June 1994

Forging a Stronger

Our highlight this month is the cover story on the visit of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao to the United States. All of us were happy to see that the visit turned out to be such a success--especially in view of the storm clouds that were blowing over Indo-U.S. relations in the past few months. Perhaps more than anything else, the visit helped greatly to put things back into perspective.

The Rao-Clinton talks may well prove to be the second major turning point in Indo-American relations in this decade. The first, obviously, was the collapse of the Soviet Union which signaled the end of the Cold War. The talks in Washington served as a powerful reminder that there is much useful and important work we can do together for mutual benefit, even if we continue to have differences on a few issues. Thus, as I see it, the turning point was not so much in the substance of Indo-U.S. relations but in the atmospherics, in the growing confidence and trust between the two parties, and in the forging of good personal rapport between the two leaders.

Especially important in this respect was Prime Minister Rao's speech to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives (which, incidentally, was the first time in the Clinton Administration that a visiting head of government has addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress).

Speaking as a wise and savvy statesman, the Prime Minister found the right tone as well as the right substance to put his points across to a critical U.S. audience-to give people a more realistic appreciation of the background of the Indo-American relationship and what makes the ties between our two countries so unique. He showed us what our two nations have in common. He showed us that there are certain shared values and shared interests that are more important to us than the things on which we disagree. And he showed us that, in spite of all the posturing and polemics over political issues we have witnessed over the years, the growing economic ties that link our countries are worth a great deal more to both our peoples in terms of their future well-being.

The tone of the Prime Minister's speech was gracious, constructive, thoughtful, and eminently reasonable. He proved once again how effective such a tone can be in a dialogue between two nations. And he proved that this kind of approach works best to win respect for India and to build mutual understanding.

It is now time for us to get down to business, to leave the rhetoric behind and set out to build a more substantive relationship for the new world and the new century that await us. A new U.S. Ambassador will soon be arriving in India. Frank Wisner is a diplomat of stature, a man of proven competence. He will be able to focus intensely on how to realize the possibilities inherent in this new turning point--on how to get down to serious business.

Hopefully, we can look forward to a period of more reasoned discourse, one in which motives are not constantly questioned or impugned-a period in which Prime Minister Rao's gracious language of reason and diplomacy sets the tone in the atmospherics of Indo-U.S. relations. We can hope for a period when we assume good faith on both sides, a period in which the reality of constructive accomplishment becomes the hallmark of a mature relationship.

2 Where Have All the Cranes Gone?

6 A Vision of Birds by Makarand Paranjape 8 Saving Migratory Birds 12

by P. Kumar

Denise Levertov and the Bengali Love Songs

by Edward C. Dimock, Jr.

16 18

A Famous Magazine Turns 40 Fate and Me and William Faulkner

21 Forging a Stronger Partnership

29 32

The Potato Revolution

37

On the Lighter Side

38 40 44

Focus On ...

by Robert Canzoneri

by Berta Gomez

by Laura Lorenz Hess

What Makes a Leader?

Campus of the Future

by John Elson

George Washington's Hometown

by James S. Wamsley

Front cover: President BillClinton and Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao were all smiles after their meeting at the White House in Washington last month.

Back cover: Prime Minister Narasimha Rao expressed himself with gestures as well as words while answering questions from the audience after delivering a lecture at Harvard University on May 17.

Publisher, Stephen F. Dachi; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing EditQ5,Krishan Gabrani; Assistant Managing Editor, Swaraj Chauhan; Senior Editor, Amrita Kumar; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistant, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front COVelO-BarryFitzgerald, USIA. Inside front cover-A vinash Pasricha.

2-3, 5-P. Kumar. 6-courtesy David Rankin Paintings Prints and Graphics. 8 top & leftWilliam Lishman & Associates Ltd.; right-eourtesy International Crane Foundation, USA. 13-eourtesy Ravi Kumar. I8-illustration by Nand Katyal. 21, 22-23-Barry Fitzgerald, USIA. 24-Avinash Pasricha, except center right and bottom left by Dwight Somers, USIA, and bottom right by M. Shylla, PIB. 25-Avinash Pasricha. 26-27Avinash Pasricha except top left by Dwight Somers, USIA. 28-Dwight Somers, USIA. 293I-Laura Lorenz Hess. 32-eourtesy of Herman Miller, Inc. 38 left-Avinash Pasricha; right-Mark Shaw. 41-Ted Thai, courtesy Time magazine. 44-48-earol Hightower.

Back cover-A vinash Pasricha.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi \10001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.

Use o!SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price o/magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 120 (Rs. \\0 for students); single copy, Rs. 12.

Where Have All the Cranes Gone?

The Siberian crane, one of the rarest and most beautiful of the world's big birds, has been the star attraction at the Bharatpur bird sanctuary. But this year the flock never arrived from Siberia. Has India lost them forever?

1. Two of the last four wild Siberian cranes seen at the Bharatpur bird sanctuary in the winter of 1993.2. Also at Bharatpur in 1993 were these two Siberian cranes, named Bugle and White, reared at the International Crane Foundation in the United States and brought to India.

3. Alexander (Sasha) Sorokin, dressed in crane outfit, carries a blindfolded u.S.-reared baby Siberian crane named Billy from his cage to the release point in the Bharatpur marshes.

4. Sasha, in crane outfit, about to release Billy near afixed dummy, the young crane's "foster mother. "

eoladeo Ghana National Park in Rajasthan-earlier known as Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary-is renowned the world over as a magnificent reserve for wetland birds.

Once the property of the local maharaja, it used to be notorious for the enormous bags of ducks which were shot there until conservationists stopped that in the late 1960s.

My recent visits to the bird sanctuary were to record the Siberian Crane Population Restoration program of the International Crane Foundation (ICF), based in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The program was initiated in Bharatpur last year.

The marshes of Bharatpur are among the two wintering places left for the western race of Siberian cranes (hereafter called Sibes), the other being the Caspian Lowlands of Iran.

The journey to Bharatpur from the birds' breeding grounds in Siberia is 6,400 kilometers.

Last year, only five Sibes visited Bharatpur. This year there was a great deal of apprehension about their arrival. As time wore on, well past the February full moon, park officials and visiting scientists gave up all hope. Perhaps India was never again to be a winter home for the Siberian crane. The American-Russian scientific team stationed at Bharatpur was at a loss. Part of their plan was to "introduce" four juvenile and two subadult Sibes into the wilds. I was there with them, sharing their exasperation.

With almost blind faith in the hospitality and protection offered by Bharatpur, the Siberian cranes used to come back year after year. They were the piece de resistance of the winter avifauna. Just like the tigers in the Indian wildlife sancturies, the Sibes stole the show at Bharatpur. Unfortunately, over a period, the loss of prime wetland habitat for agrarian purposes resulted in the gradual reduction in the number of Sibes visiting India.

The ICF, which is concerned with the welfare of cranes the world over, was naturally alarmed at the continually declining population of the India-wintering Sibes. From 100 cranes in 1967-68, the number had dropped to just five birds in 1992-93.

The writing was on the wall. Was the species becoming extinct from the Indian subcontinent?

The decimation of India-wintering Sibes has been long in the making. The migration route was simply too perilous. And all was not well biologically at the breeding grounds in Siberiawith possible inbreeding, low reproductive potential, and natural sibling rivalry. It seems that in many an avian species the birthrate adapts itself to the mortality factors through the agency of natural selection. But the habits of birds-and a host of other governing factors-are just a bit too diverse for anyone to be able to prove a priori that the regulating mechanism is the same for all species.

En route to their wintering grounds in India, the Sibes used to stop in Afghanistan where they rested amongst the flamingos of the Dashte Nawar and Ab-i-Estada salt lakes in the eastern highlands. Suddenly, in 1979, there was an abrupt cessation of all conservation activities in Afghanistan due to the war. But even before this, India's migratory crane species had been at

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The whole idea was to exploit the basic instinct of the Siberian cranes to migrate back to their breeding grounds. Though our overall experiment seems rather inconclusive in the absence of the wild Sibes, our winterrelease technique has been successful so far.

-Meenaksbi

Nagendran, ICF

risk from nomadic crane-hunters who sling lead-weighted cords at passing migrant flocks. Crane-hunting is an old tradition in this area and certainly one of the more definitive reasons for the decimation of the cranes.

ICF had foreseen disaster quite sometime ago, and had launched its massive international endeavor to augment the India-wintering population of the Siberian cranes in 1991 and 1992 in Siberia, and in 1993 at Bharatpur. This experiment, perhaps one of the most well-visioned global wildlife conservation projects, was scheduled to come to fruition at Bharatpur around March 1994. But, the wild Sibes never appeared this year. Bharatpur, the long-cherished wintering ground of these majestic snowy birds of the tundra land, has perhaps lost them.

The painstaking efforts of the ICF proved futile-but the mere effort, and its execution at such a remarkable international scale, are in themselves laudable.

The history of this conservation project is in fact the history of the late Ronald Sauey's unflagging interest in Sibes (see SPAN, May 1981), which he studied in great detail at Bharatpur during his doctoral research work; and of the creative vision of George Archibald, who studied Japanese cranes for his doctoral research at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. These two pioneering crane-men amalgamated their interests and conservation priorities with the founding of ICF in 1973 (see page 10).

Ron Sauey began detailed studies on the Sibes in India in 19174.Slowly but surely, he and his ICF colleagues were able to answer a series of important questions about these remarkable birds. Why did the Sibes choose to winter at Bharatpur and nowhere else in India? To find the answer Sauey followed groups of Sibes as they flew from one block to another within the marshes. He discovered that the adult birds would spend much of their time with their heads underwater, digging for the tubers of an abundant sedge called Cyperus rotundus. They would pull up plants and either peel and eat the tubers themselves or offer them to their chicks-so obviously the Sibes stayed within Keoladeo Ghana because they liked the food there! The sanctuary's shallow wetlands nurtured huge beds of their dietary mainstay.

And where did the Sibes breed? To find the crucial answer, ICF contacted the Institute for Nature Conservation in the

former U.S.S.R. In the spring of 1981, aerial surveys by.the institute in the Ob River valley found nesting pairs and confirmed that wetlands along the Ob and Kunovat rivers were indeed the breeding grounds for the Siberian cranes that wintered in India.

It was with the cooperation of India, Russia, Japan, and Germany that ICF began its experiment to save the cranes in 1993 at Bharatpur. Six subadult cranes from ICF's U.S. headquarters were introduced to the wild flock at Bharatpur.

The idea was to exploit the basic instinct of the Siberian cranes to migrate to their breeding grounds. The experiment had an inauspicious beginning. In March 1993, precious time was lost because of bureaucratic delay in releasing two ICF chicks (named Bugle and White). To make matters worse, the wild Sibes' flock took off for Siberia without the introduced birds.

The first time such an experiment had been conducted with captive-reared Sibes was in 1991 near the floodplain of the River Ob in Siberia. At that time, however, the wild flock left the area just three days after the release of the captivereared young ones.

The experiment at Bharatpur in early 1994 was a natural corollary of the ICF and Russian scientists' project in Siberia during May-September 1993,which in turn had been prompted 1. Sasha tries to track Billy and Bushy through their implanted radio transmitters. 2. Steven E. Landfried (with camera on tripod) shoots a close-up of Bugle and White.

3. Tubers, afavorite of Siberian cranes, being prepared as the first natural food of the crane chicks introduced into Bharatpur.

4. Sasha and Mini ( M eenakshi Nagendran) tie a radio transmitter to Gorby. 5. Bharatpur bird sanctuary staffer Ali Hussain holds Gorby while Katie (Katherine Richter) gets ready to take the crane chicks to their cages.

by the experiment at Bharatpur in March 1993.The goals of the 1993 experiment in Siberia were: To release captive-bred Siberian crane chicks into the wild flocks of Sibes; to monitor Siberian and common crane populations in the Kunovat River basin region; to mark wild Siberian and common cranes for ecological and migrating investigations; and to establish a field station for the projects listed above.

Aerial surveys were conducted over the breeding grounds of the Siberian cranes in the Kunovat basin, and two breeding pairs were located on the wetlands. On August 13, 1993, A.S. Brar, deputy chief wildlife warden, Keoladeo Ghana National Park, arrived at the camp along with Natasha Anzigitova, a Russian scientist and ornithologist. Ten days later, on August 23, the two youngest of the "introduced" chicks, Billy and Bushy, were removed from the wild flock in Siberia for a winter release attempt in India. It is at this stage that the scene shifted to Bharatpur. Scientists and nature lovers in general started expecting the birds over the Bharatpur skies anytime from Christmas 1993 onward.

Boris, Gorby, Billy, and Bushy were the four juvenile Sibes that were brought to Bharatpur in the second week of January 1994 as an extension of the experiment initiated in January 1993. The 1994 winter season was indeed quite unusual at

Bharatpur, with six captive-reared Sibes and no sign of wild flock. The four chicks had been "winged-in" aboard Lufthansa and Aeroflot. They joined their two subadult cousins (Bugle and White, both male), who had been brought to Bharatpur in January 1993 and later taken to the Jaipur Zoo for the summer and monsoon seasons, after they failed to fly back to Siberia with the wild flock the previous year. Only the Russian-bred White was available for public viewing, while the U.S.-bred Bugle was considered wild and therefore kept out of public sight. On November 6, 1993, however, both were taken back to Bharatpur.

In the absence of the wild Sibes, Bugle and White were the main attraction last winter season at Bharatpur. They attracted crowds in whichever part of the park they were in. No other

Siberian cranes had ever spent such a long time in India.

Boris and Gorby (both female) had been hatched last summer in the United States and raised by their human foster parents in isolation from other human beings. So they are still considered wild. Billy and Bushy (both female) from Russia, now eight months old, had been hatched at ICF laboratories. When about a month old they were moved to Siberia, where they stayed in the wild for about two-and-a-half months.

Boris, Gorby, Billy, ap.d Bushy had landed at Bharatpur in mid-January 1994,accompanied by their foster parent, Alexander Sorokin (Sasha), from the Russian Research Institute for Nature Conservation, and Meenakshi Nagendran (Mini), an India-born scientist with the ICF in America. Accompanying

A Vision of Birds 1986.Fifty kilometers down the road from India's most celebrated monument, the Taj Mahal, the Keoladeo Ghana National Park.

Away from the beaten tourist track, a gentle American giant stalks the still and silent predawn waters of the lake. Soon there will be a "humungotis cackle" as one of the world's most exciting bird sanctuaries awakens to life. A Minolta slung around his neck, pencils and sketchbook in hand, David Rankin crisscrosses the mud paths of this lush north Indian swamp.

Just ahead, a magnificent apparition in white, the endangered Siberian crane. Having flown thousands of kilometers from its icy home, it now sojourns at Bharatpur.

Rankin settles down to sketch the beautiful bird. Soon, he is totally absorbed, hand and eye moving in mysterious unison, near automatic. Gradually, the bird and its image fuse.

Again, he experiences that elation, that wordless wonder and joy which has drawn him over 14,400 kilometers from Cleveland, Ohio, to Bharatpur, to paint birds.

"Cranes are the most magnificent species of birds on the planet," Rankin declares. "When you know a lot of birds and you know a lot about birds and then you are exposed to cranes, it is like you have stepped into the Ferrari class, the $280,000 cars of the car industry. That's the way cranes are to me."

Keoladeo, a flooded wetland of about 30 square kilometers that shelters nearly 400 species of birds, is a veritable birdwatcher's paradise. Rankin is, justifiably, ecstatic.

