SPAN: November/December, 2009 by SPAN magazine

~_tlfOOZeSCUlptures are on dls~ at 1heAsiaSOclety Museum in New YDIk City in an exhibit shOWCasingsome of the best ~. of the art OItuntH February 7,2010, "Oevotion in South India: ehola Bronzes" presents the entire collection of Chota bronzes from the Asia Society's Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection, along WitIl select bronzes from other collections In the New York area. The objects are organized by religious concept and reflect the principal ideas and sculptural groupings found at temples in South India. "This exhibition is a rare opportunity to appreciate some of the world's finest Indian bronze sculptures in a devotional and historical context," says Adriana Proser, cocurator of the exhibition. The exhibit items~are related to festival processions, worshipping and dressing the Hindu deity and the physical form it takes on earth. There are also processional bronzes of the Buddhist and Jain faiths. The tradition of cast-bronze sculptures became widely prevalent during the rule of the Chola dynasty in South India, from the ninth through the 13th century. "While most presentations of bronzes from this era focus on their aesthetic Qualities-their graceful poses and refined modeling-this exhibition focuses on the use and adornment of these sculptures in a devotional tradition that continues today," saysAsia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu. ~ http://asiasociety. org! chola

Chola period, 12th century Copper alloy 48.9 x 17.1 x 11.7 cm

Cover package

November/December 2009

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

Front cover: A collage of photographs and prints trom the pages of this issue of SPAN, illustrating the legacy of President Abraham Lincoln. Collage by Hemant Bhatnagar Photographs ÂŠ AP-WWP and the Library of Congress

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 Alok Kaushik Bureau of Intemational Information Programs, The American Library

Lincoln's Contested Legacy By Philip B. Kunhardllll

Lincoln as a Publishing Industry: What does Abraham Lincoln Mean to Americans Today?

By Andrew Ferguson

Travel: Ford's Theatre Museum * Teaching and

Learning English is Fun

By Laurinda Keys Long

Leafy Clean By Darcy Maulsby

Corrections.

Dharma in the Dirt

PhotographerShowkatNabiRather'snamewasmisspelled in the NewsScapesection ot theJuly/August 2009 issue.

By Patricia Leigh Brown

Defeating DisJbility Through Art

Outofthe

New Avatar for Indian Art By Giriraj Agarwal

Yard and Ontothe Fork

By Anne Raver

By Richa Varma

Writer LarryOakins'namewasmisspelled on page 12 of the May/June2009 issue.

Business: New York City's Street Vendor Awards By Erica Lee Nelson

'f: . i I

1:1

Published by the PublicAffairsSection,AmericanCenter,24 Kasturba

GandhiMarg,NewOelhi 110001 (phone:23472000), on behalfof the AmericanEmbassy,NewOelhi. Printed al ThomsonPressIndiaLimited, 18/35, Delhi MathuraRoad,Faridabad,Haryana121007. Opinions expressedin this 68-pagemagazinedo notnecessarilyreflecttheviewsor policiesof theU.S.Government.

* Articles with a star may be reprinted with permission. Those without a star are copyrighted and may not be reprinted. Contact SPAN at 011-23472135 Dr editorspan@state.gov

* What

Lies Beneath

By Deepanjali Kakati

For subscriptions or addresschange:

subscri ptionspan@state.gov

A LETTER FROM

THE

PUBLISHER ith this issue of SPAN, I relinquish my duties as publisher. It is a bittersweet moment for me, as I have very much enjoyed my three years in India and my assignment here, which has included the opportunity to publish this venerable magazine. During " the past years, our fine editorial staff has made many improvements in this pUblication and strengthened relations with you, our readers in English, Hindi and Urdu. As I look forward to a new diplomatic assignment I also know that-as with many interactions between Americans and Indians these days-many of us will meet again. Along with memories of interesting discussions, delightful encounters and warm moments of shared hopes for a better future for our nations and our world, I will be taking away from India several works of art that my wife and I have enjoyed finding for our home. The linking of Indians and Americans through the artswhether it is a play, a painting exhibition, a musical concert, a book reading or a poetry recital-is an important and enjoyable aspect of the work we do in our American Centers in India. This issue of SPAN is filled with articles and images celebrating the connections between India and the United States through art. Our pages highlight the work of Sujatha Shankar Kumar and V. Karthik, whose photogJ:aphsof Chicago, Illinois and the salt mines of Marakkanam in Tamil Nadu evoke "Mythologies in the Landscape," as recently exhibited in Chennai. Giriraj Agarwal explores the collaboration between American artist Waswo X. Waswo, Indian miniaturists and photograph colorists in Udaipur, Rajasthan, re-imagining old crafts and making something new together. We are pleased, also, to highlight the paintings of Saurabh Mohan and Chaitali Chatterjee, not only in SPAN but in recent exhibitions at the American Center in New Delhi. We are also highlighting in this issue some trends in agriculture and food in the United States, starting with "Consumers Return to the Farm," Steve Fox's exploration of the Comm4nity Supported Agriculture movement. In "Dharma in 'the" Dirt," Patricia Leigh Brown profiles Wendy Johnson, who pioneered the concept of organic gardening in America. Throughout our history, Americans have grown kitchen gardens, Anne Ravertells us in "Out of the Yardand Onto the Fork." Darcy Maulsby, in "Leafy Clean," shares tips from NASA on the best house plants. As a bonus for our subscribers, we are including with this issue of SPAN our calendar for 2010, featuring the work of 13 Indian American artists. This special calendar celebrates our magazine's 50th anniversary of serving as a bridge between Americans and Indians, The occasion will be celebrated throughout

2010 in the pages of SPAN and at events around the country. We hope you will join the fun! Another anniversary that we are commemorating with this issue is the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, acknowledged as one of America's greatest presidents. Born in 1809, President Lincoln was one of the finest orators and writers to occupy the White House. He is also the first U.S. president to be widely photographed. I want to thank our longtime friend, educationist Sydney Rebeiro for reminding us not to neglect this great president in his anniversary year. Lincoln was president at a time of great turmoil in American history, determined to preserve the Union of states and also committed to ending slavery, a dual mission that seemed impossible at the time. He is one of the most written-about men in American history and the subject of at least 14,000 books, according to Andrew Ferguson in "What Does Abraham Lincoln Mean to Americans Today?" Yet, Lincoln was a complex man and his words, actions and legacy are still studied and debated, as Philip B. Kunhardt III explains in "Lincoln's Contested Legacy," We are committed to discuss hard questions about America's history, to debate and analyze our heroes and our most treasured principles. But we remain committed to government "of the people, by the people and for the people." The open and critical evaluation of our leaders and the meaning of our histories make our countries stronger. Our open dialogue with our friends in India about politics and the arts-even as we see a broadening of partnership on a range of issues-is what demonstrates the strength of our ties. President Barack Obama is known to have kept photos of Lincoln and Mohandas K. Gandhi on his office wall (see SPAN's November/December 2008 issue). Americans are proud that the president was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. We know that Indians join us in the hope that the prize will help build the peace we all seek. We also celebrate the accomplishments of the other Americans who are receiving Nobel Prizes on December 10: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz in chemistry; Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak in medicine; Charles Kuen Kao, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith in physics; Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson in economic sciences. Finally, I am pleased to introduce SPAN's new production and circulation manager, Alok Kaushik, who has the important tasks of making sure SPAN is printed in the high quality our readers appreciate and ensuring that the magazine reaches you. Kaushik has been part of the SPAN team since 2003, serving as printing assistant, after eight years working for a variety of Indian printing houses. Farewell and all the best,

romthe time of his death in 1865 to the 200th anniversary of his birth, February 1.2,2009, there has never been a dec,ade in which Abraham Lincoln's ipfluence has not been felt. Yet it has not been a smooth, unfolding history, but a jagged narrative filled with contention and revisionism. Lincoln's legacy has shifted again and again,as different groups have interpreted him. Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, East Coast elites and prairie Westerners, liberals and conservatives, the religious and secular, scholars and popularizers-all have recalled a sometimes startlingly different Lincoln. He has been lifted up by both sides of the Temperance: â&#x20AC;˘.Movement; '~invoked for and against federal intervention in the economy; heralded by anti-communists, such as S,enator Joseph McCarthy, and by American communists, such as those who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the fight against the fascist Spanish government in the 1930s. Lincoln has been used. to justify support for and against incurSIons on civil liberties, and has been proclaimed both a true and a false

friend to African Americans. Was he at heart a "progressive man" whose death was an "unspeakable calamity" for African Americans, as Frederick Douglass insisted in 1865? Or was he "the embodiment...of the American Tradition of racism," as African American writer Lerone Bennett, Jr. sought to document in a 2000 book? It is often argued that Lincoln's abiding reputation is the result of his martyrdom: And certainly the assassination, occurring as it did on Good Friday, propelled him into reverential heights. Speaking at a commemoration at the Athenaeum Club in New York City on April 18, 1865, three days

Engraving, after a drawing by Edwin F. Faber, in Harper's Weekly, May 6, 1865. It is one of the most historically authentic renditions of President Abraham Lincoln's deathbed scene. As Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes provides medical attention, Lincoln's son, Robert Todd, personal secretary, John M. Hay, and military and government officials look on. after Lincoln died, Parke Godwin, editor of the Evening Post, summed up the prevailing mood. "No loss has been comparable to his," Godwin said. "Never in human history has there been so universal, so spontaneous, so profound an expression of a

nation's bereavement." He was the rust words of great martyrs printed upon its bor- prophetic. By the 1890s, with the failure of American president to be assassinated, and ders; effigies of Abraham Lincoln hanging Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow, waves of grief touched every type of neigh- by the neck ...adorn their drawing rooms." Lincoln's legacy of emancipation lay in healing borhood and every class-at least in the The Rebellion here "seems not to be dead ruins. Regional reconciliation-the of the rift between North and South-had North. But the shock at the murder explains yet," Conwell concluded. For their part, African Americans' pangs supplanted the nation's commitment to civil only part of the tidal wave of mourning. It is hard to imagine that the assassination of of loss were tinged with fear for their future. rights. In 1895, at a gathering of Union and James Buchanan or Franklin Pierce would Few promoted Lincoln's legacy more Confederate soldiers in Chicago, the topics of slavery and race were set aside in favor than critic-turned-admirer have had the same impact on the national passionately psyche. The level of grief reflected who Douglass, whose frustration at the presiden- of a focus on North-South reconciliation. Lincoln was and what he had come to rep- cy of Andrew Johnson kept growing. As the 1909 centennial of Lincoln's birth resent. "Through all his public function," Lincoln was "a progressive man, a human approached, race relations in the country Godwin said, "there shone the fact that he man, an honorable man, and at heart an anti- were reaching a nadir. In August 1908, riots broke out in was a wise and good man .... [He was] our slavery man," Douglass wrote in December Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois, 1865. "I assume ...had Abraham Lincoln supremest leader-our safest counsellorafter a white woman, Mabel Hallam, our wisest friend-our dear father." been spared to see this day, the negro of the Not everyone agreed. Northern Democrats South would have had more hope of enfran- claimed she had been raped by a local black man, George Richardson. had been deeply opposed to Lincoln's wartime sus.~(She later admitted to ~ making up the story.) On pension of habeas corpus, ~ Friday, August 14, 2,000 which led to the imprison~ white men and boys ment without trial of thousands of suspected began to attack African <3 Americans and set rue to traitors and war protesters. black businesses. "Lincoln Though Lincoln had taken freed you," rioters were care to proceed constituheard to yell. "We'll show tionally and with restraint, you where you belong." his opponents decried his The next night, the mob "tyrannical" rule. But in the approached the shop of wake of the assassination William Donnegan, a 79even his critics were silent. year-old African American Across much of the shoemaker who had made South, of course, Lincol~ was hated, even in death..; boots for Lincoln and at Though Robert E. Lee whose brother's barbershop Lincoln used to and many Southerners mingle with African Americans. Setting fire to expressed regret over the murder, others The Memorial Building at the Abraham Donnegan's shop, the mob dragged the old saw it as an act of Providence, and cast John Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park in man outside and pelted him with bricks, Wilkes Booth as the bold slayer of an Hodgenville, Kentucky was designed by John then slashed his throat. Still alive, he was American tyrant. "All honor to 1. Wilkes Russell Pope. The 56 granite stairs represent Lincoln's age when he died. ctIagged across the street into a school courtBooth," wrote Southern diarist Kate Stone yard. There, not far from a statue of (referring as well to th~ ~imultaneous, though not fatal, attack on Secretary of chisement." Ten years later, at the dedication Abraham Lincoln, he was hoisted up a tree State William Seward): ''What torrents of of the Freedmen's Memorial in Washington, and left to die. Horrified by the reports of such ugly vioblood Lincoln has caused to flow, and how D.C., (Douglass seemed to recant these Seward has aided him in his bloody work. I words; calling Lincoln "preeminently the lence, a group of New York City activists fOlmed the National Negro Committee, . s:annot be sorry for their fate. They deserve white man's President" and American blacks "at best only his step-children." But soon to be renamed the [National it. They have reaped their just reward." for the Advancement of Four years after Lincoln's death, Douglass' purpose that day was to puncture Association Massachusetts journalist Russell Conwell the sentimentality of the occasion and to Colored People], with a young scholar found widespread, lingering bitterness criticize the goverrunent's abandonment of named W.E.B. Du Bois to serve as director toward Lincoln in the 10 former Confederate Reconstruction. And in the final decades of of publicity and research. From its beginstates that Conwell visited. "Portraits of Jeff his long life Douglass repeatedly invoked ning, the organization's mission was interDavis and Lee hang in all their parlors, dec- Lincoln as having embodied the spirit of twined with Lincoln's, as one of its early statements made clear: "Abraham Lincoln . orated with Confederate flags," he wrote. racial progress. "Photographs of Wilkes Booth, with the last Douglass' worries about America proved began the emancipation of the Negro Q)

(f)

American. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People proposes to complete it." The centennial of Lincoln's birth marked the largest commemoration of any person in American history. The Lincoln penny was minted, the flfst coin bearing the image of an American president, and talks took place in Washington about a grand Lincoln monument to be erected in the nation's capital. All across the country, and in many nations around the world, America's 16th president was extolled. An editorial in the London Times declared, "Together with Washington, Lincoln occupies a pinnacle to which no third person is likely to attain." The commander of the Brazilian Navy ordered a 21-gun salute "in homage to the memory of that noble martyr of moral and of neighborly love." The former states of the Confederacy, which less than 50 years earlier had rejoiced at Lincoln's death, now paid tribute to the leader who had reunified the nation. w.e. Calland, a state official in Missouriwhich, during the Civil War, had been a border state that contributed 40,000 troops to the Confederate cause~barely contained his astoniยงhment in a memorandum reporting on the festivities: "Perhaps no event could have gathered around it so much of patriotic sentiment in the South as the birthday of Abraham Lincoln .... Confederate veterans held public services and gave public expression t\t the sentiment, that had 'Lincoln lived' the days of reconstruction might have been softened and the era of good feeling ushered in earlier." In most of America the celebrations were thoroughly segregated, including in Springfield, when,: blacks (with the exception of a declined invitation to Booker T. Washington) were excluded from a dazzling gala dinner. As the Chicago Tribune reported, it "is to be a lily white affair from start to fmish." Across town, inside one of Springfield's most prominent black churches, African Americans met for their own celebration. "We colored people love

and revere the memory of Lincoln," said the Rev. James Magee. "His name is a synonym for the freedom of wife, husband and children, and a chance to live in a free country, fearless of the slave-catcher and his bloodhounds." Referring to the "sacred dust of the great emancipator" lying in Springfield's Oak Ridge Cemetery, Magee called upon black people across America to

Disappointed by the reaction of most rabinet members to his initial draft of the 'Emancipation Proclamation in July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln waited two months before issuing what has come to be known as the "Preliminary" Proclamation. This lithograph by J. Waeshle celebrating the event was probably published in the fall of 1862.

