SPAN Edition 1 2022

Edition 1 2022

V O LU M E L X I I I N U M B E R 1

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CONTENTS

Courtesy Rotary India National Polioplus Society

36

2

26

The Nehru Visit

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Visit to India

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How America Honored Tagore

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Training for the Future

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Studying in America: Then and Now

27

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28

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30

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Forty Years of Fulbright in India

36 39

Kalpana Chawla and the Space Shuttle

43

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Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush

43

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24

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Working Together, Making History Benefits of U.S.-India Civilian Nuclear Cooperation The Indian Pilgrimage of Martin Luther King, Jr. Polio: Reaching Every Child Empowering Through Technology India-United States Malabar 05 Joint Naval Exercises The USS Nimitz Courtesy Google India

20 24

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Courtesy NASA

2 6 8 11 14

39 Editor in Chief Michael L. Cavey

Art Director/ Production Chief Hemant Bhatnagar

Editor Deepanjali Kakati Hindi Associate Editor Giriraj Agarwal Urdu Associate Editor Syed Sulaiman Akhtar

Deputy Art Directors / Production Assistants Qasim Raza, Shah Faisal Khan

Front cover: Design by Hemant Bhatnagar

* 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 or editorspan@state.gov

Printed and published by David H. Kennedy on behalf of the Government of the United States of America and printed at Thomson Press India Ltd., 18/35 Delhi Mathura Road, Faridabad, Haryana 121007 and published at the Public Affairs Section, American Embassy, American Center, 24 K.G. Marg, New Delhi 110001.

Opinions expressed in this 44-page magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.

Originally published in

Left: Gathered around Prime Minister Nehru at International Airport in Washington, as he responds to President Kennedy’s welcome, are, left to right, U.S. Ambassador to India J.K. Galbraith, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Indian Ambassador to the United States B.K. Nehru, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and President Kennedy.

Below: The Prime Minister strolls with Mrs. Kennedy on the White House grounds.

Bottom: The President and Prime Minister meet.

JANUARY

1962

The Nehru Visit To share articles go to https://spanmag.com EDITION 1 2022 3

Mrs. Indira Gandhi visits the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

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F

ew foreign visitors to the United States have attracted greater public attention than Prime Minister Nehru who paid his fourth visit to that country in November, accompanied by his daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi.

Apart from the thousands of Americans who greeted the distinguished statesman at the various public functions organized in his honor, millions saw his thoughtful face reflected from their television sets and heard his sincere and pleasant voice on both television and radio. During the 10 days he was in the country, Prime Minister Nehru’s photograph was the one the reader was most likely to come across in the 1,800 daily newspapers and the thousands of magazines and periodicals published in the United States.

The exchange of views on world topics between the Prime Minister and President Kennedy was, in the words of the joint communique, “highly useful in the pursuit

Below: The Prime Minister celebrated his 72nd birthday anniversary at a party arranged by Indian students in California.

Bottom: The visitors meet a Sioux Indian actor in Hollywood.

of their common objectives of an enduring world peace and enhanced understanding between the Governments of India and the United States.” The meetings afforded a unique opportunity for the two world leaders to examine thoroughly their respective positions on vital problems of peace, nuclear tests and disarmament, and resulted in greater mutual confidence and respect. The President was voicing the general regard in which Americans hold Mr. Nehru when he said, “Your reputation has spread beyond your borders and has been an inspiration for people throughout the world.”

As guest of the National Press Club in Washington, Mr. Nehru met some 500 working journalists and answered their questions with much frankness and good humor. In New York he addressed the United Nations General Assembly and suggested the observance of a “world cooperation year.” He pointed out that while “little is said about the vast amount of international cooperation that exists, much is said about conflict.”

Mr. Nehru’s 72nd birth anniversary coincided with his visit to the United States, and it was fitting that, as part of the birthday celebrations, “Uncle Nehru” should have been greeted by an international group of children at Disneyland, the fabulous amusement park near Los Angeles designed by Walt Disney.

One of his last engagements was at Los Angeles where he had planned to meet some 500 Indian university students at a birthday gathering. Instead, 3,500 enthusiastic American students also turned up to wish the Prime Minister a happy birthday and give him a warm send-off.

Above: World Bank President Eugene Black greets Prime Minister Nehru.

Right, from top: New York City Mayor Robert Wagner introduces the Indian visitors to Earl Brown, City Commissioner for Housing. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and Acting Secretary General U Thant

greet Mr. Nehru at the United Nations.

The Prime Minister chats with American students in an impromptu meeting.

President Kennedy and Prime Minister Nehru had several private talks at the White House.

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Color photographs by AVINASH C. PASRICHA

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Originally published in

MAY

1962

D

uring her nine-day visit to India from March 12 to March 21, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, wife of the U.S. President, visited six cities in Northern India.

In addition to a good deal of sightseeing, she also attempted to acquaint herself with some aspects of India’s multifaceted life.

Mrs. Kennedy saw several places of historical and cultural interest including the Taj Mahal—both by daylight and moonlight—the famous Moghul monuments in Fatehpur Sikri and the Amber Palace of Jaipur, reminiscent of ancient Rajput glory. She attended glittering receptions and formal dinners, had an elephant ride in Jaipur and boat trips on the Ganges at Banaras and the famous Pichola Lake at Udaipur. She admired the exquisite silks and brocades produced by Banaras weavers, and found time for some shopping in that city.

America’s First Lady also met a crosssection of the people ranging from children in hospitals and welfare centers to princes, ministers and top officials.

On these pages, SPAN presents a souvenir album of some of the highlights of Mrs. Kennedy’s visit.

Above left: Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy at the Taj Mahal.

Right top: Mrs. Kennedy meets the engine driver of the train which took her to Agra.

Above right: In the garden of the Prime Minister’s residence.

Above far right: An elephant ride in Amber Palace with her sister, Princess Lee Radziwill.

Right: At All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Mrs. Kennedy receives a bouquet from a young patient, who tightly squints his eyes to concentrate on his speech of welcome.

Far right: At Fatehpur Sikri.

To share articles go to https://spanmag.com EDITION 1 2022 7

HOW AMERICA HONORED TAGORE

By SUJIT MUKHERJEE

Tagore’s birth anniversary falls on May 7. An Indian scholar recalls the enthusiastic celebration of the poet’s centenary in the United States in 1961 and his research for Tagore memorabilia.

T

he recent Gandhi centennial celebrations in the United States bring to mind similar events honoring Tagore.

Everybody in America in 1961 knew about Rabindranath Tagore. And this includes the Indians resident in America in various capacities for varying periods of time. All over the United States, Indian scientists, doctors, engineers, nurses, dancers, yoga experts, hybrid rice specialists—all caught the fever of knowing all about the poet and telling everybody about him. The Tagore Centenary must have been the greatest centripetal force for Indians abroad since the Non-Cooperation Movement and the Round Table Conference days.

Traditionally anti-imperial America has always lent a sympathetic ear to Indian causes more controversial than this, and in 1961 I am sure there were at least as many Tagore Societies in the United States as there were in Tagore’s homeland. As the one-hundredth May of Tagore’s birth approached, the pace grew hotter—like the last hundred days before the election of an American President—and each Tagore Society vied with the other in planning a still bigger and better celebration.

America, of course, responded in equal measure. In fact, the American celebrations would probably have been just as enthusiastic even without the aiding and abetting of available Indians. There was no large university campus in the land, no world-minded literary organization, no center of art and culture,

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no city which Tagore had visited even once, which did not underline the occasion in some form or another. More than the lectures and editorials and special broadcasts, the most interesting feature of the celebrations was the array of Tagore memorabilia which came out of oblivion, however briefly.

Philadelphia unearthed a Sturge Moore letter to Tagore. In Chicago, one could see the galley-proofs of Tagore’s first American publication—the six poems carried by the December 1912 issue of Poetry. The Cleveland Public Library showed a copy of Education and Leisure, a volume which is so rarely seen that it sometimes does not even appear in Tagore bibliographies. There must have been countless other instances elsewhere in the country to demonstrate beyond question how well Tagore was remembered. New York City, as always, went one better than all others by renaming Times Square for a day to call it Tagore Square. If that was only a formal gesture, there was no formality about the theater-goers who kept turning up at an off-Broadway house where “The King of the Dark Chamber” was diffidently planned for a four-week run and eventually ran for nearly four months.

I was in Philadelphia from August 1960 and remember how reassuring it was to find there a ready-made circle of fellow Indians brought together by a Tagore Society. Though it was by no means an appendage of the University of Pennsylvania, a majority of the members were Indians studying or working at Penn, while the Society had become a natural extrapolation

Originally published in

Tagore’s “self-portrait.”

Reproduced by courtesy of K. Kripalani.

of the South Asia Regional Studies Department, which provided not only a permanent president for the Society in Professor W. Norman Brown, but also other facilities as well.

For example, the departmental library acted as a kind of publicity center for the Society; non-Indian students in the department formed a reliable quorum at meetings; visitors heard of through the department invariably were pressed into addressing the members, the catch varying from Dr. John Matthai to Raja Rao. Soon after l arrived there, everybody was selling tickets (many were buying them) for an evening’s entertainment organized by the Society. The Irvine Auditorium of the University was pleasantly full for the function where Bhaskar—a dancer better known in New York than, say, in New Delhi—gave a series of dance-items, some solo, some with two other girls. Enough money was raised by the Society to hold the real celebration in May 1961, for which we had Mrinalini Sarabhai perform memorably, a talk on Tagore as a painter (with colored slides) by the incomparable Dr. Stella Kramrisch, and a rousing address by Professor T. W. Clarke (then visiting professor at Penn from London). He brought the Indian portion of the house down when he launched into a Bengali recital of Tagore and concluded by saying that everybody in the world should learn Bengali in order to read Tagore!

My own share in the American celebration of the Tagore

* Harriet Monroe was for many years editor of Poetry, which published Tagore poems.

Centenary in America was rather pedantic—a laborious putting together of facts and figures about Tagore’s five trips to the United States between 1912 and 1930—but MAY much of my enjoyment was in the incidental pleasures of this task. The subject itself, for example, was practically 1970 dropped into my lap by my supervisor. Those who have been to graduate school in America will know what a blessing this was, because the happy conjunction of subject and supervisor and research student is usually the result of much tactical deployment of the last named’s limited resources and time. Mine emerged from the confession made by my professor that as an undergraduate at this same university, he had gone about with a copy of “Gitanjali” under his arm. Why and how had its author dropped from this elevated position so soon? My explanation occupied the next 10 or 12 months, and it convinced him—at least, for the moment.

The search for material took me to many places, to Chicago for example. Through a friend of a friend of a friend I had heard that a history professor there was interested in a similar subject. I wrote to him and received what I thought was an unexpectedly friendly reply from a busy teacher. I did not know then what a rich strike I had made entirely by chance. When I went to Chicago, this gentleman not only took me home and gave me dinner, but handed over quite casually a microfilm of press-clippings from Tagore’s 1916-17 visit to America. It would never have occurred to me to even ask him for the microfilm even if I had known he had it, but he made it seem as if he were giving me a book for which he had no use.

It was the same professor who told me about a recent purchase of papers made by Harvard University which contained material on Tagore. Here again was a lead none of the hardworking ladies in the reference section at the University of Pennsylvania library could have given me.

Generally these ladies gave the impression that they knew everything, or at least knew where to find out everything. I never heard them say no to a request even for the most outlandish information. I once overheard a telephone conversation in which the caller wanted to know about the weather at Washington on the morning of some date in July 1846. The reference librarian did not reply, as she might well have, “Why not ask Wally Kinnan the Weatherman?” Instead, she asked him to call back in about half an hour when she might have some information on the subject.

The only region inside the libraries where one met some resistance was in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room. This department of the Harper Memorial Library of the University of Chicago, for example, turned out to be even more impregnable than the outside had looked. Only after the aforesaid history professor had put in a word for me did I get to handle some original letters in the Harriet Monroe Collection.* So when I went to Harvard, I armed myself with introduction letters and other such weapons in case I had any trouble in getting to the sources. Much to my ill-disguised relief, l had merely to sign my name legibly in a register to gain access to perhaps the most important assembly of Tagore letters in

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America. I didn’t even notice that the door locked itself after one entered, and no exit was possible without cooperation from the girl at the desk who operated a concealed mechanism to release the door.

No such finesse attended the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library. Here you make a request through a collapsible iron gate which clashes open to admit you if you have proved your bona fides and clashes close behind you once you are in. Considering that one has to step outside the building to smoke a cigarette, I am sure that they had to oil those gates for facile movement after I had spent two days working there.

From this last point of view, namely, of smokers, the new library at Penn is ideal. It not merely claims that it is fireproof but you are actually permitted to smoke practically everywhere inside the building. In addition, it is completely air-conditioned.

Thus the soggy summer in Philadelphia is no problem now to graduate students. Some old-timers, however, missed the old library with its Gothic architecture and a central heating plant almost as old as the Vikings. Snoozing there in the Reading Room was impossible, because the pipes would give out noises like pistol-shots from time to time. Otherwise, the whole place reeked of the study and scholarship of generations, overpowering enough to make one take one’s own studies seriously.