Speaking about his fascination for Indian wildlife, he says: "India has been for a very long time a backstreet to Africa and yet it has as many or more birds than Africa.

Do you know that India has the most species of cats in the whole world, the greatest assortment of deer on the planet, including the most beautiful cheetal? It has elephant; it has rhino. It has over 500 mammal species." Then, returning to his pet theme, Indian birds, he exclaims: "India has twice the number of birds found in all of North America. When you travel in India, the thing that astounds you the most is birds. You can count 150 species of birds in New Delhi alone on your first day out." No question of running out of subject here?

With an amazing and almost reciprocal run of tenacity and inspiration, Rankin has painted some 100species of Indian birds since 1986, mostly in watercolor and gouache.

"From 1987to 1990, I basically just painted," he says. "I had a few graphics clients whom I continued to service to keep the cash flow going, but basically I put all my effort into this work." What is most astonishing is that Rankin had had a totally different career before he took to painting Indian wildlife.

Gradually, however, his utter dedication and hardwork paid off. His obvious and prodigious talent began to attract attention and acclaim. His first major exhibition was at

Sarus Cranes at Dawn is one of a series of David Rankin's watercolors painted at Bharatpur.

Cleveland's Scheele Gallery in 1989. Later that year, he was featured in a 14-page article in Minolta Mirror. But Rankin's really big break came in late 1989 when he was hired by the International Crane Foundation of Baraboo, Wisconsin, to do an international project on Japan, Vietnam, and India for its upcoming crane conference. The foundation liked his work so much that it has not let go of him since then.

Next year, Rankin entered his work in the World's Best Wildlife Exhibition at the Leighyawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin. There were 17 finalists, but it was Rankin's painting that was chosen to represent the best work done in 1990 by artists from all over the world.

these two scientists in the field was Katherine Richter (Katie), an ICF research associate. The ICF veterinarian, Julie Langenberg, traveled with Boris and Gorby from Chicago to New Delhi. Not present this year at Bharatpur was Hito Higuchi, an expert in "bird marking," often deployed by the Wild Bird Society of Japan to provide special radio/satellite transmitters and data analysis. Last year Higuchi had brought ten transmitters, enough for both the Sibes and the common cranes, and this year again he provided radio and satellite transmitters for the project. (Brar is the Indian project director, and Archibald, director of the ICF, is the overall project coordinator.)

So there were six captive Sibes at Bharatpur. Bugle had been dummy-reared by a foster parent (Mini) in total isolation from

human beings; White had been hand-reared, therefore totally captive; Boris and Gorby were again to be considered totally wild (brought up in isolation from human beings); and Billy and Bushy already had the experience of the Siberian wilderness. Both Boris and Gorby were effectively screened off from tourists to maintain their wild status. Sasha was hopeful that the association of the captive White with the almost-wild Bugle would help the former to get accustomed to the rigors of the wilds. In January, when Boris and Gorby arrived, they were kept in the pens that were vacated by the now free-flying Bugle and, White. Boris and Gorby were screened off from prying eyes. Mini and Katie, however, were always around, observing their conditioning to their alien environs.

Brar introduced me to Sasha on the morning of January 18, (Continued

In 1991, another painting of his was chosen by the Society of Animal Artists for the poster of its annual national museum tour. Moreover, Rankin was the first painter in 15 years to get voted into this prestigious organization.

Then, his painting of Indian cranes won the highest award and became the art poster of the year. Subsequently, Rankin was elected to the board of the Society of Animal Artists. The society sponsored a show at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in 1992. His painting of cranes from India, once again, won the first prize for the second successive year.

Since then, several awards, exhibitions, articles, and projects have followed, making Rankin one of the world's most distinguished and unique wildlife painters. Though not widely known in India, the country of his inspiration, a Diwali greeting card that he painted and designed for Concern India, a Bombay-based charity, quickly became a best-seller. Within weeks, 60,000 cards with Rankin's painting were sold.

What led to Rankin's strange and sudden obsession with Indian wildlife? The answer to this question, I discovered, was simply astounding, almost incredible, and truly fantastic. One fine morning in 1985, Rankin had a vision. "I had awakened early and drifted back to sleep," he recaIls. "I went into this visionary dream where I s~w a vast panorama of a riverfront in India. It was incredibly beautiful. I was hovering over a river, and I could see these lights in the windows of buildings on the riverfront. There were streams of smoke going up in the air; the last rays of the sun would catch them as they rose above the buildings. The stars were just com-

ing out, and the crescent moon was in the Western sky. Then I heard a woman's voice.

All she said was: 'Paint India.' Instantly from this experience my mind was flooded with images ...places in India that I had seen and places that I had never seen."

Like any sensible person, Rankin tried to forget the vision, to disregard, put aside these images. "Each time it started up, I would try to do other things. At night when these dreams and images would start to flood my mind, I would get up and watch TV and try to dissuade them from bugging me."

Yet, the visions, the images refused to go away. Rankin was both confused and helpless.

Even if he were to try to follow the strange commandment to paint India, where should he begin? India was so vast-it was a whole world of ideas, things, people, and places. "I thought maybe I should paint the Taj Mahal or the architecture ofIndia ....So, as I'm doing this, perplexed by it and wanting to toss it all away, I felt this woman's pres~nce again, and I heard her say to me, 'Begin with my birds.' I was wide awake. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a vision. It was just there. I saw a bird in my mind, a painted stork. I had never seen a painted stork in all my travels in India. I saw this bird and made some sketches."

Later, Rankin went to his library and tried to check whether there was really an Indian bird resembling what he had sketched. It was while leafing through the pages of Audubon that he got the answer. In a feature on Bharatpur sanctuary, he found the bird he had been sketching. It was a painted stork.

Rankin prepared to go to India, now finally convinced that it was his mission to study

on page 10)

and paint its birds.

David Rankin's life before he switched careers to paint Indian wildlife is equally absorbing and fascinating. Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, he came to Cleveland at the age of 17 on a scholarship at the Institute of Art. After graduating in 1967, Rankin, like many of his generation, became interested in the counterculture movement. He became involved with yoga.

But the turning point in Rankin's life came when he met Swami Rama of whom he became one of the leading American disciples and associates. He became a vegetarian.

He mastered several yoga techniques, including asanas and mantras, himself becoming a yoga instructor. "It was the 'in' thing to do in those days," Rankin reflects. "The Beatles were running around with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Richard Alpert [Ram Dass] was living down the river from where we were. It was an interesting time."

Rankin became vice president and creative director of the Light of Yoga society and spent the next 17 years of his life, from 1968 to 1984, teaching and promoting yoga and healthy living in America. His movement attracted nearly 40,000 students during these years.

In 1970, Rankin visited India for the first time, staying at the small hermitage of Swami Rama, on the banks of the Ganges in Haridwar. It was like stepping into a wonderland. "Elephants would come across the river at night to steal squash from our vines. Cobras were in the sugarcane. Vultures would sit on the fence. Occasionally, a camel would walk down the bund. At night, I

Saving Migratory

Pril 1994 was an anxious month for Canadian artist and environmentalist William Lishman (left below).

His experiment in teaching a migratory route to 18 Canadian geese hatched on his farm in Ontario, Canada, initiated around October 1993, seemed to be failing.

There was nothing he could do about it but wait and hope.

Which is probably the fate of all bird-watchers you would think, except that in the case of Lishman, if the birds he was watching didn't do what he hoped they would, it me~nt serious trouble.

Lishman and his partner, William Sladen, an environmentalist at Airlie, Virginia, had hoped that if the experiment worked, the same technique could be used to restore rare species such as whooping cranes, trumpeter swans, and Siberian cranes to territories they once occupied.

The technique, known in wildlife terminology as "imprinting," takes advantage of a phenomenon in which certain migratory birds believe that the first thing they see after hatching is their parent. Lishman made sure this "thing" was him. He did this by running and swimming with the geese, playing tape recordings of the droning sound of his ultralight aircraft engine, and letting them follow him around to the extent that when he took off in his aircraft one day, they followed him into the sky (left above).

Seven days and some 600 kilometers later, on October 25, 1993, Lishman,

A

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heard the roar of a tiger from the jungle across the river. I had never seen any of these things.

It so astounded me. It opened my eyes to a whole other part of the world," Rankin reminisces. Though he would not paint any of these sights until 15years later, they did leave a deep impression on his mind.

In 1984, Rankin parted company with the Light of Yoga society. He married an old friend, Deanna, who was a member of the yoga group. Today, they have a lovely home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where Deanna still teaches yoga while Rankin paints.

Now, looking back over his unusual and eventful life, Rankin uses his vast knowledge of Indian spirituality and mythology to interpret the vision that changed his entire professional career. He believes that the woman whose voice he had heard was Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and wisdom. "It was Left: A poster produced by the International Crane Foundation using another of David Rankin's Bharatpur watercolors.

his fellow-pilot Joseph Duff, who was flying an almost identical ultralight, and the 18geese landed at Airlie. The first leg of the experiment was hailed a success. For the first time in history, a wild flock had been led by an aircraft on a migratory route. The geese were allowed to go free at Airlie until such time as the return journey to Canada was to commence. If they flew back on their own, the goal of establishing a migratory pattern for them would have been met.

In late March 1994, the geese were still at Airlie, but then they suddenly disappeared. Sladen had last spotted the birds on April 2. A desperate search for them was initiated at all the places where the geese normally go when they leave the vicinity of the Airlie lake. Frantic, Lishman and Duff flew back to Ontario following the migratory route in the hope that they might chance upon the birds on the way. There wasn't a sign of them.

Back in Ontario, a crestfallen Lishman feared that a great deal of labor might have been in vain. Then on April IS, he received a call on his cellular phone from his wife Paula who told him that she had just seen ten geese land on the grassy strip outside their home. The bizarre experiment had worked.

The real challenge will come this autumn: Will the geese return to Airlie on their own, without "Father Goose," as Lishman is fondly called? If they do, the experiment will really have succeeded. Its success could bode well for future experiments to teach the Siberian cranes how to return to their old 0 winter home in Bharatpur.

the Indian goddess of all art forms, Saraswati, who had instructed me to 'Paint India.' " Somehow, sitting in his beautiful Cleveland garden, designed by Rankin with all his artistic ingenuity to resemble an oasis in the desert of suburbia, and adorned with a colorful variety of plants by Deanna, what he says does not sound all that unbelievable. Yet, the skeptic in me cannot help quipping: "All this is so 'far out' that I doubt whether even Indians of this modem day and age will find it easy to accept this story."

"I find a tremendous resurgence, a linkage with those ideas [of the 1960s] which are still valid," Rankin responds. "I'm very involved in environmental concerns on a planetary level. We are concerned about the preservation of the species. Artists look at these things and say, 'These are intrinsically beautiful birds or animals, and we cannot just let these creatures disappear from the Earth.' " He pauses, then resumes: "I think that spiritual life, if one can tap into it, can be an inspirational force. No matter if one is an

accountant or a garage mechanic. This force works with whatever talents we have. Our problem is often that we don't hear it. It's like station WOB (Wisdom of Buddha) is broadcasting day and night and we're always tuned to a different channel."

While I listen to him I feel perfectly tuned, t~is quintessentially Indian message coming back to me, loud and clear, though we are in Cleveland. Back in India, I look at Rankin's "Images of India" poster on my office wall, so generously and lovingly autographed for me by the artist. I cannot help marveling at the remarkable disregard of cultural boundaries in those magnificent painted birds, so dazzlingly alive in the dark waters. Is one of them, I wonder, the mystic paramahansa, symbolic ofthe sage whose Self encompasses 0 all Otherness and Duality?

About the Author: Makarand Paranjape is associate professor of humanities and social sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.

and the story, for me, started unfolding immediately thereafter.

Knee-deep in slush, with all my camera gear, I accompanied Sasha to the pens. We took along the crane-feed (maize and pellets in a special IeF formula), a dummy dressed in white (a glistening white scarecrow created by a skillful Sasha in just about ten minutes), two wedged poles to fix the dummy, a rope, and scales to weigh the birds.

As we neared the cages, Sasha donned his white "foster parent crane outfit" and started uttering the brooding sound.

The birds responded immediately. The dummy was fixed about 15meters from the pens. Sasha then masked Billy and called me in to help him weigh the birds. It was indeed quite an effort, and I could hardly help. Then Bushy was weighed. Perhaps there was a marginal weight loss, but Sasha decided it was within safe limits and that there was no harm in attempting a "prerelease."

At precisely 12:33 p.m., Sasha brought out Billy and placed him close to the dummy, near the feed bucket. By 12:45 both the birds were out and flapping their wings. Sasha seemed relieved. We walked over to a nearby island to ob-

serve the "now-free" birds with our binoculars.

Back at camp we chatted through lunch. Meeting these world-renowned scientists and spending time in their field camp made me wonder how enlightening it would have been had I been with them in their summer camp in the Siberian wilderness rather than having abruptly joined them as a novice at Bharatpur. Through our conversation, perhaps every five minutes, Katie's wristwatch would ring to remind her to look through the scope and record her observation of the "prereleased" birds.

On January 20 all the four chicks brought in this year were right in front of us-two in pens and two free. The day before, Sasha and Mini had removed the two chicks from their original pens and taken them to the pens vacated by Billy and Bushy. I photographed all the intimate details of the operation, even a couple of hasty shots of the radio transmitter being fitted to Gorby. Mini planned to wait for a few days to see how Billy and Bushy adjusted to their free environs, and only then try a "prerelease" of her birds. Sasha's two released chicks were

The International Crane Foundation

F

ounded in 1973 by George Archibald and the late Ronald Sauey, the International Crane Foundation (ICF) is a world center for the study and worldwide conservation of cranes. The modest headquarters of the ICF at a former horse farm in Baraboo, Wisconsin, has emerged as the nerve center of crane conservation programs. Scientists from around the globe visit Baraboo regularly, and more than 200 cranes now roam the enclosures.

There are 15 species of cranes in the world and ICF has all 15 of them. Of these species seven are endangered and some of these are so few in number that they could be lost forever if current conservation programs are not intensified. And this is what ICF scientists are doing.

For years, endangered birds have been kept in captivity for the purpose of propagation and their eventual return to the wild. In recent years, information from field studies has been applied to propagating cranes at the ICF headquarters. The ICF has made use of information studies on crane dietary habits, mate selection, courtship, breeding behavior, incubation patterns, and chick rearing, in order to breed all the 15 species.

Rearing crane chicks sometimes involves bizarre activities. Archibald once danced with a captive Siberian female named Ramsar in an effort to seduce her to lay eggs. Currently at ICF, some cranes are being "dummy reared" (by scientists using crane-like outfits, even beaks, devised by Meenakshi Nagendran and her husband); some are being "hand-reared," that is, by human association; some are being "parent-reared," that is, by a captive adult of the same or surrogate species.

All these methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes combinations of these methods are being' used for rearing a particular chick.

To begin their captive breeding programs, the ICF acquired birds from zoos around the world. Dushanka, born in 198I, became the first Siberian crane ever to have hatched in captivity. Transporting of Sibes from zoos across the world soon proved to be expensive and also stressful for the birds. So ICF began bringing eggs instead. After acquiring the birds and the eggs, the ICF used its field knowledge to simulate the cranes' natural environment, to make it conducive for the birds to breed.

The ICF has now built up a fairly large

population of these Siberian cranes. As its first step in the restocking program, ICF sent four Siberian crane eggs to Russia in 1982.