make pilgrimages to Lincoln's tomb. And he cast his gaze forward a 100 years-to the bicentennial of 2009-and envisioned a Lincoln celebration "by the great-grand-

children of those who celebrate this centenary." In that far-off year, Magee predicted, "prejudice shall have been banished as a myth and relegated to the dark days of 'Salem witchcraft.' " A notable exception to the rule of segregated commemorations took place in Kentucky, where President Theodore Roosevelt, a longtime Lincoln admirer, presided over a dramatic ceremo~ ny at the old Lincoln homestead. ยง' Lincoln's birth cabin, of dubious ~ provenance, had been purchased ~ from promoters who had been .i displaying it around the country. ~ Now the state, with Congressional support, planned to rebuild it on its original site, on a knoll above the Sinking Spring that had originally attracted Thomas Lincoln, the president's father, to the property. The [44.5 hectare] farmstead would become the "nation's commons," it was declared-a crossroads linking the entire country. Seven thousand people showed up for the dedication, including a number of African Americans, who mixed in among the others with no thought of separation. When Roosevelt began his speech he hopped onto a chair and was greeted by cheers. "As the years roll by," he said in his crisp, excitable voice, " ...this whole nation will grow to feel a peculiar sense of pride in the mightiest of the mighty men who mastered the mighty days; the lover of his country and of all mankind; the man whose blood was shed for the union of his people and for the freedom of a race, Abraham Lincoln." The ceremony in Kentucky heralded the possibility of national reconciliation and racial justice proceeding hand in hand. But that was not to be, as the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.e. 13 years later would make all too clear. Members of the Lincoln Memorial Commission-created by Congress in 1911-saw the monument not only as a tribute to the 16th president but also as a symbol of a reunified nation. With Northerners and Southerners having fought side by side in the Spanish-American War

of 1898 and again in World War I, it was time, they felt, to put aside sectional differences once and for all. This meant that the Lincoln honored on the National Mall must not be the man who had broken the South militarily or had crushed the institution of slavery but the preserver of the Union. "By emphasizing his saving the Union you appeal to both sections," wrote Royal Cortissoz, author of the inscription that would be etched inside the fInished building behind Daniel Chester French's nearly [6-meter-tall] sculpture of the seated Lincoln. "By saying nothing about slavery you avoid the rubbing of old sores." Two American presidents-Warren G. Harding and William Howard Taft-took part in the dedication ceremonies held on May 30, 1922, and loudspeakers on the memorial's rooftop carried the festivities across the Mall. Black guests were seated in a "colored section" off to the side. The commissioners had included a black

speaker in the program; not wanting an activist who might challenge the mostly white audience, they had chosen Robert Russa Moton, the mild-mannered president of Tuskegee Institute, and required him to submit his text in advance for revision. But in what turned out to be the most powerful speech of the day, Moton highlighted Lincoln's emancipationist legacy and challenged Americans to live up to their calling to be a people of "equal justice and equal opportunity." In the days that followed, Moton's

MR. LINCOLN. RESIDENCE In Spr,nsfit:IJ ,Illinois.

as they appeared

on his

return

speech went almost entirely unreported. Even his name was dropped from the record-in most accounts Moton was referred to simply as "a representative of the race." Mrican Americans across the country were outraged. The Chicago Lithograph by Louis Kurz, showing Abraham Lincoln in front of his residence in Springfield, Illinois after returning from his senatorial campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858. The Greek Revival style house was home to the Lincoln family for 17 years.

AND HORSE.

at the close of the Carnp.l.lSa with Senator Dou!W

Defender, an African American weekly, urged a boycott of the Lincoln Memorial until it was properly dedicated to the real Lincoln. Not long afterward, at a large gathering in front of the monument, Bishop E.D.W. Jones, an African American religious leader, insisted that "the immortality of the great emancipator lay not in his preservation of the Union, but in his giving freedom to the negroes of America." In the decades since, the Lincoln Memorial has been the scene of many dramatic moments in history. A photograph of President Franklin D. Roosevelt taken at the memorial on February 12, 1938, shows him leaning against a military attache, his hand on his heart. "I do not know which party Lincoln would belong to if he were alive," Roosevelt said two years later. "His sympathies and hi~ motives of championship of humanity itself have made him for all centuries to come the legitimate property of all parties-of every man and woman and child in every part o,four land." On April 9, 1939, after being denied the use of Constitution Hall in Washington because of her race, the great contralto Marian Anderson was invited to sing at the Lincoln Memorial. Seventy-five thousand people, black and white, gathered at the monument for an emotional concert that further linked Lincoln's memory'to racial progress. Three years later, during the bleak days of World War II, when it seemed that the Allies might lose the war, Lincoln's memory 'served as a potent force of national encouragement. In July 1942, on an outdoor stage within view of the Lincoln Memorial, a powerful performance of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait took place, with Carl Sandburg reading Lincoln's words, including, "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have

died in vain." In 1957, a 28-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the Lincoln Memorial to help lead a protest for black voting rights. "The spirit of Lincoln still lives," he had proclaimed before the protest. Six years later, in 1963, he returned for the March on Washington. The August day was bright and sunny, and more than 200,000 people, black and white, converged on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. King's A wood engraved portrait from Harper's Weekly depicting Lincoln's Cabinet (left to right); Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, Interior Secretary Caleb B, Smith, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Attorney General Edward Bates, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles.

~ ~ ~ ~ G;'

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8 SPAN NOVEMBER/DECEMBER

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speech called Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation "a beacon of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been scarred in the flame of withering injustice." But it was not enough, he went on, simply to glorify the past. "One hundred years later we must face the tragic fact the Negro is still not free ...is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination." And then he told the enraptured crowd, "I have a dream." Author and New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein later called King's words "the single most important piece of American oratory since Lincoln's Gettysburg Address." Just three months after the speech, President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated, ushering in a period of national grief not unlike that after Lincoln's murder. Also echoing the previous century, Kennedy's efforts to advance civil rights had prompted some to mourn him as the "second emancipator." A. Philip Randolph, who had organized the March on Washington, declared that the time had come to complete "this unfinished business of American democracy for which two presidents have died." To address a profound need for national healing and unity, JFK's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy-in consultation with other family members and official planners-decided to model her slain husband's funeral upon Lincoln's. The president's casket was laid in state inside the White House East Room,

~ and the precedents created by Lincoln. Â§' Despite such lingering controversies, u ~ Lincoln has consistently polled as one of E the three greatest U.S. presidents, along ~ with George Washington and Franklin D. ~ Roosevelt. And though many African Americans lost their veneration for him over the decades, recent statements by President Barack Obama and others suggest renewed appreciation. It was black Americans, after all, who refused to give up on Lincoln's emancipationist legacy even when white Americans wanted to forget it. And if Lincoln shared in the racial prejudice of his day, it is also true that his outlook grew significantly over the years of his presidency. He was "the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely," Douglass wrote, "who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color." And yet, as Bennett and others have rightly insisted, the Lincoln of earlier genIn particular, the Nixon administration's perceived abuse of executive power during erations of blacks was also in part a mythic the Vietnam War prompted unflattering figure-his own racial prejudices passed comparisons with Lincoln's wartime meas- over too lightly, even as African Americans' ures. Some scholars, however, rejected roles in emancipation were underemphasuch comparisons, noting that Lincoln sized. In a series of 1922 editorials for the reluctantly did what he thought necessary [National Association for the Advancement to preserve the Constitution and the nation. of Colored People] joumal The Crisis, Du Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for one, Bois stressed the importance of taking wrote in 1973 that since the Vietnam War Lincoln off his pedestal in order to place didn't rise to the same level of national cri- attention on the need for ongoing progress. sis, Nixon "had aimed to establish as nor- But Du Bois refused to reject Lincoln in the process. "The scars and foibles and contramal presidential power what previous Presidents had regarded as power justified dictions of the Great do not diminish but only by extreme emergencies .... He had enhance the worth and meaning of their not, like Lincoln, confessed to the slightest upward struggle," he wrote. Of all the great misgiving about the legality of his course." figures of the 19th century, "Lincoln is to Decades later, another war would again me the most human and lovable. And I love bring Lincoln's legacy to the fore. Shortly him not because he was perfect but because after the terrorist attacks of September 11, he was not and yet triumphed." In a 2005 2001, President George W. Bush addressed essay in Time magazine, Obama said much the U.S. Congress with words evocative of for more information: â&#x20AC;˘ Lincoln's_comments at the outset of the Lincoln Bicentennial Civil War: "The course of this conflict is not I http://www.lincolnbicentennlal.gov/ known," Bush said, "yet its outcome is cerAbraham Lincoln Presidential Library and tain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, Museum have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." As in the Lhttp://www.alplm.org/ Lincoln's assassination Vietnam era, subsequent controversies over the White House's conduct of the war on Lhttp://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alrintr.html terror-such as the use of secret wiretapLincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation ping and the detention of "enemy combatand Freedom - ants" without trial-provoked another http://www.in.gov/history/3100.htrn round of debates over presidential powers ...J

A mezzotint print of the Lincoln family by New York engraver John Chester Buttre in 1873.

and was later taken to the Great Rotunda of the Capitol and rested upon the catafalque used at Lincoln's funeral. On their fmal procession to Arlington National Cemetery, the funeral cars passed reverently by the Lincoln Memorial. One of the most poignant images from that era was a political cartoon drawn by BilfMauldin, depicting the statue of Lincoln bent over in grief. In the nearly half century since, Lincoln's reputation has been under assault frolJl various quatters. Malcolm X broke with the long tradition of African American admiration for Lincoln, saying in 1964 that he had <;lone"more to trick Negroes than any other man in history." In 1968, pointing to clear examples of Lincoln's racial prejudice, Lerone Bennett, Jr. asked in Ebony magazine, "Was Abe Lincoln a.. White Supremacist?" (His answer: yes.) The 1960s . and '70s were a period in which icons of all kinds-especially great leaders of the past-were being smashed, and Lincoln was no exception. Old arguments surfaced that he had never really ~ared about emancipation, that he was at heart a political OppOltUniSt.States' rights libertatians criti. cized his aggressive handling of the Civil War, his assaults on civil liberties and his aggrandizing of federal government.

SPAN NOVEMBERIDECEMBER

2009

the same thing: "I am fully aware of his limited views on race .... BULin the midst of slavery's dark storm and the complexities of governing a house divided, he somehow kept his moral compass pointed firm and true." Lincoln will always remain the president who helped destroy slavery and preserved the Union. With stubbornness, caution and an exquisite sense of timing, he engaged almost physically with unfolding history. Derided by some as an opportunist, he was in fact an artist, responding to events as he himself changed". over time, allowing himself to grow into a true reformer. Misjudged as a mere jokester, incompetent, unserious, he was in fact the most serious actor on the political stage. He was politically shrewd, and he took a long view of histoiy. And he knew when to strike to obtain his ends. Just for his work on behalf of the 13th Amendment, Allan Pinkerton (from left), head of the U.S. Intelligence Service, President Abraham Lincoln and Major General John A. McClernand during the Battle of Antietam in 1862.

which abolished slavery in the United States, he has earned a permanent place in the history of human freedom. In addition, he was a man of patience who refused to demonize others; a person of the middle who could build bridges across chasms. Herein may lie one of his most

important legacies-his unwavering desire to reunite the American people. In Chicago's Grant Park, the night he was declared the winner of the 2008 election, Obama sought to capture that sentiment, quoting from Lincoln's first inaugural address: "We are not enemies, but friends .... Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." And with the inauguration of the nation's first African American president, we remember that, in 1864, with the Union war effort going badly, the national government might have been tempted to suspend the upcoming elections. Not only did Lincoln insist they take place, he staked his campaign on a controversial platform calling for the 13th Amendment, willing to risk everything on its behalf. When he went on to an overwhelming victory in November, he obtained a mandate to carry through his program. "If the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election," he ~ spoke to a gathered crowd . ~ from a White House window, ~ "it might fairly claim to have o ยงalready conquered and ruined ~ us.... [The election] has .~ demonstrated that a people's ~ government can sustain a ~ national election, in the midst ~ of a great civil war." cr ~ Around the world, govern~ ments routinely suspend elec<i. tions, citing the justification of a "national emergency." Yet, Lincoln set a precedent that would guarantee the voting rights of the American people through subsequent wars and economic depressions. Though our understanding of him is more nuanced than it once was, and we are more able to recognize his limitations as well as his strengths, Abraham Lincoln remains the great example of democratic leadership-by most criteria, truly [America's] greatest president. ~ Philip B. Kunhardt III is a writer and producer with Kunhardt-McGee Productions and co-author of Looking for Lincoln.

h," said a book-writing acquaintance, when I told him that I had signed up to write a book of my own. "A book about Abraham Lincoln. Just what America needs." In fairness (to me), my book wasn't exactly about Lincoln, at least not about Lincoln dire-ctly. Even so, my acquaintance's sarcasm stung. There was truth behind it. He didn't know the numbers, but I did: Since that unfortunate mishap at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., wh~re an assassin's bullet claimed his life, more than 14,000 books have been written about Lincoln, placing him second only to Jesus and Napoleon as an obsession of the world's book writers. And the asse~bly line has never slowed, shows no signs of slowing even 'now. I hadn't been working on my own Lincoln book for very long when the point was pressed upon me. I was in Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois, one weekend, at a Lincoln conference. (It's an odd weekend in . f' Id h . , hid' L' I •. ) S prIng Ie w en someone Isn t 0 mg a mco n conlerence. . . The audience was fairly large-roughly 100 scholars, authors, amateur historians, hobbyists, buffs, and, by the looks of it, a few vagrant§ in from the street. At one point, the moderator interrupted the proceedings to ask for a show of hands. "Just out of curiosity," he said, "how many people here are writing a book about Abraham Lincoln?"

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.. . . .. Top: Damel Wel11bergat his Abraham Ll11colnBook Shop 111 Chicago, Ill'11101S. . Th e sh op I1as more th an, 8000 b00k s, d ocumen ts, p h0 t ograp I1S and memorabilia devoted to Lincoln. Above left: Former South Dakota Senator George McGovern with his book, Abraham Lincoln. Above right: Historian David Herbert Donald, who edited about 30 books on Lincoln, in the library of his home in Lincoln, Massachusetts. ,.

And nearly half of the audience raised their hands. I was unnerved but not deterred, and before long I began bumping up against the practical difficulties the Lincoln glut creates for authors who are foolish enough to try to add to it. They include, but go far beyond, the problem of combing through a historical paper trail that has already been pulped for every conceivable fact and revelation. We still learn new things about Lincoln every once in a while, but the discoveries, tiny as they are, pique the interest of only professionals and the most hollow-eyed obsessives; the recent Lincoln books that have caught the public's attention consist in taking old facts and arranging them in new ways. A more mundane and, for me, unforeseen problem involved the matter of a title. Let the writer beware: Somewhere in that pile of 14,000 volumes, one author or another has already given his or her Lincoln book the same title you'd chosen for yours.

lincoln in print Every phrase that can be detached from Lincoln's most famous utterances has been stamped on a cover, from A New Birth of Freedom to With Malice Toward None, from With Charity for All to Of the People, By the People, For the People. I looked further and discovered a kind of verbal daisy chain, as though all Lincoln authors had been given a limited number of words and were forced to arrange them in a different order. There was The Sword of Lincoln and Lincoln's Sword; Lincoln and the Generals and Lincoln's Generals; The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's World, and Abraham Lincoln's Intimate World; Lincoln's Virtues and the Virtuous Lincoln. There was In Lincoln's Footsteps, In the Footsteps of the Lincolns, and-for variety's sake-In Lincoln's Footprints. By my count, there are three books called The Real Lincoln, each of which presents a real Lincoln utterly incompatible with the real Lincoln described in the other two. This surprised me less than it might have, for the other thing that struck me as I researched my own book, Land of Lincolnnot to be confused with The Living Land of Lincoln, by Thomas J. Fleming, which was published in 1980-was just how many Lincolns were running around. I had been a boy in the early 1960s when Lincoln loomed large and inescapable, a common possession, a touchstone for the country at large. Now everyone seemed to have his own ~in.c.q)n. It was as if this great piece of our national patrimony had been broken up and privatized.

