September 1995

United Nations at 50 Winning Management Ideas The House that Junk Built Uncle Sam's Best Deal

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A Photographer's Love for the Western Ghats

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VOLUME XXXVI NUMBER 9 I hope that by the time you read this, the hostage situation in Kashmir will have been resolved, and peacefully so. The kidnapping of several innocent tourists, and the gruesome murder of one of them, have caused untold agony to their families and friends, evoked condemnation from around the world, and consumed the anxious attention of countless Indian government officials and security personnel as well as of diplomats from the hostages' countries.

The crisis has been a powerful reminder, as if one were. needed, that human rights are a global issue of concern to us all. Two human rights experts, former Indian attorney general Soli Sorabjee and Yale law professor Charles Norchi, write about the subject for us this month.

Sorabjee, in a review of the successes and fail ures of the United Nations over its 50-year history, says, "One of the UN's greatest achievements has been the remarkable body of human rights law which it has initiated and which has been adopted by its member states." He goes on to note, however, that despite the passing of several covenants and conventions, "Torture and repression are prevalent and discrimination is rampant."

Torture, killing, kidnapping, and repression are usually what come to mind in connection with human rights violations.

But Norchi points out that our post-Cold War era "is yielding new humanitarian crises" as well. One of these is environmental destruction, a subject we touch on in several artic les.

An idealistic young photographer, Ian Lockwood, is concerned about threats to the fragile ecosystem of the Western Ghats, an area where days as the son of American missionaries posted in South Asia. An admirer of the famed wilderness photographer Ansel Adams, Lockwood is building an Adams-like photographic record of the Ghats to spur further conservation efforts there.

Technology often has been

he spent

his

2

9

The Western Ghats-A

Fading Bliss

bylanLockwood

Human Rights in the Post-Cold War Era

by Charles H. Norchi

12 16

The United Nations at 50

18

TheHousethatJunkBuilt

22 28

The River Farm

31

Uncle Sam's Best Deal

36

Winning Ideas in Management

38

Focus On ...

40

On the Lighter Side

Soil and Satellites

byHankBeckerandDennisSenjt

byRobinNeilson

Myth and Shadow

4 1 IfU's

bySoliJ. Sorabjee

byArunBhanot byEdwinKiestel;Jr byBrianDumaine

Tuesday, This Must Be My Family

by Leslie Wayne

Breakdowns and Tie-ups

school

On the Fashion Trail

48

Noon

A Poem by Josephine Jacobsen

Front cover: Ferns and shola trees in the Western Ghats photographed Ian Lockwood.

by

age, but it also has the potential to do enormous good. An example is our story about how satellites can analyze soil and instruct farmers on the amount of fertilizer to apply, thus avoiding the soil damage and other harm that result when fertilizers are overused.

Publisher, E. Ashley Wills; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Associate Editors, Arun Bhanot, Prakash Chandra; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rashmi Goel, Ashok Kumar; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Contributing Designers, Gopi Gajwani, Suhas Nimbalkar; Staff Designer, 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.

We also have a small illustrated feature about a modern American home called the "Garbage House" because it was built with recycled materials.

Thirty years ago President Lyndon Johnson sent a message to Congress urging that more be done to control pollution, saying that "In

Photographs: Front cover, 2-7-Ian Lockwood. 8-Ansel Adams. 9-Avinash Pasricha. 16-Scott Bauer Agricultural Research. 21-Lautman Photography, Washington, D.C. 22-27-Kenneth E. White. 28-30-courtesy Michael Jansen; 29 topAvinash Pasricha. 3J-Robert Burke. 32-35-IU Instructional Support Services, Š Indiana University. 38-39,44, 45-Avinash Pasricha.

blamed

for environmental

dam-

the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene." The Garbage House shows that by applying imagination and ingenuity, people can accomplishjust the opposite.

-E.A.W.

Published b.l'lhe Uniled Slales Informalion Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 11000 I (phone: 3316841), on behalfoflhe American Embassy, New Delhi. Pril11edatThomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. Theapinions expressed in lhis magazine do nol necessarily reflecllhe views or policies oflhe U.S. Govemment. lhe Editor. Forpermission (Rs. 110 forstudenls);

No part o/lhis magazine may be reproduced

wrile to the Editor. Price a/magazine,

single copy, Rs ...12.

withoutlhe

one year subscription

prior permission

of

(12 issues) Rs. 120

THE WESTERN GHATS

A Fading Bliss Text and Photographs

by IAN LOCKWOOD

I crouch in a wet tea garden and watch as the elephants move dangerously closer to me. Leeches slither up my boots, but my hand is steady on the camera s shutter release. Dark clouds swirl around the towering Anai Mudi peak, portending heavy rains. Several laborers make taunting noises and the elephants become annoyed.

Suddenly, the leading female sounds a warning trumpet and charges. Scrambling to disengage my camerafrom its cumbersome tripod, I gawk as the two-ton pachyderm comes hurtling toward us. The tripod and a tangle of umbrellas are abandoned as my companion and I trip over each other in our haste to escape. Slipping and sliding.over a mossy path I rush toward a nearby slope. Heart beating wildly, I am relieved to see the defensive mother give up the chase.

Fate and good fortune had brought me here amongst the highest peaks of India's Western Ghats mountain chain. Though I was born in the United States, I was raised on a diet of eclectic cultural values on the Indian subcontinent. Since childhood it had been my dream to explore and photograph these little-known mountains. Home to the largest concentration of biodiversity in India, the Western Ghats have been isolated from human interference for most of history. Unfortunately, they are now under assault as demand for scarce land and resources explodes in the wake of India's current development boom. Conservation of the Ghats has become my passion, and I use photography for this-as an educational tool to bring to the notice of viewers This shola tree at Kodaikanal sold cemetely has survived the 150 years since the lake basin wasjirst settled by American missionaries in 1845. Sholaforests, endemic to the high altitude mountain ranges ofsouthern1ndia, are being increasingly threatened bycommercialforestry.

Left: Anai Mfldi in Kerala, at 2,695 meters, is India 5 highest peak south of the Himalayas. At its base is Eravikulam National Park, whose thick evergreen forests provide a havenfor tigers and other predators.

Opposite page, top: A view of the distant Palani Hills in Tamil Nadu from Eravikulam 5 undulating grasslands.

Center: Wild grasses cover Eravikulam 5 rolling hills. Most shola, such as this, are confined to the valley, where they are protected from high velocity winds.

Bottom: Thalayar Falls, commonly known as "Rat-Tail, "isa hikers' as well as a tourists'delighton the Ghat road leading up to Kodaikanal.

that, unless concerted efforts are mounted, this magnificent natural treasure will be lost foreverto man's own peril.

The Western Ghats first captivated me while I was attending boarding school, from 1978 to 1988, in the Palani Hills (an eastern spur of the Western Ghats in the state of Tamil Nadu). Kodaikanal International School, or Kodai as students called it, had a popular hiking program. My friends and I had an insatiable appetite for adventure and always looked forward to these excursions~and for more. If we weren't on a school hike, we were exploring on ourown, cruising down the steep Ghat roads on bicycles. In high school I was introduced to photography, and started taking my camera on our adventure tri ps.

My love for these mountains and interest in photography had deep roots. My father had studied at Kodai School for more than ten years-1948-59-and been captivated by the surrounding mountains. He had been born in Sri Lanka~then known as Ceylonto missionary teachers from Boston, Massachusetts. (My grandparents, in fact, had been married in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, in 1928.) Most of the students at Kodai in his day were the children of American missionaries working in this part of the world. He met my mother, the sisterofoneofhis hiking pals, while at school in Kodai. They got married in 1968 in Virginia, where my mother's parents, who had also worked as missionaries in Madhya Pradesh after World War II, had recently retired.

At that time, Dad was doing graduate work at Kansas State University while Mom was finishing her degree in physical therapy in Washington, D.C. But India fascinated them so much that, soon after I was born in 1970, they came back-to Mysore, where Dad completed research for his PhD dissertation at the Central Food Technological Research Institute with the help of a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development. However, after about two years we moved to Bangladesh, and for most of the past 23 years we have been living in Dhaka where my father has been working with several NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) to develop alternative energy sources. Nevertheless, the mountains of southern r ndia, despite their

have

lands. There is also much more pressure on hill stations by the fast emerging, multiplying middle class with its newfound wealth.

Until the 19th century much of the Western Ghats, with their high altitude plateaus and thickly forested slopes, were largely impenetrable and pristine. Several tribal groups did live in the hills, but they

Thus the carrying capacity of hill stations like Ooty, Mahabaleshwar, and Kodai is being stretched to the breaking point. The cumulative ecological impact of all these

distance from the delta of Bangladesh, dra wn us bac k every year.

*

*

*

had no adverse effect on the fragile ecological balance.

Then, in the early 1800s, the British surveyed many of the Ghats' higher reaches.

Finding the climate to their liking and reminiscent of England, they began developing hill stations.

In the years to come lower slopes were converted into tea and coffee plantations.

Hydroelectric dams were built to tap the monsoon's torrents and commercial forests were planted in place of indigenous vegetation.

Yet, despite all these glaring realities, the mountains still have areas which retain primal wilderness untouched by the long ann of "development."

It was these obscure areas and their tenuous state of existence that beckoned me.

In the 1950s when my parents were in school, commercial forestry was confined to the area adjacent to the township; the Palani Hills, for the most part, were undisturbed. Kodai itself was a sleepy village attracting mostly American missionaries and Indian honeymooners.

Life in the hills revolved around boating, picnics, hiking expeditions, and church.

However, as a result of hunting, a popular pastime, populations of animals like the Nilgiri tahr (see SPAN, July 1992) and gaur had touched dangerously low levels.

On returning to India in 1970, Dad was shocked to find old haunts unrecognizable and now occupied by long stretches of sterile eucalyptus trees. He would try to take our family hiking to places that still retained some semblance to the not-so-distant past. This became increasingly difficult.

The pace of conversion has increased in the past 40 years with aggressive, but sometime thoughtless, exotic tree-planting drives that have replaced the native grassLeft: A sho/a leelers onlhe edge of a precipilOliS cli/Jinlhe Pa/ani Hills.

activities on indigenous been disastrous.

One of my earliest

flora and fauna has

inspirations

was the

great American landscape photographer, Ansel Adams. His timeless black and white images, besides being studies in technical perfection, did true justice to nature's indescribable beauty. What is most important, his photographs were used effectively by citizen groups, like the Sierra Club, to campaign against the wanton destruction of the American West. Adams's work had awed Dad and he had visions of documenting the Palani Hills with a large-format camera.

When he got busier with other projects and I became interested in photography, he passed those dreams on to me.

Regrettably, landscape photography is an undependable career. So when I went to the College of Wooster in 1989 in the distant corn fields of Ohio, I opted for a standard BA degree in international relations. To pay for my photographic pursuits and other expenses I worked as a photographer for the college. It was a rewarding experience, but I absorbed enough to realize that commercial photography was too artistically and intellectually limiting for me.

Throughout the sojourn in the United States thoughts of tropical South Indian mountains haunted my winter-weary mind.

Free time was scarce, but when it came my way I buried my head in books about India and the Western Ghats.

As graduation loomed nearer I made long-range plans to study sustainable development in graduate school. At the same time, I made some short-range plans to pursue my photographic ambitions down in the misty mountains of southern India.

I returned to the subcontinent soon after graduating from Wooster in 1992. T knew little about wildlife, conservation dynamics, and the mountain ranges beyond the Palani Hills. By motorcycle, bus, truck, train, and foot I have since been visiting as

much of the Western Ghats as possible.

Meetings with wildlife researchers, forest officials, and estate managers have given me a greater understanding of the mountains and the endemic wildlife. Firsthand encounters with wildlife have proved to be quite educational-and made me a firstclass sprinter!

The novelty of simply seeing new areas and wildlife soon wore off. Looking for a more meaningful way to channel my energy, I started working on a series of articles and photographs that would highlight conservation themes in the Western Ghats. I had never taken ajournalism class, nor tried to get work published before. It was a brave and sometimes daunting world, but, taking the wise advice of mythologist Joseph Campbell, I set off to "follow my bliss."

The Western Ghats stretch 1,440 kilometers from Kanyakumari to a little north of Bombay. Thus far my work has focused on the southern high-altitude ranges. Lately I have been working in the lowerrain forests, and eventually [ hope to explore all the significant areas encompassing the chain. My photographs mostly depict empty places (a psychological consequence of living in an overcrowded city like Dhaka), but increasingly I am recording human interaction with the natural environment.

Mountain dreams, explorations, and photography still don't pay my bills, so I teach at the American International School in Dhaka to cover costs. I spend almost all of my spare time in the Western Ghats. The more I see of these enchanting mountains, the more I feel committed to the cause of their conservation.

Still a little shaken, I sit in a thatched shack sipping a cup of tea, reliving the elephant chase and other adventures I have had. Staring up toward Anai Mudi:S massive granite ramparts I am again reminded of how minuscule we human beings are in the face of Mother Nature. As a fledgling artist I try to convey nature:S infinity in my photographs, while as a young conservationist I attempt to spread awareness about nature:S treasures that we human beings are frittering away. As a restless adventurer I keep moving. following some murky thing called bliss.

0

Ansel Adams Ansel Adams, who died a little more than ten years ago, was perhaps America's greatest landscape photographer.

Born in 1902 in San Francisco, California, he took his first photographs in the Yosemite Valley when he was 14. But it was not until Adams was in his late twenties and about to become a concert pianist that he decided to make photography his profession. "I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes hear music," Adams once said, "not in the sentimental sense, but structurally."

Indeed, that's what his photographs are: Musical. They are reSO\1ant,highly structured, and perfect in technique. He would spend hours, even days, before taking a shot to capture the feeling a subject evoked in him.

All through his lifetime, his was a world of mountains and woodlands and the vast, timeless reach of the Westem landscape. A well-known American writer once said of him, "If a country as limitless as this can ever be said to have posed for its portrait, certainly the photographer behind the camera was Ansel Adams."

Adams's love for nature photography led him to become an ardent campaigner for wi Iderness preservation, although he claimed that advocacy of any kind was never among his intentions when he made his photographs.

Conservation to him was "a cause beyond politics," and he was "greatly pleased" to allow the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations to use his art in their promotional material, and with notable success. His images so compellingly brought forth the beauty and significance of wilderness that even the most environmentally skeptical found il hard nOl to become a convert 10 the cause of conservation. His 1938 book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. was among the major factors that led Presidenl Franklin D. Roosevelt to persuade Congress to turn the King's Canyon area of east-central California into a national park.

Adams's accomplishments include the publication of scores of books and the appearance of his work in hundreds of volumes; more than 600 photo exhibitions all over the world, including India; and America's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, the citation for which said "regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution."