These eggs were placed in common cranes' nests, with the birds serving as surrogate parents. This idea was based on a similar project which was under way (around 198384) at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland. This organization has worked with the whooping crane since 1950 when it started out with less than 60 birds.

The Patuxent center began raising the birds in captivity in order to build up their numbers and then started reintroducing them by placing fertile whooping crane eggs into sandhill crane nests at Grey's Lake, Idaho.

The ICF has been working for quite sometime now in cooperation with a number of conservation organizations, including the Wolf-Brehm Fund, Vogelpark Walsrode (Germany), Oka Nature Reserve (Russia), and the International Council of Bird Preservation to bring about the reintroduction of the birds to their native lands. It has already met with considerable international success in educating people of diverse cultures on the finer aspects of crane behavior 0 and habitat requirements.

indeed doing fine, not just hopping or flapping their wings, but actually flying around, and flying quite well too. The day before they had disappeared for sometime in the late afternoon and Sasha had to radio-track them. He found them behind some bushes, close to a newly arrived flock of the common cranes (or Eurasian cranes). The arrival of these cranes (also from Siberia), and their landing so close to the chicks was considered significant by Sasha and Mini. Meanwhile, Mini had started making preparations to have some wild common cranes captured (not from this flock though, lest it should disturb the fostering relationship between the cranes and the released chicks) to be ringed, or fitted with radio transmitters in case the Sibes failed to arrive. By the third week of February, hope of the arrival of the wild Sibes had died.

By February 15, 1994, three common cranes had been captured by bird-sanctuary staffer Ali Hussain and his son Kasim, using primitive but effective "handmade" equipment. It is surprising how confidently they work without state-of-theart bird-catching paraphernalia such as the dart-net. All the three crane specimens caught were robust adults. They were duly ringed by Mini with colorful plastic bands tied to their legs.

Mini, who is working on the marking (banding or ringing) of these cranes with Higuchi of Japan, expects to detect these birds in their Siberian breeding grounds, and also at Bharatpur and elsewhere in India in the next season.

Studies in the migratory patterns of the common crane have added significance now, since in the absence of wild Siberian flocks, common cranes have already been used to advantage as surrogate parents to hatch the eggs of the captive Sibes. And, in the absence of the wild Sibes, imprinting (immediate postnatal association) with these cranes may also allow them to become more acceptable to the common crane flocks in the wilds, thereby considerably increasing their chances of learning the migratory route between India and Siberia. Sibes and common cranes have a parallel migratory route between Siberia and India and they breed adjacent to the Sibes in Siberia's Kunovat River basin area, and then migrate each autumn to winter in South Asia and Africa. In the absence of wild Sibes, fixing radio-transmitters on the common cranes has been considered.

This has already been done in Siberia, with a certain degree of success achieved in working out their migratory route on the basis of radar information received by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space center in H04ston, Texas.

ICF's interest in restocking the population of Sibes has an added dimension to it. The migratory route of Sibes is a tradition handed down to chicks from older birds. Though the urge to head south in the autumn is instinctive, the route they take and where they wind up is learned. ICF's fear is that, if the wild flock is lost, the migration tradition will be lost with it. And then it will be too late to reintroduce cranes to Russia, Iran, or India, because they simply won't know where to go for breeding.

Fully prepared to face all contingencies intrinsic to this type

We have established ourselves as the custodians of the Earth, and it is our duty to take measures for safeguarding the continued survival of other species of the land. We have brought untold misery upon these primitive (and unsuspecting) cranes by destroying their habitat and hunting them for centuries ....Whatever little craneconservation measures we are resorting to have been due for a long, long time.

-Katherine

Richter, ICF

of wildlife experimentation, ICF is planning another method to initiate migration in the captive-reared Siberian chicks.

Says Archibald: "If the wild population of the Siberians is lost there is still some hope that the migratory instinct in remnant captive-reared population can be rekindled using an innovative technique now being developed in Canada. During the summer of 1994, a group of sandhill cranes will be handraised and accustomed to following a keeper who pushes an ultralight aircraft across the lawns of the rearing area. Having attained the ability to fly, the cranes will be conditioned to follow the ultralight in the sky. Eventually the ultralight will lead the cranes along a new migration route south to a predetermined wintering area. If the cranes repeat this route independent of the ultralight, we are hopeful that this technique may be used to reestablish a migratory flock of cranes. If the research with sandhill cranes looks promising, as was the case with an 'ultra-migration' of Canada geese in 1993, there is a possibility that the procedure might be modified to lead a group of hand-reared Siberian cranes from northwest Siberia to India."

This innovative technique (see page 8) seems to be our only possible chance of seeing the Sibes return to the Indian wilds.

Recently Archibald wrote to me: "Although our work with the Siberian cranes has been peppered wi~h disappointments, we continue to have hope that science, perseverance, and continued international cooperation, can pave a way for a brighter future for the cranes. From a personal viewpoint, my heart is warmed that India and Russia are working closely together to help the cranes. This wonderful example provides hope that other nations will likewise join an effort to focus on our common interests of helping the Lily of Birds."

0 About the Author: P. Kumar is a freelance photojournalist specializing in wetland birds and elephants. He has been teaching zoology at Hansraj College, Delhi University,for the past two decades.

Denise Levertov anD the Bengali In the early 1960s the idea of collaborating with the famous American poet Denise Levertov in translating old Bengali love songs was raised by Bonnie R. Crown, who was then publications director for the Asia Society in New York. I had been impressed by the quality of the songs while I was reading more generally in Bengali literature for purposes of dissertation research. Bonnie was a friend of mine, and at some point I showed her a few rough translations. She too was impressed. Her judgment, quite correct, was that if the touch of a professional English-language poet were added, they would make a charming and instructive book.

I did not know Denise Levertov at the time, except through a little of her work, but Bonnie was a mutual friend. I must say that at first the idea did not strike me well. I had read The Jacob's Ladder and a few other things that Denise had written, and her work struck me as a little hardedged for the kind of sweetly romantic idyll that the Bengali songs represented. I could not have been more wrong.

Bonnie got Denise to try her hand at a couple of the poems. They were so successful that there was no longer any question. Bonnie's sense about it was right on the button. It turned out, in fact, that much earlier Denise had written a couple of poems on the Krishna theme, inspired by an exhibition of miniatures she had seen. These were amazingly like the Bengali songs that Bonnie felt should be properly translated-with a wistful love, a certain gentle irony, a playfulness, a dignity befitting both a young girl in love and hymns of devotion to a deity.

There was little further discussion, if any, and there were no formalities. I was in India for a year-1963-64, I believe it was-and I started sending Denise (sometimes through Bonnie and later, directly) rough translations, some nearly literal,

A. wicked 1IQIllIZ1

-

fouJ.er than the faulellt po1Bon.

So IUs mother's cruelt.Y. like/~ burning fire ~

tyrant huBband •• a 1Ihetted razor's

in me.

edge;

and on every side, .17proachf'Uldut1fuJ. 1rCIIl8n.

J.Li.J .;-1' ....

1!y love, llbat can I sa;i to you?

r/ t

1-"

;'·G':(i!, ..'I·.\~j.

l'lhatever they mayse;:r, you are ~

life.

'/

/' -"

Yourmark is on I1r3" body, and they knOll'.

For shame I cannot raise I1r3" face before chaste wanen, /o11''-/-i r I cannot ~~ the cruelt.Y)"· the thrust, ''\~'"

seeing ~~

'.

'-1..r-

~n

mald.ngsigns to me.

'bJ-I have lIeighed it all,

and'I have chosen

abuse, for you. ill]

"" di"•• WQA

So Balarama-dasa says.

Th:,re are parts of this I amnot entirely sure of, though of the several I have tned, this one seE!l!lS to hang together best.

I think the first line is a quote, indicating what the mother-in-lAw says; but there is no w<ryto tell in the Beneali; I suggest "liebe non-cOl!ll!littal,if possible. Line 7: the term I have translated "mark" literally means "stain", but I hesitated over "your stain is on I1r3" body". '!OO line is a difficult one, and I might read teo muchinte it, but I think there :l.S a pun: bandhu gaya saba

a

lover

on body all sing

So, rather more subtlq (sp?) than would be usuaJ., an alternative would be, "The people sing (rejoice at) your stain (on me)". If it is possible to work in both of these, so much'the better; if not, the first interpretation is I think the obvious one. Line 9: "The thrust" is literally "cruel blade".

The last ttro lines before the signature are weak, and maybeyou lIiil be able to find a better solution: literally, "I have e=inert all (or 'everyone' - perhaps the criticism of such peilple as these is not worth listening to), and I have taken (chosen) your abuse". "Your abuse" is ambiguous,but I think the interpretation above is the right one. "Abuse", however, I amnot at all happy lIith.

others less so, with explanatory notes where the language or the religious tradition seemed to require them. Denise would work on them, sometimes leaving a poem almost literal, sometimes with her extreme sensitivity, changing a word or

phrase aptly, and sometimes redoing a whole poem. We would continue to correspond in this way until we were both satisfied. The samples of our correspon- • dence reproduced here show the sort of thing that went on. I might mention that,

Love Songs

The author, a well-known scholar of Indian studies, tells of his joint venture in translating Bengali poetry through correspondence.

VP

Ak8e~anuraga

.,

M 745

A wicked woman - fouler than t~e foulest poison.

So his mother's cruelty, like fire burning in me.

My tyraat husband: the whetted edge of a razor. And all ar"und me, reproachful dutiful women.

My love, what s~all r tell you?

Whatever their calumnies, you are my life itself.

My body bears your brand - the'- know it.

For sha~e r cannot xmmtxlook up -oeforQ. c;. as1:e women,

r

(alternate: raise T,y head)

cannot bear th~ cruelty, the knife-'-hrust

of seeing my fellow women ~ake siFns to me.

r ~ave weiEhed it all.

Yet I have chosen to endure abuse for your sake.

I think nuttin~ line 1 in it&lics e~Dhasizes ~he c~oice of ~ossi~le meanings,

[ee~5

hich seems better thAn ~~lst leavjns it hen?_ i.e., it

to me it cOlJl~ be that s~e is q~lotin~ a ~roverb, 8 s~~in~, in reference to i:~er :rot~;erin "'-in-law

S2"S

law, 0 ~-~,

cOl.~ldn'tit?

or rat~er,

that

if

this

is

wt.at (\er

sbe recalls it, rfT'estinr:it lmder her breath as

it .:ere, ara a -plies it<.back to the m-in-l., ',:hois cr'lel to her.

I have left 'I have ~ei he~ it all~, b~t with a period so that ~hBt it refers to is 'all .-is' - all tb.e sClt'ferin[sr::enti"nedaoove. see ,',::at'

5 ·•:rong •.

..•.. i th 1 abu~e'

ir. tje

:;doh't

cor.text.

Gauri Ragini (Jaipur. 19th century), a Ragamala painting.

as with one of the "Aksepanuraga"- poems, we rejected a substantial number of poems-some as requiring too much explanatory paraphernalia, and a few simply because they did not come across well as poems (they are, after all, songs, and

sometimes the music carries the punch).

We did almost all the work by correspondence. The correspondence itself was very smooth, though somewhat irregular. I would send Denise a batch of material when it was ready, and she

would send it back when it was ready. I was in India, as I have said, finishing a book and starting work on another; neither one of the books was specifically on these lyrics, though the lyrics constituted a part of Bengali literature, which was the

subject of my study. So I was reading a lot of these love songs (there are great numbers of collections in Bengali; the Bengalis also think many of them are beautiful).

When I would come across one I particularly liked I would send a rough translation off to Denise.

The better part of our collaboration on this book was finished during that period, 1963-64. When I got back from India, we met a few times, in Chicago or New York, but mostly to socialize; the great bulk of the work had been done and sent to our editor, Eugene Oyang, at Doubleday. As far as finding a publisher was concerned, that too we left to Bonnie Crown. She got it published by Doubleday Anchor in 1967.

We then had a reading, at the Academy of American Poets, at New York's Guggenheim Museum. A Bengali singer first presented the songs as songs, I made a few introductory remarks, and then Denise read the songs as English poetry, beautifully.

I have to confess that I don't remember much about the reading. It was a full house, I know, and the reception was very warm indeed for Denise. Afterward, there was a small reception at Bonnie and Jim Crown's apartment for half a dozen close friends. Denise eventually went off with friends and that was the last time I saw her, to my regret. (In fact, that is not entirely true; I went to several of her readings in Chicago and elsewhere, but stayed in the background.)

I should add that I have lost touch with Anju Chaudhuri, whose illustrations I think add greatly to the charm of the poems' presentation in the book. Anju was a young Calcutta artist who had come to Bonnie Crown's attention when Bonnie was making a trip through the place. It was her taste that brought Anju into the project, and good taste it was.

Our little book, titled In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali, was reprinted by the University of Chicago Press in 1981 and has met with what I think is rather extraordinary success for a work of its kind. That is due, certainly, to the warmth and simplicity of the songs themselves, but even more to Denise's versatility and delicacy of touch.

0

,: : .•(o..,J

~.:.u..e, In life

what more shall and in death,

you are the lord

ot

to 7Ol'7

I sq

in birth

atter

b1rth

rq lit ••

~

lJ;y mind fixed on you &lana, I have otte1"lld",ewryth1ng; in truth,

I have beeClllSY=

In thi.a family,

in that

11hancan I call It

T71l8

bi t ter

11

rea1J.y

1II11W?

rq 0lIll?

am

cold,

While rq eyes blink, I feel

sla'ft.

hause, wbo

the heart

am

rlthin

I tool< retuge

I do not see ;yol1, •• di ••

Not as striJdng a poem 83 som .•• haft, I think, but it 11 good of a type; besides, it is the ~ OIW or all the p&da8 I haTe read that trlllllllates itself: the line divisions &I'9 just ." are in the Ileng&li, and the rendering is very cloee to being litere.l.

I4ne 4: the llOrd actualJ.;r is "noose", as in hanglna.n, adding perbllps & bit ot iroI1T; though maybe you would prefer not. keep it.

The bl1Jllcing .,.. bit 11 & trille extravagant, of course, but is a very old and very o<mnonpoetie eoncait.

On the whoa, I rather like the poem' there is a p"""rl'ul relig1""" qua1.itoy in the Bengali, .••. hieh I'm not sure caught just right, unl.iJc» IlWI;Tat Candidaa&'s pee•• , which are sCIlletiJoespretty e~.

u..,.

I''';

~':,is seems b·,t

,hieh

s'~titutin! line 6.

v~rv see"'s

"..ell

8S

soe:Jhow

?eloved

for

1 t is, a

little

~y love.

excep·:.; for

the

less

BO if

Also

not

About the Author: Edward C. Dimock, Jr., is a professor emeritus in the department of South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is also chairman of the American Institute of Indian Studies. One of the leading American scholars of Bengali language and literature, he has written, edited, and translated many books including a textbook, Introduction to Bengali.

its

the

first

line,

rhythm insertion

whic~

is of

'you'

banel,

is

ehan!"ed

bv in

About Denise Levertov: A major American poet, Levertov has published more than 30 books of poetry. Although she identified herself frequently with the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many critics view her as a poet of religious vision, blending the heritage of Walt Whitman with the tradition of • American mysticism.

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A Fatllous Magazine Ever since its founding, The Paris Review has been best known for discovering new talent and for its commitment to good writing"whether from the pen of a Nobel laureate or a novice."