Much of the information I was looking for was to be found in daily newspapers dating as far back as 1912. The New York Times was no problem since it has a running index as well as being on microfilm. Other East Coast newspapers were available in the Annexe of the New York Public Library. It was easier reading the files standing up than sitting down, and one turned the pages with reverence not only for the aging paper, but also for the irrevocable past. Here I read about the war in Europe as Americans had done then, almost as we read about Vietnam in Indian newspapers—a nagging problem that is mercifully at some distance. The advertisements were invariably interesting. Nothing, surely, reflects contemporary mores as advertisements do. Then there were the screaming headlines about people and events of the time which have never achieved a line of print again, and I wondered anew at the ephemeral nature of news.

Tagore’s travels had taken him to the mid-West as well as to the West Coast. In despair about locating some news items exactly, I wrote to the San Francisco Public Library asking for confirmation of some of my conjectures. Within a few days I received photostat copies of the news items I had asked about.

Encouraged by this, I wrote to other faraway newspapers and almost invariably got what I wanted. Had I known of this shortcut to research earlier, I might have spared myself long hours of eye ache running through miles of microfilm and yards of faded newsprint. The greatest courtesy, however, was the one extended by the public library at Omaha, Nebraska.

Tagore had lectured at Omaha once, but the reference librarian wrote back to say that she was unable to find any newspaper report of this occasion. However, she added, a recently retired member of the staff had actually attended the lecture and he would send me whatever details he remembered. He did so, in

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a shaky but decipherable longhand, looking back with transparent pleasure at an event that had taken place more than 40 years earlier.

Throughout these activities my headquarters were in Philadelphia, and here I came across Tagore in the most unexpected places. While cashing a check at a Sears Roebuck store, I had to explain to the cashier that I was from India: whereupon she asked me if I had heard of Tagore and quoted a few lines from “Gitanjali,” which she said she had learned while she was in school. One summer I tried to get a job on the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. The gentleman who interviewed me told me that he could not give me a job, but as a cub reporter his first important assignment had been to attend a press conference with Tagore in 1930. This rather took the sting off his having to refuse me and we had a long chat on Tagore. Another time I saw a copy of that rare volume, “Six Portraits of Rabindranath Tagore”—drawn by Sir William Rothenstein and with an introduction by Max Beerbohm—in the window of a secondhand book shop. I went in to enquire about the price, found it was more than I could afford just then and promised to return for it. I made the mistake of delaying a few days, for when I did go again, the book was gone.

Someone else was stalking Tagore in those days and he had forestalled me.

In case all this gives a rather exaggerated notion about Philadelphia’s esteem for Tagore, I must mention my most sobering experience in this regard. Looking for a copy of “The Golden Book of Tagore”—presented to him on his 71st birthday in 1931—1 found it indexed in the Penn library along with the personal collection of Theodore Dreiser’s books which the library has inherited from the novelist. The collection is housed in the Rare Book Room on the fifth floor, and as you sit there looking for what you want, a bronze bust of Dreiser glowers down at you. I knew that Dreiser had contributed something to the volume honoring Tagore, but what I did not know was that Dreiser had never bothered to open the book.

The publisher’s slip giving the number of the limited edition and mentioning that it was a complimentary copy was still there. All the pages were uncut, and my substantial share in the American celebrations of Tagore’s centenary of birth was to rouse this volume from its 30 years’ sleep and cut the pages ceremoniously.

Presently 1961 grew older than its May and the Tagore Centenary receded in America into the annals of countless other public excitements which periodically stir that country from coast to coast. Before this essay grows any longer, I must present the question which arises invariably in retrospect— how much of the celebrations bespoke a genuine and enduring regard for Tagore in the United States? I must conclude with that question because it is not really of my own making, nor can I answer it. Those who want an answer must find it for themselves and not seek it at second hand. All that I can say is that in celebrating the lives of those who have gone before us we renew our own lives. As in 1961 with Tagore, so now it is with Gandhi in the Mahatma’s centenary year.

Originally published in

Text by LYNN ASCHER, photographs by AVINASH PASRICHA

Training for the Future At Kanpur’s Indian Institute of Technology 200 students use the Computer Centre every day for training, course projects and research.

The IIT’s Computer Centre reinforces the Institute’s reputation for excellence in technical education.

Below: The modern campus.

AUGUST

1970

R

aising his voice over the clicking of an IBM 7044 computer, Hosakere Mahabala said happily, “I worked for months on a kind of computer-robot being built at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an artificial intelligence project, and I never got it to perform as reasonably as my two-year-old daughter!”

Mahabala, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, takes his relationship with computers seriously but always with a light heart. “What we always have to remember,” he continued, “is that basically a computer is an idiot. Of course, this is an idiot that can do its work very rapidly—a million calculations in 10 seconds, in some cases—but still it can’t do any more than carry out the orders you give it.” llT’s 7044/1401 system was carrying out its orders with a busy clatter in the Institute’s new Computer Centre, a modern structure of stark but strong architectural lines. The largest computer facility in any Indian school, the IIT Centre trains not only IIT students in computer use but short-term students from educational, research and industrial organizations. All 300 undergraduates in the third year of their B. Tech. program are taught the use of computers. Most of the 500 postgraduates use computers, and on a typical day the Centre runs the programs of about 200 students, chiefly in their project and research work.

A graduate program with an option in computer sciences is offered in the engineering department. Both programming techniques and computer design techniques are taught in this course. There are in addition courses in computer application.

The Centre also rents its computer facilities and services to research and development establishments, although 90 percent of the computer’s time is still reserved for faculty and student projects. So far over 100 outside organizations have used the Centre’s facilities. Their needs fall chiefly into three categories: engineering design of systems like turbines, electrical generators, bridges and buildings; operations research, such as the location of petroleum distribution points and forecasting demand; and tabulation and analysis of data collected in surveys, such as in city planning and market research.

Watching the 7044 complex at work is much like watching babies in a hospital nursery. The observer peers at the machines through windowed walls while the proud engineer at his side points out tapes, discs, memory banks, calculators, processors and print-out devices. Inside, on a reinforced floor (the weight of these mighty brain cells is considerable) stand several dozen To share articles go to https://spanmag.com

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Left: The Computer Centre’s pride is the new IBM 7044, which is connected to another computer, IBM 1401 (below far right). A memory bank of magnetic tapes is in the background.

Far left: IIT’s first computer, IBM 1620, acquired in 1963 but now obsolete, is used to train students.

cases and consoles containing hundreds of miles of wires strung in intricate patterns, each of which produces a certain electronic result. Tending this set-up is a corps of high-school graduate operators hired by the Institute. An aptitude test is given to applicants, and if selected, they are given on-the-job training.

The 7044 computer does not work alone but is fed basic data by its companion, an IBM 1401 input-output satellite. First, program data already punched onto cards by human programmers is fed to the 1401. Each card contains a statement about the problem to be solved or instructions leading to its solution. These are stated in numeric form, the computer being able to understand only mathematical terms. The 1401 records these statements on magnetic tape at the rate of 10 cards of information, or about 800 characters, per inch of tape. With a tape speed of 70 inches a second, it takes the 1401 less than a second to read and record 10 cards. The 1401 feeds to the 7044 the finished tape on which the problem and its data have been stated. The 7044 translates it into its own “machine” language and proceeds to calculate. Within seconds it produces the answer and writes it on to a tape for the 1401 to read and print out on paper.

The computer itself works much more rapidly than its auxiliary reader and printer, the 1401. For example, 2,400 lines can be calculated in a minute but only 600 lines can be printed in that same minute. Therefore all jobs must be preprogrammed to feed the 7044 continuously. To allow the 7044’s expensive electronic brain cells to stop functioning for even a few seconds is uneconomical. In fact, the computer itself—as though aware of the value of its time—immediately rejects a program and moves on to the next if it finds a programming error which prevents it from continuing its calculations.

Mahabala, with his unfailing zest for joking about his computer family, confided that despite the sophistication of its machines, the Centre is still at the mercy of the gods of electricity. “There were times when we’d have two and three failures a day, but in the last year the Institute has improved the distribution system on the campus so blackouts aren’t as frequent as before.

“The heat of a Kanpur summer is also a dangerous thing for computers,” continued the energetic engineer. “That, plus the fact

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that the machines themselves generate a lot of heat.” This necessitated installing probably one of the largest airconditioning systems in India, built here with financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Across the corridor from the 7044’s area is a smaller windowed room containing the Institute’s first computer, an IBM 1620, which was obtained in 1963 under a USAID grant.

One hundred times slower than the 7044 but still useful, it is used today to train IIT students and non-Institute personnel in computer programming methods. According to Mahabala, almost every 1620-computer center in India has IIT-trained people on its staff.

A computer’s most productive years are its first five, after which retirement looms. So as computers go, the 1620 is considered obsolete. Mahabala explained why. “The electronic circuitry in a computer doesn’t age but the mechanical parts do.

And since computer manufacturers keep building new models, after a while you can’t get spare parts for an older machine. You can continue to use a computer like the 1620—especially in India where computers are not yet that common—but eventually an old machine isolates you so that you can’t communicate with other computerized firms or institutions. At IIT we’ve been using the 1620 mainly as a calculator but we want to convert it strictly to input-output activities in conjunction with the 7044. I’m also interested in getting it to display answers on a television screen and to write music and produce graphic designs.”

Down the hall in a remarkably uncluttered office sat the head of IIT’s Computer Centre, 36-year-old Dr. V. Rajaraman. The young director’s list of scholastic credits is long and impressive: degrees of ascending levels from Delhi University, Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science, America’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin; faculty positions at the universities of Wisconsin and California and IIT-Kanpur.

Would Dr. Rajaraman explain in basic terms how a computer functions? As if all in a day’s work, the professor gladly began explaining in layman’s terms. “Originally, computers were thought of as calculating machines, but later it was found that they could be made to do more than calculate. A computer can be made to solve complex problems provided the programmer

can break down the problems into simple steps.

“As Dr. Mahabala likes to point out, computers are idiots.

Laymen sometimes think of them as having human qualities but I suppose that’s an emotional response to a process they don’t understand completely. Take, for instance, the act of baking a cake. A recipe assumes a certain set of preliminary operations: when it calls for two cups of flour, it doesn’t also tell the baker to go to the cupboard, take down the flour, open the container and measure it into cups. Those steps are assumed by the baker because it’s common sense to make that assumption. Since a machine doesn’t have common sense, it doesn’t assume anything; if a machine were baking the cake it would have to be instructed to go to the cupboard for the flour, and so on. For the computer to function, a human must give it an exact recipe plus all the other factors which man would just automatically assume to be present in a given situation.

“So, after you decide what you want to tell the computer, you decide how you’ll communicate that message. The only thing a computer understands is numbers. But on the other hand, it must be able to understand various specialized vocabularies—medical, library science, business and so on. So each of these vocabularies has to be translated into a distinct mathematical language. Most computers can digest several languages by means of internal dictionaries; the machine translates the new language into its own numerical language, does its calculations that way, and translates its work and results back into the input language. For example, the 7044 came with a built-in vocabulary that uses just two units—zero and one. To the 7044 a set of 20 zeros means something. And in its ‘memory’ it can store about 32,000 words, or configurations using zeros and ones.

“Today there are hundreds of computer languages, all adaptations of a basic algebraic language by which the programmer presents a problem to the computer in the form of numbers. Something called SNOBOL is used by librarians.

ALGOL is the international computer language used to express scientific and engineering problems.”

Dr. Rajaraman then explained the meaning of the computer terms “hardware” and “software.” When computers originally appeared, it was the machinery itself, the “hardware,” that was expensive. They didn’t contain today’s transistors and integrated circuitry which are compact and long-lasting. And, being relatively unsophisticated in the early days, the machines couldn’t handle complex programs—“software.”

“It would be quite possible,” commented Dr. Mahabala, “for India to develop a computer-software industry. Software orders from nations where programming costs are high could be filled here at much less cost and shipped back to the States or Europe and the Indian supplier could still make a very good profit.”

How “intelligent” are computers of the future going to be?

“Well,” reflected Dr. Rajaraman, “the basic relationship—the machine’s dependence on man—will remain the same. But the machine has become much more rapid and precise than the men who program it; it can do a thousand computations in twotenths of a second. To avoid waste the computer of the near

future will be serviced by 20 programmers; it will absorb data from all 20 in a few seconds, work for four seconds on these 20 problems—.2 second on each—and keep repeating the cycle of ingestion and calculation until the answers are produced.

Because input and response between each individual programmer and the computer are practically instantaneous, the programmer will not really be aware of any disruption in his relationship with the computer.

“So, certainly what we call third-generation computers are going to be able to handle more work more quickly than older models. But the computer, per se, has its limitations. It doesn’t have hunches, for example. It can only solve problems that can be broken up into a limited number of steps. That has been illustrated by a computer’s ability to win at checkers but not at chess, which has an infinite number of possibilities.

“Engineers have built artificial intelligence simulators but in order to work successfully, the machine has to be supplied with methods of solution and also with solved examples or procedures; unless it has an example, it can’t choose the correct method from its stored supply of methods. When a computer was first taught to play checkers, it was programmed with the basic rules of the game. A programmer would play against it and at first the machine would always lose because it had no experience stored up. When it was beaten in a certain situation the programmer would give it negative marks for making the moves that beat it. Afterwards it would never repeat that combination of losing moves. After years of playing, it rejected all the losing combinations in given situations and so it always won.

“At any rate, humans shouldn’t worry about being replaced by computers. I think you can draw a comparison from the old joke about the General who sends the enlisted soldier to the post office to get him some stamps. The man doesn’t come back with the stamps, so the General goes to the post office to look for him. He’s standing there with the stamps in his hand.

