," and thousands of Asian workers were imported to do the backbreaking work of building the transcontinental railroad. It took only a few minutes to find the real Chinatown. I strolled three blocks to Clay Street and turned down Ross Alley, which quickly grew eerily dark and quiet. The alley cuts between dingy buildings with musty doorways emblazoned only with Chinese symbols. The sense of mystery deepened for me when I saw a small man in a soiled, white, butcher's jacket and

Heritage on

By RANJITA BISWAS

n Satyajit Ray's film Mahanagar (The Big City), as the woman protagonist steps out to go to work fop the first time, a tram passes in the background, instantly establishing the locale as Kolkata, It is the only city in India which retains this vintage transport system, When introduced by the, British in 1873, trams were drawn by horses, They were not meant for commuters, but were used to transport goods from the railway station at Sealdah in central Kolkata tOJhe godowns at the Armenian Ghat on the Ganga, The company was sold within nine months as losses piled up It was revived as the Calcutta Tramways Company in 1880 a~d Francisco's cable cars, by contrast, are pulled registered In, London, Ele.ctrlfled trams were .along the city's hilly tracks by underground cables, These are gripped with a vise-like introduced in 1900, The coaches run on fixed tracks and are mechanism that is operated via the grip lever in hooked to overhead wires, Electricity is drawn the front of the car, Maintaining Kolkata's tram system has been by trolley poles, a tapered cylindrical pole used to transfer electricity from an overhead wire to an uphill task, Tardy upkeep, long power cuts, the control and propulsion equipment. San and customers' impatience with the slow-moving vehicles resulted in the elimination of many routes, So much so that many predicted the tram's imminent demise,

However, the Calcutta Tramways Company has spruced up its fleet. It has 272 trams, but only 110 trundle out of the depots every day The oldest car is a veteran at 70, Twelve trams lying idle in the depot have been renovated and more are due for a makeover. The new avatar is already attracting more patrons and the revenue is rising, Clearly, Kolkata's love affair with the tram is not over yet. ~ Ranjita Biswas is a Kolkata-based freelance journalist who also translates literature and writes fiction.

SPAN MAY/JlJNE 2009

For more information: knee-high, black, rubber boots wheeling a big trash barreJ toward me. I stopped, fascinated by the big, green mesh bag that seemed to be squirming on top of the banel. Why that's ...frogs! At least two dozen hand-size, fat, green frogs were jumping and wriggling inside the bag. Ignoring the temptation to trail the frogs, I instead followed a delicious smell-cooking vanilla. Up to the right was a sign: Golden Gate Fortune Cookies factory. Now the standard dessert in Chinese restaurants, this cookie was actually invented by the operators of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, a few [kilometers] away. Could that dank anonymous-looking basement be the factory? Sure enough, past the cluttered boxes of sugar and flour, three women wrapped disks of warm, still-soft cookie around slips of paper. The cheery owner of the 43-year-old factory, Franklin Yee, handed out a free sample. "Make you strong. Makes you long life," he said. "Schoolchildren eat my cookies, get smart!" I took a couple of bags ($3 apiece) on the chance he might be right and headed back to the cable car. The next car (they come by every 10 minutes or so) trundled up Nob Hill. The glory of the robber barons, who got rich off the ore mined and railroad built by workers like the Chinese, was short-lived. San Francisco's 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed many 19th-century mansions. But one surviving example crowns Nob Hill. The Fairmont Hotel was built by the daughters of silver magnate James Fair.

hat's the most important thing to do when applying for a visa to travel to the United States? ' "Listen to the consular officer carefully, Listen to the Question being asked, and answer it truthfully and briefly, rather than telling some long story," says Vivek Joshi, vice consul at the U,S, Embassy in New Delhi. To fulfill its motto of "Secure Borders, Open Doors" the US, consular service is trying to find out four things about most visa applicants, Joshi says: - Who you are, - That your reason to travel makes sense considering your circumstances,

After being gutted in the 1906 fire, the lobby was restored to its original gold and marble elegance. It has long been the place for important events. The first charter for the United Nations was drafted here in 1945. And it was in the Venetian Room that Tony Bennett first sang I Left My Heart in San Francisco. The Venetian Room is now reserved for private palties. But anybody with a hungering for a 360-degree panorama and a thirst for history can walk across the street to the Mark Hopkins hotel, take the elevator to the Top Of The Mark, and watch the fog roll in past the Golden Gate Bridge .... I opted to jump on a cable car heading back toward the bay. Gripman Scott, who has placed second in several bell-ringing competitions, clanged musically at the Dirty Harry-like drivers recklessly trying to squeeze past. It was a short, two-block stroll from the terminus to the renovated Ferry Building, where local chefs and organic farmers sell San Francisco specialties such as teleme cheese and sourdough baguettes. The gold prospectors who set off this city's first boom in 1849 discovered that if they left a batter of flour and water out, a native yeast would start to ferment. Knead a bit of that "starter" into some bread dough, and you get a uniquely delicious loaf of bread that is crusty on the outside and soft, moist and tangy on the inside. I sat on one of the benches overlooking the city's "other" bridge-the silvery Bay Bridge-and watched the boats plow through the swells while enjoying a little fresh bread and cheese. Now that's a real San Francisco treat. --------~

-That you have sufficient funds, Quickly, it is best to apply for your visa - That you intend to return to India - early, to allow time for processing, at the end of your proposed tempo- Sometimes temporary backlogs occur in visa appointments, If you rary stay. Other tips that Joshi shared with find your category is..not available, travel agents and travel reporters at keep checking back at the Web site, a "Summer Vacation 2009: Destias appointments are re-allocated nation USA" event at the New Delhi constantly to meet demand. American Center in April included: -It is very important to follow the .â&#x20AC;˘ U,S, visa aqpointment making is instructions on the Web site, and outsourced an'd onjine: not the bad advice of visa "consultwww.vfs-usa.co.in ants," Applicants who are coached - Applicants must pay the visa fee and who present false documents at a designated bra'nch of the HDFC are easily identified by the interBank before an appointment can be viewing officers and are refused, . -If you have all the documents made, - Though most cases are handled required and listed at the Web site, your photograph according to the specifications and the receipt showing you have paid your fee, your

visa interview shoUld take only a few minutes, -In most cases, you 'will be told immediately if your application has been accepted or rejected, -It takes about five days for your passport, with the visa stamped in it, to be couriered to you, Special arrangements can be made for you to pick up your visa earlier in an emergency. - You should check your visa to ensure that the passport number, your name, birth date, etc, are correct as soon as you receive it, and get it corrected before you travel if there is any error. - Your passport should have a minimum of six months validity when -L.K.L. you travel.

The United States was born from protest and Americans have always used' music to convey messages about civil, gend~r_and labor rights, consumerism, war and patriotism. rotest, demonstration and civil disobedience have been fundamental to America's journey through slavery, labor and voting rights movements and war. The arts have been an indispensible vehicle for protest, and music has been at the forefront since the colonists first fought against taxation

without representation. The United States of America was, of course, born from protest. The Declaration of Independence is the embodiment of complaints directed at the British monarchy regarding the governance of the 13 American colonies. In response to taxation without representation, the situ-

American"jolk singer Joan Baez performs during the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. in 1963.

ation in which the American subjects were taxed without a voice in the British Parliament, and were in other ways deprived of basic human rights, the colonies revolted. They declared independence and created a government that not only promised representation, but also the inalienable right to speak freely,

-=-

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recorded a painfully disturbing song, Strange Fruit. Written originally as a poem by Lewis Allen, the pen name of a Jewish high school teacher in New York, this song describes an eerie pastoral scene after a lynching, "Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." In the 20th century, the American South passed from staunch segregationist laws through the challenging gauntlet of integration. After Holiday recorded the song, her label, Columbia Records, refused to release it, fearing the reaction from Southern listeners. Commodore Records offered to do what Columbia would not, and after securing a rare one-session release from her contract with Columbia, Holiday recorded the most famous version of this troubling song. Many artists in the 1950s and beyond would later reference Bob Dylan sings Knockin' On Heaven's Door during a concert in Holiday's version of Strange Fruit as a 1997. He is one of the most prominent singer-songwriters to emerge powerful influence in crafting their music from the civil rights movement, and also protested the Vietnam War. and their message. Baez and Bob Dylan are the two most its pinnacle in the first half of the 20th cenprominent singer-songwriters to emerge protest, assemble and express their religious beliefs peacefully. One of the earliest tury. The Socialist Party put Eugepe V. from the civil rights movement. Like American protest songs, American Taxation Debs on the ballot for president five times many of their contemporaries, they also' by Peter St. John, was written in this era. between 1900 and 1920. Debs was protested against the Vietnam War. Baez's In response to the conditions imposed involved in the founding of the Industrial father was Mexican; because of this she on them, slaves often sang spirituals, both Workers of the World, an organization encountered significant discrimination in in the fields and in church. Several of meant torepresent the interests oflaborers her youth. She often sang out to the these songs are still sung in Christian in capitalist countries. On behalf of the Hispanic community, including a Spanish churches throughout the United States. organization, Ralph Chaplin wrote version of the spiritual We Shall Not Be Some of them, such as I Shall Not Be Solidarity Forever to the tune of The Battle Moved, No Nos Moveran. Dylan's prolific Moved and We Shall Overcome, were later Hymn of the Republic, a famous anthem of oeuvre was performed by many artists of invoked in the civil rights and labor rights the Civil War. The final line of the chorus, the civil rights era and beyond, including movements. Many recording artists across "For the Union makes' us strong!" was folk and rock '}nd roll musicians. genres have recorded their own versions, meant to motivate laborers and form a uniThe turbulence of the late 1960s marked including Johnny Cash, Ella Fitzgerald fied front to managers and corporatiOlfs. and Joan Baez. Folk musicians such as Woody Guthrie. The labor movement changed the lyrics sang Solidarity Forever and other songs of well-known spirituals and anthems to urging workers to organize, join unions and suit its purposes. The movement reached assert their rights. The line between politics dud ÂŁlrt was blurred, and the link between the two cpntinues today. "Battle Hymn of the Republic The civil rights movement was, of Jazz singer Billie http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas course, a key turning point in U.S. history. Holiday's soulful 200000003/default.html rendition of Strange The leaders of the movement repeated the Fruit, about the Eugene V. Debs words of abolitionists and' freed slaves lynching of black such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick tt ://www.euenevde5s.com7 Americans in the Douglass. Likewise, the musicians of the Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday South, had a powerful era invoked the spirituals sung in the days http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = h4ZyuULy9zs influence on other of slavery, as well as popular genres such We Shall Ovea;b'me by Joan Baez musicians. Iittp:Z www.youtu5e.com!watch?v=RkNsEH1 GD7~ as jazz, blues and folk. In 1939, jazz singer Billie Holiday

Folk musician Woody Guthrie, who sang Solidarity Forever, urged workers to assert their rights.

Bruce Springsteen sings Born in the U.s.A during a concert in Los Angeles, California in 1985. The

song has become an anthem for political movements of the left, right and center.

a significant change in U.S. culture. Protest music turned from folk to more assertive styles such as funk, hip-hop and punk. Hiphop evolved in New York City's South Bronx borough in the 1970s and hit widespread radio play in the 1980s. Hip-hop was, contrary to popular belief, not inherently countercultural or angry in its origins. It was originally' the product of disc jockeys and masters, of ceremonies ad-libbing comments and rhyming commentary as they played music in clubs. It was mixed with the aggressive style of breakdancing and the subversive art of graffiti. As hiphop evolved, it gave voice to the traumatic experiences of its audience: police bmtali-

ty, poor housing, gang violence, poor education and discrimination. Today, many hip-hop artists continue to address the concerns of the urban poor and their most political work receives significant airplay on popular radio stations. As hip-hop was surfacing, so was punk. Punk is inherently a counterculture, a response to mainstream culture, or "The Establishment." Unlike hip-hop, which evolved as its own culture in the South Bronx before spreading throughout New York City and beyond, punk was deliberate. Iy deconstructionist from its inception. The music is a strong example of the punk culture: 路rapid, chaotic and angry. _Contemporary groups like Green Day are examples of punk bands that have long made albums full of political and social criticism . . Throughout U.S. history there has been a convergence of musical genre and social and political movements. Popular artists such as Bmce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, and Prince have all recorded music, commenting on American life. Americans embrace the tradition of protest music as a cultural manifestation of the First Amendment'to the Constitution, both in the freedom of speech and the right to assemble. Rachel B. Crawford Mumbai.