The Paris Review was born in Paris in the springtime, launched in 1953 by a group of idealistic American expatriate writers including George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Harold Humes, Donald Hall, and William Styron. The first issue was the same size and format as the current magazine; its title page sported the same William Pene du Bois drawing of the Place de la Concorde so familiar to readers today. The first interview was with E.M, Forster. The

preface in Number One included a letter to the editors by one of their own, William Styron, announcing The Paris Review's editorial policy: That the journal should welcome into its pages "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-ax-gnnders.

So long as they're good."

Four decades later, The Paris Review is still edited by George Plimpton and a masthead full of editors who are just as quick to declare their freedom from all commitments except that of good writing-whether from the pen of a Nobel laureate or a novice, The journal is still produced in a tiny office, although it followed the expatriates home, moving in 1972 from the Left Bank of Paris to New York's Upper East Side. And the magazine still functions as a community for the literary: Groups of young writers and

publishing assistants meet in Plimpton's apartment once a month to read manuscripts and eat pizza, while writers published in the magazine often become known as "Paris Review writers" because of the magazine's paternal attitude toward their careers.

The Paris Review has lasted so long, according to Plimpton, "because of the enthusiasm of the people involved," Their energy has not gone unrewarded. In the eight years that managing editor James Linville and editor-at-large Jeanne McCulloch have been with the journal, it has grown substantially.

The size of each issue keeps increasing, due in part to the deluge of manuscripts coming in over the transom: Linville guesses 30,000 a year; senior editor Elizabeth Gaffney thinks 20,000 is closer to the mark. Gaffney oversees ten people who help with the

Turns reading, all of whom are eager to be the ~ext success story in the journal's long list of readers who "discovered" wellknown writers.

Discovering new talent is perhaps what the magazine is best known for. Plimpton prefers finding work by a new writer to soliciting something from one of his pals.

Perhaps no other editor of his generation is so receptive to new writing. Openness has become The Paris Review's trademark. "That's why we're all here," explains Linville. The possibility of opening an unremarkable envelope containing the work of the next Philip Roth or Jay McInerney lends constant excitement to the job of editor.

"Our ideal issue," Linville declares, "would contain one previously unpublished writer, one up-and-coming writer, one translation, and one 'tent pole'-a

well-known writer who calls attention to the others. Publishing established writers is nice for its own sake, but also because it adds luster to the unknown."

It is typical for Paris Review editors to focus on what the journal can do to make a writer's first publication matter even more. After Linville discovered and published an unsolicited piece of writing

by Jeff Eugenides, he sent it to literary agent Lynn Nesbit. It became the first chapter of a novel, The Virgin Suicides, which Nesbit subsequently sold to Jonathan Galassi, editor-in-chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Virgin Suicides was published in ten countries in April 1993.

In order to publish the writers discovered in The Paris Review, the editors would like to have their own book company. Two former imprints under the Paris Review name have resulted in many successful titlesby writers such as Joy Williams and Charlie Smith, to name only two-but have had trouble staying afloat financially. Unwilling to give up the dream, the editors have incorporated a third book company as a nonprofit institution, and are discussing a distribution arrangement with both trade and small press distributors.

While it's too early to accept submissions for the new Paris Review book company, the editors hope to publish four books of fiction and two of poetry each year.

The Paris Review editors have boundless enthusiasm not only for their big projects, but also for individual pieces that are the review's coming attractions. Interviews with Grace Paley and Toni Morrison are in the works. A story called "The Stubborn Porridge" will acquaint American audiences with the Chinese "Porridge Fiction" school of protest fiction named after it. The author, Chinese dissident writer Wang Meng, has never before been translated into English.

Like many cultural institutions today, Q

The Paris Review finds itself becoming more politically engaged. In an interview with Naguib Mahfouz, which ran in the Summer 1991 issue and was subsequently quoted in The New York Times, the Egyptian writer retreated from his earlier defense of Salman Rushdie. The journal has on hold an interview with Rushdie himself, conducted publicly at the 92nd Street "Y" just before the' publication of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie asked the editors to hold off on publishing the interview, as he thought his forthcoming book might stir up a controversy to which he would want to respond. The interview awaits completion.

Staying current is almost an accident for The Paris Review. "We don't publish¡ things in order to sell issues," McCulloch explains. "But we are trying to increase circulation. After all, having an audience is crucial." Asked, however, if the editors think about their readers, Plimpton responds with a resounding "No!" After consideration he adds, "I think about my mother from time to time. 1 think, 'Uh-oh, she's not going to like this.' " In the days when The Paris Review was printed in Paris, each issue of the journal was combed for dirty words by a U.S. Customs official named Demcy. Fearing a repeat performance by the government, the editor returned their National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1990, the year of the infamous "loyalty oath." But the magazine is unlikely to offend any but the most fanatical censor. Instead, it provokes fierce loyalty. Plimpton received a letter recently from a 73-year-old woman living in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The magazine's stories, she writes, "make me feel like 1 did when 1 was young and working in New york .... The Paris Review is my shot in the arm."

She is not alone. "But," Linville points out, "The Paris Review now has a circulation of II,00o-less than half the number of unsolicited manuscripts we read. We'd like it if everyone who submitted subscribed, too." Asked for a final quote, he adds: "Subscription is $24 for one fourissue year. That's 45-39 171st Place, Flushing, New York 11358."

0

Photos at left include some seldom-seen pictures of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

and make certain that the mantle was properly handed down.

Some power did, in fact, seem to bring us nearer and nearer, only to deflect us, finally, with a sort of invisible force, as if we were a pair of those little magnetic Scotties that were popular when I was a kid.

Other people, of course, have taken considerable advantage of no more acquaintance than came my way. One Faulkner scholar, for example, arrived at a remarkable intimacy with "Bill" and "Estelle" just by engaging Mrs. Faulkner in a few minutes of conversation while Mr. Faulkner stood off down the fence, refusing to join in. And a couple of University of Mississippi professors apparently became friends with the writer after his death more than 30 years ago; some sort of retroactive arrangement, I suppose.

During my first year as a student in Oxford, the nearest I got to William Faulkner was to stand beside his brother John a couple of times in the Graduate Building at Ole Miss [as the University of Mississippi is popularly called]. I had to wait for William's daughter to finish high school before I got so much as a glimpse of him.

Sitting in the fifth row in an auditorium full of people, straining to hear that faint, raspy voice deliver a graduation speech, wasn't the sort of meeting I had had in mind. By then I had published my first short story, and I sat there dreaming that the next day he would come across me downtown and say, "I spotted you out there in the audience, and I was hoping that I'd get a chance to tell you how very much I like that story of yours."

He didn't. But one day a year or so later I turned the corner into the town square, and there he was, wearing a ragged tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. His head was slightly tilted as though he were taking in the whole courthouse scene and transforming it yet again into his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. I felt that I could almost catch snatches of what was going on in his head, phrases like "the apotheosis of grinding jusUce, the avatar of annealing honor and pride ... " I would not for the world, as a fellow Serious Writer, have touched him on the arm and said, "Uh, excuse me, Mr. Faulkner. I've been wanting to meet you ... " On the other hand, he might have been just trying to decide whether to step into the nearest drugstore and talk with his friend Mac Reed, or go across the square to Leslie's, where there were a few booths and a soda fountain. It was in Leslie's, a while before, that a graduate student I knew had actually spoken to him. After buying a cup of coffee, he turned to see that the only booth not full of people was one in which William Faulkner sat, alone. He hesitated, but finally walked over, motioned to the empty seat opposite Faulkner and asked if he might sit. Faulkner nodded.

They sipped coffee in silence until the student could no longer

Fate and Me and William Faulkner ...in just that order of importance. While 'paying subtle tribute to a great literary figure, the author acknowledges the greater power of invisible forces that overtook his own ambitions as a fellow Serious Writer.

For a few years after William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he and I both lived in Oxford, Mississippi. During that time I never went to the bank or store or post office without a feeling that our paths would cross-as they almost had to in so small a town-whereupon Faulkner would give a slight nod of recognition, and we would launch into a long conversation about writing.

It was not that I was a seeker-out of celebrities. I was past that. I had recently won a college contest and become a Serious Writer myself. Unpublished, yes, but deadly, deadly Serious.

Fate, you would think, would take advantage of our proximity

bear it. "I don't really understand your novels, Mr. Faulkner," he blurted out, "but I like your short stories a lot, and my favorites are 'House Afire' and 'Speckled Ponies.' " When he told his wife about the encounter, she said, "You mean 'Barn Burning,' don't you? And 'Spotted Horses'?"

"Oh my God," the student said.

"Well," she asked impatiently, "what did he say?"

"He said, 'Thank you.' " It was not long before I had completed a whole entire novel, writtev wholly and entirely by me. Back then, the best way to send a book off for a publisher to reject was by Railway Express. "Reverently" probably best characterizes the way I handed the manuscript to the agent. He weighed the package, then asked, "This is a novel, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said.

"You interested in Faulkner?"

I told him that I was.

"Did you ever read anything he wrote?" the agent continued.

I nodded.

"Did you notice the big words?"

I said that I had, indeed, noticed the big words.

"Where do you reckon he gets them?" he said. "You know he only went to the university a few months. Where do you reckon he gets them?"

I confessed ignorance.

The agent looked at me knowingly. "You know what I think?" he said.

Here I have to go into what a friend of mine used to call a tributary. A well-known Oxford resident had just died, a man known as Goatee Brown. He had been a professor of English at Ole Miss until the early 1930s, when he was fired, apparently because he wouldn't keep regular hours.

Brown had stayed in Oxford for the remaining quartercentury or so of his life, unemployed, though it was known that he was an occasional reader for publishers of books in American literature. He sat up all night reading in the Mansion, a restaurant also frequented by Faulkner. When one of my fellow students needed an article on Thomas Wolfe that was missing from the library, someone told him: "Goatee Brown will have it. Borrow his."

The student did, and he showed me Brown's notes in the margin. Wolfe's descriptive powers in Look Homeward, Angel were under discussion, and beside a quote that went something like "the slam of a screen door, the smell of turnip greens," Brown had penciled in, "God, what a rich full life he must have lived!"

So, anyway, the Railway Express agent said, "You know what I think? I think Faulkner has been writing this stuff and then taking it down to Goatee Brown and getting him to put in the big words." He watched for my reaction. "What do you think?"

I said that I didn't know.

He nodded, with an air of satisfaction. "Well, Brown is dead," he said, "so we'll find out now, won't we!"

For some reason or other, the drugstore I traded at was not Leslie's but Gathright-Reed across the square. Reed, a very soft-voiced, gentle man, had known Faulkner long before he became a literary figure. He spotted my interest immediately and would tell me little tidbits about him from time to time. Once he said, "Bill gave me a copy of his new book," and opened Requiem for a Nun to Faulkner's inscription.

"I probably won't read it," he went on. "It's not my kind of book. Bill knows that, and I appreciate his giving it to me."

He shook his head. "There was a time when Bill was writing good stories, for The Saturday Evening Post. I always hoped he would go on that way. But he had to go his own way, and I respect that."

Toward the end of my few years in Oxford, I went into the drugstore one day for aspirin or a prescription. As soon as I stepped in the door, I saw Faulkner standing across the cash register from Reed, talking, and I stopped cold.

I stood there thinking, Should I? Not long before, I had been driving along Old Taylor Road when I overtook Faulkner walking toward home. He carried a cane or a stick, and he was dressed in his old tweed coat. My first thought had been, Offer him a ride. I decided that if he wanted a ride he would be thumbing one, not walking along intent upon the ground. He seemed to be lost in writing something like" 'What!' he cried.

'What?' Outraged, immobile, impotent in the furious immobility of the very twilight and burdened evensong of impotence deified, incarnated, crucified, unrisen."

But he couldn't be writing now; he was in conversation. It was on pure drugstore business that I would approach, not him, but the cash register, whereupon Reed would introduce us. I don't think I ever got to the point of thinking, Now is it "House Burning"? Or is it "Barn Afire"? I was too blank for that. I'mnot sure, either, how long I stood there before I noticed that my hands were trembling. I suppose I took that as a sign; in any case, I turned and walked out.

If! had taken those few extra steps, what a difference it might have made. All these years, I might have been looked upon with awe as I broached amusing little reminiscences with, "The last time I talked to Bill..."

Still, self-abnegation brings its own blessings. Ever since I had the courtesy not to intrude upon Faulkner, I have found myself associated with him in oddly intimate ways. It really does seem that Fate wished to reward me, when I consider that r had the good fortune to be hospitalized with a case of flu just down the hall from his sister-in-law when she died, that a wellknown younger writer once publicly attributed to me a sentence of Faulkner's that I had quoted to her a few years before, and that I was lucky enough to marry a girl who had been bitten by one of his dogs. "God," Goatee Brown might well have noted in 0 the margin, "what a rich full life!"

About the Author: Robert Canzoneri, based in Ohio, writes novels and short stories, as well as nonfiction.

Forging a Stronger Partnership During his six-day visit to the United States last month, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao addressed the U.S. Congress, met with business and government leaders, gave a lecture at Harvard University, had wide-ranging discussions with President Bill Clinton, and addressed a joint press conference.

'J

"Indo-U.S. relations are on the threshold of a bold new era."

With these words, spoken on May 18to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, P.V. Narasimha Rao captured the spirit of his first official visit to Washington since becoming Prime Minister of India.

"As India stands poised to contribute to global prosperity and peace in the next century, we look forward to continuing our partnership with America and with the American people," he said.

The Prime Minister's six-day tour of

the United States included stops in New York City; Houston, Texas; and Boston, Massachusetts; and culminated in a meeting with President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. Along the way, Rao conferred with officials at all levels of the U.S. government, met with international business executives, spoke with officials of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and mixed with members of the growing-and increasingly influential-Indian-American community.

In conjunction with the Washington

visit, American and Indian officials also signed two memoranda of understanding-one to promote public awareness of illegal drugs and the other to cooperate on the conservation and management of India's World Heritage Sites.

"Today we began what I hope will be a very close working relationship as our two countries forge a stronger partnership," President Clinton said in a joint press conference following his May 19 meeting with Prime Minister Rao. "Our nations share many common values. And speak-

ing as friends, we explored ways to deepen our ties and to expand cooperation."

Rao's trip highlighted the changes that have taken place in the world since an Indian Prime Minister last visited the White House. When the late Rajiv Gandhi met President Ronald Reagan in 1985, the Soviet Union was intact, EastWest relations were strained, and India was somewhat economically isolated.

Prime Minister Rao, in contrast, met the leader of an American administration

that is downsizing the U.S. military foHowing the end of the Cold War and has identified India as one of the ten most important emerging markets for U.S. exports. Moreover, the two countries have successfully cooperated in peacekeeping operations around the world.

"I think we'll have a deeper and better partnership now. And I'm looking forward to building on it," President Clinton said.

Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary-just

two of the Cabinet-level officials who spoke personally with Prime Minister Rao-will make separate trips to India later this year. Defense Secretary William Perry noted that he and the Prime Minister had discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the U.S.-India defense relationship, including the possibility of joint military exercises in the future.

Rao's arrival also coincided with a Senate hearing on the nomination of Defense Under Secretary Frank Wisner to

If the dangers to democracy are to be met effectively, the 21st century must prove that development is best assured when democracy is assured.

-Prime

Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao in his address to Congress

Left: Prime Minister Rao addresses a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on May 18, the first foreign leader to do so since President Clinton assumed office. Below: The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas

be the new U.S. ambassador to India.