But, perhaps the most eloquent tribute to this ardent nature lover were the naming of a mountain in the Yosemite National Park and the renaming of the 56,000-hectare San Joaquin and Minarets Wilderness in his name.

0

in the Post-Cold War Era verywhere on the planet, human beings make claims to a range of values that cumulatively amount to human dignity. But in too many places, human dignity is under assault. For too many of our fellow human beings, life is nasty, brutish, and brief. This, despite an evolving international human rights system, which in no small measure continues to alleviate human suffering.

Years ago, it had been assumed that what a government did to its own people was its own business. That changed after 1945, following the Holocaust and Nazi denials of basic human rights. Nations decided that the promotion of human rights ought to be a principal purpose of the new United Nations Organization.

Distinctive prescriptions and institutional arrangements for the invocation and the application of human rights norms were developed. These amount to a restraint on the use of a government's power. The basic proposition of the international law of human rights is that a government can no longer utilize any means against its own people even though it is acting against its own citizens and in its own territory.

In January 1947, the United ations Human Rights Commission held its first plenary session. The Commission comprised 18 nations and its chairperson was Eleanor Roosevelt. The task was to draft an international bill of human rights. When finally drafted a year later, the Universal

E

Charles H. Norchi was in India this past July in his capacity as executive director of the New York-based International Leaguefor Human Rights. The article here has been adapted from one of the talks he gave during visits with human rights activists and o/ganizations in Ahmedabad, Calcutta, LucknolV, and Ne\\' Delhi. Norchi recently left the League and /10\\' teaches political science and international security studies at Yale, with a joint research appointment to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In addition, he is cochairman of the International Center jar Humanitarian Reporting based in Geneva, Switzerland, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Declaration ofH um<ln Rights was presented to 55 member states of the United Nations and adopted. It was a historic achievement, and an important moment in the development of international human rights.

But now, in the post-Cold War era, our world community is facing some critical human rights challenges. The poet Arthur O'Shauhnessy wrote, "For each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth." There is a feeling in the scholarly and international policy community that we are on the verge ofa new age. That our world may be less euphonious than during the Cold War, that there are new fau It lines, and that conflicts among cultures will define our collective existence. Others believe that distinctions among nationsstates will increasingly fade in the coming millennium and we are entering an age of commona Iity.

In appraising the current state of human rights it is, of course, difficult to ignore the conditions that characterize our international environment, generally.

My Yale University colleague Paul Kennedy, a historian, asserts that "the forces that challenge and test our human condition-the forces of technology, demography, political disintegration, cultural animosities, ecological damage-are severe and in many respects increasing."

Indeed these are at the root of the challenges which our human family now faces in efforts to uphold human dignity.

national system still coming to terms with itself. Our post-Cold War order is charac-

21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts the right of everyone to participate in his or her government, and that

terized system lapsed is less than it

by disorder-and the international by a diffusion of power, and by coland disintegrating states. Our planet characterized by interdependence is by interdetermination.

Our world

the will of the people is the only basis for governmental authority, and that this will must be expressed through periodic and genuine elections. This is, of course, a matter of respect. For even if one's spiritual

is one of overwhelming volubility and immediacy-as segments of our societies function at hyperspeed.

This means that hu-

journey in this life and others is preordained-one's civil-political journey is not.

man rights abuses, thanks to the media, are conveyed about the planet. They are con-

being.

Whatever

the prognosis,

ours is an inter-

veyed to elites and to the masses.

ur post-Cold War international system is yielding new humanitarian crises, patterns of human rights violations on a massive scale, the denial of self-determination, environmental destruction, and, increasingly, compassion fatigue. This is a perplexing age-but as a famous American journalist once observed, "Anyone who isn't confused, doesn't understand the situation."

I will outline some of the human rights challenges of our post-Cold War age, and point to some positive developments.

The challenges

run deep. I would

like to

begin at what the social scientists call the micro level, but which I consider goes to the very condition of being human.

First, there is the challenge ojrespect. This is the beginning and the end of human rights.

The very first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is about "respect": "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed

with reason and

conscience

one another

and should act towards

in a

spirit of brotherhood."

This demand for respect is so intensely held that it became the foundation of contemporary human rights standards. Respect means ensuring the fulfillment of the full range of human values. It means every human being is owed respect, regardless of gender, age, race, creed, or the social status into which he or she is born.

Respect includes the opportunity to determine one's place and that of one's community in the civil-political order. Article

Second, there is the challenge oj wellThe international human rights community has worked to ensure wellbeing-understood as the right to life and security, in combating torture and slavery, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial executions. And these challenges will still be with us. But we now must reformulate the challenge of well-being to include poverty

protect human dignity in these situations of increasingly confined chaos?

The human rights system has just completed an important era of standard-setting.

Most agree that we are now facing the challenge of applying those standards. But what if there is sharp disagreement on the standards presumed for so many years to be universal? This is the challenge olunil'ersality. This challenge claims that there are regional and cultural particularities to human rights. That certain norms from what is known as the International Bill of Human Rights must be consonant with local standards. But the particularization of human rights can lead to the termination of prescriptions designed to ensure a modicum of dignity for everyone, regardless of culture, religion, age, or gender.

But in this challenge, I see hopejiil devel-

opments. This challenge

In a world of 5,500 million people, 1,500 million live in absolute poverty.

That a child dies of starvation is as much a denial of human rights as when an adult is tortured.

and a basic right to food, to health, and to shelter. In a world of5,500 million people, 1,500 million live in absolute poverty. That a child dies of starvation is' as much a denial of human rights as when an adult is tortured. Our notion of well-being in the human rights context must include, in the words ofthe Irish writer James Joyce, "outcasts from Ii fe's feast."

Our post-Cold

War international

system

is characterized by an increasing number of failed and failing states. And this is a third challenge for human rights. There are growing numbers of bordered territories having the external characteristics of "states," yet which have ceased to fulfill any criteria normally associated with a state.

How will the human

rights

system

ternational

community

is forcing to confront

the inand to

clarify its common interests.

Because of what Teilhard de Chardin called "the banal fact of the earth's roundness," this chalis driving us all toward lenge to universality commonality on the basis of values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More thah ever before, humankind is confronted with the sphericity of the human environment.

Humanity's civilizational

cleavages

are inter-thinking,

and becoming more so. And this is the womb from which an optimum public order of human dignity is emerging.

Authoritatively protected social processes increasingly maximize the shaping and sharing of all human values. At the level of human awareness there exists, in varying degrees, a planetary unification.

Regardless of differentiation in institutional practices by which values are pursued, and irrespective of individual expectations, at least the demands for the fulfillment of human rights appear to be commonly shared. The language of human rights, if not yet universal, is universalizing.1t is wedded to three human commonalities-impending mortality, the power of self-reflection, and dignity. And this is a

hopejul development.

Thejinal challenge on my list has to do with the distribution of power in our international system. This is a challenge at the

macro level, but its repercussions are farreaching. Our international system is increasingly polycentric. We are undergoing one of the deepest rearrangements of global power since the birth of industrial civilization. There are territorial centers of power and there are new, non-territorial centers of power, based on technology, computation, and high finance. We must ask ourselves, in this rearrangement of power, who will be included and who will be left out? We will all increasingly face the challenge of inclusion.

The greatest innovation in the international human rights system has been participants other than states, and this is a hopeful development. If the behavior of states was to be appraised in the international milieu, it was inevitable that non-state actors would emerge. These were the nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. At the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna (Austria) in 1993, governments and a plethora ofNGOs reasserted a commitment to the goals embodied in the International Bill of Human Rights. But the most significant development of that world conference was the participation of thousands of new NGOs from the developing world. These new NGOs represented human rights advocates all throughout the world, working on the front lines of the struggle for human dignity. They are the future of the human rights movement and we in the North and the West must ensure that our brothers and sisters in the South and the East have the means to participate fully in the system.

I

addition n to my university responsibilities I serve as executive director of the oldest continually functioning human rights nongovernmental organization, the International League for Human Rights. The International League for Human Rights utilizes its full consultative status at the United Nations in working to prevent torture, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention, religious intolerance, and disappearances-while defending freedom of expression, of conscience, of thought, and the rights of women and children. One of our primary objectives is to help NGOs from the developing world gain access to

the international human rights system. We at the International League know that our future efficacy as human rights advocates will depend on collaboration with developing world advocates.

Non-state participants (NGOs, advocates, and scholars) in the international human rights system are constantly appraising and clarifying the common interests of our ever-changing community. While necessarily drawing upon history, they have forced us all to look to new constitutive and institutional arrangements to apply those standards to which we are all committed. A result of this appraising and promoting is the recently

In the final analysis, human rights is really about human dignitya notion familiar to India's civilization centuries before the West was even born.

created United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. This is a hopeful development for human dignity in our post-Cold War international system.

Perhaps the most hopeful trend is the growing numbers of human rights monitors. The International League for Human Rights provides technical assistance in the field to those monitoring and reporting human rights abuses. This take? a special kind of courage. The late Robert F. Kennedy observed at Capetown, South Africa, in 1963: "It is from numberless that human

history

acts of courage is shaped.

stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve others,

or strikes

out against

injustice,

out a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing from

a million

daring, sweep

those down

different ripples

centers walls

the lot of he sends each other

of energy

build a current

the mightiest

and belief

Each time a man

which

and can

of oppression

and resistance."

That human rights monitors and advocates have the courage to continue their

work at great personal risk, is most hopeful for all of us.

But with our human rights standards, advocates, challenges, and a few hopeful trends, where does this leave human rights-and our species-at the cusp of the 21 st century? We are left with a speci fication of human dignity that is partial at best, unfulfilled at most, partially shared at least, and better than any alternative at worse.

The writer Thomas Mann observed that " ...man lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries." We have to clarify our goals, examine those trends relentlessly driving us to the future. We must ask ourselves ifwe like that future. Ifnot, we must consider alternatives and identify those factors that will get us to a preferred future.

We are entering a phase of the psychosocial evolution of our species in which human rights must be viewed as being at stake in every interaction and decision. That must be made clear. It must be made clear to national elites by everyone of us concerned for human dignity. Not long ago, the Secretary-General ofthe United Nations issued an Agenda for Peace. It underscored the importance of peacekeeping to the international community, along with a plan for peacekeeping operations in the future.

What we need now, is an Agenda for Dignity. We need a plan born of the claims and demands of everyone of us in our mutual common interests that will address the challenges I have outlined, while serving as a human rights road map in our still uncertain post-Cold War international system.

In the final analysis, human rights is really about human dignity-a notion familiar to India's civilization centuries before the West was even born. And similarly human dignity is central to the Islamic civilization where I have just come fromAfghanistan and Pakistan. As I travel this great land-this region so rich in diversity and human experience-I see the world's largest democracy as a great hope for human dignity in Asia with the capacity to reaffirm for the family of nations, "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity of men and of women ..." in the words of the United Nations Charter.

0

An eminent jurist and former attorney general of India reviews the world organization's successes and failures. He reiterates the need for the international body to strengthen its resolve in promoting global cooperation and peace.

The united Nations at 50

If longevi ty and survi val are cri teria of success, the United Nations Organization has amply fulfilled them. In contrast to the League of Nations, which fizzled out after 20 years, the United Nations celebrated its 50th birthday on June 26. The Charter of the United Nations was signed on that day in 1945 and entered into force four months later on October 24, designated as United Nations Day. It was the outcome of the historic conference in San Francisco, fl ip-

to create a world order in which fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person were respected.

Has the UN realized these noble ideals reflected in the preamble to the Charter?

Before attempting a general evaluation it must be remembered that the United Nations is a world organization and not a world government.

It consists of member

pantly described as "the most important human gathering since the Last Supper."

At the end of World War II there was a deep longing for peace amongst the peoples of the world, determination on the part of states to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," and a firm commitment

reflect wide and fundamental differences.

The very nature of its structure and organization make entanglement in power politics unavoidable.

Credit is due to the UN for its success in several areas. In Cambodia, thanks to UN operations, a war-torn nation has found its

states whose backgrounds and outlooks and geopolitical interests and compulsions

way back to nornlalcy, and the elections are a proud acheld under UN supervision complishment.

Last year millions of pre viously disenfranchised South Africans cast their votes for freedom and democracy underthc vigilance of UN observers.

Another field in which the world body has performed creditably is in its battle against disease and its campaign for child survival.

Every year UNICEF oral vaccines are believed to save the lives of three million children. The World Food Program has fed 57 million hungry people. The World Health Organization has eliminated smallpox from the face of the Earth, and is making great strides in its campaign to eliminate polio by the year 2000. It is also making tremendous efforts in combating the scourge of AIDS. The UN's Commission on Sustainable Development is also doing remarkable work to ensure that all nations meet their commitments under the Global Climate Convention.

In these areas the United Nations and its various agencies have greatly benefited vast sections of humanity.

Security Councilor whether it was the balance of terror generated by the possession and likely use of nuclear weapons.

No doubt, some wars were averted because of UN initiatives.

The painful reality, however, is that wars, some international and several internal, have taken place and produced casualties estimated to have exceeded those of World War II. The U

's performance

in Somalia

was

spasmodic.

Its utter failure in maintaining even some semblance of peace in Bosnia and affording protection to UN safe havens is a serious and indel ible blot on its image and has gravely undermined its credibility.

To the victims of the Bosnian confl ict, be they Muslims, Serbs, or Croats, the UN has become a cruel joke, a dirty word. Its pathetic impotence to counter massive and hOITendous violations of basic human rights has deeply shaken the faith of the international community in the world organization.

Experience has shown that except in the case of Kuwait, the UN has been unable to take effective and complete measures to enforce peace. Faced with this inability, the organization has in practice employed other methods to maintain international peace and security. Perhaps the most important of these has come to be known as peacekeeping. By definition peacekeeping measures are not enforcement measures.

In fact, the concept of "peacekeeping" is not found in the UN Charter.

What has been the UN's role in peacekeeping? [t is generally believed that the UN peacekeeping has played a highly constructive role in maintaining international peace and security, evidenced dramatically by the award in 1988 of the Nobel Peace Prize to UN peacekeeping forces. It is difficult to subscribe to this assessment especially after its failure in Bosnia Herzegovina, Somalia,

The principal purpose for setting up the of peace.

United Nations was maintenance Unfortunately, the record on this front has been discouraging.

True, a third world war has not broken out in the past five decades.

However it is a moot point whether that was on account of the efforts of the U and its

and Rwanda.

Besides, certain problems have dogged the UN peacekeepers, one of them being the fundamental disagreement over the allocation of authority under the Charter for peacekeeping among the Security Council, the General Assembly, and the Secretariat, represented by the Secretary-General.

Delegatesji-om 50 nations gather in San Francisco on June 26. 1945.10 sign the UniTed Nations Charter

Another factor that has hampered keeping operations is the absence clear

and coherent

policy.