Naturally the General wants to know why he didn’t bring him the stamps, and the soldier replies that his orders didn’t mention anything about bringing the stamps back to him.

Computers aren’t much different. They always follow your orders but don’t do any thinking on their own.”

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Originally published in

P

ostpone departure until after results, love, Daddy,” read the telegram of May 1, 1960. I had finished my B.A. examination at Delhi University and was to join my parents in London, and then proceed on to America where I would start my graduate studies. My father, Amolak Ram Mehta, had been a Fulbright and Rockefeller Scholar at Johns Hopkins and UCLA medical schools. He had acquainted me with the opportunities abroad and had promised that if I proved myself by doing well academically, he would arrange for me to do advanced studies in the United States.

My father was a gambler. He had gone against family opinion by sending my sightless brother, Ved Mehta, to the Arkansas School for the Blind when he was only 14 years old.

“Why waste money on a handicapped child?” many had argued. Ved had proved my father correct. He had earned the coveted Phi Beta Kappa key, written his autobiography, studied at Oxford and Harvard and earned a reputation as an outstanding writer. Although I was a girl and number six among seven children, my father was willing to break social norms again and not limit his investment to his sons—he was willing to give me a quality education rather than have me married off. I worked extremely hard for many years to claim his offer. He may have had second thoughts but I was confident and not about to relinquish the prize I felt I had earned. “Will definitely pass, sailing May 17, love, Usha,” went my reply. I was going to America regardless of results.

There has been a relatively small Indian representation on America’s campuses since the turn of the century. England had been the wealthy Indians’ preferred location for studies in the preindependence period. Its emphasis on arts and letters gave the nationalists the necessary philosophical and legal skills to fight for rights; many of India’s great leaders of the freedom movement—including Nehru and Gandhi—were products of British universities. The princely families considered Oxford and Cambridge more prestigious than any other universities, anywhere in the world, as did officials who were making selections in civil services during the colonial period. The few Indian students who did go to America espoused India’s cause for independence and inspired many prominent Americans to lend their support to India’s freedom movement.

After independence Indian students in increasing numbers started looking toward the United States for their education.

America’s attraction lay in the opportunity it offered for greater competency in the technical and business fields. It was the period that saw the beginnings of the exchange programs and the availability of financial aid. One exchange program that promoted Indo-American intellectual interaction was the Fulbright-Hays Program that established the United States Educational Foundation in India (USEFI). In the 25-year period after its implementation in 1950, it was responsible for over 5,000 Indian and American scholars crossing the oceans in exchange professorships and research projects.

Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Hazen

Foundation, Rotary International, Carnegie Corporation and others also lent their support to Indo-American scholarly exchange.

AUGUST “I think practically every Indian student in America received almost full tuition and fees plus some living 1982 allowance during that time,” one former student recalled.

He is probably right: American educational institutions were then expanding at a fast rate, money was readily available, and the spirit in the United States was one of helping people from developing countries. This resulted in the offer of liberal scholarships to study in American universities. Thus, in 1958, there were 2,585 Indians out of 43,391 foreign students in the United States. In 1972, the Indian contingent of 12,523 was the largest among foreign students and by 1978, India ranked seventh with 9,080 out of 235,509 of America’s foreign student population.

Some of these students had jobs in India and were in the United States on leave to get training that could advance their careers at home. Others had come under the auspices of American faculty members who had been in India and whom they had assisted on research projects. The teachers advised and encouraged promising students to go to the United States for further education, and sometimes helped them obtain financial aid.

The Indian student community that I joined in the United States in 1960 was imbued with the spirit of patriotism and service to the motherland. Optimistic of India’s future, the students knew that they could return to good jobs and make a valuable contribution to India’s development. I studied political science, for I aspired to be a high government official on my return. Other popular courses were economics, agriculture, urban development, business administration and science.

And meanwhile there was also one’s own economy to be kept in mind. My first day at Cornell brought me face to face with this problem. I arrived at Cornell University in the fall of 1960. My bus was a couple of hours late so it was after 5 p.m. when I reached the campus in a car. The offices were closed.

Where was I to spend the night? One of the American students who had shared the cab with me suggested that I register at Willard Straight Hall, run by the student union. I went there and discovered that one night’s lodging at Willard Straight would cost me eight dollars. Forty rupees flashed through my mind, an outrageous amount for one night by the Indian standards I was used to. The expense unnerved me and I couldn’t sleep. “How am I going to survive in such an expensive country?” I asked myself. To conserve my money, I decided Usha Helweg with her father, Amolak Ram Mehta.

Avinash Pasricha

CORNELL,1960

By USHA HELWEG

EDITION 1 2022 15

New Haven, Connecticut, 1960: Usha spends her first Christmas in the United States with her brother, Ved Mehta.

against dinner that night, satisfying my hunger by nibbling on some grapes and an apple that my father had given me.

Money was and still is a concern for Indian students in America, for all prices are seen in terms of rupees. I automatically found myself multiplying every dollar figure by five, calculating with a sinking heart how much it came to in rupees. My excitement at going to Cornell couldn’t help me overcome my fear that I would be a poor Indian foreign student. I had read about rich Americans “rolling in dollars” and an American friend in New Delhi had shown me slides of campus life. The color in the slides had made everything look “rich” and “expensive.” However, when I finally settled in Cascadilla Hall I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of my contemporary graduate students were at my economic level, fending their way through school. Some were on assistantships, others on fellowships, partial scholarships or part-time jobs to defray costs. Everybody was friendly and no one looked down on me or any other graduate student because we were on a tight budget.

I wondered how my parents would react to my living in a coed dormitory. Even though the wings for boys and girls were separate, for me it was a new experience. My parents had sent me to a conservative all-girl convent school and college, where even the instructors were females. Apart from my brothers and male cousins, I had been around only females.

Not only was I attending coeducational classes but living in a coeducational dorm! At first I was petrified but it did not take me long to realize that my fellow graduate students, American and other, were just as dedicated to their studies as I was and were not all lecherous males clamoring amorously for me.

The Indian male students immediately adopted me as a “sister” and charge. At Cornell, as on other campuses, an Indian was put automatically on the roll of the Indian Students Association and came under the wing of fellow Indians. They advised me where to eat, what to wear in winter, where to shop for bargains and to beware of American boys. I was a highly moral Hindu girl from a cultured family; therefore, they felt that my behavior had to be a reflection of my background.

At first their concern was very comforting because I felt lost among the vast sea of students.

16 EDITION 1 2022

My father had advised me, “Do in Rome as the Romans do.

I don’t want you to be a wallflower; do mix with fellow American students. Go out on dates and if you fall in love and want to marry, you will have your mother’s and my blessings.

However, do maintain your morals. I don’t want you to marry because you have to or because you didn’t know what you were doing. Anyway,” he had continued, “if you do get into trouble, remember we will bail you out.”

My Indian brethren had differing points of view about how I should behave. Some felt I should be the shy recluse while others felt I should mix and socialize. I lay low for the first semester, summing up the situation, absorbing the environment of dorm life and my classes. I was pleased when American grad students invited me to go for a “drink” after the library closed at 11 p.m. one Friday. Everyone ordered cocktails or beer, but I ordered a Coca-Cola. I did not know one drink from another. I had never seen liquor in my life. All I knew about alcoholic beverages was that they caused intoxication and made a person obnoxious. I was content with my Coke and nobody suggested anything else. Deep in my heart I was apprehensive about how my American friends would behave after drinking. I had heard stories in India about American “immorality.” However, after a couple of drinks and discussions revolving around advisers, professors, departmental and national politics, we all departed for our respective abodes, very relaxed and happy for the companionship. Frequent experiences like this enhanced my horizons. Like my fellow graduate students, I worked hard all week and looked forward to weekends of interaction with other students—Indian and American. Saturdays usually revolved around the mundane chores of laundry and shopping.

In the evening we went, in groups of seven or eight, to the movies and had dinner with friends. Indian and American families frequently invited me out for dinner and occasionally took me to the theater or an opera.

We were considered not only students but also representatives of India. I participated in radio and television programs and spoke to Rotary groups, Lions Clubs and other civic organizations about my homeland. I loved being an “ambassador” of India in Tompkins and surrounding counties.

I was told I was “exotic,” thanks largely to my saris and the Punjabi dress I wore. We Indian students did a lot in those years to remove the negative stereotypes and prejudices that Americans had about our country. I feel proud that we contributed to the high regard and appreciation most Americans have toward India today.

The few Indian women on U.S. campuses during those early years were primarily from institutes of higher learning in India or wives of graduate students. They usually didn’t mix much with the younger crowd, Indian or American. The more conservative Indian students—male and female—remained isolated from the Americans. Others mixed and made the best of their stay on campus.

The hotel administration students were perhaps the most gregarious. Usually well-financed by their parents, they were also paid during practical training in institutions like Cornell’s Statler Inn. It was these students who, much to the chagrin of

STANFORD,1980

By SIMRAN SINGH

I

need not have been neurotic the night before. I was taking my first examination at Stanford University, one of America’s most respected institutions. I relaxed as the professor, grinning slightly, handed out the papers. “I hope you spend as much time answering these questions as I did thinking them up. Good luck,” he said. “I’ll see you all on Friday.”

And he walked out.

I was awed by the trust Stanford places in its students.

Unmonitored, they are allowed to take their exams wherever they like. You can bring in a Coke and a bag of french fries, perch your feet on a table and finish your paper in class. Or you can take it home or to the coffee house or even to the library and bring it back after three hours.

You can cheat too, since there is no one around to check on you. But the Honor Code that all Stanford students are required to sign morally binds them not to cheat.

This “to thine own self be true” policy that puts complete trust in its students is one of the university’s unusual features.

Another is that it is students who evaluate teachers—at the end of the quarter, on his lectures, clarity, ability to arouse interest and accessibility.

Classes, too, are different from anything I was used to in India. In centrally heated conference-type rooms, the professor is dressed casually in an open-necked T-shirt. He lectures perched on his desk, his chin on one knee. He insists that his students call him by his first name. I found it stimulating to be so relaxed with some of the best known specialists in their fields.

The faculty at Stanford, which includes 13 Nobel laureates and four Pulitzer Prize winners, takes its responsibility pretty seriously. They may eat lunch in class with students and they may use four-letter words, yet your teachers will sit up all night with you before term papers are due. These world-famous professors and writers sit not in academic ivory towers, but bent over their typewriters with their office door open to welcome you. Most are very generous with their phone numbers and invitations to drop in for advice or for a beer.

Professors turned friends are your greatest critics. They spend almost as much time analyzing your term paper as you

a young person did. They were also anxious not to disappoint those who had invested in them.

I have visited some of my fellow grad students who are all holding top positions in their respective fields and contributing to the development of India. Hearing their success stories makes me feel like the odd one out of that batch—I was among the very few who opted to stay on in the United States.

Usha Helweg is a part-time instructor and a research administrator at Western Michigan University. She and her husband, Arthur Helweg, were recently in India on a Smithsonian Institution grant doing research on the effect of emigration on India.

spent writing it. Comments can vary anywhere from “You’ll never make it,” to “Yes, you have what it takes.” But while your paper might not make any point at all, you are never shown up in class, however ignorant you may seem.

“The only dumb question,” we were told, “is the unasked one.” And you can ask your adviser about anything—your career, your personal life, your finances or the lack of them. You can demand answers to the most awkward questions.

One common question concerns part-time jobs. Many students have to—or want to— earn as they learn. Often you can earn your bread and butter (and beer and postage stamps) through teaching or research assistantships to which your adviser assigns you. The first commandment of the Stanford budget is that a student once admitted to the university will not be disqualified because of shortage of funds. Depending on his proficiency, a student may be assigned to teach a junior class, grade papers or do research work. Part-time jobs are usually available in libraries, computer centers and cafeterias.

In any case, it is unbelievably easy to support oneself, for job opportunities are many and the average pay is approximately four dollars an hour. And with the secondhand turnover, you can buy a TV for 10 dollars, a bike for 25 and a car for 250.

At the undergraduate level, required courses make up less than half a student’s program. He is free to choose and try out the rest. By designing his own major with courses as varied as film aesthetics, acoustics and physiotherapy, the student can specialize later in what he discovers to be his real interest. He also has the choice of studying French history in Paris or Third World problems in Nairobi: Stanford has campuses in different parts of the world where students can spend a year with all the university facilities at their disposal.

In most of the required courses, students are meant to work under the same conditions they will experience after graduation; they are forced to make independent decisions and live with the responsibilities they have accepted. Journalism students, for instance, are required to choose a beat off-campus.

It could be health, education, refugees or crime, but it means Avinash Pasricha

our conservative Indian brothers, taught me to distinguish between different wines and to appreciate a good steak. They helped me get my summer job working as a hostess at the Statler. They took me to parties—and they protected me.

Indian students on the whole have done very well academically too. The students of the Sixties and early Seventies had an excellent command of the English language.

The British system of education, under which most of these students had studied, had taught them grammar and composition. Initially they had problems with the unfamiliar objective-type tests but because of practice in learning by rote they were able to master that also. They were partly motivated by family izzat or honor, which depended greatly on how well

To share articles go to https://spanmag.com EDITION 1 2022 17

actually being out there, spending as much time in a hospital or a police station as in the library. It means developing a nose for news and following the scent all the way—until you have your story. The idea is to wean you away from the protective cocoon of university life into the career you have chosen; to make you accept, and perhaps enjoy, the excitement and the tension you will have to live with.