For more information:

Some of the ways in which Abraham Lincoln's name lives on. Above: A 1909 one cent coin with Lincoln's image. Right from top: A $5 bill featuring Lincoln; Lincoln Street in Houston, Texas; a replica of the log cabin in which Lincoln was barn, at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Kentucky; the Lincoln Center in New York City; Abraham Lincoln Elementary Schaal in Pomona, California; the Circuit Rider, a custom Harley-Davidson motorcycle that pays tribute to Lincoln; the skyline of Lincoln, Nebraska. Below: The USS Abraham Lincoln.

Again the books told the story. Just in recent years we've had a book proving Lincoln was a fundamentalist Christianthis was written by a fundamentalist Christian. Another proved that Lincoln's greatness arose from his struggle with clinical depression; the book was written by a journalist who has struggled with clinical depression. Most notoriously, a gay activist published a book in 2005 asserting that Lincoln, though not a gay activist himself, was at least actively gay. Conservatives have written books about Lincoln's conservatism. Liberals have claimed him in books describing the liberal Lincoln. And in 2003, a book was published proving that if Lincoln were alive today, his political opinions would be indistinguishable from those of the former governor of New York state, Mario Cuomo. Two guesses as to who wrote that one.

Understanding the Lincoln infatuation Agog at this exfoliation of Lincolns, you might be tempted to answer our title question-What Does Abraham Lincoln Mean to Americans Today?-with a glib counterquestion: What does-

n't Lincoln mean to Americans today? He seems to mean all things all at once, which might lead a cynic to conclude that Lincoln has ceased to have any particular meaning at all. But that really is too glib. For there is something peculiarly American in the sheer excess and exuberance of our Lincoln infatuation. Understanding the infatuation, I came to believe, might be a way not only of understanding Lincoln but of understanding the country itself. The passion was undeniable, also surprising for a country supposedly indifferent to its own history. No other American has been so swarmed by curiosity seekers, so coddled and picked at and pawed; indeed-again with the possible exception of Napoleon-no other human being in ~ ~ modem history has shared a fate so implausibly extravagant. ~ Yet not even Napoleon has ever inspired a ~ group of men who make a living pretending to be him, as Lincoln has. In some respects, the Association of Lincoln Presenters (known as the ALP) is merely a trade association like any other-the Teamsters, for example, or the National Association of Manufacturers, or Petsitters International. Like them, the ALP holds an annual convention where members gather to socialize, swap professional tips, and hear expert speakers give advice on how to improve business. Unlike those other trade conventions, however, every l!!ember of the ALP is dressed in a black frock coat and stovepipe hat and sports a coalblack beard, real or otherwise. After the convention they return home and, refreshed, begin again the work of school appearances, Kiwanis club talks, Chautauqua presentations, walk-throughs at county fairs-the work of evangelizing Lincoln ~ to a country that they believe needs him more ~ than it needs anything. I asked their founding ~ president why they do it, why they bother. "Lincoln," he told me, "reminds us of what we need to know but might have forgotten." I ~ It's hard to describe the effect of seeing more :2 ~ than 100 men dressed like Abraham Lincoln gath~ ered in a hotel ballroom, listening to a public relaQ tions expert discourse on "Making Local Media Work for You," but I got used to such oddities as I looked for Lincoln.

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Ahov.e: Lincoln lookalikes wait . Jar th~ start of the dedication ceremony of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Right: Students of South . Roxana Elementanj School, Illinois wait to be photographed .for a lookalike contest to mark Lincoln's 200th birthday in February 2009.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, with sculptures of the faces of u.s. presidents (from left) George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

There are perhaps as many as 15,000 Americans who are serious collectors of Lincoln memorabilia, even though in recent years the price of Lincoln documents and other fusthand artifacts-what one collector called "the really good stuff'-has soared into a stratosphere accessible only to the wealthiest connoisseurs. But collectors of more modest means are undeterred. With typical ingenuity, they have defined quality downward, to cover commodities that can be more reasonably priced: the "good stuff' now rillght include, for example, matchbook covers from the old Lincoln Life Insurance Company, which sell for under $10. The online auction eBay has proved that anytmng with a Lincoln association can find a buyer. Documents in Lincoln's hand now go for tens of thousands of dollars; so non-rich Lincoln lovers have begun trading in forged Lincoln documents, particularly those of such celebrated forgers as Joseph Cosey, a scam artist who prospered in the 1930s. A Cosey-forged "Lincoln letter" rillght sell for $2,500. "But you've got to make sure it's a real forgery, a real Cosey," one collector told me. "The market's so hot now we're seeing a lot of fakes."

Expressing the American experiment For nearly a century, historians and sociologists have tried to explain the historical infatuation that could result in such endearing absurdities. The reasons they've come up with are often clever and sometimes even plausible. Lincoln continues to fascinate his countrymen like no other historical personage, we've been told, because he was the first such personage to be commonly photographed: He is thus more real to us than great figures from earlier times can be. And it's true that Lincoln was exquisitely sensitive to ,the ways in which he presented himself to the public, including through the use of the then-new photographic art. He seldom passed up a chance to have his likeness made. Thanks to that craftiness, we seem to ~now him in a way we could never know George"Washington or'Thomas Jefferson.

Even so, goes another argument, no matter how farillliar we are with his face, with the sad eyes and tousled hair, Lincoln is tantalizingly and finally unknowable; it's this mystery that draws us back to the melancholy, humorous, intelligent, reserved, distant, and kindly man that his acquaintances described. Other historians have said our infatuation with him is rooted in the drama of his personal story: Born in abject poverty to become one of the great men of human history, Lincoln embodies the "right to rise" that Americans claim as their birthright. Still others credit his enduring fame to his assassination on Good Friday, a shock from which the country never quite recovered. The most soberminded of our theorists say we're obsessed with Lincoln because he presided over, and somehow exemplifies, the greatest trauma of American history, a civil war that reinvented the United States into the country we know today. There's truth in all these explanations, I suppose, but it's the last one, in my opinion, that comes closest to being the comprehensive truth. I live not far from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., that grand, photogenic temple on the banks of the Potomac River that is home to the "iconic Lincoln." Researching my Lincoln book, spending time with scholars and collectors and obsessives and being introduced by each of them to yet another privatized Lincoln, a Lincoln pieced together from their own preoccupations, I was always glad to return home and pay the memorial a visit: to see this singular and solid Lincoln, the enduring Lincoln that every American can lay claim to. The memorial is the most visited of our presidential monuments. The strangest thing about it, though, is the quiet that descends over the tourists who climb the wide sweeping stairway and step into the cool of the marble chamber. Before long th~ir attention is drawn to one or both of the two Lincoln speeches etched in the walls on either side of the famous statue. After all this time I am still astonished at the number of visitors who stand still to read, on one stone panel, the Gettysburg Address, and, on the other, Lincoln's second inaugural address. What they're reading is a summary of the American experiment, expressed in the finest prose any American has been capable of writing. One speech reaffirms that the country was founded upon and dedicated to a proposition-a universal truth that applies to all men everywhere. The other declares that the survival of the country is somehow bound up with the survival of the proposition-that if the country hadn't survived, the proposition itself rillght have been lost. Sometimes the tourists tear up as they read; they tear up often, actually. And watching them you understand: Loving Lincoln, for Americans, is a way of loving their country. That's what Lincoln means to Americans ~ today, and it's why he means so much. Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard magazine and the author of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America.

Ford's rheatre Museum

Leading Visitors

Through a

Historical Jourtney t08.--

National Heaptache

useums are increasingly becoming like theaters, their once-staid display cases giving way to extended narratives and elaborate special effects. But now, after nearly two years of renovations, a theater has become more fully a museum. It is being incorporated into an expanding multibuilding exhibition that will recount a tale as resonant and dramatic as any ever staged: Lincoln's presidency and assassination. In February 2009 Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., where the murder took place on April 14, 1865, reopened as a fully functioning theater doubling as a memorial exhibit. The presidential box, where Lincoln sat with his wife, Mary, watching a comic playas John Wilkes Booth put a bullet through his skull, overlooks the stage and has itself become a permanent set, draped with flags and decorated as it was that evening.

[On July 15, 2009, a 650-square-meter exhibition space opened-Ford's Theatre Museum-through which visitors proceed before emerging into the theater itself.] Before the extensive renovation, the museum simply displayed the extraordinary collection of objects belonging to the National Park Service, which is a partner with Ford's Theatre Society in the enterprise. Many of these objects have been so well preserved because

The Gettysburg Address exhibit at the Ford's Theatre Museum.

they were evidence in a murder investigation: the guns and knives belonging to the conspirators, Booth's diary and confession written as he was on the run, his thigh-high boot, slashed open by a doctor (his name was, yes, Mudd) treating the leg that the assassin injured leaping to the stage from the president's box. But as the museum's director, Paul R. Tetreault, explained, traditional displays could do little to explain the significance of these objects, the events they reflected or the achievements that made the killing such a trauma. They presumed an understanding but did not create it. So in consultation with historian Richard Norton Smith, a $3.5 million transformation of the museum has taken place, leading the visitor though a historical journey. The exhibition, below the theater, opens with an image of the train that brought Lincoln to Washington for his inauguration in 1861 and then presents a deft history of the Civil War and Lincoln's life in the White House. It ends in a hallway in which parallel walls chronicle the activities of April 14 for Booth and Lincoln, before they came together in the theater to which the hall leads.

Artifacts related to the Lincoln assassination conspirators on display at the For,d's路Theatre Museum.

After a guided tour of the theater by a park ranger, visitors then cross the street, just as Lincoln's injured body did that night, to enter the Petersen House, another part of this museum complex, in which historically costumed park rangers give an account of the events of Lincoln's final night in the cramped back room. In 2010, Tetreault says, construction will begin to transform the building next to the Petersen House into the Center for Education and Leadership; it will include resources for teachers, but also exhibitions that will examine the aftermath of the assassination and Lincoln's legacy. So the opening of this museum in Ford's Theatre provides the framing of an ambitious narrative, in which these two primal sites provide the focus. There is much stagecraft in this, of course. Even the theater, for all its impact on visitors, is mostly a re-creation: in the 19th century it was gutted to create a government office building that was later damaged in a structural collapse. But the care taken during the theater's first major restoration during the 1960s and the attentiveness of its latest

revision reincarnate the historical aura. The museum space, the newest addition to this multibuilding project, is also strong and is designed to attract a wide cross section of the million or so annual visitors now expected at the site (300,000 came just to see the theater since its recent reopening). It begins with a light touch: the first image we have of Lincoln shows an unrecognizable life-size figure draped in a military cloak and wearing a "Scotch plaid cap"-just as a New York Times reporter mistakenly described him-trying to stymie any assassination attempts as he entered Washington for his inauguration. (The description, we are told, "had no basis in fact"though that didn't prevent the exhibition from tapping into the myth.) But the brass knuckles and goggles in a display case really were given to Lincoln by his bodyguard; apparently they were never used. Then, keeping th~ wry tone, displays describe the conditions of 1861 Washingtop-the malarial Potomac Flats, the open sewer running along what became Constitution Avenue, the "marble stump" of the Washington Monument, abandoned for lack of money. We then see a gathering of life-size statuary, pompous, preening and supplicating, a representative "swarm of office seekers" who crowded the new president's schedule. Inform~tion abo~t Lincoln's Cabinet is presented in files, displayed m a...cabmet. But matters turn so~ber soon enough: we learn a bit about the tensions between North and South and the events at Fort Sumter and get a compact history of what the exhibition calls "The Improvised War"-at least during its first year~. One display features the roster Qf military l(}aders Lincoln' dismissed before Ulysses S. Grant was able to draw the war to its conclusion. Another reproduces the view that Lincoln might have had from the Oval Office as;a video recounts the layers of decision and conflict that made the middle of the war so terrible. "If there is a worse place than hell," Lincoln is quoted as saying after the defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, "I am in it." ~ And along the way there are glimpses of domestic life (and tragedy) at the White House as well as a defense of Mary Todd Lincoln's enpimous home-decorating expenditures that points out what a sorry state the presidential residence was actually in when the couple arrived. Another series of displays compactly

reviews Lincoln's steadily evolving views on slavery (and includes a video about his encounters with Frederick Douglass). This is a lot to cover in a small space, and there are times when ambition would have been greater fulfilled if it had been more moderated; as it is, the latter years of the war become a bit muddled in the viewer's mind. And though there is an account of the contention in the NOlth about the Civil War in a display about the 1864 presidential campaign (along with some sheet music for a campaign song I'd very much like to hear: Abraham the Great and General Grant His Mate), we are not fully prepared for the intensity of hatred and resentment of the conspirators. They are given their own separate space in the exhibition that is meant to evoke the boarding house of Mary Surratt, at which they met. Here, life-size figures of the plotters stand ominously about as a display case shows relics of the assassination and the thwarted escape, including the revolver used by Lewis Powell during his attempt to -kill Secretary of State William Henry Seward, Dr. Samuel Mudd's medical kit and the compass that the fugitive Booth misread, thus ensuring his eventual capture. Here, rather than providing too much narrative, the museum presents too little, particularly given the spectacular events that unfolded.

~ ~ ~ o ;;; z ~ President Bm'ack Obama speaks during a February 2009 visit to Ford's Theatre to mark the Lincoln Bicentennial. It may be that that chronicle is being left for the park rangers to outline in the Petersen House, as they did on my visit there. And perhaps, too, it would be too jarring suddenly to walk into the theater where the assassination took place, after one had already been led to its aftermath. These are also matters of emphasis, and when, a few years hence, the last act of this museum drama is completed, the plotting may be more meticulously worked out. In the meantime, the museum provides a lively and vigorous survey. In its last display case, the original door to the president's box is shown, along with the pine bar Booth used to jam it shut-objects that become creepier once you've seen the place where it all happened.

#ti

Edward Rothstein York Times.

is critic-at-Iarge for the arts section of The New

Colors are a way to communicate with the world for Saurabh Mohan.