Any

peaceof any proposed

UN peacekeeping miSSion should have clear objectives, identify and ensure who will participate in the mission, and present a realistic assessment of what it will cost and who will be asked to pay for it. The delays by members of the United Nations to pay their dues are notorious. A Ford Foundation panel suggested that governments charge peacekeeping costs to national military budgets and authorize the United Nations to charge interest on arrears. It is unlikely that this proposal will be accepted by member states, and thus one of the main difficulties experienced in peacekeeping operations will continue. The reality is that demands made upon the United Nations are not being matched by the resources to do the job. As rightly pointed out by President Bill Clinton: "We have too often asked our peacekeepers to work miracles while denying them the military and political support required and the modern command-andcontrol systems they need to do their job as safely and effectively as possible."

Humanitarian intervention by the United Nations in the case of grave human rights abuses in a particular country has been the subject of controversy. Article 2(7) of the Char-ter excludes involvement by the UN in matters that "are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of states." However, the current thinking rightly is that gross and persistent violations of human rights constitute threat to international peace and are therefore a matter of international concern. The Charter confers "primary responsibility" for maintaining international peace and security to the Security Council. Under Article 39 of Chapter VII of the Charter, it is the Security Council that determines the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, and decides whether inter alia forcible intervention is necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Any such decision of the Council is binding upon member states under Articles 25 and 48 of the Charter.

The prerequisites of breach of the peace, and in particular threat to the peace, can be variously interpreted. After North Korean troops attacked South Korea on June 25, 1950, the Security Council determined a breach of the peace in Resolution 82 of June 25, 1950. That assessment could not

be seriously disputed. However, a resolution put to a vote on April 7, 1987, according to which it was to be determined that South Africa's continued illegal occupation of Namibia represented a "breach" of the peace, was not acceptable to the United Kingdom and the United States, and they vetoed this resolution.

Again, there can be widely differing perceptions about what constitutes "threat to the peace." The most far-reachin'g and expansive use of the notion of threat to the peace was reflected in Resolution 748 of March 31, 1992, concerning Libya. After the United States and the United Kingdom had requested that two Libyans should be handed over to them because they, allegedly acting as agents for Libya, were suspected of planting a bomb on Pan American flight 103 which was destroyed over Scotland (Lockerbie), the Security Council decided that Libya should meet these requests.

When Libya refused to comply, the Council formally determined a threat to the peace and applied sanctions under Article 41 (in Resolution 748 of 1992). Not many will agree with this determination.

Interpretation of Charter provisions by majority votes based on political considerations has understandably given rise to some concern that the "integrity" of the Charter may be impaired by political tendencies.

This is inevitable because the Security Council is essentially a political body and its decisions have largely been swayed by partisan political considerations in several cases. Moreover the five permanent members of the Council-the United States, Great Britain, Russia, China, and Franceare able through the veto power to prevent any enforcement action of which they disapprove. This gives dominance to the five permanent members.

The Security Council does not reflect the aims and wishes of peoples inhabiting vast parts of our planet. One reform that is needed is to expand the Security Council and make room for adequate representation of nations of other continents. In light of the experience of the misuse of the veto provision, especially during the period of the Cold War, it is worth considering whether the same needs to be replaced or modified by another one which provides for effective

decisions by three-fourths of the members of the Security Councilor some such analogous mechanism. This reform whose aim is to depoJiticize and democratize the Security Council is necessary because with the end of the Cold War, the opportunities open to the Security Council under Article 39 have greatly increased and its dominance at present by one superpower, the United States, is patent. Political ground realities, however, do not inspire optimism forthis reform.

An imminent reform required in view of past experience is that there should be precise yet flexible criteria for determining whether there is a real breach of the peace or a real threat to the peace that warrants forcible intervention under Chapter VII of the Charter. It is most essential that the determination whether such criteria are attracted in a given situation should be entrusted to a nonpolitical body. In view of the speed and urgency of the action required, the International Court of Justice may not be appropriate. Instead there should be a standing judicial committee of the Security Council.

It may consist of statesmen, judges, jurists, and military personnel whose integrity and independence are beyond question and who hail from different regions. The judicial committee, after consulting the concerned states and assessing the situation, can make the requisite determination, which is a prerequisite for UN intervention. This mechanism will ensure greater objectivity and minimize, ifnot eliminate, partisan considerations from vitiating the decision-making process. This proposal will probably be greeted with cynical skepticism and considered utopian. But remember the words of Oscar Wilde: "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at....Progress is the realization of Utopias."

Humanitarian intervention, however, should be a last resort after exhausting an entire range of international initiatives, especially preventive, or preemptive, diplomacy. There is need to improve early warning procedures and greater emphasis must be placed on subsidiarity, endeavoring to promote local or regional solutions to human rights crises. It is necessary to associate NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) with established credentials in the process.

A UN peacekeeper with relief supplies in strife-torn former Yugoslavia.

If humanitarian intervention becomes necessary to redress situations the creation of an adequate and effective rapid deployment force under the auspices of the United Nations is essential. It would be in a position to respond immediately and thus head off or reduce the massive violence in situations like Rwanda, or some comparable human rights disaster in Burundi, Somalia, Bosnia, or elsewhere. What should be the composition of this force? Ideally it should have a significant representation of the region concerned and the middle powers, say Canada, rather than the great powers whose involvement often creates suspicion. Who shall bear the cost if the great powers are kept out?

After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune. However, these difficulties should not deter the creation of the rapid deployment force without which intervention will not have teeth.

All said and done, one of the UN's greatest achievements has been the remarkable body of human rights law (see page 9) which it has initiated and which has been adopted by its member states. The world today has its International Bill of Rights in two covenants, namely the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The ICCPR and ICESCR have been ratified by 129 and 131 states, re-

spectively, as of January I, 1995. The Declaration under Article 41, which permits interstate complaints, and the Optional Protocol, which enables individuals to make complaints against their governments, have met with less success. As of January I, 1995, only 44 states had filed declarations under Article 41 and 79 states had ratified the Optional Protocol.

The ICCPR creates a special body of 18 independent experts, the Human Rights Committee, to oversee its implementation.

It has issued a number of interpretative "general comments" on various provisions of the Covenant and has appreciably contributed to the development of human rights jurisprudence.

Other significant human rights instruments enacted are the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965); Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979); Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984); and Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). The Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities adopted on December 18, 1992, is a landmark in the protection of minorities.

True, with the passing ofthese covenants and conventions, human rights violations have not ceased. Torture and repression are prevalent and discrimination is rampant.

But as the late Paul Sieghart, a British hu-

man rights activist, rightly reminded us: "It would of course be naive to expect that international human rights law will miraculously abolish the oppression and exploitation of man by his fellows. But by making at least some of these visibly illegitimate, it can help to diminish their intensity and their extent."

The heart of the matter, highlighted by President Clinton, is that the United Nations is a reflection of the world it represents. Therefore, it will remain far from perfect. It will not be able to solve all problems.

It is a human institution manned and worked by human beings who cannot claim perfection. And as long as there are people on the face of the Earth, imperfection and evil will be a part of human nature.

As we look back over the past 50 years it cannot be said the UN's record has been one of dazzling success. There have been several gaps and shortcomings. But one thing is certain. In the present world order the United Nations is indispensable. Indeed, if there were no United Nations Organization we would need to create or reinvent one.

The position was aptly and eloquently summed up by the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright: "Let us heed the instruction of our own lives. If Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel could envision from jail the freedom not only of themselves but of their peoples, and if Aung San Suu Kyi can, as we speak, hold firm to the conviction that lies must inevitably give way to truth, and if Anne Frank, a child surrounded by evil, could believe, nonetheless, in the fundamental decency of human beings, then we, too, can believe in the dream begun here 50 years ago; we, too, can believe in ourselves."

Let us not stop dreaming. Let us continue to believe in the noble ideals of the United Nations and resolve to achieve them by greater effort inspired by goodwill toward all.

0 About the Author: Soli J. Sorabjee has been actively associated with several legal and human rights organizations. He is president of the United Lav.yers Association, vice chairman of Article 19 (Organization for Promoting Freedom of Expression), and member of the Advisory Commission of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.

TI

he Global Positioning System (GPS), a fleet of satellites developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, has proven its versatility several times over. Originally deployed for maritime rescue operations, the GPS was used to help guide coalition forces during the Gul fWar in 1991. The technology has since been adapted for use by surveyors, geologists, and even fishermen, for whom it pinpoints the best oceanic fishing areas.

Now the GPS has stirred up a flurry of interest among agricultural researchers. At the Soil Tilth Laboratory of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Ames, Iowa, agricultural engineer Tom Colvin is busily perfecting a GPS-Iinked system called JANUS (Joint Agricultural Navigation Using Satellites) to take the guesswork out offertilizing fields. His aim: Cut costs and reduce harm to the environment through a more rational application offertilizer.

"JANUS uses what we know about the field's past to guide us in its future management," Colvin says. "We use a dossierof data collected on crop yields and soil conditions to map each part of a farm field. Then GPS accurately pinpoints where the tractor or combine is tracking."

Such precision can give farmers on-the-spot data so they can quickly decide on how much animal waste, chemicals, and seed to apply and just where to use them. Farmers have known for a long time that over large acreages the soil can vary greatly. While one area can produce up to 180 bushels of com, another will yield just 60. Yet farmers generally apply chemicals uniformly, wasting money and causing residues to build up and contaminate watersupplies.

Since 1989, ARS researchers at the Ames lab have accurately measured the yields of soybeans, com, oats, and alfalfa on a 64hectare area selected forthis study. Data were collected on soil fertility, moisture, temperature, tilth, organic matter, and other variables.

Crop yields were measured with combines every 12 meters.

The data are stored in a computer database called Geographical Information System, or GIS, maintained at the Ames lab. The GIS is used to combine and integrate information on past yields, current soil fertility, and current and past infestations of weeds and pests, as well as other data. Based on data collected from each sector, JANUS will help farmers make microsite decisions regarding all field applications, sector by sector.

How JANUS works is simple. Two satellite radio receiversone tractor-mounted and the other at a fixed spot outside the field-pick up signals generated at regular intervals by Earthorbiting transmitters. The signals enable a computer on board the tractor to pinpoint the longitude and latitude of the tractor's position on the field to within about a three- to 4.5-meter accuracy.

The data are automatically correlated with other information from the computer on the sector's soil history. ) "Some state-of-the-art tractors already have the electronics capability of monitoring just what the tractor is doing-like keeping track of slippages so farmers know whether they're wasting fuel," Colvin says. "Some farmers already use two-way radios, so very little is needed for a complete system except a satellite receiver and a computer." He adds that the lab's system "has worked well on several different vehicles, including a pickup truck and a four-wheel-drive tractor."

Colvin also envisions using JANUS to guide farmers in making other important decisions like planting, scouting for pests, and harvesting crops. "Eventually, JANUS should take much of the guesswork, except for weather variables, out of farming," he says. "With so much information available on each part of the farm, farmers will be pretty darn sure that any decision concerning their fields is the best possible."

Using global positioning satellites and a tractor-mounted salinity sensing unit, technician Robert LeMert (on tractor) and statistician Scott Lesch prepare a computerized salinity map of a field.

The JANUS technology may also be a boon for environmental researchers, he says. Two areas on adjacent farms in central Iowa are currently being studied to compare conventional with alternative or sustainable farming practices.

"We'll be able to pinpoint how the two management systems affect the ecosystem of each area by being able to easily return to a specific site," Colvin says. "The greatest benefits from JANUS will be reaped by farmers who practice sustainable agriculture and desperately need this information. It will allow them to use less chemicals, disturb the soil less, and better protect groundwater while getting the greatest yields possible."

One specific problem that seems tailor-made for GPS investigation is that of soil salinity. The widespread degradation of some of Earth's most productive agricultural lands can be curbed if salt buildup is slowed or halted. "If we can locate areas where excessive salinity is developing, we can undertake practices that will control it in most cases," says James D. Rhoades, director of the ARS's Salinity Laboratory in Riverside, California.

Salts accumulate in soil as the result of irrigation, because all waters contain some dissolved salts. When crops take up watt;r, they leave salts such as sodium, calcium chloride, and sulfate behind in the soil. After a while, soil salts reduce crop yields.

Salinity is often hard to spot. Yields from crops like corn and alfalfa can drop by 25 percent before plants begin to show any visible symptoms, by which time the cost of reclaiming the soil may exceed the land's value.

"To control this vast problem, we first need to obtain accurate, detailed data from large areas," says Rhoades. "Then we can diagnose, manage, and monitor salinity conditions."

Two recently developed mobile systems, coupled to the GPS, can rapidly pinpoint and measure soil salinity. Computers then process the data and produce maps. "The new mobile instruments should drastically increase the accuracy and speed of salinity mapping while simultaneously cutting the cost," Rhoades says. "Using conventional sampling and analyses, time and laborto collect these samples has been substantial-at least ten minutes per site. A typical soil sample costs $25 to analyze in a laboratory, and it takes weeks for results to come back. And hundreds may be needed for each 256-hectare field. Our devices should be able to measure a field this size in two hours at a fraction ofthe cost."

Rhoades developed these instrumental techniques and with help from ARS engineer Lyle M. Carter adapted them to mobile systems. One instrument is a tractor-mounted, four-electrode sensor system that measures and logs soil" electrical current from one probe through the soil to another probe. A meter indicates how much resistance the current encounters. The less the resistance, the greater the salt content. Computer techniques then calculate salinity and produce maps and plot cross-section profiles of the field.

The four probes are mounted on a five-meter-long, hydraulically controlled tool bar attached to the three-point hitch of a small farm tractor. As the driver steers the tractor across the field, the probes

are dragged ten to 15 centimeters deep through the soil. Readings are made automatically every second as the tractor moves at speeds of five to ten kilometers per hour.

The other instrument is an electromagnetic induction salinity sensor mounted on a spot-spray vehicle that resembles a small, high-clearance tractor. With this remote device, a generator produces an electromagnetic field that penetrates the soil.

This invisible electromagnetic field causes an electric current flow within the soil that is proportional to the soil's salinity. In turn, this creates a secondary electromagnetic field that rises above the ground where it is measured and converted to units of soil electrical conductivity and, after computer processing, to a measure of soil salinity.

The electromagnetic sensor is mounted on a 2.5-meter-Iong boom that is attached to the vehicle's front. Hydraulic controls raise and lower the boom to different heights above the ground.

Other controls rotate the electromagnetic coils from vertical to horizontal positions. These changes in configuration are made to gather information on salinity within different depths of the soil.

Both measuring systems also contain an antenna, receiver, data logger, and power supply to collect satellite signals that can be decoded to provide location information.

"This will not only help us to map salinity but allow us to acquire information on salinity concentrations at many depths," says Rhoades. Such data help reveal the extent ofleaching (amount ofirrigation water that passes below plant roots), adequacy of drainage, and cause of salinity in the region. Then, he says, "we can recommend more appropriate changes in irrigation and drainage practices.