Wisner assured the Senate panel that the Clinton Administration understands the importance of India and promised to strive "to ensure that our relationship with that great country lives up to its fun potential."

Despite the positive statements made

by Indian and U.S. officials throughout the visit, neither side glossed over their very real differences on certain issues.

They pointed out, rather, that disagree-

Foley (left), and the President Pro-Tern of the Senate, Robert C. Byrd, lead the applause at the end of the speech. Bottom: The Prime Minister is congratulated by members of the audience.

At Vice President Al Gore's luncheon (right below) in honor of Prime Minister Rao are (clockwise from right) former ambassador to India John Gunther Dean; Senator Phil Gramm; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (former ambassador to India); and former ambassador to India William Clark.

ments exist in every bilateral relationship and are best resolved in the context of each country's overall interests. India and the United States, they stressed, are in the process of building a relationship that is stronger than ever before-and one in which areas of agreement overshadow areas of dispute.

President Clinton said he was "disturbed" by press reports suggesting that U.S.-India ties were fraying over disagreements on nuclear nonproliferation, human rights in Kashmir, and specific issues relating to trade. "We have a very great stake, it seems to me...in having not only a friendly relationship, but a constructive and operating relationFacing page: 1. Washington'sfamous Willard Hotel where Prime Minister Rao met VIPs. 2. The Prime Minister, Ambassador Ray, and the Ambassador-designate to India, Frank Wisner, share a humorous moment. 3.

Meeting with Secretary of Defense William Perry. 4. Discussing trade with Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. 5. Conferring with World Bank President Lewis Preston. 6.

Earlier that day the Prime Minister hosted a breakfast attended by, among others, Minister of Finance Manmohan Singh; GE Vice Chairman Paolo Fresco; and AT&T Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer Network Systems William Marx (right).

ship-we, the two great democracies, with a great future together," he said.

"When two nations are friends, it doesn't mean that they agree on everything, or that they should. But in the context of their friendly relationship, they are then able to discuss differences, problems, or issues between them," President Clinton explained.

In a speech at Harvard University, Prime Minister Rao warned against permitting "Cold War attitudes" to stand in the way of the growing friendship between his country and the United States. "This is a decisive opportunity and we miss it at our own peril," he declared.

During his confirmation hearing, Ambassador-designate Wisner touched on the same theme, saying, "We cannot afford to let our differences define our relationship."

By all accounts, economic ties will form one of the strongest pillars of that relationship. American leaders from the

Our Commerce Department has identified India as one of the ten biggest emerging markets around the world....

We are now the largest bilateral trading partner and investor with India.

We're proud of that, and we want that relationship to grow.

-President Bill Clinton at a press conference (left) on May 19

President on down--expressed admiration for the economic reforms that the Rao government initiated in 1991.

"It was a distinct pleasure for me to meet the Prime Minister who has led India through ...what to me is an absolutely astonishing period of economic transformation," President Clinton told reporters. "He's kept a steady hand on the helm of Indian democracy through many challenges."

"Under your leadership, Mr. Prime Minister, India is clearly poised to take its rightful place among the world's economic giants," Vice President Al Gore said in a toast to Prime Minister Rao at a State Department luncheon

Above: Prime Minister Rao tours the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, with the gallery's director Milo C. Beach, before attending a reception given in his honor by the Freer Gallery and the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture.

Left: Prime Minister Rao delivers the 1993-94 Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture at Harvard University's Memorial Hall (left center) on May 17. Seated on the dais are former ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith (left) and Professor Robert D. Putnam. The Jodidi is the most prominent annual lecture series of Harvard's Center for International Affairs.

Far left: Prime Minister Rao in Houston, at a luncheon (above) hosred by the Greater Houston Partnership on May 16 to meet eminent businessmen, including many nonresident Indians. and at a morning meeting (below) with those businessmen.

held in his honor.

Similarly, Wisner's remarks to the Senate' Foreign Relations Committee highlighted the economic sphere as having "the most dramatic potential" for the future of Indo-U.S. relations. "India is emerging as a truly great economic power," he said. "The progress ofIndia's newly liberalized economy is literally breathtaking and is building a fundamentally new dimension for Indian and American interaction."

Prime Minister Rao reassured public and private sectors in the United States that his country is committed to staying on the course of economic reform. He drew some of the warmest applause of his visit when he mentioned his economic program. "After decades of centralized economic policies, India recently embarked on a reform program designed to modernize our economy, liberalize trade,

and realize our economic potential," he said. "The momentum of these reforms will carry India into the next century as the single largest free market in the world."

Earlier, in a speech sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers, Rao told the gathering'Jof executives: "There is nothing to indicate we will go back on our reforms. If you want an assurance, you have it."

Apart from economic matters, Prime Minister Rao reminded his audiences that the United States and India have other, far deeper, ties. He indicated that as the world's two largest democracies, they should seize the opportunity to promote that form of government around the world.

"The basic and most essential agenda of the world hereafter, perhaps through the next century, is the consolidation and

concretization of democracy," Rao told Congress. "On this single plank, directly or indirectly, will depend the prospects of peace, disarmament, and development-{in other words] the survival of humankind."

Prime Minister Rao looked into the future, but he also acknowledged history.

"The United States and India have learned a great deal from each other throughout history," he said. "Distances did not matter. Indeed, distances never mattered in the transmission of ideas because their medium is the mind."

He recalled that when India gained independence, it looked to the U.S. Constitution as a model. "Now both countries are forever joined by the shared values of secularism, political pluralism, and the rule of law."

0 About the Author: Berta Gomez is a SPAN correspondent based in Washington. D.C.

The Potato Revolution A new technology has developed "true potato seeds" from the fruit of the flower. Indian farmers will pay much less than they used to for sowing a field.

And the resulting potato crop will be virtually virus-free.

Early dawn in Punjab. Or Uttar Pradesh, or Bihar, or Karnataka. Heavily loaded potato trucks rumble down the highway, destined for markets thousands of kilometers away. Many of those potatoes will not be eaten.

They will be used as seeds-eut up and planted.

"Here in Karnataka farmers cannot produce good quality seed tubers because of the climate conditions," says K.S.N. Murthy, associate director, Centre for Technology Development (CTD) in Bangalore and former chief secretary,

government of Karnataka. "Truckloads of seed tubers (60,000 tons every year) have to come from the northern states."

It takes up to two-and-a-half tons of tubers to sow a one-hectare field. Current production in India of certified seed tubers meets only 25 percent of farmer demand. For the rest, farmers must pay Rs. 2,000 or more per ton, often for degenerated stocks that require heavy inputs of fertilizers and'Jpesticides and have low productivity. And in the north, farmers must put aside up to 25 percent of their crop to use as seed tubers for the next growing season.

But now a new, environmentally friendly, economically profitable technology for growing potatoes is capturing the interest of commercial growers, small farmers, and private seed companies in India-propagation using the "true potato seed" (TPS), the small seed contained in the fruit of the potato flower.

TPS is expected to revolutionize potato production in India by the year 2000.

Punjabi farmer Prem Singh (center) and American agronomist Karl E. Foord (right) examine potatoes grown from "true potato seeds" under an Indo-U.S. joint venture that has receivedfunding from USAID.

Small farmers as well as medium and large farmers will benefit from this technology, developed over the past 14 years at the two international potato centers in New Delhi and Lima, Peru, and at the Central Potato Research Institute in Shimla. For one thing, true potato seeds will cost less than Rs. 700 for a onehectare field (compared to some Rs. 5,000 if non- TPS tubers are used). In addition, potatoes grown from TPS are genetically diverse hybrids which means that they have a broader range of genes than potato plants grown from tubers. They are virtually virus-free, and require as much as 50 percent less pesticides and fertilizersfactors that also save farmers large amounts of money.

"Any agricultural technology we develop now has to have a built-in stability on a long-term basis. TPS fits in there very well," says Mahesh D. Upadhya, regional director, International Potato Centre in New Delhi. TPS schemes are under way in several states, including

Himachal Pradesh and Haryana.

The Centre for Technology Development is a nonprofit agency. It is working with three research centers in the state to produce true potato seeds and develop potato seedling and potato tuber storage units. The CTD is also working with entrepreneurs to create private marketing systems.

"The whole idea is to get the seeds and the technology into private hands, so that people will see this thing really works," says B.G. Rudrappa, retired chairman of the Karnataka ElectricityBoard and one of 30 CTD volunteers.

CTD expects that its TPS project will reduce Karnataka's dependence on conventional seed tuber requirements by 33 percent by 1997. It expects that it will boost local potato production, increase farmers' incomes and rural employment, and create a new market for TPS. Commercial seed companies will supply most of that market.

Humble though it may be, the potato is the fourth most important crop worldwide after rice, wheat, and cotton. It is consumed in more than 130 countries.

In 1989, farmers in nine countries grew more than 276 million tons of them, and farmers in India produced more than 15 miIlion tons on almost one million hectares.

The potato is a nutritious, high-yielding, short-season crop, rich in calories and vitamins Band C. Eventually, India's undernourished will benefit from greater availability, at lower prices, of this nutritious food.

Over the past four decades, potato production in India has increased by 881 percent, to about 18 kilograms per person per year. By using TPS, Indian farmers may double potato production to 30 million tons annually by the year 2000, and increase productivity to 20 tons per hectare.

Potatoes were first cultivated in the Western Hemisphere, and introduced to the rest of the world by the Spanish in the 16th and 17th centuries. Stroll through any market in South America's Andes Mountains, and the variety of potatoes overwhelms you-small, black, smoothskinned potatoes; larger, lumpy gray ones; tiny purple ones; yellow, red, shades

A t the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, a researcher handpollinates a potato flower (far left); net houses (left above) are used to protect potato plants from insects; computers (left below) play an increasingly important role in agricultural research.

diverse, hybrid population, such as that grown from TPS, is consistent in production without degrading your resources, is stronger at resisting insect and virus attacks, and can adapt better to different climate and soil conditions."

The challenge of TPS technology is how to make it widely available to farmers. Some commercial seed companies are already getting into the act. Kalyani Agro Corporation Pvt. Ltd. (KACL), based in Pune, recently signed a producer-distributor joint venture with TPS Products, Co., a subsidiary of EscaGenetics of brown; oval, round, or long and thin. Corporation, in San Carlos, California, Some varieties are better for boiling, oth- to produce high-quality, virus-free seeders for frying, some for puree, and still ling tubers and seed tubers from TPS others for freeze-drying in chilly Andean using a large-scale farming system develmountain streams. oped by TPS Products. The U.S. Agency Although scientists at the International for International Development (USAID) Potato Centre in Lima have collected has provided KACL with $300,000 in some 5,000 varieties of potatoes, farm- venture capital under its Program for ers throughout the world actually cul- Advancement of Commercial Technology (PACT) project. tivate only seven varieties. The potato "From a commercial end, we believe most commonly grown in India is called that this is a project that can stand on the Ware.

The technology of producing a potato its own," says Karl E. Foord, senior crop from true potato seeds is highly agronomist of TPS Products. "But it is labor-intensive. The seeds are sown in always a challenge for a new project like high-density seedbeds, ten by ten centi- this to become an active, viable commermeters. The first generation of plants cial business before the funding runs out. produces mostly seedling tubers, also That's why USAID's support is great." called micro tubers or tuberlets. The India's future economic growth defarmer stores them until next season, to pends on broad-based development of the use as planting material or sell to others. private sector. USAID-India, in supportAccording to research conducted by the ing the government's ambitious goals, is International Potato Centre in New using its experience in assisting the "green Delhi, one ton of seedling tubers is re- revolution" to support the new revoluquired to plant one hectare, as opposed to tion to transform agriculture into agriroughly two-and-a-half to three tons of business. As with the gr'een revolution, cut-up seed tubers. Only 200 square me- technology will play a deciding role in ters are needed to produce that ton of this transformation. seedling tubers.

"India has one of the greatest scienti"For the small farmer, his liability each fic sectors in the world," says Felipe season is how much cash he is going to Manteiga of USAID-India, "but the spend to raise a crop, or how much of a scientific and private sectors are loan he will take from a middleman," says delinked. CTD is helping to forge that Upadhya. "As an agricultural scientist, I link, which is essential for India's ecowould like to help him get rid of that nomic growth." liability and become more independent of KACL and EscaGenetics are working loans and collateral. with Pepsi Foods Ltd., in Punjab, to "Single genotype tubers exert unidirec- try to provide quality potatoes that tional pressure on extracting the nutrients Pepsi needs to produce the evenly shaped, from the soil," Upadhya adds. "But a more sized, and colored potato chips required

to supply India's high-end market and export to the Middle East.

Pepsi's plant capacity is 2,500 tons of potatoes per year. In 1993 the company operated at only 40 percent capacity because of a lack of the high-quality potatoes needed. "Our problem is supply of raw material," says Jasjit S. Sandhu, senior executive, Pepsi Foods. "What we are looking for in terms of quality is color, and also low water content. With potatoes a lower-water content reduces the amount of oil and energy required for frying."

Pepsi hopes to contract local farmers to produce the high-quality potatoes they need using seeds or seedling tubers produced by KACL. "The benefit of contract farming is that the farmer understands our problems, and we understand his problems," says Sandhu. "He has a guaranteed market, and we get the quality we need."

When I was visiting Pepsi's plant, I met Balvinder Singh, who established a 20-hectare farm in Punjab in .J 972.

He was waiting patiently to talk to Sandhu.

"I am interested in supplying Pepsi because from them I can get a good price for my potatoes," says Singh, who mechanized his production in 1986. Last year he produced 20 tons of potatoes per hectare, 25 percent of which he stored for himself as seed for the next year, 33 percent he sold as table potatoes in Bombay, and the rest he sold as seed potatoes, destined for South India.

Widespread use ofTPS technology, it is hoped, will lead to more potatoes for India, most probably at a cheaper consumer price. But will the consumer demand for those potatoes be there?

"By the year 2000, the per capita availability of grain will be 18 percent lower than it is now," says Upadhya. "The public will need good potatoes to supplement the food deficit. That's why TPS has such a tremendous future-especially in this part of the world."

0 About the Author: Laura Lorenz Hess is a New Delhi-based freelance writer who specializes in agricultural and other developmental subjects.

hat Makes a Leader?

A Conversation With Management Guru Max DePree

In a world in which virtually everybody has a theory of leadership, Max DePree is concerned less with theory than with practice. And practice he has. For the past 20 years he has been chairman of Herman Miller Inc., the second largest office-furniture manufacturer in the United States. DePree, 68, is an ornament to traditional values, to humanism. But humanism to

DePree, the author of two books on leadership, is not touchy-feely. He asks hard questions of would-be leaders: "Are you willing to be ruthlessly honest?" He talks about things such as betrayal. And he is down-to-earth: The marks of the struggle to lead, he says, should be as apparent as the nicks and scrapes of a six-year-old boyJat the end of his summer vacation.

A.J. VOGL: Of late, leadership books seem to be something of a minor growth industry, maybe even a major one. Can one really learn to be a leader from reading books about leadership?

MAX DEPREE: Much about leadership can be learned from reading books, from going to school, from the mentoring process. But we also have to take into account the probability that leadership, to a great extent, is a gift. One is born with it.

Then, too, my personal feeling is that one learns leadership through risky work.