Defealing Dis nterspersed with bold strokes of rust, gold, green and fuchsia and emblazoned with the recurring outline of a glowing candle, Saurabh . Mohan's paintings are a tool to communicate with the world. "I like to paint because I like to show beauty ... Colors play their role in making my paintings beautiful," he explains via an e-mail interview. Born deaf, Mohan, 29, stumbled into painting almost accidently He was barely 7 when he received a certificate of merit in a school drawing contest. Mohan says that what started as an escape from studies in higher classes became a journey to discover the iO~Y of colors. The visitor's book at the American Center in New Delhi, where Mohan held his first, solo "Art is Ability" exhibition in October, turned out to be a barometer of his tryst with the brush. ';An artist with a promise," wrote a guest. "There is positivity in all portraits," was another response. Yet another praised the "confidence and maturity" of " his strokes. Though his paintings fo~ow no set pattern, many comprise multicolored geometric shapes in stark acryl ic colors on a canvas base. Mohan says he does not decide the colors beforehand and adds more hues as the painting progresses "When I paint, my mind opens up and I like to paint more and more," he says, adding that some of his initial

Mohan's "Art is Ability" exhibition at the American Center in New Delhi.

work conveyed the issue of global warming. "The hearing loss in 1925, Mrs. Tracy devoted her time \ squares, the blocks, the blobs, the circles and the and energy to studying how deaf children could be streaks take shape as I proceed Sometimes they taught to communicate with the hearing and speakresemble buildings, sometimes people, some- ing world. Through her patient guidance, he gained times forests, sometimes an aura and sometimes an understanding of language and lip-reading and water. I leave that to the viewers' imagination." learned to speak, says the clinic. When other "His exhibition at the American Center has mothers of deaf children asked for her help, she proved a successful training ground," says his founded the clinic. John Tracy became a cartoonmother, journalist Kumud Mohan. ist and polo player among other accomplishments Recounting the chaos that prevailed in the fam- and died in 2007, leaving a son and grandchildren. ily after discovering that their second born, healthy "Though we never met her, somehow Mrs. son was in fact, profoundly deaf, Mrs. Mohan rec- Louise Tracy, the founder of the clinic ... became ollects how her initial days were filled with grief one of the finest people to enter our lives," Mrs. Help came in the form of the John Tracy Clinic Mohan wrote in a November 1986 article for SPAN. in Los Angeles, California, an education center for "It used to take 20 days to a month for the deaf children and their parents. Its' services include course material to arrive by ship. The same free correspondence courses for parents of hearing amount of time for the answers to reach from impaired and deaf children anywhere in the world. me to them," she says. The course lasted just Mrs. Mohan says the course gave her the direc- over a year. Today, however, parents have a tion and support she desperately needed. "The much easier option The John Tracy Clinic procourse I did with John Tracy Clinic, Los Angeles, -vides material on the Internet which is available gave me tremendous faith, which probably trans- for downloading at htlp://www.jtc.org/services/ lated to Saurabh's self-confidence," she says. d istan ce-ed ucati on/i nd ex. htm I The clinic has served over 300,000 families An avid photographer who has traveled extensince its establishment in 1942 by Louise Tracy, sively across India, Mohan loves long-distance wife hf American movie star Spencer Tracy. When driving and spends considerable time practicing their infant son, John, was diagnosed with profound his speech. Mohan says he is grateful to have his family's support in all his endeavors, includfor more information: ing painting Though silence may reign in his life, he says color has filled it with happiness and tranquility. ~

New

va arâ&#x20AC;˘ lor n Ian Art By GIRIRAJ AGARWAL Images courtesy WASWO X. WASWO

An American artist collaborates with Rajasthani painters and colorists to rework old crafts such as photograph tinting, miniatureÂˇ painting and border illustration into-a re-imagined art form that represents both cultures. e loves to walk barefoot in his home, grew to savor lots of chili in his food, developed a liking for the roadside food stall, and does not mind sitting cross-legged on a straw mat. American artist Waswo X. Waswo, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has made India his home for the last eight years. During his first "real encounter" with India 16 years ago, he felt so connected that he visited again and again and then decided to remain here in order to give new dimensions to his artistic expres~sions. Known for his sepia-toned photographs of people and places in rural India (which were hand-processed by the artist in his darkroom in the United States), Waswo has since been collaborating with Indian artists in Udaipur, Rajasthan. He has made the city his home since 2005. His work involves trying to"revive old Indian arts

Mirror Image Hand-colored black and white digital print.

Left: A Prayer for Rain, Pigment and gold on wasli. Right: The Chara Tala Wallah Hand-colored black and white digital print.

and crafts, especially hand-coloring of black and white photographs and expanding the expressive possibilities of Indian miniature paintings. How did this idea of making black and white photographs in a studio and then hand-coloring them emerge? "Through seeing and collecting vintage Indian studio photography, I became eager to explore posed studio portraiture myself," says Waswo. "My initial idea was to once again create sepia photographs in a chemical darkroom .... But at the studio in Udaipur I found the complications of unfamiliar chemicals, water and heat too much of a hurdle." In the meantime, he began to use a digital camera and started making "digital prints. One day Rajesh Soni, who was interpreting between Waswo and miniaturist R. Vijay, saw the digital black and white prints and said to Waswo, "Chacha, I can paint these." Waswo liked the Below, from left: Waswo X.Waswo, (left) with Rajesh Soni in the studio in Udaipur, Rajasthan; R. Vijay at work; and Shanker Kumawat gives finishing touches to a border of a miniature painting.

idea but was apprehensive about the quality. "It was not easy. Chacha did not like my initial efforts. He thought I was using too loud colors and asked me to use lighter shades. But after discussions with him I developed a special style to color these prints, which produced wonderful results," says Soni, whose grandfather, Prabhu Lal, was an expert hand-colorist and photographer who worked for Maharaja Bhopal Singh of Mewar. There is another reason why Waswo likes these hand-colored prints. "Hand coloring maintains some of the evocative softness of my former sepia prints and still lends a certain vintage feel. ... It also opens up a world of new possibilities in mood and expression," he says. A hand-colored image, The Chara Tala WaUah (the man who sells hay from a cart), is one ofWaswo's favorites. "The black and white print was wonderful, but once it was handcolored by Soni the image became truly magical," he says. Each finished hand-colored photograph from Waswo's studio is a collaboration between at least four people-the person who paints the backdrop, the model, the colorist and Waswo himself, as photographer. Backdrops are painted under Waswo's direction

From far left: Paani; I am Serenaded on The LakeHomage to Ravi Varma; I Hold my Father's Bones. Pigment and gold on wasli. Below: The Ladder Man Hand-colored black and white digital print. Bottom: Card Players Hand-colored black and white digital print.

by Udaipur artists Zenule Khan, Anil Atrish and Chi man Dangi. The models are generally local people who come into contact with Waswo and his team members. "I feel a bit like a film director. I have this vision of what I want to make, and there are a lot of people working to make this vision reality ... ," says Waswo. Soni has been working with Waswo since 2006 and has applied colors to more than 250 black and white images. "As soon as a print comes to me I start visualizing the colors it would need and apply the colors in several layers," says Soni. Waswo does not inteliere much in his work. "Rajesh understands what I am looking for but sometimes I do point out the things I dog't like," says Waswo. Another area in whic,r Waswo has collaborated with Indian artists is miniature paintings. The Udaipur region is famous for miniatures and it is obvious why an artist like Waswo would like to experiment with them. "Miniatures express feelings and ideas which cannot be expressed through photography," he says. Waswo's miniatures are painted by R. Vijay and are mostly autobiographical. "I make a very rough sketch of what I would like to see in the miniature, and R. Vijay then perfects the sketch, and after my approval, procee<,!.st9 paint. ... These miniatures portray different episodes from my life in India," says Waswo. "Of course R. Vijay adds a lot of his own feeling and style," he adds. Waswo's miniatures, such as A Prayer for Rain and Paani deal with contemporary is~ues. A Prayer for Rain w~s made when .Raj,\sthan was worried about rains and Paani portrays the ecologically conect Indian way of using a clay pot and pitcher. R. Vijay does not h~ve any formal art education but he has been painting since childhood. "Earlier I was doing traditional work which was more about lives of former kings and queens and landscapes. Waswo introduced me to new subjects and~ expanded my horizon," he says. He has painted about 75 miniatures for Waswo in the last three years. Shanker Kuqw'wat is another local artist discovered by Waswo. He does the intricate borders for the collaborative miniatures created by Waswo and R. Vijay. "He is perhaps the best in

Grey Skies Pigment and gold on wasli. doing borders. Sometimes he comes up with better ideas than what I tell him," says Waswo. Kumawat has been working with him for the last year. "I study the details of a miniature and try to bring contrast to the border," says Kumawat. He prepares the colors himself in such a way that they will last for years and do not fade in sunlight. He" also uses real gold powder to impart shine and richness. Waswo is happy with his local collaborators. "We work as a team. They bring my ideas to ~li:(e... .In worIdng ~ith the artists of Udaipur I do feel that I have encouraged the revival of craft or expansion of it. I do not think Rajesh Soni would be seriously hand-coloring photographs if it were not for the "Studio in

For more information: Waswo X. Waswo http://www.waswoYNJaswo.net! India's Art Appreciation Grows With Investment tittp:Z www.wastimgtonpost.com7wp-ayn con entlartlcle72009/03/23/ AR2009032302834.html?sid = ST2009032 401606

Rajasthan" series ... And in working with R. Vijay I think I have encouraged him to see new expressive possibilities of miniature painting." The local artists also say they are happy; they are paid "enough" and get a "bonus" when Waswo makes good sales at an exhibition. Even models, who are mostly workers and farmers, get "good money" for about half an hour of work. Indian printmaking, like etchings and woodcuts, also fascinates Waswo. He is making a collection which he hopes " ... will one day be representative enough to make for an educational exhibition which could trave!." Waswo's India connection runs in his genes. His father, George Waswo, traveled through India during World War II. "As a child I was often told the story of the ammunition ship that blew up in Mumbai harbor. It was a famous event from those years and my father was in a nearby pub when it happened," he says. "As a child, I read books about India and had a kid's romantic ideas about tigers and elephants and unexplored spaces." When did he realize his interest in art? "My mother, Lucille, introduced me to art. She did drawings, paintings and used to organize art events." Her watercolor painting showing an old farm house covered with snow is still in Waswo's Milwaukee home. His father also did a bit of painting, and Waswo remembers how he used to paint flowers. As he grew older, Waswo studied photography at the Milwaukee Center for Photography, and Studio Marangoni, Center for Contemporary Photography in Florence, Italy. The Milwaukee center has since closed. Waswo has exhibited his work in India and the United States. His "India Poems" series of sepiatoned photographs was exhibited in several Indian CItieS including Mumbai (2004, 2006), Cochin (2003, 2007), Panjim (2003), and Udaipur (2004) and later in the artist's hometown at the Haggerty Museum of Art (2007). The "A Studio in Rajasthan" series -of hand-colored photographs and miniature paintings has been exhibited in Cochin (2008), New Delhi (2009), and Genoa, Italy (2009). He has also exhibited his work at Kandy and Colombo in Sri Lanka and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. What kind of response is he getting for this collaborative work? "I am happy. We had good sales. People are really liking these." The artist thinks awareness about India's art is growing in the country and abroad. " .. .1 have been overwhelmed by the talent that exists in this country." He feels cultural exchange between the United States and India could do some good. "Many Indians have expressed to me their desire to see more contemporary American art, which unfortunately does not seem to cross the ocean to India with much frequency. Conversely, America has a long way to go in exhibiting Indian art and recognizing its importance .... " He adds, "Art alone may not be able to bridge cultural divides, but it can at least help us recognize and begin to understand them." ~

Left: Beyond Giza by V Karthik, Marakkanam, Tamil Nadu, 2008. TMAX 100 printed on !lford Fiber Black and White. Right: The exhibit at The Park hotel in Chennai. Below: Stork's Neck by V Karthik, Marakkanam, Tamil Nadu, 2008. TMAX 100 printed on !lford Fiber Black and White.

hen does a Chicago skyscraper become a symbol of the transience of life? When does a mound of salt in Tamil Nadu hint at a hidden world? The transformation takes place when they are seen through a photo artist's point of view. These were among the distinctive takes on structures and landscapes in the United States and India presented by Chennai-based photographers Sujatha Shankar Kumar and V. Karthik in their exhibit "Barking Dog Tree and Other Places: Mythologies in the Landscape." Mounted on poles"in the lobby of The Park hotel in Chennai, the 17 works were on view for nine days, beginning October 10. Emphasizing traditional photography and fine printing techniques, the images were displayed in sets and accompanied by short stories. "Our show is about the deep connect with the land and how we form symbols and myths, and their part in our life," explains Kumar. Kumar's photographic journey began in Chicago, illinois where she lived for eight yearS'from 1995 and studied filmmaking at The Art Institute of Chicago. She worked.Jor several years in design and media in the city, while nurturing her interest in photography in her spare time. Kumar returned t~)lJdia in 2003 ~nd.started fineGrain Studios in Chennai for design and photography. "In 1995, following an internal compass which showed me the path to a place by the river in Chicago, I experienced an epiphany, a moment where all things came together-the past, the present and the future-in the river's reflections," says Kumar. "Back in India, at the salt mines at Marakkanam on the 0ll,!skirts of Pondicherry, I continued this journey with photographer V. Karthik to discover the evanescent activity of salt-making, in 2007." Karthik recalls how they were drawn to the breathtaking views of the salt pans captured in "Flatlands" and "Stork's Neck" while

travelling down the East Coast Road along the Bay of Bengal. Structures and natural elements playa key role in Kumar's "We were drawn to them again and again as they were always and Karthik's works. Kumar, who studied furniture design at the beautiful as a landscape. Much, much different from the rest of National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat says she has the landscape. The colors, the tones, the symmetry, asymmetry, always been drawn to architecture, textures, materials and surtextures all arrested our attention. Instantly the landscape trig- faces. "A sense of geometry and space has always been central gered memories of the Mahatma's Dandi March and we were to my work. As I practiced furniture design before my work in well on our way to exploring salt and freedom! Freedom from the the visual arts, my work has been very much about giving life to ordinary clutter of life.::. The spirit of the landscape beckoned objects. This in turn has inspired me to see the life in objects," us," he says. . she says. "As photo artists engaged with traditional processes, we find Much like the river in Chicago beckoned Kumar to capture the special moment in "Lost City." "Looking into the depths of it inspiting to our art that the images born are entirely out of the water, by the riverside in Chicago, away from the bustle of earth, salts, water and sunlight at the time of photography and the city, I felt myself immersed i~ the depths of a different again out of paper, salts, water and light in the print room where world-of a Titanic sunk under waters, a mermaid who beck- the print emerges with a full play of tones, light and shade, natoned but could not speak, a city like Xanadu, perfect but unat- urally," says Katthik. The images in the eXhibit convey several layers of meaning. tainable. And within seconds, all that glimmered in the reflecWhile the Egyptian pyramid-like shape of the mound of salt at tjons of the waters, simply disappeared," she says. Kumar says that drawmg 'c'onnections between her experi- Marakkanam in Kllithik's "Beyond Giza" indicates the power of ences in India and America has aJways been important for her. natural forces, the skyscraper in "Temporary Effervescence" is At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Turkish fellow not just a building. Its twisting and swirling reflection in the student had asked Kumar about thli...terrnAmericarl "Illdians." "I Chicago River reminds Kumar of the transitory nature of life. told pim the whole Columbus story and how he believed he had "When you see a great mound of salt like that, it tells us of the â&#x20AC;˘ found India. When I r.elated this story that I had many times power of all the natural forces that make it happen from the spirheard in my life, but on American soil, I suddenly realized this itual dimension. A world that cannot be seen, heard or talked odd link between our two lands, as if America and India were about. The hidden side of things from which springs all these related, latitudes and longitudes across, by these searches for forms and life is the real world," says Katthik. Talking about how they select their subjects, Kumar says it's each other," she says. This connection surfaces in their work, too. At a bigger exhib- an automatic and intuitive connection, adding that photography it last year, a visitpr commented on the provides the freedom of living in the For more information: moment. "With photography, unlike other . American Indian-like rendition of "At Barking Dog Tree," a' pair of photographsÂˇ of fineGrain Studios arts, the act is in the moment. And that is http://www.finegrain.in/index.html Marakkanam, and its accompanying tale. why it is the most liberating." ~

Lost City by Sujatha Shankar Kumar, Chicago, Illinois, 1995. Ilford XP2 400 printed on Type C paper.