"In one preliminary experiment, we were able to determine how effectively the buried drainage tiles were keeping salinity under control. It was dramatic how accurately our readings correlated with tile location."

"The mobilized sensing systems also have potential for coping with salinity," says Carter. "Ifsuch computerized sensors and controls were installed on farm equipment, they could interpret data being collected and alter planting and fertilization rates while the equipment is passing through fields."

Dennis L. Corwin, a soil scientist at the Riverside laboratory, says, "It should be possible to get detailed maps of salt loading from the different regions of large irrigated areas. We would get such map.s by incorporating the intensive information on soil salinity, along with other data, including soil type, water table depth, soil permeability, leaching fraction, and groundwater salinity, into a commercially available geographical information system and coupling it with a computer model we developed. The model, called TETrans, for Trace Element Transport, can simulate salt movement in soils by using these location-related databases."

Rhoades hopes new equipment, based on these two prototypes, will become commercially available so it can be used by consultants, government officials, scientists, and individual farmers. Because it is based on satellites positioned around the world, the mobile equipment can be used to study any irrigated region on Earth.

0 About the Authors: Hank Becker and Dennis Senft are staff writers for Agricultural Research.

THE HOU5E THAT JUN~ BUILT qy;

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It's elegant, handsome, and spacious. It would do proud

The Garbage House construction crew takes recycling to new heights as a backyard solar collector (j) doubles as a swing setforchildren; polyethylene bags are loaded into a hopper (lJ to make sidewalkpaving blocks; old copper plumbing (1J becomes new gutters and downspouts; wastepaper @ is transmuted into mulchfor the yard; newspapers W emerge as wall insulation; auto parts scrap ÂŽ is reincarnated as steelframing; discarded computer housings @ take on a new identity as resin-compound shinglesfor the roof; and, last but not least, all the construction waste ÂŽ is collected in the attic in three dumpsters for-you guessed it-recycling.

Petals unfold, to reveal a prayer And a devotional melody strikes up ... in sheer marble.

The Baha'i House of Worship in New Delhi is said to be the finest tribute ever paid by the construction industry to the glory of a faith. It is yet another historic achievement

by L&1's construction engineers.

For over half a century. L&1's Construction Group has played host to history. Take some of the landmarks of our times. The Nehru Stadium in Madras. the Stock Exchange tower in Bombay.

Or the country' s highest viaduct being built for the Konkan Railway.

All of them carry ECCs insignia of excellence.

Overseas. the ECC imprint is visible at the Abu Dhabi international airport terminal complex. two hotels in Uzbekistan. five bridges in Malaysia ..

Of course. chances are you won t see L&1's Construction engineer at the landmarks he has helped to create. Already. he has moved ahead - further down a timeless road.

Tomorrow, a new project.

A new landmark.

any upscale residential neighborhood.

The two-story house, with 335 square meters of living space, has a finished basement, four bedrooms, two baths, two powder rooms, and a two-car garage. It boasts such modern-day trappings as track lighting and a whirlpool in the master bath. It looks like thousands of other colonial-style houses that dot the suburban American landscape. But this dream house is different from all the others.

This house, located in Bowie, Maryland, is built from recyc1edjunk-all kinds of it. The house is framed with steel, most of it reclaimed from discarded cars and dismantled bridges.

The clapboard siding is made of sawmill wastes and wood chips. Even a layer of insulation beneath the siding is 20 percent polystyrene packaging. The wallboard is about 70 percent gypsum and 30 percent waste paper. Ceiling tiles contain recycled newsprint. .

There's more. The roof ventilation system, which saves energy by releasing hot attic air in summer and prevents rot-causing moisture buildup, is improvised from plastic soda bottles.

The roofing tile is made from recycled computer housings.

People refer to it as the Garbage House, but its formal name is the Resource Conservation Research House. The Research Center of the National Association of Home Builders

(NAHB) conceived and built it. "One inspired riff on the theme of recycling and energy conservation," is how writer Richard Wolkomir described it in a recent issue of Smithsonian magazine.

The Research Center's use of energy conservation technology is as innovative as its use of junk. The double-paned windows are state-of-the-art energy efficient. So is the heat pump, which draws warmth from the earth via copper pipes buried in the lawn.

Solar panels heat 80 percent of the house's water.

TlJe dwelling is a prototype for the future, according to the NAHB, which, in addition to financing research and development in the construction industry, lobbies on behalf of its more than 150,000 members and conducts public affairs activities to increase public understanding of housing and the economy.

Some of the environment-friendly products used in the Garbage House are available on the U.S. market, while others are still in the prototype stage.

As forests dwindle and the price of lumber and energy skyrockets, the cry to protect the environment will become louder, and industry will have to find ways to spew forth new products and processes from the waste materials. To quote Wolkomir again: "No doubt about it-build your life on garbage and we'll all be better 0 ff."

0

Text by ROBIN Photographs

NEILSON

by KENNETH

E. WHITE

The River Farm, located in the scenic Shenandoah River Valley about 175 kilometers from Washington, D.C., is a good deal more than a sheep farm.

W

hen owner Priscilla BlosserRainey moved from Michigan back to Virginia 20 years ago, she knew she wanted to live on the farm that she and her first husband had bought years earlier. The setting, in the Appalachian foothills next to the Shenandoah River, was idyllic, and the location, near where her ancestors had settled and she had been born and raised, gave her roots. But how she would generate income to meet expenses was sti II a problem.

"I tried to figure out what somebody would want that I could create," she remembers. "I tried to see the opportunity of what to do with my life and my land." A skilled hand spinner, she decided to use her talent to teach workshops on her farm. Hand spinning, once a necessary skill for most farm women, had faded out with the mass production offibers.

The classes proved to be popular, which Priscilla credits to people's need to do something with their hands. "The students might not even realize it," she says, "but they feel a disassociation with the earth, with what they used to take for granted."

Today, hand spinning instruction is just one of many services she and her second husband, Jerry Rainey, offer as owners of the River Farm. They raise sheep, of course, but because they want to keep their operation small scale, not enough sheep to earn a living. Like many American farmers with land close to urban areas, they have started various sideline businesses to attract city folk with a yearning for country life. Their original hand spinning business has developed

Top: Priscilla Blosser-Rainey and Jerry Rainey clothe their sheep so their wool remains clean. The couple's farm produces some of the finest wool in the Shenandoah Valley, which itself boasts of having wool with the best loft and least shrinkage in the United States.

Above: Priscilla spins wool during an afternoon break from other duties.

into a fiber center that includes an outlet for spinning and weaving supplies, such as spinning wheels, looms, wool, hand-spun yarn, factory-spun yarn, and related books; workshops; lodging; a traveling sales booth; breeding stock; and sheep-management consultation.

Catalogs, which are printed three times a year, advertise the farm's services. They bring in 85 percent of the farm's business while the sales booth, which Priscilla occasionally takes to craft festivals, accounts for a portion of the rest. "Catalogs are expensive to print, but they are our lifeline," says Priscilla, who oversees the farm's general operation and organizes the catalogs. A list of customers and their purchases, which is kept on a computer, serves as a mailing list and a record of activities.

Practical information, like descriptions of the different services and products, a price list, a toll-free phone number, and a mailorder form, are balanced in the catalogs with details about the history of the farm and helpful tips for weavers and hand spinners. Local artists' renderings of the farm, its products, and staff make the 24-pag~ book inviting.

Priscilla and employees Beverly Mongold and Maretta Crider handle paperwork and shipping. "We ship orders immediately because we've found that customers want everything in a hurry," says Priscilla. The largest sales come from spinning wheels and looms, then fibers, particularly wool. A room in the Rainey house displays items for customers who come to the farm, and an old buggy shed, which students and customers labeled the "Spinner's Candy Store," holds barrels of wool for hand spinners.

The farm offers three-, four-, and fiveday weekend workshops for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students. One workshop is held each weekend, with usually Priscilla or Maretta Crider, a local weaver, instructing. A brick building, which dates to the l800s, serves as the school. The first floor, previously used both as a washroom and smokehouse, now functions as a space for carding, washing, and dyeing wool; the second floor, at one time quarters for the farm workhands, provides a bright, sunny classroom for spinningand weaving.

1. The Raineys use one process to shear, skirt, bag, weigh, and label the wool.

2. While Gerald Strawderman shears the sheep, another employee (barely visiblp behind him in photo) gathers wool to be sent to the mill.

3. Priscilla and assistant Beverly Mongold remove inferior and soiled wool from the fleece.

4. Jerry keeps record of his business on a personal computer.

Although students, who come from all over the United States, are welcome to stay at a hotel, most opt for the picturesque bedand-breakfast accommodations of the River Farm. The Raineys' farmhouse, built in the late 1800s, and the older tenant house accommodate six guests each. The tenant house, which had been vacant since the 1920s, was restored in 1989 at a cost of $25,000. When it is not being used for students of the fiber-arts workshops, the tenant house may be rented by vacationing families or church and civic groups.

Guests of the River Farm seem to find it relaxing to look out onto 16 hectares of pastureland filled with flocks of grazing sheep.

But Jerry Rainey takes the business of Corriedale sheep for premium wool and lamb production seriously. A retired aerospace engineer, he learned to care for the sheep mostly through reading and a sheepmanagement program in Kansas. His 18 years of hands-on experience allow him to act as a consultant to others, primarily recreational farmers, interested in starting a flock. They spend a day with him on the farm, where he teaches them about flock health, feeding, marketing, color genetics, fencing, and lambing.

The sheep-175 ewes, four rams, and 110 lambs-wear heavy-duty woven plastic covers to keep the fleece adequately clean for hand spinning. "We take them off for about five minutes to shear the sheep and before we let them go, we put another one back on them," Jerry says. Breeding is timed so that half the ewes lamb (give birth) in December and the other half in May to make best use of the barn. The sheep are sheared once a year before lambing. The heart of the fleece, what is left after the sheep has been skirted on the shearing table and on the skirting table, brings $13.75 a kilogram. "Some people reserve a fleece," says Jerry. "We send those out first."

The Raineys think their business can withstand the ups and downs of the market.

"During a recession the price of wool and sheep may go down, but the spinning business will go up," Priscilla believes. "People who no longer can afford an evening out will be looking for things to do at home." D About the Author: Robin Neilson is a SPAN correspondent based in Washington, D. C.

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1. Priscilla attends to customers at her booth at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.

2. Maretta Crider (standing) teaches a weaving class at the farm.

3. Participants in the weaving class have breakfast with the Raineys.

4. Carol Hanes (standing), a computer-systems analyst, offers tips on weaving to fellow student Kathy Davidson, a second-grade teacher.

5. Jerry entices a mother back to the bam by holding her newborn lamb.

lYlytl1

Hlld

In June last year, on the eve of his departure to India on a Fulbright fellowship to study indigenous architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, Michael Jansen spoke with a well-known American architect in Chicago about his project. The architect wondered why Jansen, who studied architecture and painting at Yale University and at Cambridge, would want to study Indian architecture. "If I were you, I would fly to Delhi, take the train to Chandigarh, spend three days there, and return home," he said.

On his arrival in India, however, Jansen ignored the advice.

Instead of heading for Chandigarh, the city designed by French architect Le Corbusier(see SPAN, May 1994) and a prime destination for almost every visiting Western architect, he scoured the Indian countryside. He traveled extensively in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and all over South India to explore what he terms the "soul ofIndian architecture."

Originally planning to write a book, Jansen changed the focus of his project from words to pictures. The result was his first solo exhibition titled "India's Sky Windows," featuring mixed media works "on the subject of encountering architecture." The exhibition was shown in Calcutta, Delhi, and Bombay this past spring, before he took it to the United States. ''I'm glad I didn't heed my architect friend's advice," said Jansen. "I wrote him a letter and sent him a catalog of my work here in India. I said 'You take a good look and rethink what you said.

Because what is here is old, and it's ancient, and it's great!' " The past fascinates Jansen. He understands and respects the tradition in ancient cultures. Not surprisingly, therefore, after graduating from Yale in 1991, Jansen traveled to China to study traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. For the better part of three years he was apprenticed to ~, the country's leading landscape painter Chen Ping.

"My master taught me to think about things like I never thought before because I came from an entirely Western tradition," he says. "He gave me a reason. For example, he explained to me that Ellora # 1, Photocollage with rendering, 26x 38 em.

011HdO~Y

through painting I am participating in a ritual which is thousands of years old, and it connects whatever I do today to something ancient. He instilled in me enthusiasm for things ancient and the importance ofthose things."

Following his stint in China, Jansen returned to Chicago and almost immediately began preparations to visit India. After China, coming to India was a logical step for Jansen, an extension of his goal to study "older and more sophisticated" architectural traditions. He was looking beyond such obvious constructions as forts and palaces to the ways in which craftsmen in the past evolved architectural metaphors for the ideas contained in Hindu and Islamic philosophy, especially the manner in which light and shadow were conceived in Hindu temples.

"Unlike Gothic cathedrals where light was introduced from the top through gem-like stained glass windows," Jansen says, "in a typical Hindu temple just enough light is introduced to make the sculpture on the columns and on friezes around the nave readable.

Yet there are places behind the sanctum which are entirely dark. I think that this quality oflight and shadow is something that craftsmen of the past actively designed, unlike the European tradition where they were more actively thinking about light."

Jansen's project took him to Aihole, Karnataka, a town which is home to many original experiments in Hindu temple-building, and also Madurai, Kanchipuram, Sanchi, Ellora, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, and Fatehpur Sikri. The Buddhist rock-cut caves of Ajanta were clearly the highlight of his visit. "There is something very primitive, very powerful about those places," he says. To illustrate his point he quotes from Junichiro Tanizaki's book In Praise of Shadows: "Have you never felt a sort offear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you have grown old and gray?"

Fqr Jansen it is the "experience" of ancient architecture that provides real understanding of a structure. The experience, in his case, translates best with art. "I don't distinguish between architecture and painting," he says.

"What I learn from one, I carry to the' other, and what I learn from that, I carry it back."

Jansen practices drawing as a form of meditation; a ritual. There is no other way, he says, to examine, digest, and interpret the forms and symbols of the past. "Chen Ping taught me that the secrets

of the past can be learned through the ritual of drawing. In my sketches I try to evoke that sense of ritual so as to describe the soul of my experience of a place," he explains.

In following the Chinese method of drawing, Jansen tries,to avoid rendering the mere physiognomy of structures. Instead, he draws the same forms over and over, gradually distilling the images from one sketch to the next. The process, he says, imprints a vivid, "poetic" understanding of the structure on his mind. As Chen Ping once told him, "Let the accidents of sketching reveal to you what you never knew was actually there."