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1958. h;gh school studeot Robert G. Heft of Lancaster, Ohio, was spurred by his interest in politics, and talk of Alaska and Hawaii becoming states, to design a 50-star flag as a school projecLHis teacher, Stanley Pratt, gave him a B-minus, describing it as unoriginal. However, he said he would grant Heft a higher grade if the U.S. Congress accepted the design. Thanks to the efforts of his local congressman, Walter Moeller, Heft earned his A grade when the design was accepted by Congress on July 4, 1960. Hawaii had become the 50th state the year before. Although Americans fly the flag everywhere on Independence Day, or July 4, on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, at school graduations, outside schools and government buildings and any other time they feel like it, there are speCial remembrances, particularly on June 14. On that day in 1777, the' Continental Congress

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The Stars and Stripes stand for the union of the American states.

approved the stars and stripes design as the emblem for the new United States of America, which was fighting for its existence. More than a century later, President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation declaring June 14 as Flag Day. It's not a national holiday, though; only Pennsylvania has made it a state holiday. Although most schools are closed for the summer on Flag Day, lessons earlier in the year include learning to recite. the Pledge of Allegiance and to perform patriotic songs, such as You're a Grand Old Flag, written by George M. Cohan as part of a Broadway musical in 1906 . .This iconic symbol of American patriotism isn't without its share of myths and controversy. For example, many Ameticans believe that Betsy Ross, a Pennsylvania seamstress, stitched the first American flag and personally displayed it to then head of the Continental Army George Washington. There is even a famous print, made by Percy Moran in 1917, that has imprinted that scene on the minds of millions of American schoolchildren. However, there are no records that make certain who designed and made the first Stars and Stripes. The journals of the Continental Congress indicate that Francis Hopkinson, a. congressman from New Jersey and signer of the Declaration of Independence, may have been the first to modify the unofficial Continental flag, which at first still carried the Union Jack from the British flag. Historians believe that Washington did know Ross, and she did sew flags. The Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, where she lived, in the early years of the War of Independence. In May

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The Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia. Ross' daughters and grandchildren said that this was the place where she made the first American flag. --------------1777 she had been commissioned by the State Navy Board of Pennsylvania to sew flags for Navy vessels. Ross' descentlants

recounted that a month later, when the new U.S. flag design was determined, Ross was the first to make one, and that she changed the six-pointed stars in the design to five-pointed ones to speed up her work. Within a few mo'nths, American troops had the Stars and Sttipes with them to carry into battle, at Brandywine, Pennsylvania. The American flag flew over foreign tenitory for the first time in early 1778, at Nassau in the Bahama Islands, where the Americans had captured a fort from the British. To date, there have been 27 official versions of the flag, but the anangement of the stars vatied according to the flag-makers' preferences until 1912, when President William Howard Taft standardized the flag's 48 stars into six rows of eight. The 49-star flag (1959-60), as well as Robert Heft's 50-star flag, also have standardized The Birth of Old Glory, Percy Moran, print, 1917.

History and Myths of the U.S. Flag http://www .Ioc. gov/today/cyberlc/feature _ wdesc.php?rec=3335 Seamstress for a Revolution p: www.amenca.gov s pUDs-english/2002/January/20050606114658pssnikwadO.7165491.html The story of You're a Grand Old Flag http://lcweb2.loc.gov/digl b. ihas. 200000026/default.

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star patterns. The Founding Fathers were fully aware of the symbolism of the nascent nation's flag and so they took the trouble, in an act passed on June 14, 1777, to specify: "That the Flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." Washington, who was to become America's first president, explained it this way: ''We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing liberty.~~ After Vermont and Kentucky became states in the 1790s, Congress approved adding two more stars and two more stripes to the group that represented the original 13 colonies. It was this "Star-Spangled Banner" that poet and lawyer Francis Scott Key saw flying over Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland after an allnight bombardment by the British navy during a subsequent war, in 1814. This is the flag that inspired him to write the poem that became America's national anthem by an act of Congress in 1931. As more states were added to the union, Congress decided in 1818 that new stars would be added for states, but the original 13 stripes would remain. ~ Based on material from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and The Library of Congress.

~OurFlau Was Still O ne episode that's hard to forget, much as we Americans would like to, is the sack of our national capital in 1814. A British landing force put ashore from the Chesapeake Bay, marched inland in the humid heat of August and headed for "Washington City." We scraped up all the militia we could, and ventured to meet the invaders at the suburb of Bladensburg. At first glimpse of approaching redcoats with bayonets aglitter, most of us scampered home as fast as our weary legs could take us. The battle became known as the Bladensburg Races. The British were tired, too, but they pressed on to Washington, burned the Capitol and many other buildings, and stormed into the White House. Before setting it ablaze, the officers sat down to a sumptuous dinner laid out for President and Mrs. James Madison, who had hastily departed, Dolly Madison clutching Gilbert Stuart's portrait of [President] George Washington. ... Leaving Washington smoking, the British troops, flushed with success (and wine), marched toward the Bay to rejoin their fleet and attack the vital seaport of Baltimore. Americans, humbled but angry, finally rose to the occasion. Capable leaders appeared and strengthened Baltimore's defenses, beefing up Fort McHenry, which guarded the harbor, adding shore batteries. More militia arrived from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and a regiment of regulars showed up. Earlier, in the second year of the war, Fort McHenry's new commander, Major George Armistead, had asked for a suitable flag to fly above it, "so large that the British will have no difficulty in seeing it from a distance." The request was granted, and Mary Pickersgill, who supplemented her widow's mite by making flags for Baltimore ships, started fabricating a standard-sized garrison flag~[13 by 9 meters], with 15 stars stretching [24] inches across and [0.6 meter] stripes~ 15 ofthem, since the number of stripes didn't revert to the original13 until 1818. Nbw the British were really coming. Glutted with victory, and dead tired, they encamped at Upper Marlborough On the way to Washington, they had usurped the manor house of Dr. William Beanes, a feisty 65-year-old, eminent in his profession. Now, as the British reached town again, roistering redcoats disturbed Beanes and his dinner guests. They went out to stop the noise and got the drunk soldiers jailed For this, the British brass ordered that Beanes be taken prisoner. .Aghast, the doctor's friends set about trying to

get him released. A parley with the' British command called for a skillful negotiator, able to exert charm yet put generals and admirals firmly in their place. Aha! Francis Scott Keyl Key was one of those people who knew everybody By 1814, he was a lawyer and a popular success, with a wealthy wife and a fine home in Georgetown, the rich old neighbor of muddy little Washington. He liked to scribble poetry~a not unusual diversion two centuries ago. He was a godly man, a pacifist w.ho hated this war yet served as an officer in a Georgetown artillery company. Altogether, this able, likable, well-connected dilettante was the perfect choice for an extremely dicey~if not impossible~mission. Letters were exchanged across the battle lines. Grudgingly, the British agreed to let Key and Colonel John Skinner, in charge of prisoner exchange, make their plea if they could meet the British fleel, sailing up the Chesapeake. Key and Skinner hailed the British flagship from their small vessel, were taken aboard and learned that Beanes was in danger of being hanged. Key went to work, pointing out that the doctor had treated wounded British soldiers with the same care and kindness as he had Americans. That won over the British command. Dr. Beanes could go, but he and his rescuers must stay with the fleet until Baltimore went the way of Washington Under a guard of marines, Key's party ended up in their vessel, towed by the British flagship as it surged up the Bay. On September 11, the British fleet came together~50 vessels, ranging from the 80-gun flagship through 74-gun men-of-war, 38- and 36-gun frigates, to rocket and bomb ships (actually huge rafts) Transports carried "Wellington's Invincibles," the 4,000 or so troops who had so enjoyed themselves in Washington Early on the morning of the 12th, the redcoats landed east of Baltimore and charged the massed militia. And this time things fell apart for the British. Two American snipers quickly picked off the British commanding general, and although some militiamen skedaddled, many others stuck it out. Humid, rainy weather helped the American cause. The Invincibles pulled back and encamped, waiting for the navy to do its stuff. The ships would first have to put out of action that pesky Fort McHenry Next morning, in pouring rain, bomb ships

For more information: National Museum of American History Star-Spangled Banner http://americanhislory.si .edu/ssb/ Whitney Houston sings The Star-Spangled Banner http://www.youtube.com/watch?v

= qciWEufZ2xA

There The U.S. National Anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, was written after a battle that saw Americans determined to persevere in the face of the fiercest attack, redeeming the ignominious burning of their capital city a few weeks earlier during the War of 1812. The United States had declared war on Britain to stop it from seizing American ships, sailors and passengers. The British navy and army brought the war to America's coastal cities.

Above: This painting depicts Francis Scott Key, a prisoner aboard a British warship, seeing the American flag, which inspired him to write The StarrSpangled Barmer. Above center: Thi$ is one of two known copies of the first published version of The StarSpangled Barmer, acquired by the Library of Congress after it was found in an old scrapbook in an attic in Baltimore, Manjland. Above far right: The flag that key saw flying over Fort McHenry at dawn on September 14, 1814 is preserved at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

opened fire thunderously from about three kilometers below Fort McHenry-well out of range of its guns. Mortar bombs, some of 200 pounds r soared high in the air and pluoged into the fort to explode in showers of rubble. Key, Skinner and Beanes had a distant view from their small vessel. They made out a flag, limp in the soggy air. . All day the guns bellowed. Newly introduced Congreve rockets screeched toward the fort in hopes of starting fires. When enemy "bomb," or mortar, vessels moved in to score even more hits, the Americans opened up with everything they had and drove' the British back. Night fell. The tremendous bombardment eased off as boatloads of British troops slipped past the

fort to attack the city The Americans spotted the foray, and their guns roared, and again the British had to pullout of range. Desperate to finish off the fort, they redoubled their cannonade, bombs curling high in the night sky, their lit fuses streaking across it, then down to their bright burst. Key, tirelessly watching, realized that the roar of British guns meant the fort still held; by the burst of bombs he could see the flag, still there. And, in the faintest first light of dawn, at about the time the British command called _off its Baltimore campaign, he spotted it. The rain had ceased; a stirring of wind opened it, and he made out the red of the stripes, the blue square. The American flag. As a poet. Key could be suddenly and deeply moved, and instinctively he would create rhythmic phrases to describe his feelings. All night, words had tumbled in his head: proudly hailed .gallantly streaming ... bombs bursting in air ...gave prooLStil1 there! Now he scribbled them on the back of a letter, then later, safely ashore in Baltimore, he wrote out and polished the song. Of course it had to be a song. The phrasing of Defence of Fort McHenry, as he first named it, fitted perfectly an old favorite: To Anacreon in Heaven. This was the song of a popular London gentlemen's club, the Anacreontic

Society, honoring an ancient Greek poet who Iyricized life's joys. Members devoted themselves to good food, good wine, good cheer. They'd composed a pleasant. lilting tune .. The music was a hit in America. A patriotic song, Adams and Liberty (later changed to Jefferson and Liberty), adopted the tune, which was also used for a song celebrating the naval war against Barbary pirates, early in the 19th century: "When the warrior returns, from the battle afar, To . the home and the country he nobly defended And who had written that? Francis Scott Key. The Star-Spangled Banner was popular, but not America's national anthem. Not until 1931 did the U.S Congress grant that status. Before that Americans made do with My Country 'Tis Of Thee, our version of God Save the King (Queen) as an anthem. (Many people still regret that America the Beautiful wasn't chosen.) But Key's song, played more slowly than the original song, with a few crashing chords and drumrolls, works well because it deals with America's flag ...Americans don't have a king or queen. We have a flag. ------*-*-*-**-----~

Edwards Park, a founding editor of Smithsonian magazine, died on February 12, 2005 at the age of 87.

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Young Americans are choosing careers later, 'switching jobs more frequently and seeking different benefits than their parents' generation.

n some ways, it has never been easier for young Americans to pursue a career. A wealth of information about education opportunities, potential employers and specific job openings is as close as the nearest computer. Yet, many young people today are taking longer than previous generations to complete their education, find a job that suits them, and settle onto a career path. They are choosier about jobs they accept and likely to change jobs more frequently. To this generation, loyalty between employer and employee is a bygone concept.

would favor a job candidate with a traditional college degree over one with an online degree. On the positive side, 83 percent of employers and hiring managers consider online degrees more acceptable now than five years ago.