In his most recent book, Leadership Jazz (Doubleday), DePree described an employee as being "a real gift to the spirit." To the world of corporations and board rooms, Max DePree brings a similar gift. He talked to A.J. Vogl, editor of Across the Board magazine, during a recent trip to New York, where he spoke at a Conference Board meeting on productivity and competitiveness.

What do you mean by "risky work"?

I think you have to bet your career on your way up the hierarchy. r had an interesting conversation with a man who wants to be CEO [chief executive officer] of a Fortune 500 company. I asked him if he was willing to make a jog in his career and spend some time in a position where he'd put his job at risk. He didn't understand the question. "You're a very fine financial person," I said to him. "But you don't bet your job on what you do. You have to miss a sales quota and have an

executive vice president say, 'We can afford to have our financial reports a couple of days late, but our company can't afford to miss a sales quota. If you do that again, you're out.'"

You learn a lot faster under stress and under difficulty. It's a lot like sailing. I live on Lake Michigan. When our children were all home, we had a three-and-a-half-meter catamaran.

You know, on Lake Michigan in a high wind, you can almost go fast enough to pull a water-skier with one of those. Our children and I would love to sail in those conditions, but my wife would always say, ''I'm willing to sail, but not when the wind's out." Well, that's an oxymoron. You can't learn anything about sailing if there's no wind, and you can't develop leadership in a situation that doesn't make demands upon you.

At your corporation, Herman Miller, you've sailed in a high wind?

Yes, and I've had my share of failures. I was responsible for bringing some new products to market that just weren't ready for market. And I've had some failures with key people, where nothing we could do together worked. To learn leadership, you have to have some losses in life. And I think followers need to have leaders who understand that.

There were also occasions or situations where it wasn't clear whether we failed or succeeded. One was in Europe-this was more than 20 years ago-where we had a very difficult time trying to switch from having about a dozen independent licensees to becoming a single coherent company. Getting rid of the licensees was both a human-relations problem and a legal problem. We solved the latter problem, but to this day I don't know whether we were adequately sensitive in the way we terminated our relationship with every group.

The productfailures you referred to, was there anyone thing responsible for them-were they too advancedfor the marketJor instance, or insufficiently thought through?

Insufficiently thought through, yes, and not executed with great expertise. We also were impatient to get to market, trying to meet other goals besides getting the product right. Sometimes failures can be attributed to human relationships. Once, for instance, I depended on the executive in charge of an R&D program to make sure a new chair not only fit the American market, but also met German standards-the most stringent in Europe. When the chair was manufactured, it didn't. I asked why, and he offered no explanation other than he changed his mind. We immediately launched a program to make adjustments in the chair so it would fit German standards.

And it took awhile to heal the relationship between that executive and myself.

In your book Leadership as an Art, you say, "Most people never get the opportunity to be meaningfully involved in the working of the system." That's a prelly damning thing to say.

But it's true. Most people, if they work for a large corporation, either have a specialty or have a focus that gives them a lot of information about a relatively small segment of the operation. For years at Herman Miller, we've had a large display area in the factory where the final products are set up pretty much the way they would be in the user's office. So if you're making one of the components for a piece of furniture, you can see how your component fits, and also get a picture of who might be using the things you make. But in a lot of industries-think about working in a chemical plant, for instancethat's not true.

Has this always been so, or is it a recent development?

I think it's been this way for a good many years. Actually, as companies are being broken down into smaller units, I think we're getting better at it. We're also being helped along by a strong movement toward more enlightened leadership. You know, one of the things that surprised me after my first book, Leadership as an Art, was published, was the number of readers who wrote to me. This was particularly surprising since I never in my life wrote to an author. That book has been out six years now, and I still get mail from it.

Do your correspondents hold sentiments in common?

One theme runs through the letters: "Thanks for putting into writing what I've always felt, or what I've always believed, or what I've always wanted to practice. Your writing helps me believe in what I believe."

You support them, in other words.

Yes, in various ways. Several weeks ago, I gave a speech in Chicago and a woman came up to me and said, "Your use of the feminine pronoun in Leadership Jazz has made me feel authentic."

Speaking of that book, I suspect some classicists might feel uncomfortable with the analogy implied by your title.

I didn't mean to exclude the possibility that there are organizations that are like a symphony orchestra and ought to be led like one. I believe there are. But I was struck by the way my own experience of leadership corresponds to the way a jazz band operates-with a certain looseness and room for improvisation. My point is that people who want to be leaders¡ have to run the same kind of risks that ajazz-band leader runs if he's going to have a good band.

That ties into something else: That everybody basically is a volunteer-and especially your best people. They don't have to stay in your place; they don't have to work for you. So you have to learn how to lead people who are not obliged to follow your leadership.

One of the reasons that I think people ought to work outside their companies-on the school board, for instance, or the Boy

You have to learn how to lead people whoc Scouts-is that it gives them a chance to lead without power.

That's a growing need in our society-for leaders who can lead without power. You may be president of the school board, for instance, but you can't fire any of the school-board members, whereas if you're president of Herman Miller and somebody doesn't measure up, you can terminate that person. Or, if you're the college president, you can't fire the tenured faculty member, but you can fire the provost.

Recently in a speech, you spoke about the need/or leaders to have openness, even to make themselves vulnerable. I can imagine some executives saying, "That's nice in principle, but if you have to fire somebody, then the closer you are to him, the more difficult it is." Is that a real concern?

It can be. But like so many parts of life, I don't think we should determine our behavior on the basis of the worst possible consequence. There's much more to be gained on the positive side of the matter. Most of the people we work with we don't have to fire. And even if we do, many of these relationships continue. I remain good friends with three or four people I've had to separate from the company over the years. You see, I don't really believe that you can bring out the best gifts in a person in an arm's-length relationship.

At another level, it's probably true that everybody you know well has some kind of problem in life. None of us goes through life without encountering difficulties, and these difficulties in many cases affect our productivity or our effectiveness.

If you want to be a good leader of people, you have to be prepared to deal with these difficulties-a sick child, a divorce, a death in the family. At such times, you can't ask a person to go on the road and do something. The leader must pack his bag and do it himself. Leadership can't be a "one-size-fitsall" proposition.

In any workforce, there are a number of employees who come to work only to get healed, so they can handle the problems at home that night. I know a number of people like that, who have handicapped children, or an old parent, or a serious illness going on in the family. If you're close enough to people to have some insight into these things, if you can really see when they're hurting, when they need healing rather than motivation for a few days, then I'm convinced that overall you're going to get better performance out of them. Even if you have no empathy for their problems, even if you're just being totally pragmatic, you're going to get better performance out of people by taking into account the forces that have a!l impact on them.

In your own growth models?

toward leadership,

did you have any

A few. One is a man named Dr. Carl Frost, an industrial psychologist. He's 78 now, and he's been a consultant to Herman Miller since 1949, which must be some sort of record.

Then there's Peter Drucker, whom I've known for quite a few years. Another mentor of mine is an outstanding leader in a totally different field: David Hubbard, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. I've been on his board for 29 years.

There are also many people who come through one's life who you wouldn't call mentors, but they surely are your teachers.

Many years ago, when I was first trying to be a plant manager, Dr. Frost told me that I was going to have days where I'd be sitting in my office wondering what's the solution to a tough problem. Walk out into the plant and ask somebody, he saidthey'll know.

Let's talk about your company/or a bit. When one reads ahoUl Herman Miller, working relationships, compensation practices, and the like are usually spoken about in reverential tones. I wonder if Herman Miller employees ever leave.

Well, they do. They not only quit, they sometimes get fired.

Heresy, heresy.

It may be, but it's true. As you know, for many years it was part of IBM's theology that nobody would be laid off. But the exigencies of the free-market system don't give you a right to that kind of principle. Years ago when I was CEO, people used to ask me if we had a guaranteed-work setting. I replied that as long as we had customers who guaranteed us orders, we had one.

As I understand it, all employees at Herman Miller are organized into work teams. The team leader evaluates his workers every six months, and then, in turn, each worker evaluates the leader. Is that so?

No, not quite. The leader evaluates the performance of all the people in his work team, but not everybody evaluates the leader. That's more voluntary than a requirement. There are . some who have hidden agendas who don't want to run the risk; others are not qualified.

What would make a worker unqualified to evaluate his hoss?

If you have a representative work population, then it follows that every worker isn't equally intellectually qualified to know whether or not the boss is doing the right thing. They may have an opinion or a feeling about it, but as far as truly evaluating performance-I'm not so sure.

are not obliged to follow your leadership. is determined by how much money he saves the company. The last reference J saw mentioned annual savings of more than $ J 2 million in worker-inspired efficiencies. What kinds of efficiencies?

Efficiencies in terms of the time it takes to complete a process or operation. Efficiencies resulting from reducing the amount of waste material. Efficiencies resulting from a worker suggesting a new or better kind of tool or jig to use for a process. Even suggestions that change the product itself. I don't think we've ever had a product, no matter how well-engineered or ready to go to market we thought it was, that wasn't improved when it got on the factory floor. It's a perfectly normal thing for our engineers to go back and keep working on a product in light of what happens on the floor.

Another thing we encourage is the abandonment of stuff. A lot of the work we do doesn't need to be done. One of the reasons it's done is that a momentum is built up that's hard to resist. I remember years ago, when the computer was the new thing in business, we had a wonderful guy named Whitey Nichols running our computer department.

And every few months Whitey would purposely fail to deliver a report to some department or to some officer. And if in a few days nobody asked for the report-well, they simply never saw that report again, because Whitey concluded it just wasn't necessary.

I think a lot of businesses in America could benefit by thinking about what they could abandon. Government, too.

I'm old enough to remember when the rural-electrification program was started, and we really needed to electrify America's farms. Well, our farms have been electrified, but we still have the rural-electrification agency; and] recently heard an economist predict that by the year 2000, ifno trends change, we'll have more people in the Department of Rural Electrification than we'll have on farms. Now, I think that's astonishing.

When J mentioned to several people that J was going to talk to you, they immediately said, "Oh, Herman Miller-the company that caps the CEO's salary." That has become so much identified with you. Are you surprised or disappointed that more companies haven 'tfollowed your lead in this regard?

I'm not surprised. I'm a little disappointed.

On the other hand, I understand other companies are following the same track-Ben & Jerry's ice cream is a good example.

Maybe it's the only other example-and certainly, after Herman Miller, the most prominent one. How do you explain this cold reception to the cap idea?

I can't, but I can tell you that the way we got to it was not through studying compensation; it was through talking about justice in the workplace, and our board concluded that the most significant and most concrete part of justice in the workplace

was compensation.

And if you're going to try to have an organization in which you share a lot of information, in which you have high expectations of people, then you have to have compensation relationships that are understandable and acceptable.

Actually, the idea was originally Peter Drucker's. He wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal proposing caps for the automobile industry; this was in the early 1970s, when they were beginning to have problems with the foreign imports. As I recall, he said that for the automobile industry the cap for the CEO should be 50 or 60 times the pay of the average factory worker. Well, we did our own arithmetic and discovered that 20 times the compensation of our typical worker was a very reasonable amount.

Are the salaries of other senior executives also capped, or just the CEO's?

Just the CEO's. But nobody can make more than the CEO, so they are in effect capped. Executive compensation at Herman Miller actually is managed by the committee of the board of directors, and we stay in touch with the law of supply and demand as well. We're not fooling around with the free-market system by doing this. A little more than a year ago we were looking for a new CEO. We had 16 very good applicants, which we narrowed down to eight very good candidates, then four, and, finally, one. In the final eight, not a single executive objected to the idea of a salary cap; in fact, they all said that, in principle, this was the right way to compensate.

At a board meeting a few months ago, we were reviewing the subject again, and our new CEO, who's been on the job about a year now, told the chairman of the compensation committee, an outside board member, that there's absolutely no reason to change this method of compensation. ] should point out that we're only talking about cash compensation here, not stock options and that kind of thing. We have that as well.

Still, your CEO pay package is much more trlodest than those of many other corporations.

Sure, that's right. But it seems appropriate. We're a public company that does about $800 million worldwide in annual sales. Our average wage is in the neighborhood of$30,000 or so.

That means there's a cap of $600,000 on the CEO's salary.

Now, you don't have to apologize to offer a guy $600,000 to work for you. And as I said a moment ago, the eight finalists for the CEO's job all thought that salary was fine, just fine.

Why, then, do so many corporations pay their CEOs in the millions? Are they just responding to the market?

All that's blown out of proportion. We don't have enough

A leader should encourage employees to abandon unnecessary work. data on all of the really good companies to ascertain how much a CEO should be paid. As an example, take IBM. Louis Gerstner's compensation package is $3.5 million in annual salary and bonus, a one-time payment of about $5 million, and 500,000 stock options. I don't think that's unwarranted pay for a company of that size and complexity, for the difficulties he's taking on. As a stockholder I don't object to that.

It's not IBM that's out of whack. Look at the guys at Disney two years ago. A couple of them made $30 million-and they're selling to families, the families who go through Disney World.

Their $30 million came out of the pockets of working families. I think that philosophically, you have a right to question that as a matter of justice.

There are ramifications to be considered, too. The announcement of the Gerstner salary package was made about the same time that several thousand IBM employees were being laid off. I was reminded of this when, in Leadership Jazz, you recall telling your wife that you had to layoff 40 men, and she corrected you, saying, "Forty families."

No question that sometimes layoffs are necessary, but if a layoff is necessary, then why couldn't it at least be accompanied by a word of apology? Why doesn't the CEO say, "We really feel bad about laying you off. We're sorry." But that doesn't happen in the corporate world.

Why not?

I don't know. But the human niceties haven't completely disappeared.

I was at the Little Rock conference [called by President-elect Clinton to discuss the economy before he took office], and one of the things that impressed me about Clinton was that two or three times, in front of all the people there and on national television, he apologized to people for the way he treated them.

I remember one instance in particular with a woman banker.

Two or three times in her presentation to him she said there were a thousand things he ought to do about deregulating the banks. After she said that several times, Clinton smiled and said, "Okay, name three." She named two. Then she was stuck.

He kind of smiled again and said, "Look, I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have put you on the spot like that. I apologize." Now that's a bit of humanity that is worth gold in our society.

Just as critics charge that American CEO salaries have become bloated, so, too, do they claim that their companies have become bloated. Do you agree, and if you do, is it due to lack of vision?

I think it's a fair charge, but I don't think it's due to lack of vision. It's more the result of leadership not paying attention,

not being alert to change. Look at how the Big Three [of the U.S. automobile industry] initially reacted to the foreign car manufacturers. They just didn't take them seriously, which was obviously a mistake.

But, you know, there are a lot of temptations for a CEO. There's the temptation to get involved in the government, the temptation to give speeches ...

And the temptation to make a great deal of money.

That's right. And one of the things that diverts and distracts high corporate types is wondering what to do with all that money. Answering that question becomes sort of a second vocation for them. Obviously you don't just put it in a savings account. Some of it you invest, some of it you give away, but whatever you do takes time, takes attention. I have a friend who with great joy is getting ready for a second marriage. Her new husband is an entrepreneur-he runs a small bank. What's he been doing lately? He's been making frequent trips to Cancun, in Mexico, to decide whether or not to buy land there. Now, one of the things you have to ask is: If the CEO is spending weeks in Cancun looking over land, what is happening at the bank? See, that happens. There are real distractions for people in those jobs.

We've spent some time talking about your books on leadership, and what books on leadership can and can't do. To conclude, let me ask you: Which books about leadership would you recommend?