As part of their training, journalism and business school students get together, the former interviewing the latter. The encounter is recorded on videotape and then played back to be analyzed and improved upon.

An Indian student can probably get much more out of Stanford than an American student because there is much less that he takes for granted. Because many of the nonacademic courses are always available to Americans, they sometimes tend to ignore them. But most foreign students enthusiastically grasp the chance of learning jazz dance, fencing, car mechanics, aerobics, body massage or five different types of martial arts.

The libraries at Stanford are magical. There are over 20 research libraries in addition to smaller ones in most departments. The Meyer Undergraduate and Green Graduate libraries alone “provide 68 miles of shelving, enough for more than 2.8 million volumes, and seating for 1,700 readers,” writes Peter C. Allen in “Stanford: From the Foothills to the Bay.” To give students even greater access to books, the Gutenberg Express joins the campuses of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley through a daily shuttle service.

Libraries soon become addictive. You can spend hours studying beside a pleasant potted plant, undisturbed. You can analyze the Indian Emergency in the microfilm section, drop by at Green library to read The Times of India or India Today, or study in the Hoover Institution library where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote his memoirs. Those involved in serious research use the library computers: From one database they can get a printout of all the published material on a subject. Some students have video display terminals in their rooms wired to the main computer on campus.

Punch the right code and your computer will give you the day’s news, mail from a friend at MIT or even tell you a dirty joke. Some students become so addicted to computers that they forgo food and drink and sleep in the Center for Educational Research at Stanford that houses LOTS, the Low Overhead Timesharing System. It is open 24 hours a day.

Many professors give serious students free access to their private libraries. Departments can usually arrange for almost any kind of material you might need in your research or get an expert to come and speak on your subject. Students are allowed as much funding as may be necessary to justify their research.

For instance, “The engineering research at Stanford,” Allen tells us, “now runs about $25 million a year, involving some 200 grants and contracts. The range is universal, from microscopic integrated circuits to all of outer space.”

An examination in the United States is not an unusual experience for a student from India. Since you have to put in three hours of work at home for every one hour in class 18 EDITION 1 2022

Simran and her friends at every Stanford student’s favorite haunt—the coffee house.

throughout the year, you don’t have to spend the nights before exams cursing yourself and seeing the clock tick away mockingly.

In any case, the final exam counts for only 20 percent of your grade. The rest depends on class participation, term papers and your consistent progress through the year. If you are not well during an exam or are busy with another course, you can arrange to take it later. The Stanford policy is to see how much a student can get out of a course, not how much he can put on a piece of paper in three hours. The atmosphere at Stanford and the facilities available make you want to study and pursue education for education’s sake, not for examination’s sake.

A Stanford degree also buttresses your career chances.

“Rating of academic quality is an inexact science at best,” writes Peter Allen in his book. “But the most recent surveys taken for the most part among faculty peers across the country offer a preponderance of evidence as to the distinction of Stanford’s professors. They rank the schools of education and business first in the nation, engineering and medicine second, and law third; and they place 17 of the university’s departments among the top five in their discipline.”

Most graduating students already have assured jobs before they leave the university. Indian graduates are mostly from the engineering department and most are absorbed into Silicon Valley in the heart of which lies Stanford.

An amusing scenario takes place once a year on campus: This is the Job Fair where Lockheed, Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild and other top companies send executives to recruit Stanford students. In their well-pressed, three-piece suits these executives hand the students their catalogs and brochures and make attractive job offers. The students in T-shirts, jeans and slippers chuck these catalogs into their backpacks to think about later.

Life outside the classroom is casual yet demanding, hard work but full of surprises.

Graduate students who live on campus have a choice of high-rise buildings, or low-rise, two-bedroom apartments, both built with consideration for the students who will be using them. In either case you have to learn to live with a roommate who might turn out to be a friend in need or a fiend indeed depending on whether your friends, phone calls or all-night typing get on his or her nerves.

Stanford is a very bikeable campus, many of its streets shut off to automobiles. Along with the students zipping by on their ten speeds, also on his bicycle is Donald Kennedy, the eighth

president of Stanford who has three degrees from Harvard University. Every morning the soft-spoken president runs 10 kilometers; he invites any student who would like to join him.

For many a shy foreign student, the Bechtel International Center is a good place to begin finding his feet and his friends on this 3,560-hectare campus. The ivy-covered I-Center has weekly coffees to break in foreign students and their spouses, language classes, international cooking, folk dances, a giantsize TV and a very, very friendly staff. While their homelands might be at war, many an Iraqi and Iranian student become friends here.

Once you’ve made your friends, life on campus can be one of the most fulfilling experiences of your life. The general enthusiastic feeling is, “I just can’t get enough out of my days here.” Allen quotes a student: “You have to work pretty hard to be bored at Stanford. Almost anything you want to do you can find some club, team, organization or friend to do it with.”

Almost every day there are plays, talks, concerts, all-night folk dancing, parties. Sometimes, Joan Baez who lives down the road drops by to sing. The university shows at least 10 different films a week. The variety extends from contemporary hits to French and Italian classics to history-making films.

One of the biggest events of the year is the annual football game between Stanford and Berkeley (a university that Stanford students disparagingly refer to as “second best in California”). Tickets for the big game are sold out months in advance. Closer to the game there is black marketing.

Then there is the coffee house, a cozy little hideout in the center of campus. It has tough wooden benches and serves the finest coffee. Even students who don’t have the time find themselves here. You can be sure of a couple of hours’ amusement. Talented students sing, dance, perform a play for free. Or if you’re the kind that can keep his cool amid noise and music and dancing student waitresses, you could write your thesis here or pore over a game of Scrabble.

During the beginning of my first quarter at Stanford, sitting with my book on a coffee house table, I was taken aback to see a noisy group of about 20 men and women rushing in, wrapped in bedsheets. They were obviously wearing no clothes under their sheet wraps. That was my introduction to a “Toga party,” usually held at the beginning of the quarter to initiate freshmen.

The coffee house closes at 11 p.m. but if your spirits still strain to be high, the place to head for then is The Oasis, one of the 10 most frequented student spots in the United States. A giant-size pitcher of beer and a bag of unshelled peanuts (the shells you simply throw on the floor) see you through till 3 a.m. when it shuts. Then it’s time for a 24-hour coffee shop like Denny’s.

Of course, the beer sessions are limited to weekends. The rest of the week is hard, hard work. One of the advantages of being at Stanford is that almost every other student knows a good deal about his subject. Conversation on every level is enlightening. Depending on who your friends are, you could come out with a fairly good knowledge of biochemistry, computer science or heart transplants.

Sometime during the year a group of students, to create a response to Third World malnutrition, organize a fast that they ask all of Stanford to participate in. The fast is to make well-

fed First Worlders realize what hunger feels like.

Many student dormitories and houses also organize courses to increase awareness of Third World issues. Hammarskjöld House, for instance, holds a course on how the Western press distorts Third World events; the discussions often end in fierce debate till late at night.

“A comfortable university,” Richard Lyman, Stanford’s seventh president had said, “is virtually a contradiction in terms...we exist to disturb and activate the minds of men and women.”

For the Indian student in the United States many values change. So do impressions. Most come expecting all American kids to take drugs, all American women to be easy game.

And yes, sex on campus does exist as on any other campus in the United States. But the attitude is not one of denial or secrecy. Instead men and women students live together openly, there is free contraceptive counseling; gay people have their own clubs.

Crime exists too on this idyllic campus. Bicycle theft is an accomplished art at Stanford, and you just resign yourself to the fact that at least once in three years, you’re going to find your bike gone. More serious crimes like rape are being combated with a round-the-clock police vigil at different parts of campus.

The university runs a service after 8 p.m. that sends escorts up to one kilometer off campus to see women safely home.

But being in a small town like Palo Alto, Stanford is a fairly safe campus. It is a campus that slowly spoils you. Its winters are gentle like east coast springs. Nestling between hills and bay, the university offers both mountains and beaches as recreation. The Spanish architecture of the university is breathtaking. Standing in its great green oval, an awed lump in his throat, the new student for the first time gazes at the noble buildings with their intricately carved columns, the clear blue skies and golden rolling hills. Very pleasant surroundings for what architect Frank Lloyd Wright called one of the most beautiful campuses in the United States.

And in April, when winter gear has just been packed away, doors and windows are left open to let fresh air and the smell of soft grass wander in, Stanford reserves a day to celebrate spring in its own unique way. From early evening till dawn an entire street is shut off to vehicles. For miles you can hear a superpower band thundering out Stanford’s favorite rhythms while thousands and thousands of students pushing against each other dance the night away. Beer and popcorn are on the house this spring night. This is also the night when the entire graduating senior class is saying its goodbye to the university.

It isn’t goodbye forever, though. The Stanford Alumni Association has more than 50,000 members who keep in touch with their school through newsletters, conferences and summer programs. The khaki envelope with the university stamp on the left corner falls through the post box in different countries for many, many years.

Simran Singh has recently returned from the United States with a Master in Journalism from Stanford University. During her course, she reported for The Stanford Daily and was a copy editor for The Alumni Almanac.

EDITION 1 2022 19

Forty Years of

Fulbright in India

By MEENA SANYAL

Among the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the Fulbright program in India is the release of a commemorative publication incorporating reminiscences of a number of Indian participants.

SPAN presents excerpts.

S

ince 1950, the United States Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) has grown into an important focus for scholarly exchange between the United States and India, forging special bonds of cooperation, friendship and understanding between the peoples of our two nations.

USEFI was established to administer

the Fulbright program in India on February 2, 1950, with the signing of an agreement by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and U.S. Ambassador Loy W. Henderson. The program’s primary goal is the promotion of “mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States of America and India by a wider exchange of knowledge and professional talents through educational

Girish Karnad with his family.

20 EDITION 1 2022

contacts.”

The success of the Foundation in its early years was due immeasurably to the efforts of its first director, the legendary Olive Reddick. A pioneer in the development of the lndo-U.S. exchange program, Reddick was associated with numerous educational and scholarly initiatives, including the creation of the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad in 1964. She was no stranger to India when she arrived here to pick up the reins of the Foundation in 1951.

She had taught economics at Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow in the early 1920s and again in the late 1930s.

She had also worked with the U.S. State Department in the mid-1940s, part of the time in India stationed in New Delhi.

Thus when she came to the Foundation she had firsthand knowledge of India, direct association with college classrooms and extensive administrative experience.

The long line of distinguished directors has continued from Reddick to the current director Sharada Nayak. In 1973 Charles Boewe, who served as the director for two years, handed over charge to the first Indian director C.S. Ramakrishnan, describing it as “an act long overdue.” “My most notable accomplishment at USEFI,” noted Boewe, “was to preside over the transfer of the Foundation to capable Indian

Originally published in

FEBRUARY

Photographs courtesy USEFI

1990

Chitra Naik (right), 1953

hands, a move whose outcome has proved so salutary since.”

Over the years the Fulbright program in India has benefited more than 7,500 grantees—about half of whom are Indian and half American. Many Indian Fulbright grantees have returned to occupy positions of importance in their country. In 1985, for example, the vicechancellors of 27 Indian universities were Fulbright alumni. India’s Fulbright program ranks as one of the largest in the world, a far-reaching program made possible by the vision of U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright. At the end of World War II, Fulbright sponsored legislation that drew upon American surplus property lying idle in warehouses around the world to fulfill a need for

Hanuman Singh, 1985

Prabhakar Machave (first row, second from left), 1960

greater understanding among nations.

He saw cross-cultural education by the international exchange of students, researchers and professors as a way of bridging the distance between different cultures and societies.

As signed into law on August I, 1946, the Fulbright Act permitted foreign currencies held by the United States to be used to finance educational exchanges between the United States and the countries involved, for the purposes of study, teaching, lecturing or advanced research. The idea caught on, and the program has continued to grow steadily. Today 40 countries throughout the world have formal exchange agreements with the United States and many others participate in the program

through the cultural offices of the U.S. Information Service.

In 1987, 20,859 individuals participated in the program worldwide. The U.S. contribution to the program in that year was $147 million. Increasingly other governments are matching the U.S. contribution in recognition of the benefits of the exchange program.

If today students and scholars move around the world with greater ease and frequency, it is in part thanks to the Fulbright program. While providing substantial sums of government money to finance the exchanges, the program has taken care to minimize the influence of political considerations by making its working the responsibility of a nonpartisan Board of Foreign Scholarships in the United States, and of binational foundations or commissions in most of the participating countries.

The Fulbright grantees around the world are chosen competitively, on the basis of merit, and travel as private persons, not as government representatives. Most grantees remain long enough to accomplish a substantial piece of academic work and to become familiar with their host country and its society. Sustained contacts among peoples of different countries result in greater understanding of and appreciation for different cultures and ways of life in our world.

S.V. Chittibabu (center), 1966 To share articles go to https://spanmag.com EDITION 1 2022 21

Barry Fitzgerald

J.W. FULBRIGHT, Former U.S. Senator I am pleased to send greetings and congratulations to you and the members of the India Fulbright Commission on your 40th anniversary. The creation of the Educational Foundation with the balance of the war debts gave the program stability and prestige which has contributed to its effectiveness. In addition, it was a symbolic act of converting the debris of war into a constructive effort to bring about peace in the future. The fundamental challenge in this nuclear high-tech era is one of psychology and education in the field of human relations. We must draw upon our human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination and of empathy and understanding between cultures. The cultivation of these attributes is the highest calling of all true educators, a calling to which the U.S. Educational Foundation in India and its alumni are committed.