Gvber surfing lor careers No development has had a greater impact on how Americans search for jobs than the Internet. In the past, graduating students had no choice but to attend career fairs, meet with company representatives, and peruse reams of information at the campus career center in order to learn about job possibilities in their field. Today, students can, at their own convenience, research potential employers via company Web sites and even apply for jobs online. "Many students find it more _-; 1\1 _ '2-C t) comfortable to explore in a passive

Postponing adulthood While the job search itself may be easier, young Americans seem to be having more trouble charting their course in life. Indeed, many stumble into a career rather than pursuing their education with a clear-cut career goal in mind, according to John Flato, vice president of research and consulting at Vault. Half of all college students change their major during their first year. And while more than 40 percent of freshmen plan to go on to graduate studies or professional school, that number drops to 20 percent by the time they are seniors. The study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed that most college students elect a major because they enjoy the course work. Except in fields such as engineering, where undergraduate work 6" ~ L...5 is strictly designed .to prepare students for a specific career,

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way," says Edwin W. Koc, research director for the National Association of Colleges and Employers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. "The disadvantage is that this makes it more

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students do not connect their major with what they will do when they graduate, Koc says. Perhaps because of all this uncertainty, it now takes college

difficult for employers to judge the I students an average of six years student as a job candidate. n to complete what used to be a Employers ...in the United States ) four-year degree, says Flato. still rely very much on face-to-face -. One reason, he notes, is that colcontact. Our surveys show that stuleges are anxious to retain students who landed jobs earliest were ~ . dents and do not allow those those who combined a Web search • t: who change majors to take an with direct meetings with employextra course load in order to ers." graduate in the traditional fourThe newest"'online tools for job year time frame. seekers are the popular social netNor does graduation from colworking sites, such as Facebook, lege automatically launch young MySpace and LinkedIn, which people into adulthood. Overall, enable users to let hundreds of peo~ • they are marrymg later, and for pIe know instantaneously that they economic reasons many move are in the market for a particular Copyright © Tribune Media Services, Inc. back home. Doting parents are All rights reserved. content to provide some continukind of job. Employers seeking to fill jobs are als'6 tflrhing to these ing financial support, and some sites. In Koc's surveys, about J 7 percent of employers say they stay deeply involved in their adult children's lives--even to the point, use the social network sites as part of their recruiting, and 7 per-say career experts, of accompanying them to job interviews or calling cent of students say they have been coptacted by an employer an employer to find out why their son or daughter wasn't hired. directly through their soci~l network site. The downside for job To many young graduates, the fust job is merely a stepping applicants is that many more employers-44 percent-use the stone; half change jobs within 12 to 18 months. "In some ways, sites to check the personal profiles of potential job candidates, the exploratory process that used to occur in college is occurring according to a survey by www.Vault.com.aWebsitethatfocusesduringthefustyearsintheworkforce •••saysDanielH.Pink.an on careers. More than 80 percent of these employers say that see- author and lecturer on issues of careers and employment. "A cering something negative in a job candidate's online profile would tain amount of stumbling [into a career] is inevitable and I think affect their decision to hire. healthy when you have a labor market that is hard to predict." The Internet is also making it possible for more and more Americans to earn college degrees online, a convenience espe- Shining trends cially for older students with jobs and family responsibilities. One of the most significant trends in the United States is the However, in Vault survey, 63 percent of employers said they disappearance oflong-term loyalty to an employer. Young people

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rec9gnize that changing jobs is the fastest way to advance. in both salary and responsibility, and unlike their parents and grandparents, few expect to stay with the same company for decades. Nor do they expect long-term loyalty and job security from employers. "People are seeing their friends and family going through layoffs, terminations and acquisitions, so they're saying if companies are going to do that, I'm going to look out for myself," notes' Flato. For their part, employers are making it easier than ever to change jobs. Health insurance coverage for new employees usually starts immediately, with no waiting period, and traditional company pensions' have been replaced by 40 I (K) retirement plans. Employees IiIake their own contributions to these plans, and keep the funds even when they leave a job. More than any previous generation, young Americans are searching for meaning in their work., Surveys show that they seek out employers who are environmentally friendly and socially responsible, and they want jobs where they can make a difference in the world. They gravitate also to employers who provide a variety of workplace amenities, such as a fitness center, on-site health care and child care, barbershops; 'hiundry and dry-cleaning services-any-

thing that makes it easier to balance work and personal life. In several recent surveys, college students asked to name their ideal employers gave top billing to the giant search-engine company Google, famous for its free gourmet cafeteria and other amenities for employees. For a significant number of young people, geographic location is a major deciding factor in job acceptance. Some are seeking a certain lifestyle in or near a major city or a specific region of the country. Many also prefer to stick with the familiar and will decline a job offer because it is too far from home, according to a National Association of Colleges and Employers study. Despite their choosiness, recent college graduates can expect their employment opportunities to remain relatively strong, experts say. Young hires are attractive to employers, because they are less expensive to recruit and more receptive to on-thejob training than more seasoned employees. As workers born in the years following World War II-the so-called baby boomers-begin to retire in the next few years, large numbers of jobs will open up, especially in government and education, Koc predicts. He adds that overall job prospects will remain good for business majors-the most popular college major in the United States. As more and more routine tasks are assigned to computers, "skills such as artistry, inventiveness, empathy and big-picture thinking, already at a premium today, also will become even more important," says Pink. One thing is certain: In today's economy, nothing is more constant than change, both in the way young Americans approach careers and in the kinds of jobs they will occupy. As Pink says, "Some young people can expect to land jobs 10 or 20 years from now in industries that might not even exist today and have job titles we might not even have the vocabulary for today." ~ Phyllis

McIntosh

is a Washington,

D.C.-based freelance journalist.

For more information: National Association of Colleges and. Employers http://www .naceweb. org/default.asp , IRC 401 (k) Plans http://www.irs.gov/retirementlarticle/0

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At Google, Hours Are Long, But the Consomme Is Free http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/contentl article/2007/01/23/AR2007012300334.html Fortune says I should work at Google http://workinprogress.blogs.time.com/2008/01/23/fortune _says_i_should_ worUV

"By the way, I love your resumemay I ask where you got it?"

Walk through a human heart, mummify a frog or experience space travel at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute.

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hen the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, famous for housing Galileo Galilei's 400-year-old research . telescope, announced its plans to close for renovation, museums all over the world rushed to offer the telescope a temporary home'so it could be shown outside Italy for the first time. A bidding war ensued as hun&eds of requests poured in for the rare opportunity to showcase a historic instrument, widely regarded as the ancestor of the Hubble, cr~ated by a man Albert Einstein called the father of modem science. Philadelphiis Franklin Institute won the honor to host the. telescope, other instruments of Galilee;, paintings, prints and manuscripts from the 17th cent-l!lrycollection of Florence's Medici rulers. This spring, it ki~~ed off the~.".100 Hours Astronomy" program as part of the International Year of Astronomy with t~e worldwide participation of nearly 80 observatories and thousands of observers. The Franklin displays the collection in a special exhibit, "Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy," through September 7; "Creating. awareness of these artifacts makes s~nse for us because Galileo's story of seminal advance in science is similar to

the story we tell of science in early America through Benjamin Franklin," says Derrick Pitts, the Franklin's chief astronomer. "Our mission reflects values that encourage people to pursue science today." As the Franklin's planetarium and astronomy program focus on the exhibit, its observatory provides modem telescopes for visitors to observe stars, planets, and maybe even a

Top: Visitors stand over a sectioned image promoting the "Body Worlds" exhibit on the steps of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Above: Galileo Galilei's telescope at a press review for the exhibition"Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy" at the institute.

The Franklin Institute tittp://www2.fi.edu7inoex.p p International Year of Astronomy 2009 ttp:7/www.as ronomy2009.org7 galaxy or two. Pitts claims, "We offer a personal discovery as valid as GaWeo's first look through his telescope." The Franklin Institute was founded in 1824, in memory of Benjamin Franklin, a minimally schooled printer who got rich and retired early to become a respected statesman. He went on to become one of America's Founding Fathers, an ambassador, a writer and a scientist. This iconic Philadelphian's legacy was so highly regarded that, after his death, the city hon- ~ ored him as a role model by founding the ~ Franklin Institute. It started as a meeting ~ place for mechanical engineers, a library~ of scientific books and journals and a ~ place where patent models and records of "'gj patents (of machines like the first 35-mm ~ film projector) were stored. Very soon, it became a center where students came to learn mechanical design and drawing, where inventions were tested, where scientists helped entrepreneurs develop and build their inventions. In short, it proffered practical applications of technology. In 1824, the Franklin instituted awards for the best products and inventions. Called The Franklin;Institute Awards they became America's "Nobels."When the first

Above: Retired engineer Seth Goldstein from Maryland with his computer-driven n~cktietying machine, Why Knot, at the Franklin Institute. It was part of an exhibit titled "Sir Isaac's Loft: Where Art and Physics Collide." Below: A 16th century polyhedral dial (left) and an armillanj sphere (right), which are part of the exhibition "Gali/eo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy."

U.S. government grant for technology research was awarded to the Franklin-to investigate explosions in high-pressure steam boilers on ships and trains-the institute's engineers revolutionized the use of such boilers. In 1934, the institute expanded, moved to a new building in a prime location, and established a museum, a temple of science in honor of Franklin and his entrepreneurial and scientific spirit. Its mission is to "- teach science in a hands-on way so visitors ~ of all ages can participate by handling the ~ devices themselves, rather thaR looking at ~ scientific artifacts from a distance. "We ::::> fj? encourage people to pursue their interest in ~ scientific knowledge," says Pitts. "We give everyone an opportunity to satisfy their curiosity." The muSeum includes an aviation wing and a train wing, but its greatest legacy is in astronomy because its planetarium-the second oldest in the United States-is complemented by a fully equipped observatory, not for research but for public use. However, the Franklin is much more than its museum which, though impressive, is only a small part of its outreach. Reinventing itself constantly, through the 1970s it was an important research institute with facilities on every continent, including an astronomical observing station at the South Pole. For years, the Franklin collab-

orated with institutions around the world, fulfilling a need for manufacturers and universities that did not have research facilities. Later, as universities took on that essential role and the need disappeared, the Franklin shut down that program. Now,

the household vacuum cleaner and demonstrates how they work. Other permanent exhibits include an air show focusing on aviation, with the Wright brothers' aircraft and explanations about the science and technology of flight; a "Sports Challenge" exhibit; "Space Command"; and, "Sir Isaac's Loft" where Newton's principles and the laws of physics can be studiedhands-on, naturally! The Franklin's rotating special exhibits Left: Dylan Lutton and are its trademark. In 2007, "Tutankhamun c.J. Hoag look at a and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" telescope and space exhibit at the Franklin Institute. focused on King Tut's tomb by explaining Below: The two-story the 3,000-year-old technology used to walk-through heart at the build the pyramids and mummify bodies institute is big enough for as school children mummified worms and a 67 -meter-tall person. frogs, and studied Egyptian astronomy, Pitts says. In the "Titanic" exhibit, the shipwreck was examined via reproductions of the ship's sections and studies of icebergs. Questions addressed included: Bow do ships stay afloat? Why did the "Titanic" sink? What happens at very cold temperatures? @ The Franklin's crown jewels are its ~ observatory and planetarium. Using special ~ filters for eye protection, visitors look through its telescope at the sun. The moon, ยง visible planets, bright stars, even a galaxy "5 and a few nebulae can be seen during the "Night Skies" program on the second Thursday of every month. Even when none of these are visible, just to look through a telescope is an educational experience for the thousands who have never done so. "Our mission is to support people's curiosity; our telescopes work fabulously for this purpose," says Pitts. . The observatory is supported with lectures ~nd an enhanced 3-D-like experience at the regularly upgraded planetarium. Pitts says it has the "capability to offer an experience of flying out into space: you fly way out into star-field, go out of our galaxy into others, look around there, look back to where we've come from, see what the universe looks like, Then there is the "Train Factory" with its then fly back to our galaxy, into our solar 350-ton Baldwin steanl locomotive, an system, passing the planets as we return to . experimental model testament to man's Earth. It's a very moving experience-and ability to bpild machines. It weighs more an opportunity for. us to teach modern than a fully loaded aircraft, yet can travel at astronomy." A mission befitting Galileo A,. 100 mph. Here, visitors can ride it back and himself. -----~ forth and examine its insides. "Amazing Machine" shows the interiors of everyday Vibhuti Patel is a contributing editor with objects like the power drill, thermostat and Newsweek International in New York. stairs to see its different chambers, the aorta, and pulmonary veins connecting to the lungs. It includes related exhibits on cardiac health, nutrition, the amount of blood circulating in our bodies, even other mammals' hearts.

with a million visitors a year, it is a premier science museum known for its sophisticated permanent exhibits. Among the oldest of these is a giant model of a heart, large enough to belong to a 67-meter-tall person. Visitors can walk through it and, like corpuscles, see it from inside, hear the sounds of blood coursing through, climb up and down

Above: Dancers from Northwestern University perform during the Bhangra Blowout competition. Above center: Dancers from Virginia Commonwealth University use the supp clapper. Above far right: Dancers from Drexel University. The team won second prize. Left: Dancers from Virginia Commonwealth University, who won first prize, perform at the competition. The dancer in the center is based on the Joker jrom Batman. Below: Students dance during a dinner for the participants.