I think the best book on leadership is Robert Greenleafs Servant Leadership, especially the first two-thirds; the last third deals mainly with his personal relationships with many people.

I also think that John Gardner's On Leadership is outstanding.

Then there's Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise, which was a landmark book in the kind of leadership were talking about these days. I was also helped by the first version of Warren Bennis's Why Leaders Can't Lead. And Peter Drucker's books have been very important to me. Speaking of him, my own feeling is that many of the really good books on business and leadership, like Drucker's, are more icons than actually studied.

Also, for me, I can't say that the most helpful books have necessarily been books on business or leadership. There's a wonderful book called Watership Down by Richard Adams.

Have you read it?

The one about rabbits?

That's it: The one about rabbits. It has so many lessons on leadership that it ought to be required reading for anybody interested in leadership or aspiring to be a leader.

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"God gave her very great gifts and imposed on her great burdens. She bore them all with dignity and grace and uncommon common sense. In the end, she cared most about being a good mother to her children."

This moving tribute was paid

by President Bill Clinton to the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (popularly known to everyone as "Jackie") at her internment ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Jackie died of cancer on May 19 at her New York apartment. She was 64.

She was buried alongside the grave of President Kennedy.

The widow of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was, said President Clinton, "a remarkable woman whose life will forever glow in the lives of her fellow Americans. More than any other woman of her time, she captivated our nation and the world with her intelligence, elegance, and grace."

In recent years Jackie had lived quietly, working as an editor at Doubleday; joining efforts to preserve historic New York buildings; spending time with her son, daughter, and grandchildren; jogging in Central Park.

Born into a wealthy family, Jackie attended prestigious schools in the United States and France. As First Lady, her interest in art, literature, and history led her to invite many of the world's foremost writers and artists to the White House.

Jackie, says the International Herald Tribune, transformed the White House into "a living stage-not a museum-creating a sumptuous celebration of Americana that 56 million television viewers saw in 1961 as

the First Lady gave a guided tour for television."

She charmed the public in her country and elsewhere. The crowds chanted "Vive Jacqui" on the road to Paris. A bemused President Kennedy, after the state visit to France, said: "I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Parisand I have enjoyed it."

But the images of Mrs. Kennedy that burned most deeply, states the International Herald Tribune, were those in Dallas on November 22,1963: "Her lunge across the open limousine as the assassin's bullets struck, her pink suit stained with her husband's blood, her gaunt stunned face in the blur of the speeding motorcade, and the anguish later at the hospital as the doctors gave way to the priest and the new era."

The photograph of Jackie and Jawaharlal Nehru on this page, which appeared on the cover of SPAN, was taken by the magazine's Photo Editor Avinash Pasrich a at Rashtrapati Bhavan during her nine-day visit to India in 1962. Pasricha, who covered her entire trip with a vintage Rolleiflex 120, was in the United States to cover Prime Minister PY Narasimha Rao's

Clockwise (from left): The cover of the May 1962 issue of SPAN magazine; Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and their daughter Caroline in 1960; Jacqueline Kennedy's first official photograph taken at the White House.

visit when the former First Lady passed away. Says Pasricha: "I watched with nostalgia televised recollections of Jackie, including her trip to India. Her visit to India was a hectic one.

Wherever Jackie went she was cheered by crowds. She enjoyed her visit to Agra, Jaipur, and Varanasi."

Mrs. Kennedy spent the last hour of her nine-day trip at Prime Minister Nehru's house, enjoying the traditional fun and gaiety of HolL She and Nehru daubed each other's faces with gula/. India's then ambassador to the United States, B.K. Nehru, made a vain attempt to run away after smearing colored powder on Jackie's nose. But she succeeded in daubing him with gula/.

In her farewell message from Delhi airport Mrs. Kennedy said: "At the end of every day, I could not decide which was the best. I have such feelings of affection for this country and its people and the Prime Minister, who is so kind to have made it all possible. It is with gratitude and sadness I am leaving India."

Sports Medicine "I like America. It's a great country and it has given me the opportunity to be very successful. I am grateful for this," says Dr. Thomas Alexander Chandy, a native of Bangalore who specialized in orthopedic surgery and sports medicine at Oklahoma University and lived in the United States for 16 years.

Now, Chandy, 43, has come back to India, and is using the expertise and the experience he gained in the United States "to promote the cause of sports in India." He has set up an ultramodern, $2.5 million Hospital for Orthopaedics Sports Medicine and Trauma, in short HOSMAT, in Bangalore.

Help to Earthquake Victims Indian Rotarians, with support from Rotary clubs in America, have helped rebuild houses in a remote village in earthquake-devastated Uttarkashi in the Garhwal Himalayas. The relief project was conceived by and completed under the supervision of Sushil Gupta, a Rotarian of Delhi Midwest and past governor of Rotary International District 301.

Gupta, a naturalist and mountaineering enthusiast, treks in the Garhwal Himalayas every year. In 1992, one year after the earthquake, he visited Uttarkashi and learnt that no government or voluntary help had reached 28 families at Dhung, a village at an altitude of 1,800 meters. Its inhabitants had been living in the open for months in extreme weather.

Back in Delhi, Gupta persuaded fellow Rotarians to raise a sum of Rs. 275,000 ($8,790), and he made an appeal to Rotary clubs in America. Rotary District 5130 of California committed $5,000 (Rs. 156,250) from unspent money in its fund for the California earthquake of 1989, while Rotary District 7670 of North Carolina chipped in $3,790 (Rs. 118,450). The Rotary Foundation in Chicago also agreed to give a matching grant of $17,580 (Rs. 549,400). Thus a project fund of more than $35,000 (Rs. 1.09 million) was created.

This fund, according to Gupta, financed construction of modern earthquake-proof structures. When the houses were ready last autumn, they were handed overto the villagers at a simple ceremony, which was attended by, among others, Rotary Delhi Midwest President Jagdish Sharma, Rotarian Rakesh Bedi, and Gupta.

To continue "the bond of love and friendship" with Dhung, Gupta says, Rotary clubs are also helping villagers to set up a school. With contributions from the Rotary Club of Elmira (New York) and the Rotary Foundation, a sum of $5,000 has been raised forthe purpose.

Villagers in Dhung welcome Rotarians from Delhi Sushi!

Gupta (second from left) supervised the village relief project.

Among the facilities available at the five-story hospital are an aircooled physiotherapy unit (perhaps the biggest in India), a computerized power and strength endurance testing machine called CYBEX, and a fast-frame video system that analyzes athletes' movements.

Chandy, who is an honorary consultant to the National Institute of Sports and the Sports Authority of India, says that if Indian athletes have to successfully compete in international sports meets, they must undergo the rigors of scientific training on these high-tech machines to improve their endurance, strength, and performance.

-Susie

Kuruvllla

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A revised edition of Arun C. Vakil's Gateway to America, a handy and useful volume for visitors, students, and immigrants to the United States, was recently published. It incorporates major changes in U.S. immigration laws, and a Q&A on visas. The first edition was published in 1983.

In the foreword, eminent jurist NA Palkhivala describes the book as "a Solomon's mine of information, advice, and insight" in dealing with the rules and regulations of the visaprocuring process.

And, Palkhivala adds, "when the immigrant, visitor or businessman has finally landed on the shores of that great country, he will again find this book of immense assistance-with its detailed advice on the minutiae

of life in America-Americanese, its lifestyle, the mysteries of its cuisine, the travelling to and fro in the country, its festivals, and statewise detailed information to meet almost every need The book will assist the Indian across many barriers, seen and unseen, and will help build one more span in the bridge of friendship between the two largest democracies."

Author Vakil has studied, lived, and traveled in the United States on many occasions. As secretary-general of the IndoAmerican Chamber of Commerce for nearly a decade, he was continuously involved in promoting Indo-U.S. commercial relations. During 1974-77 he was associated with the U.S. Consulate in Bombay as an economist. He gives frequent "orientation lectures" organized by the Indo-American Society and the U.S. Educational Foundation in India for Indian students heading for America. He also lectures frequently on U.S. immigration laws.

Gateway to America, priced at Rs. 250, has been published by the Indo-American Society, Kitab Mahal, SD. Sukhadwala Marg, Bombay-400 001.

I

fan American fourth-grader could gaze into a crystal ball and envision the college world he or she will enter in the year 2000, it would reveal a mixture of the surprising and the familiar. Dormitories would probably have the same kinds of sagging mattresses, desks, and bookshelves that have furnished collegiate rooms for generations. School pennants and posters would likely be smeared across the walls. But there might be special TV consoles-a few colleges have them now-that could beam up taped lectures by any professor on campus or even let students monitor courses from other schools. Built-in computer terminals, similar to ones in place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, could tap into the card catalogs of half the college libraries in the country, call up encyclopedia articles, or scan the daily papers.

A glance at the quad outside would show groups of teens in whatever uniform eventually supplants T-shirts and blue jeans, but also many older students taking courses to change careers, and even retired couples returning to campus to satisfy their curiosity about everything from art history to zoology.

There is, in fact, no need for a crystal ball to envision the university of the 21st century. Bit by logical bit, it is taking shape already on dozens of U.S. campuses as administrators begin to rethink their goals in light of a cost crunch that, recession or no, promises only to grow worse. From Kansas's Sterling College to Ohio's Youngstown State University, from the huge State University of New York system (total enrollment, more than 369,000 on 23 campusl:s) to tiny Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage (639 students), officials are deciding not only how to do the same with less money but also how to do less with less.

Budget deficits have led to a sharp drop in both state and federal funding; public colleges and universities, which had previously relied on tuition and legislative grants to pay the bills, now compete aggressively with private institutions for

corporate and foundation grants. Even heavily endowed Ivy League universities are deferring maintenance and debating whether to lop off entire academic branches. Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, for example, considered, and is holding for further study, a plan that would close its linguistics department and merge three branches of engineering into one. Columbia University in New York City is abandoning its highly regarded library-science program.

Still, the Ivy League schools are doing better than the vast California State University system. San Diego State University stirred student anger by dropping 662 of 5,000 class sections and not rehiring 550 part-time instructors last fall.

At the same time, critics of the academic establishment have raised sharp questions about whether U.S. colleges and universities, for all their reputed excellence, are giving good value for money, as tuitions rise faster than the inflation rate. One year at an elite private institution today costs $23,000; by the year 2000, the price could be as high as $40,000. Recent scandals, like the misallocation of federal research funds by Stanford University in California and some other research-minded universities, have undermined academia's credibility with the public.

In some respects, alma mater in Anno Domini 2000 will look pretty much the way she does now. "Madonna reinvents herself every season," is the dry observation of Sheldon Hackney, president of the University of Pennsylvania. "Universities are much more stable." Nonetheless, experts foresee quite a few changes-good as well as bad-for America's diverse complex of private and public institutions of higher learning. Items: â&#x20AC;˘ The small liberal-arts school with a meager endowment and a largely local reputation is an "endangered species," contends Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education. By the year 2000 some of these schools will have

The university of the 21st century is already taking shape as administrators and others rethink American educational goals.

CAMPUS OF THE

FUTURE

closed their doors or merged with larger, more stable schools. Meanwhile, new schools will open. Some will be two-year community colleges emphasizing serviceoriented courses. Others may be small, publicly funded schools with innovative liberal-arts programs, like the University of South Florida's New College or Evergreen State College in Washington, D.C. And there will be much more intercollege cooperation, as neighboring schools share facilities and courses to avoid expensive and needless overlaps .... â&#x20AC;˘ Curriculums will show some radical departures from the past. To justify their existence as servants of society, all schools will come under pressure to be less theoretical and more practical in preparing students for careers. There will be more emphasis on ethics as well as on science and technology, particularly in courses aimed not at those who intend to major in chemistry or engineering but at liberal-a.rts majors who need at least some scientific literacy. Students will be under pressure to take two foreign languages, and there will be a growing emphasis on Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.

Academia's international horizons will broaden in other ways. Instead ofa comfy junior year abroad in France or Italy, many undergraduates will opt for more adventurous and exotic locales-Eastern Europe, say, or Southeast Asia.

â&#x20AC;˘ Great research-oriented universities like Harvard and the University ofMichigan, the pride of higher learning in America, will probably stay at world-class levels. But both the elite giants and less prestigious schools will place a stronger emphasis on the quality of classroom teaching.

Professors accustomed to thinking of research as their real work will be under pressure to spend time with firstand second-year undergraduates as institutions adapt to an increasingly diverse academic population-not just more women and minorities, but older students and part-timers with special needs. Even today, only 20 percent of America's undergraduates are young people between 18 and 22 who are pursuing a

parent-financed education. Two-fifths of all students today are part-timers, and more than a third are over 25.

Higher education in the United States is big business-a $100,000 million business, to be precise, representing 2.7 percent of gross national product. No other nation can boast of so many and such different institutions: 156 universities, 1,953 four-year colleges, 1,378 two-year colleges and technical schools. More than half of these are defined as private schools (although nearly all get some form of state or federal funding). Collectively, they employ 793,000 faculty membersnot to mention a supernumerary army of deans and other administrative personnel-and accommodate 14 million stu-

dents. One sign of the astonishing increase in part-time students: Only about 20 percent of these knowledge seekers annually receive one or more certificates of graduation, from the two-year A.A. (Associate of Arts) to PhD. In contrast to most other industrialized nations, the United States has no central government ministry imposing lockstep conditions on an untidy educational conglomerate.

That is why so many schools are attempting to seize the future in strikingly independent ways. Take computers, for "Instance. At the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Egyptian-born senior professor Maha Ashour-Abdalla is using the smart machines to teach physics to 140 students.

The computers can simulate experiments, from sound waves being measured in a pool of water to a 3-D, multicolored representation of molecules colliding.

Abdalla's course is part of a broader effort by UCLA administrators to perk up flagging student interest in the sciences.

"We cannot afford to train everyone as a scientist," says Clarence Hall, dean of physical sciences. "But there are hardly any students to teach. Science and engineering are the engine of economic progress, and without some changes, we are bound to lose the fuel for that engine."

Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, has found a broader use for computers. Some 200 classrooms and laboratories have been wired with a fiberoptics video information system, complete with color monitors, that allows professors to tap into the school's library of films, videos, and laser discs. Tony Edmonds, chairman of the history department, uses the system to teach a course on the Vietnam War. "Now I can discuss the My Lai massacre, press a button and show a two-minute film segment on it," he says. "I discuss the antiwar movement and pull up a segment on [antiwar activist] Abbie Hoffman."

His undergraduates, children of the sound-bite era, take to the course like, well, MTV. "Of 105 students only ten got below a B," Edmonds says. "That's never happened before."

Edmonds's Vietnam course is also transmitted to 20 off-campus sites around the state. And what about the guest lecturer who was grounded in Chicago by a snowstorm') No problem: Out-of-town speakers can visit an interactive TV studio and get beamed directly into a Ball State classroom. ust as more and more computerwise workers will earn their keep from home offices, a growing number of students can expect to get their degrees without ever setting foot on campus. Susan Lerner, 40, of Burnt Ranch.

California, is doing so now. An elementary-school teacher at a remote American-Indian reservation. she has enrolled in a new master of arts program

in educational technology offered by George Washington University in Washington, D.C., more than 4,000 kilometers away. Lerner takes two four-hour courses a week, beamed to her via the satellite dish in her yard, and keeps in touch with her professors through her computer's electronic bulletin board. "I want to integrate the use of technology in rural areas," says Lerner, who expects to get her degree in two years. "With a modem we can be connected to the rest of the world. With interactive video, we can offer opportunities that people in these areas don't ordinarily have."