.S. supermarkets offer an eyepopping array of productsabout 47,000 different food items in the average store-all delivered by a vast, round-theclock supply system where growing, processing, manufacturing, importing, distributing and retailing work together in intricate harmony. American consumers need not heed the seasons-they can buy freshi fruit and vegetables in the dead of winter, flown in from around the globe. Grapes and apples from Chile, tomatoes and peppers from Mexico, bananas from Ecuador, lamb from New Zealand, shrimp from Thailand-shopping in a U.S. supermarket is a striking example of globalization. However, for what appears to be a growing number of Americans, the profusion of food from far away is not a benefit but a problem, even a threat. Concerned about the safety of their food, the environmental impacts of transpOlting food for thousands of miles, a desire to support their local economies and the palate-pleasing allure of freshly-picked produce, more families are contracting directly with farmers to buy fruits, vegetables, eggs and sometimes meat. The trend, which is known as Community Supported Agticulture or CSA,

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8 Shoppers choose from a huge assortment of products in American supermarkets, with flowers, fruits, vegetables, fish and meat often flown in from other countries. has gained force in recent years and accelerated in 2009 after a series of food-poisoning outbreaks involving spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, wheat flour from China and hot peppers from Mexico. In one instance, salmonella poisoning was blamed in the deaths of nine people and the sickening of at least 683. The salmonella outbreak, traced to a

peanut processing plant in the state of Georgia, led to the recall of more than 3,900 peanut-related products made by several manufacturers and lit a fire under efforts to repair the U.S. food-safety system. Noting that his 7-year-old daughter eats peanut butter, President Barack Obama called for a complete review of the Food and Drug Administration, which plays a key role in food safety. Legislation aimed at enhancing food safety is moving through the U.S. Congress, but many consumers aren't mollified. Instead, some families are buying a share of a local farmer's output and introducing their children to the forgotten reality that fruits and vegetables come out of the ground. "What we hear from parents over and over is, 'My kid would not touch a veggie and now he or she loves anything that comes off of our farm,' " says Erin Barnett, director of LocalHarvest, a nine-year-old organization which maintains an Internet database of about 3,000 CSA farms. "With CSA, there's a direct connection with the farmer or the farm. It takes the anonymity out of your relationship with your food. When you know where it comes from and have a word or two with the farmer when you get it, you're invested at a whole different level and it's very satisfying."

Is CSA the New Organic~~~~~~~ bout 40 years ago, America's supermar"CSA is really a local movement but it's also ket industry began to notice a new trend. tied in with organic, and lots of people are Consumers wanted "organic" food-food choosing CSA because they want organic," shegrown without the use of toxic pesticides and says. "(But) some CSAs are certified organic fertilizers, grown in such way that cropland is and some aren't A CSA can be just a farm-it replenished rather than depleted. Dismissed doesn't have to use organic practices. When initially as a hippie trend left over from the they're not organic, the draw for consumers is 1960s, organic food is now a big busjness and bu'ying~local, When a CSA is organic, the conan integral part of the''rnainstream food industry, sumer is getting food grown locally and under About 3.5 percent of total U.S. food sales, 5 organic practices that are verifiable," percent of dairy products and almost 10 percent Uneasiness about the food supply chain has of all the fruits and vegetables sold in 2008 benefited both organic and CSA, Haumann were organic, according to the Organic Trade believes, Association, "More and more consumers in the U.S. want Organic and CSA have some of the same to be connected with their food, want to know characteristics but are not synonymous, says the trade association's spokeswoman, Barbara 8m'bars Stroud with some of her produce from a CSA farm in Indiahoma, Oklahoma. Haumann.

where their food came from," she says. "In the last five years, the number of CSAs has skyrocketed. It's something that caught on gradually, but has really boomed in the last two years. Partly it's questions about food safety, part of it is the environment, part of it is the whole local orientation of some consumers. I don't think CSA is replacing organic, though. The fact is they're both growing substantially" -SF

Right: CSA farms often introduce their members to new varieties of produce they may not have tried before, Right center: A desire to participate in the growing process is often cited by CSA enthusiasts like these, who are helping pick part of the salad they will later feed their families. Right bottom: Sarah Griffin, her nephew, Griffin Mandirola, and other members of their family plant lettuce on their CSA farm in Suffield, Connecticut,

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CSA takes many forms. Some farmers sell a ~ z portion of their harvest to consumers who usu- ~ ally drive out to the farm every week or two or Bpick up their "shares" at central drop-off points. Some farmers require consumers to work on the ~ farm-Barnett estimates that about 10 percent ~ of LocalHarvest members do this-and some ~ CS~ fa~mers are happy to have help but don't reqmre it. A good example of CSA is Danjo Farms in Moberly, Missouri, where owners Dan and Joanne Nelson have 46 families who contract with them for a share, or "box," of the farm's output, which includes fruits, berries, vegetables, eggs, beef, pork and chicken. A full share, which provides families with a large box brimming with the farm's bounty every week for 24 weeks, costs $700 plus 12 hours of work during the busy summer season. Families can also buy quarter- or half-boxes, with the dollar and work amounts adjusted accordingly. "They like the concept of this as a package deal-they get their heads around 'Hey, I have a box from the farm',every week for 24 weeks, I have things in season,' " Nelson explains. "They bring their kids-that's probably the main reason a lot of them do it-to associate their children with the natural world and where food really comes from. The kids learn that eggs are laid by chickens; they don't come from the store. We have a couple of ponds, so they can have a little picnic. And it helps us to have two or three families out h'ere'on a weekend, It gives us a little labor pool here to do things we need to do on the farm." Nelson, who has been a faSl)1~Ffor 3S yemls, sees a larger purpose in CSA and his thoughts are echoed by many others in the movement. "There's a need, in my mind, to help people ~. see where food comes from, how things are :r: ~ really done," he says. iL ', •• "A lot of people have no experience at all with how things are done in the natural world, because ~ 80 percent of our population now lives in cities. ~ So that's a part of what I'm doing. Another part is ~ that we are ecologically minded and concemed ~ about the generations to come. On our farm, we ~

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A Massachusens Farm That Pioneered Community Supported Agriculture E

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Left: CSA members say their children are much more likely to eat their vegetables if they have picked them. This little girl may discover that she likes tomatoes. Below: Farm chores such as planting, weeding and harvesting are shared as part of the payment agreement at Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts.

ne of the first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operations in the United States is Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts, a small town about 210 kilometers north of New York City The land, once owned by the Housatunnuck Indians, became a dairy farm in the early 1900s, and in路1985 was converted to CSA by a pioneer of the movement, Robyn Van En. Run today by Elizabeth Keen and Alexander Thorp, Indian Line grows more than 60 varieties of vegetables, fruits and herb,s, as well as cutting flowers. The 6.8-hectare CSA farm has about 140 members and a five-year waiting Iist for those who want to join. "We're actively looking for more land so we can capture more' that market, not because we need more money but be.cause people want to do this and I'd like for them to be able to," says Keen" who spent se\leral years working. with low-income farmers in Latin America before she and Thorp assumed leadership of Indian Line in 1997. "In Latin 'America, I was living and working with people who were growing food for themselves and working the land and that was part of their heritage," she says. "It sort of romanticized me at the time, but I also wanted to get my hands dirty-I enjoy physical work. I want-

ed to experience what it was like to grow my own food. I ended up coming to Indian Line and learning how much it really takes to be a farmer, And I also became very attached-to this particular place and AI and I decided to see if we could make the farm work," Indian Line's members "tend to be fairly well-educated and tend to be white," Keen says, "The vast majority are families with children, although we also have plenty of couples, some gay, some straight What they all have in common is that they are really concerned about where their food comes from, and about eating healthy food and high-quality food." Indian Line has prospered as the CSA movement has grown. The farm, which sells to members from ,early June to late November, offers a "regular share" for 24 weeks-a weekly collection of fresh-picked produce that feeds two adults or a small family-for $600. A same-size

"working share," which requires the member to spend 32 hours each season weeding, harvesting and transplanting, goes for $375. Many members who choose this option do so to teach their children about the food chain. "My 4-year-old, Henry, really likes it," says Jennifer Sahn, a 1O-year working member "He likes walking down into the fields, he likes the other children, and he likes to get dirty And I really appreciate that it allows him to understand where food comes from. We don't eat completely off the farm, only about half the year, but it's giving him a real sense of where stuff comes from." Although Keen and her customers enjoy the fresh-picked taste of Indian Line's fruits and vegetables, they and other CSA enthusiasts also stress that they are benefiting their community's economy as well as the environment as a whole, "I believe in supporting the local farmers," says Peggy Barrett, an eight-year working member. "And when you buy locally, you know that there hasn't been a lot of fossil fuel expended on air-freighting and trucking what you're eating to the store, Getting fresh produce, locally grown, and knowing where my food comes from-it all appeals to me. During last year's spinach scare, I wasn't nervous at all because I knew where our spinach came from," Like many in the CSA movement, Keen believes that Americans eat too much fast food and processed food products She is also concerned about the safety and security of items found in conventional supermarkets. "There's so much fear about what's going on in the world and in our country that food security is something people grab on to," she says "Last fall, with oil prices going so high, people were worried that maybe trucks weren't going to be able to get to the markets, That may be far-fetched, but people want a sense of security and everyone knows you have to eat, so food is the first thing they are going to think about In a larger sense, though, I believe we've got to change the way we eat We need a lot of new farmers in this country to satisfy the market of people who need good food and also to change the way the food system in this country works. CSA can help do that, and that's exciting." -SF

Due to an efficient global supply system, American consumers can buy their favorite fruits and vegetables any time of the year, practice fair and humane treatment of animals and of the plant life. We don't spray pesticides. We don't punish our land. I consider myself a land steward. I want to leave the land better than I found it every season." Price comparisons between CSA and store-bought food are imprecise because farms don't sell everything that is found in stores and supermarkets often hand out discount coupons and also engage in periodic price wars to attract shoppers. Itemto-item comparisons are also inexact when CSA members work on farms, since their hours are part'of what they pay. In a general sense, CSA"jJroducts are probably more costly, although Nelson says his produce is more expensive than in some stores and cheaper than in others. "I did a cost comparison study about nine months ago and what I found was that our produce was about $1.96 a pound, versus about $1.01 or $1.02 at a local supermarket," he sayS: "If you compare us to a Whole Foods [a major natiqpwide chain focused on organic foods], they're about $3.10 a pound: This isn't ~~ ...complete)y representative'though, because these 'other outlets sell a variety of conventional vegetables that we don't put in our mix." Jay and Jennifer Myers of Columbia, Missouri are CSA customers of Danjo Farms. Like many other families, they joined in part to introduce their daughters, Charity, 7, and April, 20, to the concept of food coming @ut'ofthe ground. "They loved looking at all the animals, but they weren't too fond on the hoeing,

tilling and all that," says Jay, adding that the Myers like knowing where their food comes from. "We see what goes into planting and growing and harvesting our food, and we don't have to worry about contaminants, or how long it sits somewhere. And we know we're helping local farmers, so that makes a big difference." Danjo supplies the Myers with a weekly package that includes a dozen eggs, fruits, nuts or berries and a 4.5-kilogram box of seasonal vegetables, some of them a surprise. "We get onions and squash and things we know, but we also get a few things we have to ask what they are, and then we get on the Internet and try to find recipes for them," says Jay, who estimates that Danjo's prod-

ucts are about the same price as the equivalent at his local supermarket. There are no precise numbers on how much of America's food comes from CSA. Barnett, noting that about five CSA farms join LocalHarvest every week, estimates that food sold locally may account for close to one percent of the overall food supply. Her estimate includes CSA; "UPick," where farmers open up a specific field to consumers and let them pick a basket at a set price; and farmers' markets, where consumers buy from stalls set up by farmers in city parking lots or closed-off streets. But whatever the percentage, almost everyone agrees that CSA is growing rapidly. "It's a newly invigorated outlet for produce and one that appeals to a lot of consumers," says Kathy Means, vice president of government relations and public affairs for the Produce Marketing Association, the leading produce trade group. However, while acknowledging its appeal, Means and other leaders of the mainstream food industry regard CSA as a niche market whose enthusiasts may be somewhat misinformed. "There may be some people who believe, erroneously, that local food is safer food, but the truth is that you can get sick just as easily from local food as food grown farther away," she says. "And if we say we're always going to eat local, then there are many consumers who would never eat another banana. Do we really want to eat in

a way that means folks north of a certain parallel never eat another banana, or folks in the south never eat apples? We are a global society. We're not going to close the door on that and we shouldn't want to, because there are a lot of good things associated with it." CSA has gotten a considerable boost from best-selling books by journalist Michael Pollan, and by Dr. David Kessler, who was commissioner 路of the ;Food and Drug Administration during the Bush anq . I Clinton admin,istrations. Pollan argues that Americans are fatter and less healthy partially because' they have forsaken "real" food in favor ,of highly-processed "foodlike" products containing a variety of suspect ingredients. Accurate or not, Pollan's assertions that Americans' dietary choices are linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer have rung true with many consumers. Kessler has essentially accused the food industry of manipulating consumers into eating food that's harmful to them.

Above: Picking green qeans seems to be delighting these young girls, who may just sample some of the crop right out of the field. Right: Many CSA members work on the farm as part of paying for the fruits and vegetables they receive. While the debate rages, America's ultra-competitive food industry (the average after-tax profit margin of a supermarket is about 1.5 percent) is paying CSA what may be the ultimate complimentselling more locally grown food. "Supermarkets are extremely sensitive to consumers' lifestyles," says Bill Greer, manager of communications for the Food Marketing Institute, whose approximately 26,000 food retailer members account for about three quarters of all retail food store sales in the United States. "People are more interested in locally grown food, and as a reflection of that there's more and more of it in the super-

markets. They are doing many of the things that CSA is doing, but on a much bigger scale. They are reaching out to local farmers more aggressively now and seeking local sources. The reason is simple-con_su_m_er_s_a_r_e_d_e_m_an_d_i_ng_it_.'_' ----~ Steve Fox is a freelance writer, former newspaper publisher and reporter based in Ventura, California.

Dracaenas grow slowly and retain their foliage for long periods of time. Plant them in regular potting mix and keep the soil moist, but don't let the pot sit in water. They grow best in bright, indirect sunlight, warm temperat res and low humidity.

NASA-sanctioned houseplants purify indoor air ou don't need exotic technology or expensive gadgets to remove pollutants from the air you breathe indoors. According to NASA studies, a selection of hardy, easy-care houseplants can help. NASA has been researching methods of cleansing the air so that future space stations can be kept fit for human habitation for extended periods of time. Researchers have discovered that many common houseplants "scrub" significant amounts of harmful gases-such as formaldehyde and benzene-out of the air through photosynthesis, absorbing pollutants and rendering them harmless in the soil.

These findings are especially relevant for inhabitants of newly constructed buildings, which are sealed tightly to conserve energy but consequently trap pollutants indoors. NASA researchers recommend that you have a minimum of two plants per [nine square meters] of floor space in your home or office. Best of all, you don't need to be a green thumb to incorporate these popular, low-maintenance houseplants into your _en_v_i_ro_n_m_en_t_.

Excerpted from Radish (Autumn 2008), published in Moline, Illinois. www.radishmagazine.com

Pothos looks like a philodendron, but it can be distinguished by its ridged stems. Pothos plants are vigorous climbers and look nice in a hanging basket. They're happiest in bright, indirect sunlight, warm temperatures and low humidity.

Heartleaf philodendrons grow better than most other houseplants under adverse conditions. They do well as long as they're kept warm, moderately moist and out of direct sunlight.

Snake plant. These plants, which develop clumps of strapshaped leaves that are [46 to 76 centimeters] tall, grow in almost any environment. Allow the soil to dry completely between waterings. Grow in any light intensity, from dim interior light to full sun.

Spider plants make excellent hanging plants, and while they prefer bright light, they're very adaptable to medium light. Because potbound spider plants produce plantlets, they're a great choice if you want to populate your living space or office with foliage.

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Long before best-selling books about eating locally grown produce, Wendy Johnson was cultivating an awareness of how foods grown au naturel can also feed the soul.