M.S. GORE, 1951-53 Former Director, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay What I found valuable was the freedom to work on my own without being bound to particular textbooks. This was different from the pattern of instruction in Indian universities. It forced me to be on my own, to read extensively. This was a new experience and not entirely without a measure of associated anxiety.

CHITRA NAIK, 1953-54 Honorary Director, State Resource Centre for Nonformal Education, Pune Studies at Columbia University were interesting. I had opted for administration of rural education and chosen my courses accordingly. I still remember the seminars given by Dr. Jerome Bruner (rural sociology), Dr. Sloan Weyland (the school and the community), Dr. Cyr (rural education) and Dr. Clark (economics of education). The atmosphere at Columbia was relaxed and friendly.

22 EDITION 1 2022

Avinash Pasricha

W. ROBERT HOLMES, USEFI Director, 1967-71 It is a genuine pleasure to be reminded that the United States Educational Foundation in India is soon to be 40 years old. Our four years in New Delhi were in many ways the happiest of our lives and the most fruitful. The friendships made, particularly in the scholarly community of Indians and Americans, the acquaintanceship with dozens of Indian universities and the privilege of being woven into the rich cultural fabric of India in general and Delhi in particular is beyond assessment. It gives us much satisfaction that the Foundation’s services continue to fertilize and enrich Indo-American relationships and that “Fulbright scholar” is still an honored title.

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, Former Ambassador to India, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts There is no activity involving my association with India that has given me more pleasure and no meetings have been intellectually more agreeable and rewarding than the occasions when I have met with recipients of the Foundation awards. My congratulations on this important occasion.

M.S. RAJAN, 1950-52 Professor Emeritus of International Organization, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi The Fulbright/Smith/Mundt grants which enabled me to study at Columbia University for two years radically altered my career aspiration from an administrative one (which I held in 1950 in the Indian Council of World Affairs) to a scholarly one, for which I can never be adequately grateful. Those two years of study/research in international affairs laid for me the foundations of much that happened in my subsequent career as an academic.

PRABHAKAR MACHAVE, 1959-61 Editor, Choutha Sansar, Indore In the department of Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin, I taught four courses, two on Indian literature, one on ancient Indian culture and one on Mahatma Gandhi. I stayed in the United States for two-and-a-half years and traveled coast to coast. Those were the days of Kennedy’s election campaign.

Nehru visited America and called me to see him in New York.

Four things impressed me very much in that distant land.

Curiosity for other cultures in spite of technical advancement and dependence on gadgets, freshness of outlook, freedom of individual opinion and a great humanist wave. At Chicago’s Ramakrishna center, I met an American young man who had read all the works of Vivekananda. In Berkeley, where I taught a seminar on Bhakti in medieval poetry, I found that the interests of students were amazingly varied—Shiva in Indian sculpture, Tukaram’s humanism, music of Surdas, Kabir’s language, influence of saint poets on Tagore. That experience enriched me greatly.

D.M. NANJUNDAPPA, 1963-64 Vice-Chancellor, Bangalore University, Bangalore

The Harvard model of university/government/industry exchange, its tradition of scholarship, its culture and freedom to maintain one’s own views have been the constantly enthusing and guiding factors in my determination to become a “maker” rather than a mere “joiner” in the Indian society. I must record my gratitude to the U.S. government for the scholarship which took me to Harvard University. A common faith, which binds the two countries, has bound me to Harvard University, whose logo “Veritas” (Truth) has been my conscience keeper.

World Religions at Harvard, write a paper on Indian theater for Daedalus, browse for hours through the Regenstein Library (certainly the most spectacular library I have ever stepped into), learn from C.M. Naim how to carve Jack O’Lanterns, attend the International Theater Festival of Chicago, write a full-length play in Kannada, translate it into English, produce it with the students at the University Theater, and finally spend almost every evening, for 10 months, at home with my family—something my profession doesn’t allow me in India!

HANUMAN SINGH, 1985-86 Associate Professor, Department of Life Sciences, Manipur University, Imphal My field of research is fish bio-chemistry, and in America I had a really good experience while collecting fish for my research. In India, I always had the privilege of having laboratory attendants meet our fish requirements through the local fishermen. However, when I landed in the United States, I was told that I would have to catch the fish for my experiments on my own, from the sea. This put me in an embarrassing position, as I did not have any experience of handling fishing nets or lines. However, I took up the challenge and went out on the open sea in a fishing boat along with a few other colleagues, and to the surprise of everybody caught the largest scup (fish on which we were working) of the season on the first day of my training!

GIRISH KARNAD, 1987-88 Playwright, director, actor and Chairman, Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi The opportunity of being a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the department of South Asian languages and civilizations of the University of Chicago, enabled me to give myself time to read Bharata’s “Natya Sastra” in detail, clarify my thoughts on classical Indian theater and poetics by giving a course on the subject for two quarters, spend hours chatting with the research students and teachers such as Ed Dimmock, give a course on Indian literature along with A.K. Ramanujan, speak at various seminars including one at the Center for Study of

Avinash Pasricha

S.V. CHITTIBABU, 1966-67 Former Vice-Chancellor, Madurai-Kamaraj University, Madurai, and Annamalai University, Annamalainagar During my stay in that fascinating country I found that American education was in ferment and unprecedented problems of quantity and quality clamored for unprecedented solutions.

The flood tides of science, imperatives of social and moral values and significant changes in the world scenario were exerting such pressures on the educational system that educational agencies, both public and private, had necessarily to respond with hundreds of innovative educational experiments, new methods of organization, new technological devices and new concepts of the role of the teacher. It was indeed an exciting and thought-provoking experience for me.

Looking Back—and Ahead

By SHARADA NAYAK

I

n the four decades of the Fulbright Exchange Program in India, many changes have taken place in the nature of USEFI’s work. These changes have reflected our responses to the wider concerns of educators in both India and the United States. The need to build stronger human ties in a postwar world inspired Senator Fulbright to propose the educational exchange program that bears his name. But the program grew to take the color, shape and identity of the countries that developed these educational links with America. In planning ahead, like Janus, we look behind and recognize that the forces that have affected society have given the stimulus to spring new shoots in this growing tree.

Two generations of Fulbright scholars have built foundations for teaching and research. Today the academics who participate in the Fulbright program have access to more information than their predecessors had and they proceed to the United States seeking a different dimension to their educational experience. The needs of India have shifted to the new priorities in the country’s development, and USEFI must be sensitive to them. However, the understanding of the social concerns in both India and America must remain our raison d’être. The need to recognize the stirring of a society is still paramount; to discover how past history and tradition have shaped us, and to understand how the present is trying to shape our tomorrows—to know not only how people in India and the United States live, but also what they are trying to become.

EDITION 1 2022 23

KALPANA CHAWLA AND THE

SPACE SHUTTLE Indian American Kalpana Chawla was part of the international crew aboard the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia Flight STS-87 who completed a successful mission last December. While Earthbound humans were embroiled in politics and other quirks of the third planet from the Sun, the sixmember crew space-walked, manipulated remote control devices and orbited millions of miles performing experiments.

K

Courtesy NASA

alpana Chawla says scientist. In 1994 she was she never dreamed, as selected by NASA for training a child in Karnal, that as an astronaut, which she she would cross the began in March 1995, at frontiers of space. It Johnson Space Center (JSC) in was enough that her parents Houston, Texas. allowed her to attend engineering The fourth U.S. Microgravity college after she graduated Payload shuttle flight STS-87, from Tagore School. Not only which completed its 15-day, 16did she get a bachelor of hour, 34-minute mission on science degree in aeronautical December 5, 1997, was her first engineering from Punjab time around as Mission Engineering College, but she Specialist. She hopes to do it went on to get a master’s again. She and her teammates degree in the United States traversed 10.45 million from the University of Texas. kilometers during their trip. It She earned her Ph.D. in was an international crew, aerospace engineering from the including Mission Specialist University of Colorado in Takao Doi of the National 1988. And last November Space Development Agency of Chawla was the first Indian Japan—the first Japanese Orbiter Columbia touches down at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) American woman astronaut to astronaut to do a space walk— shuttle landing facility on December 5, 1997, after a successful sojourn blast off from the launch pad at in space. Commander Kevin Kregel and Pilot Steven Lindsey were at Ukrainian Payload Specialist Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the controls. It was the 12th landing for Columbia at KSC, and the 41st Leonid Kadenyuk of the participate in a successful National Space Agency of the KSC landing in the history of the space shuttle program. mission in space. Her family Ukraine, and three other from India cheered along with staff at the Kennedy Space Americans: Mission Commander Kevin R. Kregel, Pilot Steven Center as they watched the Columbia liftoff.

Lindsey and Mission Specialist Winston Scott. The crew Chawla was born in Karnal, Haryana, but is a naturalized performed experiments as part of the Collaborative Ukrainian U.S. citizen, married to flight instructor Jean-Pierre Harrison.

Experiment.

Besides being an astronaut, she is licensed to fly single and Some of the experiments involved pollinating plants to multi-engine land airplanes, single-engine seaplanes and gliders. observe food growth in space and tests for making stronger She is also a certified flight instructor. After qualifying as a metals and faster computer chips—all for a price tag of about pilot in 1987, Chawla began to consider another challenge: $56 million. They also had to deal with recalcitrant satellite applying to NASA’s space shuttle program. She was hired as a Spartan, deployed by Chawla for solar observation. A research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in malfunction gave space-walkers Doi and Scott an extra job to California in 1988, and in 1993 she joined Overset Methods, do: retrieval of the $10 million satellite.

Inc., Los Altos, California, as vice president and research Now the work will continue back on the ground as scientists

24 EDITION 1 2022

Originally published in

JAN/FEB

Photographs courtesy NASA

1998

analyze the data. When the subject of modeling comes up for Kalpana Chawla, it is usually in connection with numerical simulation and analysis of flow physics. When asked what it is like being a woman in her field she replied, “I really never, ever thought, while pursuing my studies or doing anything else, that I was a woman, or person from a small city, or a different country. I pretty much had my dreams like anyone else and I followed them. And people who were around me, fortunately, always encouraged me and said, ‘If that’s what you want to do, carry on.’ ”

Far left: Astronaut Kalpana Chawla flying high in NASA’s KC-135 “zero-gravity” aircraft, getting the feel of microgravity during training.

Above left: On the job in space. Chawla on Day 2 of the space shuttle mission.

Left: Suited up in training, Chawla prepares to go underwater for general familiarization of underwater simulations for Extravehicular Activity (EVA).

Far left: Portrait of the STS-87 crew. Five astronauts and a payload specialist pose at the Johnson Space Center (JSC). Left to right in foreground, wearing partial pressure launch and entry suits: Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Steven W. Lindsey, pilot; Kevin R. Kregel, mission commander; and Leonid K. Kadenyuk, Ukrainian payload specialist. In white Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMU) are mission specialists Winston F. Scott and Japanese Takao Doi. Left: An electronic still camera view of the autonomous robotic camera in the cargo bay of the Earth-orbiting Columbia. The camera is a prototype free-flying television camera that could be used for remote inspections of the exterior of space stations.

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Originally published in

JULY/AUGUST

Ron Edmonds © AP-WWP

2005

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

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

26 EDITION 1 2022

J. Scott Applewhite © AP-WWP

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush

Originally published in

Working Together, Making History

MARCH/APRIL

2006

Gerald Herbert © AP-WWP

P

rime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush characterized the agreements and initiatives they finalized during the President’s March 13, 2006, state visit to India as “historic.”

Important steps forward in cooperation on fighting terrorism, supporting other democracies, developing clean energy and encouraging robust new farming methods are significant evidence of a new era in the relationship, one that President Bush said “is going to be good for laying the foundations of peace in this world of ours.”

“Many of the areas that our cooperation now covers are essential to India’s national development,” said Prime Minister Singh. The ambitious agenda outlined in the five-part Joint Statement issued by the two leaders on March 2 commits their governments to work together on initiatives in agriculture, science and technology, trade, investment, health, the environment and clean energy. “When implemented, they will make a real difference to the lives of our people,” the Prime Minister said during a joint press conference with President Bush at Hyderabad House in New Delhi.

President Bush’s program in New Delhi on March 2 also included a ceremonial welcome at Rashtrapati Bhavan; a briefing from a group of powerful CEOs of American and Indian companies on ways to strategically improve trade and develop new types of business and industry; meetings with political leaders; a dialogue with religious representatives; laying of a wreath at Raj Ghat; a lunch hosted by the Prime Minister, and a state dinner

hosted by President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

On March 3, President Bush traveled to Hyderabad, where, he promised, the U.S. government will open its fifth consulate in India to make it easier for Indian students, entrepreneurs, experts and tourists to get visas and to facilitate interaction with American officials pursuing the broad range of new cooperative projects. One of the most important, the Agricultural Knowledge Initiative, involves American and Indian scientists, technicians, inventors, farmers and officials working together as they did in the 1960s to promote a second Green Revolution in India. During his relaxed visit to Andhra Pradesh, the President held lively exchanges with members of local women’s self-help groups associated with farming and small businesses. Then he met with 400

President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush are greeted by President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on March 2.

students, teachers and young entrepreneurs, the CEOs of the future.