While bhangra has long been popular in the United Kingdom, it also has a substantial force on U.S. campuses-with a good portion of major U.S. universities, as well as many smaller colleges, hosting bhangra teams. Other c~mpetitions that have followed in the wake of Bhangra Blowout include Bruin Bhangra, hosted by the University of California, L~s Angeles and Dhol di Awaz, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley. "Bhangra is popular on campuses nationwide mainly because of the pride of our culture and olir Cia'nce.People love the sound of the music and are very.路curious," says Sohail Hasnain, a George Washington University s~nior who helped organizt Bhangra Blowout in April. "It is also a very fun dance for spectators," he adds. ; Bhangra Blowout started in 1993 as a small event organized by the university's South Asian Society in the school's cafeteria. It then grew)o fill the university's theater, and finally to the biggest concert hall in D.C., thy, DAR Constitution Hall, an American 'national historic landmark. What makes this event even more unique is that it is organized entirely by the university's

undergraduate students. With costs at an average of $100,000 each year, a nearly 4,000-person capacity concert hall, a DJ flown in from London and a singer from India-it is truly a large undertaking. . All proceeds from the event go to Pratham, a Mumbai-based charity whose mission is to teach children in the slums how to read and write, the organizers say.

The night before The eight teams chosen to compete this year read like a glossy catalog of top U.S. schools: Columbia, New York University, Cornell, University of California, Drexel, San Diego, Virginia Commonwealth, the University of North Carolina and Northwestern. Duke University and the hosts, George Washington University, put on exhibition performances. The night before the competition, the competitors ary feted at a welcome dinner on a rooftop terrace. Yet, despite the glamorous atmosphere, there is real work to be done-picking the team order. "It's very important," says Shahrukh Khan, a Virginia Commonwealth University sophomore of Pakistani descent. "The best is at

the very end, or just before intermission. It gives the judges time to have the performance sink in." Khan is happy to oblige skeptics with a look at his student J.D. card to prove his famous name is real. "Everyone is always asking me," he says, smiling. He rep011s that being on a bhangra team is like a full-time job, Hsting the many competitions he's been to this year-not to mention the exhibition performances. Talking about the next day's event, he says, "We're the defending champions ...and the founding members of our team are graduating, so it's a pretty emotional thing this year." He's been coming to Bhangra Blowout since 7th grade, and sees it as an important East Coast event that draws the South Asian community together. Bhangra Blowout co-director Madiha Malik, a George Washington University sophomore, says that it has been going on "for the past 16 years, so it's a huge part of the culture. It's become like a family tradition.". Bhangra dancing is also a way to bring people together from the diverse South Asian diaspora-and beyond. Malik notes

Bhangra and Diversity hile the vast majority of Bhangra Blowout dancers were of South Asian descent this year, many students from different cultures are active in the bhangra scene. One of them is University of Mary Washington freshman Will Douthitt, who joined his school's bhangra team in 2008, and came

to watch Bhangra Blowout. Douthitt was not familiar with Indian culture growing up in Virginia, but a high school friend introd'uced him to Bollywood music. "I didn't learn the distinction between Bollywood and bhangra until I got into college," he admits. After figuring out that bhangra was a unique dance form, he says, "I thought it was so awesome, I should be doing this," His university team (left) is just one year old and has about 15 members. Only one person is of Punjabi descent. The rest are Caucasians, East Asians, and students from other parts of India. "I'm really into multiculturalism, so I really like the opportunity," he says. They are still practicing for their first competition.

, that while she is from Karachi, her co- of their chadars and sit patiently as teamdirector, Anugna Kasireddy, is from South mates wrap turbans around their heads. India. "Punjab is just where the dance They are tired from traveling, but overoriginated. But at this point, it has become , coming it all with pure excitement. so much of a sport at schools ...a lot of Out in the theater, two giant video people are not even Indian or Pakistani," screens run advertisements for the Bhangra she says. Blowout sponsors: including McDonalds, After a dinner of butter chicken and a matchmaking Web site, MySpace, a travdancing with BBe's DJ Kayper, it's time to el company and Tanmit Singh's Roots pick the team order. During this long Gear, a Punjabi T-shirt company. process, chaos ensues. Arguments break Still only a senior at Virginia Commonout. This is a serious competition, and these wealth University, Singh sponsors events teams are willing to fight for the best spot. across the United States, hauling along Eventually, the organizers get everyone on humorous T-shirts that say things like board, and the final. placements are made. "Real Girls Do Bhangra." Earlier in the As the teams make weir exit, Hasnain pre- day, at a free bhangra event for the comdiets that he will get only a few hours of munity, his table was easily the most popsleep as he still needs to do some last ular spot. minute promotions to help sell tickets. "We want to create an urban culture within our community," he says, describThe competition ing his, business mission. "We've found Bhangra is one of the few dance forms ,People in our culture alter themselves in in which the women's costumes are less order to be cool and fit in." Singh hopes to show Punjabi youth that they can honor complicated than th~we.n's. Backstage, one hour before the show, all the girls are their roots and still be considered cool. dressed and ready ..;Bhangra Blowout was certainly the '/001 place to be that evening, which was while the guys ~-------------adjust the length Shahrukh Khan of Virginia Commonwealth University (right) dances with another student during a dinner for the Bhangra Blowout participants.

illustrated by the turnout for the eventmore than 3,000, a mostly full house on a holiday weekend. The show begins at 8 p.m., with the opening act, a trio of dhol players rushing down the aisles. When Juggy D comes on stage in an Indian tricolor jacket, the girls in the audience go crazy, shouting his name and waving their hands. Soon, the Northwestern team is on: a cacophony of color, jumping, prancing and props. Each of the teams incorporates traditional instruments such as the supp clapper into their dances. Some of the songs are traditional, others are more hiphop oriented, and some are from completely different cultures-such as the Spanish song Macarena. Basically, anything goes, as long as the audience and judges enjoy it. All of the teams try some sort of acrobatics and feats of strength. Columbia spins its dancers around in circles on the shoulders of their fellow dancers, and other teams form tall and complex human pyramids. Soon, it's Virginia Commonwealth University's turn, and they come out with a real surprise: the Joker from Batman. After a brief appearance in the beginning of the dance, he reappears at the end, asking the audience "You wanna see a magic trick?" He then disappears behind a curtain, only to reappear as a fully-costumed bhangra dancer-in complete Joker make-up. Again, the girls go crazy, and many audience members get out of their seats to dance along with him. In the end, it may have bet<n the Joker trick that did it; Virginia Commonwealth University defended its title and won first prize, with Drexel second and Cornell third. New York University won the viewers' choice award (voting was conducted via audience SMS) and seemed almost more excited, shouting through the organizer's speeches. With the giant trophy in hand, Shahrukh Khan marched triumphantly off the stage into the adoring arms of his team. The next day, they would have to travel back to school to begin preparing for their finals-but tonight, they were champions. ~ Erica Lee Nelson is a Washington, D.C.-based writer. She and her husband, Indian photographer Sebastian fohn, married in New Delhi.

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Reprinted

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Post magazine.

A Story of Fulbrights and Friendships

By KATHRYN MYERS

A painter and art professor at the University of Connecticut since 1984, Kathryn Myers' work and life have been influenced by her visits to India and her connections with other Fulbright scholars.

unctures and Constellations" is. my poetic attempt to by the Fulbri.ght office if I would be interested in running a describe the chance meetings-in life, academia and painting workshop in Goa. I immediately agreed and looked forart-that"de,\(elop into a web of relationships resulting in ward to getting to know artists from the region. series of unforeseen events. The phrase is drawn from a . In the meantime, Kambli had recently returned from his . particular description ofSamkhya, a complex and subtle Fulbright work at Michigan State University in Kalamazoo and had been asked by the Fulbright office if he would be interested in school of Indian philosophy !n which anrndividual is described as a field of€nergies sirrmrtaneously interacting with innumerhosting a visiting professor from the United States. He said "Yes" able other fields, and that each of us are a "juncture or constel- before even knowing how or where he would facilitate my visit. lation" of these interactions. As it turned out, Yolanda Sousa and Rudolf Kamrnermeier I was searching for a suitable title for a 2008 exhibition to be generously sponsored the three-day painting workshop and exhiheld in India and the United States that would reflect my friend- bition at their gallery, Art Chamber, in the beach town of . ship with Hanuman Kambli, professor of printmaking at the Goa Calangute. It included Kambli's students and other area artists College of Art: I also wanted to reflect through my' art the and allowed me a first glimpse into art-making in Ooa.I began to understand how the unique heritage of the state is expressed in increasingly rich and complex web of individuals, encounters and event~. that led up to, and then beyond ·it. many of the artists' works. Kambli stressed that when I returned The story starts with my 2002 Fulbright experience at the to India, I must come to Goa and work with his students again. I Government College of Arts and Crafts in Chennai. In what was didn't get the sense that he was merely being polite. We kept ih to be a series of serendipitous yet connected events, I was asked touch, although the next opportunity was not until my sabbatical

Above, from left: "Coast to Coast" exhibition at the University of Connecticut's Jorgensen Gallery; Hanuman Kambli with students from the University of Connecticut printshop; Goa College of Art students and alumni with Kathryn Myers (far left) and Hanuman Kambli (far right) at Ruchika's Art Gallery in Panjim. from the University of Connecticut in the winter of 2006: Yet another link, to another individual and another culture, was made when Kambli and I were allowed to conduct our February 2006 workshop in a beautifully restored building in the heart of the historic district of Fontainhas in Goa's capital, Panjim. This was made possible by Sergio Mascarenhas, director of the Goa-based Portugese private organization, Funda~ao Oriente. Kambli chose a select group of his postgraduate stu-

dents, and for three days we explored ideas of narrative in painting from different formal, conceptual and cultural perspectives. The following year, Mascarenhas was touring the United States and was a guest of the University of Connecticut's India studies program. His presentations illuminated, for my students and others, the intertwined history of Portugal and India. This visit was also a catalyst for the further inteitwining of the art being created by Kambli, myself and our students. Upon his return to Goa, Mascarenhas was inspired to facilitate the first joint exhibition of the work of Kambli and myself in India and the United States, scheduled for May 2008 at Funda~ao Oriente. When he unexpectedly decided to return to Portugal, the exhibition was generously sponsored by Jaywant Chowgule and Sameer Gupta at Ruchika's Art Gallery in the Miramar district of

Brad Guarino, Watch the Gap, oil on paper, 2008.

indeed been fulfilled. The only thing missing in the web of relationships, events and exchanges was for Kambli to visit the United States to work with the students of , Beboutand myself. And so it happened. Bebout, along with The Global Education Center and the Department of Art at Montclair State University, subsequently invited Kambli to be a visiting professor for the spring 2009 semester. He is teaching a course in printmaking and Indian culture. In March he visited the University of Connecticut where he shared the story of his life, from a small village without electricity to successful artist and beloved teacher, and met with the printmaking class of professor and fellow printmaker Gus Mazzocca. I often think of how uncanny it has been that my engagement with the two enormous countries and diverse populations of India and the United States has made my world so much smaller. In our "Junctures & Constellations" exhibition brochure I recalled philosopher and art critic Thomas McEvilley, who wrote of the necessity "in a shrinking and terrifying world to begin to use each other's languages, as the future is an unknown language that we will speak together." In thinking back on the chain of events that led to Kambli's visit to our campus, I now see how phone calls in 2002 by the Fulbright office to Kambli and myself developed over time into an increasingly rich web of relationships; one that at first was unpredictable but now has a significant form that will continue to evolve.