Jansen's oil paintings also explore the poetic realm. They try to encompass the myth, the light, the sky, and the construction into one work. They are a riot of color. He says: "I've done a series about color because you do not get this sort of intensity of light in other climates. The temples in the South are completely covered in color. In Kanchipuram I was amazed to see every house colored to the hilt. Of course there is Jaipur, the Pink City, and Jaisalmer, the golden city. My colors are metaphors for the shocking, brilliant hues that can be experienced everywhere in India."

While Jansen's purified and exaggerated colors underline the poetic aspect of Indian architecture, it is in the "metaphoric collages," as he calls them, that Jansen best reveals his fascination for the interplay of light and shadow, of form and sculpture.

"Someone criticized me saying why my works are so dark," Jansen says. "I explained that I was fascinated by shadows, the use of shadow. Everything is not a beam oflight. There is a mythic importance to shadow in India which I found very fascinating."

0

Top.' Kanchipuram, Mixed-media collage on top of photograph, 50 x 30 em.

Middle: Jaipur, Colored-paper collage, 47x38em.

Bottom: Jaisalmer, White ink and oil on glass over photoeollage.

On that humid evening in May 1944, College? Not for a young man from an In this 50th-anniversary year of the ending a reminiscent Les Faulk was saying Italian-speaking immigrant household of World War II, a veteran reflects on nearly five decades later, he could see -the name on Faulk's diploma read America's G.I. Bill of Rights. "By granting his future unrolling ahead of him, like "Falcocchio." Not in a factory town a paid education to every qualified frames of a wartime Movietone News. where half the males saw so little future veteran," he says, "the bill cranked out As he crossed the high school stage, in the classroom that they dropped out a huge pool of trained professionals ...and clutching his brand-new diploma and of school at 16. Not in Turtle Creek, fueled a giddy postwar booJ11.Suddenly switching the tassel on his mortarboard Pennsylvania, where before the war a college degree was within the reach of from right to left to signify his new fewer than five percent of graduates millions-and remained that way." graduate status, he figured that within went on to post-high school education, weeks he would board a train for aU. S. even a secretarial course or barber trainArmy camp and eventually wind up in the climactic battles of ing. "College," Faulk remembered decades later, "that was for the World War II. teachers' kids or preachers' kids. For the rest of us, with names like Tarantini and Trkula, it was a distant dream."

Ifhe were lucky-and Faulk had always been lucky-he would So how had this white-haired 68-year-old, who still moved with the get to COmehome safely to the smoky western Pennsylvania industrial town where the grim days of the Great Depression were still easy grace of a basketball point guard, managed to collect bachelor's vivid. Then he would look for work. Ifhe were very lucky, he would and master's degrees and several credits toward his doctorate? How move up from his high school occupations of caddying at the local had he avoided the blue-collar life that seemed so certain in 1944, and golf course and racking balls in Kindler's poolroom. Maybe he spent 38 years as a teacher and elementary school principal instead? would even find what the town considered a "good job." That Faulk raised his beer glass in toast to the 11 other 1944 Turtle Creek meant he might be stoking a steel-mill open-hearth furnace or High School graduates who had gathered to shake hands, slap backs, winding copper armatures in the Westinghouse generator plant. display grandchildren's pictures, and exchange embroidered memo-

ries about Mrs. Whittum 's American history class.

"To the GJ. Bill!" Faulk said. "The G.1. Bill!" the others echoed.

The G.1. Bill of Rights, also known as Public Law 346 and the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, is clearly one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. On June 22, 1944, as Private Leslie Faulk was getting accustomed to the fit ofG.1. fatigues, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the measure with so little fanfare that most major newspapers, overwhelmed with news of the Allied invasion of Europe, buried the story. Two years later, though, people certainly took notice. American college campuses were flooded with young veterans (including 60,000 women and an estimated 70,000 African-Americans) who had never in their lives expected to be there.

Its impact can still be felt today. The G.1. Bill pulled a whole generation of Les Faulks up by their combat bootstraps and put them among the most educated and financially well-off generations in U.S. history. By granting a paid education to every qualified veteran, the bill transformed America's colleges and universities, cranked out a huge pool of trained professionals, changed the educational goals of the nation, and fueled a giddy postwar boom. Suddenly a college degree was within the reach of millions-and remained that way.

From Vets to Who's Who There were two periods in American history when rapidly expanding education eventually translated into economic gain. One was after the land grant colleges were established in the 1860s. (Public lands were sold to create colleges, which led to the creation of state university systems.) The other was the era of the G.1. Bill, clearly the most farsighted veterans' program in history.

G.1. Bill statistics are awesome. Out of 14 million eligibles, 2.2 million veterans jumped at the chance to attend college. At a cost of $5,500 million, the first G.1. Bill turned out 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, 17,000 writers and editors, and thousands of other professionals. Colleges that had languished during the Depression swiftly doubled and tripled in enrollment. More students signed up for engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1948 (70 percent of them veterans) than had in five years combined during the 1930s. By 1960 there were a thousand G.1. Bill-educated veterans listed in Who s Who. The 'astonishing thing about this human cascade is that practically nobody saw it coming. The measure squeaked through a congressional committee only after some hardball lobbying by the American Legion (an organization of U.S. war veterans) and a midnight legislative rescue ri1ission. Moreover, the college-for-everyone clauses were really a kind of throw-in; the bill's real purpose was to keep the boys off the streets. Haunted by memories of the violent veterans' bonus march of the 1930s and gloomy warnings of a postwar depression with up to nine million

It is 1947 and these excited young veterans have just been admitted to Indiana University.

unemployed, Congress made the main feature of the bill a program that guaranteed to veterans $20 a week in unemployment benefits fora year, which rapidly became known as the "52-20 Club."

In 1944 everyone knew, absolutely knew, that only a handful of veterans would take advantage of Uncle Sam's offer to go to college. Experts predicted eight to 12 percent. Veterans were expected to return posthaste to farms and factories. The Saturday Evening Jpost was so confident on this topic that it commissioned an article declaring that veterans had turned their backs on college. "G.I.'s Reject Education," a Post headline in the August 18, 1945, issue read. The GJ. Bill, an accompanying article stated, is "a splendid bill, a wonderful bill, with one conspicuous drawback. The guys aren't buying it." Two months after the article appeared, 88,000 veterans were "buying it." A year later there were a million.

Roosevelt's signature was hardly dry on the bill when the first applicant signed up. On June 23, 1944, the day after the White House ceremony, former corporal Don A. Balfour of Washington, D.C., called on John M. MacCammon, a Veterans Administration vocational officer. Balfour, who now owns an insurance agency near the White House, had been honorably discharged with poor eyesight. He was paying his way at George Washington University, editing the school paper, The Hatchet, and interviewed Mac

The massive enrollment of veterans taxed campuses all across America. Indiana University set up these temporary desks at its Wildermuth Field House for registration of new students in 1946.

Cammon for an article. "I asked Mr. MacCammon to explain the benefits to me," Balfour recalled. "Suddenly 1 said, 'Could 1 sign up for benefits?' He said, 'Certainly.' The forms hadn't even been p.inted, but by August 1was officially on the G.I. Bill."

Although critics at first denounced the bill's educational benefits as a "handout" and predicted that "lazy" veterans would capitalize on them to shirk jobs, the 1944 bill guaranteed military personnel a year of education for 90 days' service, plus one month for each month of active duty, for a maximum of 48 months.

Tuition, fees, books, and supplies up to $500 a year would be paid directly to the college or university (at a time when private universities charged about $300 a year tuition and state universities considerably less). Single veterans were to receive a subsistence allowance of$50 a month; married veterans $75 a month.

That may not have been a bonanza, but it was plenty for a generation hardened by the Depression. In his book The American Veteran Back Home, sociologist Robert 1. Havighurst followed 416 veterans who had returned to a prototypical town he called "Midwest."

Twenty-eight percent-some of whom had not planned to goused the G.r. Bill for college, he reported. He could have been talking about Les Faulk and the other young men of Turtle Creek '44.

Of 103 male graduates in their nO-member class, 30 earned college degrees, nearly ten times as many as had in the past; 28 of the 30 attended college under the G.!. Bill of Rights. The class produced ten engineers, a psychologist, a microbiologist, an entomologist, two physicists, a teacher-principal, three professors, a social worker, a pharmacist, several entrepreneurs, a stockbroker, and a journalist (me). The next year's class matched the 30-percent college attendance almost exactly. The 110 male graduates of 1945 included a federal appellate judge and three lawyers, another stockbroker, a personnel counselor, and another wave of teachers and engineers. For almost all of them, their college diploma was a family first. Some of their parents had not completed elementary school-a few could not read or write English.

For their children, however, the G.!. Bill became a ticket of ad-

mission to a better life. On our spring-night reUnion, the gray-haired, mainly retired "boys of '44" told one another tales of how a handful of legislative paragraphs had changed their lives. As they nibbled pizza and sipped beer, they spoke of houses, jobs, travel, knowledge, and career accomplishments far beyond their wildest dreams of many years before.

Joe Valentich, for instance, had grown up on Prospect Street in Turtle Creek, among a cluster of Slavic immigrants who provided the strong backs and muscles for western Pennsylvania industries. "I don't think I learned a word of English until I entered first grade," confided Valentich, a Croatian-American whose father worked in an alloy plant. But the Army veteran proudly displayed two books with the brain-twisting titles Short Range Radio Telemetry for Rotating Instrumentation and Tube Type Dilatometers: Applications from Cryogenic to Elevated Temperatures-and the byline "Joseph Valentich." After a high school machine-shop diploma, he had earned a degree in mathematics and 45 graduate credits in math and physics at Duquesne and Pittsburgh universities in Pennsylvania, shouldering loads of up to 23 hours per semester to graduate early.

Les Faulk, who fought in Germany as a Seventh Army infantryman, "matured awfully fast in a foxhole." When he returned home, his father arranged ajob for him as an apprentice bricklayer at a steel mill. The job lasted one day. "I went to the poolroom and said to my old boss, 'I'm going to college.' He said, 'I read that only one vet in 20 who enters college will finish.' 1said, 'I'm goingto be that one.' " Alvan Hoffman had held an after-school job as mechanic's helper before entering the Army Air Corps. "My dad said, 'I can give you meals and a roof over your head, but 1 can't afford college. ' " A fter discharge, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering and traveled the world, briefing military personnel on survival techniques.

With few models to follow but in a hurry to catch up, many of the Turtle Creek graduates made capricious, hasty academic decisions-which nonetheless paid off. Wyatt Young, center fielder on the baseball team, who had served in Europe with the AirCorps, chose a small West Virginia college he had never heard of, Bethany, because he was told a friend was going there. Bethany launched the farm boy on a successful career in advertising; he now owns a bookstore.

Jim Graham, who became a university professor and then an aerospace engineer, applied to the engineering schools at Penn State and Cornell (Ithaca, New York); he went to Cornell because it accepted him first. Navy veteran Alexander Yerman, the class valedictorian, applied for electrical engineering at Carnegie Tech (now CarnegieMellon). Told that the program was full, he simply switched to chemi¡ cal engineering and built a career developing microchips.

couples and families; on some campuses, ,Why go to just any school when Uncle The G.!. Bill tumed out 450,000 Sam will send you to Yale? Time magazine half the veterans were married. The engineers, 240,000 accountants, asked in 1946. Bill Norris, Turtle Creek '45, University ofIowa hastily assembled a trailer 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, now a U.S. Circuit Court judge in Los camp in what newspapers described as "a sea 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, Angeles, California, and Layman Allen, proof mud." Veterans had to carry water in buckets 17,000 writers and editors, and fessor of law and a research scientist at the to their apartments. They and their families thousands of other professionals.

University of Michigan, asked themselves tiptoed across boardwalks to a common lavathat very question. When the two close tory-bathhouse to take showers while, acfriends learned about the G.!. Bill, Allen, who was stationed at cording to one report, "little boys played peekaboo." The Treasure Island, California, and Norris, at San Diego, met in Santa University of Wisconsin threw up a similar "vetsville" with a cenBarbara to discuss their educational future. Allen recalls: "I told tral water outlet, but eventually the school opened Badger Village, Bill that a Navy friend had suggested we try for Princeton. We were a 699-unit complex that had its own post office, fire department, small-town boys, what did we know? Bill said, 'Where's chapel, grocery store, barbershop, and elementary school.

Princeton?'" Both got in and graduated. Afterward Norris went on to Concurrently, the easygoing college life depicted in "varsity Stanford Law School, clerked for Supreme Court Justice William show" movies disappeared. One of the first casualties was the O. Douglas, practiced law in Los Angeles, ran for attorney general freshman beanie, the distinguishing skullcap traditionally worn by of California and was appointed to the bench in 1980. Allen went to newcomers on many campuses. No 25-year-old freshman who had graduate school at Harvard and then on to Yale Law. He became a gone through the Battle of the Bulge and had a wife and two kids was going to put up with such a thing. Out went other hallowed tranationally known authority on the application of mathematical logic to the analysis oflegal problems. "Princeton opened all those ditions, too. At the University of Iowa, a certain romantically doors for us," Judge Norris says. "But the G.I. Bill opened the doors shaded bench had always been reserved for courting couples-by to Pri nceton." prewar tradition, every woman student would be kissed there beThe two were typical of the new crop of students. Norris was the fore she graduated. Veterans saw the bench as another convenient fifth of six children. None of his brothers and sisters had gone to spot for study and shooed the amorous away. college, nor had his parents. When he and Allen entered high Veterans often had little time for extracurricular activities, camschool, they signed up for the commercial track-typing and secrepus politics, or social life, but they made their presence felt in athtarial skills. "We didn't expect college," Norris says, "but we didn't letics. While recent high school stars sat on the sidelines, teams want to get our hands dirty in the mill. The plant had this big buildwere dominated by 24- and 25-year-olds, some fresh from service ing full of offices, and we thought it would be nice to wear clean squads. Worse yet, women students preferred the dashing ex-sershirts and flirt with all the secretaries." vicemen, with their scars and battle jackets, to fuzzy-faced One day their biology teacher, Miss Chilcote, stormed in and l8-year-olds. As for the vetsvilles, they had a life and an atmosmade them go with her to the principal's office. "'What kind of phere unlike anything the campuses had seen before. Before World school are you running?' she said. 'These boys shouldn't be in a War II, a student could be expelled from many colleges ifhe or she got married. But veterans were creating families as fast as they commercial course. They could get scholarships to college.' She insisted that we be transferred to the academic track. We had a lot of could get to the altar; so many babies were born in one section of the credits to make up, but we did it," Norris recalls. In the class of University of Minnesota veterans' housing that it was nicknamed 1945, the two took first and second honors.