Back in New Delhi that evening, the President gave his farewell address at the Purana Qila (Old Fort). He dwelt on the natural partnership between India and America that began when the United States supported India’s freedom struggle, and affirmed the shared foundation of both nations’ commitment to fundamental rights, justice and democracy. Calling for even deeper partnerships to secure safety, economic opportunity, technological advances, health and education, the President said he had “come as a friend.”

—L.K.L.

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Benefits of

U.S.-IIndia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation

P

resident George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh concluded a landmark agreement on March 2, 2006, that would place India’s civilian nuclear program under international safeguards and enable full civilian nuclear cooperation with the United States.

It would benefit Indians economically by enabling India to purchase nuclear fuel and technology from the United States and other countries, to help meet growing energy needs.

President Bush has promised to ask the U.S. Congress to change a U.S. law, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, in order to implement the agreement. Such a modification requires a majority vote in the U.S. Senate and in the House of Representatives. As part of the effort to win this approval, the White House issued this explanatory document on March 8 to dispel some misconceptions about the agreement.

CRITICS: The U.S.-IIndia civil nuclear cooperation deal will accelerate the nuclear arms race in South Asia.

COUNTERPOINT: This is a historic agreement that brings India into the nonproliferation mainstream and addresses its growing energy needs through increased use of nuclear energy in cooperation with the international community. The United States has no intention of aiding India’s nuclear weapons program. India’s plan to separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and programs will allow other nations to cooperate with India’s civilian facilities to expand energy production. Those facilities will be under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards to prevent diversion of technology and materials to India’s military program. Greater use of nuclear reactors to produce energy for the Indian people will not undermine regional security or stability.

28 EDITION 1 2022

CRITICS: Only 14 of India’s 22 nuclear power reactors will be safeguarded under its separation plan, and India’s two developmental fast breeder reactors will

Ambassador David C. Mulford (from left); R. Nicholas Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs; and Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran in New Delhi at an October 21, 2005, meeting, one of many held over the past year to work out the U.S.-India civilian nuclear agreement.

Vikas Narula

CRITICS: Doesn’t this initiative effectively recognize India as a nuclear weapons state?

COUNTERPOINT: No, the United States has not recognized India as a nuclear weapons state. The 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) defines a nuclear weapons state

as “one which has manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to January 1, 1967.”

(The United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia and China exploded nuclear devices prior to that date.) India does not meet this definition, and the United States does not seek to amend the treaty.

remain un-ssafeguarded. With these facilities, India can produce enough nuclear weapons to significantly expand its current arsenal.

COUNTERPOINT: The understanding the United States has reached with India will significantly increase the number of Indian nuclear reactors under IAEA safeguards, as well as bring associated facilities under safeguards. At present, only four of India’s nuclear power reactors are under safeguards.

Under its civil-military separation plan, India has agreed to place the majority of its existing nuclear power reactors and those under construction under safeguards and to place the other associated upstream and downstream [input and output] facilities that support those reactors under safeguards.

Furthermore, India has committed to place all future civilian power and fast breeder reactors under safeguards.

This agreement is good for American security because it will bring India’s civilian nuclear program into the international nonproliferation mainstream. The agreement also is good for the American economy

Originally published in

because it will help meet India’s surging energy needs—and that will lessen India’s growing demand for other energy supplies and help restrain energy prices for American consumers.

CRITICS: Doesn’t this initiative create a double standard and won’t it encourage rogue nations like North Korea and Iran to continue to pursue nuclear weapons programs?

COUNTERPOINT: It is not credible to compare the rogue regimes of North Korea and Iran to India. Unlike Iran or North Korea, India has been a peaceful and vibrant democracy with a strong nuclear nonproliferation record.

Under this initiative, India—which has never been a party to the NPT—has agreed to take a series of steps that will bring it into the international nonproliferation mainstream.

Iran and North Korea are very different cases. They signed and ratified the NPT and gave lip service to adhering to their international obligations. Through their covert actions, however, they broke the very nonproliferation commitments they claimed to follow. Additionally, both regimes have isolated themselves from the international community and are state sponsors of terrorism.

India, on the other hand, has agreed to take steps that will bring it into the nonproliferation mainstream, including: • Placing its civilian nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards and monitoring; • Signing and implementing the Additional Protocol, which allows more extensive inspections by the IAEA; • Ensuring that its nuclear materials and technologies are secured and prevented from being diverted, including recent passage of a law to create a robust national export control system; • Refraining from transfers of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to states that do not already possess them and supporting efforts to limit their spread; • Working to conclude a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty; • Continuing its moratorium on nuclear testing; and • Adhering to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) guidelines.

CRITICS: This initiative will weaken or unravel the global nonproliferation regime. Creating

an exception for India will lead Pakistan and Israel, who are also outside the NPT regime, to insist on a similar deal or cause other nations to withdraw from the treaty.

COUNTERPOINT: India has stood outside the global nonproliferation regime for the last 30 years. Through this initiative, India will enter the international nonproliferation mainstream, thereby strengthening the regime that continues to play a vital role in enhancing international security and stability.

All nations that are

technology for peaceful purposes.

Pakistan and India are different MARCH/APRIL countries with different needs and 2006 different histories. The United States’ relationship with Pakistan, which has Major Non-NATO Ally status, follows a separate path that reflects our countries’ strong commitment to maintaining close ties and cooperation, including in the war on terror. However, Pakistan does not have the same nonproliferation record as India, nor the same energy needs. The

ENERGY SECURITY AND A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT • Welcomed the successful completion of discussions on India’s [nuclear facilities] separation plan and looked forward to the full implementation of the commitments in the July 18, 2005, Joint Statement on nuclear cooperation. This historic accomplishment will permit our countries to move forward toward our common objective of full civil nuclear energy cooperation between India and the United States and between India and the international community as a whole.

• Welcomed the participation of India in the ITER [experimental] initiative on fusion energy as an important further step toward the common goal of full nuclear energy cooperation.

• Agreed on India’s participation in FutureGen, an international public-private partnership to develop new, commercially viable technology for a clean coal near-zero emission power project. India will contribute funding to the project and participate in the Government Steering Committee of this initiative.

• Welcomed the creation of the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which will enable India and the United States to work together with other countries in the region to pursue sustainable development and meet increased energy needs while addressing concerns of energy security and climate change. The Partnership will collaborate to promote the development, diffusion, deployment and transfer of cleaner, cost-effective and more efficient technologies and practices.

• Welcomed India’s interest in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international marine research endeavor that will contribute to long-term energy solutions such as gas hydrates.

• Noting the positive cooperation under the Indo-U.S. Energy Dialogue, highlighted plans to hold joint conferences on topics such as energy efficiency and natural gas, to conduct study missions on renewable energy, to establish a clearing house in India for coal-bed methane/coal-mine methane, and to exchange energy market information. party to the NPT are permitted full access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes but are prohibited from pursuing or possessing nuclear weapons (except for the five recognized nuclear weapons states). The United States does not expect nations to withdraw from the NPT. Any move to withdraw from the NPT would clearly signal a nation’s intent to pursue nuclear weapons and would result in the loss of access to nuclear

United States does not intend to pursue a similar civil nuclear cooperation initiative with Pakistan.

The status of Israel is not comparable to that of India. Israel has not declared itself to be a nuclear power, nor articulated such extraordinary energy needs. As for other Middle Eastern countries, the United States expects all NPT parties to live up to their treaty obligations.

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The Indian Pilgrimage of

B

Martin Luther King, Jr.

By LAURINDA KEYS LONG

30 EDITION 1 2022

© AP-WWP

y early 1959, Martin Luther Emancipation Proclamation of President King, Jr. had led the Abraham Lincoln had ended slavery. successful Montgomery Although they were full U.S. citizens, boycott of buses and the African Americans, especially in the businesses in the southern southern states, but elsewhere, also, U.S. state of Alabama. He, as well as often had to choose between being killed his colleagues and followers, had been or harmed and putting up with arrested, jailed, convicted, fined, humiliating treatment, illegal threatened and beaten. And in 1956 discrimination and deprivation of their they had celebrated the historic U.S. rights. And even when the laws were Supreme Court ruling that said laws changed, just as with the caste system— allocating public resources on the basis and other forms of discrimination around of race are unconstitutional. Segregation the world against people because of their was doomed, but not yet dead. appearance, race, family, name or The newsreels, photographs and tribe—it takes decades for the laws to be newspaper articles—about African fully enforced. How long for the hearts Americans nonviolently resisting unjust of their would-be oppressors to change? laws, but refusing to cooperate with Perhaps centuries. arbitrary rules that treated them as King and his cohorts were realists. second-class citizens—were fascinating They knew how hard it was, how long it to Indians who only a dozen years The Kings at their Atlanta, Georgia, home on March 17, might take. Yet they were brave, patient, earlier had won independence using peaceable and—despite the horrors of 1963 with children (from left) Martin III, Dexter and Yolanda. Their infant daughter, Bernice, is not shown. lynching, house burnings and church similar tactics.

King was also making the bombings—hopeful, optimistic, connection. In a speech to the national convention of the determined and full of faith. That faith rings forth in King’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People speech in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963. “I have a in June 1956, he mentioned that through “soul force,” dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation Mohandas K. Gandhi “was able to free his people from the where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by political domination, the economic exploitation and the the content of their character,” he said. Implied in that humiliation that had been inflicted upon them by Britain.” articulated dream is that there would be, some year, an African The Montgomery boycott was carried out by black Americans American president. King is unlikely to have visualized Barack to force the local authorities to rescind discriminatory laws. It Obama. His father a Kenyan, his mother a white American, was part of a widespread, multi-state, nonviolent, church-based Obama was six years old and living in Indonesia at the time of campaign that knocked a gaping gash in a hydra of law, tradition King’s death. Yet he became president 40 years later, within the and prejudice that for almost two centuries had deprived African lifetime of King’s children.

Americans of the rights of a citizen guaranteed by the Back in 1959, however, some people dreamed that King Constitution. himself might become the first African American president. His There were many more boycotts, marches, sit-down protests, oratorical talents, leadership abilities, strategic planning, courage church meetings and prayer vigils, many families who fled their and amiableness made him a man of interest to the ordinary and burning homes or sat up all night in fear, men and women and the great across the world. One of these was Prime Minister children who were beaten, spat upon. They were denied jobs, the Jawaharlal Nehru of India. right to vote, to walk down the street without being harassed, to During a short visit to the United States in 1956, Nehru said go to a good school, use the public library, eat in a restaurant, sit he wished he had met King. Indian representatives followed up, on a park bench, use a public restroom or get a drink of water. as did former U.S. Ambassador to India Chester Bowles, to bring The U.S. civil rights movement has obvious resonances in about a journey to India for King.

India, where the Dalits and people born into “lower castes” have “While the Montgomery boycott was going on, India’s Gandhi lived for centuries under the same type of oppressions that were was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change. being faced by African Americans in the years since the So as soon as our victory over bus segregation was won, some of

Originally published in

JAN/FEB

2009

Illustration by Hemant Bhatnagar. Source photographs © AP-WWP, Yoichi R. Okamoto, White House Press Office

Only 12 years after Indians won their freedom with nonviolent protests, noncooperation and boycott, African Americans were using the same tactics to overturn unjust laws.

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© AP-W WWP G Geennee H Heerrrriicckk © ©A APP-W -W W WW WPP

Harold Valentine © AP-W WWP

my friends said: ‘Why don’t you go to India and see for yourself what the Mahatma, whom you so admire, has wrought?’ ” King said, according to “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” edited by Clayborne Carson of Stanford University in California.

In the end, King, his wife, Coretta, and Alabama State College professor Lawrence D. Reddick, King’s biographer, spent just under a month in India. Because of flight problems, they landed on February 9, 1959, in Bombay, spent the night at the Taj Mahal Hotel and flew the next day to Palam Air Base in New Delhi, two days late.

One could say, however, that the scene had been set years before, when King, as a teenage student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, was mentored by the principal, Benjamin Elijah Mays and first read the writings of Gandhi. Mays had “returned from India as one of the growing number of African American disciples of Mahatma Gandhi” and became one of the great influences on King’s life, H.V. Shivadas of the Gandhi Foundation of USA has written.

According to King, Reddick had told him at the outset of the India trip “…my true test would come when the people who knew Gandhi looked me over and passed judgment upon me and the Montgomery movement.” He described the ensuing, socalled hurricane tour as “one of the most concentrated and eyeopening experiences of our lives.”

He spoke to thousands, was greeted by name as he walked the streets or traveled in trains, planes and cars, was besieged for autographs, welcomed into the poorest village homes and the most palatial. He said that his wife “ended up singing as much as I lectured.”

The American Friends Service Committee (or Quakers, a pacifist Christian denomination) co-sponsored the trip, along with the Gandhi National Memorial Fund. James E. Bristol, director of the Quaker Centre in New Delhi, acted as guide throughout the journey. The Indian government did not host the visit, but Nehru sent a welcoming note and had dinner with King on his second night in India. The prime minister had scheduled a dinner for the Kings the night before. But because of the delayed landing (due to fog!), in an amazing move that must have sent the protocol-checkers into a tizzy, the prime minister had them for dinner the next night.