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Panjim. As a second generation Indian American from Los Angeles, Gupta was particularly interested in continuing the exchange between India and the United States. He and Chowgule, for instance, had recently hosted an exhibition and workshop by Catherine Bebout, professor of printmaking at Montclair State University in New Jersey, during her Fulbright scholarship in 2008'. Along with our joint exhibition at Ruchika's Art Gallery, titled "Junctures & Constellations" I had the opportunity through this third workshop to reconnect 'fith artists I worked with before and to meet some of Kambli's recent graduates. The theme was "Self-Portrait, Fact-Fiction-Fantasy." I was planning to bring Kambli's work to the University of Connecticut for the second part of the exhibition~t the Jorgensen Gallery that fall, but was so impressed with t~ p~aintings from the Indian students that I decided to include them as well. .;.' After a discussion with Kambli and Gupta, we decided that my university st1.,ldentswoul,d create workbn the same theme ;~ ,and all of the paintings from both groups of students would \etum to Goa to be exhibited at Ruchika's Art Gallery in December 2008. The exhibition subsequently traveled to DakshinaChitra Art Gallery in Chennai through the generosity of Deborah Thiagarajan. Another link back in time: I had worked with her during my)002 Fulbright scholarship. Because the exhibition was traveling from the coast of Connecticut to. the east and west coasts of India, we titled it, "Coast to Coast, Students and Alumni from the Goa College of Art and the' University of Connecticut." This joint exhibition of the students of two former Fulbrighters felt like something had

Kathryn Myers is a professor of studio art at the University of Connecticut, where she serves on the board of the India Studies Program and developed a course on Indian Art and Popular Culture.

United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF) invites applications for Fulbright-Nehru and other fellowships from Indian citizens residing in India, including students, college/university faculty, researchers, secondary school teachers, policy planners, administrac tors and professionals For complete details and downloadable application material, please visit USIEF's Web site:

www.usief.org.in

For a fellowship brochure, contact the USIEF office in your region or send request with a self-addressed stamped (Rs. 2500) 10"x7" envelope North: USIEF, 12 Hailey Road, New Delhi 110001 West: USIEF, American Center, 4 New Marine Lines, Mumbai 400020 East: USIEF, American Center, 38A Jawaharlal Nehru Road, Kolkata 700070 South: USIEF, American Consulate Building, Anna Salai, Chennai 600006 Due dates for submission of 2010-2011 Fulbright applications have begun. The last deadline for this year is July 17. If you have questions, e-mail them to ip@fulbright-india.org

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Mexico to South America. "When I was there in t had been 22 years since Beth Middleton, an American wetlands specialist, had been the '80s," Middleton said, "it had taken over in Keoladeo National Park at Bharatpur in many of the savanna areas and it was so thickly Rajasthan, not since she spent four years infested that I never went into these areas, It was simply impenetrable." there researching her PhD. dissertation. . But she learned that villagers are now removThis April, she was back, with friends from the Keoladeo Naturalist's Association and the ing the trees in return for free wood to burn or Tourism and Wildlife Association of India, sell. "What really struck me was when I went into Middleton was apprehensive that several years of the main gate and a little way down the road I drought had caused biodiversity losses. But she made two discoveries which indicate Many of these species that Indian wetlands can be preserved with help have the ability to from those who live nearby and use them, and even the most sensitive native plants can withsurvive dry periods. stand harsh conditions and still cling to life. Middleton said !ier short visits and observations are not enough on which to draw conclusions, and more monitoring and record-keeping are needed to determine whether changes in water supply to Keoladeo and other,lndian wetlands are having irreversible effects. But she was mildly hopeful about her two serendipitous discoveries: a temple and a tiny flower. Middleton had returned to India in 1991 as a Fulbright scholar study'ing ecology at G.B. Pant Nymp':oides indica or water snowflake University, then in Uttar Pradesh, but had not vis- found In a pond at Keoladeo Natwnal Park. ited Keoladeo since 1987. In April, she saw a lot of differences, some reaIIY~'positive. For exarrn- â&#x20AC;˘ said, 'What is that temple? Was there a new temple, the WWF has enlisted residents of nearby pie recently built?' They said it had been there for villages to rid the park of an invasive genus a long time, but I never knew it, nor did a lot of called Prosopis or mesquite, a hardwood, sugar the Indians. Now there was a completely cleared producing tree that thrives in the arid soil from path through the Prosopis to get to it. And as for the savanna, after they removed the Prosopis, it turns out that underneath this thick thatch of Water snowflake shrubs there 'are other native shrubs. So immedihttp://plants.usda.gov/java/profi le?symbol = NYIN ately they started to grow quickly, they are flowering, setting seeds, some of the grasses that are United States-India Educational Foundation still there have been stimulated to grow," http://www.usief.org.in/ The Prosopis have strong, deep roots. And Keoladeo National Park http://wh c.unesco. org/ en/I isV340

Beth Middleton in Keoladeo examining mat sedge, used to make sleeping mats. when they grow again, it will be awhile before their wood is attractive to the villagers. What then? That's the challenge for those in charge of India's national parks and biodiversity resources, she says. Maybe villagers would have to be paid to do the shrub removal. But she also noted that preservation of wetlands is in their interest. Wetlands not only provide water, and animal and plant life used for food and shelter, but organisms in wetland soil help to leach out pollutants, keeping it fertile. Yet, Middleton says, the main problem for wetlands is not invasive species but hydrologic changes. A tropical, dry wetland like Bharatpur is meant to adapt to changes in water levels, she notes. But when large amounts of water are diverted for' other uses the ecology becomes much more dependent on rain. After several years of drought, it rained this year. This was one of the reasons the Keoladeo Naturalist's Association wanted Middleton to come back "to get my advice about what species were still there and where." Many of these species have the ability to survive dry periods "so I looked back at myoid notes and we went through block by block allover the place and noted where we had found species before," And? "We found Nymphoides indica, It's called water snowflake, but it looks like a water lily, very small. It was encouraging because ... 1 view it as being kind of a biodiversity indicator. It's one of the species that's always been a little bit rare. When local people who are accustomed to seeing it are saying, 'We are not seeing it, we are seeing species change in the park, can somebody come and help us figure out what's going on,' then it becomes a concern." ~

adia Shepard IO.Oke,dat the small, round metal pin in the blue velvet box. She haa found it in the bureau of her maternal grandmother's bedroom. It had an image of Florence Nightingale and the inscription on it said, "Awarded to: 13,a<;;odJacobs." "Nana, who is Rachel Jacobs?" she asked her grandmother, Rahat Siddiqi. .;,' "That was my Jewish name, before I wa~ married," Siddiqi replied, and began telling a 13-year~otd Shepard had not ;~\heard before. It was about how the Bene Israel community to which Siddiqi once belonged believed they were shipwrecked on the Konkan coast it) western India over2,000 years ago and, according to their legend, only seven men and seven women survived. " ... This became a kind of catalyst in my own life. I learned that I was not just bicultural but in fact was tri-cultural and I suddenly discovered that I had a Muslim mother, a Christian father and a Jewish g17andmother," says Shepard, a documentary filmmaker and w;iter based in New York City. Shepard spent 2001-03 in India documenting the Bene Israel community in photographs and a film. She worked first at the

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Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, Maharashtra, under the auspices 'of a one-year Fulbright scholarship. She continued her researl::h for another year on a grant from the New York-based Jeremiah Kaplan Foundation. She returned to India this April to release her book The Girl From Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home and to screen her documentary, . In Search of the Bene Israel. "When you are a kid you aren't necessarily very aware of the role that history and your own family history plays in your life," she says. But as time went on, Shepard began to ask her grandmother more about her past. "I began to pester her to tell me more and more stories, As she did so I began to learn a little bit more about this fascinating community that she is descended from," Shepard says. "It was a compelling tale that I longed to learn more about. Growing up hearing that story from my grandmother shaped me profoundly. It set in motion this trajectory that I am still on." Shepard grew up in' Massachusetts, hearing stories of India and Pakistan and celebrating Christmas, Ramadan and Eid. Her

mother, Samina Quraeshi, went to the United States from Pakistan in 1961 on an exchange program with the American Field Service. She did her final year of high school in Kansas and stayed on for higher studies. Shepard's parents met as graduate students at Yale University in Connecticut. Quraeshi maITied Richard Shepard in 1973 at his family home in Colorado. Quraeshi's mother, Rahat Siddiqi, had been born in Bombay and maITied a Muslim, Ali Siddiqi, in the 1930s. She was his third wife and they moved, with their children, to Karachi in Pakistan after the partition of India. When Shepard was born in 1975, Siddiqi went to the United States to help raise her. Before Siddiqi passed away in 2000, she had made Shepard promise that she would go to India to learn more about the Bene Israel community and about the confluence of different religions within her own life. Shepard landed in Mumbai three days before the teITorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, equipped with five cameras, a crumbling mimeograph of family names and a handful of sepia photographs of unfamiliar faces. "I am here as an amateur detective on that most American of journeys: a search for the roots of my own particular tree. This is reverse migration. I have returned to the land that nurtured my grandmother and my mother, to walk where they walked, to make my own map within their maps," she writes in The Girl From Foreign. As she began to research and document the Bene. Israel community in Mumbai and the Konkan region she was overwhelmed by how many stories there were to tell and by her "own confusions and mishaps and misadveRtures along the way." Shepard tracks down every clue and paints a vivid picture of the sights, sounds and smells of the city as well as the verdant countryside where her Jewish relatives live. "I began to keep a diary and I lfegan to write in my diary every day, taking notes on what I was seeing and observing. As I began to do so, one diary became tw,o, became six, became 10 and at the end of my two years here I had half a suitcase full of journals," she says. As Shepard began to try to re-acclimatize to life in the United States on her return in 2003 she read those journals again to "try and understand what I had seen and what I had experienced and what impact it might have on my life." Some of those early recollections written Sadia Shepard during a book discussion at Mumbai's Crossword bookstore"

Sadia Shepard www.saOiasfiepar.com Sadia Shepard and the Lost Jews of India http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 6-csNXvLXcQ U.S.-India Educational Foundation http://www.uslef.org. in in her notebooks were the foundation of The Girl From Foreign. Speaking about her trip to India in April, Shepard says, "It has been enormously exciting to be able to come back to India and share this story with people here and with the place that inspired this book." She interacted with audiences in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi where she found that "many, many people want to know what it was like to grow up with multiple religions in one home and how that can shape your identity as a young pero son. That's of course something that's a ~ big part of my work. And it's something ~ that I enjoy thinking about." 芦 ~ She acknowledges that being exposed ~ to different faiths is "a path that's not ~ without confusion" but "it's also one that ~ has the possibility to provide great ff. resourc~s and opportunities for dialogue." Within her own family there are people, Shepard says, who don't always see eye to eye. "I have cousins in Israel and cousins in Pakistan who certainly have different political views or different religious views and yet they are all united in some way because of the historical serendipity that my grandmother and my grandfather fell in love. As such we are compelled to try and seek some kind of common ground." Shepard, a Stanford University Documentary Film Program graduate, is also one of the producers of The September Issue, which路 won a cinematography award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in Utah. The feature-like documentary is a portrait of the making of the September issue of American Vogue magazine and its editor, Anna Wintour. "We followed the creative process, the making of the magazine from January till it comes out on the newsstands in September. The September issue is the largest issue of Vogue magazine .... It's the size of an American telephone book," she says. Shepard says she would love to write another book, in India. "There's such a strong tradition of storytelling in South Asia and I feel very proud to be travelling in that same tradition and there's quite a bit more work that I would like to do here." ~

Sadia Shepard created a visual record of the Bene .Israel community in photographs and a documentary film.

nespring afternoon in 1996, then-Seattle Times reporter Deborah Nelson's phone rang. The anonxmous caller told her that an Indian tribal official had built a castle-like home for herself and her husband, using federal money earmarked to build reservation houses for low-income American Indians . â&#x20AC;˘... Nelson took a drive to the construction site to see the [490 square-meter] structure, one of 18 lavish homes built on the Tulalip reservation with $2.5 million in tax " money-all.of which shduld.have been spent to build affordable houses for tribal members living in deplorable poverty. Seeing the potential for a national story about corruption in the Indian housing program, Nelson immediately submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain the relevant records from the U.S. Department

of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The records included a number of e-mail exchanges between the Seattle [Housing and Urban Development] staff and the Washington, D.C., headquarters. The top official involved was obviously comfortable communicating bye-mail, so Nelson kept in touch with him electronically after their fIrst interview. "He was very busy and difficult to catch by phone," she says, "so the emails allowed us to maintain a running dialogue. When I wanted a database ofHUD grants to tribes, I di<;ln'thave to wait years for a FOIA response; he had it e-mailed to me as an attachment." The resulting five-day series cataloguing the mismanagement of the federal program won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and launched an internal [Housing and Urban Development] investigation. Nelson, who coauthored the series [and is now the

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director of the Carnegie Seminar at The Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland] says it "was stronger because of the access e-mail gave us to people and information." When Nelson's investigative team broke this story at the end of 1996, e-mail was still in its early stages of use in the newsroom. Now, [more than] a decade later, the Internet's new frontier is old hat to many reporters, who rely on e-mail more and more to gather information for a wide range of stories, from routine news reports to in-depth takeouts. But while many journalists laud e-mail's speed and efficiency, others remain leery of using it to conduct interviews, citing it as less transparent and credible than more traditional reporting methods. Using e-mail interviews may eliminate rounds of phone tag, but skeptics say it also eliminates the candor, spontaneity and natural dialogue that make for engaging conversations and compelling stories. The e-mail debate has heated up in recent years as journalists increasingly embr~ce the technology as an indispensable reporting tool. It's a battle between the new generation of reporters who grew up in fr~'nt of a computer and the newsroom traditionalists who maintain that live conversations, either face-to-face or by phone, are far superior to cyberspace communication. The tendency of e-mail to prpmote lazy reporting and the use of unreliable sources is one of the 'biggest concerns for some editors. "It can be dangerous," says Brant Houston, [who teaches investigative reporting at the University of Illinois in Champaign]. "You've got to be absolutely certain of who you're talking to, ".