Long before Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver wrote s a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mjndfully muster up affection for many of the earth's best-selling books about eating foods grown locally, Johnson, with a long-necked English watering can perpetually in hand, species, with the possible exception of persimmondevouring gophers. was cultivating an awareness of how lettuce grown au naturel can also feed the soul. But poison heml.ock holds a special place in her heart. Without the pre~ence of this pernicious carrot look-alike, a "You should taste this place," she says, offering a visitor dried potent vertigo-indljj.;ing poison that when ingested can cause lemon verbena tea from the garden, her wide eyes bringing to death, she reasons, her garden would be all cloying lilac- and mind a surprised lemur. lily-scented perfection-boring, in short. The innocent-looking It is a cliche to say that gardening is meditative. But few have malevolent weed, which she allows meditated as long and as earnestto flourish for its capacity to, draw ly as Johnson, who arrived at "the rich minerals from the soil for comGulch" with a sweaty Kelty backpost, "gives the garden its punch," pack in 1975 after trekking much she says, "snapping me back to my of the way from Tassajara, a senses." rugged Zen outpost in the Like her beloved hemlock, Johnson Ventana Wilderness in CalifOlnia. In her new book, Gardening at has deep taproots in California. Her the Dragon s Gate: At Work in the own garden, bordered by a mountain creek with a vit:(w of the ·Pacific Wild and Cultivated World-part ',Ocean, lies down the road from the memoir, part Sunset magazine sitting on the floor mindfully eatGreen Gulch Farm Zen Center, ing a raisin in the zenda-she where she helped, pioneer the concept of organic gardening in the ponders such questions as whether it's O.K. for life embracing United States. Now the farnl's unofficial gardener emeritus, she lived at Buddillsts to crush snails (ask for»A Green Gulch for 25 years, marrying, giveness first) or to trap gophers "r brought the bougainvillea in from the greenhouse. It raising her two children and growing (breathe deep, then fence instead). wasn't happy out there. n produce for Greens Restaurant, For Johnson, who occasionalCopyright © The New Yorker Collection ] 996 which was founded by the center in ly waters the Buddha statue in George Booth from cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved. her greenhouse to, as she says, 1979.

Far left: Wendy Johnson, who gardens in Muir Beach, California helped pioneer the concept of organic farming in the United States. Left from top: Bull thistle, opium poppy, jasmine and narcissus flowers.

"bring him to life a little bit," gardening is about far more than Gravenstein apple trees or David Austin heirloom roses. It is to literally know "the heart and mind of your place," and in so doing, to know your own heart and mind as well. "I am often most alert and settled in tile garden when I am working hard, hip deep in a succulent snarl of spring weeds," she writes. "My mind and body drop away then, far below wild radish and bull thistle, and I live in the rhythmic pulse of the long green throat of my work." â&#x20AC;˘ Her looks betray her place: an unapologetic 60, Johnson has earthmotherly white hair, liver spots, knee socks and gnarly rose-scratched hands that horrify her two fashionable younger sisters in New York and Los Angeles. ('We'd .look like you if we didn't take care of ourselves!" they tell her-Iovingly, she insists.) '. . ! i Her primer':on meditati~n and gardening is' simi- ~ larly steeped in northern California, a place where, since the 1960s, cultivation of the land and the self ~ have been intertwined. Less widely known than ~ Chez Panisse or the Zen center's own restaurant, Greens, the farm has influence that has nevertheless "extended far beyond its terroir, a fertile dragon-shaped ;wath of what was once compressed ocean bottom at the foot of Mount Tamalpais': From'it germinated a movement toward "conscious eating and conscious growing, linked with the ethic of taking care of the land," says Randolph Delehanty, a San Francisco historian. The OJ

organic Buddhists, led by Johnson; her husband, Peter Rudnick; and two influential teachers, Alan Chadwick and Harry Roberts, were "among the first people to take the idea of stewardship of the land and make a lifestyle out of it," says Fred Bove, the former education director for the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society. As a gardener, Johnson combines the conventional and the not-so. She grows roses and apple trees but also advocates compost and manure teas to boost the immune systems of plants (add two or three cups well decomposed compost or live manure per gallon of water; steep for three days). A columnist for Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, she occasionally lapses into the woowoo in the book, defining "inter-being" as "looking mindfully at broccoli and beet plants" and knowing that you are all one. In her own garden, which she describes as "wild and bestial," a hot tub deemed ugly on the deck is concealed by tangles of jasmine, narcissus and other plants, including several opium poppies. "The bees love them," she observed of the poppies. "They're medicating themselves right and left." The hot tub overlooks a pond filled with rainwater where otters occasionally do the backstroke and frogs make chirping sounds at night (she holds the phone over the pond to comfort her daughter, Alisa, a freshman at Bard College in New York, when she is homesick). Johnson meditates daily here, sitting on the cushion she stores beneath the living room sofa, where the cat sleeps ("stray cats target Buddhist households," she says). Written in longhand over 13 years, the book, her first, published by Bantam, hints at but does not fully reveal Johnson's own circuitous path. She and Rudnick have lived "off campus" since 1998, when she inherited enough money to "move out into

She and her sisters, Deborah, a New York fashion designer, and Sally, an actress in Los Angeles, were raised with a French governess they called Nanny. (Yes, Eloise was her favorite book). Her parents divorced when Johnson was 13, and she divided her time between Westport and Manhattan, where her father "kept clothes so we could go to the theater," including a turquoise and gray houndstooth suit with patent leather shoes. Both parents have died, but she remains close to her stepmother, Sandy Johnson, the author of The Book of Tibetan Elders. A photograph of her in a satin dress on her 10th birthday at Sardi's Restaurant hangs on the wall. "I remember my father telling me, 'I have the best present for you,' " she says. "I thought it was a horse. Instead, it was tickets to the New York Yankees." Her father told her it was "really not conscionable" to go to college-she should be out protesting. But Johnson eventually wound up at Pomona College in southern California. Like many young seekers, she responded to the tumult of the Vietnam era by fleeing, spending her junior year in Israel, where, in 1972, she met her first "root teacher," Soen Nakagawa Roshi. A year later, she arrived at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center near Big Sur in California, where people walked around in black robes chanting in Japanese. "I felt I was making the most relevant decision," she says, "because the world didn't make sense to me." A fellow pilgrim was Annie Somerville, now the executive chef of Greens, with whom Johnson frequently collaborates on the "eating-garden relationship," including the cookbook Fields of Greens (Johnson is also an adviser to the Chez Panisse Foundation's Edible Schoolyard project at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California.) At Tassajara, Somerville recalled, Johnson insisted on planting comfrey, "a deeply mucilaginous plant with furry leaves that helps coagulate blood and tastes absolutely revolting." Johnson says: "There was a lot of sitting, chanting and meditatinK The garden kept me sane." - She felt profoundly disoriented upon leaving Tassajara, with its dry porous soil, for foggy Green Gulch, where she and Rudnick would get married and eventually plant their children's placentas beneath a now-flourishing crabapple tree. Her homesickness was less.ened only when she stumbled upon a huge, wild, red rose growing on a crest of the headlands, perhaps left by a long-gone rancher, a "north star" plant that emotionally anchored her by reminding her that she was on well-loved land. She takes stock of such touchstones, finding Zen perspectives even in compost. On a cold and windy New Year's Eve [in 2007], she and Rudnick headed out to the compost heap with five shopping bags full of outtakes from her book, "much of it purple prose," she says. She placed the discarded manuscripts on the pile, covering them with old weeds, hot manure and newly pulled poison hemlock to help them decompose. She put another batch of prose and weeds into a [208-liter] drum. Then, with lovingkindness toward herself, she lit it all. g-------~ _'_'I_t_w_a_s_h_u_g_e_Iy_sa_t_is_fy_i_n_ s_h_e_s_a_y_s_. _,'_'

Wendy Johnson's ga~jlen in California lies down the road from the Green Gulch Farm Z~n Center, seen in the distance overlooking the Pacific Ocean. the world," she says. Though she lives "one rung out" from the farm, as she puts it, she continues to teach gardening and meditation and serves as a mentor to young apprentices. She shares her home with her husband and their friend Mayumi ada, a Zen silk screen artist, who also spends time in Hawaii. The decor of her ~0IY!eis a heady mix of votive-lit Buddhist altars and moon calendars combined with schoolmarmish English teacups and other heirlooms from her grandmother's house on Mirror Lake in Lake Placid, New Y?rk. She grew up in Westport, Connycticut, the,..路daughter of 'an -independently wealthy, politically involved theater producer and a "wild gambIer" mother who spent much of her time in Manhattan teaching bridge at the Rege~cy Club and gambling at the Cavendish Club. (On Fridays she would say, "See you Monday.")

For more information: Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, http://www .slze.org/ggt! Gardening at the Dragon's Gate http://gardeningatthedragonsgate.eom/index.

htm I

Patricia Times.

Leigh Brown

is a contributing

writer for The New York

y peas are coming up-sugar snaps and snow peas-and the seeds I scattered out in my cold frame a month ago are now a blanket of baby greens, 1\ few mornings ago, while weeding, I popped a tiny bok choy seedling into my mouth and let its peppery, sweet flavor explode on my tongue. It's hard to describe the flavor of something so alive, hardly 10 seconds out of the earth, I want to say that it tastes green, but a grass blade does not taste like bok choy. It's something you have to experience yourself, after doing something as simple as planting basil in a window box, or salad greens in one big pot and a no-fail cherry tomato plant in another. Kitchen gardens are as old as the first hunter-gatherers who decided to settle down and watch the seeds grow. Walled medieval gardens protected carefully tend-

Kitchen gardens are, being rediscovered by a neW generation of Americans who worry about! what is in their vegetables and how much fuel was consumed to grow and transport them.

ed herbs, greens and fruit trees from marauders, both human and animal. The American colonists planted gardens as soon as they could, sowing seeds brought from Europe. Call them survivor gardens. Now, they are being discovered by a new generation of people who worry about just what is in that bag of spinach and how much fuel was consumed to grow it and to fly it 1,000 miles. Roger Doiron, a kitchen gardener in Scarborough, Maine, produced so many vegetables in 2007 that there were still a few rutabagas in his root cellar a year later. "Our seed order was $85, and we did not buy a single vegetable from June through January," he told me by phone. He hadn't planted peas yet, he said, but the spinach he planted the previous fall was greening up. Doiron, 42, spent 10 years in Belgium, running the "'Brussels headquarters of an

international envir~nmental group called Friends of the Emt~, where he dealt with contaminated food production issues like mad cow disease. He also met his wife, Jacqueline, there; she grew up in the Belgian countryside, and they often spent weekends there with her parents. "I would trail after my mother-in-law, watching her harvest things 1'd never seen growing before, liktS Brussels sprouts," Doiron says. "In Belgium, these people were eating out of the garden for three seasons, harvesting potatoes and salads nonstop." When he amt, his wife .returned to "Scarborough, his hometown, eight years ago, with three young sons, they bought a little Cape Cod ho~se with a white picket fence. And they planted their yard, front and back, with vegetables and herbs, not just because they had grown used to the taste of fresh, organic food, but because Doiron wanted a flagship for the revolution. Kitchen Qm:deners International (www. kitchengardeners.org) a nonprofit organization Doiron founded in 2003, is a virtual

community of 15,000 gardeners from 100 countries. On the Web site, where you can learn how to compost or grow garlic, a YouTube video shows tile Doirons in their front yard. Swiss chard and cukes have replaced grass, and a sign poking out of the pumpkin patch reads "1,500 Miles/400' Gallons/Say What?" (The miles refer to the average distance food travels "from field to fork," Doiron says; 400 gallons [or 1,514 liters] to the amount of oil he believes are used to make pesticides, fertilizer and aniTal feed, and to transport cattle and the hke,.to feed one person for one year.) "We're trying to reframe the backyard in terms of global sustainability, without losing any of the fun," says Doiron, who manages to make a living from donations to his

For more information: National Gardening Association http://www .garden. org/home Friends of the Earth http://www.foe.org/

Doiron is actually suggesting a return to a tradition as old as the founding fathers. John Adams planted a vegetable garden at the White House to feed his family, "because back then, presidents had to fund their own household," says Rose Hayden-Smith, a historian and gm'den educator based at the University of California in Davis. During World War I, to save fuel and labor, President Woodrow Wilson had sheep grazing on the White House lawn. His wife, Edith, planted vegetables to inspire the Liberty Garden campaign, in which thousands of students, called "Soldiers of the Soil," grew their own food in their schools and communities, she says. As the Allied powers began to win, the nan1e Liberty Garden was changed to Victory Garden. Just after Pearl Harbor, Hayden-Smith says, another Victory Garden campaign was started. Eleanor Roosevelt grew peas and carrots on the White House lawn, and by the end of the war, Hayden-Smith says, "Americans were producing 40 percent of the country's produce" in their gm'dens. So here we are, at war again, with gasoline over [$2.50] a gallon and a bag of possibly polluted spinach about the smne price. Though overall garden sales m'e slightly down, according to the National Gardening Association survey, from 2007, vegetable gardening sales are up by 22 percent and herb gardening sales are up by 52 percent.

new edition. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are not discussed either. "I used to say, 'I prefer to use compost and add organic matter, but if you use chemical fertilizer, you could do this,' " Damrosch says. Now "there's none of the if-you-dos. Nobody is coming to me and saying, 'I want to garden with chemicals.'" These new gardeners are not necessarily back-to-the-land types. "I think a lot of the young ones are in search of authenticity," Damrosch says. "They still have their iPods and their BlackBerrys, but they're interested in crafts and knitting and acoustic music. They don't like the fake. They can see through stuff." Also, many of them grew up with environmentalism. Creasy says: "They have been trained in schools to look at the consequences of what we're doing. My kids dissected a lung from a smoker in the sixth grade. They study frogs that have been put in ponds with too many pesticides." What's the san1e for everyone is the joy of tasting that first, just-dug-up potato. "It seems like a miracle," Damrosch says. "Like buried gold. And the flavor is

I've been growing vegetables since I was a child. I don't remember anyone ever saying, could you run out and grab some Merveille des Quatre Saisons from the kitchen garden? We just grew lettuce in the vegetable garden. But my gurus took me far beyond the chemical fertilizers and pesticides of my father's garden: lL. Rodale, who preached the religion of compost; Shepherd and Ellen Ogden, who started the Cook's Garden, a mail-order seed company in Vermont that carried French heirlooms; Barbara Darnrosch, whose Garden Primer was my mud-stained bible; and Rosalind Creasy, who shook up her neighbors in Los Altos, California, in 1984, when she dug up her front lawn to plant edibles. Creasy's book, The Complete Book of Edible l.£mdscaping (Sierra Club Books, 1982), started a little revolution of its own. Now she is working on a revision, scheduled to be out in 2010. Interestingly, in March 2008, Darmosch put out a revised edition of The Garden Primer that reflected a greater understanding of the environment, from invasive species to the science of soil. ''I'm a recovered double-digger," she says, refening to the English tradition of digging deep into the soil and reversing its layers. Doing so. destroys the soil's structure and the complex civilization underground; there's RO double-digging in the

_in_c_re_d_ib_l_e_."

Anne Raver writes about gardening, nature and the environment for The New York Times.

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"Here's some baby spinach-from Copyright Edward

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my soil to your plate."

Koren from carloonbank.com.