"Fertile Acres." Baby carriages were parked under the campus elms; drying diapers fluttered in place of college pennants. For the young wives, it was a hectic life under primitive conditions, with ,responsibility for governing the communities while their husbands Meanwhile, campuses all across America were being flooded by studied and often worked part-time. ambitious veterans. Some 11,000 ex-GJ.s attended the University of Between books and babies, there was not much social life, Wisconsin in 1946, swelling the total enrollment from 9,000 the prerecalls one veteran's wife who lived in Stanford Village. What vious year to 18,000. Rutgers University's enrollment jumped from a prewar 7,000 to 16,000 by 1948. Stanford went from 3,000 to 7,000 there was revolved around meetings in the common laundry room students within a year; four-fifths of the men were veterans. There and wives' gabfests in the children's play yards, which the simply were not enough beds, teachers, classrooms, and laboratories. "daddies" had constructed with scrounged scrap lumber. . Some ingenious makeshift living and teaching arrangements re"If there is a baby," a Columbia University sociologist had sulted. Quonset huts and surplus barracks mushroomed on once solemnly intoned as late as 1945, "college is almost out of the question for any reasonable man." In fact, fathers turned out to be the pristine campus lawns. Marietta College in Ohio obtained a surpl us Coast Guard vessel and anchored it in the Muskingum River as a most diligent students. Grade-point averages hit a record high at Stanford the first year the veterans were back. Flunk-outs and floating dormitory. Stanford converted a former military hospital into one- and two-room apartments. absenteeism hit an all-time low.

The veterans' hurry-up pace revolutionized the colleges' old, Prewar student bodies had consisted of single men and single easygoing schedule. Summer vacation almost disappeared. At women. Noone was prepared for the postwar deluge of married

To handle the influx of married veterans and their families, Indiana, like other universities, devised makeshift living arrangements, such as trailer parks with play areas for children.

Stanford before World War II, only seven percent of the classrooms were occupied at 2 p.m. By 1946-47, classes were beginning at 7 a.m. and running until past the dinner hour.

Faculties, their ranks already depleted by the war, were stretched thin. Wallace Stegner, who taught literature and creative writing at Stanford, once recalled that his pre-G.!. Bill classes could be comfortably seated around a dining room table. By 1947 he was teaching 160 students~and grading as many papers, because he had no graduate assistants to help him.

Professors at some universities were accustomed to prep school types who dutifully took notes but were not all that interested in real lessons. Those teachers had a tough time dealing with grown men.

One veteran recalled a student who interrupted a Contemporary Affairs lecture with "Don't tell me about China.

I've been there." A Spanish professor directed a veteran to write a mistranslated The veteran

sentence

I 00 times,

simply laughed

A minority offaculty "ruining" the college in ing a living. They were professors complained. critics, "They couldn't

as if he were in eighth

grade.

at him.

deplored the driven young men who were their haste to gain a diploma and gettoearnmissing the essence of college life, these Said one Stanford professor of the faculty cope with students who didn't swallow

goldfish or hold all-night parties." But most found the atmosphere stimulating.

Having taught at the University of Pittsburgh for more than 50 years, economics professor Reuben "The vets were very good, very motivated .."

Siesinger

recalled,

The idea that Uncle Sam should help veterans with their education was not exactly new. After World War I, the states of ew York and Wisconsin set up programs under which certain veterans could receive academic or vocational training at government expense. In 1941 Canada began considering such a plan. President Roosevelt, an assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I, had long been concerned about the government's role in planning for the veterans' return to civilian life. By 1942 the educational community, headed by the august American Council on Education, was quietly sketching out suggestions for veterans' educational benefits. But the issue really began to move when it caught the attention of the American Legion, which had enormous political clout. To this day, several 10Eventually, ters, a Legion

The Legion had thrown all its weight behind its "omnibus" bill (opponents called it an "ominous" bill), which lumped veterans' educational and medical benefits, on-the-job training, home and fam1 loans, and unemployment payments into one measure. Other veterans' groups initially disagreed, urging Congress not to be "stampeded into hasty and possible unwise legislation."

Some organizations worried that the omnibus tactic would allow opponents of individual features to gang up and defeat the whole package. The Disabled Veterans of America feared that wounded and disabled G.I.s might be shortchanged ifbenefits were given to all.

Partly as a result, one version of Public Law 346 passed the Senate, while another passed the House. The bitter struggle to reconcile the two threatened the bill's survival. At stake were sharp differences about such issues as states' rights (would a new, perhaps statecontrolled, office administer the funds or would the Federal Employment Service?), veteran eligibility (should it include all veterans or just those whose school ing had been interrupted')), and varying degrees of hostility to unemployment benefits (which some legislators thought likely to promote indolence).

The conference committee trying to sort things out contained seven Senators and seven Representatives.

The Senators offered a compromise bill that three Representatives agreed to. But three others, led by the powerful states' rights proponent John Rankin of Mississippi, rejected it. The seventh and deciding voter, John Gibson, was back home in Georgia. He had submitted a proxy vote to Rankin, but when it turned out to be for the compromise, Rankin refused to honor it. On June 9, 1944, the conferees remained deadlocked, and Gibson was still away. Under the conference rules, the two committees had to agree by 10 o'clock the next morning orthe G.I. Bill would die.

Opponents

were confident

rarily defeated.

The Bill's Tortuous Passage

cal Legion posts still claim they "originated"

campaign forthe bill. Yet it was almost strangled at birth in a bizarre political turfbattle and a fuss over tactics. It was saved, finally, only worthy of Hollywood. through a last-minute, cliff-hangerrescue

the G.!. Bill.

after lining up political support and testing the wacommittee in fact prepared a draft bill. One winter

evening in 1943, Legionnaire Harry Colmery sat down in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and wrote out the proposal in longhand. The Hearst newspapers began a drumbeating

the bill had been

When the Legion decided

at least tempo-

that Gibson

must some-

how be hauled back bodily to cast the deciding vote it was already past 6 p.m. and nobody could find him. He was believed to be heading home to Douglas, Georgia, after a speech at Valdosta, 110 kilometers away. Later that evening the pro-bill newspaper, Atlanta

Constitution, got into the act; a telephone operator started calling Gibson's home every five minutes. Radio stations broadcast an appeal for anyone knowing Gibson's whereabouts to "call operator 2 in Washington immediately."

Just after 11 p.m. Gibson answered his phone in Douglas. With a Georgia state motorcycle-police escort, he was driven to an Air Force base in Waycross and transferred to a military car, which raced through a slashing thunderstorm at ISO kilometers an hour toward Jacksonville, Florida, where the Legion had a plane waiting.

At 6:37 a.m. on June 10, less than four hours before the deadline, Gibson's plane touched down in Washington. Promptly at 10 a.m., he appeared

at the committee

room and cast the deciding

vote.

D

About the Author: Edwin Kiester, 11:, went to the University of Pittsburgh on the G.1. Bill, earning a degree in political science in 1950.

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Fortune magazine recently published a special issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of its FORTUNE 500 list of America's largest corporations. The issue included this article examining the golden rules of management that have sustained the corporate world over the past four decades.

Management must be one of the most unnatural activities in the world. Why else would managers sustain a vast publishing and consulting industry with a huge component of blather whose main function is reassurance rather than the transmission of knowledge':' Like diet and golfing books, the hundreds of management guides that come out every year really function as corporate security blankets. Managers, like obese people and duffers, feel so perpetually anxious about themselves that they will tolerate an almost incredible torrent of balderdash in the hope of self-improvement.

Managers can spend an eternity searching for panaceas in the pages of such books, but they won't find them. They may for a few months or even years think that they've found a piece of the true Cross, but eventually the advice, trend, or tool will devolve into just another fad or folly. Yet if you look hard at the history of the FORTUNE 500 over the past 40 years, there emerges through all the static a set of golden management rules that have surviving power. They don't have labels-once you stick a name on something, it's fast on its way to becoming a flavor-of-the-month disappointment-but are broad management principles. They are (I) Management is a practice. (2) People are a resource. (3) Marketing and innovation are

••••••••• • •• • =

the key functions ofa business. (4) Discover what you do well. (5) Quality pays for itsel f.

Still, the question nags: Is any of this real') Has it actually generated wealth':' As with golfand dieting advice, some fundamentals have proved themselves over time. While no one can measure the precise financial impact of these ideas, the argument that they paid off can be made with confidence.

Stanley Gault says that basic management principles like empowerment, strategy, and quality contributed greatly to his successes at General Electric (GE) in the 1960s and 1970s, and to his turnarounds at Rubbermaid and Goodyear in the 1980s and 1990s.

The very idea of management as a practice, like medicine or navigation, didn't even exist when Fortune published its first 500 list in 1955. Until Peter Drucker published his classic The Practice of Management the previous year, management had been seen largely as the expression of rank and power. People managed subordinates; they didn't manage businesses. Says Drucker: "When my book came out, nobody had even thought of managing a business. It led to the whole idea of objective, of what is the mission ofa business."

Drucker's insight has had nearly endless ramifications.

Once companies like General Electric, Du Pont, and Sears started thinking about management in this way. everything needed to be redefined. What, for instance, was the appropriate role of top management':' Rather than trying to control everything, Drucker taught, senior executi\'es should focus on strategy and let the rank and file carry out their objectives.

With Drucker's help, General Electric in 1956 opened its now famous Crotonville, New York, training centcr and has since taught generations of managers this philosophy.

••

•.••

a

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•

Odd as it may seem in an age when downsizing has depopulated entire office towers, one of the most important and enduring ideas about management is that managers should treat workers as a resource rather than a cost.

Says PepsiCo Chief Executive Officer Wayne Calloway: "It seems to me that over the last40 years the biggest idea is the notion that management doesn't have the monopoly on brains orjudgment.!t's this idea ofutilizing all the strengths ofa corporation."

The shift away from command and control didn't happen fast. It has taken decades to get people-at least some people-to take initiative, to learn, to change constantly. True, in the 1970s, self-realization movements like cst got out of hand. Pac Bell had to abandon its costly leadership program after employees complained that it was a "dress code for the mind." But more recently companies have put "empowerment" to better use. Hewlett-Packard (H-P) in the 1980s used it to reduce cycle times, requiring employees to team up and design, develop, and market products and services at record speeds. For instance, in 1988 H-P developed the DeskJet printer in just 22 months-ajob like that used to take twice as long.

In the early 1990s books like Peter Senge's The Fljih Discipline took empowerment a step further, arguing that people are more than cogs; they are individuals with feelings, thoughts. and insights that need to be aired and understood.

What Senge and others articulated was that motivated people are good for business.

Says Goodyear's Gault: "The empowerment revolution ... has allowed our nation to record unprecedented progress in the areas of productivity, creativity, technology, product development, and O\'erall competitiveness in a global market."

--..,...... _---.... ••••• ------ ------~

This notion has exerted a powerful effect on corporate structure.

If people were to have more autonomy, they didn't need as many middle managers looking over their shoulders.

Thus, a company could shed layers.

Lincoln Electric organizational started experimenting with the flat, or horizontal, organization in the 1950s, but it wasn't unti I the restructuring movement of the late 1980s that corporate America really began to see the light.

In

the

management

of

products,

as

opposed to people, a similar change has turned out to be a winner. In the 1950s and 1960s, with Japanese and German industry still in ruins, U.S. industry could make virtually whatever its engineers or marketers pleased, the customer be damned. But in the 1970s, especially in the auto industry, global competition began to intensify.

American corporations slowly realized they would have to start organizing around the idea of serving the customer.

Says Theodore

you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation.

Everything else is a cost center."

Our fourth nominee for a great management idea, strategic planning, took a wrong turn for a decade or so. Although the Pentagon had been doing strategic planning through the 1950s and 1960s, not until the 1970s did the idea gain broad currency in corporate America. Before strategic planning, executives essentially sat around and played what-if: What ifourcompetitors did this or that? Then, starting in 1969, GE began to teach strategy as a discipline.

The new idea was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of competitors-their past, present, and anticipated future. GE's strategy course also taught managers to allocate resources based upon how you would categorize your business: Is it a growth business or a harvest busi ness?

The beauty of this kind of planning was that it helped managers focus on what they

Levitt, Harvard business school professor emeritus and marketing expert: "We call it the marketing concept. It made us run businesses around the principle 'Put the custo mer first, and then profits will follow.'"

A strong customer focus led companies to adopt disciplines like test marketing, surveys, and focus groups that helped them

did best, on competencies (although they didn't use the word at the time) that gave them a competitive advantage.

Obvious, perhaps, but the point got lost in the conglomeration-mad 1960s and 1970s. Seeing the inefficiencies that resulted and realizing-with the help of Wall Street raidersthat their best strategy was to focus on what

keep in touch with customers and create new products. Says Andrall Pearson, a part-

they did well, companies in the 1980s began deconglomerating.

Implicit in the idea of jettisoning the unnecessary was focusing on the essence.

Thus it was that corporate strategy came back full circle to one oftoday's most popular ideas: Core competencies.

Consultants Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad (see SPAN,

ner at the New York firm of Clayton Dubilier and Rice: "The idea ofa marketing discipline was revolutionary.

Before, we had no scientific focus. We were just pissing money away on the market." That attention to marketing detail spread in the 1970s and 1980s and helped build such service giants as L.L. Bean, Nordstrom, and Federal Express. Drucker "You get paid for creating

sums it up best: a customer, and

May 1995) argued that every company has a core strength-be it marketing, manufacturing, or research and development-and that it should focus resources on what it

does best. N ike, for instance,

concentrates

on marketing and design, farming out the manufacture of its athletic shoes.

Sometimes a truly good idea needs an apostle. Before the "quality revolution" of the 1980s and 1990s, managers basically thought that investing in high quality was a More than cost that couldn't be recouped. anyone else, consultant W. Edwards Deming disabused them of that notion. In the 1960s and 1970s, Deming worked in Japan and taught the Japanese that by continually improving the quality ofa product or processkaizen, as it's called-a company could save time and money, reduce waste, and give the customer better products faster. For years Deming couldn't sell his message in the United States. Then, on June 24, 1980, at 9:30 p.m., he appeared on an NBC show about Japanese qual ity called IjJapan Can, Why Can 'f We? A manager at Ford happened to be watching

and brought

Deming

and his

ideas to Ford. The result was Team Taurus, a quality-driven project that helped Ford turn itself around (see SPAN, May 1994) and eventually led to the development of the company's best-selling car.

After that, quality spread wildly throughout the rest of corporate America.

Yes, there were abuses, as some companies like Florida Power and Light got carried away in the 1980s and turned their quality programs into self-sustaining bureaucracies. But overall it works. Stressing high qual ity makes lots of money for companies.

Some 15 years after Deming appeared on NBC, Motorola, one of the great disciples of the quality movement, makes such good pagers that it is now a formidable player in the Japanese market.

D About

the Author:

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Promoting Tradition Although less than a year old, a small art gallery in Delhi's Lalpat Nagar is already attracting the attention of collectors and other admirers of traditional Indian art. Named after the famous painter at emperor Sufi, Mahaveer Swami, 1995.