Anticipating a surge in "distance learning," cable entrepreneur Glenn Jones in 1987 founded the Mind Extension University. Based in Englewood, Colorado, it beams college-credit courses to 36,000 students across the country, under the aegis of such established institutions as the University of Minnesota and Pennsylvania State University. Last fall a branch of the University of Maryland began offering the nation's first fouryear bachelor of arts program via Mind Extension: Sixty students are enrolled.

"Today's students are often working," explains Paul Hamlin, the Maryland dean in charge of the program. "They need to be able to compete, and they want a flexible format. Because of time constraints--ehildren, jobs, commutesthey can't go to the typical campus."

It's not only the students who have changing needs. So do the various communities that colleges and universities are trying to serve. Inside what was once the ivory tower, there is a growing interest in new kinds of alliances with business. In St. Louis, Washington University and the Monsanto Company have linked up in biomedical research projects involving proteins and peptides, as part of a search for more sophisticated drugs. On the campus of the University of California, Irvine, Hitachi has built a hightech research lab. which it shares with the university's top-flight biochemistry department. Critics worry about the ethics of this cozy arrangement, despite strict conflict-of-interest rules drawn up by the university. "What forms of industrial co-

Academia's code word for the future is "accountability"-both to the students it hopes to serve and the public that pays the bills. habitation should a state-funded university permit?" asks Michael Schrage, a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

"It's one thing for a campus to encourage private industry to participate in research. It is quite another to have facilities that blur the line between private and proprietary."

Similar questions have been asked about the efforts of some publicly funded schools to justify their existence by trying to fulfill immediate community needs. The University of New Hampshire has been able to squeeze additional funds from New Hampshire's traditionally tight-fisted legislature by polishing its public image with projects like developing a nontoxic bacterium that virtually eliminated black flies, which plagued some of the state's tourist resorts. But the university's president, Dale Nitzschke, allows that catering to the lawmakers' whims is a high-risk proposition. "We don't enjoy a separation anymore between the university and the political system," he says. "It is critical that we don't becor.1e pawns of the government, the legislature, or business and industry. If we lose our autonomy, we've lost the ball game."

During the great expansion that took place after World War II, American colleges and universities sought to be all things to all people. In the new age of austerity, schools are being forced to rethink their missions. decide what they can do best and-in a form of academic triage-abandon certain fields of learning to others ....

It is fairly common these days for neighboring colleges to share talents and facilities, particularly in arcane specialties. For example, one-third of the graduate students in a cognitive-psychology class at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania are actually enrolled at the nearby University of Pittsburgh. Many experts believe that much more can be done to eliminate overlap. "Worcester

County in Massachusetts has at least five colleges," says Arnold Hiatt, chairman of the Stride Rite Corporation and a member of that state's Higher Education Coordinating Council. "If one has an outstanding physics department, it would make sense for the other fom to phase out physics and build their own strengths." .... But institutions need not always be neighbors to collaborate fruitfully.

In 1992 American University in Washington, D.C., signed an agreement with Japan's Ritseumeikan University to offer a joint master's degree in international relations from both schools. "Students would spend one year in Washington and one year in Kyoto," explains American's former president Joseph Duffey who wants to set up a similar program in business administration.

Most colleges, in the era of permanent retrenchment, will have to offer a narrower range of courses than in the past.

But this does not necessarily mean intellectual deprivation. John Silber, the acerbic and outspoken president of Boston University, complains that he has seen "an increasing number of too small classes and too many courses. We have about I SO courses that study the human mind. But all that we know about the human mind could be taught in 30. A course on the effect of Anna on Sigmund Freud is fine. But it's part of the waste that is commonplace at big research universities. Small colleges cannot afford that kind of narcissism."

So what is the alternative? One answer is offered by Adelphi University, on New York's Long Island, which was on the verge of bankruptcy when Peter Diamandopoulos was named president eight years ago. His strategy: Trim fat by linking Adelphi's professional schools, notably in business, social work, and nursing, with its undergraduate studies and by introducing an imaginative core curriculum that encompasses ethics as well as arts and sciences. One part of the curriculum deals with "the nature of modernity" and ranges from war and economic development to breakthroughs in technology.

For better or worse, many experts believe that the battle over what is com-

monly called multiculturalism (see "Campus Debate," SPAN, July 1992) is winding down. That is, there is an emerging consensus that every curriculum needs broadening to encompass the cultural experience of women and minorities-but not at the denigration of DWMs (Dead White Males). Robert Wood, who is Henry Luce professor of Democratic Institutions and the Social Order at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, argues for balance.

"In the past five years, we have generally had two counsels on curriculum, and they're both wrong. Allan Bloom and others basically say, 'Don't read anything after the Age of the Enlightenment' (see "Is Bloom Right?" SPAN, June 1988). Then we have our present multicultural movement saying every culture should be explored. We need some consensus on this. What we should do is concentrate on how to train competent Americans."

A

nd how should colleges do that?

Wood has a three-part program.

"We've got to teach economics to every student. It conveys a rigor and quantitative skill that all students should understand before they look at political or social institutions. We should require the study of communications, especially visual, and not just with some tired old journalist teaching students how the front page is put together. And third, we need to offer real science courses to the nonscience student. Most hard scientists tend to belittle nonmajors, assuming them to be cognitive1y inferior. The teachers keep on doing what they're trained to do, expecting tlte nonmajors to sink or swim."

Wood is also concerned, as are many other educators, about the problem of attracting-and keeping-minority students. According to the Congressional Budget Office, blacks and Hispanics were only half as likely as whites to have completed four or more years of college in 1990. Probably no school has given more thought to the problem than Occidental College of Los Angeles, where 44 percent of the 1991 first-year class was nonwhite.

President John B. Slaughter, who is

black, believes many nonwhites need a kind of social and cultural head start to prepare them for college life. He strongly supports a program begun by his predecessor that invites about SO "students of color" to spend five weeks of the summer on campus, prior to their enrollment.

There is some course work but also reassurance that they are not alone in a potentially threatening, predominantly white environment.. ..

Academia's code word for the future, in the view of some, is "accountability"both to the students it hopes to serve and the public that pays the bills, either by taxes, tuition, or gifts. In Hiatt's view, "too many higher-education institutions have been run like government, and that means they have been run badly." One inevitable consequence of imitating or emulating government has been bureaucratic bloat-a self-perpetuating nomenklatura of assistant deans, development officers, and other office-bound personnel.

"Harvard doesn't have a financial problem, it has a management problem," contends Boston University's Silber.

Some innovative schools ... have chosen to dismantle their bureaucracies to devote more resources to labs, libraries, and classrooms. "Higher education has to see itself as having an enhanced obligation to society and the community," says Arthur Hauptman, a Washington-based educational consultant. Ernest Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is even blunter.

"Universities and colleges," he warns, "will be either engaged or judged irrelevant." To measure by its noble past and present accomplishments---even amid fiscal agony-odds are strong that higher learning in America will find a way to compete and survive. Like Fortune magazine's annual list of the 500 top U.S. industrial corporations, the pecking order of academic excellence is bound to see eventual changes. But too much is at stake, in pride and passion, for the entire empire of academia to fall ignobly into mediocrity, somnolence, and sloth.

0 About the Author: John Elson is a frequent contributor to Time magazine.

The historic port city of Alexandria, Virginia, which has the largest collection of 18th- and 19th-century buildings in the United States, beckons thousands of tourists each year to savor its old-world charm and flavor.

Every Saturday morning since 1749, the people of Alexandria, Virginia, have gathered in their Market Square to do business, spread news, watch the militia drill, flirt a little, and generally provide a robust heartbeat for George Washington's hometown. Today, the pulse of the country's oldest continually operated city market is as strong as ever.

"Some Alexandrians feel if they don't come here on Saturday, they've lost it for the next week," says vendor Wendy Fike. "They buy their fish, flowers, fresh fruit, and vegetables .... " If Fike has anything to say about it, they will also buy earrings and scarves, for she is one of a number of merchants whose offerings are more fashionable than edible. It makes for a nice mixture of stands to browse through on a brilliant October morning, fortified by coffee and cinnamon rolls, a traditional alfresco breakfast here.

The contemporary bustle animating this well-landscaped plaza (about halfa city block, with an elegant fountain spurting in the middle) blurs for only a moment the antiquity drenching Alexandria's core. The historic port city on the Potomac River claims to have the largest collection of original 18th- and 19thcentury structures in the United States, a panorama of brick town houses, bow-windowed shops, and early warehouses distributed through an old town of about 90 blocks. New construction here emulates the original; a row of freshly built town houses at Cameron and Lee streets, for example, appears to date from the I 790s. So does the Morrison House, a handsome small hotel in the Federal style, although it's less than ten years old. Even the Holiday Inn (motel) looks as if King Street in Alexandria has remained the city's commerical center for the past 200 years.

George Washington might have slept there.

Though Washington spent his boyhood in Fredericksburg, Virginia, about 60 kilometers south, as a teenage assistant surveyor, he was present at Alexandria's inception, helping lay out the original plan of 1749, more than 40 years before he would select the site of Washington, just across the Potomac, for the U.S. capital. By the early 1750s, young George-a militia major not yet 21-was drilling troops in the square, and then marching off to fight the French. Soon after, he inherited Mount Vernon, just 13 kilometers down the Potomac, further cementing his permanent links with Alexandria.

Reminders of those early years in the city's history have endured almost miraculously. Across Fairfax Street from Market Square, the gambrel-roofed Ramsay House, the city's oldest structure, has stood since the founding year of 1749. According to restoration experts, it is even older than that. It's thought to haveoeen built 40 kilometers down the Potomac around 1724.

Scottish merchant William Ramsay brought the structure to Alexandria on a barge, and it was tugged up King Street by oxen. In subsequent years it would become a tavern, a brothel, even a cigar factory. And now? Alexandria's oldest house is the city's visitors center.

It is also the site "of appearances that cannot be explained," in the careful words of Diane Bechtol, a staffer of the convention and visitors bureau. In the Ramsay House, office chairs may levitate or surge and spin across rooms. Typewriters and printers have been known to turn themselves on and clatter merrily away. "That part isn't threatening, or ominous," Bechtol says. A bit more disturbing was the time an elderly female hand reached from the basement stairwell, clutching the doorframe. Because the bureau's bathrooms are in the base-

ment and the stairwell is steep, a staff member-thinking a guest might be having trouble climbing the stairs-walked over to help. But the stairwell was empty.

Alexandria's distant past, ghost-bestowing or not, has a way at least of seeming very close. Consider the Carlyle House, perhaps the grandest residence in town, built near the Ramsay House in 1752-53. The elegant house, owned by successful merchant John Carlyle and Sarah Fairfax, was, in 1755, the

Clock wise from top: The City Hall of Alexandria was constructed in 1752; cycles are still a popular mode of transportation today; an old residential neighborhood; Christ Church, built in English rural style between 1767 and 1773, contains George Washington's pew and lists Civil War General Robert E. Lee as aformer member.

obvious choice for a high-level meeting between General John Leadbeater on the day in 1859 when Lieutenant J.E.B. Edward Braddock, commander of British forces in North Stuart handed him the War Department order to suppress America, and five colonial governors. The gentlemen failed to abolitionist John Brown's insurrection at Harper's Ferry, West agree on how to finance a new campaign against the French, Virginia. The future general of the southern Confederate forces, and the meeting-held in the Carlyle House's parlor more than married to a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, had 20 years before the American Revolution-is often cited as one grown up in Alexandria; his boyhood home on Oronoco Street is of the first important cases of friction between Great Britain one of two Lee mansions in the city open to visitors. and the colonies.

Federal occupation throughout the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) It says something about Alexandria's concern for its heritage may have been hard on Alexandria's Southern loyalties, but it that no matter how low the fortunes of the owners of Carlyle preserved the city from bombardment by the Union armies.

House sank, the ornately paneled parlor was always preserved.

After World War I, a degree of fashionability slowly returned to some of the most appealing neighborhoods, such as the lower Today the entire mansion is restored to its original state, featuring authentic paint colors and period antiques. block of Prince Street, a vision from the 18th century with its On the other side of Market Square stands Gadsby's Tavern, famous "Captains' Row." The wife of Captain Harper, one of perhaps the greatest name in early American hotels. The first the street's original seafarers, is said to have borne 20 children, section was built in 1770 in the Georgian style; in 1792 a tall "and then died in self-defense." Here is the most photographed Federal wing was added. George Washington was a frequent part of town, a street still paved with the smooth tan ballast stones from sailing ships. Ancient legend claimed they were laid visitor. He and his wife, Martha, came up from Mount Vernon to attend "Birthnight Balls" held in his

by Hessian prisoners during the American Revolution, but no one honor, an annual institution that continues to this day in Gadsby's spareally knows. cious ballroom, with its high One block north, lower King Street musicians' gallery. Not long before is the same busy commercial center Washington died in 1799, he reviewed Alexandria's concernthat it was 200 years ago, although a company of local militia from the today's focus is on fine specialty and pride-for its heritage is tavern steps-his last military act in shops and restaurants. The most reflected even in the city's striking change in town is probably Alexandria, where he had begun his on the nearby waterfront. A tenmilitary career 45 years before. new structures that faithfully building naval torpedo factory from Gadsby's, described by an English emulate the original.

World War I, long a ponderous eyetraveler as "the best house of entertainment in America," is a museum sore, has been redesigned into lowtoday, with an activities program rise condominium units, office space, harking back to the inn's golden age. retail markets, a new food pavilion There may be a demonstration of the and-in the most original reincarnatechnique and etiquette of dueling, an appearance of such tion of all-The Torpedo Factory Art Center. smash 18th-century entertainers as dancing pigs or acrobats, or Visitors expecting to find just another flea market-like a visit by a colonial dentist. Visitors tour the restored rooms, collection of touristy "crafts" are pleasantly surprised at The marveling at the discomforts earlier travelers endured. "You Torpedo Factory's quality and scale. Some 160 juried artists did not pay for a room, you did not pay for a bed. You paid for work and display here; as a part of the agreement to occupy a space," the guide says. "You shared a bed with several others, stddio and gallery space, the painters, potters, lithographers, or slept on a pallet on the floor." and jewelers must agree to spend a certain amount of time Sensitive travelers sickened by such accommodations could talking to the public. That creates a rare opportunity for find relief half a block away at the Stabler-Leadbeater Apothesociable, informative interaction with a small army of first-class cary Shop. In a bow-fronted structure built by a silversmith in artists.

1775, a Quaker named Edward Stabler opened an apothecary The contemporary improvements seem to have settled in in 1792. The Washingtons, naturally, were patrons; the shop comfortably along the waterfront, as if welcomed by ancient displays an order from Martha for a quart of castor oil. In the neighbors such as tobacco warehouses as old as the United States 1850s the interior was modernized with Gothic Revival trim itself. A visitor is pleased but somehow not surprised by this over the original shelves, but nothing else was changed, includharmony in the cityscape. There is continuity here, a sense of ing the already-old stock of pharmaceutical bottles and equipappropriateness and good taste. It's as if Alexandria doesn't want ment. After 141 years of continuous operation, the store closed to do anything that might disappoint George Washington. 0 in 1933. Several years later, it opened as a museum, and thus it remains, astoundingly intact.

About the Author: James S. Wamsley is a freelance writer based in Robert E. Lee was in the pharmacy chatting with proprietor Richmond, Virginia. He often visits Alexandria.