2008

Making

aTerrace Garden f I had only a few pots on a terrace, or a tiny outdoor plot, I would grow one big pot or a square foot of mesclun, a mix of salad greens that includes arugula, Japanese mustard, endive, and red and green lettuces. Simply fill a pot with a mix of potting soil and organic compost, and moisten well. Sprinkle the seeds over the surface, cover with a quarter inch of compost and water lightly to moisten the seeds. As the first baby greens grow, pullout any weeds and thin out the mesclun, eating the leaves you pull Start more greens every couple of weeks, and move the pots into semi-shade when hot weather arrives. Or switch to heat-tolerant lettuces, like oak leaf and buttercrunch. Fill a few smaller pots with herbs: Italian parsley, Genovese basil, dill, oregano, bay and rosemary. Plant one or two no-fail tomatoes, one each to a large pot, or one to a two-squarefoot plot: one cherry type, like Mexico Midget, Jaune Flamme or Sungold, and a big juicy producer like Big Beef, Better Boy or Rutgers. (Plants are readily available at farmers' markets and plant sales or by mail order, from www.burpee.com, www.seedsavers.org wwwwhiteflowerfarm.com and others) Add a Meyer lemon in a big pot, if you have a sunny spot where it can winter indoors, and you can enjoy organic lemons all year. Edible flowers, like my favorite, Empress of India nasturtiums, can be tucked into pots or garden beds, and plucked as a spicy garnish for salads. -A.R.

ars honk. Rain falls. Health officials pay surprise visits. Still, they keep on serving up hot, delicious food at prices that everyone who works in the nearby skyscraper office buildings-fromjanitors to managers-can afford. These are New York City's culinary warriors, the famed street vendors who often start their days at 4 a.m. in order to serve the lunchtime hordes. Street vendors are sometimes looked down upon as serving cheap, unsanitary food. Yet, in

Left top: Balwant Singh, owner of an Indian food cart in New York City. Left: Meru Sikder serves biryani during the 2009 Vendy Awards in New York City.

Top: Chicken cooks at Sammy's Halal food cart. Above: Patrons line up at the Country Boys taco truck run by Fernando and Jolanda Martinez during the Vendy Awards.

the United States, the profession is beginning to gain respect from celebrity chefs, the national press, advocacy organizations and everyday people looking for healthy, fast food that fits their budgets. Street food is celebrated with special events in San Francisco and Los Angeles in California, but the New York City Vendy Awards are arguably the best-known; the Oscars of street food. The fifth annual Vendy competition took place on September 26, 2009 in Flushing Meadows Park, the site of the 1964 World's Fair.

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Left: The staff at the 53rd and 6th halal cart prepare to serve customers. Left below: Thiru Kumar, also known as the Dosa Man, wheels his food cart in Washington Square

Park at Sullivan Street in New York City. Below: Mohammed Rahman serves lunchgoers at his street cart, Kwik Meal, in New York City.

Meru Sikder, Biryani Cart Specialty: Kathi rolls Freddy Zeidaies, King of Falafel Specialty: Chicken gyro platter with pickled turnips Kenny Lao, Rickshaw Truck Specialty: Dumplings

South Asian vendors have been regular finalists for the awards and have once taken home the top prize. Thiru "Dos a Man" Kumar frotTIJaffna, Sli Lanka, won the 2007 Vendy f\ward. Bangladeshi chef Meru Sikder's Biryani Cart took the People's Choice Award (considered by some to be the most important prize) in

2008.

Beyond the Biryani Cart's second try at the award, South Asian flavors dominated in some totally unexpected food offerings this year. An ice cfeam cart offered toasted, curried coconut as a topp'ing, and another vendor handed out curry and apple flavored cookies. !

The event not only offers great exposure for the vendors, but serves as a fundraiser for the Street Vendor Project, affiliated with the international movement StreetNet, headquartered in South Africa. India's own- branch, the Patna, Bihar-based National Alliance of Street Vendors of India, is also part of the network. These organizations work as street vendor advocates with local governments in order to make legal processes, such as the distribution of permits, work more effectively. Plus, since many vendors in the United States are immigrants, they often need help navigating the legal

South Asian vendors have been regular finalists and have once taken home the top prize.

O'Neill Reid, The Jamaican Dutchy Specialty: Jerk chicken (a Jamaican marinade of herbs and spices) Fernando and Jolanda Martinez, Country Boys/Martinez Taco Truck Specialty: Huarache (a Mexican dish with a fried cornmeal base, topped with meat, salsa, etc.) Other award categories include the 2009 Rookie of the Year (for vendors in business for less than a year) and Desserts.

Vendy Awards http://streetvendor. org/vendys/ The National Association of Street Vendors of India nttp://www.nasvtnel.org current events_ detail.php?id=5

Right: Rude Mechanical Orchestra performs during the Vendy Awards. Right center: Sayeed Khorsheed (from left), Amad Ismail, Garry Jendy, Patrick Almaliki and Ruben Villaviceinco have lunch at Rafiqi's at 52nd and Park Avenue in New York City. Below, from left: Celebrity chef Bobby Flay tries kathi rolls by Meru Sikder during the filming of a TV program on the Vendy Awards; falafel sandwiches made by Freddy Zeidaies; the rice and meat platter at 53rd and 6th halal cart in New York City; and Fernando and Jolanda Martinez of Country Boys/Martinez Taco Truck with their 2009 Vendy Awards troph짜.

Americans are becoming much more comfortable with the hygiene levels of street vendors, especially in light of the strict health inspections they are subject to. requirements needed to set up shop on the city streets. That's where the project's founder, Sean Basinski, comes in. "Every day [we] go out on the streets to talk to vendors," he says. "We go to court to fight for their rights, and we organize meetings where vendors can fight for their own rights." Basinski used to run a burrito cart before he went to law school. That experience laid the foundation for what has become his life's work. "I never did it with the intention that we would be here today," he says. "I just wanted to make a few bucks and I liked the idea of being my own boss." That same allure is what drove 2009 finalist Sikder to open up his own cart. After coming to the United States in 1993 and working as a banquet chef in a hotel for many years, Sikder says he always dreamed of opening his own restaurant in New York City. The start-up costs were too high, though, so he started to think about alternatives. He's had the cart for seven years now, and has never looked back. Since winning the People's Choice Award in 200~, he says his business increased 40 p~rcent. He already owns another cart right next to his original, and is planning to expand further next year. "It's the land of opportunity in America. My first job was Rumping gas!" he says with a smile. Of course, there are many successful

vending businesses that don't make it to the awards. Balwant Singh, an immigrant from Phagwara, Punjab, has been running a successful Indian food cart on Park Avenue in Manhattan, New York City for the past six years. A full meal is cheap even for street food-just $5. He holds an official permit for his location and doesn't move around, which makes his daily business easier. "In India, the police often chase you," he says. "Here, there is no hassle. I have an LD. and I can park in peace." As to the spice factor, Singh reports that he keeps it moderate to please the general American palate, but adds, "I keep extra chilies for Indians." Hilary Sadoo, a long-time New York resident, doesn't mind the spice at all. She frequents Sammy's Halal cart, which, after winning the 2006 Vendy Award, has been able to expand to multiple locations across the city. Sadoo believes that Americans are becoming much more comfortable with the hygiene levels of street vendors, especially in light of the strict health inspections they are subject to. "The fear is subsiding I think," she says. "The food is probably actually fresher than a restaurant because it's all out in the open and there's a high turnover. ... My mother came here from Minnesota, and was terrified of street food until I gave

her some. And then she said, 'I could eat this every day.' " Jehangir Mehta, one of the award judges, is a chef originally from Mumbai who has become a celebrity in the United States, thanks to his appearance on the TV show Iron Chef He loves street food, but is careful to eat only at select outlets in India because of hygiene. Mostly, he says, eating well and staying healthy is a matter of what your body is accustomed to. Mehta was also impressed that small, immigrant-run businesses were receiving so much attention. "People are looking beyond where this man came from .... They are looking to what that person can do. It's so nice to see we are living in a culture like that." Illustrating the sheer popular appeal of his spicy, juicy kathi rolls, Sikder took home the People's Choice Award for the second year in a row. But the top prize went to Fernando and Jolanda Martinez's Country Boys cart, which specializes in traditional Mexican food. Fernando, an immigrant who struggled to speak English, thanked the crowd while a band played, cameras flashed and TV reporters thrust microphones toward him. "We are so happy to know that people love our food," he said. ~ Erica Lee Nelson is a Washington, D.C.based writer. She and her husband, Indian photographer Sebastian John, married in New Delhi.

he 24,300-ton cruise ship that docked in Chennai in October didn't carry camera-laden tourists just anxious to visit the famous beaches of southern India. Rather, it brought 520 American university students for reallife lessons that will earn them college credit as they sail around the world for a semester. On the ship and off, the classes are nothing like a normal campus. One learning session occurred in a community center near a huge, open sewer in a Chennai shantytown. Five American university students and several Indian students from a local Rotary Club offshoot, Rotaract, were discovering what it takes to make a sustainable difference in the lives of people they want to help. "For 100 dollars, we can get two water purifiers and 50 mats for the kids to sleep on," says Caroline Langford, a student from University Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. The $100 comes from the American students' own pockets; With input from their Chennai counterparts they decided what路 they could afford to do and what would have to wait. The real-world application of the lesson for the shantytown is whether the 50 young children who sleep in the community center will have mats between them and the cold floor and the nearby residents would have cleaner water, or whether women learning a trade there will have fans to keep them comfortable so they can continue learning and working. Rotarians had built the center to train women as beauticians, tailors and computer technicians. The water quality in the area is tolerable, but many children become ill every month. About 50 children, aged 4 and 5, sleep on the floors of the center at night. The computer room and the beauty parlor do not have fans and it can get stifung in the 38-degree summers. The residents would like all three problems solved. But the $100 will not cover everything: For 10 minutes, the students debate the

pros and cons of investing in an answer for each problem as their professor, Bernard Strenecky, observes, seeing how they turn his classroom lectures into lasting solutions. L. Jayashree, a Chennai student, chips in: "If they drink clean water, they won't get sick. Their health will improve. And if they can sleep on mats instead of on the cold floor, they will also be well rested. There will be improvement on two fronts. The fans can wait. We can make that the second project." Heads nod. And a "$100 Solution" has been found. The $100 Solution teaching program was created by Strenecky in 2005, in collaboration with the Rotary Club of Prospect/Goshen in Kentucky. He uses it to bring his students face-toface with applications of the lectures and reading he gives them in classes aboard the ship M.Y. Explorer. The ship's stop in Chennai was part of the 100th voyage of the Semester at Sea program.

Langford had only been ashore a couple of days before she was participating in the decision about how best to spend $100 to benefit some of the poorest resideqts of the city. Other students undertake projects such as painting walls and planting trees or they meet with local writers, thinkers, activists and political leaders. Semester at Sea, which began in 1963, aims at providing students with the skills to compete in a rapidly globalizing world.

Students from American universities sign up to spend one semester aboard the ship, taking courses with leadership or global relations elements as they sail around the world. Classroom work is supplemented with field visits and individual studies. Many students spend two or three days with local hosts, often in villages, to get a better

understanding of the lives of people they have studied about. The ship sails to eight to 12 countries three times a year, with 500 to 700 students and 30 teachers, nearly all of them from the United States. The emphasis is on having fun while learning. At the same time, there are few parties, no drinking, no smoking and of course, no drugs. In fact, the casino and bars of M.V. Explorer house classrooms. Tuition and passage cost about $21,000 for the cheapest rooms and about $30,000 for suites. Some 40 percent of the students receive financial aid. Academic credits are awarded by the University of Virginia and are transferable to the 280 universities from which the students come.

The M.V. Explorer in Honolulu, HazZjaii.

Far left: Caroline Langford (center) and other students of the Semester at Sea program worked with a Rotary Club unit to come up with a $100 solution to a Chennai community center's problems. Left: Students at an Art of Living Foundation yoga session in Chennai. Above: F.J. Gavaller of California Lutheran University fries vadas during a cookery show hosted by Mallika Badrinath as part of the Semester at Sea program in Chennai. "We are committed to providing profoundly transformative study-abroad experiences that emphasize global exchange and awareness," says Academic Dean Robert Chapel. "We will continue to make a positive world impact by developing leaders who have the knowledge and perspective necessary to promote greater understanding of all peoples and all cultures." The $100 Solution teaching program is one of the unique features of the Semester at Sea curriculum. In recent months, students have donated money to buy goats in a village in Tamil Nadu; ceiling fans for stuffy classrooms in Accra, Ghana; English language textbooks for senior citizens in Hong Kong; and a hot water heater for an orphanage in Saigon, Vietnam, to allow kids to take a hot bath for the first time in their lives. Members of the Global Nomads Group, an international NGO that creates interactive educational programs for students about global issues, are traveling on the ship to document the program and to see what has been achieved so far. "These projects are all sustainable," says Strenecky. "Problems can be solved not by millions of dollars but by small sums of money, with a good heart. People are appreciative of the work and, on behalf of the U.S., we are spreading a lot of goodwill." Forty such field activities, some of them purely tourism-oriented, fill the five days in India for the students and faculty.

Right: Semester at Sea students funded a water purifier for children at a community center in Chennai. Far right: Students paint a room at a school for poor children. "Twenty years ago, there was little or no awareness about India," says Hamsapriya Srinivasan, who has been coordinating the twice-yearly visits for the past two decades. "Even the faculty used to say, 'You speak good English.' They knew very little about India," she says. "With India becoming so prominent now, their views have changed. The Indian students interact with their American counterparts. They go shopping together, they eat together. They make longstanding friendships. It builds their confidence. For the Americans, it provides them a global focus." The teachers say American students usually tend to focus on their immediate area, so the visits to several countries over about 100 days in the fall and spring passages help broaden their perspective. The summer voyage usually lasts 65 to 70 days and is confmed to a specific region. The current voyage covers Spain, Morocco, Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China and Japan. So far, more than 50,000 students from 1,500 institutions have studied and traveled to 60 countrie~ as part of Semester at Sea programs. Sorpe of them have come back, as faculty. Byron Howlett is one of these. "I was on Semester at Sea 21 years ago, as a student," says Howlett, who is now dean of students. "I came to India not knowing what to expect. But the people were so warm and embracing, I fell in love with India." It's Howlett's third voyage to India. In Chennai, Howlett goes around persuading fence sitters to take part in a reception aimed at providing them a window into Indian culture. "If there's one program you shouldn't miss, it's this," he tells them. The idea behind most programs is for Americans to take interest in a community activity and contribute something to the

Semester at Sea http://www .semesteratsea. org/ The $100 Solution htlp://www.semesteratsea.org/our-100thvoyage/overview/the-$100-solution.php

people. Henry Thiagaraj, organizer of one such visit to a poor school in Chennai, says: "From past experience, I've found that the American students want to work and give their labor. So, we encourage that." Hours after sailing into Chennai, he leads two dozen students to the AIWC Primary School. They scrub the walls of a room and paint it yellow ochre; others fix blackboards or plant saplings. "It was fun," says Joanna Greene. "I'm all excited about this school. The welcome by the kids was simply amazing. All the love and affection they showed. Everyone wanted their pictures taken. And they would ask to see it!" Her fellow student, Joey Coe, from Western Kentucky University, says: "I was taken aback at how lively they were. There were so many kids. It was so beautiful and I'm happy that we were able to touch their lives." Some programs, such as the one conducted by the Art of Living Foundation, try to help people get in touch with their feelings. "Laugh your problems away! Laugh your worries away!" says Niharika Peri as fhe leads 30 students through a brisk session. of yoga and meditation at a beachside cultural center. The yoga session has left the students limp and they flop down for a 20minute relaxation program. "I thought this session was going to be more about yoga and meditation," says Jeremy Sloane, from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. "But it was more like self development. It was really interesting to dive into all the stuff that we never thought of before. I discovered so many things about myself," he says.

While more than 400 students decide to fly to the Taj Mahal, take in the bathing ghats of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh or tour New Delhi's monuments, a handful of them choose to visit rural areas. Fourteen students board an overnight train to the town of Erode in Tamil Nadu. Another group, of nine, brave a longer journey to the southern tip of India, to Nagercoil. The activities are varied: bathing in a farm well, trying to climb a coconut tree, tapping latex from a rubber tree, watching women draw intricate rice powder patterns on the floor at dawn, or seeing farmers in rice fields and laborers plucking cardamom pods. Visits to Hindu temples and retreats provide an insight into the religion. "It was a great cultural experience seeing the real India," says Madison Henry. "It allowed for the transmission of ideas with the local people and to compare and contrast urban and rural India." Hosts Padmanabhan Kumaraswamy and his wife, Latha, find the departure of the students from their Nagercoil home difficult to handle. "We had a great time with them. The house is so empty and quiet now." The executive dean of the Semester at Sea's 100th voyage, Nicholas Iammarino sums it up: "If the students come back with an appreciation of how small our global village really is, if they come back wanting to do more in and for the world, then I'll know I did my job." ~ Krishnan Guruswamy is a freelance editor, writer and photographer based in Palghat, Kerala.