Jehangir's court, Gallery Mansur is run by Maureen Liebl, an American art historian based in Delhi, and her Indian partner, Palka Kapur "This is a small beginning for contemporary painters of traditional Indian art," says Liebl about the gallery. "There are still painters who draw on much older inspiration and technique, but have no place to exhibit their work, or means of gaining recognition We hope the gallery will make these artists' work accessible to collectors and connoisseurs" Most of the artists represented at the gallery are descendants of Rajasthani court painters, though gradually Liebl and Kapur hope to branch out to other regions as well The two women were Instrumental in arranging the participation of Bikaner artist Mahaveer Swami in an exhibition at the Hunt Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, last November Two other Gallery Mansur artists will participate in an exhibition being planned by the Huntlnstitute later this year Maureen Liebl is no stranger to the Indian art scene The author of several books on Indian art, Liebl first visited India in the mid1970s as associate director of the John 0 Rockefeller 3rd Fund which supported cultural exchanges between the United States and Asia She also served as a coordinator of academic and public programs forthe Festival of India in the United States

The gallery works in tandem with OAK LId Delhi-Denver, a small company founded in 1993 in Denver, Colorado, by Liebl and Mary Lanius, a professor of ASian art history and former chairperson of the Museum Studies program at the University of Denver, to promote traditional Indian art in the United States. "We managed to generate a lot of interest in art circles there in these paintings.

That is when we broached the idea of opening a gallery in Delhi to Palka, and Gallery Mansur was born," Liebl says From amongst the gallery's collection, Liebl particularly prizes the works of Dwarkalal Janjid, the most famous of the Nathdwara painters. "The artist no longer paints because of old age," says Liebl, "but his grandson, who is about 13 years old, is every bit as talented and dedicated as the old artist himself."

The artists represented at the gallery include Mahaveer and RaJu Swami from Bikaner and Mohan Lal Sonl, Mahesh Soni, and Kailash Raj from Jaipur. "We recently acquired some truly beautiful paintings

by Mysore-based artist Raghupathy Bhalta," says Liebl. "His work is nothing like I'd ever seen before It certainly did not look traditional, although Bhalta himself scoffs at the idea of being described as anything but a traditional painter."

According to Palka, whose businessman husband, Ashwan Kapur, is an art collector in his own right, Gallery Mansur represents "the artists as much as their works Eventually, Maureen and I hope to develop new patronage for our traditional painters and establish an international identity for them"

DANCE ANd POETRY GitanJali Kolanad, the Singaporebased Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer, staged her most recent dance-theater piece, Night, in Delhi and Madras last month The introspective, trilingual work incorporated the words of American poets Sylvia Plath and Judith Kroll, a physics textbook, and Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.

Kolanad (in photo), Padmini Cheltur, and M Pasupati danced amidst a set of sculptures byValsan Kolleri and a latticed stairway by M. Natesh, and provided narration in Hindi, English, and Tamil.

"I had been working with the idea for some time of dealing with the darker side of life through the imagery of night and with a

production based on AK love poetry

sense of the Earth rotating and looking out into space," Kolanad said. "I wanted to do this by looking at such things as dreams and humankind's sense of loneliness, and I found that the poetry of Sylvia Plath fit this imagery well."

American actress and theater director Deborah Dunthorn, directed the production Last year Dunthorn directed Under Her Breath, * Kolanad's dance-theater Ramanujan's translations of Tamil

*Gitanjali Kolanad says that the article on Anita Ratnam, June 1995 SPAN, contains some misleading references about the production Under Her Breath.

"This production was conceived, scripted, and choreographed solely by me.

There was no creative collaboration by Anita Ratnam, nor did Deborah Dunthorn ever say that she wanted the work rechoreographed, as the article stated. "

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Lessonsin Diplomacy Kavita Kalsy and Tanuja Majumdar, both 24, recently completed a three-month internship program at the American Embassy in New Delhi Kalsy worked in the economic section, and Majumdar in the political section They are the latest in a growing number of Indian Americans who have taken advantage of the program sponsored by the US State Department to gain work experience and a perspective on the world of diplomacy in the country of their ancestors.

Kalsy's father lived in Delhi before going to the United States in 1963 to pursue his master's degree in engineering at Michigan State University Later he came back to India to get married and finally settled down in New Jersey, where he works with Mobil Corporation and where Kalsy and her sister-now an 18-year-old college freshman in Boston-were born. Kalsy plans to practice international law after graduation from American University in Washington, D.G. Her mother is a dietician at a local hospital Majumdar's father, a native of Calcutta, went to America in 1965 to do his PhD in botany at the University of Kentucky. Later the same year her mother, also from West Bengal, joined him.

They settled down in eastern Pennsylvania where he teaches biology at Lafayette College and she is a nursery school teacher.

Majumdar has two sisters and a brother She received a master's degree in political science and comparative politics from the University of Pennsylvania, but is undecided about a career. "The main reason why I am doing this

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Majumdar, making her third visit here, thought Indians had shed many of their past inhibitions. "During my last visit, I found that I couldn't get away with wearing dresses like shorts and jeans; people didn't approve," she recalled "But now people have become more Westernized, and the changes are obvious." Kalsy, who also had visited India twice before, said what struck her this time was the wave of consumerism and increased assertiveness"more open, eating out, buying things, and discussing money matters. " Downside of her visit this time, Kalsy said, was eve-teasing.

She related her experience in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, where she was bothered by the unwanted attention of males She said, "Women in India lack the freedom enjoyed bywomen in America" Kalsy noted that the way Indians relate to each other in America is different from the way they do in India. In America, their Indianness, not a regional identity, is paramount. "Although the regionalistic attitude is not totally absent, you become more Indian there," she said "They have something in common; it is immaterial whether one is Rajasthani, Gujarati, or Punjabi," she said.

She said social mores and religious practices among Indians

Tanuja Majumdar and Kavita Kalsy with Ambassador Frank G. Wisner

in America are similar to those prevalent here "Arranged and love marriages," Kalsy explained, "depend on individual outlook, and (the trends] aren't very different from those in India."

"The main criterion for marriage," according to Majumdar, "is one which would make my parents happy" Her eldest sister is married to a Bengali while her second sister has married an American; both the couples lead happy lives, she says Both Kalsy and Majumdar said they had detected a perceptible change in attitudes among young Indians in America "They now decide what they want to retain of their culture, and what they want to lose Parental influence could playa big part in this attitude," Kalsy said. Majumdar underscored this point, saying "Although of Indian descent, I would say only my parents are from India. I am Americanpolitically that's where my thinking is. However, I might add here that on cultural issues and religion you do feel that your upbringing does have some influence" Both women found the visit enjoyable and fulfilling. "It's been quite a refreshing experience," Majumdar said. "I could use my academic background and levels of analytical skills acquired over the years in research, reading, and writing."

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An increasing

number of business executives around the world are spending more time on the road than in the office-and they love it. For them there is no such place as far away.

T

hey are the road warriors of business. With their platinum frequent-flier cards and their roll-on luggage, road warriors are the growing number of business travelers who spend more time on the road than in the office-70, 90, more than 100 days a year. And they love it.

Hotel clerks know them by name, airlines adore them. Their friends think they are crazy and their children, if they have them, wonder who they are.

One of them is James Williams, a business executive who stayed in so many different Hilton Hotels in one year-more than 100-that the company gave him a car and enshrined him in the Hilton Frequent Traveler Hall of Fame. "I'm always going," said Williams, 52, who lives in Mesa, Arizona, "just like the Energizer bunny or Moses."

Williams, head ofinfornlation services for the Luce Press Clipping Service, travels nearly every business dayalthough he has recently cut back to three or four days a week. "When you are traveling constantly, you don't have a life and don't realize it," said Williams, a bachelor. "No way could I have a family and, as far as relationships are concerned, forget about that. I've got lots of friends that I talk to

on the phone, but I never get to see them."

Even the Hilton car did him little good. It came with a gratis lease lasting one year and when it ended, Williams had driven the Pontiac Sunbird convertible a paltry 4,000 kilometers. A love life is equally stalled. "I'm reluctant to get involved in a relationship because I fear the consequences of getting involved and being away," Williams said. "So I've just avoided it."

There have always been business nomads-from European merchants who traveled the spice routes to Asia to itinerant peddlers on the byways of Old Russia to the Willy Lomans on America's Blue Highways. Williams and his fellow travelers are the modern equivalent but with a twist: They are the creation of technology that was supposed to have wiped them out.

The gadgets that let business people fax, phone, and surf the Internet from more than 9,000 meters are from the same technology that once promised to eliminate bothersome travel by heralding a new age of video teleconferencing and the information superhighway-businessmen talking to each other by E-mail and on television screens. Instead, the opposite has happened. Advanced telecommunications have made the office portable, and have propelled more business people into a place called the virtual office-an office-in-abag that accompanies them as they work above the clouds.

Futurists see increased travel as a sign of where business is heading-that face-to-face contact is becoming more important and the virtual office is making it easier to accomplish. "These people are leading indicators ofwhat's in store for the rest of us," said Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, a research foundation in Menlo Park, California. A powerful symbol of this trend is Vintun Cerf, one of the founders of Internet.

Today, Cerf, an MCI Communications executive armed with a powerful laptop computer, spends most of his time on airplanes.

The road warriors, a tel111 coined by the travel industry, are a new class of super-frequent travelers, the top one percent of the 40 million or so Americans who travel for business each year. Minimum travel to gain road-warrior status is about 50 airplane flights a year and an equal number of hotel nights-an industry rule of thumb. At each airline, there are about 20 million to 25 milliollmembers in frequentflier programs.

And while numbers are sketchy, some 500,000 of those at each carrier travel at road-warrior levels and qualify for elite frequent-flier bonuses.

Hard-core

road warriors,

however,

easily top those mini-

mum levels: Hilton Hotel executives

talk about the manage-

ment consultant who stayed at their chain 330 nights in 1993-still a record.

Like wanderers of yore, today's road warriors leave their wives, children, and loves in the dust. But, while psychiatrists lament the impact this travel has on relationships, road warriors would not spend their lives any other way. For their part, they say they are happy. "They want to be doing this," said Carrie Reckert, director of public relations at the Hyatt Hotels Corporation.

George T. Shaheen,

managing

partner

of Andersen

Consulting, espouses the gospel of the virtual office. With an around-the-world itinerary and stayovers at hotels like the George V and the Plaza Athence in Paris, he is on the road, he estimates, 90 percent of the time. He has no one business base. He owns a house in Atherton, California.

But he has offices in New York; Chicago; Palo Alto, California; and points beyond.

Even Andersen employees who report directly to him can live wherever they want. "They just have to be willing to travel to see me," he said. "We 're a totally networked, global organization.

We don't warehouse our consultants.

They have a territory-the territory of the globe."

Then there are David Sams and his wife, Eagle, owners of S.B.L. Vision Merchants, a company in Palm Springs, California,

that runs corporate

meetings.

On 3verage,

they

each take 180 to 200 flights a year, rarely together, and each have more than a million frequent-flier miles in the bankso many that they cannot use all the free frequent-flier tickets they have accumulated.

"Lots of times, I'll be going through an airport like Dallas or Chicago and the 3irline personnel will say 'Oh, we saw your wife here about an hour ago,' " said Sams, who cut an interview short to pick lip his wife at the airport. "We have two cats and a fabulous house in Palm Springs that the cats enjoy and we occasionally visit."

Airlines and hotels love people like the Samses and for good reason: Revenues from road warriors are disproportionate to their numbers.

While psychiatrists lament the impact business travel has on relationships, road warriors would not spend their lives any other way.

Northwest Airlines estimates that the top one percent of those in its World Perks frequent-flier program contribute ten percent of all revenues from World Perks customers. At Hilton Hotels, the 10,000 customers who represent the top one percent of the frequent-customer program, Hilton Honors, account for about 15 percent of all revenues from Hilton Honors customers, or some $60 million. The Marriott Corporation had 50 people who stayed 200 nights or more at Marriott hotels last year-a business year has 220 days.

"I can't begin to describe to you how valuable road warriors are to us," said Cindy Baker, director of marketing operations at Hyatt Hotels. "You can't put a dollar value on it.

They are unbelievably valuable and they are the people we most don't want to lose."

For that reason, hotels and airlines closely guard any information about their best customers and bend over backward to coddle them. Once a business traveler flies enough miles or stays enough at a hotel chain to reach road-warrior status, hotels and airlines bump them to a special elite level-giving them gold, platinum, and diamond level cards that provide such perks as airplane seat upgrades, bonus frequent-flier points, admission to private airline clubs at airports, better hotel rooms, and housing on exclusive floors at snacks, special hotels with round-the-clock attendants, and private lounges.

"If you want to know what guys really talk about, this is it," said Richard M. Neustadt, Partners,

a senior adviser at Galway a Washington, D.C., telecom-

munications company, whose wallet bulges with gold and platinum cards. "It's locker room comparisons: 'I've got a platinum and you've only got a gold.' " Neustadt remembers that when he cut back flying on American Airlines, he

was downgraded from a platinum card to a gold one. "It was a terrible ego blow," he said.

Road warriors spend so much time on the road that even the definition of "home" is murky. "It's almost a joke, the words 'welcome home,' because hotels are their home away from home," Baker of Hyatt Hotels said. "Sometimes road warriors spend more time with hotel employees than with their families. They know the doorman and the housekeepers. Then they have to be reintroduced to their families each weekend. It's amazing how close they get to our employees.

They have two families."

Unlike many real families, the hotel family is always cheerful. "Their kids may not smile at them when they get home," Baker said, "but the front desk will."

Hilton, for instance, offers unexpected treats for its best customers. Already, the company has given out five cars as a thank you. One lucky traveler who liked golfwas given an expense-paid trip to Scotland's links. If Hilton gets tickets to Los Angeles Lakers' games or opening day for the Dodgers. it has one of its Los Angeles properties give them to their best guests. Hilton has sent road warriors to the Academy Awards and even asked some to serve on a Hilton Honors Advisory Council, which gives the company road-warrior feedback.

Indeed, for all the grumbling about the grind of travel, most road warriors cannot imagine a traditional 9-to-5 job.

"I love travel," said Marc Hodak, a consultant with Stern Stewart & Company in New York. "Everything frol11 the isolation of small towns, to the vibrance of big cities, to the exotic nature of the Third World."

Hodak, a divorced father of two who took to the road when he became single again, said: "I like getting taken care of at an airport. I like the airlines thanking me for flying so much, and I like the platinum perks. ('m so used to hotels, they are like home to me. I don't take the kindness of strangers personally.

I take it for what it is-professional pampering.

But it is nice gettii1g taken care of at someone else's expense."