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Mitra, assistant editor, Business Today

if you can't see them, especially if you've never met

them before." Steve Buttry, the American Press Institute's director of tailored programs, agrees that e-mail has its downsides, but so, he says, does the telephone. He adds, "I don't see e-mail as inherently worse or better than the phone .... I don't think e-mail in and. of itself will water down journalism." [In 2005], Washington Post reporter Ylan Mui was looking for a New Year's eve story idea. She turned to the Internet, where she noticed a plethora of personal ads airing the last-minute scramble for New Year's dates, and she used the e-mail addresses listed in the ads to contact her sources for the story. Although she conducted the main interviews over the phone, she checked in with her primary source via e-mail over several days. "He was so much more quotable in an e-mail than he was in the interview that I just used his e-mails" in the story, says Mui. "Some people are better with the written word than with the spo. ken word." While she prefers to conduct in-person or telephone interviews for most of her stories, she doesn't "have any qualms about using e-mail." Like Mui, many journalists acknowledge that nothing should replace the in-person interview, but they are quick to take advan-

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"While doing an e-mail interview.itis a must to ascertain the source-and a verification of the mail 10 is a must, and though it may not be possible to call a person always for this purpose, it is advisable to the maximum possible extent. A brief telephonic chat before sending the Qs is always better." -Utpal

Borpujari, special correspondent, Deccan Herald

tage of the convenience afforded bye-mail. In some newsrooms, it has begun to intrude on the telephone's role in keeping in touch with sources. RepOlters argue that electronic communication is quick, easy and accessible-and it .offers luxuries that other forms of contact cannot. . ...E-mail interviews provide a written record of the conversation, "so there's no real room for being accused of misquoting," says Daniel Golden, senior editor with Conde Nasi Portfolio magazine. [When he was a reporter with The Wall Street Joumal,] Golden used e-mail to communicate with a few sources for his extensive 2003 series on admission preferences at American universities, which won a Pulitzer Prize for beai reporting. In-person and telephone interviews may offer better chances for more spontaneous and frank remarks from a source, "but then it's your notes against their word," he says. "An e-mail is like having the transcript of a court case. They can't really say you got the quote wrong." E-mail can also break down barriers created by language and distance. American Press Institute's Buttry recalls several instances

Mencher, a veteran newspaper reporter who taught路 at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for 30 years and wrote a widely used reporting textbook. "It's frightening how many people would rather sit in front of a computer screen instead of getting out and enjoying humanity .... It's part of a trend that separates the reporter from the reality of the life ..E-mail interviews save time. You can get to we're supposed to be examining," the interviewee directly-cutting through the Even in a phone interview, he says, "you can still get a sense clutter of PR agencies, secretaries, etc, providof the person's voice, their personality," and you can hear their ed you have the personal e-mail 10 of the perpauses, chuckles and reactions. E-mail, though, is just a collecson, Nowadays, most people in top positions tion of stale, lifeless words without context. use BlackBerries, so e-mails can be replied to , Mike Foley, a former executive editor of the St. Petersburg using mobiles as well. ..,But the biggest disadI Times who now teaches at the University of Florida's College of vantage is the reporter has no chance of as:Jing Journalism and Mass Communications, says he is constantly instant supplementary questions, as would fighting students on the e-mail issue. When they rely too heavihappen in an in-person interview." ly on e-mails in their assignments, "I jump up and down and -Dinesh C, Sharma, science editor, Mail Today _ scream at them not to use it," he says. To Foley, dependence on e-mail is the ultimate sign of laziin which communication with sources would have been impossible ness. "There's something to be said for the old-fashioned shoewithout e-mail. As a national correspondent for the Omaha leather reporting. E-mail requires no shoeleather. ... It's easy, World-Herald, Buttry was covering the cleanup of a smelting like quoting from a press release, and then your stories are sterplanUhat had caused lead poisoning. A crucial source for the story, ile and boring, neither of which compels me to read them." Unreliability is the drawback that he most fervently drives a scientist who had done the most extensive research on the poihome to his students. "You don't know who you're talking to," soning of children in Omaha, Nebraska, was hearing impaired. "If it wasn't for e-mail, I wouldn't have been able to commu- he says. "It could be the CEO, the public relations VP, the secrenicate with her very well," he says. And because she was used to tary, a clerk-it could be the janitor who just happened to be in expressing herself in writing, "her personality did come through there cleaning up." Which leaves plenty of opportunity to fall for a hoax. Journalists in the e-mail." Buttry has used e-mail to interview people in Afghanistan, and he knows of other reporters who have done the too quick to believe what they read in an e-mail could get caught in an embarrassing situation. In 2003, a reporter for Computerworld's same with soldiers in Iraq, Improved access to public officials is another benefit of using Web site wrote a story about cyberterrorism based on an e-mail tip. e-mail to approach overscheduled sources. "If you call them and It later turned out that the e-mail was sent by a journalist posing as they're busy, yo.u're [out of luck]. But even if they're busy they a terrorist who claimed that his group had unleashed a virus through can be looking qt their e-mail," Golden says. In fact, many public officials actually prefer to be contacted via e-mail rather than a phone call because they find it more convenient, according to [investigative journalist] Nelson. "You're lucky to get 20 minutes talk.;ingto them, but when you send an email, they read it and respond when they have time, and they "The positives are speed and convenience. don't have to wait for their secretary to clear an hour or two" on The negatives are-as with all interviews not the schedule, she says. She estimates that about half of her comconducted in person but via phone, fax, munication with ~urces takes place in cyberspace. etc.-that the 'color' surrounding an interSome sources believe e-mail can make for more precise view partner, his expressions, et ai-go reporting. "From the corporation's point of view, e-mailed missing. To me as a journalist, these remain answers increase the likeliho~d that the c?mpany will be quoted supremely important, so I try to avoid e-mail accurately," t~e [Florida-based] Poynter Institute's Butch Ward, interviews as much as I can," a former vice president for corporate communications of an -Padma Rao, chief of South Asia bureau, Der Spiegel insurance company, wrote in an e-maiLinterview. Such interviews, the fOflller Philadelphia Inquirer managing editor wrote, give sources the chance to gather more accurate information and the Internet, which was completely false. In 1999, a Canadian newspaper falsely reported that an e-mail fllmor of a govemmentcollect their thoughts rather than giving an immediate knee-jerk imposed tax on sending e-mails was true. ~ response that may be off the mark. But reporters can be duped in person or by phone just as easBut the trend toward checking inboxes instead of walking the ily. American Press Institute's Buttry remembers writing an obitstreets or dialing phone numbers is alarming to some professionals, esped~lly teachers and writing coaches who fear younger uary for a man who was still alive. "The guy called it in himselL.the very worst mistake of my career," he recalls. journalists have become too e-mail dependent. Investigative reporters should be especially careful when using Conducting e-mail interviews is "madness" to Melvin -~-~~--------

the Internet to contact anonymous sources, says Brant Houston [of the University of Illinois]. That need for caution was illustrat. h d d . I h e d w hen Time magazme an e over to a specla prosecutor t e electronic notes and e-mails of White House correspondent Matthew Cooper in the Valerie Plame case. "As Time magazine and Cooper have shown, e-mail is quite a double-edged sword," he says, and details that could identify sources-including e-mail addresses-are best kept off the information superhighway. In the early days of e-mail, a source once sent Houston encrypted messages through e-mail and snail-mailed the passwords to access them, which he sees as a safer way to exchange information. "With e-mail," says Houston, "you're just laying a paper trail of what's supposed to be an anonymous source and an anonymous relationship." As e-mail interviewing becomes more prevalent, editors are still unsure of how to regulate its uSe. Should they establish a policy limiting the number of e-mail interviews reporters use in their stories? And if a reporter quotes from an e-mail, should that be disclosed to readers? "If it is from an e-mail, we have to say so," and the reporter must talk to the source to verify that he or she is the author of the e-mail,

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"If a story contains critical data/information, I may send it back to the source for double-checking but that happens usually with phone interviews. E-mail interviews eliminate that hazard and also provide a better protection if someone suddenly retracts a statement. I save all the responses till the story is out or even for later reference." -Ranjita

Biswas, editor, Trans World Features.

Adell Crowe, [former] standards and development editor at USA Today, said in an e-mail. "There is no limit on e-mails in a story, but because we have to identify communication bye-mail as such, one doesn't want to dg,i! .tqo often." That could hurt credibility, she said. "If there are repeated e-mail references, then we had better be sure we explain to the reader why we can't reach this person." The San Jose Mercury News in California1does not have hard rules about how frequently r0porters can use e-mail interviews, according to [former] Managing Editor David Satterfield. But if . quotes are obtained in any way other than face-to-face or telephone interviews,_ the writer should spell that out. Jeannine Guttman, editor of Maine's Portland Press Herald/ Maine Sunday Telegram, sees a need for more discussion of the issue. She has noticed a definite surge in e-mail use among reporters at the paper. She, too, is concerned about the credibility of the sources and tells her reporters to be absolutely sure of their identities .. Professional-associations, including American Press Institute (http://www.americanpressinstitute. org/), In vestigati ve Reporters

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..E-mail has definitely empowered journalists. It's a very important tool which provides us access to people and places which were not accessible via other means. Many times people holding high positions are not accessible but they do not mind answering questions by e-mail. This helps us in getting their version of the story. But as Internet accessibility is low in India, it cannot be very dependable ... We cannot ask cross questions and the person may not give us offthe-record news and offbeat comments." -Govind

Singh, executive editor, Amar Ujala

and Editors (http://www.ire.orgl) and Poynter (http://www.poynter. argl), don't frequently address the e-mail question in seminars and workshops. Poynter's Web site offers articles with tips on conducting e-mail interviews .... But Nelson thinks a broader discussion of the issue is in order. "I guess we could all lament that we don't do everything in person anymore," she says. "But the world changes, and we need to change with it." While some editors remain suspicious when the words "said in an e-mail" appear in copy, many reporters are convinced that e-mail interviews have become a fixture in the profession. Editors, they hope, will become less skittish over time about inbox journalism. Amy Gahran, a freelance journalist and online media consultant who has taught courses for Poynter's News University, says she finds it frustrating that journalists are "extremely technophobic .... They're great at finding new angles on their beat, but when it comes to finding new ways to do their job, they;re surprisingly reluctant." She thinks the main reason reporters don't use e-mail more than they already do is to avoid a "battle with editors." But just as journalists warmed up to the idea of using the telephone to interview sources almost a century ago, Gahran predicts that the next generation of reporters and editors "won't think twice about it." For devotees of instant messaging, traditional e-mail is so 15 minutes ago. While America Online and MSN instant messaging

"Instant message, text message an~ SMS are the new media of communication. TV channels are utilizing SMS extensively to get immediate feedback from viewers or to conduct instant polls. However, these are inadequate for comprehensive interviews. It also requires more time to type out the message." -Suhail Anjum, correspondent, Voice of America, Urdu service