So February 10 was spent in greetings, garlanding and interactions with reporters to whom King commented, “To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”

32 EDITION 1 2022

Above far left: Martin Luther King, Jr. (second row, left) with Reverends Ralph Abernathy (front row, left) and Glenn Smiley (second row, right) in an integrated Montgomery, Alabama, bus after the Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional on December 21, 1956.

Above center: A policeman leads away Abernathy (left) and King from a demonstration they organized against continued discrimination by businesses in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 12, 1963.

Above right: King receives a kiss from his wife, Coretta, after leaving the Montgomery Courthouse, where he was found guilty on March 22, 1956 of conspiracy to boycott city buses. The judge suspended his fine while the case was appealed.

From the accounts we have, the evening dinner was a fascinating four hours, as King and Nehru had fundamental differences on important issues of their day, which humanity is still disagreeing over today.

The vast number of India’s poor struck King, just as it does visitors these days when they see it for the first time. “Most of the people were poor and poorly dressed. In the city of Bombay, for example, over a half million people—mostly unattached, unemployed, or partially employed males—slept out of doors every night,” King said in recalling his visit later. The Kings saw these scenes as they were being driven from the airport to the luxury hotel on their first night in India. “The sight of emaciated human beings wearing only a dirty loincloth, picking through garbage cans, both angered and depressed my husband,” Coretta Scott King said in her memoir. “Never, even in Africa, had we seen such abject, despairing poverty.”

Even earlier, King was concerned, having visited Africa, about the questions facing emerging, post-colonial governments on how to use resources: should they follow Western capitalism, socialism, Soviet-inspired centrism, encourage natural crafts and professions or build huge factories.

The issue of developing countries, in particular, using precious national wealth to build up armies and buy weapons was on King’s mind. At his final news conference in New Delhi on March 9, he called on India to set an example to the world by unilaterally disarming. “It may be that just as India had to take the lead and show the world that national independence could be achieved nonviolently, so India may have to take the lead and call for universal disarmament, and if no other nation will join her immediately, India should declare itself for disarmament unilaterally. Such an act of courage would be a great demonstration of the spirit of the Mahatma and would be the greatest stimulus to the rest of the world to do likewise,” King said. The suggestion, though echoing Vinoba Bhave, seems as

Rangaswamy Satakopan © AP-WWP © AP-WWP Courtesy Gandhi Smarak Nidhi/National Gandhi Museum

astounding in its context as the one made by Gandhi after the start of World War II in open letters to the British and the Jewish people, advising them not to fight, even to the point of allowing themselves to be conquered, exiled or killed. King did not go so far; he said passive resistance should not be confused with nonresistance.

King could not have known, as he engaged the prime minister in discussion on the evening of February 10, 1959, “that India’s ambitious nuclear power program (which was then consuming a third of the nation’s research budget) could someday produce nuclear weapons” Carson, founding director of Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, wrote in a recent article for The Times of India.

Just days before he set out for India, King had addressed the War Resisters League in New York, saying, “What will be the ultimate value of having established social justice in a context where all people, Negro and White, are merely free to face destruction by Strontium 90 [radiation] or atomic war?”

“He probably realized at that time that this was not Nehru’s viewpoint when he had dinner with Nehru,” Carson told SPAN in an interview. “We know now that India had already started its atomic program; it saw the threat of China. That’s one of the things where, by the end of the trip King had become more Gandhian than many of Gandhi’s former colleagues. I think he came to India to learn more about Gandhi’s ideas, and by the time he left India, he was the pre-eminent Gandhian.”

In fact, Reddick wrote in his account of the trip, “With King through India,” that Nehru had acknowledged, “as an individual and a follower of Gandhi he favored nonviolent resistance in every phase of life—between persons, groups and nations; but as a head of state, in a world that had not accepted the nonviolent principle, it would be folly for one country to go very far down that road alone.”

In commenting on this, Carson could immediately think of only one other country that has done so, Costa Rica. “I think nonviolence is one of those ideas that everyone kind of believes in for the other person, but it’s hard to accept for oneself, particularly if we believe we have something of value that other people want,” says Carson.

“I think he left India on the road to the Nobel Peace Prize because he had become by that time an international figure and international symbol of the greatest freedom struggle the world has ever known, the struggle of the 20th century to bring basic rights to the majority of the world’s people,” Carson says of King. “He and Gandhi are the primary symbols of that. Gandhi was assassinated; King was left to carry on that mantle of the preeminent global symbol of the constructive solution to the central problem of the century.”

According to the “Autobiography,” a compilation of King’s writings, conversations and speeches edited by Carson, King’s impression was that India was divided between those who wanted it “to become Westernized and modernized as quickly as possible” to raise the standard of living, and those who felt Westernization would “bring the evils of materialism, cutthroat competition and rugged individualism,” causing India to “lose her soul.”

King felt that Nehru was trying to “steer a middle course

Top: The Kings were garlanded upon arrival in New Delhi on February 10, 1959.

Above center: The Kings spent March 9, 1959, their last Indian evening, at the home of Acharya J.B. Kripalani, an interpreter of Gandhi’s teachings (third from left). Others are (from left) Kripalani’s secretary, Shanti; Barbara Bristol and James E. Bristol of the Quaker Centre.

Above: The Kings and Lawrence Reddick, in prayer at the Gandhi memorial in New Delhi.

EDITION 1 2022 33

34 EDITION 1 2022

separately from caste Hindus. Thiagaraj argues this is exactly what African Americans faced, until U.S. laws were passed, and enforced, that prohibited refusing to sell or rent housing to someone based on their race. Other similarities he cites: “Dalit children are asked to sit separately, play separately and prohibited from drinking water from the same tap as caste Hindu children.

Laws and safeguards are not enforced in rural areas, where landowners maintain their age-old discriminatory social customs, violations of which are punished by lynchings.” King and other African Americans of his time would have found such a description almost identical to their way of life in the southern states. Well into the 1960s, and in some places later, signs appeared over public drinking taps and toilets designating them for “Whites” or “Coloreds” in the American South.

In fact, one of the moving stories King told about his trip to India showed how clearly and forcefully this similarity had been brought home to him. It was when the principal of a school for the children of former Dalits introduced him as “a fellow Untouchable from the United States of America.” Six years later, as King told an American church congregation about this, he said, “For a moment I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an Untouchable.”

Then, he says, he started thinking: About the fact that 20 million of his fellow black Americans “were still, by and large, in rat-infested, unendurable slums in the big cities of our nation, still attending inadequate schools faced with improper recreational facilities.” And he said to himself, “Yes, I am an Untouchable, and every Negro in the United States is an Untouchable.”

King was moved when he visited small villages and saw hundreds of Photographs courtesy Gandhi Smarak Nidhi/National Gandhi Museum

between these extreme attitudes.” King recalled that in their talk, Nehru felt “there were some things that only big or heavy industry could do for the country” and that the state’s watchful eye could prevent pitfalls. At the same time, Nehru supported the expansion of weaving, spinning and other home and village handicrafts to “leave as much economic self-help and autonomy as possible to the local community.” The subject of this 50-yearold discourse is still relevant today.

The talk also touched on what Nehru described as India’s efforts to eliminate caste discrimination, including the policy of giving preference to Dalits in university admissions, an idea that was hotly controversial when it was later applied to African Americans in the United States, and stirs mixed feelings in India, also. “This is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people,” Nehru had explained.

The same basis was used when the similar method, called “affirmative action,” was adopted in the United States.

King described himself as delighted that Indian leaders had “placed their moral power” behind laws aimed at ending discrimination against Dalits. His enthusiasm when he returned home and talked of these things may have been overly rosy, almost as if he believed the laws and the government’s support were on their way to eliminating caste discrimination very soon. He praised the village projects he saw that were aimed at helping lower castes, but he may have been surprised at how entrenched it remains 50 years later, comments Henry Thiagaraj, author of “Human Rights from the Dalit Perspective,” brought out a year ago

by Gyan Publishing House.

“The treatment of American Blacks in the 1960s, the violence inflicted on them and their suffering, is comparable with the treatment of Untouchables,” Thiagaraj tells SPAN. “Untouchability, in my opinion and study has the origin in racism, although the distinctive feature in India is that it has acquired a religious sanction.” Giving one example of the similarities, Thiagaraj mentioned segregation of dwelling places, with Indian villages divided into sections so that Dalits live

Left top: The Kings met Indian President Rajendra Prasad and a longtime Gandhian, Amrit Kaur (left, second from top), soon after their arrival.

Left, third from top: Coretta Scott King with Indian women.

Above left: G. Ramachandran, secretary of the Gandhi National Memorial Fund, sponsors of the Kings’ visit to India, presents a gift of books.

Left: King at the Quaker Centre, which sponsored his visit.

Below: Mohandas K. Gandhi, in white shawl, walking with others in New Delhi, in March 1936.

Below right: Martin Luther King, Jr., in white cap, marching with others from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965.

two heavenly lights shining, affected King so profoundly that he later used it in a sermon.

His pilgrimage would not have been complete, however, without passing time at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, which Gandhi founded upon his return to India from South Africa, and where he had lived for 18 years, “working out his way for the freedom of the country and the new social order,” as Swami Vishwananda put it. He described his travels with the Kings in a very descriptive and personalized memoir published by the Gandhi National Memorial Fund. It was at the ashram, of course, that Gandhi’s closest associates were trained for nonviolent action, where the march to the seashore began.

“The Kings had a great experience going round the hallowed place and meeting in prayer the 600 or so inmates—most of them Harijans,” wrote Vishwananda. “We came back much refreshed mentally and feeling grateful for the purity and the strength we had gained by the visit.”

What King gained was evident, as he returned to the United States to live for a few more years, marching, preaching, calling, cajoling, walking toward the goal of an end to the evils of injustice and racialism that held back his country from its full potential.

To encourage the Freedom Marchers back home, King spoke about that March 1, 1959 day that he had spent at the ashram in Ahmedabad. He told how Gandhi had started the 322-kilometer walk to Dandi Beach with just a few people, and ended up with millions, all there to break the law by scooping up handfuls of sea salt. King told his listeners the story, in that compelling African American Gospel preaching rhythm that builds enthusiasm and sends a thrill down the spine: “And Gandhi said to his people: ‘If you are hit, don’t hit back; even if they shoot at you, don’t shoot back. If they curse you, don’t curse back. Just keep moving. Some of us might have to die before we get there. Some of us might be thrown in jail before we get there, but let’s just keep moving.’ And they kept moving ...”

Photographs © AP-WWP

people sleeping on the ground, or living in little huts shared with cows and chickens, with no water for washing. “Pretty soon we discovered that these people were the Untouchables,” he said, according to the “Autobiography.” “These were the people who worked hardest, and they were trampled over, even by the Indians themselves. Gandhi looked at this system and he couldn’t stand it. ...And he decided that he would speak against it and stand up against it the rest of his life.” King told of Gandhi’s adoption of an Untouchable as his daughter, against his wife’s wishes, and of his fasting until Untouchables were allowed into Hindu temples. “He demonstrated in his own life that untouchability had to go,” King said.

The continuing existence of casteism and racism 50 years later should not produce despair, but illustrate the need, now more than ever, for “shining examples of individuals who reach across difference for the sake of a common goal, a common good,” comments Eboo Patel, executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, based in Chicago, Illinois. “We may not have achieved it yet, but King understood that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’ Neither King nor Gandhi knew the fruits that their labor would produce following both of their assassinations,” Patel tells SPAN. “But still their lives illuminate the pathway to justice today.”

The Kings saw a good deal of India. They got used to rising early in the morning to make connections, nevertheless arriving late, sometimes eating from banana leaves, cross-legged on the ground, walking through villages, interacting with students and academics, taking a swim in Kerala, viewing the Taj Mahal, enjoying the cultural richness of Gaya and Shantiniketan, and watching the sun set and the moon rise at the same time off Cape Comorin on India’s southern tip. The beauty of that scene, with

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Polio:

Reaching Every Child Eradication of the disease in India would be a huge step toward ending it everywhere.

Courtesy USAID-NPSP

Courtesy USAID-NPSP

“This year we have seen an unprecedented progress never seen in the program before,” says Hamid Jafari, project manager of the National Polio Surveillance Project. “Strong and well coordinated partnership between the Government of India, WHO, UNICEF and Rotary International has ensured this success,” says Jafari, who has also worked as chief of the polio eradication branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Rotary International is a service organization established in Chicago, Illinois, 106 years ago, now with branches around the world, including 106,000 members in India. Rotary is committed to stopping the spread of polio from the remaining endemic countries—India, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Rotarians not only raise money to pay for polio immunization, but members travel long distances to help out.

Rajesh Kumar Singh © Rotary International

A

rshi and Bilal are sweet 2-yearolds living in the Dhaulana block of Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. They smile, coo their first words and cuddle. But neither can stand without aid.

A year ago, their families noticed something unusual in their leg movements.

Laboratory tests confirmed their worst fears—both children had contracted the crippling disease of polio. High population density, open sewers, polluted drinking water and malnutrition have made such places in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar perfect targets for the poliomyelitis virus, which attacks the nervous system of young children and can cripple them for life.

Last year, 42 Indian children became victims of the polio virus. Many will require multiple surgeries to be able to walk. That number, tragic as it is, represents a 90 percent drop in Indian polio cases from 2009 to 2010.

Courtesy WHO-NPSP

By GIRIRAJ AGARWAL

One of these is Ann Lee Hussey, a veterinary technician and survivor of polio from Maine, the northeastern-most U.S. state. She has been coming to India for the past 10 years. She was in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, in November 2010 for an immunization campaign, then led a team of volunteers to help the anti-polio campaign in Nigeria.