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he goal is to work ourselves out of the job," says Joelle Uzarski, the new Reglon"ai English Language Officer assigned by the.U.S. State Department to help teachers â&#x20AC;˘ across South .Asia learn ~better ways of teaching students to speak the global language. Uzarski, who has a Master's in teaching English as a second language, arrived in New Delhi in September and has been traveling almost nonstop since then, allover India and neighboring countries. "You never go in 'Yithout knowing who the teachers are and"what they need," she says. She is meeting with teacher associations, universities, schools and individuals to learn

more about how her office can help reachers of English, particularly in non-elite public schools, get training, resources, tools, whatever would help them to teach better. "And then the next step is helping them be eJllPowered so that they can help their colleagues. So that in the perfect world there is no need for a RELO (Regional English Language Officer) someday." Although the RELO office coordinates some programs that directly impact disadvantaged children who learn to speak English in a short time, it is implemented by training teachers first. "One teacher might teach 50 students or 200 students in the course of a year and so that is why we focus almost all of our resources and time

Ambassador Timothy J. Roemer points to a map of the United States to show children at Deepalaya School in New Delhi where his home state, Indiana, is located. His October 9 visit was part of a lesson under The English Access Microscholarship Program, which helps teachers train students to speak English. and energy on teachers," Uzarsld says. Uzarski is the second Regional English Language Officer in South Asia, having replaced Richard Boyum. He opened the office in 2005 and has now moved on to work in South America, effectively trading posts with Uzarski. "In South Asia and in India certainly there has been a long, wonderful tradition of English as a literary subject with emphasis on literature and on the reading sldlls," says Boyum. "Now, what young people are finding in today's world is that there is a real market demand for communication skills. The traditional way that English has been taught using a text of literature, some translation, some memory work, acquaints people with the English language and literary culture, but the classroom procedures do not really emphasize the active sldlls, the oral skills." Boyum estimates hundreds of teachers and thousands of children were trained in English teaching and speaking over the past four years in India and neighboring

countries under the RELO program, and it is expanding. In Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, for example, "we have trained 20 trainers, who then go back to their locations in state colleges. And we worked with 150 or 170 state colleges in each of the three states. Those trainers have gone around and given twoweek courses to all the English lecturers. So literally hundreds and hundreds of teachers in those states have benefitted from this new methodology and teaching," he says. Over the past 20 to 30 years, Boyum says, "many methods around the world have been developed to specifically address oral communication. That is what we have been doing here, sharing those techniques, those classroom procedures, those activities to help the traditional English teacher shift a bit from a purely lit- 'I< erary approach to a student-centered, inter- ~ ~ active, language education approach." a5 Boyum says the training involves "a lit- I tle bit of theory and a lot of practice." The fortable with small group work, and pair teachers are taught in the same way they work and having the learners be responsiare to teach their students. "Learning a ble for the learning. So the teachers are language is like an athletic skill," Boyum learning to teach effective communicative says. "You can't swim without jumping in skills without losing controL" the water and you can't learn to speak It's understandable that children get without speaking. So that's why our focus excited when they are learning to use their has been on training teachers in student- new skills and interacting with each other. centered, interactive methodology to pro- That's how teachers react, too, when they mote these language communication are participating in conferences and semiskills that are so important to get a good nars where they learn new techniques by job in today's marketplace." doing them with each dthel~' Some of the techniques include using In Chile, for example, U zarski says her folk songs, making up new o~es, creating office provided a one-week intensive simple poems, drawing posters and then teacher training camp during the winterexplaining them, but working in teams so students must speak to each other in English to complete the project, then giving them confidencetoexplain their project in front of the class, or to visitQfs. Commenting on a traditional style in which "the teac?er lectures.,. the student takes notes and then memorizes what they are taught," Uzarski says emphatically, "for learning a language these methods do not work at all." The new methods, with all the student interaction and students speaking up, can make some teachers "nervous about surrendering control of the classroom," she say~. "And in the beginning, sometimes students are not accustomed to this and they do get out of control until the rule is set and everybody becomes com-

Above: Richard Boyum, the former Regional English Language Officer (RELO) for South Asia, in his American Center office with English teaching materials just before his departure. Right: Since her arrival in September, the new RELO, Joime Uzarski, has been traveling nonstop to meet with teachers throughout South Asia.

break, which occurs in July. That made it possible to bring academics from the United States, having their summer break, to train the Chilean teachers "pn topics the teachers said they want the training on." Despite the high ranking of the academic trainers, they weren't there to lecture. "The trainer talks for five minutes and then the participants start working with each other, practicing things, whether that is role-plays, materials development, actually doing things. By the end of the week each teacher is presenting something to the group of 30 other teachers, giving a short mini-lesson, demonstrating something." Amirullah Khan, a professor in the Department of English at Aligarh Muslim University is one of the teacher-trainers who has worked with the RELO office to share English-teaching skills with teachers at madrassas in India. At a training session in July; Khan was assisted by

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Kevin McCaughey, an American English Language Fellow, who is an Arabic speaker. "Kevin told me later these madrassa teachers were the best lot oj teachers he has ever encountered. They were able to produce language games by the end of the week. They were so excited they produced three or f2Uf language lessons, music lessons, word building lessons." One activity the teachers 'learned, which they can reproduce in the classroom, was to draw a simpl~ object such as an apple or a cricket bat and then start talking about it. "One can say, 'I like this apple. It keeps, me healthy,' or 'I like cricket. My favorite cricketer is Sachin Tendulkar,' " Khan explains. "These are vocabulary building exercises. Most of them were also made to write poems converted into a song. Leaming to speak and listen." Bel'says the poems were basic, such as: "I live in the sea. You live next to me. Don't throw your trash. Keep my

~ home clean. I am a fish." In no time, the I teachers were able to write their own poems in English, using the language in everyday ways. Since the training, Khan says, "Each day I keep on receiving calls from them, very excited about their students' response, asking, 'When are you going to conduct another workshop?' " Some have produced CDs with languagelesson songs. "English is the lingua franca here in India and the whole world. Without English it is difficult to proceed through life. The madrassa teachers know that their students must try to master English. In order to express themselves, to spread their message, they must master English," Khan says. At the same time, "There are a lot of misconceptions if you are unable to read what others have written" or understand what others have said. "Everything can be resolved through reading and dialogue." He says most of the teachers "were in tears when they departed. All the participants now carry our telephone and e-mail address and we'll likely have another session." Other schools have heard of the program and its advantages are spreading by word of mouth, he says. Uzarski talks about the benefits of bringing teachers together to share ideas, and letting them form networks to keep chatting on-line. "One teacher thinks of an idea, and then another, and it just builds and builds and they share how they can adapt it, they have small professional networks so they can stay in touch with each other and support each other," she says. Boyum also feels the future lies with Intemet connections, so that teachers ~can share ideas and view materials on-line as well as take Internet courses. The RELO office provides scholarships to teachers in t India to take on-line university teaching ' courses, allowing them to interact with teachers in other countries as well as with a U.S.-based professor, but so far this has been limited by the lack of Web connections for non-urban schools. This is why the Regional English Language Officer works closely with teacher associations, as well as with universities and NGOs that partner in providing venues for conferences. The RELO office also gives booklets, journals, language-learning games to teachers in the

For more information: RELO in India http://newdelhi.usembassy.gov/reloi

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Regional English Language Officers http:// exchanges. state.gov/eng 1ishteach ing/reg-e 1officers. html#south%20asia programs and makes many of these available in American libraries in India. The office also sends to India English Language Fellows, who must have a university degree and experience in teaching English for their lO-month assignments, working with teachers associations to set up seminars, conferences and interactive learning opportunities, including on-line. The three fellows in India now actually have much higher qualifications than required, Uzarski says. Why do Americans care so much about South Asians learning to speak English well? "English is a tool that most of the people in the world need. For example, more people speak English as a second language than as a first language," says Uzarski. "Since English is our native language, we are working toward helping to get that tool to as many people who want it. A second reason is that people who have English skills can get jobs ... and therefore they will be able to contribute to the socioeconomic health of their communities. It makes for a more secure and positive world .... " A principal program partner in India is Maya Pandit-Narkar, vice chancellor of the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, which trains teachers from across South Asia and Southeast Asia. "We are reaching down to underdeveloped areas, not urban-center teachers," she says. "The non-native English-speaking teachers are reflected in the materials ... and the Americans are very conscious of the multicultural approach. They have crafted a course that takes care of the local needs." She calls this "a much more democratic" approach which benefits from allowing teachers to use their local culture-songs, tales, traditional practices-in teaching the children to use English as an everyday tool. And, she says, "this is improving the teachers' own proficiency in the classroom." ~

Ashim Kumar Chatterjee, New Delhi It is indeed heartening to note from the publisher's letter that an increasing number of Indian students are getting opportunities to study in U.S. universities. As in all societies, education is valued in India by people irrespective of their background and position in life, and yet quality education is in acutely short supply. New significant initiatives have been taken to bring quality education and there is a sizable section which is willing to pay more in higher levels in professional fields. It follows, therefore, that there is a vast scope of collaboration between U.S. private and state universities and Indian universities to end the shortage of quality educational institutions, bring down the cost without sacrificing standards and make it more affordable. One hopes that this matter is taken up by the leadership of both countries for collaboA LETTER ration in education, not in tiny FROM THE drops but in leaps and bounds PUBLISHER anYOllhe~irPlanes flying lrom India Collaborations can be designed to the Umted Stales over the paSl few weeks have been tull of s\u~ with financial viability to be sus-

dents, on tt1eir way 10 American universilieS, colleges and high schools. Many 01 them are among the 94,563 Indians wtlo studied in the United Stales last year, the most ever, and have been returning to continue ttleir classes after spending the summer at home. ThoUsands more, most with a parent or two along as a traveling escOft. were lJOingto the United Stales lor the first time. to begin the biggest adventure ollhe;r lives so tal Not only willihey be learning much more aboullheir fields 01 interest. but about the world beyond their own homes and country and the profound similarities in values, despite cul~ turalditlerences, thai connecl Indians and Americans. In the pages ot this. SPAN's annual education issue, several of these Indian students and professors with academic experience in the United States have shared their advice and tips with our readers. Vishal Gupta. who has studied at three American universities and is now a professor there, even passes along some advice Irom Rabindranath Tagore on how an Indian can get Ihe besl from an educalion in the UniledStates Andlhis is the right time lor students and their parenlsor relalives to read this information because anyone hoping to study in the United States in the next academic year, 2010~2011, should start planning nowl Researching un;versilies, finding oul about living conditions and academic requiremenls, writing letters seeking admission, assessing costs and ensuring that all admission tests are taken and fees paid are some 01

tainable. A.S. Shenoy, Kochi, Kerala It is gratifying to note from the publisher's letter in the September/ October 2009 issue of SPAN that more than 94,500 Indian students have gone to the USA for higher studies I am also proud to read that educational exchanges between India and the United States are growing and many American

university students are doing internships in India. Apart from education~1 exchange programs, such mutual exchanges end in cultural exchange progrilJlls as many parents of students going to the USA get opportunities to visit the United States and know more about American culture, which creates a cultural bond between Indians and Americans.

Amit Roy, Ko/kala SPAN magazine has highlighted the 40th anniversary of man on the moon .. It was a ,small step with a human footprint but a very big step for humanity. India s Chandrayaan, In Its maiden mission to orbit the moon has struck liqUid gold ' with the help of NASA; it ~has discovered the presence of water on the moon. It is a celebration of human endeavor and evolution. I welcome more cooperation between India and America in the area of space explor~tion.

S. Raghunatha Prabhu A/appuzha, Kera/a Arjun Bhasin's "More Than Just Intellectual Growth" and other articles on education in America were very interesting and informative. I have great admiration for American education. Higher education is America's best industry. No wonder, the USA has eight of the top 10 universities in the world. That is why the USA has been the world's most important, continuing source of new ideas and the greatest number of Nobel laureates happen to be from America.

More Than Just

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Harshida Ramu Pandit, Mumbai ~~~~ni ~~u5d~~19a~;h~~~versity of Southern California in Los Angeles helpful in reminiscing m: ~a~:~~s dl;y;~lte;hcee~ithe recent issue was congratulate you as well as all the stude pe age of 82. I must ~i~e~ about the educational facilities a~~s:~~~i~r:~~:d~:~POS-

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iln~~~s~ i~eth~SUbject and try to be he:I~~ fUlli~ ~Iro~ea~~~:: pleased to read the comm·ents. ne IClary. Therefore, I was very In 1966, I visited the U S und th US . . a short seminar course fo; 1'0 w er e EFI-Fulbflght program for in students' personnel . eeks a~ the University of Minnesota Women's U· . services. I utilized the training at S NOT nlverslty where I taught psych I f 2 . . .. using this at one NGO oogy or 5 years. I am still (A.K. Munshi Yojana)

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Responsl'bl'l alter my retirement. I have passed on the issue to students who ytf1}:§§ are going to the USA ~~::;';1 ":;=:::',,"':·~:ll f or further studies. 5.?-"i§5:::=:: Education in the USA ~~~€=.~~~ was more than an §'~~~=.:~1 adventure and was very useful. ?:::-::S".::'f32

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The US. Army displayed 17 of its Stryker armored vehicles, the largest U.S. Stryker deployment outside Iraq and Afghanistan, during exercises with the Indian Army in Babina, Uttar Pradesh at the end of October. The drill focused on a UN peacekeeping scenario, and included live-fire exercises, joint planning and maneuvers, cordon, search and rescue. In the photograph, U.S. soldiers from the 12th Cavalry "Strykehorse" Regiment, based in Hawaii, work with Indian soldiers from the 7th Armored Mechanized Battalion to prepare the vehicles for unloading. http://www.usarpac.army.mil/yudhabhyas.html

On October 14, Ambassador Timothy J. Roemer and Kolkata Consul General Beth A. Payne visited children who benefit from a USAID food program at Shishu Bhavan, run by the Missionaries of Charity. The ambassador has completed visits with government, business, health and cultural activists and leaders in all the Indian cities that host a U.S. consulate: Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi. http://newdelhi.usembassy.gov/ Pravina Shukla's book, The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India, has received the 2009 Millia Davenport Publication Award from the Costume Society of America. Born in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, Shukla moved in 1982 to the United States, where she is an associate professor of folklore at Indiana University. Her! book tells stories such as the journey of a gold ingot ~ from the goldsmith who fashioned it into a bracelet, ,~ through a jewelry shop to a bride's wedding day display. http://wwwcostumesocietyamerica com/ ~

John Reilly, an assistant professor of chemistry at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, is teaching physical chemistry at the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur as a Fulbright scholar. He includes writing and ethics components on the history, development and use of nuclear weapons. Reilly and his sister, Beth Teer, are shown at i-india in Jaipur, where he teaches math, science and English to homeless children. http://www.usief.org. in/

Tracy Lee Stum, a California artist, is touring India, creating threedimensional chalk drawings on pavements. Stum completed the depiction of a kingfisher hovering over a pond at liT Kanpur in October and is appearing in New Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. http://www.tracyleestum.com/

American 1n~irations "Brooklyn Bridge" is among a series of paintings by Indian artist Chaitali Chatterjee documenting her experiences in the United States in 2007. This view of the bridge is seen from the ferry that connects Battery Park to Staten Island in New York City. Chatterjee's paintings are on display at the American Center in New Delhi from November 16 to 27. More may be viewed at www.artslant.com

Brooklyn Bridge Oil on canvas, 2009, 85.8 centimeters x 91.4 centimeters