[1M] programs have been used for personal communicationespecially among teenagers-for several years, journalists have only recently discovered it as a helpful tactic. Paul Conley, whose career has included stints at the WinstonSalem Joumal, CNN and Bloomberg, has used instant messaging, or 1M, on a daily basis toreach sources for stories. "It's become more popular than the e-mail system," says Conley, who ...worked as an editor and reporter for a trade newsletter publisher-Oil Price Information Services-and spent about 12 hours a day on Yahoo Messenger. When he started to cover the oil industry, he began to communicate with his sources almost exclusively through 1M because they prefer it. "The only way to cover this market-based reporting is through 1M. If you try to do this on the phone or bye-mail, you've excluded yourself from the conversation. That is the way to reach them as a reporter; this is the language they speak." Gahran says she always asks key sources if they use instant messenger. 1M is more immediate and conversational than e-mail, allowing more "give and take" in the process. "Sometimes I'll be getting ready to file a story, and an 1M will pop up telling me that legislation just passed or something else happened that is crucial to my story," she says. "I couldn't conceive being a reporter without the Internet and e-mail, and 1M is just one more tool." According to Conley, 1M's strength lies in its quick and informal nature; he likens it to a casual phone call. "People tend to use it at first as a chatting environment," he says. "So people tend to live in that informal world and don't think of you as a

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reporter. They think of you as one more person on their buddy list...and you can get closer to ytiur sources." Mui of The Washington Post uses instaqt messaging to keep in touch with [sources]. "Jushn the course of a cBnversation I came up with different story ideas," she says. "It helps because it's so much more casual that you can pick up on things without having to do a full-blqwn interview." But the relaxed attitude of 1M conversations makes them difficult to quote. "People sometimes don't realize they're on the record," Conley says. "I have to remind people that· I'm a reporter in order to get a usable quote, to overcome the bad spelling al)d the willful ignorance of grammar." Even Jh~ most vociferous supporters of electronic communication, whether e-mail or 1M, agree that it's not as valuable as inperson, or even telephone, interviews. No matter how quick and

efficient it may be, e-mail cannot capture the sense of place, tone of voice, body language, unexpected reactions or off-the-cuff remarks that live conversations can. ''I'd go as far as to say that an e-mail is not an interview at all," says John Sawatsky, a well-known Canadian investigative reporter and interview expert. An interview consists of two parts: discovery and scrutiny. "There has to be scrutiny in an interview, and e-mail doesn't lend itself to that."

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"I have come across several instances of emails of some of my close friends being hacked and received a couple of misleading e-mails originating from known e-mail IDs in my address book which were not sent by them but by the hackers. Hence I take extra caution while using e-mail for reporting." -Sushanta

Talukdar, special correspondent, The Hindu

The lag that accompanies e-mail gives interviewees too much control over the situation, since they have more time to prepare spin or look for exit routes to questions, he adds. "If you just want to get a response, you can shoot it out there and wait for it to come back," says Sawatsky, who is now director of talent development at ESPN. "But just getting a response is not an interview .... That will never be at the heart of journalism." E-mail interviews and in-person conversations are "leagues apart," says Mencher, now a professor emeritus at Columbia University. "An e-mail interview can't be made into an interesting story .... You don't know if he's thickset or thin as rail. You .don;t get the intimacy." But, he adds, "I don't damn all e-mail interviews." Golden of Conde Nast Portfolio says e-mail is a great way to set up an interview, but the conversation should then be continued on the phone if possible. Even for contacting sources overseas, says University of Illinois' Houston, "I still think phone rates have come down enough that it's worth having at least a partial phone interview." With in-person, telephone and e-mail interviews alike, inherent skepticism is always critical, he says. Teaching good habits of verification is just as important as how the interview is conducted. "I think being savvy comes down to being savvy ill all media." "It's only one tool," says Portland's'Guttman, who unabashedly admits to her old-fashioned preferences. "But, as the saying goes, if all you have in your toolbox is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. Get out of the office. Be a journalist instead of a stenographer." ~

Kim Hart is a business reporter for The Washington Post.

Log on to http://span.state.gov to read more comments from Indian journalists on this issue.

Indian American actor Rizwan Mirza (in spotlight above), and Caroline O'Neill and Harry Sinclair (in photo at right) perform in Continuous City.

Marianne Weems' trilogy looks at how media and technology have changed our lives.

n 2003, just when the outsourcing of jobs was making political waves in America, the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, known for presenting innovative works of performing arts, staged Alladeen. This large-scale multimedia piece by Marianne Weems, artistic' director of The Builders Association, a New York-based experimental theater

company, explored the phenomenon of international call centers where Indian operators are trained to pass off as Americans. In a stunning production characterized by a trademark cinematic technique, video images and numerous computer screens onstage, it highlighted the issues of media and technology impacting global culture. The play won an Obie

award for outstanding production, toured internationally and inspired Weems to create a successful sequel, Super Vision, which also used technology and dealt with contemporary concerns. Now, Continuous City completes Weems' trilogy of technology-centered works. This play was recenti,Y performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, which presents groundbreaking contemporary works, before touring nationally and internationally t~is summer. The Builders' Web site describes it as "a meditation on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our 'networked selves' ""-',, ~.. occupy multiple locations." Its fast-paced plot features a globe-trotting salesman who maintains virtual contact with his 11year-old daughter as they cha,t.via computer webcanis. Her nanny, a newcomer to New York, blogs about the city. A transnational businessman promotes Xubu, his social networking Web site, and chats online with his farflung relatives and girlfriends. Every relationship in the play is wired. Weems says she got the idea for the play from her own regular webcam conversations with her goddaughter who lives in Indiana. "We've done this since Lola was

born. Now she's seven, she has learned to text [message] and orders, 'Get on the computer!'" It is a connection that is better than no communication but, since the participants cannot hug or hold each other, it has its limitations and the play expresses that ambivalence. "Technology can provide the illusion of bringing us closer even while driving us further apart," says Weenis~ The play's father-daughter story is sad: the girl is by turns bored, lonely and sulky at having to

"Technology comes as part of the story-telling package because people's !Iives are complicated by it, "and because those are -the tools we use. It's a way of holding a mirror up to our society to express something that's part of the contemporary moment."

communicate virtually with a distant father who misses her terribly. But the story is real, too. Many Americans talk to their far-away grandchildren by videocam. And we know that this is how President Barack Obama kept in nightly touch with his young daughters as he moved from place to place, through two long years of campaigning. Indeed, place has become a precious idea for Weems. "Continuous City grapples with the idea that we're in a network that stretches everywhere; it doesn't need a location. The father is lost in the confusion of cities, his point of connection is with his daughter who is far away, at home. But it's a failed connection," she says. On the other hand, the father's boss, an Indian American played by Rizwan Mirza, has a positive farruly connection because in real life, Mirza chats online with his cousin and his nephew every night. That is a testimonial to the positive power of technology and connection. In the play, as he ichats with his relatives, live, we get the immediacy of watching people onstage kick ideas around. With one in London, another in Virginia, and Mirza wherever the show is that night, they are not "acting," they're in three places, yet not separated. So, "the idea of connection, disconnection, and how

we remain intimate is at the heart of the play." Tellingly, Mirza's character, fearing intimacy and commitment, connects with his numerous girlfriends only online-he refuses to encounter them in his real city. Weems and writer Harry Sinclair, who hails from New ,Zealand, traveled all over the world to s~pot for this show. Their videos are projected onstage-and on the daughter's computer screen-to physically locate the father. "The imitation of one city by another fascinated me-Spanghai has an Eiffel Tower!" Weems laughs. "It's global displacement. Identities shift, they're borrowed and adapted as the world becomes more connected." .â&#x20AC;˘.â&#x20AC;˘...And ~ ..that is another idea that links the plays in this trilogy. Alladeen focused on displacement by bridging three continents via technology: the play's acl;ion shifts bad< and forth! between New York, London and Bangalore. '"'

It showed how we get caught up in technology as our voices and images travel across the world. For this project, Weems collaborated with motiroti, a London-based company led by Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi. These two young talents also maintain a whimsical Web site replete with recipes for curry in homage to their chosen name, motiroti, meaning fat bread. "I saw their work in London and was taken by their optimism and charm-no one in American experimental theater does song and dance!" Weems recalls. The admiration was mutual: Khan and Zaidi said they were envious of what Weems had done in Jet Lag, which they had seen in London. Jet Lag is based on the true story of a grandmother who flew across the Atlantic more than 125 times until she suffered a heart attack and died in an Amsterdam hotel. The play was about constant motion and the compression of geography that happens through technology. That exchange led to an intense crossnational collaboration: "We had to raise money just. to see each other," says Weems. After 18 months of trans-Atlantic back-and-forthing, the threesome acquired the material for their play. "Our output is slow because my product is layered, largescale and ambitious," Weems explains.

Asked why her plays focus on new technology, Weems replies, "The impetus for me is not the technology but the human story and, in the 21st century, stories are inevitably bound up with some kind of network. Technology comes as part of the story-telling package because people's lives are complicated by it, and because those are the tools we use. It's a way of holding a mirror up' to our society to express something that's part of the contemporary moment. ''These plays are melancholic and critical but they're also c~lebratory. I love the spectacle we can create in them, which is very elaborate for a nonprofit theater company. Technology has come to staycertainly in my theater." And what would she like to do next? Not surprisingly, Weems muses, "India plays a huge role in the global network that my project is about so it would be a milestone for me to take Alladeen there. It's a question of finding a theater that would intersect with this kind of technol_o_g_ic_a_l_p_ro_j_e_ct_.'_' -----~-~ Vibhuti Patel is a contributing editor with Newsweek International inNew York.

aboard doesn't make any difference. I just the bow, a compact galley where he get up in the morning and go, just like I cooks, and two settees. Like most liveaboards, he showers and does laundry at always have." You don't have to be wealthy to live nearby facilities provided by the marina. Monthly slip rentals are based on the aboard. Walk 90 meters from the Tullohs' luxurious steel ship and there's Dave length of the boat, with rates ranging from Nixon, 77 years old and happily retired on $15 to $35 a foot depending on the locaa 9-meter Columbia sailboat he bought tion and amenities of the marina. Marinas nine years ago for $8,000. Nixon lives on charge additional fees for living aboard. a monthly Social Security ch~ck of about Showers, laundry, garbage and parking $1,000, with a little under $600 going for facilities are usually covered by the his slip fees and the rest for food and inci- slip/li ve-aboard fees, with electrici!y, dentals. He walks to the grocery store, water and cable TV also supplied at addibuys his books at thtif(shops and places a tional cost. Live-aboards' wastewater is pumped out by special boats that travel great value on solitude. "I think I was born to be a herifut," he from slip to slip, says. "For me, living aboard is appealing I "This is like camping out," says Nixon. because there's rarely anyb<Ydyaround. I "'When it's cold, it's cold on the boat can sit here and read and think and noth- because I just have one little electric ing intelTupts my train of thought. I spend heater. When the weather is bad, I'm pretabout one-quarte.r of what I did when I ty well trapped on the boat. But for me, it's fine. When I was working, I used to was working." The interior of Nixon's boat is small look out the window and think how nice it but well-organized, with a bunk bed near would be to live on the water. Now I live I

on the water and I love it. I get up early because it gives me more time in which to do nothing." For Ralf and Shirley Guenzel, whose home is "Lucky," a 13-meter powerboat docked in Ventura, California, working full-time while living aboard is not a problem. "You have to get used to having less space," says Mrs. Guenzel. "You have to plan your grocery shopping more carefully and you don't have as much room for clothes and other things, but we wouldn't go back to living on land. We're close to nature, there are other live-aboard couples we spend time with, and it's just a fun way to live." The Guenzels paid $93,000 for their boat and spend about $950 a month on slip fees. Work keeps them close to the dock, but they sometimes spend weekends at an island about 40 kilometers off the California coast. Some live-aboards travel around the