Hussey remembers her first visit to a clinic in India, in January 2001, where she met with several polio survivors: “One particular girl caught my eye. She was 9 years of age. As I returned her smile I looked down and saw the same, thin right Below far left: A health worker administers polio drops to children in Bihar.

Below center: Rotarian V.N. Singh marks a child’s little finger with indelible ink after administering the polio vaccine in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

Below: Vaccinators on their way to the Kosi River area in Bihar.

Originally published in

Below: Ann Lee Hussey administers polio drops to a child at a railway station in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh.

JAN/FEB

Courtesy Anne Lee Hussey

2011

leg, the same heavy metal brace.... As I looked back at her face, tears streaming down my cheeks, she smiled again, seeming to understand my personal pain. I cried for her, I cried for me, I cried for all the senseless waste polio has brought to so many for so long.”

India is among the four countries that have failed to eradicate the polio virus, largely because it has found escape routes in the two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In 2009, India had 741 cases of polio: 602 in Bihar and 117 in Uttar Pradesh.

Jafari explains why these two states have been among the most difficult places on Earth to fight against polio. “U.P. and Bihar, especially western U.P. and central Bihar, have posed a number of challenges because of high population density, poverty, low routine immunization, low sanitation and low hygiene. Widespread diarrheal diseases in these areas make the polio vaccine less effective.” Extensive movement of population from these areas poses another challenge. “They are more likely to miss the immunization campaigns. So, when they move, the virus moves with them,” he says.

Parents’ superstitious refusal to get their children vaccinated has been a major problem in certain parts of these

states but Jafari says community participation has improved. “There are, of course, still some pockets of refusal associated with rumors or concerns about the safety of the vaccine. But we have actually found a higher level of acceptance in all communities and cases of reluctance and refusal have gone down.”

Tajikistan is an example of why it is so important to eradicate the polio virus completely. The Central Asian country had been free from polio since 1996, but in 2010 the virus spread from Uttar Pradesh, and has afflicted 458 children in Tajikistan, says Jafari.

As long as the polio virus is active in any part of the world, there may be an outbreak in other parts of the world.

“India is really very, very important for global eradication of polio,” says Jafari.

“Given the scope of challenges, the size, population and risk factors for polio, if eradication succeeds in India, then the global fight against polio is won.”

This requires repeated immunization drives in the polio endemic regions, which is a task of gigantic proportions.

Last year, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar received “intense mobilization and up to 10 rounds of polio vaccination,” says Jafari. “Every house was visited eight to 10 times a year; 60 million children were

given polio drops.” In a polio-free country, generally three doses of the routine vaccine are considered enough.

But polio hotspots like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar require much more.

In January 2010, a bivalent vaccine was introduced which has the capacity to fight against type 3 polio and the more virulent type 1. This vaccine was developed and tested in India by WHO and is now being used globally. “We have seen significant decline in both type 1 and type 3 polio cases because of the use of the bivalent vaccine,” says Jafari. In routine immunization programs, the standard trivalent vaccine is generally used. It provides immunity against all three types of polio virus, although type 2 has already been eliminated. The last case was in 1999 in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh.

“Unprecedented social mobilization” in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is another factor behind the recent success in these two states, says Deepak Kapoor, chairman of Rotary International’s India National Polioplus Committee. He says the committee “has garnered public support for the program by involving the politicians, bureaucrats, local leaders, Bollywood actors and famous sportspeople.” The committee also approached religious leaders to allay

To share articles go to https://spanmag.com EDITION 1 2022 37

Rajesh Kumar Singh © Rotary International

A health activist on a door-to-door round checks whether children have been vaccinated in a high-risk block in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

fears about the safety of the vaccines, Kapoor says.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is led by national governments in partnership with the four spearheading partners: WHO, Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is another important partner. What the program has done since its inception in 1988 is unique. More than 2.5 billion children have been immunized with the help of 200 countries and 20 million volunteers, backed by an international investment of over $8 billion. India is an important partner and beneficiary of this initiative.

The United States—through its international development agency, USAID, the Department of Human and Health Services and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—is a major partner and donor in the global fight to eradicate polio. The Centers for Disease Control also provides technical assistance, technologies and methodologies to Indian laboratories to do polio related tests and analysis.

In India, USAID provides about $6 million annually for polio eradication. It supports surveillance and social mobilization activities through the WHO, UNICEF and the CORE group, a network organization of many non-governmental organizations. UNICEF and CORE have extensive engagement with community leaders in thousands of identified high risk areas, with a particular focus on religious leaders and institutions in western Uttar Pradesh and eastern Bihar to ensure that all children below 5 receive their immunization doses. USAID also supports WHO’s implementation of the National Polio Surveillance Project, funding approximately 300 surveillance 38 EDITION 1 2022

medical officers and additional full-time staff. These personnel are distributed across India to conduct high quality surveillance for acute flaccid paralysis to detect the transmission of polio in suspected cases, lend laboratory support, and provide technical advice and leadership for supplementary immunization activities. The Government of India provides the vast majority of funding for its national polio eradication program, while the United States and others primarily provide technical support, says Ellyn Ogden, USAID’s polio eradication coordinator. “India has overcome obstacles for reaching every child...with dedication, hard work, innovation and coordination,” she says. It “encourages the remaining infected countries to take all needed measures to stop polio transmission and sets the stage for global certification three years after the last case in the world.”

Without consistent and comprehensive immunization, a gap in immunity could lead to a terrible resurgence of cases, says Erin Soto, mission director for USAID in India. Last year’s “reduced number of cases provides real hope. But we cannot flag in our global efforts or in our efforts to achieve the last mile in India. ...Outbreaks this past year in Tajikistan and elsewhere illustrate how crucial our ongoing vigilance and efforts will be,” says Soto.

USAID is supporting three interlinked projects on polio in India to support the national program: CORE Group Project (World Vision U.S.), Polio Eradication (UNICEF India) and National Polio Surveillance Project (WHO). These projects aim to help interrupt the transmission of polio by increasing the numbers of immunization centers (called polio booths) and by reducing the percentage of missed and resistant

households during immunization campaigns. There are 4,300 high risk communities in 44 districts in Uttar Pradesh, 300 poorly accessed villages in the Kosi River area of Bihar, and urban areas of Patna and Khagaria that receive special attention through established Social Mobilization Networks. These projects also work to ensure that the migrant and mobile population receives the polio vaccine both through routine and supplementary immunization. The CORE Group Polio project also supports families with crippled children. It helps to improve the timeliness of polio case detection, leading to early reporting of cases.

Devastation by polio in the 1950s and ’60s is still fresh in the memory of many Americans and they continue to extend help in polio eradication efforts. “More than 300 U.S. Rotarians visit India every year to participate in polio immunization campaigns,” says Kapoor of Rotary International. “They keep the enthusiasm up. They raise funds, contribute from their pockets and live in uncomfortable places to help eradicate polio.”

Rotarian Anil Garg, an Indian American financial adviser from Simi Valley, California, comes to India every year. He recalls one incident: “It was in my first trip, in 2000. I saw a young mother bring her infant child to get the polio drops. After the child was immunized, I saw the eyes of the mother and they were filled with gratitude.... It has reinforced my resolve to keep going back until we eliminate polio forever.”

Brad Howard, a Rotarian and owner of an international tour company in San Francisco, California, participated in Indian immunization campaigns in March 2009 and last November in Moradabad. “I worked in a central immunization station where we would immunize hundreds of children, 5 years and younger. The next day we walked door to door to ensure that every single child had been immunized,” he says.

“Until polio is eradicated in India, and throughout the world, children are at risk,” Howard says. “Indian children are at risk, American children are at risk, children in all countries will be at risk.”

Originally published in

MARCH/APRIL

2017 Courtesy Google

The Internet Saathi initiative by Google India and Tata Trusts is helping rural women go online.

Empowering Through

Technology

By MICHAEL GALLANT

The Internet Saathi initiative teaches rural women to use and benefit from the Internet.

To share articles go to https://spanmag.com EDITION 1 2022 39

Photographs courtesy Google India

Go Online 40 EDITION 1 2022

Helping Women Get Online https://hwgo.com

Saathi stories

https://hwgo.com/ stories

Courtesy Google

G

oogle’s goals transcend simply making it easy to search on the Internet. In fact, its central mission is quite ambitious—to organize the world’s information and make it accessible to everyone.

“We strongly believe that easy and quick access to information can transform lives,” says Sapna Chadha, head of marketing for Google India. With a groundbreaking initiative called Internet Saathi, Google India, in partnership with Tata Trusts, is working to make that belief a reality, specifically for India’s rural, less technologically educated women.

The phrase “Internet Saathi” translates into “Internet friend.” The program has been designed keeping the specific needs of rural women in mind. “We modeled the entire initiative around India’s traditional information and communication distribution system,” says Chadha, “where the Internet Saathis are akin to the village postman, who is the single-point contact between the village and the outside world, in terms of information as well as communication.”

Trained by Google, these saathis are roving educators and activists who travel to villages, armed with smartphones and tablets, and spend a minimum of two days per week, over a period of six months, teaching local residents about the Internet.

They work hard to make sure their students become adept at using the Internet independently to gain knowledge that can benefit them in various aspects of their lives.

“Once an Internet Saathi has completed the training in a cluster of three villages, she moves to an adjoining cluster of villages where she trains women to get online,” says Chadha. Google India works with local groups and organizations to continue the educational momentum in rural areas, even after the saathis have moved on.

Chadha describes Internet Saathis as “change agents,” tenacious teachers who take great pride in their work. And, their Above left and left: Gayatri (right), an Internet Saathi in Sarani Khera village, Rajasthan, trains women in her area to use Google Voice Search.

Far left: Trained by Google, Internet Saathis teach basic Internet skills to rural women in India.

EDITION 1 2022 41

Right and below right: Gayatri (left), an Internet Saathi, teaches her neighbor Lakshmi to search for new designs and sewing techniques on the Internet, to help advance her tailoring business.

“ ”

efforts have paid off. She shares the story of Chetna, who lives in the Alwar district of Rajasthan and joined the program in December 2015. “Chetna not only learned about mustard farming techniques to run her farm, but her own experience also inspired her to train over 500 girls and women in a span of four months,” says Chadha. “Several women still reach out to her for a range of issues, including quick remedies for day-to-day health conditions and information on MGNREGA and other government schemes.” MGNREGA is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees 100 days of wage-employment in a year to a rural household.

Chadha also tells the story of Bujii, an Internet Saathi in Somavaram, Andhra Pradesh, who trained her neighbor to advance her business of stitching and tailoring in various creative ways. “She is now able to use the extra money she makes to send her daughter to the best school in the area,” says Chadha, adding there are thousands of such success stories.

The Internet Saathi program was launched in July 2015 to address a troubling trend observed by Google India team members. “As Internet penetration started gaining momentum in India, we realized that the usage of the Internet amongst women in India was lower than that in most countries in the world,” says

42 EDITION 1 2022

Photographs courtesy Google

We strongly believe that easy and quick access to information can transform lives.

Chadha. “Only one-third of India’s online users are women.” The situation is much worse in rural India, she continues, where only one in 10 Internet users is a woman.

In response, Google India first launched an initiative called Helping Women Get Online in November 2013, which sought to encourage daily Internet usage among women. But, it soon became clear to Google staff that specially crafted strategies were needed to reach those living in rural areas. “We took all the learnings [from Helping Women Get Online] and launched the Internet Saathi program,” says Chadha.

Spread across approximately 40,000 villages now, the program aspires to reach over 300,000 villages, or half of the

country’s villages, in the next few years.

While trained Google educators have already worked with more than one million Indian women, there is still much to be done. “There are still a lot of women in rural and urban areas who do not know how to operate smartphones or are not aware about the benefits of the Internet,” says Chadha. “So, the best and easiest way to contribute is to help those women who are around you. These can be your domestic help or an elderly woman of the house who doesn’t know about the benefits of the Internet.”

Michael Gallant is the founder and chief executive officer of Gallant Music.

He lives in New York City.

Originally published in

India-United States

Malabar 05 Joint Naval Exercises NOV/DEC

Indian and American aircraft carriers, submarines and other naval vessels participated in the Malabar 05 joint exercises, allowing some 10,000 personnel from both countries to practice anti-terrorism operations and rescue missions in the Arabian Sea from September 25 to October 5. A news conference aboard the INS Mysore is addressed by Capt. S.P.S. Cheema of the INS Viraat and U.S. Navy Capt. Michael Smith, along with commanding officers of the other vessels in the exercise (below right). On the right is a view of ships during the exercise and far right below, a Sea Harrier takes off from the INS Viraat.

Manish Swarup © AP-W WWP

2005

Originally published in

The USS Nimitz, one of the world’s largest aircraft carriers, was in Chennai in early JULY/AUGUST

2007

Elizabeth Thompson/U.S. Navy

July. It is the first-ever port call in India by a U.S. aircraft carrier. It can carry 90 fixedwing aircraft and helicopters, including the F-18 “Super Hornet.” The super carrier has a flight deck area of about 1.8 hectares and accommodates over 5,000 crew members.

While docked near Chennai, sailors from USS Nimitz volunteered in numerous goodwill events in the local community, such as cleaning local sites and refurbishing buildings.