Being a road warrior means never having to make up your bed (housekeeping is there). Or worry about the price ofa meal (expense account living). Or having to put gas in the car (it's a rental). And from the motion comes meaning.

"Most people have trouble figuring out at the end of any given day just exactly what they have done," Neustadt of Galway Partners said. "When you travel, you have a sense that you're doing something really concrete.

You tease yourself into thinking that you've actually gotten something done."

Psychiatrists who treat high-powered businessmen are familiar with road warriors and are critical. "It's great if you don't want to be in a committed relationship," said Dr.

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Wayne Myers, a psychiatry professor Center, New York. "If you do, you're

at Cornell Medical in trouble. Lots of

people are not great at intimacy and work makes them feel needed and important.

For people where intimacy is

not No.1 on their list, this fits. When they enter the concierge level at the hotel, there's fruit and champagne them. It's very seducti ve."

waiting

for

Dr. John Munder Ross, a professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical Center and a Manhattan therapist, said that some "people choose work that keeps them feeling like a rolling stone."

"Travel makes them feel special and they get taken care of like a baby," Ross added. "But those back home get left in a lurch. It's very disruptive to home life because it's hard to

have real relationships.

They have developed a way of being special every time they show up~whether on the road or returning home."

In fact, both Myers and Ross said, road warriors make for difficult patients~they are always canceling appointments.

Myers treats his road-warrior patients by video telephone when they travel domestically and by regular telephone when they are overseas.

"They are very manipulative," Myers said.

Road warriors, of course, see themselves in a difficult jug-

Breakdowns and Tie-ups Why was Y.K. Modi,

scion of one

London and New York respectively.

Using it as a home base, he will take one-day business trips to other cities and return each night to the apartment. "The cost of travel is more that way," he says, "but I save money on

of India's leading industrial families, walking through a downpour, suitcase in hand, toward a hotel where he in a city didn't have a reservation where he didn't want to be? Answer: Winding up another day of business travel which keeps this high-flying deal maker away from his Delhi office

hotels. I often bring an assistant who cooks vegetarian meals for me and looks after other matters such as send-

at least 40 percent of the time.

On this particular trip some years back, bad weather had forced Modi's late night Bombay-Cochin flight to divert to Bangalort:.

To compound matters, the taxi from thc airport broke down, as did a subsequent autorickshaw a few hundred meters short of the Ashoka Hotel. Modi acknowledges that delays, detours, and an occasional scare~he and his uncle, K.N. Modi, who began chanting Hanuman Chalisa, once made an emergency landing in an executive jet when one of its two engines conked out 12,000 meters above the state of Ohio~are occupational hazards for a road warrior like himself who, in addition to countless trips within India, makes eight to 12 international journeys each year. They are the price one must pay, he says, for making and solidifying business tie-ups for the Modi Group, India's seventh largest industrial conglomerate.

Telephone calls and fax messages are no substitute for face-to-face meetings.

Modi is CEO, vice chairman, and managing director of Modi Rubber

ing faxes and taking messages.

Again, this is not a major expense when you consider that I am saving money on restaurant meals. A meal at a good restaurant in London can cost as much as ÂŁ I 00. Being in an apartment also permits me to entertain friends I have in London and New York."

Limited, which makes automobile tires and tubes, and chairman of Gujarat Guardian Limited, which produces float glass. Just back from an August visit to London and planning a trip to Singapo}"e and the United States this month, Modi says he has developed several habits for dealing with the burdens and pressures of international travel.

Whenever possible, he books his international flights for night and instructs flight attendants not to wake him for meals or drinks so he can sleep. He normally carries only hand luggage to avoid delays in retrieving a checked suitcase.

On visits to Europe and the United States, he often rents an apartment in

Friendly and outgoing, Modi says he enjoys the opportunity that firstclass travel provides for meeting interesting and influential people~ top government officials, other business executives, and celebrities.

Film director Richard Attenborough, Chandraswamy, and assorted American and Indian film stars are among the acquaintances he has made. In fact, it was on a flight from Japan to New Delhi that he met by chance an executive of Continental Aktiengesellsha ft, the German tire company. was born the Out of that encounter technical collaboration that created Modi Rubber and its yearly turnover ofnearly RS.l 0,000 million. Not a bad deal for one fl ight.

gling act between

family and job. Steve Belkin,

a business-

man who heads Sports Media Management of University Heights, Ohio, a sports programming company, travels throughout the Midwest and to California. Left at home is his wife, a doctor, and two children, ages eight months and twoand-a-half years. "You could call my wife very understanding," said Belkin, who was interviewed from a pay phone at O'Hare Airport in Chicago en route to Los Angeles.

Belkin recalled how he had once traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so much that his firstborn's first word was

"Milwaukee." is a necessity

Still, he believes in what he is doing. "Travel for me and I'm investing for our future," Belkin

said. "This is the choice I've made and I accept the good and the bad of it. If! had a choice between a 9-to-5 job and being my own boss, it's an easy decision."

Sue Sobol, a technical support engineer for US West Commun ications, covers 14 states as a computer troubleshooter. She said she thought the near-daily travel might wear thin, but it did not. "I really like it," she said. "I love getting out of the office."

On the Fashion Trail circumstance his control.

Deepak K. Seth, chairman of Pearl Global Limited, a Delhi-based manufacturer and exporter of fashion apparel, travels some 400,000 kilometers a year. That is

beyond But, un-

like many othcr business travelers, he has no cause to worry about the kind of music he will face from his wife, because "she invariably trav-

equivalent to a journey to the moon, but Seth is very much earthbound

els with me. My only worry is that she is a 'worrier' type. On the

in his attempt to keep up with clients, most of them across Europe and the United States, but some 111 Austral ia, L:.!lI "'" Dubai, and Hong Kong.

Most of his trips last about ten days.

"I am in the fashion trade, which is

caught napping. Moreover, when you interact with a client across the table,

like a highly perishable especially in the United

you develop a certain rapport, a certain human relationship, which is just

smallest pretext, an air pocket for example, she'll swallow a tranquilizer, a blood pressure tablet.

.

~-J,â&#x20AC;˘.-

commodity, States where

"There was this Delhi-London fl ight, about the time when there was mounting tension about the imminence of the Gulf War. When our air-

fashions change in weeks," Seth says, "so I must constantly keep myself abreast of the latest trends. 1 rarely have more than two days in one city and 1do about five-six cities each trip.

It's, of course, hectic."

Couldn't he take care of business via telephone, fax, or a courier ser-

not possible any other way. I doubt there ever will be a substitute for faceto-face contact."

Seth doesn't consider air travel stressful. In fact, he finds it relaxing.

"I have no fear of air travel. I rather love it-no telephones, no visitors, no nothing. The moment I board the air-

craft was 9,000 meters or more up in the skies over the Middle East, the captain grimly announced that the bombing had started and that he would be diverting the aircraft. And there she was with her pills."

Seth, who returned early last month from a trip to Europe and America, is al-

vice? "Routine

craft,

ready offagain.

matters,

yes. But you

see we are perhaps the only Indian garment company that sells under its own brand name-LERROS in Europe for men's wear and TRIB ES in the United States for women's fashions. But now with liberalization, so many other companies are trying to get into the act, and I don't want to be

I slump

into the seat and doze

off, no matter who my co-passenger is-a prospective business client or a famous film star. Of course, I travel first-class."

At times Seth finds himselfin situations where he is forced to postpone his returnjourney home-because of a business exigency or some other

He left on August 30 for

the United States where he has a personal matter to attend to as well as business. Seth has accompanied his elder son to Chicago to help him enroll in his first year at Northwestern University in nearby Evanston. "So, in future I will have one more city on my itinerary."

-K.G.

She has kept up this pace for three years. But, a year ago, after breaking up with a boyfriend, the 29-year-old Sobol paused to rethink-briefly. "I thought that I've got to stop all this traveling and do something with my life," she said. So, she moved back to her hometown, Boulder, Colorado, to be closer to family and friends, although she has kept up the same travel pace. "One of my sisters thinks I'm nuts," Sobol said. "The other is married with children and thinks it's glamorous. But it hit me. In a couple years I might want to settle down."

Right now, she has started dating someone else-a fellow engineer with an equally demaI)ding travel schedule whom she sees on weekends. "The hardest thing is that we live a half-hour apart and, when it comes Friday, we both want to be in our own house for a day," Sobol said. Still, she can't stop traveling. "If I'm in town for two weeks," she said, "I'm asking my boss to let me out of here."

Maintaining relationships is the toughest problem road warriors face. David and Eagle Sams talk daily by telephone and say they believe that absence actually does make the heart grow fonder. "We look forward to having our time together," Sams said. They treat themselves to quick trips-a four-day weekend in Hong Kong or a popover to the Netherlands to see the tulips. But these are usually brief jaunts. "The last time we had what people formally call a vacation was November 1993," Sams said. "Most of our friends think we're crazy, but we like it."

Shaheen of Andersen Consulting makes a point ofretuming each weekend to his California home-regardless of where he is. "It would be unfair to my wife to be stuck in Atherton while I'm in Phuket playing golf and eating roast pig," said Shaheen, who was interviewed in New York before leaving for Orange County, California, to meet his wife for two days.

Technology can help romance-to a point. "My girlfriend Karen pages me," Neustadt of Galway Partners said.

"It's really sweet. And then we E-mail each other. That's pretty romantic."

Jonathan Donahue, a corporate finance associate with the General Electric Capital Corporation, used to travel I00 percent of his time as a GE auditor and recalls how fellow auditors reveled in romantic E-mail. "You should see how the auditors bragged to each other," Donahue said. "It was like, 'Boy you should read the E-mail I got from my girlfriend.'

Then they would tell you how great it was."

April Pease, a benefits administration consultant for Towers Perrin in Atlanta, says that while she likes the independence of weekly travel, there are times she misses her husband, a property manager who also travels. "If I go some-

where for a week and it's someplace where there are fun and enjoyable things to do, then 1 wish my husband was there," Pease said. "Most of my trips, though, are short one- and twoday hops. Then I want to eat by myself, get some exercise, and take some time to decompress and salvage my sanity."

Children make for difficult complications.

James Beasley, a safety engineer with the Intel Corporation, makes 50 business trips a year. He did this even when he was the custodial parent of his young daughter, Samantha. (He has since remarried). While single, he hired a part-time nanny.

His daughter "used to think I worked in an airplane," Beasley said. "An airplane would go overhead and she would point up and say, 'There's Daddy.' " Hodak, the Stern Stewart consultant whose job takes him to Hawaii, Istanbul, and throughout the United States, said he saw his children about as much as any other divorced Dad. ''I'm no longer in a position to see my children four nights a week, which enables me to do whatever I have to do to satisfy the demands of my job and 1take advantage of it," said Hodak, who spends each weekend with his two sons.

"Between raising my children and developing my career, I don't have what anyone would consider a social life in modern parlance. I know I can't do this forever. But for now it's all right."

And Shaheen of Andersen Consulting cut back on his travel sharply when he was left widowed with two children earlier in his career. He remarried and his children have grown. "The most difficult thing is to have a kid or a spouse who needs you," he said. "I remember a few of those situations. I could spit it was so frustrating." And he says he raised his children "a little by remote control."

In fact, most road warriors say that someday they will cut back-although therapists say this usually is an idle promise.

"A lot of them play games with themselves," Myers said.

"They say they'll quit the road and move to the apa Valley when they've made X amount of dollars, but they never do."

Besides, said Dr. Wilbert Sykes, head of the Trisource Group in Manhattan in New York, which specializes in treating high-level managers, some executives become so addicted to travel, they literally cannot stop. "Our culture has a way of worshiping excitement," Sykes said. "They go everywhere and do different things as a way of perpetuating this frenetic sense of novelty and excitement. To them, it's a lot better than sitting on the couch with a beer and watching [the TV show] Seinfeld."

0

Sometimes road warriors spend more time with hotel employees than with their families. Then they have to be reintroduced to their families each weekend.

About the Author: Leslie Wayne is a general business reporteljor the New York Times.

Ingersoll-Rand India, a Government recognised Export House, is by far the largest exporter of compressors in the country. In the last few years, exports have earned over Rs. 450 million in foreign exchange annually.

This includes export of sophisticated process gas compressors to the People's Republic of China, small air compressor packages to Russia, drilling rigs and allied equipment to Africa, Australia, Europe, South East Asia and the USA. But that's not all. For the last 18 years, Ingersoll-Rand India has continued to receive recognition certificates and

Best Exporter Shields from the Export Promotion Council, for outstanding export performance. In 1989-90, we also won the All India Best Exporter Shield. An achievement befitting a company which, to date, has exported over 290,000 compressors to every continent.

Manufactured at our Ahmedabad plant, Ingersoll-Rand compressors have earned an international reputation for unmatched reliability.

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India

NOON Peace, the day says, and peace.

Seven colors sweep the palette sea.

A frigate bird cruises. (Look, no wings! only air currents.) The fiddler crab, sand-body from sand, pops up, fiddles, dives back, three grains of sand fall after him. Exhibitionist, the frigate bird sails, sails and cruises, cruises. And peace and peace says the sail just far enough to see, the fringe bubbling on the sand.

Inside the wave, turquoise, violet, Jacobsen is a Canadian-born American poet, short story writer, critic. and essayist. Her book. The Josephine

Shade-Seller: New and Selected Poems, was nomi-

nated for the National Book Award. Says novelist Joyce Carol Oates about her: "Josephine Jacobsen's characteristically understated poems [attempt] to calibrate. in exquisite, polished, an4 unjailingly intelligent language. the wonders and horrors of the interior landscape. "

gteen move the cool fish, secret butpresent. The human stares in the trance of colored peace.

The dog lies in a stupor of sun and gently the sea-almond gives up a scarlet leaf to the sea. The frigate bird drops; dives; rises.

And the cool Jish sails, too, sails

Reprinted b)' permission; Copyright Š1994 Josephine Jacobsen.

Originally in The New Yorker.

After helping to build advanced communications networks around the world, AT&T is doing the same here in India.

Our wide range of technology is already reaching out across the country. In partnership with VSNL, we have been providing long distance phone services to the US for over 25 years. Our alliance with the Aditya Birla Group aims to provide basic and cellular services to consumers and businesses. Switching and transmission equipment manufactured by joint ventures with the Tatas is already being installed in the Indian network. Our project with Finolex to manufacture fibre optic cables goes onstream in early 1996.

The full range of modern AT&T business communication systems and consumer products is already available in India. And AT&T is also bringing together computing and communications, to provide the banking, financial and communications sectors with breakthrough information solutions.

In fact, with our alliances, manufacturing capabilities, over 100 years' experience and the unparalleled achievements of AT&T Bell Laboratories, we are best equipped to design, build and operate complete state-of-the-art communications networks in India.

Our business is complex, but our vision is simple. We want to help bring people together, across India and around the world. Anytime, anywhere.

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