"loopers" Ira ~-America's Waterways

This live-aboard boat in Berkeley, California is simply a house that floats. United States on their boats, visiting northern portions of the country in the summer and retreating south when the temperatures drop. These boaters, known as "cruisers," move from one marina to the next and also spend time at ancnor. Their boats are usually bigger and better equipped, with Neil and Peggy King's 17-meter motoryacht being a good example. "We live on the boat about s~ven months a year and at home in St. Augustine, Florida, the rest of the time," says King, a licensed captain who has cruised with his wife to the Bahamas-and around the eastern United States. "For us, one of the big attractions is the unpredictability of thtexperiences. You never know what might happen next, which sort"of charges tis' up. Second ~are the people we meet along the w'ay. Third is the freedom you experience while cruising. You see things from a new路 perspective on the water, in ways you never would if you were traveling on land." If there is a "guru" of the cruising lifestyle, it might be Tom Neale, who with his wife, Melanie, raised two daughters during the'30 years the family has lived aboard and cruised the U.S. East Coast and

the Bahamas. He is the author of a book on cruising called All in the Same Boat and a columnist for the 600,000-member Boat Owners Association of The United States whose blog can be found at www.boatus. com/cruisingffomNeale/. He cautions that cruising isn't for everyone. "There are a lot more retirees and folks on sabbaticals who are cruising, but some of them don't prepare well, put up a lot of money, convince their spouse it's going to be great and find out otherwise," he said from Virginia, where the Neales were wintering. "People sometimes go into cruising thinking it's all about sitting on deck with a pifia colada. The reality is that it's extremely hard work. You have to be very self-reliant. You have to be a plumber, an electrician, a diesel I mechanic, clean the boat's bottom. You have ' to'wear a whole lot of hats. But if you love the sea, it's great. Our lifestyle has been cruising, going places, and we. probably travel between 4,000 to 8,000 kilometers a year. We've experienced independence and an intimacy with nature that you could never _im_ag_in_e_li_V_in_g_l_' n_a_ho_u_s_e_.'_'

Steve Fox is a freelance writer, former newspaper publisher and reporter based in Ventura, California.

very popular cruise for many liveaboards is a circular journey around the eastern half of the United States known as the "Great Loop." Those who undertake the 9,600-kilometer trip, which includes the intracoastal waterways of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and various canals and other rivers, call themselves "Loopers." "Part of the appeal of this particular trip was the history, because the United States was largely setfled through its waterways," says Bruce Melchert, who looped with his wife, Jeanne, in their 12-meter motoryacht appropriately named "Adventure." "We stopped in a lot of historic towns and got a car and saw American history first-hand," he says. Cruising couples stress that it only works if both husband and wife want to go. "It was more his passion than mine, but it was a great experience for both of us," says Mrs. Melchert. "It's not something you'd want to do with someone you're not really close to, though. I never got the feeling from any of the women of 'Oh, this is miserable.' Most of the women doing it were having a good time." Jim and Lisa Favors, who live on a 12meter motoryacht named "Kismet," are doing the "Loop" for a second time. They interviewed 27 couples who also made the trip and produced a book: When the Water Calls, We Follow. They also write about their adventures on www.favorsgreatloopblog.com. "We did the Loop in nine and a half months and it wasn't nearly enough time to see everything, so now we're at it again, this time for two years," Favor$ says from Key West, Florida. "We have a different backyard every day and we've seen so many incredible places," says Mrs. Favors. "It's changed my thinking about living ashore. Originally our plan was to cruise for a while and then buy a cottage somewhere. Now I don't know how easy it would be to go back to land."

Jamie Osborne (left) interacts with Malini Chib, who uses the computer in her lap to make her speech audible.

Jamie Osborne

Designing lor the Text and photographs by KUMUDMOHAN

imple changes can make huge differ- way stations and the Metro," Osborne said. ences to the lives of people with dis- Attaching a belt or bar at the entrance could make abilities," says Jamie Osborne. A tran- it more secure. sit planner and accessibility coordina"I feel that phase one of the Delhi Metro is a tor with the San Francisco Municipal stunning success for senior and disabled transit Transportation Agency in -California, Osborne users. The system has accessibility features like says that providing accessibility for senior citi- lifts and wheelchair-accessible fare gates at all stazens and the disabled is not'rocket science, but tions, audible and visual announcements of stops these issues must be considered' from the start and system announcements, as well as tactile of any project. "Also, people with disabilities guiding paths for visually impaired people. Few and seniors must be made partners at the plan- other systems in the world can claim all these .. , ning stage because retroactive improvements "However, I am concerned about the way that would be costly and less effective ... ." some Metro stations are integrated to the surAt a recent conference in New Delhi, Osborne rounding communities, There are often significant gave presentations on how San Francisco pro- barriers to accessing the station. Lack of curb vides accessible lransit and on obstacles in India ramps" unusable pavements and dangerous seen through the eyes of a visitor. He told the pedestrian paths all prevent a person from entering conference organized by the NGO Svayam, the or exiting the accessible Metro station," he said. Delhi Government's Transport Ministry and the Osborne's India connection began six years ago Indian Tourism Ministry sustainable solutions are when he was invited by Michele Friedner, a hearnever driven from the outSide; they are a result of ing impaired student from the University of the adaptation of the local population to their California at Berkeley. Friedner was researching specific needs. . how deaf young adults in India envision- their "The autorickshaw, because of its size and futures for her Ph.D. in medical anthropology. maneuverability, can easily work as a feeder servOsborne ended· up marrying Ffiedner and ice for public transport systems like buses, rail- spending more time in India. He is currently using . liis extended leave to study Indian transportation

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networks, infrastructure planning and public participation, Osborne completed his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and a Certificate in Bioengineering course at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the rnid-1990s. "I did not want to use my knowl. edge just for commercial purposes," he recounts. "I wanted to directly benefit society and not just encourage others to consume more products." He became a rehabilitation engineer at the Center for Accessible Technology in Berkeley, California, after graduation. Rehabilitation engineering involves developing

technical solutions for people based on their specific needs and abilities. "For instance ... there was a young woman who could only make small movements with her foot, so I developed an adjustable pressure-sensitive switch thaI, with other technology, helped her access educational games on the computer or communicate with her family .... I also devised a vibrating timer for a deaf wheelchair user who needed a reminder for medication and for changing his position." Barely one-fifth of India's 10 million disabled people have access to assistive devices. Can some of Osborne's ideas be cheap and useful enough for Indian counterparts? "The devices I developed were appropriate to a specific set of environmental factors," says Osborne. "They cannot always be helpful in other environments/cultures Besides, many more devices are now available with advances in technology. India has a growing number of talented rehabilitation engineers and therapists ... and I'm sure Indian rehabilitation engineers could come up with effective solutions." Osborne noted that India has made great advances in technology'and infrastructure. "I have come across some fine examples of pockets of accessibility at Dilli Haat and the Garden of Five Senses in New Delhi, and Coles Park and APD Horticulture Training Centre at Bangalore," he said. In India,where pedestrians greatly outnumber drivers, arterial rOads and highways are not designed with pedestrian needs in mind, Osborne said. "Ideally, the size of streets would be limited to ensure safe pedestrian crossings and the arterials would be designed so that the pedestrian crossings would be at grade, with elevated or underground arterials." A. ------~ Kumud Mohan is a freelance writer and photojournalist based in New Delhi. '

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Ali Khwaja Bangalore FBI Director Robert S. Mueller Ill's speech reproduced in your March/April issue reflected what many of us the world over are feeling. As he mentioned about the USA, in India too we run up against a wall of distrust between law enforcement and the community. Hence, perhaps globally, we must re-double our efforts to build up trust. Mr. Mueller mentioned about the man from Minnesota who became the first U.S. citizen to carry out a terrorist suicide bombing in Somalia. This perhaps indicates the beginning of an era where we can no longer talk about "them" and "us." Perpetrators of violence and hatred will be breeding among us unless we work together to pull down the walls of distrust, improve communication and understanding, and build bridges to truly make the world a global village.

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S. Raghunatha Prabhu Alappuzha, Kerala FBI Director Robert S. Mueller Ill's speech "Partners in Fighting Terrorism" was very informative and thought-provoking. It is a fact that scattered but highly networked, small groups 'of terrorists, driven -by a dangerous concoction of extremist ideology and a simmering sense of anguish and revenge, supported and trained by rogue nations, now pose a serious threat to the world. Just imagine what would happen if any

crude nuclear device falls into the hands of terrorist outfits. Mr. Mueller is quite right when he says that our challenge comes in developing the intelligence to disrupt an attack before its occurrence. All partners in fighting terrorism should treat every act of terrorism as mere terrorism (and not as st(uggle for freedom) and should crush it before it raises its ugly head. The consequences of inaction or inadequate action in matters relating to terrorism could be devastating. m#t1t.trizi±ii;'ii;;±:;;rmm

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Siddharth Chaturvedi, Lucknow, Uttar'pradeSh .It IS really wonderful to se th t .. zlne has been devoted to e a a sAlgnlflcant part of your esteemed maga. women. s I picked up the copf" 01' SPAN (March/April 2009) and saw some Informative articles on women's great contributions to literature, art and sci,ence, I was glad to kn'ow that wom;~'; Commendable efforts have not gone unrecognized and unappreciated. I always knew this fact 'and the articles of thiS magazine have proved that my opinion IS not a non sequitur. Well, I ~ould suggest that the magazine publishes more of this ki~d and thus helps spread awareness about the real and Justified status 'of women in society.

Lakshmi Kannan, New Delhi I thought Laura Miller's article is a thorough and scathing analysis of the socio-literary syndromes that women writers have effectivelyif painfully-broken in their writ.i1JURYoLti!iR PEERS ing careers. Although the article .\.\II.I(IC.\ '\ takes off on Elaine Showalter's A \,'0.\11-'\ \\'1(1'1'1 1(.' from Anne Bndstrt:tt wAnllic Proulx Jury of Her Peers: From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, we find Miller launching off independently with her unsettling insights about what plagues writings by women. 0 NO! Nothing plagues their writing per se. They're fine writers. What Miller has done is to rightly reinsta,te a well-deserved respectability to the alleged domesticIty In women s writing. After all, it is grounded in the one reality they know so well because they live through it. What is clearly wrong is the patronizing critical perspectives by mainstream critics on writings by women ~nd thiS unfortunate trend is pointed out so very incisively by Laura Miller.

Rekha Kumar; Sringeri, Karnataka I feel very happy to have read fo . . (March/April 2009) Th r the first time an issue of SPAN velous set. "That's Why\~ove~ sto~y and other articles form a mar-

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the Blues" is a very lovely and touching article. Flowers African and southern American f Ikt Iin a beautiful manner about I really liked reading "Celebr 0 a es and ~Iues music. World" and "Women Scient' t at'0 Women s Contributions to the teacher I can' say it is a ver ISr~~h orklng for Recognition." As a environment 'and the histor/of wo~ource .of ~nowledge about the book review with the title "Wh C e,n SCientists. I also liked the American Novel?" It opened u Ya . an t a Woman Write the Great women's rights and place in s:Ciet;ew door for me to think about

AMERICANCENTER The colors of India's flag are now represented in the logo for American Centers in India. Ameet Mehta, principal designer at Pineapple Consulting in Mumbai, blended India's saffron, white and green with America's red, white and blue, into a shooting star design that won an India-wide contest. Victorious over 1,300 entrants, Mehta won a Motorola mobile phone and a 1O-day study tour to interact with top design schools and professionals in the United States.

Ind ian writers, teachers and students celebrated the U.S. National Poetry Month in April at the Chennai American Library. Vice Consuls Kris Fresonke and Kelly Kopcial spoke on the works of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Allen Ginsberg (19261997). In his Passage to India, Whitman describes a mystical 2i journey to an ancient land: "For we are bound where mariner 0zÂŤ has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves :f and all." Ginsberg saw India as a spiritual fountainhead, and ~ lived in Calcutta in the early 1960s and '70s.

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Celebrating World Jntellectual Property Day in April, the American Library in New Delhi opened its new collection of some 400 DVDs for rental by members. Dominic Keating, the U.S. intellectual property rights attache, Ajay Shukla, managing director of Tata McGraw Hill and Raji" Dalal, managing director of the Motion Picture Distributors ASsociation, highlightecfwhy it is important to protect intellectual property rights. "In today's world creative industries contribute enormously to a country's tax base as well as to its job market. And copyrights are essential to protect these industries," said Keating. "Creative industries which need effective copyright protection to flourish include publishing, music, movies, gaming, animation, software, photography and advertising. In the United States, core copyright industries are responsible for an estimated 6 percent of the nation's GDp,totaling $6.26 billion a year." Dalal cited a U.S.-India Business Council/Ernst & Young 2008 report on the effects of counterfeiting and piracy on India's entertainment industry. It showed that the Indian film industry lost $959 million and more than 570,000 jobs due to piracy. "It's never been as bad as it is right now," Dalal said.

Shobit Nair and Shonan Kothari were winners in a Young Ambassadors competition sponsored by the Indo-American Society, which celebrated its 50th anniversary on April 24 at the U.S. Consulate lawns in Mumbai. The chief postmaster general released a first day cover to mark the occasion.